With the upcoming patch vastly increasing the survivability and more scaling for DK pets, and Garg/imp ghoul becoming a mainstay of pretty much every maxed dps build, those two talents are quickly becoming the impale/deep wounds of our class, is this intended? are any deep-blood/frost changes planned to compete with the pets? (dk dps isn't overly high like some other classes right now so I dont see them being nerfed) or moving them higher so they are more accessible to cross-specs?

Frosts 51 point talent is pretty nice, except it fails to put its disease on targets that are immune to the CC effect (read: its nigh useless in raids) Is this a documented bug or is it intended?

Blood's heart strike cleave component doesn't seem to be "smart" and avoid cc'd targets, but the attack itself deals more damage than blood strike, is attaching a Bloodstrike buff to another deep blood talent to make the damage the same so a DK can choose to /not/ cleave the pants off of everything around him without nerfing his already low personal dps planned?

Maybe I never gave it enough time/effort but I always felt blood dps was low. The addition of the cleave mechanic sucks for the reasons stated - why does blood's strike suffer from this restriction? I understand the thinking behind it. They wanted you to choose when to use an ability.

A better idea would be to change the tooltip for heart strike to say that Blood Strike now has a cleave effect instead of Heart Strike. This is a good idea because using blood strike means you're choosing to use a lower damage ability at the cost of hitting multiple targets while maintaining your personal dps using HS.

This also works well because the cleave effect only works if you take HS, so you're not messing with other specs.

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Maybe I never gave it enough time/effort but I always felt blood dps was low. The addition of the cleave mechanic sucks for the reasons stated - why does blood's strike suffer from this restriction? I understand the thinking behind it. They wanted you to choose when to use an ability.

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The problem with blood currently is that its a one trick pony, and that is DRM (though right now garg does more damage than DRM) IIRC you are supposed to pop hysteria, pop all your trinkets, use DRM, summon your ghoul (gets doubled) army of the dead (doubled) then have heroism go off, and with all that timing you can do a stupid amount of dps for about 20 seconds. before going back to being sub-par.

Blood is severely limited by global cooldowns, some people even sit in unholy stance which would be cool if the spec worked "right" but it's pretty hard to overcome the 15% damage bonus of blood. Ive a feeling blood will shine later when all the %dmg bonus and stat %ages add up to more damage.

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The problem with blood currently is that its a one trick pony, and that is DRM (though right now garg does more damage than DRM) IIRC you are supposed to pop hysteria, pop all your trinkets, use DRM, summon your ghoul (gets doubled) army of the dead (doubled) then have heroism go off, and with all that timing you can do a stupid amount of dps for about 20 seconds. before going back to being sub-par.

Blood is severely limited by global cooldowns, some people even sit in unholy stance which would be cool if the spec worked "right" but it's pretty hard to overcome the 15% damage bonus of blood. Ive a feeling blood will shine later when all the %dmg bonus and stat %ages add up to more damage.

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Well..haste does nothing for DKs, since our damage is mostly through diseases and magic damage. Auto attacks (which are affected by haste) do not contribute a large amount to our damage.

In fact, the ONLY reason I would ever use Unholy Presence would be if I wasn't UH and I wanted to walk faster. It makes me wonder what the actual purpose of this presence is.

But, in the ridiculous scenario you mentioned, those are ideal circumstances and nobody really wants another "3 minute mage" scenario even in PvE.

I use unholy for trash and 5 mans so I can blow through 1.5-2 rotations before everything is dead, ive also heard it is good for duel wield specs that rely on killing machine and spam 1rune abilities for more procs of things. But I dont believe it is for sustained dps, it just isnt efficient to blow out all your runes then sit without an ability to use for 3 seconds per rotation.

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A better idea would be to change the tooltip for heart strike to say that Blood Strike now has a cleave effect instead of Heart Strike.

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All around bad idea. Blood spec needs help in all aspects, tanking and DPS, and Heart Strike buff is VERY MUCH NEEDED! Considering that nobody CCs these days hitting CCed targets is not a big deal, especially since its FRONTAL CONE, so all you have to do is turn your back to CCed target to never hit it.

