Death Knight Cataclysm Preview
Written by Gazrella.
Blizzard recently released the upcoming changes to DK’s and there response on the new rune mechanics. Below is the post!
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will bring with it several changes to class talents and abilities. In this preview, you’ll get a glimpse at some of the new abilities, spells, and talents in store for the death knight class, along with an early look at some improvements we plan to make to the rune resource system.
New Death Knight Abilities
Outbreak (level 81): Outbreak infects the target with both Frost Fever and Blood Plague at no rune cost. This ability allows death knights to apply diseases quickly when they are switching targets or when their diseases have been dispelled.
Necrotic Strike (level 83): Necrotic Strike is a new attack that deals weapon damage and applies a debuff that absorbs an amount of healing based on the damage done. For context, imagine that the death knight can choose between doing 8,000 damage outright with a certain ability, or dealing 6,000 damage and absorbing 4,000 points in incoming heals with Necrotic Strike — the burst is smaller, but a larger overall amount of healing would be required to bring the target back to full health.
This ability is meant to bring back some of the old flavor from when death knights could dispel heal-over-time (HoT) effects. It also gives the class a bit more PvP utility without simply replicating a Mortal Strike-style effect.
Dark Simulacrum (level 85): The death knight strikes a target, applying a debuff that allows the death knight to copy the opponent’s next spell cast and unleash it. Unlike Spell Reflection, Dark Simulacrum does not cancel the incoming spell. In general, if you can’t reflect an ability, you won’t be able to copy it either.
Rune System Changes
While we’re satisfied with the way the rune system works overall, we’re making a few major changes to the mechanics that will ultimately help death knight players feel less constrained. Here’s the rationale behind the changes, followed by an explanation of how the new system will work.
- In the current rune system, any time a rune is sitting idle, death knights are losing out on potential damage output. By comparison, rogues spend most of their time at low energy levels, and if they’re unable to use their skills for a few seconds, that energy builds up and can be spent later, minimizing the net loss from the interruption.
- A death knight’s runes, on the other hand, cannot be used until they are fully active. If a death knight ever goes more than a few seconds without spending an available rune, that resource is essentially wasted. Because the death knight is pushing buttons constantly, it can be difficult to add new mechanics to the class because the player doesn’t have any free global cooldowns to use them. We can’t grant extra resources or reduced cost, because there is no time to spend them. Missing an attack is devastating, and it’s impossible to save resources for when they’re most useful.
- Additionally, each individual death knight ability has a fairly low impact on its own, making it feel like most of the death knight’s attacks are weak. The death knight’s rotations are also more easily affected by latency or a player’s timing being just a little off. At times, it feels like death knights aren’t able to take advantage of their unique resource mechanic, which can diminish the fun.
- The new rune system will change how runes regenerate, from filling simultaneously to filling sequentially. For example, if you use two Blood runes, then the first rune will fill up before the second one starts to fill up. Essentially, you have three sets of runes filling every 10 seconds instead of six individual runes filling every 10 seconds. (Haste will cause runes to fill faster.) Another way to think of this is having three runes that go up to 200% each (allowing extra “storage”), rather than six runes that go up to 100% each.
- As this is a major change to the death knight’s mechanics, it will of course require us to retune many of the class’s current abilities. For example, each ability needs to hit harder or otherwise be more meaningful since the death knight is getting fewer resources per unit of time. Some abilities will need to have their costs reduced as a result.
Talent Changes
Next we’ll outline some of the death knight talent-tree changes we’re planning in Cataclysm. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it should give you a sense of how we’re intending each death knight spec to perform.
- One of the biggest changes we’re making is converting Blood into a dedicated tanking tree. While we feel that having three tanking trees was successful overall, it’s less necessary in a world with dual-specialization. In addition, the current breakdown isn’t as compatible with the Mastery-based passive talent-tree bonuses we want to add (see below). We’d rather spend time tweaking and balancing one good tanking tree rather than having a tank always wondering if they picked the “correct” tree out of three possibilities.
