Still not digging frost this patch. Frost strike critting as a spell doesn't help I guess, but..

Frost strike = 50 RP and is doing... about 1800ish damage.

As blood, I can have 6 blood runes (thanks to death rune mastery), and each heart strike does about 1400 damage with a couple diseases up. Combine that with a full RP bar for DRW, and I can pump out tens of thousands of damage that makes my occasional frost strike, and those frost rotations, look pretty bland in comparison.

Top that off with my insane self-sustainability as blood, and I feel like a walking god as blood. It makes the other two specs just meh.

Also, DRW is useful in many, many more situations than hungering cold. It's just simply insane damage for the cooldown. I'd argue that it's the strongest 51 point talent in the game, to be honest. It's scaling so incredibly well with gear. I've been rooted and watched the weapon go around and just 2 shot a 77 clothie who was at 4.5k life left thanks to it critting twice in a row. Hungering cold seems like one of those super situational skills that comes in handy once in a blue moon, but DRW I use every possible chance I get. It's just so damn good.


On another note, fighting against priests and expecting to strangulate them has been pretty frustrating lately , but only when they have shadow protection up (which any good priest will).

Spell hit + spell resist check = silencing them is iffy at best. Oh, and of course if you succeed both of those rolls, you still have to make the 20% resist check vs martyrdom. >_<

Just tossing that out there. Do what you will with it.

[ Post edited by Jayde ]

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aka Leiah
/cast Slap to the Face
http://jadefury.blogspot.com

Icy Touch -- may very well need to do more damage. It was reduced back in the day when death knights kept saying "Why would I ever use Death Coil?"

Obliterate -- underwent a similar phenomenon. Every DK rotation was built around Obliterate spam. It needs to do more damage than something like Heart Strike.

Hungering Cold -- after experimenting with the scaling costs for a long time, we think they are just awkward and confusing. DRW will probably stay as "uses all your RP" but Hungering Cold and Unholy Blight will probably be a discrete cost of something like 60 RP.

Blood of the North -- the idea of this talent is that you could Blood Strike twice, and then be able to Obliterate or Howling Blast twice the next time around (the aptly named FUFUFU rotation). Walk me through why Plague Strikes turning into Death Runes is helpful -- it's pretty hard to ever skip over spending an Unholy Rune, yes?

Similarly, we would love to work a Death Rune ability into Unholy but can't figure out how to make it work. Unholy doesn't really need more Unholy runes unless the DK wants to spam Plague / Scourge to grind down the cooldowns through Night of the Dead. A clone of Blood of the North might be helpful for the FUFUFU, but then Unholy might play a lot like Frost too.

Dancing Rune Weapon -- we've actually known it's overpowered for some time. We left it that way on purpose because there were still so many threads (misguided we suspect) about how weak it was. Psychology is unfortunately a reality of game testing, and we wanted to make sure people would actually use it. I'm not saying it needs to be nerfed to the ground, but it is probably doing too much damage.

Blood in general -- we're not inclined to do anything to Blood's damage until we have some good numbers about how DKs compare to other classes. One change that is potentially coming down the pike is letting Blood Boil be a more spammable ability, and perhaps letting that replace Pestilence as a good tanking tool. It would give Blood some different spells to work in as well.

We'll try and improve RP generation of Frost.

I think Howling Blast could go down to a 10 sec cooldown. That would let you use it once a rotation with Obliterate using the other FU if you turned your two Blood Runes into Death runes. If it has no cooldown, then it might compete a lot with Obliterate.

In the next build, try spamming Blood Boil instead of Pestilence. Use Pestilence to spread diseases to set up Blood Boil.

As everyone has pointed out, Death Rune Mastery was designed to mix up the rotation of Blood and it seems to do that well. Blood of the North was designed to let you mix up Frost, but low Icy Touch damage and a long Howling Blast cooldown seem to be inhibiting that. Obliterate may be too weak now too.

The thing that changes up Unholy's rotation more than anything is Epidemic. You should be able to skip the Icy Touch and Plague Strike the second time around and just wail away with Obliterates, Blood Strikes or the new Blood Boil. Scourge Strike itself does decent damage, but if you use it twice, then you end up with an extra Frost that you can only use for Icy Touch. But if we turned that Frost into a Death Rune for yet another Scourge Strike, then you'd lose Frost Fever (unless Scourge Strike itself applied Frost Fever too, but then you'd totally waste Icy Touch). It's tricky. :)

One more thing to consider:

Black Ice says it affects "spells" but I believe the way it is set up is just to improve Frost and Shadow damage. I'm not sure if anyone has tested that or not. Changing that tooltip could have a big effect on Frost and Unholy.