They’re small, sometimes overlooked, and aren’t included in the box. But when used properly they are game changers. It’s time to get out the special doll and point to where the bad man put his…
Glyphs and Runeforges
Runeforge Changes
Rune of Cinderglacier now procs per minute instead of a 5% chance.
Good. This change needed to be made for the rune to be anywhere near effective
Rune of the Fallen Crusader: This weapon enchant now provides only 15% strength, but its chance to proc is doubled.
So now it’s at basically 100% uptime but the strength gain was reduced to minimize burst damage.
PvP change
Rune of Razorice now affects Frost damage done by the death knight only, but stacks up to 10%.
Frost DPS change. Intended to be placed on two weapons to get the % up as fast as possible.
Makes Frost the largest burst damage spec for DKs
Glyphs
Glyph of Blood Boil: This has been replaced with Glyph of Heart Strike, which adds a snare effect to Heart Strike.
I guess a ranged snare was too powerful to have when it was not from a frost rune. Good thing that this speed debuff will be undispell-able just like Chilblains. Entirely a PvP glyph
Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon: Increases the duration of Dancing Rune Weapon by 10 seconds.
PvE blood glyph. Keep the blade out longer, do more damage with it for less RP. Important for DPS efficiency
Glyph of Dark Death: Increases the damage done by Death Coil by 15%.
Blood DPS Glyph. It’s their only RP dump, might as well make it more useful
Glyph of Death Strike: This glyph now increases Death Strike damage by 1% per 2 runic power, but has a limit of 25% increase.
Almost restored to its former glory. The DS glyph is back in style. Great for PvP when you’re not being told to burst and for farming alone.
Glyph of Disease: Your Pestilence ability now refreshes disease durations on your primary target back to their maximum duration.
Huge Glyph. Transforms 1 Blood rune (least valuable) into X Frost / Y Unholy Runes depending on what you get caught in the AoE. A must have for any DPS spec.
Glyph of Howling Blast: Your Howling Blast ability now infects your targets with Frost Fever.
If Blizzard didn’t incorrectly implement Icy Talons then this glyph could be mainstream for Frost DPS DKs
Glyph of Hungering Cold: Reduces the cost of Hungering Cold by 10 runic power.
Still horrible.
Glyph of Icebound Fortitude: Icebound Fortitude now grants at least 30% damage reduction, regardless of defense skill.
Still horrible, but less than before
Glyph of Plague Strike: Bonus lowered to 20%.
Why you would ever glyph this skill is beyond me. Perhaps it’s because it’s raw DPS, but I still say this Glyph is not worth it.
Glyph of Strangulate: This glyph has been changed to reduce the cooldown by 20 seconds.
AWESOME. PVP Change to the maximum.
Glyph of Unbreakable Armor: Increases the amount of damage absorbed by Unbreakable Armor by 20%.
Reduces the amount of suck and fail that UbA produces by 20%
Glyph of Unholy Blight: Increases the duration of Unholy Blight by 10 seconds.
More bang for the buck. Lets you throw out a Death Coil every other rotation, also allows UB to overlap better with Gargoyle.
Miscellaneous Changes
These are two very important changes I think I need to address here separate from everything else.
Ebon Plaguebringer: Multiple death knights can now use this debuff against a target without overwriting each other.
Necrosis: The damage from this ability will no longer benefit multiple times from damage increasing effects.
The Ebon Plaguebringer change we knew about but I don’t think you really understand how strong this change really is. The more unholy DKs you stack the more damage your casters will do. Raise eRDPS by stacking one class? Didn’t Blizzard want this to NOT happen? Expect this to change.
Necrosis’s change is interesting in that it will only be affected by one singular damage increasing effect… but what they mean by this is that only ONE buff to your damage will modify Necrosis’s damage. In other words, only ONE AP booster (probably going to be GBoM) will add the value of its contribution to Necrosis. This was done more or less for balance purposes only.
Now let’s turn our unwavering gaze on some subtle, or overlooked changes in the midst of all this 3.1 excitement…
Armor Penetration
Is it now worth it?
When Blizzard took a look at their current implementation of the Armor Penetration stat I think they realized a very important problem: Placing a worthless stat on tier pieces would make players unhappy. I say armor penetration is worthless because it simply does not scale in PvE very well and that’s going easy on the term “worthless.”
