Lichborne: Patch 5.4 patch note analysis for death knights

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done.

The patch 5.4 PTR has seen its first round of updates, and with those updates has come a handful of death knight changes. We had most of our earth-shattering changes in patch 5.2, so while there's nothing completely major here, there are some welcome surprises and good quality of life changes, mostly focusing on making it easier for tanks, both in general and blood tanks in specific, to keep threat. Today, we'll take a look at the patch 5.4 patch notes as they stand at this writing. As always, this is the PTR, so class balances may change pretty drastically before the final patch goes live. Official Patch 5.4 PTR Patch NotesClasses

All taunt type abilities now increase all threat generated against the target while the taunt is active by 200%.
Vengeance gains from being critically hit have been halved.

Death Knight

General

Icebound Fortitude no longer costs Runic Power.
Riposte is a new passive ability learned at level 76. When the Death Knight dodges or parries any attack, they gain 50% of their Parry and Dodge as additional bonus to Critical Strike for 20 seconds.

Talents

Anti-Magic Zone has been redesigned. The talent now reduces magic damage taken in the area-of-effect by 40% for 3 seconds, there is no longer a cap on total damage absorbed, and the ability no longer scales with strength.
Death Siphon had its damage increased by 10%.
Plague Leech now tries to convert 2 fully-depleted runes (up from 1) into a Death Rune based on specialization.

Blood: Restores 1 Frost Rune, 1 Unholy Rune
Frost: 1 Frost Rune, 1 Unholy Rune
Unholy: 1 Blood Rune, 1 Frost Rune

Glyphs

Glyph of Enduring Infection now reduces damage dealt by diseases by 15% (down from a 30% reduction).
Glyph of Mind Freeze now reduces the cooldown of Mind Freeze by 1 second, and raises its cost by 10 Runic Power (down from 2 seconds and 20 Runic Power).
Glyph of Outbreak now causes Outbreak to cost 30 Runic Power (down from 40).

Blood

Dancing Rune Weapon no longer costs Runic Power.
Sanguine Fortitude no longer reduces the cost of Icebound Fortitude.

Unholy

Master of Ghouls now reduces the cooldown of Raise Dead by 60 seconds.

Blood gets more threatening

Only a few weeks after I speculated on the possibility of making DPS stats more useful for tanks, Blizzard has played with my expectations, as it is their wont to do, and turned them on their heads. Now, instead of DPS stats being more useful to tank, tank stats have been made more useful for DPSing with Riposte.

It's not a straight-up boost, since you first have to dodge or parry, and then, and only then, will get a temporary boost to your critical strike chance based on 50% of your Dodge and Parry. This causes a lot of interesting hypothetical situations. If you need more threat, it will probably still be more use to get the more dependable hit and expertise caps, but you now have the option to stack more parry and dodge in order to boost both threat and defense, and use defensive trinkets or cool downs that increase your dodge or parry chance as makeshift DPS cooldowns. The one downside here is that the critical strike boost is calculated off of ratings, so it appears it will be ignoring such mechanics as strength-to-parry conversions, which could make it less powerful than one would first think, as much of our parry comes from that conversion and from runeforging.

Blizzard's stated reason for doing this appears to be giving death knights and warriors a way to get DPS from mitigation stats, as paladins can already get both from haste, while druids and monks can get both from critical strike. That said, If there is a downside here, it is that death knights have traditionally prioritized avoidance far below mastery because of its antagonistic relationship with said stat. This, in fact, may be Blizzard's attempt to get avoidance back on the map for death knight tanks. Whether it's enough or not remains to be seen, especially as, again, the boost will ignore much of the parry we have in the first place. That said, much like warriors, we may see a change to make Riposte's critical strike chance more desirable in an upcoming build.

Blizzard also provided another buff that may be called a DPS increase. Now that Dancing Rune Weapon needs no runic power, that's 60 more runic power one can use on more Rune Strikes. It also makes it easier to deploy the cooldown at a moment's notice when you need some extra defense. Since it provides a boost to parry and dodge chance, it should also mean more chances to trigger Riposte.

Of course, the other change arguably somewhat negates the need for a DPS increase for tanks. Taunt abilities (in our case, Dark Command and Death Grip) will now also provide a 200% threat increase while active. This means you can use the taunt to build extra threat even if the mob is already on you, which should make single target fights a little easier to handle, at least, as while as helping to assure that you can save that DPS who refuses to stop burning the mob even as it eats his face off.

