Love him or hate him, GC took the time to get pretty involved in a discussion about DK’s success and failures throughout WotLK. The discussion was in the tanking forums and titled “3.3.3 Worked (sorta) for DKs” and can be found over at the official forums here.

Among the topics discussed was the population fluctuation of DK’s. First, they were “OP” according to GC, then they were fixed to be more inline with the other classes. This caused a lot of DK’s early on in the expansion, and tapering off later on in the expansion.

As the posters in the thread stated, the 3.3.3 patch was relatively successful for DK tanks, seeing our class used more often in ICC encounters. There is now a DK related blues news thread where we will attempt to consolidate any news relating to our class which should save some time trying to stay current. You can find the thread here.

We DKs can again control multiple targets, with a hotfix allowing chains of ice to operate on more than one target. Should help in arenas, and the occasional PvE situation like Faction Champions.

This reverts an accidental nerf to chains which came in 3.3.

Blizzard just announced that Icecrown Citadel will be a staged release much like Crusader’s Coliseum was. It will be broken up into four separate sections: The Lower Spire, Plagueworks, Crimson Hall, and Frostwing Halls. The Lower Spire will be released first which includes Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Icecrown Gunship Battle, and Deathbringer Saurfang so guilds can begin gathering information on these bosses for their 3.3 plan of attack. Blizzard has also announced that the final boss of each wing will have a limited number of attempts per week, much like we saw for Trial of the Grand Crusader as an instance. Blizzard does plan on increasing the number of attempts on the bosses each week to allow more raids to pass through over time. Also, as would be expected, players may not enable heroic mode on the bosses until the Lich King has been defeated in normal mode.

In addition to the staged release content, Blizzard also made some comments on some of the more difficult achievements in Naxx, Ulduar or ToGC.

There will be no explicit rewards for defeating the Lich King with a specific number of attempts remaining as there was with Trial of the Grand Crusader. There will also not be an achievement to complete Icecrown Citadel without being defeated by a boss encounter, or letting a raid member die. (i.e. A Tribute to Insanity).

Personally I think the staged releases are good for the community for a few reasons. They provide a more even playing field for less then cutting edge guilds, they extend the lifetime and excitement of the instance, and they allow for several 0 day encounters where little information is known about the bosses. What do you think, are staged releases good for the community or does this hold back the competition of top guilds?

Source

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Patch 3.3.5 released

Blizzard recently released a bit of a shocker to the raiding community the return of a Sunwell Radiance-esque type of effect with the raid-wide debuff Chill of the Throne.

To summarize for those who weren’t around in BC, or were around but weren’t party of the “Royalty” guilds of the time, a raid effect called Sunwell Radiance was introduced in the last raid of the expansion to shift focus away from avoidance and introduce more steady streams  of damage. (Gravity wrote about the change over at pwnwear.com and has the blue posts embedded if you missed them.)

Lucky us, history has decided to repeat itself in the form of a 20% dodge reduction Chill of the Throne (which, interestingly enough, was originally planned as a raid-wide constant damage aura). Though dodge was the only possible stat to reduce due to being the common avoidance stat among tanks, this severely gimps already dwindling Druid tanks as that’s their only form of avoidance, whereas DKs and those other two tank classes can still parry. Some interesting discussion regarding the further impact of this change can be found on the original forum post, as well as Gravity’s site.

This opens up an interesting window into Blizzard’s design philosophies though. From Ghostcrawler’s responses on the subject, its clear that having multiple tiers of gear available from heroics and hardmodes was not in the original plan. Blizzard claims that this is the cause of the problem for the avoidance scaling getting so out of hand, but even without all the tiers of gear popping up in Wrath, this was bound to happen again eventually. Conveniently, it sounds like Blizzard already has a change coming in Cataclsym to stamp out this problem once and for all, with the possible introduction of  boss expertise. This will change tanking so that at higher levels of gear, you’ll still be taking the same amount of hits from the end boss of each raid. Some solid discussion also at Tankspot.

Sounds like a plan to me, and makes sense. It’s easy to compensate for high dps on a boss, just give it more health, but high tanking stats cause some wonky problems.

Here’s hoping they get it right and working properly. Interesting they announce this now, after testing has already occurred, as all the previously collected boss data is now completely worthless, aside from health pools.

