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Q u o t e:
Yes, thank you. The bug is not trivial to fix or we would have done so and it isn't worth bumping other changes off the list in order to buy time to fix it at the moment. It might involve re-designing the talent.

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Well, as has been noted by another person... How about we remove the extra disease from Ebon Plaguebringer, put the disease back into Unholy Blight - thus making the talent actually worth having again, and exciting- and then make ebon plaguebringer a magic effect? That would solve a lot of problems and also make Blight FUN, which it currently is most assuredly NOT.

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Q u o t e:


This is the right solution. However, as I said the last time this question was asked, our priority right now is making sure more DKs spec Frost or Blood, not how to reward groups that bring multiple Unholy DKs. We do recognize it is annoying though and we'll get it fixed.

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It feels like IFF would be a smilar issue.
Say I have IFF. If you have mulitple druids (w/ or w/o) Imp FF, and another druid overwrites yours with FF/FFF do you lose the bouns gained?

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Q u o t e:
However, as I said the last time this question was asked, our priority right now is making sure more DKs spec Frost or Blood, not how to reward groups that bring multiple Unholy DKs.

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From a tanking perspective, I'd LOVE to spec Blood. However, it's just not viable by comparison to the other two trees, even with the 3.0.8 buffs. Health is fantastic, more mitigation talents would be nice, but it's the lack of AoE threat that's the deal-killer.

As for Frost, a stam boost would be nice, but there are still too many 5-point talents required. Improved Icy Talons also has too high of a cost, and is a total waste to a 2H DK.

Lastly, both Blood and Frost's 51-point talents are pretty lackluster. DRW's cooldown is too long, and Hungering Cold isn't worth speccing into.

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Q u o t e:


This is the right solution. However, as I said the last time this question was asked, our priority right now is making sure more DKs spec Frost or Blood, not how to reward groups that bring multiple Unholy DKs. We do recognize it is annoying though and we'll get it fixed.

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We run with 2 - 3 DK's Ghostcrawler, and while I'm usually blood, we like to respec alot, because frankly we clear all 25 man content in one day, and it's fun to play with new specs and/or test theories concurrently, so two of us will run the same spec and compare results. Actually Unholy is currently the "out" spec just because everyone does it. Just because everyone does it, doesn't mean it's the best, you know? I've personally stuck with blood the whole time, and I've had amazing luck (and DPS!) with it. I PvP as frost after the patch and it's amazing (and frustrating), even though I miss some unholy talents (no, not garg and ghoul).

Most of the time however, we run into this problem when we run 5 mans or quick 10 mans and you just grab a DPS. Oops! You're unholy too? Darn, guess one of us is gonna get gypped!

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Q u o t e:


From a tanking perspective, I'd LOVE to spec Blood. However, it's just not viable by comparison to the other two trees, even with the 3.0.8 buffs. Health is fantastic, more mitigation talents would be nice, but it's the lack of AoE threat that's the deal-killer.

As for Frost, a stam boost would be nice, but there are still too many 5-point talents required. Improved Icy Talons also has too high of a cost, and is a total waste to a 2H DK.

Lastly, both Blood and Frost's 51-point talents are pretty lackluster. DRW's cooldown is too long, and Hungering Cold isn't worth speccing into.

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DRW is amazing, and 3 minutes for a talent that almost doubles your dps is a reasonable cooldown.

Hungering cold, from a tank point, yeah, it does suck, but it's a free spread of disease on trash (HB gooo!). However, in PvP a 10 second freeze every minute (on par with untalented HoJ with better duration) is out of control, especially in 2's.

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Q u o t e:


This is the right solution. However, as I said the last time this question was asked, our priority right now is making sure more DKs spec Frost or Blood, not how to reward groups that bring multiple Unholy DKs. We do recognize it is annoying though and we'll get it fixed.

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Here, let me tell you what's wrong with the other two trees that have a lot of DK's as Unholy.

Frost: One of the major abilities in Frost is Howling Blast, however it has two cooldowns which make the use of this ability rather clunky, specially if your Icy Touch and Frost Strike are eating your KM procs.
Solution: Make Blood of the North reduce the cooldown of HB of 1 second per point invested. Right now Blood of the North is a talent point sink as both Unholy and Blood have their Death Rune ability at 3 points instead of 5.

Blood: A very gear dependent spec that relies heavily on weapon damage.
Solution: Beef up some of the deeper Blood abilities, make things such as Blood Worms not soak up CoH and other heals.