As a prime example let’s look at Patchwork (the DPS optimal scenario): He has enough armor to reduce the damage you do on your melee attacks by about 30% of their physical value. As a Tank, I pop obliterates with raid buffs for about 2300 non-crit on his dome; against a target with 0 armor (made possible with a cooperative warrior) the very same obliterate hit for about 3500 damage.
In relative terms Patchwork has less armor mitigation than your standard Naxx tank, half as much to be exact (As I cannot find a published value for Patch’s armor mitigation, I have no choice to assume my testing is accurate, if you have better numbers please let me know!). If you are one of those weird DPS people who decided to aim for ArPen and got your magic number up to 50% then you would be mitigated against about 15% less than everyone else hitting with physical abilities. Whoopdie freakin’ doo!
Compare your damage to the person who went with expertise and got around the 8% rear quarter dodge (assuming their hit capped). You will do 15% more damage but miss 8% more of your attacks. Total, you’re only getting away with an increase of 7%. If you would have just gotten up to the expertise line you would pump out 1% extra damage.
Now that Blizzard is giving all classes 25% more bonus from ArPen the question of worth actually comes into play. The benchmark by which I determine worth is always in the latest raid instance (Ulduar ATM) and thus far it seems like bosses have a marginally higher amount of physical mitigation which makes armor penetration just as worthless as it was before the patch. If Blizzard puts some more armor on their bosses then of course this opinion will change.
Flip Side: You could argue of course that with the bonus amount of ArPen you get that you can now squeeze out some more damage by jumping onto a fresh DR curve if you’re already expertise and hit capped. This is a very viable argument and the ONLY instance which I would recommend flipping into ArPen. The curve looks better than Haste…
Haste
Armor Pen is no longer viable!
… At least it did look better until you see the extra haste bonus. If you’re a DK then forget everything I just said above this section of the post: If you have to choose between getting your haste rating up and getting ArPen up, it looks like haste is the winner. The reason for this is simply that you will now get more of a bonus out of the haste than you will the ArPen; 5% more of a bonus to be precise.
Of course if you’re any kind of decent you will remember that Haste rating was sooooo nice that Blizzard took it off the DK epic sigil from Heroism Rewards and replaced it with critical strike rating.
The end idea is that even though Haste and ArPen are both getting buffs, both are still equally worthless to Death Knights as most of our attacks are yellow damage and bypass mob armor to an extent.
Hysteria
Damn
Changing the % based damage stacking really sucks. It used to be a great way to get the most amount of burst damage that you could if needed. I guess this just means that one physical DPS guy gets to have his +% damage buffs rotated instead of stacked.
With 3.1 upon us, I have dove in and looked around at all the changes with the current build. Here I will be giving you my take on each of the changes for Death Knights tree by tree.
Doesn’t matter who smelt it, YOU dealt it! It’s stinky, toxic, and will kick major ass. That’s right! It’s time to talk about…
Unholy
Is the hot chick at the party
Unholy has been given breast implants and a cooch that emits pheromones in such volume that all DKs go rabid when they get near it. This is not an overstatement at all. I will explain why at the end of this section.
With 3.1 upon us, I have dove in and looked around at all the changes with the current build. Here I will be giving you my take on each of the changes for Death Knights tree by tree.
Put on your mittens and earmuffs — mine are made from baby polar bears. It’s time to go…
Frost
Wait… I thought I was a tank class
When I first posted the build 9347 notes I knew that Blizzard would screw up my class almost beyond recognition and the most recent (most likely LIVE) notes confirm this. Lichborne has been reduced entirely to a PvP talent and Unbreakable Armor blows royal cock for tanking. DKs have, at best, been relegated to dedicated OT duty in case shit hits the fan.
With 3.1 upon us, I have dove in and looked around at all the changes with the current build. Here I will be giving you my take on each of the changes for Death Knights tree by tree.
Hmmm, let’s start with…
Blood
Got some ROIDS
I was really hoping that Blood got the buff it needed to become viable against Unholy in terms of sustainable damage and my prayers were answered… to an extent. Let’s take a look into the world of the Blood DKs and how everything just got turned upside down for them. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re a regular here at I’m Tanking What?!, a wowinsider.com patron, or just a drunk college student surfin’ the net, you may have noticed my recent opus, The Saga of Normalization Does Not Balance Make.
(And if you are an I’m Tanking What?! regular, please cover your face with a dark cloth… you wouldn’t want your incredible good looks to blind anyone, would you?)
