Upcoming Death Knight Changes
Here are a few blue posts from the beta forums outlining some upcoming DK changes and fixes:
 Ghostcrawler |
| We think we have a pretty good idea now about what kind of death knight abilities are fun and useful and which ones are clunky or confusing. So now feels like the time to get the death knight into a more shippable state. A big change you’ll see in the next patch or two is consolidating death knight diseases.We like the gameplay that evolves from trying to get a disease on a target in order to do cool things. On the other hand, we need to fix:
1) The confusing array of diseases with their different durations, effects and stacking rules.
2) The crazy number of debuff slots a death knight can occupy on a target. 3) Diseases not playing well with freezing targets. 4) Getting a new talented ability only to find that you don’t have the runes availble to incorporate it into your rotation.The kinds of changes you’re likely to see include: meh abilities going away or getting packaged together, talents sliding around in talent trees, and more logical synergies and rotations. We don’t want to lose the depth that the class offers and certainly don’t want to lose what’s fun about being a DK.We’ll try and get the official talent trees updated when the changes are ready, because that will explain things better than me trying to do it all here in a wall of text. But I wanted to mention these changes in case it affected any of your feedback on the class. (Which continues to be awesome, in this forum, online and throughout the community.) |
Frost Strike
| Ghostcrawler |
| There is a bug right now preventing normalized attacks from doing non-physical damage. Frost Strike will be normalized when that bug is fixed. (Obliterate will also be normalized.)But, sadly, instant attacks do less damage than next-swing attacks, since an instant attack also lets you get the full benefit from the normal melee swing. That’s why Frost Strike does less damage now. The freezing part wasn’t even factored into the damage calculation because we want to mess with that some more… as well as get feedback. |
Heart Strike (did he say bosses?)
| Ghostcrawler |
| The reason Heart Strike is on next swing is you want to be able to get it off before you or your allies do too much damage to an enemy. The earlier you get it off, the better. It can be renewed if it falls off too.I’ve seen enough people play with it to know that it can feel underwhelming, and a big part of that is because the enemy’s hp bar barely moves. You have reduced what “100%” means for the enemy, not knocked it from 100% to 90%. But it is still a lot of damage.This is going to be a pretty scary ability in PvP and it’s very useful in PvE once you start fighting challenging enemies, like bosses. If you’re blasting through things quickly, then there are probably a lot of abilities that seem of questionable use. |
Unholy Blight
| Ghostcrawler |
| We’ll check Unholy Blight.The damage from Degeneration is supposed to be small, unless you hit a target with a hot on it. It’s not a bad way to use up a spare unholy rune most of the time, because you don’t always have a lot of options with unholy, but it’s not going to do huge damage in a lot of cases. (Now getting a disease on a target period can pay off for a death knight in lots of cases anyway.)Unholy Blight can get a stack of diseases on a lot of targets pretty quickly and those diseases can be pretty debilitating depending on your other talents. It’s not going to do huge AE damage like say Blizzard or Volley (all channeled AEs do a lot more damage now), but it isn’t intended to be just for tanking either.The death knight spells tend to be pretty complex so it’s possible we just broke something since we are still iterating on a lot of spells and abilities pretty quickly. |
You can follow our forum post here for further discussion.
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