As some of you may or may not know, a new patch has recently become active on the Public Test Realms for World of Warcraft. Now, I don't usually participate in the testing, because I like experiencing everything for myself once it shakes out and goes live, but this patch is a little big more special than most. Specifically, it's patch 4.0, which is the large content patch before the next expansion – Cataclysm (Recently unofficially announced for November 2nd!). Notably in this patch is the talent changes for every class and spec.
There's been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about the new trees and abilities, going through them one by one and giving them each the thumbs up or down. I'm not going to really do that. There are plenty of WoW-devoted sites that are more than covering that angle. (I would specifically recommend elitistjerks.com if you like math, and wow.com if you don't. Both sites do quality work for the kind of player that they're geared towards.) Instead, I'm going to give you general impressions of the trees that I tested, and explaining what I think the major differences were in comparison to live.
I'll admit that most of my playtime was spent on Unholy. I do tank, and I have dpsed as Frost for a while, but I have been Unholy from Ulduar all the way through ICC. I know it the best, and so the majority of my focus was spent on it.
I've been following the development of unholy through the patch notes, and I've generally liked the direction that it's been taking except for one thing – our mastery. Unholy's mastery at the moment is an increase to disease damage. While diseases are clearly the shining gem in Unholy's arsenal, they're not quite what I'd be looking for in a mastery. When I was thinking of a mastery, as they were first announced, I was looking for something interactive. A stat that had more depth than just “you do more damage.” For unholy, any good Death Knight is trying to keep 100% uptime on their diseases, and it's not a terribly hard thing to do. Diseases do a set amount of damage baseline, and scale upwards with attack power and mastery. That makes mastery a very linear increase based solely on your gear, rather than something skill based at all.
Contrast that with something like, say, pet damage. Now, pause. I know what you're thinking. Pets don't really require micromanagement! Well, that's certainly the way we thought of our ghoul in Wrath – especially after some of the increases to pet survivability that they pushed through to make them less of a liability to have around. In Cataclysm, we're getting a slightly different paradigm. Instead of just simply telling the pet to attack the right target, we have some direct control over our pet's damage. There is a new section of talents in the Unholy Tree that allow the Death Knight to apply a buff to their pet with Death Coil, and then empower their pet once there's five stacks. Perfect use of that ability is going to take some practice to get down, and moreover, some skill to execute properly. That means that mastery given to a subpar player is less valuable than mastery given to a skillful player who's able to maximize their pet's output.
That is a good stat. I'd love to see that on my gear, because it encourages me to play better.
That was a little bit of a lengthy rant that might lead someone to think that I didn't like the play experience as unholy, but nothing could be further from the truth. I think that the Unholy dps play experience has been greatly improved by some of the changes that have been made. Basically, the situation that was on live was as follows:
- Put diseases on target
- Use scourge strike if you can
- Use Death Coil if you can
- Use Blood Strike until one of the others comes up.
If you followed that guideline, you could easily do competitive dps in ICC. To be really top notch, you needed to do a little more involving timing your disease refreshing and all, maximize your use of Gargoyle, and all other stuff like that, but really, it was fairly simply. In the new system, there's a lot more in that latter category. You've gotta take Death Runes into account much more than before, especially with the addition of Scourge Strike as a 1 rune ability instead of two. Runic Empowerment adds in an element of random chance to the whole situation. In addition, maximizing the up time on your ghoul's empowerment and high-stack time will let good DK's eke out a little more damage, or give us some of the much-needed burst that we've wanted so long in both PvE and PvP.
That's one end of the rotation. That's the heavy lifting, damage dealing half. The other half of Unholy, as I said before, is diseases, and that's always been something that felt...lackluster. They were dots, sure, and they provide important debuffs, which is good, but really, it felt more like a warm up to doing your ACTUAL damage. This was compounded by the fact that you needed to refresh them more than you really wanted to under any circumstance. Blizzard has taken two major strides to removing that as a concern. First, they last MUCH longer. That should cut down on the need for it to feel so maintenance-y for any spec. For unholy inparticular, though, they've added in Festering Strike: an attack that immediately refreshes your diseases to their maximum duration and does a hefty amount of damage – for the low, low price of a Blood Rune and a Frost Rune.
The ramifications that this has on the unholy rotation are numerous. Notably, it gives us something else to maximize. Without even getting into anything more complex like disease tick timing (which, I think, was solved with some of the cataclysm dot changes), there's huge differences in having to reapply diseases with our normal applicators and being able to refresh them with a GCD that also does significant damage. The fact that the other two specs don't want to use it (due to rune-combo concerns) only reinforces Unholy as the disease spec. Not only are their diseases more powerful, but they're easier to use, to spread, and (though I disagree with it) to enhance with mastery.
Next time I post about WoW, hopefully I'll have had some experience tanking on the PTR, and I'll let you know how Blood is shaping up. As for tomorrow's post, I'm thinking something more in the lines of my experiences being a DM for the Dresden Files RPG, which I've been enjoying greatly for the last few months on a weekly basis.
See you all tomorrow!
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