Anyway, that saga of mine sparked a lot of lively discussion, rapid back-and-forths, and a bit of napalm on wildflowers. Today I would like to recreate if you will, a discussion of Tanks vs. Death Knights with the incorrigible — or is it incomparable? — Billy Wallace of the blog Casual Tank.
BillyWallace Says:
I admit that your description of warriors as “sissies” ruffled my feathers a bit. I promise you that I can “live on the edge”,in fact to the dismay of my healers, I often do just that! You all just feel cooler doing it because you’re so OP!
Surazc:
I rotate my cooldowns from the very beginning of a raid encounter as to not make my healers feel that I’m living on the edge. My use of “edgy” is only to reflect that Death Knights do not have access to shields and the block mechanic, a defining trait of both Paladin and Warrior tanks.
BillyWallace:
Seriously though, I agree a lot with what you’re saying here. I love the distinct flavor of each class of tank. I’m bothered a bit by the homogenization of them. And I tire of people whining about other classes being “OP”.
But even Ciderhelm, who I have always gotten the impression that he feels warriors have been able to tank just about everything in game as good as the other classes, has recently been vocal on the official forums about the large advantage DK’s have over all other tanking classes in fights like Sarth.
Surazc:
Rather than answer this with another clone of “it’s a poorly designed encounter,” or “players can’t escape the thought of unilateral thought,” I’ll simply point readers here to either my response to Ancro or Hatch.
BillyWallace:
I kind of feel like Blizzard painted themselves into the corner with the “Take the player not the class” idea. Ideally it’s nice, but how does that work in reality?
Surazc:
Ideally, it functions with the Dual Talent system. If you bring a professional grade player in the shoes of a hybrid then you get much more flexibility in what your raid is able to adapt and shape itself to; however, if you bring a average player who shines in a specific specialization then you’re going to have a problem when you no longer need his shining function.
Players who are exceptional at all facets of the game (or their class) will be the ones asked to swap talent specializations the most and incidentally, they will be the ones who morph the raid into a new composition which makes a group of players capable of clearing content that would otherwise be above their level because of optimization.
The “Take the Player not the Class” mentality would actually disapprove of the new shield glyph for warriors because it enforces the idea of taking the role and not the player. A good player should have the option of not taking the glyph and using another method to avoid the damage that this glyph exists for.
Currently no such option exists and this is why people are saying that the change is needed TO THE SKILLS AND THE GLYPHS but NOT THE ENCOUNTERS THEMSELVES.
In the words of our GM Prometheuss:
“Bosses down… good job everyone, let’s move on to the next room and we’ll see how we have to adapt to the new content.”
One of the biggest challenges that exist for MMO games is the fact that your Box sales (copies of the game) will never make you as much money as would your monthly subscriptions.
Blizzard has overcome this problem by producing a record number of 14+ MILLION subscriptions to the game worldwide. At the average rate of $14.99 per month Blizzard is making $209,860,000 A MONTH. That’s revenue of approximately $2,518,320,000 every year. Two and a half BILLION dollars a year.
Blizzard is not hurting for money, and the costs on keeping servers stable and running (which they don’t do a very good job of) is sub $10 million a year.
So why is the game taking a turn for the worse? Why are the classes losing their distinctions and more of the “devoted” fans leaving the game and yet blizzard is turning a blind eye? It’s the money!
You see, when you make a $2.5B yearly gross revenue for doing basically nothing, you are disinclined to change the game in a way that would cause people to be either frustrated or confused. As only 5-10% of the game’s population actually cares about the way their class works and not just the numbers they put out, Blizzard is free to do whatever they want with their game as long as it maintains mass appeal andis easy enough for anyone to feel like they are a champion.
Add to these facts the idea that Blizzard is primed to release Diablo 3… they want you to stop playing. They want you to go and buy D3 and forget about your monthly recurring subscription for a while. Re-read that last sentence real quick: Blizzard wants you to stop playing WoW and buy Diablo 3. It means more money for them if you forget to cancel and let your recurring subscription run for 2 months without playing.
After all that is said and done, Starcraft 2 comes out… a release for which they want the exact same effect.
Then you have the second generation WoW… You see where this is going I hope.
This is the problem with a game studio that has other active franchises developing an MMORPG. They, the studio, do not want you to stop playing their other games because this leads to people in that company who have domain over the IP (intellectual property) leaving and forming their own company. This, in turn, removes potential revenue from the big studio. To justify keeping those people from going out and stealing all that money they have to keep them onboard to develop their franchise, and for THAT to happen, people MUST play those games.
