As we expected, we already have the first preview of the changes that will be made to the class Death Knight en Cataclysm. These changes are those published by Blizzard and make the class designers' intentions regarding this class quite clear. Note that these changes are preliminary and things can (and will) change during the Beta phase of Cataclysm.
In addition, I recommend you visit this article regularly as we will update it as more information about the Death Knights appears. They usually answer user questions to clarify or reveal a few more things.
These are the most significant changes of the class:
- Outbreak (available at level 81): Outbreak will infect the target with Frost Fever and Blood Plague at no runic cost;
- Necrotic Strike (level 83): Necrotic Strike is a new attack that will deal damage and apply an effect that will absorb an amount of healing based on the amount of damage dealt by the CoM;
- Dark Simulacrum (level 85): The death knight will attack his target and apply an effect that allows him to create a copy of the next spell his opponent casts, allowing the CdlM to cast that same spell.
- Mastery Bonus - Healing Absorption: When they heal themselves they will receive an additional effect that will absorb damage.
You can find the rest of the information after the jump.
In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm we will be making many changes and additions of talents and abilities for each class. In this preview, you will have the opportunity to learn about some changes we have planned for the death knight; In addition, we will provide you with an overview of some of the new abilities, talents, and an overview of the new Mastery System and how it will work with the different talent specs.
New abilities of the death knight
Outbreak (available at level 81): Outbreak will infect the target with Frost Fever and Blood Plague at no runic cost; this will allow the death knights to quickly apply their illnesses in situations where they need to change targets or when their illnesses have been dispelled.
Necrotic Strike (level 83): Necrotic Strike is a new attack that will deal damage and apply an effect that will absorb an amount of healing based on the amount of damage dealt by the CoM; For example, imagine that the CoM can choose between attacking its target to deal 8,000 points of damage with an ability or dealing 6000 points of damage with Necrotic Strike, in addition to applying the debuff that will absorb 4000 points of healing; This ability deals less damage instantly, but requires a greater amount of healing in the long run for the target to regain full health.
This new ability is intended to reinstate a portion of the game experience that was had when the death knight was able to dispel periodic healing effects; In addition, it gives the class more PvP utility without having to copy Mortal Strike style effects.
Dark Simulacrum (level 85): The death knight will attack his target and apply an effect that allows him to create a copy of the next spell his opponent casts, allowing the CdlM to cast that same spell. Unlike Spell Reflection, Dark Simulacrum does not cancel the cast spell; in general, if they can't reflect a spell, they won't be able to copy it either.
Rune system changes
Overall, we are pleased with how the rune system works; however, we do plan to make some changes to the mechanics that will ultimately help make the CoMs feel less constrained. Here we explain the reasoning on which these changes are based, as well as an explanation about how the new system works.
- In the current rune system, if a rune is not used, the MOCs lose the potential to do a greater amount of damage; by comparison, Rogues spend most of their time with a low energy level, and if they cannot use their abilities for a few seconds, that energy accumulates and can be used later, minimizing the net loss caused by the interruption.
- On the other hand, the runes of a death knight cannot be used until they are fully available; If a CdlM spends a few seconds without spending one of the runes available to him, then that resource has been wasted. Since the CoM is constantly pressing its buttons, adding new mechanics to the class can be difficult since the player does not have any global cooldown periods available to use them; Therefore, we cannot provide you with additional resources or lower the cost of your faculties as you do not have time available to use them; not launching an attack is devastating and it is impossible to accumulate resources to launch them just at the moment when they are most useful.
- Additionally, each death knight ability has little impact on its own, resulting in most CoM attacks being perceived as very weak; likewise, the death knight's rotation is more easily affected by latency or because the player's rotation is just slightly out of sync; sometimes the perception is that CoMs can't take advantage of their unique resource mechanics and therefore not that much fun.
- The new rune system will change the method of regeneration of runes and instead of the runes being "filled" simultaneously, they will be filled sequentially. For example, if you use two blood runes, the first one will fill before the second one begins to fill; that is, they will have a set of three runes filling every ten seconds instead of having six individual runes that fill every ten seconds (Haste will make the runes fill more quickly). Another way of looking at it is that they will have three runes and each one will fill up to 200% (which will allow them to have a greater amount of storage), instead of having six and each one being filled to 100%.
- Since this is a major change for the Death Knight mechanics, we will need to reset many of the current abilities of the class; For example, each ability must cause more damage or be more significant since the CoM will obtain fewer resources for each unit of time; in addition, we will have to reduce the cost of some faculties.
Talent changes
We now provide you with some of the talent changes we plan to bring to Cataclysm. This list is not exhaustive, but we hope it gives you an idea of what we have planned for the CoMs regarding the performance of the three specializations.
- One of the most important changes we will make is converting the Blood tree to a dedicated tanking tree. In general, we consider it a success to have three trees to tank; however, it is no longer so necessary since we have the dual specialization system; Furthermore, the current design is not very compatible with the passive Mastery bonuses for the talent trees that we want to incorporate (more information below) and we prefer to spend our time adjusting and balancing a tank tree, rather than tanks wonder if they picked the "right" tree.