Tiki is a moderator of the DPS forums here on DeathKnight.info, as well as a contributor to the Tanking section of old. He’s been around the site since its conception back before release, and continues to spread his diseases to anyone within range. His profile, including an armory link and a bit more about him, can be found here. He’s an avid gamer on WoW, Xbox, and flash games when he’s supposed to be paying attention in class. Tiki is also a big fan of writing in the third person about himself, and is considered by many impartial interviewees to be super attractive. Like, really.

3.3 is looking awesome. The new bosses we’ve seen on PTR are looking innovative and challenging (albeit, Blizzard have said they’re not trying to make Icecrown as daunting as Sunwell).

We’ll see Unholy DKs going back to a traditional deep spec, but necrosis has lost its value in that spec. Current EJ theory is seeing either Dark Death or Disease glyphs being top; I personally would prefer to use Disease, and for AOE it’s the winner. Runeforge Gossip wrote how to use disease glyph. He also likes the scourge strike change to having mix of shadow and physical damage.

The changes around levelling alts were a little surprising for me. Hodir enchants being bind on account, for example, and increases in how quickly you gain rep from other groups in Northrend. I suspect Blizzard just bundled some Cataclysm changes into 3.3, which as a whole will make it easier to level new character from L1 all the way to L85.

Racial changes are available now too. Being a new class, mostly I expect DKs to remain on their current races (not like we can really claim to be bored of it), although I have had a question on switching to Night Elf from Human just for tanking.

I’m levelling a new DK now, and picked a Tauren for their awesomeness of size.

The Emblem changes in 3.3 mean we can get some wonderful raid-quality loot from heroic 5-mans, and the new LFG system will make that even easier, and helps old guys like me gear up their new mains.

But do you miss using crowd control in there? 2fps talked about cc. I like having cc, since it creates a bit more complexity for the tank, but am glad it’s not as crazy as in the L60 days.

A new blogger is on the scene too, Hinen writes on dps and whilst a new blog, it’s very active and worth visiting. His post on the Bleeding Hearts addon is relevant if you want to roll the best diseases.

PTR 3.22 for DPS and Tanks bears some good news.

Tanks can now consider unholy and frost as proper equals to blood tanks. Unbreakable Armour being one minute and buffed to +armour again makes it mathematically similar to the damage reduction of bone shield. I expect UA duration to be put to 15s down from current PTR 20 seconds to balance it out, sine Bone Shield is now 3 charges (+1 from glyph) on PTR and Vampiric Blood is 10s (+5s from glyph).

I did some analysis on Unholy tank builds in 3.22 with a simulator to check its TPS, plus dual-wield tanking and more.

2FPS agrees.

DPS DKs can choose scourge strike deep unholy now. Unholy obliterate has been nerfed out of usefulness. The contender spec for unholy dps will look like this. The Elitist Jerks DPS thread for unholy has a great OP.

Otherwise, blood and frost dps aren’t much changed.

PvP: Blood’s loss of an overpowered cleave will possibly influence arena comps, as is having 1 min bone shield a boon for arena. Remember ghoul stun has been nerfed too. The rune strike buff will help frost DW too.

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So you want to Frost Strike?

No surprise here, but we’re probably going to see the surprisingly awaited 3.2.2 patch here in the next week or two. The PTR is still hopping with lots of changes, but with Onyxia up for testing and all sorts of small changes being tweaked around, they’re getting close to the final release. We’ll keep a close eye for just how much everyone gets smacked around by Onyxia when she goes back live. We’re rather hoping for some destruction. Onyxia has some revenge to level against all those level 70s who smacked her around a couple years ago. For now, here’s some blue posts:

Death Knight
Heart Strike in 3.2.2
Heart Strike is balanced around its single target damage since its a primary ability for Blood. However, since it can strike a second target for full damage (on live), Blood dps jumps up dramatically just because of the presence of a second target. The ability needs to be either balanced around its single target or dual target dps. If it’s the latter, you’re going to use Blood Strike on a lot of attacks instead and the core strike for the tree becomes more situational, which feels lame.

It will still keep the kit of hitting a second target, and Blood dps will still jump up when you can cleave a second target. Just not as much.

[...] We’ll write a more clear tooltip, something like: Instantly strike a target, causing 50% weapon damage plus 368 and 10% additional damage for each disease. Also strikes a secondary target for half of what it strikes the original.

