Mosg2's DK Manifesto

[Shodokan]

The trend I see is, if anything is OP, it will be nerfed. and nerfed very quickly. Stacking NS seems very OP to me. I felt 4DK and DK + 4 Rets are kinda on the same boat.

I like frost dk's burst and control. but they die hella fast. At least at level 80, they die like arm/fury warrior.The melee arena match, how long does it really last? More like 30seconds. The match total time is like 2mins. and minus the beginning and ending (clean up), the meaningful fighting time is like 30 seconds. Whatever you can come up in those 30 seconds matters. Wings and bubbles have their places. Death Grip and NS are also awesome. But they are all melees, and melees have similar problems.

Now if you get a friend the heal you, and you use 4 dks. That's a different story. that >>>> playing Dk + 4rets all by yourself, as far as effectiveness goes.

I had a long talk with a GM the other night about multi-boxing when i called to see if i could get a discount for x-fering all my toons which lasted for about an hour. We talked about specific mechanics that are abusable by a boxer such as necrotic strike etc and from the horses mouth unless the class is unbalanced overall and not just in a fashion that a VERY insignificant amount of users actually participate in then those abilities will remain as is. If we want to talk about things being OP in multiples... then both fulmination and lavaburst would not be in the game, but they are balanced around a single person using them on a single target so they remain. If a shaman didn't have lavaburst then ele would be complete ass.

On to NS. NS does not stack for every hit, it stacks based on the amount of people doing it on the target. Which means that if you NS and then NS again it just resets the amount back to the max amount of heals necessary, not NS1 + NS2 - Healing done to that target between the two attacks = new healing required. If this debuff does a checksome as to "is this buff on from another player" it then makes that button useless and ultimately the spell useless because you can use plague strike instead for more damage.

Arms warriors played by a skilled player are one of the single best pvp characters in the game. Comparing them to fury also isn't the best comparison because i barely ever see a fury warrior able to compete even 1v1 against a lot of classes, dks have tooks for taking out and preventing things from every class... so comparing them to a class and spec with a lax amount tools for certain situations isn't the best route. Even then warriors have last stand, shield wall, spell reflect, frenzied regeneration, howl of terror etc...

If you are talking purely about arena... the up front burst of a 4 paladin dk team with ranged hammer of wrath is unparalleled, especially if you have inquisition on. But the MAJOR problem for this in arena is that you can't blow this straight off the bat against any team with a priest... mass dispel kills your cooldown use, like bubbles avenging wrath can be dispeled.

Survivability of a shaman team is much larger than a paladin team and their damage is ranged and just as high. At 85 a single lavaburst + mastery proc is equal to about 50k damage... thats a lot and that is PER shaman. The target will die, even with pain suppression. Shaman get totems etc etc... we all know how practical shaman are. The largest advantage a shaman have over the paladin/dk team is that all of their attacks do high damage and fulmination as group is OP as all hell. If you have max fulmination you can guarantee the target will die from 4 of them. Lightning bolt also hits for a baseline amount of like over 10,000... which if you think about it you are doing 1/3 of someone's life every non crit. Not to mention the ability to flash heal someone for like... 1/2 their hp because it is 4 of them in flaky situations, plus you have purge and lust.

So for arena... shaman are superior to DK/Ret.

This team i see like the rets as a 1trick pony in arena though. Pop your anti-CC macro and spam the fuck out of howling blast and frost strike and kill 1-2 people. Then pick the rest off easily. Realistically the numbers for a single attack for a DK are close to 1/3 of their life per attack, so it will take 2-3 attacks to kill someone, but at the same time if NS is up they can't be healed so it doesn't matter. The largest problem for 4x dk team is that they need to use 2 blood runes before they can do their maximum burst potential. Unlike paladins and shaman dks don't have an instagib... but right now my frost strikes and howling blasts in meh gear are hitting for like 14k... so even at those numbers you are killing someone in 2-3 attacks, which because of unholy presence is <3 seconds. You get much more control over the situation in a lot of maps... and if you DG someone to you they are dead before they can be healed plain and simple.

Like i said though, arena is going to be on the back burner in comparison, even a lot of the arena players on Illidan and other hot spots for PVP like servers on BG9 are all happy that they get to do something that requires more than just coordination of cooldowns and switching at the correct times.

I myself am going to play both shaman and paladin/dks. Lavaburst is too powerful... period. 20k+ crits = at least 80% of their life gone, thats if you don't use unleash weapon first. I'm doing paladin + 4 dks, and 4 shaman, and will run my healer for both comps.

@Toned:
As it stands now, if I understand it correctly, the debuff doesn't "stack" in the sense that consecutive NS's don't just add to the running total--They just reset it to a higher value and refresh the debuff (-30% cast speed). If it does indeed actually stack then this team is going to be the runaway best team to play for Cata.

As of right now every DK gets their applied. So it "stacks" as in each DK gets their own anti-healing debuff on the target. It resets when the thing is used again, keeping them at -30% casting speed. So for example you have 10,000 AP and your NS has anti-healing of 7.5k, they get a heal of 6k, you NS again... they need 7.5k again before they can get heals again... not 8.5k (the 1k not used from before + new application). One debuff is consumed when they get 7.5k. So lets assume you have 4 debuffs on the target... it requires 31k healing before they get a bit of their hp actually healed.

Can NS be nerfed? OFC it can., but will it? I doubt it. Every other class with a MS effect (priest, hunter, rogue, mage, warrior) gets -10% healing for a duration and does not lose it's effect when they are healed. So in 10 seconds someone gets off 4 flash of lights + 2 holy shocks... 10% of all that healing is down the tubes (lets assume 10k), not just the first 7500 and then they get the rest. 7500 is much less than the 10% debuff over the duration (which resets when re-applied) so sure their first heal makes NS go away, where as the next heal or two after ends up being more healing prevented than the time it takes for regen of unholy runes. No the 10%'s do not stack, but NS and MS effect do so it makes no sense to make NS not exclusive with itself unless you make it non exclusive with other negative healing effects.