Talents get bandaids

The Anti-Magic Zone change has proven controversial, but it may arguably be a buff. With the absorption limit gone, this means it can more easily soak up large amounts of damage from sustained magic damage effects in a raid, as long as said effects occur within a 3 second window. Arguably, the main thing that changed is the exact situation it should be used in, leaving it simply powerful in different situations than it was before.

Death Siphon gets another damage buff, but the main problem remains the same. It's just not as powerful as using our main strikes, and the fact that it costs a death rune means its awkward to fit into your existing rotation, especially for two-handed frost death knights who have to split up an Obliterate to properly use Death Siphon. Death Pact still remains the clear winner of this tier. Death Siphon has always been rather situational, and this buff won't really change that.

Plague Leech's change seems to acknowledge the death rune problem in the same way Death Siphon's change does not. Plague Leech, while technically a DPS boost if used properly, is often avoided by your average death knight because it is difficult and annoying to use properly. By tailoring the skill to refresh the exact runes you need to unleash your signature 2-rune strike, it makes it at least a little more convenient to use, by assuring you'll get back the two runes you need most. Keep in mind, though, that you'll still be left disease-less, so once those runes refresh, you'll still need to have a disease application method ready to go, and Plague Leech will preclude the use of at least one of those methods, Unholy Blight. This is a change that won't really solve the base issue with Plague Leech, that it's too annoying to use, and my feelings about it really remain the same as they did before patch 5.4.

Glyphs and other changes

Icebound Fortitude is now free to use by default, which is definitely welcome news for DPS. While Icebound Fortitude has always been a survival option, now it's one that doesn't reduce our DPS by forcing us to give up valuable runic power. All death knight DPS should already have this ability hotkeyed, but now it's even easier justify pushing the key.

The glyphs don't really change anything major, especially for PvE. I've argued in the past that Outbreak should have no cooldown by default, but the need for runic power to activate it on the glyph isn't even a question of losing DPS, it's a question of needing to reapply diseases at a critical time or at the start of a battle and having no runic power to do it. 10 runic power shaved off the top won't change that reality. Learn the ropes of endgame play with WoW Insider's DK 101 guide. Make yourself invaluable to your raid group with Mind Freeze and other interrupts, gear up with pre-heroic DPS gear or pre-heroic tank gear, and plot your path to tier 11/valor point DPS gear. Tags: anti-magic-zone, blood-death-knight-lichborne, dancing-rune-weapon, dark-command, death-grip, death-knight-blood-lichborne, death-knight-frost-lichborne, death-knight-guide, death-knight-info, death-knight-patch-5.4-changes, death-knight-ptr-changes, death-knight-talents, death-knight-unholy-lichborne, death-siphon, dk-guide, dk-info, dk-talents, featured, frost-death-knight-lichborne, glyph-of-enduring-infection, glyph-of-mind-freeze, glyph-of-outbreak, guide-to-death-knights, icebound-fortitude, master-of-ghouls, patch-5.4, patch-5.4-death-knight-changes, patch-5.4-ptr, plague-leech, riposte, sanguine-fortitude, taunt, unholy-death-knight-lichborne, wow-death-knight, wow-dk

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Lichborne: Addressing ability bloat in death knight skills

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done.

Recently on Twitter, Lead systems designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street was asked what issues he'd fix if he could immediately wave a wand and make it better. One of the ones he mentioned was ability bloat. Ability bloat is the term used to describe a class needing to press too many buttons simply to perform the basic tasks expected of them in group PvE and PvP content.

Ability bloat is certainly something that's been on my mind as well, so this week we'll consider the possibility of ability bloat in death knights and figure out various ways to address it. Much like how talents were pared down for Mists, I wouldn't be surprised to see abilities pared down in major ways for the next expansion, and we might as well start anticipating it.

Streamline the daily grind

I personally don't know if our day to day rotations need much changing. I'm still not a huge fan of unholy's rotation, per se, but it avoids bloat because it uses different buttons than frost or blood as opposed to additional buttons. I'd still ultimately argue that it makes it overly confusing to switch between specs, but especially with addition of Plague Strike adding both diseases, it's a much more tolerable rotation.

Plague Strike, though, brings up an interesting point. Why shouldn't it work that way for all specs? Right now, in order to properly make sure we have the ability to apply diseases, blood and frost death knights have to have a lot of buttons their bar. Outbreak and, if you can spare the talent point, Unholy Blight offer free disease application, but each have restrictive cool downs. Thus, you also need Plague Strike and Icy Touch on your bars. Technically, frost death knight use Howling Blast, but there are times when you need precision single-target disease application (or a single target way to spend Rime procs) in which case only Icy Touch will do.