- Blood seemed like the best fit for tanking. Unholy has always had a strong niche with diseases, magic, and command over pets. Frost now feels like a solid dual-wield tree with Frost magic damage and decent crowd control. Blood’s niche was self-healing — fitting for a tank — as well as strong weapon swings, which could easily be migrated to Frost and Unholy.
- Our plan is to move the most interesting and fun tanking talents and abilities to Blood. For example, you will likely see Vampiric Blood and Will of the Necropolis remain, while Bone Shield will move over from Unholy.
Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses
Blood
- Damage reduction
- Vengeance
- Healing Absorption
Healing Absorption: When you heal yourself, you’ll receive an additional effect that absorbs incoming damage.
Vengeance: This new mechanic is designed to ensure that tank damage output (and therefore threat) doesn’t fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will grant a stacking Attack Power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character’s unbuffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have an Attack Power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Blood tree; these values will be smaller at lower levels.
You only get the Vengeance bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Blood tree, so you won’t see Frost or Unholy death knights running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to design tank gear more or less the way we do today; there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but the goal is that all four tanks will do about the same damage when tanking.
Frost
- Melee damage
- Melee Haste
- Runic Power Generation
Runic Power Generation: This will function as the name implies, and the new rune system will make generating Runic Power more appealing.
Unholy
- Melee damage
- Melee and spell critical damage
- Disease Damage
Disease Damage: Unholy death knights will be able to get more out of their diseases, which are integral to the tree’s play style.
We hope you enjoyed this preview, and we’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on these additions and changes. Please keep in mind that this information represents a work in progress and is subject to change as development on Cataclysm continues.
[...]
Here are a few points of clarification:
- We want to provide a 2-handed style for Frost since we recognize that pets are an acquired taste. We think we have the design space to do that now that we don’t need to support Frost tanking. We’re definitely committed to making Frost work as a dual-wield tree though — that isn’t going away.
- Outbreak is free with a 1-minute cooldown. It’s not supposed to completely replace Plague Strike and Icy Touch.
- We’re not sure how we’re going to handle presences yet. We recognize the oddness of Blood death knights playing in Frost Presence and Frost death knights not playing in Frost Presences. We might rename the presences or take some other action.
Just focus on Blood Runes for the moment. The big change is that rune #2 will never start filling up until rune #1 is full. They always fill 1 then 2. Today 1 and 2 can both fill at the same time.
In Cataclysm, when you’re killing things, you use rune 1. Then any extra “red” in rune 2 will fill rune 1 back up again. If both of them are full, you can use 2 Blood Runes immediately. But after that, rune 1 will fill up first and then rune 2. If it helps, imagine rune 2 is the extra tank.
This sounds like it will slow down DK attacks, and it will to a point. That’s part of what we’re trying to accomplish. We can then fill those extra GCDs with things like free abilities or runic power abilities or we have room to add talents that make runes fill faster. Remember, slow attacks can hit harder though. Instead of DKs hitting fast like a rogue, they’ll hit slower and harder, like a warrior, which fits a lot of player’s image of a DK anyway. Dual wield will hit faster of course.
I’ll try another comparison. Imagine that all rogue abilities cost 100 energy. They have to wait until they get 100 energy, and then immediately use an attack so that they aren’t wasting future energy. That’s how DKs play now, except they have 6 runes to watch. Now imagine the same rogue except all his abilities cost 50 energy. If he hits an attack when he has 60 energy, then 50 is consumed but he has 10 energy still left and a head start on the next attack. That’s the way we want DKs to play.
If that still doesn’t make sense, then focus on what the experience will be, which is that you’ll have more breathing room in your rotation and won’t have to hit a button every single GCD. If you don’t use a strike the second it’s available, that’s more okay because the extra tank will store extra rune resources rather than just wasting it. You’ll still be hitting a lot of buttons though. We’re keeping double rune strikes and Death Runes and disease multipliers and all of that. We’ll have to make some changes in some abilities to accommodate the resource change, but it won’t be unrecognizable to you.
