Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. This week's header image comes to us from everyone's favorite WoW Insider commenter, Orkchop.
So recently, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street posted a new Dev Watercooler discussing the ins and outs of the new active mitigation tank philosophy. Since he dedicated a whole section to proposed death knight changes in patch 4.3, I figured it would be a good idea to take a look at the stuff and see what it does.www.scanscafe.com
My preliminary verdict would be pretty simple: It's a pretty big help. It fixes or mitigates a lot of our quality of life issues, it makes a little less squishy, and it nullifies rune tetris nicely. I can't really disagree with the individual changes or the rationale behind them. That said, it doesn't completely solve our problems, and there are probably one or two more little things to be done before stuff looks really good. Let's take a look at the specifics.
The skills, they are a-changing'
Outbreak The dev team has realized that we have a unique issue when it comes to applying the standard tanking debuffs offered by our diseases. Because they generally use the same runes as our main defensive ability, Death Strike, we leave ourselves uniquely vulnerable to damage by applying them, leaving us vulnerable to extra damage for the 8 seconds or so it takes those runes to refresh. Outbreak could, in theory, fix this by allowing a rune-free way to apply diseases, but at a 1-minute cooldown, it's not viable for long stretches of time.www.threadwow.com
In patch 4.3, we'll see that cooldown reduced to 30 seconds for blood death knights. This should handily take care of most issues, since Pestilence should take care of spreading diseases where needed while Outbreak is on cooldown. It's a quick, dirty fix, but it works. I think the only other idea I'd have would be to make Blood Boil a Thunder Clap-style move and allow it to spread our diseases, if only because Outbreak has the issue of not doing much up-front threat. That said, that's probably not as huge of an issue with the recent threat changes. Two global cooldowns and 1 blood rune to put our diseases on a large group is a pretty solid Band-Aid fix.
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