Giving Plague Strike the ability to apply diseases at any time could be invaluable in that it might neatly justify removal of at least 2-3 other buttons from a death knight's main toolbar, but it does have drawbacks as well. For one, since it costs a single unholy rune, it leaves an orphaned frost rune. Unholy death knights take care of that with Festering Strike, but that isn't (and shouldn't be) an option for the other specs. With that in mind, perhaps the proper option is to simply remove the cool down on Outbreak (We have a glyph that does that now, but it also makes it cost runic power, which makes it impossible to use as an opener). Consider it somewhat like a warlock's Corruption or a shadow priests Shadow Word: Pain. Both cost so little they hardly register as mana drains. Disease should be a step toward using our other abilities, not a shackle keeping us down.

Soul Reaper is another prime candidate for removal, and honestly the button I'd least miss if it were gone. This is an ability that directly complicates the existing rotation, especially for two-handed frost death knights. You have to wait for the right moment to fit it in, which includes tweaking your UI or using addons to predict it, and you have to . Personally, I'd love to see Soul Reaper gone, especially since you can essentially replace it with Merciless Combat, the old frost passive talent. It may be the most obvious way to reduce button bloat that we have.

When something extra is just extra work

With those two issues out of the way, it falls to look at our major cool downs and situational abilities to see if any of them could leave. I'm going to say that one of the first things to go would probably be Dark Simulacrum. In PvE, especially in unskilled hands, it often becomes more of a gimmick or a party trick than a helpful tool. It doesn't actually absorb many PvE boss abilities, and many of the spells it does absorb it shoots back at minimal damage because they require spellpower to work. It does have it uses, especially in PvP, and can even be manipulated using mind control for more predictability, but ultimately, it requires such a high level of skill and such specific circumstances to be used effectively that it seems a prime candidate for removal.

Army of the Dead is another candidate for removal. It has seen significant improvement in Mists with the introduction of a glyph to remove the taunt factor, and if used correctly, is a DPS boost, but if it's unglyphed it can cause havoc, and it's relatively easy to forget since it stays on cooldown for so long. I'm a huge fan of the ability for "look and feel" alone, but it'd be one of the easier abilities to remove. On the other hand, at a 10 minute cooldown, you can assign it to a relatively obscure hot key and not having to worry about getting too overwhelmed. Regardless, if they do remove it, I'm still pushing for that Wild Imps-style ghoul summoning passive as a replacement. It's basically my new pet issue now that we can make our ghouls look like geists, sorry.

Are we the ones in trouble?

When all is said and done, there's one more tack to take: Maybe death knights aren't really a problem class in this regard. One of my favorite alts is my hunter, and I can certainly confirm that between all of her stuff, even with macros, it's often a struggle to get all the buttons for every ability mapped and hotkeyed were I need them. So far, I really haven't faced the same struggle with my death knight. We have an established set of priorities with just enough extra burst or situational buttons to make it interesting, and I'm fine with it, for the most part.

Regardless, something like this would really have to be done as part of an expansion redesign, allowing the dev team time to re-balance the game and class to compensate for the missing buttons and giving us time to say goodbye to some old friends. It's likely something that's needed for the long term health of the game in the same way the Mists talent revamp was, and I can't say I'd fault the developers for doing it, even if I am a little still sore over losing old school Unholy Blight. Learn the ropes of endgame play with WoW Insider's DK 101 guide. Make yourself invaluable to your raid group with Mind Freeze and other interrupts, gear up with pre-heroic DPS gear or pre-heroic tank gear, and plot your path to tier 11/valor point DPS gear. Tags: ability-bloat, army-of-the-dead, blood-death-knight-lichborne, dark-simulacrum, death-knight-abilities, death-knight-blood-lichborne, death-knight-diseases, death-knight-frost-lichborne, death-knight-guide, death-knight-info, death-knight-skills, death-knight-talents, death-knight-unholy-lichborne, dk-guide, dk-info, dk-talents, featured, frost-death-knight-lichborne, ghostcrawler, guide-to-death-knights, merciless-combat, outbreak, patch-6.0, plague-strike, soul-reaper, unholy-death-knight-lichborne, wow-death-knight, wow-dk

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Lichborne: DPS stats for tanking death knights

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done.

So Rossi bought this up in his last column, and I feel like it is a valid question. If haste is a valid gearing strategy for Paladins, why shouldn't it be for the other tanks? The idea of haste and critical strike as being valid, even desirable stats for a tank seems almost anathema, but as of Mists, especially, it's worth a look. Paladins even have a gearing strategy built around haste. Are they the only ones? Should death knights be considering haste and critical strike rating? Should Blizzard be looking at ways to make haste and critical strike rating more desirable for tanks? We'll consider those questions this week.

