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Q u o t e:


Hunters don't have a chance against healers either and they have MS.

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Thats true since the nerfs they got a while back, im not asking to be able to "own" healers, just that they make it so its not as pathetic as it is currently, even on my 2100sp elemental shaman its still no good they can out heal my burst and there mana > mine.

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Q u o t e:


If that's the case, the modifiers would take blood strike down to 127.5% weapon damage on an ideal target.

Which makes obliterate still look just plain crappy. 155% of weapon damage on an ideal target. Would be nice if they made Blood of the North affect oblit.

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They decided to move some of the damage over to Blood Strike. The problem is now oblit is more garbage. You will always do 2 BS over doing 1 oblit on your second rotation. Making the Death Rune conversion part of BOTN pretty much worthless.

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Q u o t e:



190% weapon damage plus 305 on an ideal target. Wow. Ok, I retract my gripe about Frost DKs not getting their damage back. Sheesh, those things are gonna hit hard... I can understand making blood strike that powerful though, since it makes us less of a hard-counter vs other melee, and increases our deadliness to casters who normally have success absorbing our frost/shadow damage.

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I don't think it's meant to be a buff vs casters. It's meant to allow you to do the same overall damage, but for it to be spread out across all your strikes instead of concentrated into just scourge strike or frost strike.

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Q u o t e:


They decided to move some of the damage over to Blood Strike. The problem is now oblit is more garbage. You will always do 2 BS over doing 1 oblit on your second rotation. Making the Death Rune conversion part of BOTN pretty much worthless.

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It's still nice to have the extra frost runes for CoI or UA, but I agree. Oblit is almost to the point that i won't even use it situationally against cloth classes.

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Q u o t e:
I believe the Blood Strike numbers have already come down a bit from when we made those patch notes because it did seem like an all Blood Strike rotation might be feasible, which isn't something we want. But yet, we are going to have to see the numbers coming out of the PTR. We have learned our internal testing can only go so far.

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So it actually was 50% more damage per disease? Nice. Even if that gets halved to 25% per disease, it makes blood strike a very good fix for PvE and PvP.

But the oblit weapon scaling issues still stand.

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Q u o t e:
I believe the Blood Strike numbers have already come down a bit from when we made those patch notes because it did seem like an all Blood Strike rotation might be feasible, which isn't something we want. But yet, we are going to have to see the numbers coming out of the PTR. We have learned our internal testing can only go so far.

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Would it be possible to do something with the new Unholy talent Desolation? Due to it now being triggered of BS instead of PS/SS it will have a much lower uptime then before, plus its lost the snare but still costs 5 points.

5 points for a 5% damage boost that has ~60% uptime seems a bit costly.

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Q u o t e:
I believe the Blood Strike numbers have already come down a bit from when we made those patch notes because it did seem like an all Blood Strike rotation might be feasible, which isn't something we want. But yet, we are going to have to see the numbers coming out of the PTR. We have learned our internal testing can only go so far.

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GC,

For the love of god why won't you comment on the RP issues? I just want to know if you are aware or think if runic power generation for Frost pve DKs is a problem?

It's on every major EJ thread, and is all over the DK forums. Yet no Blue ever says anything about it and all your changes seem to just bypass look over it.

I am sooooo tired of Icy Touch spam but what am I to do when it's the only way to gain RP fast enough to take advantage of RPM, and get 4 FS per rotation in?

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Q u o t e:
I believe the Blood Strike numbers have already come down a bit from when we made those patch notes because it did seem like an all Blood Strike rotation might be feasible, which isn't something we want. But yet, we are going to have to see the numbers coming out of the PTR. We have learned our internal testing can only go so far.

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Wait +50% was intentional? Geez... o.O Even if you, in the collective sense, back-tracked at this point and realized +50% bonus weapon damage per disease was a bit much... ... ...lolwut? D:

Not trying to flame you or imply anything negative about your persons at all. I just find it amusing NO ONE threw up a giant "WTF" flag when that came up in discussion or across his or her desk. ;P

(Btw, if you wanna just leave it, I wouldn't mind the >380% weapon damage crits from Blood Strike with 3 diseases up. ;D)

Ghostcrawler.

