With all the changes coming in Mists of Pandaria, I've noticed all the QQ about how "My class is being completely changed. It's going to be unplayable." or "My class isn't getting any love." etc. So I figured I'd pipe in with my current thoughts of death knights as of now and what I think of the changes in Mists.
Blood Now
As it stands right now, I feel blood is in a good place. Hell, I'd go out on a limb in saying it's in a great place. For Dragon Soul, dk tanks seem to be the way to go on most fights. There are a few places where other tanks seems to shine a bit better (Corrupted Blood tanking during Spine, Warmaster Blackhorn), but I feel as though I can pretty much completely negate some mechanics with my Blood Shield, some pretty deadly mechanics at that.
Hagara's Focused Assault used to cause complete chaos before I learned how to time my Death Strikes to heal myself back up and put up a shield large enough to absorb the remainder of the attack. Once I did that, the ability became little more than a nuisance to me. Not only that, but I didn't have to move her... at all. So ranged was free to spread around her and take turns blocking the Ice Lances. This cleaned things up quite a bit for our raid group. I can't imagine how much frustration other tanking classes must have running from her each time she does that.
Impale from Madness is another mechanic that becomes a small bump in the road. Being able to stack my blood shield to over 200k and combined with smart damage reduction cool down usage, it's almost laughable to see the entire Impale absorbed.
Before the change to Death Strike in patch 4.3, things could sometimes be pretty unnerving. Will Death Strike land and give me that heal and all important shield? No? How about now? No?! Third time's a charm? NO?!?! I experiment with a more hit/expertise heavy build at that time to see if it helped. I took more damage due to having less avoidance and less mastery. But I could almost certainly count on that clutch death strike to land. Although I've enjoyed how over powered blood shield has been, being able to stack it to it's maximum shouldn't be this easy. I think Blizzard realizes this as well, or rather, they always knew. But leaving us as the only tank with the active mitigation model would not work for class balancing. But come Mists, we're all on level playing field.
As a side note, am I the only person in the death knight community that doesn't have a problem with Runic Empowerment? All the hate I've seen in reference to it boggles my mind. I can count on Rune Strike proccing it with somewhat regularity. Yeah, it's not every single time. But it shouldn't be.
New Death Knight Abilities/Changes in Mists
Unholy Blight is back in a somewhat old version. I hadn't thought of a specific use of it until I did some reading on the dk forums over on MMO Champion. People were complaining about how a dk tank's AOE rotation makes it impossible to get a Death Strike off early in the pull since they have to make sure diseases are present as both a threat mechanic as well as survival in the debuff provided. Sacrificing survival for threat is something other tanking classes don't have to think about, is what their argument was. Then it hit me. Pick up Unholy Blight, alternate it with Outbreak at the beginning of each pull. Yes, it's not perfect as the cool downs don't line up, but it certainly helps a ton and allows you to have runes available for that all important Death Strike. But wait, there's more! With the Glyph of Outbreak you can forget about Unholy Blight entirely! So yeah, don't know why none of this was thought of. It doesn't take long for a dk to accumulate 40 runic power.
On a Pale Horse is now passive for all death knights. Can't really say much here. More movement speed is always nice.
Control Undead is an interesting niche spell. Virtually identical to a warlock's Enslave Demon, it's fun to think about where it can be used. But I don't see it being very game changing. How often do you see a lock enslaving demons in raids? Yeah, you don't. I see it being fun to mess around with while questing though.
Soul Reaper is the new death knight version of Execute. Perhaps a bit more powerful, but from what I've gathered, it's cost is one Death Rune and it's on a 6 second cool down. This makes it impossible to spam, which is fine. I don't see a lot of use for blood, obviously, since it's more or less a dps ability. Death runes are better spent on survival. But in a fight where there's a tank swap and the dk is not longer tanking, I could see it being used there.
A recent blue post was brought up where it's being discussed to change the cost of Soul Reaper, possibly to runic power instead of an actual rune. I think this would be pretty ideal.
Death Siphon is another ability that requires a death rune to use. From comments, I see that it scales with frost/unholy mastery, seeing as it's shadowfrost damage, and it also scales from 40% of attack power. So on fights where Vengeance has stacked fairly high, it could prove to be useful.
Conversion is of particular interest to blood dks. Before a few changes, it seemed possible to generate enough runic power to keep this going for quite some time. As my friend Shanthi and I discussed, using it in conjunction with Anti-Magic Shell while standing in fire or some other magic effect seemed like it could easily allow you to generate runic power faster than Conversion could us it up. It has no rune cost and no cool down. As long as you have the runic power to feed it, it can be used. Definitely a must have for any blood dk.
After playing around with Conversion a bit on the beta, I noticed that each tick of health per second uses 10 runic power, but also if you end up with around 7 or so runic power (just less than 10) it will still give you one last tick to bring you to 0. This I think is of particular interest since it gives you the ability to keep it going a bit.
I'm going to wrap things up here for now. I'll likely post more thoughts about the beta in the future. Hopefully people enjoy this a bit.
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