Mop Death Knights...

[Shodokan]

Alright this is mostly a rant post based on their current iteration on the PTR.

Death Knights have been nerfed to the ground and as a result I will likely be switching characters in MoP. This post will go over their current skills and how they must seemingly be used in PVP.

Rune system
Our tier 75 for talents is fucking retarded. They removed blood tap and added it into rune tap which makes getting reliable strangulates/asphyxiates impossible without rune management (which we cannot do on a boxing team unless we are using runic corruption at the moment unless you want to pray for death runes)

Necrotic strike now costs a death rune and has been nerfed
This forces us to basically take death pact unless we do not wish to have any anti-healing (which for 3v3 is one of the reasons dks are any decent what soever). This forces us also to use plague strike once again or remove howling blast (will need rhyme proc management) and use obliterate instead which does less damage than it does now on live.

Also now only reduced cast by 25%

Soul Reaper
Again... death rune specific usage... more management of resources (fun!) Though this ability is really over powered.

Removal of hungering cold
We now get remorseless winter which is alright but it requires uptime on a target and if you pop it at the wrong time vs say a mage then you're going to have it be a useless talent. Will be good in 5's staggering it though.
If you get CC'd during this time you are screwed and your CD gets wasted... honestly looking like desecrated ground might be the best as it is a secondary get out of jail free card. Will have to test though.

Dual-Wield is not viable for PVP anymore
Plain and simple the runic power generation in comparison is terrible and 2h frost with frost presence has far too much RP and too few GCD to use it all and your abilities at a decent pace putting 2h frost back into UH presence (which doesn't matter ultimately since we use that now and will get more RP overall than before)

Not that I used DW other than for funzies...

Only thing dks really get... that is an improvement
Glyph of Icy Touch
Buffed howling blast's AP coefficient by .2 and range by 10 yards
More frost strikes because every AA gives 15 RP to make up for rune abilities giving less base RP because there is no talent.


How can we get around this?
It seem that the only means to playing them as we currently do would be to change to a FULL DAMAGE usage opposed to necrotic spam even when necessary (necrotic spam would mean only 4 stacks of it per DK now which is hardly worth it seemingly vs a 300k+ health pool. Your AP goes up by about 2x. So your NS only will take about 19k (anti-healing) off fully geared (t2) and do your white damage (dunno what that will be)

So our new rotation will look something like

Option 1:
Soul Reaper > Howling blast > plague strike
Random rune usage: icy touch, strangulate

Option 2: Soul reaper > necrotic strike > howling blast > plague strike
Option 3: Soul reaper > necrotic strike > Oblit > rime
Option 4: Necrotic strike > Howling blast > plague strike (80k heal absorb isn't terrible)
Option 5: Necro/Soul macro > HB > PS
Option 6: Necro/Soul macro > oblit > rime

The saving grace of this comp is the... 200k damage execute if something is below 35% (if the stars align) which is more than 2/3 of someone's HP

Personally I don't see dks being that great. Necrotic strike being on a rune that can be used by ANYTHING screws up how we use our rotations currently.
Survivability in general goes down as well but we get more anti-stuns with glyphed icebound

Might add more to this... tired as hell.

[MiRai]

Hopefully it isn't as bleak as you make it sound. =\

[EaTCarbS]

It probably won't end up as bad as you make it seem. Remember that it is still beta, and things are bound to change. I am going to stick with death knights because I don't want to level again >.<

[Shodokan]

It probably won't end up as bad as you make it seem. Remember that it is still beta, and things are bound to change. I am going to stick with death knights because I don't want to level again >.<

I hope there are changes. Its not going to be TERRIBLE, there are just a lot of inherent class problems with their current state on the beta.

[ebony]

Theres are lot class changes on beta, deathkights but blood are still pending.

Heres a few things to note.

1) if useing pemade the gear is not right there useing old 4.1 pemade char copys still.