You've quoted one of my posts on beta, and I never washed that han-- wait, wrong movie.

Anyway. Have you folks looked at Blood Plague, Horn of Winter and the possibility of reverting Frost Strike back to unavoidable status bar dodging?

While the Frost Strike piece is minor in my scope, I'm more interested in what's going on with Horn and Blood Plague.

We still have no talent that increases Horn of Winter to match the equivalent SoE Totem, and Blood Plague is a minor damage dealing DoT with no secondary effect.

I've posted about it a couple times now, but I really don't feel I can voice these enough.

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Q u o t e:

Because we took away Unholy Blight's AE damage. Some of the "DK's do too much damage" claims from Ulduar were because of Unholy AE damage and a big part of that was Unholy Blight. Note that Scourge Strike received the same nerf as Frost Strike, so their burst did go down.

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Unholy blight was barely more damage per RP than a normal DC, this is most likely a single target buff, unholy doesn't need more single target DPS, it's already far too high, AoE DPS does not matter, i can hit 8k on naxx trash in blues, what the hell?

Assuming it works like you think it works:

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Q u o t e:
Start with 40% weapon damage.

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40% (that was easy)

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Q u o t e:
Add 100% weapon damage with 2 diseases up.

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80% (100% of 40% is 80% not 140%. Note how it increases the bonus damage, which is 30% and not just flat out damage)

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Q u o t e:
Add 20% from glyph on snared targets.

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96%

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Q u o t e:
Add 15% from Blood of the North.

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110.4%

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Q u o t e:
Add 15% from Tundra Stalker.

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126.96

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Q u o t e:
190% weapon damage plus 305 on an ideal target.

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Not quite.

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Q u o t e:


GC,

For the love of god why won't you comment on the RP issues? I just want to know if you are aware or think if runic power generation for Frost pve DKs is a problem?

It's on every major EJ thread, and is all over the DK forums. Yet no Blue ever says anything about it and all your changes seem to just bypass look over it.

I am sooooo tired of Icy Touch spam but what am I to do when it's the only way to gain RP fast enough to take advantage of RPM, and get 4 FS per rotation in?

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Q u o t e:
I believe the Blood Strike numbers have already come down a bit from when we made those patch notes because it did seem like an all Blood Strike rotation might be feasible, which isn't something we want. But yet, we are going to have to see the numbers coming out of the PTR. We have learned our internal testing can only go so far.

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Why would you nerf SS down to BS levels when it's supposed to be our hard hitting strike? It's hardly worth the two runes it uses up now. Moreover, if you are nerfing Unholy AOE damage why would you also nerf SS? DK's are going to take a large hit in PvE with the AOE nerf, SS nerf, and now the descration nerf.

Next, why would you double nerf frost strike? Frost DPS is low to begin with. I understand taking away the dodge, parry, and block effect but then why also nerf the damage? Seems a bit over the top and I think you are nerfing PvE DPS too much.

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Q u o t e:


We did. We moved damage into Blood Strike.



We made almost no crowd control changes this patch. We wanted to tame damage and healing (in PvP).



We split it into a PvP and PvE ability. It will cost more talent points to get both, so in that sense it's a nerf. It does however mean the Desecration graphic will be occluding the ground less often in PvE.



Because we took away Unholy Blight's AE damage. Some of the "DK's do too much damage" claims from Ulduar were because of Unholy AE damage and a big part of that was Unholy Blight. Note that Scourge Strike received the same nerf as Frost Strike, so their burst did go down.

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If Blood Strike numbers are anywhere near the PTR numbers, it seems like it would become our hardest hitting attack by far (around 140%?!). Even on a heavily armored target, that's going to hit for at least as much as Frost Strike and Scourge Strike, but we'll have to wait to test that.

