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Where is Mankrik's wife?
Blood Elf Death Knight
US-Burning Legion
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This is my first time posting a comment on WoR so please excuse me if I have made a mistake.
I understand that blizzard is trying to balance a lot of things in 3.2 patch.
Here are 3 major changes I'm looking at right now:
1) DW viable again?
2) Tank Nerf
3) PvP dmg Nerf
1) DW viable again?
First of all, DW is going to be viable again, but I am not sure if that's a good thing or bad thing. DW spec was very good (or somewhat OP) when it first came out because they acted like casters in melee range just spamming IT and HB. It's got lot of attention and some of them did better DPS than 2H DPSers.
Obviously, it was nerfed and no one ever switched back to DW spec. However I don't see many people complaining about going back to DW other than the people asking "why do we have a talent for DW and blizz not even making use of it"
And they are right, I think it's really time to just get rid off DW spec.
TBH blizzard is trying too hard to make DW spec viable again; it's almost like making 2h wep viable again for enh shamans.
What about the loots? most of the one-hand weps out there are Agi weapons because they are used by rogues, enh shamans, and hunters (I'm not sure if AGI is gonna even worth to get over STR we lose from 2H weps). The only STR one-hand wep I can really find is the tanking weapons and I don't think blizz wants to make another set of STR DPS one-hand weps just for DKs since I dont think any of those warriors would downgrade themselves to DW one-hand weps.
Unless this DW spec is as close as the pre-nerf spec, let's try not to go in there too deep because we can live without DW specs and that's my view on the DW changes in 3.2.
2) Tank Nerf
I think this change is due to a lot of the raid grps asking DK's to MT many fights in Uldar apparently. Before I talk more about how unfair I feel about this nerf, I want to you to know that the only reason raids asking DK to MT is that because of their CD rotations, not their HP nor their mitigations.
Let's see what kind of Tanking nerf we got in the past and find out where we are standing atm.
We recently got armor nerfed from frost presence. Thanks to that, now we are getting hit much harder (on your tooltip, it's only about 3% dmg reduction lose compare to pre-nerf, but thats only against lvl80 mobs and the actual calculation invloves more than that; you can find more about this calculation on different forums such as Elitist Jerks) and we feel that our dmg taken from uldar bosses are about the same as warrior and paladin tanks. DK's still probably have slightly more armor than those two classes, but since the other two classes got blocks, it puts us about the same dmg taken.
Another nerf we had in the past was Blade Barrier (Original version of this talent was 10% parry when the blood runes on CD instead of 10% dmg reduction). I think this nerf was definatly got our DK tanks loose their title of being an "avoidance tank" as I undestand how blizzard initially designed the class to be, but at the same time i could say it was reasonable nerf since many WotLK bosses hit slow but hard, and that makes blocks for war/pally tanks somewhat meaningless mitigation.
Comparing DK's present HP Pool/Mitigation/Threat generation with other 3 classes, we are standing just slgihtly above them due to our fast CD rotations but NOT ANYTHING ELSE (When you compare high-end geared war tank vs high-end geared DK, their dodge and parry are almost the same, usually 25% dodge and 20% parry; warriors got extra 25% blocks unbuffed and DK's got 10% dmg reduction on using blood runes.)
Alright, I just explained what I think about where DK is standing right now and let's talk about how this DK tank nerf in 3.2 will affect the class.
DKs Tanks are getting 3, possibly 4 nerf in this 3.2 patch.
First, we are getting our HP nerfs. I'm not sure where this HP nerf came from but this 6% stm instead 10% HP change will make me lose about 2k HP since i got 36k HP unbuffed in blood. On top of that, blood specs also getting 3% stm lose from VotTW which used to be 6% stm (Warrior's Vitality is exactly same as pre-nerf VotTW???)
Paladins getting their HP buff in this patch to get closer or slightly above warriors, too. So just by looking at this HP changes, we DK's HP pool will be just about the same as these other two tanks. Let's move on to next nerf.
IBF CD increased to 2min instead of 1min.
As I said above, this is the main reason why we DK's have been MTing a lot of fights in Uldar. We have 1min IBF, 45sec AMS, one extra 2min CD from the spec you chosen. Warriors got 5min SW (Glyphed and talented: 1min CD) and 3min LS (2min when glyphed). You can see that DK's have slightly better on CD's since they don't need to glyph to reduce CD timer and got AMS that goes well with 4pc T8 bonus.
Just by looking at IBF nerf, this change is reasonable to put us DK on same level as warriors. However, when you look at the whole thing, we are not just getting CD nerf but HP nerf prior to the armor nerf.
In fact, war and pallys getting extra buff that the block values will be doubled in this patch.
Another Armor Nerf!
Toughness is now 10% at maxed instead of 15%. 5% loss in armor buff is gonna hurt us even greater. As I said on above, your tooltip might say about 3% dmg reduction loss, but that doesn't mean you are taking 3% less dmg from lvl 83 boss mobs and you will need to calculate to figure out how much extra dmg you actually going to take.
With this armor changes, I am not even sure if healers want to even heal DK Tanks now. Think about it, if a healer has a choice to heal a warrior tank or a DK (same armor, same hp, same avoidance, same CD timers, but warrior got extra 25% block unbuffed), If i were the healer, I am not healing the DK cuz it sounds like a Tank with only enough armors to endure the dmg.
the last possible nerf could be the DK's Threat. This is probably due to warrior and paladin's buff but not directly on DK's ability nerf. Since War and pallys getting buffs from doubled block value, their threat also goes up. Obviously Blizz already mentioned that Shield of Righteousness deals 100% instead of 130% but they are also getting buffed from Seal of Vengence for more threat. (There is no indication about warriors' shield slam modification yet). One thing we are sure at this point is that DK's are getting nerfed but not buffed.
I am not quite sure is this nerf really necessary for DK tanks. From my observation, people who know how to play their classes do as fine as all other tanks. I've seen many war/pally tanks don't even know how to gem their sockets right or what kind of gears they need for better tanking...and if this changes is for those less knowlegeable players to have easier time to play their classes, then im not very convinced. I could be biased on some points, but I don't think this nerf is necessary. It really gets to some point where each classes lose their unique characteristics and they all become kind of same, such as how DKs were started with their unique tanking style as "avoidance tank" and now it's getting changed over time compare to when it first released out. People were worried how DKs would tank without a shield, but at the same time many tanks switched to DK to try out their avoidance tanking style, which we don't have that anymore. I used to be paladin tank back in BC, and I liked the new style of DK's avoidance tank (more like feral druid, you have big HP pool and high avoidance, you're mainly focusing to avoid their dmg, but if you are unlucky with avoidance and get hit by an attack, you need a lot of heals to heal back)
TBH, I rather play paladin tank if i had put as much effort on my abondoned lvl70 paladin. It just there is no uniqueness of DK tank anymore....lost avoidance, lost armors, lost CDs, lost HPs...and I don't know what's next.
3) PvP dmg Nerf
I am not gonna mention about PvP too much since I spend more time in PvE and there are better comments from PvPers about this nerf.
One thing I can say is that most of DKs start with unholy pvp spec until they get the sigil of the vengefulheart in Uldar25 then they go for PvP frost spec.
Nerfing frost strike to 55% from 60% is reasonable and gargoyles flying lower is reasonable. But again, PvP got more to add on this so I am gonna just stop here.
Surely, this 3.2 patch doesnt sound great for many DKs and I am not really satisfied with what we are going to see on PTR. Yet, we got lots of time to improve on this so I hoping to see some changes near future.
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As i desecrated and honored all the flames last year but cant this year for some reason.