Unholy is largely popular because it's based off of Spell Damage vs Weapon Damage so it's a great starter raid spec for those not in the best gear. But also it offers a lot in the deeper tiers that no other tree can compete with for those that want to min/max if user can pull off a tight rotation.

Not fixing a tree because you want people to try the other two is bad form mate. Instead make the other trees more attractive in their deeper tiers and you wouldn't have this problem of an Army of Unholy DK's.

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Q u o t e:
our priority right now is making sure more DKs spec Frost or Blood, not how to reward groups that bring multiple Unholy DKs. We do recognize it is annoying though and we'll get it fixed.

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This was unfortunately phrased. I assume you meant that you don't want to penalize groups that bring unholy DKs, as no reward would apply.

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Q u o t e:
Blood has... good damage and more self healing than anyone needs. Lame.

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I liken Blood to one of those two-for-one movie packages that you find in stores like Wal-Mart and Target. They give you one sweet movie that you know you'll like and some lame movie that you take just so you can get the sweet one.

That's what the Blood tree is like. I'm forced to grab healing talents for PVE (which are usually only useful if something is going wrong) because I have to be able to get up further in the tree.

In other words, I should be able to choose between survivability/tanking and DPS. One change I think would assist in this would actually be a reversal of an old change... moving Bloody Strikes back to Tier 2 (where it used to be -- where Scent of Blood is). Doing this at least allows you to spend one less point in a relatively worthless talent and the only reason it was moved was so tanks could get it (or so that's what they said). Yet I don't think I've seen anyone get it? You could say it might give Frost something to boost their extraneous Blood Strike damage, but I doubt they'd waste 3 points for what amounts to a smaller portion of their damage.

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Q u o t e:


Honestly, they're not speccing Frost or Blood because the itemization in the game doesn't support those trees as well as it does Unholy (in Blood's case), or is simply too demanding of gear item level and rotation compared to Unholy (in both Blood's and Frost's case).

Blood got shafted on the set bonuses in this tier. By comparison both Frost and Unholy make substantial gains on both 2pc and 4pc (Frost in particular makes an enormous gain on the 4pc because of how absurd the RP dump in the tree is). Blood also takes a giant hit from the fact that you've got two extremely powerful sigils for Icy Touch and Obliterate/Scourge Strike (honestly the IT sigil is only strong because the scaling on the ability is faaaar too much), but there's nothing even remotely that strong to compliment Heart Strike. Glyph situation is nearly identical; both Frost and Unholy have a full compliment of strong glyph choices, whereas the Glyph of Blood Strike is PvP oriented and has very strict requirements to glean any benefit from in a PvE raid setting (you need to change this glyph in the same fashion that you did Torment the Weak).

The other issue is that Blood and Frost simply are more demanding on the player. In Blood's case, you have a lot of potential that is just completely wasted because there is no competitive way to run a 2H Blood setup in Unholy Presence; any gains you make by trying to actually use Sudden Doom to full extent is lost and more by simply not being in Blood Presence for the 15% damage scaling. The build is going to remain weak until you either address how RP is consumed with this build or re-examine the relative benefit of Blood and Unholy Presence for DPS purposes.

Frost isn't getting as much play as Unholy because it is about as un-intuitive as a talent tree gets. In 2H Frost's case, you literally drop Plague Strike altogether - in my mind this is a serious scaling issue that needs to be addressed. When you have a tree that actually eats a DPS loss by using the same disease management that is drilled into the player's mind from the second they create their DK, of course it is going to be less popular; when these same people try 2H Frost and play it in a way that is intuitive with the rest of the class' design and it falls short, they are going to abandon it. That issue needs to be looked at because anyone that doesn't wander to the DK forum or EJ to find out that you cannot deal optimal DPS if you run your second baseline disease is going to see it as inferior, and rightly so; that is a design failure with very clear and, as you have clearly seen, real implications when you look at spec population.

Fixing the bug with Ebon Plaguebringer shouldn't be interfering with your desire to see more of the other two specs in raids. They are in that state simply because you have yet to make those two tress as fully functional and fully supported by secondary/tertiary factors like gear, glyphs and rotation. Right now, every one of these factors lines up in Unholy's favor. Things won't change to any significant degree until that happens, whether EPB is working properly or not.

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I came here to say almost exactly this, except I wouldn't have been able to express myself as well as this.

Worth a read.

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Q u o t e:


Yes, thank you. The bug is not trivial to fix or we would have done so and it isn't worth bumping other changes off the list in order to buy time to fix it at the moment. It might involve re-designing the talent.