Don't be too hasty

Haste certainly isn't useless for death knight tanks, in theory. Not only do you get more threat, but faster rune regeneration means more Death Strikes, and more auto attacks means more Scent of Blood procs. But haste simply doesn't make up for the lost survivability you get by eschewing all that mastery and avoidance, and if you need more threat or DPS, getting hit rating and expertise to 7.5% each will get you more bang for your buck in most situations.

Oddly enough, the haste protection paladin works similar to how a death knight tank is often described to work: you take larger spikes of damage due to a lack of innate defense, but you have a large range of active defensive buttons to pick up the slack. Haste simply helps the protection paladin use those cool downs more often and to greater effect thanks to Sanctity of Battle.

So the question here is, should DPS stats be more important for all tanks, and if so, how should Blizzard implement it?

A Blizzard of new stat options

On the side of making DPS stats important is the idea that it would provide for more meaningful and interesting choices when gearing up your tank. Rather than "best in slot," you'd have at least a chance at a more meaningful choice at what gear to wear and what to gem or reforge for. In addition, with threat and DPS potential slowly slipping away from blood tanks' hands, an opportunity to get them back would certainly be welcome.

On the other side of the coin is the argument against complication. Many members of the WoW community are already pointing out how complicated boss fights have become. Adding another layer of difficulty in the form of figuring out how to juggle up to 7 secondary stats (hit, expertise, mastery, dodge, parry, haste, and critical strike chance) might be going beyond the pale. In addition, while Blizzard's pretty big on gear consolidation, a lot of DPS would probably be a little miffed that that great critical strike trinket is suddenly a perfectly reasonable thing for a tank to roll on too. More players going after the same piece of loot may make things easier on the itemization developers, but it could lead to hurt feelings and lack of variety in a raid.

One thing to weight here might be the possibility of streamlining stats anyway. In previous columns, we have discussed some of the problems with hit rating and expertise. Hitting specific numbers with hit and expertise can get frustrating, especially with the over-abundance of hit rating on weapons and trinkets in Throne of Thunder. With Blizzard designers such as Ghostcrawler acknowledging this on twitter, we could see a removal or extreme revamp of these stats in a future expansion, thus paving the way for haste and critical strike to become important for tanks without completely overwhelming them.

Can we do it?

Of course, if you decide the positives outweigh the negatives, how do you implement it? You'd need to add some extra incentive to haste and critical strike to make them worthwhile. On the haste side, you could simply buff Scent of Blood until it becomes powerful enough, or procs often enough, for haste to be worth getting for more Scent of Blood procs. Another idea might be to apply a Sanctity of Battle-like effect to all tank specs. Blizzard's often talked about preferring classes to be more "active" in their tanking, and while paladins might initially dislike sharing one of their signature passives, it could end up being a tidy, simple way to move toward the active role, and within an expansion or two, many might forget it was once paladin-only.

On the critical strike side, the most likely candidate might be a proc of some sort. Bears, of course, already get a critical strike heal from Leader of the Pack, but we'd probably need something even more beefy to justify using it. One idea might be to allow Blood Shield to activate or be added on to from a critical strike, allowing for some fun synergy between mastery and critical strike. That also solves some of the problem of the randomness of procs by tying it to the predictability of a Blood Shield, so you know exactly what you're getting and already have it tied up with Death Strikes.

Should we do it?

In the final estimation, I have to say that I'm content with mastery, parry, and dodge as the main tank stats, and I really wouldn't feel in a hurry to change that. The high complexity of the modern raid boss battle makes me hesitant to complicate gearing on top of that, and I prefer that a tank's main job remain gearing for straight, uncomplicated survivability. What problems we do have should be fixed by new or buffed skills or mechanics, not by introducing a whole new itemization scheme. Still, the idea of haste and critical strike as tank stats and as a way to fix whatever problems we may or may not have is intriguing enough to look at, and with a new expansion almost certain to be announced at BlizzCon, a little bit of speculation never hurt anybody. Learn the ropes of endgame play with WoW Insider's DK 101 guide. Make yourself invaluable to your raid group with Mind Freeze and other interrupts, gear up with pre-heroic DPS gear or pre-heroic tank gear, and plot your path to tier 11/valor point DPS gear. Tags: blood-death-knight-lichborne, blood-shield, critical-strike, death-knight-blood-lichborne, death-knight-guide, death-knight-info, death-knight-talents, death-knight-tank-stats, death-knight-tanking, death-strike, dk-guide, dk-info, dk-talents, dk-tank, dk-tank-gearing, dodge, expertise, featured, guide-to-death-knights, haste, hit, mastery, paladin-tank-haste, parry, sanctity-of-battle, scent-of-blood, tank-stats, tanking-gear, tanking-stats, wow-death-knight, wow-dk

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Lichborne: Reviewing death knight talents for patch 5.4

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done.

Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has indicated that Blizzard is pretty happy with the new Mists of Pandaria talent design, and I have to agree with him. While it does suck to wait 15 levels between new talent choices while leveling a new alt, otherwise the new talent system allows real flexibility and interesting, meaningful choices, arguably more than we had under the 51 or 31 point talent systems, where almost every tier had a clear best choice for whatever role you were playing.

That said, there's always room for improvement, and the devs have mentioned they plan to use patch 5.4 as another opportunity to go over talent trees and bolster talents that see less use or otherwise feel underpowered. With that in mind, this week we'll look at the death knight tree and pick out some candidates for a patch 5.4 redesign.
The first tier of our talent system deals primarily with the manipulation of diseases. This is, all in all, a relatively balanced tier. There's two small problems here. The first, and more minor, is that Roiling Blood doesn't fit comfortably into frost anywhere. This is one that probably won't need to be fixed, per se. Talents that are naturally better for specific specs seem like a reasonable thing, and Roiling Blood is very good at what it does.

What probably will need fixing is Plague Leech. Plague Leech is a talent that a lot of death knights have had some justifiable distaste for since it was first introduced. Because it supplies an extra death rune, it ends up being a straight up damage increase, but only if you use it just as your diseases about to expire. Interestingly enough, while it is a damage increase, most death knights seem to agree that it's not the end of the world if you don't take it. Part of this may be because it's only a damage increase if you use it exactly right.

Still, if any talent of ours is liable to be changed, I'd expect it to be Plague Leech. It does technically have an unfair advantage of increasing damage over the other two, but is similarly so complicated to use right that many death knights skip it anyway. Swapping it for a less awkward talent would be welcome.

The second tier is a set of survivability options. This one is actually pretty solid. Purgatory here is probably mostly blood-only since it's so hard for a DPS to get the healing needed to survive, but both Lichborne and Anti-Magic Zone have a lot to recommend to any spec depending on the situation. If there's an argument to be made here, it might be that Anti-Magic Zone should be baseline so that all death knights have a solid raid-wide cool down, but I wouldn't expect this tier to be touched.

If the 3rd tier has a problem, it's that Death's Advance is just too good. Having extra movement speed is very hard to pass up. One of a melee's main duties, whether tank or DPS, is getting out of the fire and getting into position, and a talent that helps you do that is pretty solid. That said, the other two options have good situational use. Chilblains is amazing for kiting duty. So there's possibly an argument for making Death's Advance baseline (or taking it out altogether) and placing another mobility or control option here -- maybe even a long-term crowd control option. That's probably something that would be more a decision to made in a patch 6.0, though, so I wouldn't expect this tier to change.

Tier 4 is our health regeneration tier, and has already seen quite a few tweaks. At this point, both Death Pact and Death Siphon are solid talents and unlikely to change. One offers a big chunk of emergency healing every few minutes, while the other allows on-demand healing as long as you're willing to give up a more hard hitting strike you could have use that death rune for. Essentially, you decide whether you want a strong burst of healing every few minutes, or quicker, smaller bursts at the cost of a chunk of your DPS. Conversion, on the other hand, is the black sheep of this tier, and for good reason. Since it drains a steady stream of your runic power, it essentially blocks the use of our rune regeneration talents and the benefit of Scent of Blood, resulting in a crippling us in ways the healing doesn't make up for. Conversion is right up there with Plague Leech for things that should be redesigned or removed.

The 5th tier, at this point, is what it is. At this point, it's an essential part of our class, and if it's ever removed, it's going to need to be part of a more complete redesign that you'd see in an expansion beginning patch. I would not expect to see any changes in patch 5.4. That said, what might be interesting here is a return of Blood Tap to a base emergency cool down as it was before the revamp, though it's unclear what one could replace it with.

