Level 80 Combat Ratings, DK new rotations & tanking changes, Blue posts

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

We're almost ready to show the updated death knight talent tree. It was quite an overhaul but we're pretty excited about it. In case the talent trees go out before a new data push, I wanted to explain what we're trying to do here.

We revamped the DK to have a standard rotation that used all the runes intelligently. Then we tweaked a lot of other abilities to be able to swap out one for another with similar rune costs. Some talented abilities can be used situationally for this purpose, while others just flat out replace one of the core abilities. I don't want to give the impression that "standard rotation" means the DK loses all its depth (or that the game forces you to use this rotation at all). On the contrary it feels like you are making an intelligent decision about what to do next instead of just randomly pounding abilities when they light up.

1) Icy Touch -- 1 Frost -- Pull a mob and get a Frost Fever disease on it.
2) Plague Strike -- 1 Unholy -- Get a Blood Plague disease on the enemy.
3) Blood Strike -- 1 Blood -- Do extra damage for getting both diseases up.
4) Blood Strike -- 1 Blood -- Do extra damage for getting both diseases up.
5) Obliterate -- 1 Frost, 1 Unholy -- Your diseases are going to expire soon, so time for a big hit.
6) Death Coil -- Runic Power -- You probably have enough Runic Power by now.

Those are the basics, but you can swap out those moves as you see fit. If you're wounded, instead of Obliterate for Step 5, you can Death Strike instead for the same cost. Or you can Chains of Ice. Or Howling Blast. If you are deep Blood, you can Heart Strike instead of Blood Strike for bigger damage and an all new debuff. If you are deep Frost, you can use Blood of the North to earn 2 Death Runes and then get 2 Obliterates next time around. Or you can Frost Strike instead of Death Coil, especially if the target is really wounded and you also have Merciless Combat.
------------------------------------We are trying to fix the Unholy Rune demand in a few ways:

-- Degeneration is now an upgrade to Plague Strike. It was such a situational ability (but a very good one in that situation) that we thought it was a good opportunity to merge it with something else. The risk is that serious PvP players will feel like it's mandatory to only go Unholy. If this happens, we'll try something else, like making it core again. The runeforge idea is also intriguing.
-- We're going to try Chains of Ice as 1 Frost. Certainly not too many people seem to be complaining that the DK has too much CC. :)
-- Raise Dead doesn't cost any runes. The cost was irrelevant outside of combat and hard to work into a rotation once in awhile.
-- Empower Rune Weapon activates all your runes and provides some runic power. Its cooldown is probably long enough to handle this.
-- This isn't a recent change, but remember that with Annihilation more available you can sometimes save a Plague Strike when you Annihilate. Likewise, with the Icy Touch change, you can still get a disease out without spending an Unholy.

It probably feels like we are focusing predominantly on the DK's PvE options for now, which is probably true. But PvP will start to get a lot more testing as some of the new features (arenas, Wintergrasp) come online.

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

When you see the new talent trees, there will be several significant tanking changes that I wanted to explain. Don't worry -- they're all good.

1) Forceful Deflection is gone. Why? It is now a core ability all death knights get!
2) The top of each tree has a really desirable tanking talent. We figure it's not painful to spend points in tier 1 of any tree. You can, and probably should, get all of these.
3) Near the bottom of each tree is another really desirable tanking talent. You will still be able to grab this talent and sub-spec into other trees, but you won't be able to get the gold medal in more than one tree.
4) These talents are more predictable and more under your control. For example, we changed Unbreakable Armor to have a 30 / 60 / 100% chance of boosting your armor by 25% whenever both Frost runes are inactive. To balance this, there is a 90 sec internal cooldown (which we will show in a debuff aura). So you can choose when you want the armor buff. Hold that second Frost Rune until just before the enrage or whenever. Stack it with Icebound Fortitude or Anti-Magic Shell (or both) for truly amazing mitigation.
5) I am not trying to imply there are only 2 tanking talents per tree. The point is that there are some talents we can assume all DK tanks will have, and some others that will be more variable (but ideally equal in utility).
6) No, Blade Barrier is not the ultimate tanking talent in Blood. :)
7) With the disease changes, getting diseases on multiple enemies is much easier than before. We're also positioning Pestilence to be better at multi-target tanking. A much improved Death and Decay will be nice for pulling, but it's not Consecrate.
------------------------------------ Forceful Deflection is bonus Parry Rating equal to 25% of your Strength. There is one "rank" and you start with it at level 55.

The concern about saving your Runes for the bonus mitigation is totally valid and we're just going to have to try it out. We didn't want the bonus to be up for a very short period of time, and we didn't want the bonus to be trivial but up nearly all the time. We think it's okay to have to surrender a little bit of dps (in the form of saving a rune you might have used for Obliterate) in order to boost your survivability periodically -- to some extent that is what tanking is all about. You also have core abilities like IBF that you can use if you get caught with the ability on cooldown.

Part of the DK tanking style is that you have high enough dps to generate sufficient threat. Still we recognize that you can get into a situation where say the ret paladin is catching up to your threat level too fast and you need to do [something] to really pour on the threat. If we find that a few DK abilities need to generate extra threat, we can go that route.

Death Knight - New Frost disease called Frost Fever (src)
DKs now have a disease called Frost Fever. Icy Touch is a delivery mechanism for Frost Fever, and the disease's debuff is basically the old Icy Touch debuff. A lot of Frost abilities now key off of enemies infected with Frost Fever, similar to the way Blood Strike works. This solves a lot of problems while still getting the fun shatter-like combos, and it has way more synergy with the other DK abilities. The guys who have tried it think that everything just flows better now. Hungering Cold and Chains of Ice still do bona fide freezes, so the frost mages will still like to hang out with you. It's very... ahem... cool.