I think Blizzard is screwing up their game on purpose. I think this is a marketing strategy designed to keep us all from walking out the door and leaving blizzard with a mere shell of a $2.5B/Year gross income.
A long time ago a video was made and posted on youtube that was just over 30 seconds long. It made a simplistic depiction of WoW PvP combat using the analogy of Rock, Paper, Scissors. If you haven’t seen it, you should… right now. Go watch.
Or watch it here:
The reference I make here is to the traditional mechanic of balancing something in a game. The reason that PvP is currently (in this author’s opinion) unenjoyable is that Rogues are capable of beating every class in the game without much effort at all (except for possibly other rogues or mages). I’ve heard people attempt to argue this point with me by saying, “Trinket out of the kidney shot and you’ll be fine.”
The truth is that you WON’T be fine because a smart rogue will just blind you and resume his rotation. You die and you didn’t once get to play your character.
I would like to make it clear that Blizzard has fucked up pretty bad with the DK changes for this patch. Not because there are a lot of class nerfs, or changes to skills that cause us to lose damage, or little things changing like the duration on diseases… no. Blizzard fucked up this patch because they forgot that Death Knights are a hero class.
In an earlier post I made a reference to Star Wars Galaxies and how Jedi were what a hero class is supposed to be: difficult to obtain and beyond the scope of balance. Death Knights are NOT that class. We have been homogenized down to work exactly the same as every other melee DPS class. We have had defining talents removed from our trees. We have been changed to such an extent that now there is no such thing as an Unholy DK tank (unless he has > 59% avoidance unbuffed) any more, and Blood is almost to the same state (a 30 second Last Stand w/ bonus healing on a 1 minute CD is too good to invalidate blood as a tanking spec).
If Blizzard doesn’t get their act straight in the next 4 months, I quit. I’m making that publically known right now. I will most likely change all my account info and sell, or give away, my account. This is utterly ridiculous.
With the 3.1.0 PTR patch notes currently live at MMO Champion, it is my duty to share with you my thoughts on the Death Knight changes, not only from the perspective of tanking, but from the class as a whole (with of course, an emphasis on tanking).
Let’s start with:
Glyphs
Strangulate – “Reduces the CD on strangulate down to 1 minute.”
Finally! Range is NOT an issue because of Death Grip. Mostly a PVP change
Icebound Fortitude – “Your Icebound Fortitude now always grants at least 30% damage reduction regardless of your defense skill”
This hints at a couple changes to the IBF skill itself. The Runic Power cost has probably been removed and they’ve reduced (or removed) the amount of % damage reduction granted for free. Potentially bad alteration
Unbreakable Armor – “Increases the amount of damage absorbed by UbA by 1%”
With the mechanic of UbA changing, it is unknown as of yet whether or not this is a good change.
Plague Strike – “Your Plague Strike does 60% additional damage”
Is this supposed to make up for the Plague Strike changes? Pathetic. Barely a DPS upgrade… but a DPS upgrade.
Death Strike – Good to see this reverted to its original implementation. Blood DKs can now stack their runic power to hell and back without fear of being inefficient. Mostly a PVP change
NEW – Hungering Cold – “Reduces the cost of Hungering Cold by 10 runic power”
I see this as mostly a PVP alteration. Given the new position of Hungering Cold in the Frost tree, we do not yet know if the skill itself has been altered.
NEW – Unholy Blight – Increases the Duration by 10 seconds
Bomb Glyph. This essentially allows you to death coil something without fear of not having enough RP left over for your next UB
NEW– Death Coil – “Reduces the cost of Death Coil by 8 Runic Power”
A direct copy of the Frost Strike glyph. Lazy coding and not worth it for Blood spec. Maybe Unholy can make better use of this.
NEW – Pestilence – “Your Pestilence ability now refreshes disease durations on your primary target back to their maximum duration”
Oh my god. This is an ESSENTIAL glyph for ANY Death Knight to have. Changing ONE blood rune into TWO guaranteed disease refreshes is TOO efficient. Expect to see this glyph changed or removed quickly
NEW – Howling Blast – “Howling Blast now infects your targets with Frost Fever”
Not sure if this is good or not. It all depends on if the Fever debuff is added BEFORE or AFTER damage calculations. What with the new position of Howling Blast in the tree (Point 51) this glyph may be never used.
Posted by The Editor 
I'm Tanking What?! 