I admit that I was not a fan of the final tier when it first came out, and I'd still kind of like damage talents as our top tier. That said, the tier as it's shaken out in actual game play has been relatively strong. Both Gorefiend's Grasp and Remorseless Winter have been very solid crowd control and mob wrangling options for trash pulls, and really have no pressing need to be changed. That leaves us with Desecrated Ground. While it has some limited use for PvP and specific PvE fights, it just doesn't have enough to recommend it in the long run. This is one that may need a revamp of sorts. Giving it a damage absorption component like Anti-Magic Zone might beef it up enough to be useful, though that might also beef it up so much as to make it mandatory, which wouldn't be any better. Arguably, it would also see a resurgence in use if one of the bosses in the Siege of Ogrimmar uses fear spells liberally, though that would still bring up a possible needed redesign for future boss tiers. Learn the ropes of endgame play with WoW Insider's DK 101 guide. Make yourself invaluable to your raid group with Mind Freeze and other interrupts, gear up with pre-heroic DPS gear or pre-heroic tank gear, and plot your path to tier 11/valor point DPS gear. Tags: anti-magic-zone, asphyxiate, blood-death-knight-lichborne, blood-tap, chilblains, conversion, death-knight-blood-lichborne, death-knight-frost-lichborne, death-knight-guide, death-knight-info, death-knight-talents, death-knight-unholy-lichborne, death-pact, death-siphon, deaths-advance, desecrated-ground, dk-guide, dk-info, dk-talents, featured, frost-death-knight-lichborne, gorefiends-grasp, guide-to-death-knights, lichborne, mists-of-pandaria-talents, patch-5.4, plague-leech, purgatory, remorseless-winter, roiling-blood, runic-corruption, runic-empowerment, talent-revamp, talent-system, talents, unholy-blight, unholy-death-knight-lichborne, wow-death-knight, wow-dk

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Lichborne: 2012 predictions for death knights and how they actually shook out

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done.

As it was for, to some extent, all classes, 2012 was a busy time for the death knights, as one expansion ended and another began. As the news of Mists of Pandaria began pouring in, I started making some predictions. As the Mists beta progressed, I started mentioning things that I felt, or that the death knight community felt, needed to change or would change. This week, I figured it might be interesting to look back on some of those old articles and see what exactly happened, and how far off the mark I was (or wasn't).

My crystal ball's a bit cloudy

Back in late January 2012, I made 3 predictions for the upcoming patch 5.0. The first was technically a prediction about other classes. Namely, I predicted block would be removed. This would take care of the infamous "avoidance cap," thus allowing the non-blocking tanks to worry less about being outclassed by warriors and paladins in later raiding tiers.

As someone who played a druid tank in Burning Crusade and has tanked regularly on my death knight since Wrath, this has been an issue near and dear to my heart. I didn't get it quite right this time, but I like to think I was in the ballpark. Blocking wasn't abolished outright, but by making it calculate only after dodge and parry are rolled, it makes it such that the traditional avoidance cap is not reachable by any achievable metric. That truth has held up so far, though we may need another raid tier or two to see the full extent of what it means, for death knights and others.

The second prediction I made was that two-handed frost would become a thing of the past, simply because Blizzard would grow weary of trying to balance it much as they did making every tree tanking or DPS. With the roller coaster ride that has been buffs and nerfs to Might of the Frozen Wastes, this might have almost felt like a safe bet at the time, but Blizzard did no such thing. In fact, they have done a remarkably decent job of balancing the weapons, making it so that two-handed frost gets extra damage from Obliterate, and dual wielding from Frost Strike, giving each a slightly different play style and stat outlay, and so far keeping the DPS relatively close. This was definitely a swing and a miss on my part, no two ways about it.

My final prediction was for an unholy revamp. Unholy was in a very interesting state at the beginning of 2012. It was actually relatively popular and well regarded as a raiding spec. Unfortunately, this was due to one thing: Gurthalak. The blade dropped off of Deathwing, and it had a proc of a tentacle that did shadow damage. This shadow damage could be buffed by Dreadblade. As a result, unholy death knights found themselves finally competitive with frost, but only if they had that sword.

Thus, it stood to reason that once the sword was no longer in the picture, unholy's flaws would come back to the forefront. Alas, Blizzard disagreed, and unholy, in basic mechanics, remained relatively unchanged in the Mists beta. As a result, all the problems that plagued unholy, from awkward rune spending to slow damage ramp up time, continued into Mists, and resulted in a near rogue-like exodus from the spec.

The good news here is that Blizzard's added a few unholy changes in patch 5.2. They're not exactly a complete revamp, but they do look like they'll make a good, solid run at solving some of unholy's weak points. It just took a year longer than I expected, more or less. Now we just have to hope those changes make it to live servers.

Beta lamentations

The first fix suggested was the removal of Plague Leech. Plague Leech is essentially the only first tier talent that directly translates into a damage increase. As long as you use it to remove diseases every 30 seconds or so, right when they would otherwise expire, you'll get some extra DPS by using the death rune it gives you. Weirdly enough, very few death knights have been actively happy about this, primarily because it gives us one more complicated thing to watch. Alas, Blizzard left it in place, so it is there, and it is a DPS increase if used properly. The good news is that it's slim enough that you can probably get away with skipping it if you aren't on bleeding edge content, but I doubt many death knights would mourn it if it went away.