2) pvp gear is not fixxed to the new stats we should be getting in 5.0.6

3) if pvp on beta then your going to get oneshooted by buged itams there many wands on beta that are green giveing like 2m spellpower. (therhe gankers on pvp realms that use itams like this just to do this. and yur going to have 89's oneshooting u ike 84s oneshooting 80's

4) blizzard not even looked at pvp so far there just looking at dungons more questing.

5) i nerver seen a beta have so many class changes so fast.


there noway on eath to datamind a class on beta atm not untill level 90 is out and pemades for 90 are open. And we still got the ptr that should have 5.0.6 in the next few weeks if there going to get it out for Aug.

[Shodokan]

Theres are lot class changes on beta, deathkights but blood are still pending.

Heres a few things to note.

1) if useing pemade the gear is not right there useing old 4.1 pemade char copys still.

2) pvp gear is not fixxed to the new stats we should be getting in 5.0.6

3) if pvp on beta then your going to get oneshooted by buged itams there many wands on beta that are green giveing like 2m spellpower. (therhe gankers on pvp realms that use itams like this just to do this. and yur going to have 89's oneshooting u ike 84s oneshooting 80's

4) blizzard not even looked at pvp so far there just looking at dungons more questing.

5) i nerver seen a beta have so many class changes so fast.


there noway on eath to datamind a class on beta atm not untill level 90 is out and pemades for 90 are open. And we still got the ptr that should have 5.0.6 in the next few weeks if there going to get it out for Aug.

1. The DK I was playing on is 89 and was a copied character to begin with.
2. Wands don't effect the outcome of class changes
3. DK's on the forums are even complaining about the mechanics of runic power, death runes and a few other things... not just me.
4. Most of the talents in the game are PVP centric so how can you even make that statement? Also making contested world PVP zones opposed to instanced PVP areas. Also added blacklist BG feature among other things.
5. Fast class changes for EVERY class other than death knights. The only class changes since the launch of beta have really been glyphs and a few talents which honestly don't matter since they suck anyway for our purposes.

I thought everyone knew by now, classes aren't ever set until 2 patches after an expansion is released.

Class balancing is always done every patch. Thats why there are flavor of the month classes. DK's have been OP at least 1-2 seasons per x-pac (just like rogues and mages, warriors but unlike them have been actually bad at times, though warriors now are bleh) since their release, so I'm not going to just put them on the back burner.

My main point is that if something isn't changed from their current iteration, the micromanagement for playing the class will make it much harder to multi-box efficiently. With cataclysm's difficulty in comparison to older expansions i just don't want DK only players to get frustrated with the game when they aren't facerolling quite as hard.

Just to clarify its 70k sp green wands , my lock has 85k sp with it.

As for the DK I think they will revert the necro strike to its live usage. There are too many things wrong atm with dks and I think once people are allowed to lvl to 90 we will see more tweaks across all classes. Rogues are in pretty bad shape also, but all range classes and a few melee are looking pretty good.


I think the pvp meta game will change completely in mop, I think the 8 sec cd on dispels is such a game changer.

It will change a bit, but there is SO MUCH CC that the 8 second cooldown can REALLY screw you over if they are chaining well enough. This is the only place I think DK's shine, because of desecrated ground + lichborne.

I hope they do revert it, at the very least.

[Fat Tire]

If dk changes go thru I may dump the dk in my ret-ret-dk team and replace with a warrior on my melee team.

[Shodokan]

If dk changes go thru I may dump the dk in my ret-ret-dk team and replace with a warrior on my melee team.

I was thinking the EXACT same thing.

[Mosg2]

I think you guys are being too negative. Soul Reaper is a huge gain for our DPS and burst. The new rotation will just be:
Soul Reaper --> Howling Blast --> Necrotic Strike --> Frost Strike

Efficient rune usage, AE pressure, great burst. What more do you want? We still have the best array of defensive cooldowns and the easiest time of any melee staying on target.

Ret Paladins are a second to the DKs. I'm not sure how close they'll end up being but the ability to burst like they can plus all the passive healing they get is pretty damn good.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Fair enough, ebony, but some of his points regarding the way skill synergy and micromanagement works with the proposed mechanics won't really be affected by 2-million SP wands or obsolete set bonuses.