Death Knight - Mind Freeze is no longer affected by the global cooldown (src)
Mind Freeze does no damage now and is off the GCD.

Death Knight - About the DK kitability (src)
AMS hasn't got a lot of attention since it's a high-level spell and we haven't had a number of high-level DKs yet. It should not be dispelled and it should affect dots and AEs. Silence preventing it is by design (at least for now). DK kitability is something we're keeping a close eye on. We don't want them to be charging around the battlefield -- that's the warrior kit. We gave the DK a number of ranged abilities for a reason, but I'm not going to argue that they are 100% effective yet.

Death Knight - Tanking/Threat and Taunt Mechanics (src)
Blood Boil and Death Grip are both true taunts. We discuss a lot whether the DK needs a simple warrior-like taunt. Blood Boil and Death Grip are both fun abilities, but they serve multiple purposes. Death Grip for example would be way too powerful with a 10-sec cooldown. I will note that with the upcoming disease changes that getting a disease on targets is much easier now. That will make managing groups a little easier, but it may not be enough for moments when the mage accidentally pulls. It's something to keep in mind as you guys run more Lich King instances.

Death Knight - Why don't Strikes that use 2 runes give x2 Runic Power? (src)
The logic is that double rune abilities are already packing twice as much damage (or equivalent power) into the same unit time. If they also generated twice as much runic power, there would be an even bigger incentive to use them instead of single rune abilities.

Hunter - About the Devilsaur pet size (src)
The devilsaur is an exotic pet that will ultimately require 51-BM to tame. There are several other exotic pets that are not implemented yet. (The moth is not an exotic pet.)
The size of the devilsaur is not a bug, but I also can't promise it's going to stay that way. It would be awesome if it did, but only if it doesn't cause a bunch of other problems, like clipping through terrain and making it impossible to see mailboxes in Dalaran.

Mage - New ability to replace Shatter Shield (src)
We nuked Shatter Shield and put it into a talent instead (as you've noticed). The new Mage ability has yet to be unveiled... ;)

Mage - Mana Shield future changes (src)
We're talking about it...

Mage - Living Bomb is unfinished (src)
We've considered giving it a knock back or *ahem* "knock up" but we felt that probably wouldn't be desired for what Living Bomb is made for. It works for Thunderstorm (Elemental Shaman Talent) because Shaman's aren't an AOE class, and because it's cooldown controlled. I don't think we're done yet with Living Bomb, just not completely sure with what we want with it yet.

Paladin - Beacon of Light being tweaked (src)
We're working on tweaking this spell a bit to make it fit the Paladin's "kit" a bit more... look for the change in an upcoming build.

Paladin - New abilities still need to be polished (src)
Like I promised, the paladin changes were more sweeping than most changes. As such, it's going to take us some time to go through a second pass on the abilities and get everything polished up enough to evaluate the shiny, new paladin. I expect we'll be a lot more active on this forum when that happens.

Priest - Mind Sear's mana cost too high? (src)
If you've noticed a lot of the ranks have similar mana costs, though I do agree Mind Sear's mana cost seems particularly high... I've been assured that the mana costs for the new ranks of spells and for the new spells are accurate in relation to the mana pools players will have with the new itemization. We'll make sure the mana cost isn't offensive when we do some internal raid testing in the coming weeks. We also made the ability not work on the primary target because we didn't want Mind Sear to be used as a ghetto Mind Flay and because we found it was annoying when the target you were casting Mind Sear on died, causing you to re-cast it. There's also some interesting gameplay for the ability that you may not of thought of yet :)

Priest - Threat generation of Aegis/Shields (src)
I am concerned about this, and will make sure it's not too much of a problem. If it is, we can always do a glyph or talent that causes the target to regen rage/runic power etc. when they absorb damage through your spells. That will be a last resort, however.

Priest - Glyphs soon (src)
We're actually doing Priest glyphs now, get your ideas in before it's too late!!

Warrior - Protection Tree Q/A (src)

• Anticipation - Defense is usually a pretty easy stat to max out with gear, whereas you can't really do that on dodge. We saw some tanks actually spec out of Anticipation at the T6 or so level because it just stops being as useful as your gear improves. Hit is another stat we don't really like to hit in talent trees, since it's possible to hit the cap with gear alone.
• Improved Shield Block - The problem with the old Shield Block was it was never a choice. It was available so often, and always so useful, that you could just about put a brick on the key you use for Shield Block. We're trying to get Shield Block to feel more like a mini-Shield Wall. Use it when Something Bad is about to happen. We're not trying to nerf it -- we're trying to make it more fun.
• Improved Taunt - This has always been a delicate talent to balance. The more you run with pugs and the more 5-player instances you do in general, the more useful it is. In raids, especially with people who really know your play style and manage their threat, it's a lot less valuable.
• Stalwart Protector - We have to be careful with this talent because prot warriors are going to generate a lot more rage than before, just because their dps is going to be higher. A lot of tanking gear comes with strength now. Strength is a good stat, and even before the shield block change, it was probably the best +threat stat you have. I sort of feel that for too long we have all emphasized mitigation as the primary role of a tank, when in reality it's only half the job. Doing more dps will let tanks be more fun when not-tanking, and for warriors, might make a lot of rage starvation issues go away.

Quote from: Blizzard (source)

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