The second fix suggested was combining DPS presences. Midway through beta, a perennial death knight issue was the fact that Frost Presence was just not useful to anyone outside of some AoE situations. The one second global cool down on Unholy Presence was just too dear for any DPS death knight to use anything else. It seemed like just giving up on Frost Presence and removing it completely would be the best option. Blizzard, instead, made the one second GCD universal, and tweaked the two presences to offer unique benefits that suited the spec they matched. So while this request wasn't fulfilled, the alternate solution Blizzard offered has turned out for the best.

The third fix suggested was a revamp of the level 90 talents. Originally, the level 90 talents off some extra damage to go with their effects. Alas, balancing that damage proved a bit much especially taking into account masteries, so Blizzard removed the damage altogether, leaving the unique effects in place. This didn't go over well with some in the death knight community, the concern being that it made the tier feel less epic and less like an exciting thing to look forward to at the level cap.

It's certainly true that other classes get solid damage abilities at level 90, and since our level 90s, without damage, are arguably just glorified reskins or slight retweaks of old abilities like Hungering Cold, it is a little discouraging they were never redesigned. Still, they have proven to be solid workhorses with genuine situational utility. One just wishes they were a bit more substantial.

The level 75 talents were the next ones I put up for a possible re-do. Our rune regeneration system, in which Runic Empowerment and its variations provide faster rune regeneration when played against our runic power generators, has always been a point of contention since it was first implemented, with many death knights saying it makes our rotation unnecessarily complicated, bringing rise to terms such as "rune tetris" to describe the elaborate dances needed to "game" the abilities. In addition, Blood Tap made it onto this tier, becoming a new rune regeneration ability instead of the old dependable standby it had been before. There was a strong movement among the death knight community for the whole mechanic to be abolished, or at least for Blizzard to stick us all on Runic Corruption and replace that talent level.

Alas, Blizzard did not cave, and thus we still have the prospect of rune tetris for the optimal play style. That said, the difference in most cases is minuscule enough that, again, a lot of death knights are just going with what feels comfortable, so again, it's a case where we're probably alright in a holding pattern. Still, when the next expansion or major balance patch rolls around, I fully expect this to be one of the major issues again.
Learn the ropes of endgame play with WoW Insider's DK 101 guide. Make yourself invaluable to your raid group with Mind Freeze and other interrupts, gear up with pre-heroic DPS gear or pre-heroic tank gear, and plot your path to tier 11/valor point DPS gear.
Tags: avoidance-cap, blood-death-knight-lichborne, blood-tap, death-knight-blood-lichborne, death-knight-frost-lichborne, death-knight-guide, death-knight-info, death-knight-predictions, death-knight-presence-changes, death-knight-talents, death-knight-unholy-lichborne, death-knight-wish-list, dk-guide, dk-info, dk-talents, dreadblade, featured, frost-death-knight-lichborne, frost-presence, frost-strike, guide-to-death-knights, gurthalak, hungering-cold, might-of-the-frozen-wastes, obliterate, plague-leech, rune-tetris, runic-corruption, runic-empowerment, unholy-death-knight-lichborne, unholy-presence, wow-death-knight, wow-dk

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

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Lichborne: Unholy death knights get some gifts in patch 5.2

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done.
Given that I have been talking the past few weeks about unholy's woes and some things Blizzard will probably never give us, I wanted to spend this week talking about some of the good things Blizzard has given us. Luckily, Blizzard decided to give us the greatest Christmas gift of all: Meaningful balance and mechanics changes to the unholy death knight on the upcoming patch 5.2 PTR.

Plague Strike delivers both diseases

Applying diseases when Outbreak is on cool down has been one of the most awkward parts of playing unholy ever since Scourge Strike was switched to a single rune model. Applying via the usual Plague Strike/Icy Touch model leaves orphaned runes that cannot easily be spent on a standard strike that fits into the basic unholy priority system, throwing off the rotation in a pretty jarring manner and making fights with multiple target switches a bit of a pain. However, in patch 5.2, Ebon Plaguebringer will allow Plague Strike to apply both Frost Fever and Blood Plague.

This means that single target fights will become a lot smoother. The ability to apply both diseases on one strike with no cool down means that your rotation isn't interrupted at all. All you do is apply a Plague Strike when you would normally apply a Scourge Strike. While Plague Strike certainly does do significantly less damage than Scourge Strike, it's not as much lost as if you had that orphaned rune hanging out there. Regarding, Festering Strike will continue to extend diseases, so in single target fights, at least, you'll still be able to use Scourge Strike to your hearts' content most of the time.