We’re not sure DKs even need Rune Strike any longer. If it survives, we’ll turn it into an instant swing. But if we turn it into an instant swing, then it really isn’t that different from existing strikes so it’s possible we can just make a tanking rotation without it.
38 Comments so far
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Really awesome
This is an outrage! You are screwing up the DK.
Whats the point?
I myself out dps all unholy and frost Dk’s,
i know my class and now blizzard are going to just change it cos they want the hybrid to be a tank.
1.
Blood is great dps.
2.
Why not implement a 4th talent tree per class,
this would also allow for greater strategy and decisions when choosing a spec.
3.
The dual wielding could easily be migrated to unholy, it wouldnt change the class much at all, and the frost could then be able to change back to its “Proper” tanking ways.
U are failing to even think of all the changes to the dk.. JUST STOP NOW, DONT FORCE ME TO STOP PLAYING MY FROST DK TANK. U are taking this way too far and for no good reason. leave the dk alone. Frost tanks are ftw, blood is fail fail fail.. WOW fire the devoloping people behind this dumb idea will u, thanks
and cole u are a idiot, can u read?
screw blood, frost all the way. yes you can heal yourself in blood but ive found that i took more damage in blood than i ever did in frost making the healing a requirement
blood as tanking…nice!
your all taking it the wrong way, and also everyone likes the specs differently i myself prefere unholy tank but some prefere blood, the point is instead of having people go off at you cos they dont like the spec and also to make it easier on you to know that your tanking well, the damage reduction is added to blood and also there taking the good tanking aspects out of frost and unholy and putting it into blood so an all in one, and istead of you guys having a go cos something dosnt go your way, how about you wait and give it a go before having a cry
also the veriaty in all the different specs leaves a WHIDE area to stuff up the tanking spec changing this gives us DK’s a push forward in good tanking, i myself am sick of getting pushed around cos people kick you for not liking your spec or swearing there heads off at you before you even start tanking, i for one am with blizz in this new develepment and besides there still working with it how much have other classes gone through getting twiked to what they are now DK’s are still in develepment and should have a few more changes coming why cant you just give it a go and get over your ego’s for once, besides you might like it
just remove dks you guys fucked up on it enough they suck enough buff mages instead of having these shitty classes
honestly , the only question I have about all this is will my imp icy talons(melee haste only) affect the way runes cooldown kinda suck if it doesnt I am doing everythign I can to get myself the 4 piece set bonus from t10(my dk is an alt)since I can burn through all of my runes quite easily. I currently spend quite a bit of time waiting for them to cooldown so I can hit obliterate pestilence or blood strike again even if my attacks do less damage individually being able to hit them more frequently should make up for that quite well. The statement that dks are constantly hitting buttons while other classes aren’t kinda worries me though since I am mashing buttons as much on my rogue and druid as I do on my dk , the diff is that I am not hitting buttons for diff abilities as much on the other toons on the dk I need to make sure I am taking advantage of all of the runes where with the other classes it is much more about spamming the same abilities over and over
I also agree that DK’s are definitely still in base development , they are the newest class available and so of course they are undergoing the most frequent changes as blizz attempts to balance them against the rest of the classes while still mainting the hero class feel , a DK SHOULD be the hardest class to play , it is the only one you have to be eligible to play by having played something else for a requisite amount of time so while yes it does need to be balanced , it also needs to feel special and personally I think blizz is doing a great job of meeting that so far
WTF BONE SHIELD IN BLOOD TALENT this will end my life as a DK /cry QQ this change will ruin the unholy tree :X:X:X
Guys you all need to chill and wait and see what the changes are like before you start crying. I myself have a unholy/frost pvp off spec frost/blood tank dk and he pwns, People say dks are crap more like they are crap with them and cant hack it when they get owned haha