We’ve got a few discussions actively going on the tanking and dps changes in PTR 3.22. I think PvPers will like the bone shield cooldown being reduced to 1 min too. MMO-Champion has done a spell comparison with very promising results.

Ghostcrawler has commented now, read the discussion.

Death Knight
Blood

• Heart Strike now has its total damage increased by 10% for each of your diseases on the target to the primary target, and half that to the secondary target.
• Vampiric Blood now lasts 10 sec. (Down from 20 sec.)
• Subversion now also affects Scourge Strike.

Frost

• Frost Presence now reduces damage taken by 8%. (Up from 5%)
• Threat of Thassarian now also affects Rune Strike.
• Unbreakable Armor now increases your armor by 25% and increasing your Strength by 10% for 20 sec.

Unholy

• Bone Shield cooldown has been lowered from 2 min to 1 min.
• Dirge no longer affects Obliterate.

Tier 9

• Item – Death Knight T9 Tank 4P Bonus – Decreases the cooldown on your Unbreakable Armor, Vampiric Blood, and Bone Shield abilities by 10 sec. (Down from 20 sec)

Glyphs

• Glyph of Scourge Strike – Your Scourge Strike increases the duration of your Blood Plague and Frost Fever on the target by 3 sec, up to a maximum of 9 additional seconds. (Old – Your Scourge Strike has a 25% chance to cause Blood Plague and Frost Fever.)
• Glyph of Unbreakable Armor – Increases the armor granted by Unbreakable Armor by 20%. (Old – Increases the amount of damage absorbed by Unbreakable Armor by 20%.)
• Glyph of Vampiric Blood – Increases the duration of your Vampiric Blood by 5 sec. (Down from 10 sec)

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So you want to Frost Strike?

There are quite a few blue posts going up these days with Cataclysm details and discussions, but there haven’t been many details about Death Knights of late, so it was nice to see a few good posts in the last day or so about some issues that are relatively important for the class.

For the most part, it discusses the comparison between Obliterate and Scourge Strike, something that many Unholy DPS DKs have been dealing with for some time now. Interesting to see where there are thoughts are headed on this:

Diseaseless rotations
The diseaseless issue wasn’t a big problem with Unholy builds per se, but the fact that diseases could potentially be ignored led us to nerf base damage and buff per disease damage of all the strikes. We could potentially have Scourge Strike benefit from diseases more than other strikes.
Unholy DPS
Unholy is alive and well. The spec is just using Obliterate instead of Scourge Strike. But the two abilities are almost identical in the first place. You’re not changing your game up that much to replace one FU ability with another. It’s not ideal and we’ll get it fixed but it’s not as if the entire spec is dead or using a mostly Frost build or anything. At most you’re not benefiting from some of the talents that focus on SS or Shadow damage.

Armor Penetration’s effect on DPS
I’m not sure this is really an armor pen issue (though I could be wrong here). Blood doing such high dps is probably an armor pen issue. Obliterate beating out Scourge Strike is likely not because of armor pen.

Scourge Strike / Obliterate
If Unholy itself was non-viable, then it would be a much bigger issue. (And, no, you can’t equate Unholy with Scourge Strike to try and define Unholy as non-viable.) If hitting Obliterate instead of Scourge Strike radically changed your playstyle or second to second decisions then it would be a big issue. As an example, if you just used Blood Strike and never a FU attack at all, we would consider that game-breaking. But as I say many times, these things are subjective and I can’t expect the community to always place the same priority on things that we do.

I can appreciate that you might just like Scourge Strike. But given that we have limited bandwidth in which to solve class problems (and given that the Blizzard solution is never to just hire more inexperienced people to try and help us tackle more at once), we have to prioritize things.

[...] I would add that PvP Unholy DKs will also still use Scourge Strike, because it wins over Obliterate when the target is not sundered. Your target better be sundered in PvE but often is not in PvP.

It’s also fine if some players can be moderately successful with Shadowfrost (which I am defining here as a DK that largely ignores melee attacks). We just don’t want a return to the world where that was the only way to play a DK.

The bottom line is still that we understand Unholy DKs want to use Scourge Strike and we want that too. In the meantime, using Obliterate gives you a pretty similar experience to using Scourge Strike. Going 51 Frost or using nothing but Icy Touch does not (and again it’s subjective).