Please Settle the Rune Empowerment Debate

Q u o t e:
GCD capped means you use every GCD. Whether it's for a damaging ability, defensive ability, anything.

This is a bad model for several reasons:

1. It greatly increases or decreases the value of expertise based on latency (There's an actual spreadsheet on EJ that has this)

2. It leaves no room for thought or planning of rune usage.

3. You're grossly penalized in dps if you manage to not get a few abilities off (say on a target switch, or hitting some lag) vs say a mutilate rogue who's dps isn't going to change whether they mutilate now or 2 seconds from now as long as their energy isn't sitting near max.

This is a good start, but there are other reasons we don't like being GCD locked. It means you can never take even a moment to look around and notice the battlefield, notice who is in trouble, maybe shout something out on Vent. If you have a situational utility ability, or even are asked to do something unusual on a boss fight, you're reluctant because you need those GCDs for more dps!!!!

(Usually when I say that, the response is "I can multitask!" But the reality doesn't always match that boast. What we see instead if players complaining about e.g. movement fights because that means they can't always get to step 6 of a 6 step damage rotation.)

Even more importantly, we also want design space for ourselves. When your spec is GCD locked, you have to start ignoring things like procs or free resources, because you can't spend them without screwing up your rotation.

That said, we know that being GCD locked is a really subjective issue. Some players like hitting a button every 1.5 (or 1.0) seconds and feel like they are waiting around when that doesn't happen. Fury warriors and the dps paladins who can't necessarily hit a button every 1.5 sec now have found their Cataclysm versions of the classes to feel almost foreign... though we still think it will feel better in the long run. I worry a little about the overall health of our game if going 1.5 seconds without hitting a button bores you to tears. :( Overall, I think everyone would have more fun if they focused more on beating the boss as a team and less on their individual contribution to that effort.

We also know that some players are just really intolerant of randomness. They make the logical leap from understanding that dealing with randomness is a challenge they need to overcome to campaigning for us to remove the randomness altogether. This is particularly true in PvP, which some players want to be more like a button masher fighting game and less like an RPG. Suffice to say that we think randomness is healthy and necessary as long as it doesn't get out of control. Even though you may claim it's the easiest thing in the world to hit that Pyroblast button when Hot Streak procs, we also know that dps can vary enormously even between relatively skilled and fantastically skilled players, and a great deal of that is using the right abilities at the right time.

Now with regard to DKs specifically, we think what is happening is that players are transfering characters in at 80 and ending up with 40% haste or whatever because of the way gear was converted on their character (no mastery, no armor pen). Once you get closer to 85, you won't have that much haste. You may be GCD locked for short periods of time when the stars align and you get a bunch of procs at once, but you'll also go streaks without those procs. This is still a world of difference from the DK on live, whose rotation collapses if they fail to get off a Plague Strike, or who can't even take advantage of free runes or procs, or who just have to reroll if they experience the unfortunate but also inevitable lag that comes with playing an online game.

Now, if you're one of those players who just hates gaps, then go ahead and stack a bunch of haste. You'll have to go out of your way to do that though, and sacrifice some other stats to get there. For the DK that balances gear out, you shouldn't be GCD locked for long periods of time.

Q u o t e:
This still needs to be addressed. Way too many people are wasting RE on HB or PS when they don't need too.


Most of the time (but not all) you should sit on the rune and wait for the pair. Here's why:

-RE will ONLY proc on dead runes. Not runes on cooldown; the runes waiting for them to finish.

-Therefore, a rune enabled by RE (say, FR1) will ALWAYS have a corresponding matching rune on cooldown (FR2). Not dead, not available; cooldown. You will never have a rune enabled by RE and now have two of the same rune immediately available!

-Therefore, with the new rune system, you have from now until the time FR2 is active to use the RE enabled FR1 without resource penalty. It will always come back 10 after FR2 is done recharging, so you are allowed to wait. There is a great chance that UH1, UH2, or a death rune will be available in this window. Sometimes you may want to PoF or refresh diseases instead, but you have that choice. It's a Priority System, baby!

Otherwise, wait for the Oblit! Consume the KM! Benefit from the rime! Get more RP from the HB to feed the next FS to proc RE again and GO GO GO!

This is accurate and something a lot of players seem to miss. Runic Empowerment will ONLY work on fully depleted runes - the ones that are sitting idle. It does not just feed you random runes that you have to work in, Tetris-like, to your rotation. That's a perhaps subtle but meaningful distinction.

I would not get an Unholy Rune from Runic Empowerment and think "I must hit Plague Strike NOW or I am losing potential dps." That would make more sense through today's lens of an unspent rune is always a wasted rune. In Cataclysm, you shouldn't let Runic Empowerment change up what ability you were planning on hitting next, at least for the most part. Sometimes you can just hit that ability sooner. But if you want to hit Obliterate, wait for Obliterate. Don't spend that Unholy Rune just becuse it's burning a hole in your pocket.

On the topic of DKs being GCD capped, we're trying to follow some of the math presented to see why you disagree with us so strongly.

It is apparent, despite my caution earlier, that some of you are saying "If I get procs, all my GCDs are filled." That's fine. That's going to happen sometimes. It's not going to happen every time. On Live, DKs often can't even react to their procs because they don't have space in their rotation to hit another button.

Here is a grossly simplified rotation on Live:

ABABABABABAB

Here is a rotation in Cataclysm:

AB_AB_AB_AB

Sometimes you'll get a proc, such as C, so you'll get:

ABCAB_AB_ABC

Sometimes you may get a lot of Cs:

ABCABCABCABCABC

You still won't get them every time.