I my self think blood is single target dps, frost is tank and unholy is aoe dps, even tho you can make them all into dps and all into tank and all have there good and bad point, but why oh why change them so much, i play frost tank and think it is the best for tanking damge as for self healing what are the healers in the riad for you are there to take damge and stop others from takin damage, changeing all this to blood is kind of you saying you want dkn to go blood for tanking wich is wrong mybee change bone sheild to blood, but not to far down the tree so a frost tank can get it as well
and what about making the dps stronger as are they not ment to be a hero class ive seen pallys with same gear put out about 1.5k dps more than a dps dkn and this was not me as i go tank but this person does no his class and so does the pally its just dps pallys dont have to wait for there stuff to come of cd if they do it right but dkn seem to have a few seconds were they are waiting for runes (death coil ftw at ths point)and i cant see how giving them 3 runes at 200% rather than 6 runes at 100%. Mybee get rid of of the runes and have the runic power like others have rage
wow dude that sux nice job making dk suck and the funny part is i just switched to blood today nice. Unholy sucks imma just delete my dk wish i knew lvling him was gonna be a waste of time
Hmmmmm if blizzard keeping nerve DKs then why they make DK class they should balance all classes not nerveing DK since wotlk patchs came the DK are getting nerved till when they will be nerved ?? Then what’s the use to make a dk if its like that it will do less dmg if it is like that blizzard don’t know how to balance the classes
How about u remove DK class and let us Choose any other class instead since u will do The BIG FUCking nerf!
Hmmmm since the DK will hit harder but slower how about u make them like warriors I mean they hit slow with 2 hand 2 hand such as titan GRip how about u make Titan Grip for DK will be awsome!!!!:D XD
OMG. Wtb periods, reason, and parents for all of the QQ’ers. Chill the hell out. Things are changing, you might like it, might not. There’s lots of classes to play if you fall out of love with your precious DK. It’s not all about you.
And it’s spelled “nerfed” not “nerved”.
Best class after pally… <3 ily. OHD!
since youre taking Bone Shield frm the unhly spec,why dont u bring self rezzingback, or automatically give the DK Goblin Jumper Cables. Quite often DK’s are the last ones standing in a fight. It would be very useful to let him rez the heala.
and come on Blizz hurry up w the fricking maintenence on the realms, its screwing up my Addons. Jeez
BLizz has ruined this class. THey are changing the blood spec to primarily tanking!? Its now going to be a spec just like the protection spec for warriors, wtf. I picked blood for my DK because of blood’s high DPS and healing, to not to tank and do all that bull sht. Blizz is just ruining WoW, every class is getting detroyed. Blizz just doesnt get all this f’in feed back. All they care about is making the game there way. God damn blizz is just fucking stupid.
I do have some trouble dps’ing in frost and unholy, but i never tried blood dps’ing. I’m just praying that they make dps easier and better in cataclysm, so dk’s are actually somewhat wanted, as they are not realyl needed in icc at the moment.
i also think dk’s need some more ranged spells, so they might actually stand the smallest chance against the other OP pvp classes, like pally and lock.
Seriously? You QQer’s are really just annoying. Go play another game until your balls drop.
Also, please, someone crack open a dictionary, don’t they teach grammer in elementary school anymore?
Give it a try. You don’t like it? Fine, play another class. You know how often Blizz flip flops on class changes and builds. First it’s strong, then it’s weak, then it’s strong again. Just wait, if it doesn’t work out, Blizz will most likely work with it.
Really the only question I want answered is… will I still be able to blow up people?
Corpse Explosion FTW!
I see some peeps saying DK’s dont pwn! WTF i play blood dk as dps even as AOE (plague strike, icy touch,pestilence,death and decay) i do great dps! always top 3 in icc25, true pala power is to OP to even come near but DK sure can do great dps. And me as Blood out dpsing frost and unholy am devastated as i dont like frost or unholy see blood becoming a tank spec. Ye ofcourse i can say lets see what happends but i doubt i have as much fun is a do now in catalysm.
I defiantly agree with the changes to the rune cool downs, it seems like an excellent idea from a PvE standpoint. I only worry about the Dk’s PvP ability once they are able to do double the damage of their normal dps, as an initial burst.