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'

off-topic, but relevent...but is this the way you feel about sacred shield+sheathe of light not scaling for pve?

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Q u o t e:


Not all Unholy DKs pick up Unholy Blight though. One of the benefits of Ebon Plague is it just happens without having to spend that extra GCD. We'll get it fixed.

We also agree that Plague Strike feels underwhelming. Part of the reason is that, unlike Icy Touch, it also has a pretty significant PvP effect in its ability to remove hots. We have some ideas to improve it though. We definitely don't want DKs to ever feel like the right way to play is to ignore one of their two main diseases. As some players have pointed out, there are a few reasons why that is the case.

As a new class, I would expect to see a higher rate of change over time in the DK until they have caught up a little more with the 4+ year history of the other classes.

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I'll be interested to see what changes are in store for Blood as there are disease-less rotations in the works that are yielding impressive results.

If you've built your Blood spec accordingly, you have four talent points to sink into the utility of your choice. Four. For me, that would be Blood Aura, Hysteria, and Mark of Blood. Other choices are Rune Tap and the worms. That's not a lot of self healing, and really that's no healing to me at all since blood presence would be giving me the 4% anyway. It's tank healing and raid healing. Hysteria is something I rarely use because I don't want to kill myself or someone else on a healing intensive fight, but it's a dps boost. And yes, since it applies to physical damage, it applies to pretty much all a Blood DK's damage aside from diseases and death coil.

I will agree though, that my greatest issue with Blood is not having enough cooldowns to do everything I want to do. For example, an Oblit, 4 heart strikes, and 3 death coils. I don't really feel that the .5s from unholy aura would do anything to fix this problem. Personally, I'd like to see another talent in deep blood that either refreshes our diseases dependably (unlike, for example, glyph of scourge strike for unholy) or extends their duration. Yes, I've got the talent in the unholy tree, but it's just not enough. I mean, we're the only tree that emphasizes a 1-rune ability as our main strike (and let's ignore how the T7 2piece bonus neglects blood's main source of single target damage), it's only natural that our rotations would have to be longer. Without including a free death coil.

Really though, I completely understand where GC is coming from when saying that the third disease issue is not urgent enough to replace their current goals. One of which, I hope, will be fixing locks. I mean, I run with a couple locks; they shouldn't be doing less dps than me in roughly equivalent gear. I get plate and tank presence and utility and they get... cloth? range? A destro lock should outdps plate melee, imho.

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Q u o t e:

So you won't fix an obvious and confirmed bug because you want other people to spec different trees? Man, I wish I could get away with that at my job...

User: Hey, there's a bug where this application won't allow me to select a location close to me for Pharmacy pickup for my prescriptions!

Developers: Oh yes, we know about that bug and we have a solution, however we are not implementing it because not enough people are choosing the Home Delivery option and we'd like to make sure more people use that before rewarding people who prefer the Pharmacy pickup option.

I know the similarities stop pretty quickly into this analogy, but the principle is the same. Man, to have such control over your users and ignore anything they say about it... a dream, for sure :)

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There is this thing called prioritization.

There are finite resources. First off it has been proven many times that just throwing more resources into things can just cause more problems.

How bad a bug is determines priority. The amount of effort and possible risk of a change is taken into account. Then there is of course how hot are the other issues.

GC was being straight up honest that they want to get this fixed, that it isn't a simple fix, and they're trying priority at the moment is getting the other trees some attention. That being said there could be a lot of reasons for this. People are mid task on other items etc etc etc.

Your priorities because you are a certain spec are not always going to match Blizzards. The world isn't going to end because of this bug. He's said they are going to fix it eventually. In the meantime how many DKs are being brought to your raids? Depending on your raid makeup it might be a good idea to have blood or frost there as well.

More importantly you are DW spec and don't even have crypt fever so this doesn't even affect you. If it did here is a temporary work around: The way to spec around this at the moment is to have one of the unholy DKs have only crypt fever and the other ebon plague. Am I correct on that?

no. they don't "stack" anymore. they fixed that in the patch.

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Q u o t e:
If you've built your Blood spec accordingly, you have four talent points to sink into the utility of your choice. Four.

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Actually using what I consider the standard build*, there are five using your definition as you'll get stuck at 31 points in and 44 points in. Personally, I don't include Hysteria like you do because it is a DPS boost for either myself or some other person. I include talents such as Vampiric Blood, Mark of Blood, Blood Aura, Rune Tap, Improved Rune Tap and Bloodworms in the list of worthless healing/survivability talents we're forced to get to proceed further up the tree. Now I understand that you may see four or five talent points out of 51 spent in a tree as small, but I see it as a tree that could use some touch ups. I see Blood as the physical DPS tree with healing-based survivability, but right now we have to get a little bit of the latter to truly get the former.