- We consider that the Blood tree is the one that best suits the tanking role; the Unholy tree had a good niche with its diseases, magic, and dominance over its pets; Frost is now perceived as a solid dual-wield tree, with Frost damage and acceptable crowd control; Blood's niche was self healing, making it a suitable tree for tanking, as well as powerful weapon swings, which can be easily migrated to Frost and Unholy.
- We plan to move the fun and interesting tanking abilities to the Blood tree; For example, the Vampire Blood and Will of the Necropolis talents are likely to stay where they are, but the Bone Shield talent will migrate from the Unholy tree.
Passive Mastery bonuses for talent trees
Blood
Damage reduction
Revenge
Healing Absorption
Frost
Melee damage
Melee Haste
Runic Power Generation
Profane
Melee damage
Damage dealt by melee and spell critical hits
Disease damage
Healing Absorption: when they heal themselves they will receive an additional effect that will absorb damage.
Runic Power Generation: This one will work just as the name implies and the new rune system will make the generation of runic power more attractive.
Damage from diseases: Unholy Death Knights will be able to get more out of their illnesses, as they are an integral part of the playstyle of that talent tree.
Revenge: This is a mechanic that will ensure that a tank's damage (and thus its threat) is not left behind as DPS classes gain weaponry upgrades throughout the expansion. All tank specs will have Vengeance available as their second passive bonus for their talent tree.
Whenever a tank is hit, Vengeance will give it a stackable attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage dealt, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's amount of health without buffs; for boss fights, we assume they will always have the attack power bonus of 10% of their health amount. It is worth mentioning that when we talk about the 5% and 10% bonuses, we are assuming that they have invested 51 talent points in the Blood tree and, therefore, these values will be lower at a lower level.
Remember that you will only get this benefit if you have invested most of your talent points in the Blood tree; that is, there will be no Frost or Unholy Death Knights with this buff. Vengeance will allow us to create tank weapons in a similar way to how we do it today, which means that it will have some DPS statistics but, for the most part, they will be statistics oriented to survival; Druids' weaponry, including tanks, generally have higher DPS stats, so their Vengeance bonus will likely be lower; however, our overall goal is for all four tanks to deal a similar amount of DPS when tanking.
We hope you enjoyed this preview and we look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions on it. Please note that this information is subject to change as Cataclysm development continues.
Post edit
Here are some points of clarification:
- We want to provide a 2-handed weapon style for Frost as we recognize that pets are an add-on. We think we have to design space to do so now that we don't have to support Frost to Tank. We're working on making Frost a two-handed weapon branch, don't worry.
- Sprout is completely free, with a one minute cooldown. It is not intended to completely replace Plague Strike and Icy Touch.
- We are not sure yet how to manage presences. We know the hassle of Blood Death Knights playing with Frost Presence and Frost Death Knights not playing with Frost Presence. We may rename the presences or take some other action.
I'll explain the rune mechanics better. Once you see it in action it's pretty easy to understand.
Focus on the Blood Runes for now. The big change is that rune # 2 will never start to fill until rune # 1 is full. It will always fill 1 and then 2. Today 1 and 2 can be filled at the same time.
In Cataclysm, when you're killing things, you use rune 1. Then any extra "red" on rune 2 will fill rune 1 again. If both are full, you can use two blood runes immediately. But after that, rune 1 will fill up first and then rune 2. For if it helps, imagine that rune 2 is a secondary deposit.
It will sound to you as if we are slowing down CoM attacks and that is to some extent. It is part of what we are trying to achieve. We can supplement those skills that use the global cooldown with things like Free Skills or Runic Power skills, or maybe it gives us room to add talents that make runes refill faster. Remember, though, that slow attacks can hit harder. Instead of the Death Knights hitting fast like a Rogue, they will hit slower and harder, like a warrior. This is the image that many players have of the Death Knight. Double grip will hit faster of course.
I'll try another comparison. Imagine that all the rogue's abilities cost 100 energy. They would have to wait until they got 100 energy and then immediately use an attack so they weren't wasting future energy. This is how CoM works now, except they have 6 runes to watch out for. Now imagine the same rogue but all his abilities cost 50 energy. If he makes an attack when he has 60 energy, he consumes 50 but has 10 remaining for the next attack. This is how we want the CdlM to work.
If it still doesn't make sense to you, then focus on the experience that will be, that is, you will have more court to breathe in your rotation and you will not have to press buttons every Global Cooldown. If you don't use a hit in the second it's available, it's a bit better because the extra deposit will save extra resources instead of wasting them. However, you will still be pressing many buttons. We will keep the double runic strikes, Runes of Death and multiple diseases and all the fanfare. We have to make some changes to some skills to accommodate the changes in resources but it is not something that is unrecognizable.
We're not even sure the CoMs need Runic Strike anymore. If it survives, we will make it an instant hit. But if we make it an instant hit, it won't be that different from existing hits so we may be able to do a tank rotation without it.
GC, so does that mean major cooldowns won't need runes? Instead, will we see things like Strangle, Bone Shield, Ghoul Rage, and things that cost runic power or just free? It would be incredibly frustrating to have to use such long cooldowns.
I don't think we can make everything cost runes. It would be very difficult to manage. If I had a say, some will be runic power and some will be free. If we moved Bone Shield to Blood then that might be a good thing as a runic as it's something you do before you run dry, but we have to work a bit more in the talent branches before we can really respond to this.
Source: American forums