To Quandery, the hardest class to play should be the one that does the most dps. Although I see your reasoning, making any one class that much harder to play than all the others is never a good idea.
Changing DKs to blood tanking is a decent idea. In WotLK, i saw no real use for blood. Frost for tanking, and some pvp, unholy for pvp and dps… Blood fit in nowhere. It was crap dps, crap tank, crap pvp.
ok why the fuck u guys firstable QQ’ing bout Blood?, Blood imo is the best for tanking, and not dps? Imo unholy frost do muuuuuchh more dps then blood on Single and AoE!
I’m glad that they have decided to make a specific tanking spec. but I’m a little surprise that bliz chose blood and not frost. I played with both unholy and blood spec. for Dps I think Blood is better at Dpsing. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how bliz changes will work. If it doesn’t they will just change it aging.
Hahahahaha woooot blizzy fuck up again
. Word’s cannot describe how crap this modification to the DK is…are we alowed to please change our class from this now bottom shit class to another (say an OP pally or mage)? kk ty 
My respect for blizzy has gone down the drain…i’ve read up on all the class changes and what not and i say it’s not too much of a great expansion (6/10). I had a love for my DK but now you guy’s are going to ruin it so again tyvm
Quit complaining. Every class is changing, some more than others like Warlocks, Hunters, and Paladins. Death Knights start at level 55. That alone gives them an incredible bonus, but that also gives them an incredible disadvantage. You get to skip to 55, the reason for so many poor death knights out there. Most people seem to just want everything easy and handed to them. Instead of complaining about all the changes, why not embrace them? Look at it as a new challenge. Change is not always bad. By the way, a lot of you need to learn grammar, spelling and to not use lazy abbreviations. I don’t take posts that are hard to understand seriously at all. Neither do I take posts seriously that just complain. How about you actually give reasons as to why you don’t like the changes.
i like the one tank tree. It sucked being blood and lacking so hard in AoE tanking, it was possible but it did suck. and lacking the survivalbilty of blood while in frost boss tanking. making a one tree tanking spec will be a refreshing look at the DK tank. looking forward to seeing the mechanincs
To Dkvanace
July 13th, 2010 | 12:50 am
Who wrote
“i also think dk’s need some more ranged spells, so they might actually stand the smallest chance against the other OP pvp classes, like pally and lock.”
Are you kidding me? Both unholy and blood dks usually smack warlock pretty bad (yes even if the have pvp gear and the doesn’t) and when it comes to retridins vs blood for example it’s really up to the player. We have Mind Freeze, stangulate, death grip (interrupts/silences) we have anti-magic shell (duh), we have self healing every hit if blood or in blood presence (and if in frost we have lots more health). we have a ghoul to sacrifice which should count as a semi-instant heal since we can use it while running (making it a 3 sec heal with the ability to use instantly).
My point being; warlocks are the least of our problems when it comes to pvp (including all lock specs).
And to the guy who said “buff mages”… Go drown yourself:P Mages could be made more fun, that’s something I could agree with when you say that you want them buffed. But never increased dmg, when played right they are a horrible threat in both pvp and pve when it comes to dmg.
Blood tanking for life<3
prsonally i think that this will be a good change. just try it befor exploding about it
This is going to be an amazing buff. Currently as a mage I can destroy a dk with 1 set of cds, without even using my cold snap, its all lock downs and freezes, and the dk drops so fast. Once that pets gone, and gargoyle is released, a nice counterspell to that pet stops it from doing 3k damage a hit and reverts it to a 350 damage physical damage for at least 9 of the 20 seconds its available. By that time the dk is almost dead and finishing it off with a nice set of deep freeze will destroy him/her. Tricking the dk into using anti magic shield before a deep freeze is key, and allows the mage the HUGE upper hand on destroying the class. I am excited for this buff, as well as the mage buff. Seeing these 2 titans collide on the battle field will now be even more epic than its current state. Its really going to be a battle of brawn vs brains here.