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The problem with blood currently is that its a one trick pony, and that is DRM (though right now garg does more damage than DRM) IIRC you are supposed to pop hysteria, pop all your trinkets, use DRM, summon your ghoul (gets doubled) army of the dead (doubled) then have heroism go off, and with all that timing you can do a stupid amount of dps for about 20 seconds. before going back to being sub-par.

Blood is severely limited by global cooldowns, some people even sit in unholy stance which would be cool if the spec worked "right" but it's pretty hard to overcome the 15% damage bonus of blood. Ive a feeling blood will shine later when all the %dmg bonus and stat %ages add up to more damage.

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This.

Cleve is nice and will help with damage on trash... but main issues still remain - blood rotation is very awkward with 1.5s GCD because diseases don't last long enough.

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All around bad idea. Blood spec needs help in all aspects, tanking and DPS, and Heart Strike buff is VERY MUCH NEEDED! Considering that nobody CCs these days hitting CCed targets is not a big deal, especially since its FRONTAL CONE, so all you have to do is turn your back to CCed target to never hit it.

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No disrespect intended but ive downed every boss in warcraft back when they were hard, you cant always expect cc'd targets to be behind you.
Im not disagreeing with you, but lets say in one of those instances when you /cant/ turn your back on the target for whatever reason, you are completely useless, like elemental-shammy-on-hydross useless, why-are-you-even-here useless
considering blood already has issues its a bit silly to attach a cleave to their, main, spammable attack when the only other attack you can replace it with does alot less damage.

I agree with the OP. Gargoyle and the deep unholy pet talents are pretty much required for a max dps build. Blood and Frost offer little in return for giving up these two strong talents.

Frost in particular has a crappy 51 point talent. Frost is not a good pvp spec (see every single sk ranked DK is unholy) so pvpers do not take the talent. That leaves pvers, who do not take the talent because it is worthless on every boss fight.

Edit: The max dps dual wield build is 20 frost 51 unholy and the patch will not change that.

I do like those ideas, though the blood ones are a little out of whack.

All frost needs I think is a way of applying blood plague without horribly wrecking its rotation (you cant even use blood tap for it, you need that for unbreakable) that would increase your obliterate and BS damage as well as do its own, and pretty much even things out.

Hungering cold applying its disease to CC immune targets would be great towards not being useless, as would having its cost reduced so you could open with an icey -> hungering -> howling to gather up aoe pulls.

I dont think that ghoul/garg are too overpowered, just they are too high in the tree and do more damage compared with very deep blood and frost talents.

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you would think being a godmode class atm would be enough for them..................

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http://img111.imageshack.us/my.php?image=timetostopih5.jpg

Agreed

Have you ever considered scaling?

Other than their death coils blood scales better in every regard than unholy, and frost scales better than unholy in every regard period >.>


garg however does need to be moved to 41 points to put it out of reach of 0/32/39 DW and 50/0/21

I think that blood needs a better rp dump than death coil, cause of the way the cds are. Im usually left with a couple of seconds with nothing up but my CD spells and death coil. And death coil seems to do too little damage for too much rp. Maybe thats just me though,

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I think that blood needs a better rp dump than death coil, cause of the way the cds are. Im usually left with a couple of seconds with nothing up but my CD spells and death coil. And death coil seems to do too little damage for too much rp. Maybe thats just me though,

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3k damage in unholy presence for 40 rp doesn't seem that bad when you have extra time and DRW is on cd.

[quote]Have you ever considered scaling?

Other than their death coils blood scales better in every regard than unholy, and frost scales better than unholy in every regard period >.> /quote]

Ive always hated the scaling excuse, blue tossed that at warriors since release, and while the few months of being overpowered just before content release comes out and the cycle starts over again is fun, I'd rather be moderately powered all the time ;)

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you would think being a godmode class atm would be enough for them..................

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There's really no reason to interrupt their discussion of things they like/don't like/would like to see changed for their class.

We didn't like it in TBC when we asked for changes, even when not buffs per se, and others came along and said "QQ moar OP FOTM".

"do unto others...." and leave these folks to their discussion.