I'm not sure Unholy actually received a net nerf here. Most PvP Unholy DKs weren't taking or making great use of Unholy Blight. By separating Desecration into 2 effects, you may have given Unholy 3 points to play around with. 3 more points and the new UB may offset the 5% Desecration loss and Scourge Strike nerf. I think nerfing Sigil of the Vengeful Heart and Chains of Ice would probably address some of the biggest issues with Unholy...

I don't really understand why Frost received a net nerf where Unholy did not. Again, I think a big component of what made Frost Strike OP was Sigil of the Vengeful Heart+Cinderglacier. I found the dodge/parry thing to give the ability reliability and character, and I'd rather take an outright damage nerf to it than lose that. Also, is Frost is being balanced with DW PvP in mind? A quick and dirty assessment of the Furious 2H and 1H showed me the average weapon damage from the ilvl232 2H will be around 870, and the 1H times 1.5 will be 690. Considering there isn't much white damage uptime in PvP, 2H will probably be stronger still.

I also wonder if there might be a problem here for Blood... is Heart Strike still worth it if Blood Strike hits that hard? Or does it become an AoE/Snare only ability? Will rotations pop up that emphasize Blood Strikes to the exclusion of Oblit/SS/DS? There's a looot of testing to do to see if this works...

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Q u o t e:
I believe the Blood Strike numbers have already come down a bit from when we made those patch notes because it did seem like an all Blood Strike rotation might be feasible, which isn't something we want. But yet, we are going to have to see the numbers coming out of the PTR. We have learned our internal testing can only go so far.

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Do you want an all IT rotation to be feasible?

Are you aware of how Frost plays right now? Its not pretty.

Bumping for great justice...

"A quick and dirty assessment of the Furious 2H and 1H showed me the average weapon damage from the ilvl232 2H will be around 870, and the 1H times 1.5 will be 690. Considering there isn't much white damage uptime in PvP, 2H will probably be stronger still."

actually this makes frost only truly feasible as dw. (depending on how deep in frost tree the new talent is)

your assessment of the damage doesn't take into account weapon speed and the 1.5x benefit of ap as well.

I'm not certain weather or not bloodstrike is normalized if it is not then you also need to account for the fact that you need to also add 3.9 x (ap/14) for the dw and the 3.6 x (ap/14) to the 2-h. this .3 difference in ap contribution may seem small but at the level your looking at its a pretty decent difference.

if it is normalized (the way i understand normalization to work) then you would need to account for dw getting 3.6xap/14 and 2-h getting 3.3..... and remember this is considered at base for strikes meaning before the modifiers.

either way dw benefits from ap by either .2 or .3 better than 2-h instant attacks and by the .3 for white damage. this buff in damage of dw is even better considering that haste and ppm still favors dw much better than 2h.

and even these numbers are off as i only did napkin math and did not include the extra 15% of the oh weapon .

basically now its just a matter for testing as gear changes hit/epertise now need to be a priority stat where as before soft cap for hit mattered and expertise could almost be ignored.

using 3k ap as a base and not taking into account the extra 15% dmg from oh (or misses) this was a 12% increase in benefit on white attacks with these weapons in question and an 11% increase for normalized attacks. (%'s are identicle with 4k ap so it seems consistent)

as you can see the 12% benefit from ap can currently only curretnly be competative with the highest geared as otherwise it will not make up for the loss of strike damage. combine this with the fact that according to these notes strikes will be getting an additional 11% benefit from ap i don't think it will be a comparison for the highest geared although how well this scales when considering the against the 4% 2-h damage in conjunction with the extra miss % that dw will suffer from is what the testing will be all about. and lets not forget the all important benefits of our weapon enchants how they will scale etc.

then of course theres the whole which presence thing thats going to need to be revisited.

lets not even talk about the all important fact that how deep in the frost tree that it is will make or break other possible possible dw builds (althought the fact that the new talent exludes hs and ss we can assume that its atleast a t7 talent)

and dw tanking actually looks very feasible as frost tanks are the only ones that ever had snap agro (deathchill) and with hb frost is also deffiantly the king of aoe threat now that unholies aoe won't even exist