Dk Q&A

[Bloodwraith]

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Class Q&A Series: Death Knight

TL;DR

In terms of 3.2, we want to chill out the death knight AE damage and defensive cooldowns a little. It’s fine for a melee class to have strong area-effect, but they shouldn’t be so much better than warriors, rogues, and Enhancement shamans. One culprit here is Unholy Blight, which we are considering changing to be more single-target in nature. We are also likely to split Desecration into two abilities: a PvP-oriented snare and a PvE-oriented self damage buff. We are considering shifting some of the damage from Scourge Strike and Frost Strike into Blood Strike, which still hits for fairly paltry amounts for Frost and Unholy. We’ll talk about some additional changes below.

What we are going to do with dual-wield in 3.2 is just provide the Frost tree with the talents necessary to prop-up dual wielding, including a new talent that lets Frost Strike, Death Strike, Obliterate etc. hit with both weapons. This will likely mean that Blood and Unholy dual-wield specs just won’t work anymore. It also carries the risk that all Frost death knights feel like they have to go dual-wield. This latter part isn’t necessarily a goal, but could be the outcome. We think in this case our only option is to remove some player choice in order to provide a real choice in other areas.

We tried to make Dancing Rune Weapon and Gargoyle unique, but I think it has ended up causing more problems than anything. I think it’s likely you’ll just see both abilities as flat runic power costs that summon a creature for a flat period of time. This will let us balance the numbers appropriately.

It’s entirely possible you’ll see Icebound Fortitude on a two-minute timer in the 3.2 patch.

But our answer to that problem is going to be to make all specs regard the stats more similarly, not to provide lots of different armor choices. It’s already hard enough to get a boss to drop what you want.

No plans to save runeforge enchant with dual specs.

Still trying to research Mind freeze delay.

No plans to nerf DK self healing. If death knights continue to be good at PvP even after some of the defensive nerfs, we’d likely look at say Chains of Ice, the interrupts or the amount of non-physical damage they can do.

There are two answers to this question. The first is do we think the death knight needs any additional tool for PvP? The answer to that is definitely not. Death knights have been really well represented, if not overpowered, in PvP. The second part of the question is more philosophical though, which is whether or not Mortal Strike is mandatory in PvP. You can currently argue it isn’t because there are teams that feature Retribution paladins or Unholy death knights (or both) that do just fine. However, it is an issue that rises up every few months or so: whether every damage class needs some option of bringing the “mortal” debuff, or at what point we just make it a passive aura upon stepping into PvP.

Q: Will Chains of Ice ever be subject to diminishing returns?

Ghostcrawler: If we need it. It’s not in the plan. Snares don’t currently have diminishing returns, and Chains is limited based on the availability of Frost Runes. It is a possible concern that between Chains of Ice, Death Grip, and the ghoul stun that a death knight can lock someone down for a long time.

[Bloodwraith]

The questions I still have (From my questions in the thread) are:

3. When using glyph of disease, refreshing frost fever when you have the Chilblains talent does not refresh Icy Clutch snare on the main target but it does for all additional targets. Are there any plans on fixing this?

4. Lichborne does not remove existing effects that it immunes if you're already afflicted yet it still uses the cooldown. Is this intended?

5. Lichborne can't be cancelled manually anymore. Are there any plans on reverting this back to the old way?

6. Any plans on changing ghoul frenzy to cost runic power or a blood rune instead of an unholy rune?

7. Why can’t we death grip while in mid air?

8. Any plans on making blood spec viable for arena?

10. Any plans on making horn of winter last longer? I don’t see the reason you would design a buff that would need to be refreshed multiple times in one boss fight or arena.

14. Are there plans to add more minor glyphs that are a bit more spec specific?

15. What is the thought process behind nerfing the T7 set just to make the T8 more desirable? Why not just improve the T8 so that it can stand on its own?

17. Any thoughts on changing the gladiator sigil? It blows pretty badly in its current state and is definitely not anywhere near as good as it’s PvE counterpart.

19. Will Death Knights be given better methods of protecting their diseases in PvP, given how vital they have been made to the damage output of all major attacks?

20. Any plans on making a disarm reducing talent?

22. Why is IT still on Deathchill/Killing Machine procs? With how drastically it has been nerfed, being forced to refresh Frost Fever while IT is up results in thousands of lost damage.

[Krenian]

Was more than positive to be honest that they wouldn't answer most questions. A lot of people had a lot of questions and you only have oh so much time to do a Q&A.

From what I got from the jist of that segment is that they posted it far too late as they kept referring to 3.2 and yet the PTR's out and we knew of the changes. Kinda of a boo boo.

[Magnuss]

I really am not a fan of the Q&A's. The idea is sound, but in practice all it really does is give a summary on things that were already announced/obvious. I suppose if you don't know what a blue tracker is then these things popping up on the front page are pretty awesome, but pretty useless the for the rest of us.