Last week, I talked about three quick fixes death knights should get before the
Mists of Pandaria beta is over. This week, I'd like to discuss three more death knight
issues. These aren't necessarily any less urgent or problematic than
last week's issues, but they're complicated enough that we probably
can't expect them to be fixed before the expansion goes live. Still,
they should probably be dealt with sooner rather than later.
1. Tier 5 talents have got to go. I have to admit, the level 75 death knight talent tier had me pretty
excited when it was unveiled. Finally, anyone could choose their flavor
of rune regeneration. At optimal balance, it seemed like everything
could turn out great. People could choose how much control they wanted,
people could avoid rune tetris if they wanted, and everything would be
cool.
In practice, it hasn't worked out like that. It's become more and more
obvious that it will be nearly impossible to balance the three types and
that Blood Tap is the clear winner for any death knight DPS player, with Runic Empowerment nearly equal and Runic Corruption
taking up the distant rear. The level 75 tier, in other words,
Sell wow gold, doesn't
pass the basic litmus test for the new talent system. There's no real
choice. Min-maxers will feel forced to take a specific talent on this
tier in all situations, and it will, in fact, almost always be Blood
Tap.
Part of the problem is fixing this is that the issue inherent to it are
all tangled up in point 2. Blood Tap is overpowered because we need
death runes more than ever. But even if that weren't true, there would
be balance issues between the three.
At this point, I think tier 75 just plain needs to go. Redesign it. Get
something new in there. You could even move the level 90 tier down to
level 75 and get some new damage talents for level 90. Make Runic
Corruption baseline for the class. This removes the awkwardness of rune
tetris and offers some much needed relief for our increasingly
complicated playstyle. If you take care of point 2, you can even give us
back old style Blood Tap, too.
2. Reevaluate unusual rune usage. After
Wrath, Blizzard started to get a little bit creative with rune usage -- namely, it put Scourge Strike,
which was once a traditional frost/unholy rune spender, on unholy
rules. This of course did not at all fit with other traditional strikes
such as Blood Strike, Plague Strike, and Icy Touch. Blizzard tried to fix this by adding Festering Strike, which took up the blood and frost runes now left orphaned by Scourge Strike.
Unfortunately, this has still left unholy in an ultimately awkward
position where solid base class skills like Icy Touch and Plague Strike
and extra lifesaving and utility buttons like Death Strike
suddenly just throw everything off in a way they don't for frost or
blood death knights. In addition, it makes it a lot harder to transition
from frost DPS to unholy DPS when you have to learn a whole new way of
spending runes. This is not to say unholy should be functionally
identical to frost, but there should be some continuity and some ability
to communicate with other class abilities. In short, I truly believe
Scourge Strike should be returned to an frost/unholy rune-spending heavy
hitter.
Of course, this issue is relatively minor compared to the real can of worms opened in
Mists, that we now have abilities that use death runes directly, most notably Soul Reaper. In
Wrath and
Cataclysm, death runes have been a mostly intuitive way of adding a few more of your signature strike into your rotation. In
Mists of Pandaria,
we will specifically have to set aside these death runes to maximize
our damage. This becomes most notable when Soul Reaper starts giving
bonuses. You'll essentially be changing your entire priority and
rotation to generate as many death runes as possible. This ties back
into our first point, as this makes Blood Tap immediately the best
choice for DPS simply so they can generate death runes more or less "on
command."
Death knights already juggle so many indicators and resource types.
Adding death runes as a resource in their own right rather than a side
effect of the rune system is going to add an extra level of complication
we do not need as a class. It is likely too late in the beta for the
developers to simply scrap Soul Reaper and give us a new level 87 skill
(though like I said last week, I'd love for them to do it and give us Gorefiend's Grasp as a base level 87 ability).
But I do predict that the use of death runes is going to be a prime
source of confusion, burnout, and low DPS among death knights in
Mists of Pandaria.
Our rotations are just too complex for their own good anymore, and
death runes are going to be one of the prime causes. Abilities that
directly use death runes and rotations that can't support basic class
skills need to go.
3. Address those nagging DPS spec balance issues. This point really boils down to the existence of Unholy Might
and the balance of two-handed and dual wield frost DPS. There are other
issues of varying importance with the specs, but these two have really
haunted the class all through
Cataclysm and look like they'll stick around for
Mists, as it currently stands.
Two-handed frost DPS has been on an unfortunate roller coaster through much of
Cataclysm.
It fills a much-needed DPS role in the class, offering the flavor of
the heavy hitting two-handed weapon playstyle that blood DPS used to
fill. Unfortunately, it hasn't always done that successfully.
Sell wow gold, Dual
wielding continues to offer more weapon damage than two-handed frost.
While Might of the Frozen Wastes
sometimes managed to fill the gap, it was generally nerfed back down
pretty quickly. As a result, dual wielding has been the clear choice for
frost if you want to min-max your damage for most of
Cataclysm. It's difficult to say if this will continue into
Mists of Pandaria, but right now, dual wielding continues to pull away from the pack pretty handily.
Unholy Might's issue is scaling. Since so much of unholy's damage comes
from things like pets and diseases, Unholy Might looks at first blush to
be perfect for that reason alone. It affects all of unholy's damage,
making everything nice and uniform. Unfortunately, what it doesn't do is
affect weapon damage nearly as much as it should. As a result, weapons
upgrades are often lackluster as compared to other melee DPS specs. In
addition, Unholy Might has become subject to many patches and hotfixes,
as Blizzard has used adjusting it as an apparently quick fix to unholy
DPS levels.
Now, in the long run, this is probably the least urgent thing I've
discussed over the past two weeks. In some ways, one could argue this is
part of the flavor of the specs. Still, Unholy Might and Might of the
Frozen Wastes are perennial thorns in our sides, being buffed and nerfed
repeatedly when most of the death knight community feels the right move
would be to go at the underlying issues they highlight with their
specs.