One new facet this does bring to the unholy rotation is the advantage of refreshing diseases. Diseases are a solid chunk of unholy's total damage. When you apply diseases, their damage is determined by taking a snapshot of your current stats, such as attack power. For the duration of the diseases, those modifiers stay the same, determining the exact damage and critical strike chance of each disease tick. With Plague Strike now a quick and easy way to apply diseases, death knights may find that it's worth it, in the long run, to sacrifice a Scourge Strike to use Plague Strike and refresh diseases for higher damage. This could especially prove true if you have a couple strength trinket procs up and an active strength potion. There's already some addons being worked on to help calculate this, so if this change makes it live, look for those for sure.

The greatness of Gary the gargoyle

Summon Gargoyle has long been a point of contention between the unholy death knight community and Blizzard. It's one of the only real ways unholy death knights can get an on demand burst of damage that stacks with Heroism and similar haste effects, but its strength hasn't been legendary as of late. In fact, the math suggests that if the gargoyle (dubbed Gary by the unholy community) stays how it is, there's a swiftly approaching gear point at which you'll get more DPS from spending the 60 runic power cost on Death Coil instead of the gargoyle.

Blizzard is aiming to fix this with two changes on the patch 5.2 PTR. The first is that the gargoyle costs no runic power. Given the rather low amount of damage it does and the fact it is an uncontrollable pet, which means it may not attack when and where we want, making it a "freebie" seems to be a rather fair way to bring it into equity.

That said, Blizzard did not stop there. In addition, the gargoyle will do plague damage in patch 5.2, which is a combination of nature and shadow damage. This is significant because it may mean that Gary will finally gain a benefit from Dreadblade, the unholy mastery. Mastery has strictly been a bottom barrel stat for unholy due to the fact it doesn't affect pets at all. With this change, it may see a comeback, though we may need to wait for the PTR to come up to confirm how much it benefits.

Still, this change has the effect of helping to offset two of the longest-lasting unholy complaints, lack of mastery synergy and lack of a good worthwhile burst damage button, so it's definitely a change I'll be looking forward to.

Reaping adds an Icy Touch

If the two fixes above work as well as they promise to, it may be that Unholy's AoE woes will be the last major beef the spec has. Blizzard has been making some tentative efforts to fix this. In an earlier patch, they allowed Reaping to apply to Blood Boil, essentially meaning that once you actually got your AoE rotation up, you could keep it up by allowing most of your runes to refresh over and over as death runes.

Unfortunately, this still leaves the problem of setting up the initial death runes. Currently, death knights have to plan ahead and try to use Festering Strike to set that up ahead of time. This is a sore spot for many unholy die hards, with suggestions including making unholy's Blood Boil into a frost/blood spending heavy hitter.

Blizzard didn't quite take that route, but they did add Icy Touch to Reaping. In theory, this means you could "prime" your AoE rotation by using only 2 Icy Touches, allowing you to immediately use your 2 blood runes for Blood Boil and Pestilence.

Is Unholy Fixed?

It's difficult to predict the full impact of these changes just yet, especially since the PTR isn't up, but so far, these changes are shaping up to be an excellent start to fixing unholy. Of course, recall that unholy's problem, much as with rogues, isn't the actual damage as much as the "feel" of the spec. Heading on the PTR will help us get a better grasp on whether the changes help with that aspect. Considering they promise to allow quicker burst damage and fewer orphaned runes when setting up diseases or AoE rotations, I'd say the prognosis is excellent.

As always, of course, these are PTR changes and may never make live servers, but from what we know right now, I'm hopeful they will.
Learn the ropes of endgame play with WoW Insider's DK 101 guide. Make yourself invaluable to your raid group with Mind Freeze and other interrupts, gear up with pre-heroic DPS gear or pre-heroic tank gear, and plot your path to tier 11/valor point DPS gear.
Tags: blood-plague, death-knight-balance, death-knight-guide, death-knight-info, death-knight-patch-notes, death-knight-talents, death-knight-unholy-lichborne, dk-guide, dk-info, dk-talents, ebon-plaguebringer, featured, frost-fever, gargoyle, gary-the-gargoyle, guide-to-death-knights, icy-touch, outbreak, patch-5.2, patch-5.2-death-knight, patch-5.2-ptr, patch-notes, plague-strike, reaping, scourge-strike, summon-gargoyle, unholy-balance, unholy-death-knight-lichborne, wow-death-knight, wow-dk

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

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