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Q u o t e:
I will agree though, that my greatest issue with Blood is not having enough cooldowns to do everything I want to do.

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I've never had an issue running out of time in-between rune refreshes to get everything done... this even includes pushing SD procs in-between Heart Strikes. I've also tried Unholy Presence for kicks and found that using UP just caused me to drain all of my RP very quickly as I had enough extra GCDs to burn on Death Coil.

*Note: My current talent build is in no reference to what I consider the optimum build. I just have no logical reason to respec for what amounts to a relatively minor DPS increase as I'm not in a raiding guild.

EDIT: Removed a paragraph.

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Q u o t e:



We also agree that Plague Strike feels underwhelming. Part of the reason is that, unlike Icy Touch, it also has a pretty significant PvP effect in its ability to remove hots.

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This is true, though my healer can dispel hots faster than I can remove them, don't overestimate this abilities ability to ms/wound poison hot healers because I don't think it fills this role well. I mean death knights might be destroying resto druids, but barely any faster or slower then other dps. Besides that if you ps spam you remove two hots and completely destroy any damage by removing your ability to scourge stryke for 10 seconds since it puts your unholy runes on cd. (Sorry that's one hell of a run on sentence)

Death Knight counters are still nice, I have no complaints, I do wish anti magic zone lasted a bit longer I don't pair with a pally like im supposed to I play with my priest friend and anti magic zone for 30 seconds used to be great protection for her.

It would be great to either buff plague strykes damage or maybe add a 20% reduction in healing. Death knights have to much defense for a full 50% healing reduction but ps feels half fast against healers at best.

Thanks gc and it's hump day :D

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Q u o t e:

We also agree that Plague Strike feels underwhelming. Part of the reason is that, unlike Icy Touch, it also has a pretty significant PvP effect in its ability to remove hots.

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This is not a significant effect when compared to Mortal Strike (that deals decent damage) or Wounding Poison (auto-apply). Right now the only time I use Plague Strike in PvP is against druids, and without ability to remove HoTs, or without healing debuff applied on druid, there would be simply no way I could ever kill a resto druid that otherwise would just load on HoTs and bear-tank any DK.

Death Knights right now have very serious issues dealing with healers. Unless you happen to be tauren (warstomp) or blood elf (arcane torrent) burning any healer down is highly problematic with Blood and problematic with Frost or Unholy. You *have* to use Death Grip to interrupt, you have to have strangulate up (2 min CD) and you have to have use offensive cooldowns, like hysteria, gargoyle or Death Chill to make sure healer goes down. Often times it still doesn't happen unless your partner chains CC to help you bring a healer down.

Overall - as a Blood Death Knight in both PvP and PvE I generally don't use diseases to maximize my damage by avoiding Plague Strikes.

My Suggestions to address this:

1. Buff Plague Strike to 60% weapon damage, move outbreak to Blood Tree (Unholy DKs never spec into it, so its wasted there) and change Blood Plague to be a healing debuff instead of hot-removal.

2. Move Epidemic to first tier Unholy, so you don't need to spend 7 talents in Unholy to get it.


Side Note: Can Blood Boil get similar treatment to Plague Strike? Right now it doesn't deal any damage, it hits for 300-400 when I use it (I occasionally need to rely on BB glyph snare in PvP). Can we limit it to 3 targets and then significantly boost its damage... pr at least remove must-have-diseases component?

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Q u o t e:
Bloodworms in the list of worthless healing/survivability talents

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Can't agree more. Blood Worms in its current form are absolutely worthless. Can we change this talent to act more like snake trap? So you activate this ability and get 10 or so blood worms on demand, say on 1 min CD?

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Q u o t e:

Metzger of < Osmosis > said:
LOTS OF REALLY GOOD STUFF HERE

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I was going to say that all the DK whining in this thread made me sad to be associated with them, but you held my tongue, mostly. Seeing as I posted that it made me sad anyways.

Get over yourselves. You're acting immature. Obama won, get over it. There are bigger fish to fry, like why does Archavon always drop gear for rogues that are never in the raid.

He said they'd fix it, and said a more important issue was figuring out why people don't want to play as Blood or Frost for DPS, and that rewarding people for playing a clearly overpowered and unbalanced spec is not a high priority. You people need to stop blowing stuff out of proportion.