Ghostcrawler
As promised, here are some responses to some of the more common DK questions we have seen. There are several threads on the topic, and I don't mean to suggest anything by posting here instead of somewhere else. It's also not possible to address every single (often contradictory) point brought up by every player, but hopefully this will give you some idea of where we are coming from.
Q: Every DK is going to take talent X.
A: We haven't been convinced yet that that is the case. Please keep providing feedback on talents you like and don't like and we'll consider it.
Q: Blood's AE threat is too weak.
A: Blood's AE threat should be comparable to other tanks and we'll make sure that that is the case. Remember that AE tank threat is intended to hold aggro against AE DPS threat. That is to say, if you have a DPS going to town on a single-target, your AE buttons are probably not sufficient to hold threat in those cases (otherwise there would be not distinction between a tank single-target and AE rotation). We don't want to buff
Muerte y descomposición for all DKs, but we could for Blood if needed.
Q: I don't want to stance dance.
A: You shouldn't have to. Our intent with the
Glifo carbonizado is largely to make it easier for a DPS DK to go Blood to "turtle up." We don't want Frost and Unholy DKs to shift a lot between Frost and Unholy Presence. If you feel like the right thing to do is swap frequently between the two, that's not intended and something we'd want to fix.
Q: What Presences should Frost and Unholy use then?
A: Dual-wield Frost should use
. 2H Frost and all Unholy DKs should use
Avance de la Muerte. Our thinking goes that a DK using a 2H will be flooded with more resources than they can spend unless they are in Unholy.
Q: Unholy DKs lack burst AE.
A: There are numbers we worry about and there are numbers we don't. We want all specs to have comparable AE damage (and single target damage too). AE damage in particular is very sensitive to combat length. Different specs do better on short AE cycles than long AE cycles, and we're okay with that. If you aren't AE'ing for very long, then Frost DPS will probably beat Unholy. We're okay with that. We aren't trying to guarantee DPS to be identical in all situations, or else the classes and specs really start to blend together. Overall, Unholy's damage is designed around lots of abilities, including managing diseases, so none of those abilities are going to hit super hard on their own.
Q: Why doesn't the Gargoyle scale with mastery?
A: Because it ultimately doesn't need to. We want mastery to affect portions of damage (or healing) and not just be a +10% damage stat that scales perfectly no matter what you do. If the Gargoyle does more damage for DKs with comparatively low mastery, we don't think that's a problem. Now if the Gargoyle damage isn't high enough across the board (especially in PvE -- it's still useful in PvP) then we can buff it.
Q: I don't like that
Máquina de matar devalues crit and that I can waste it on
Golpe de Escarcha instead of
Asolar.
A: We make abilities guarantee crit when they hit for really hard damage. The alternative is their damage is unpredictable, which can cause balance problems especially in PvP. We think there are plenty of tuning knobs to make sure crit (and haste and mastery) are all relatively valuable for Frost. As far as
Asolar goes, using
Máquina de matar the most efficient way is one of those mechanics we put in to elevate some players or rotations over others. The most interesting rotations (for any class) carry some risk of failure (and by “failure” I mean inefficiency not a total collapse of your DPS). There are times when you may want to
Golpe de Escarcha on a
Máquina de matar. If you really want to
Asolar instead, you can hold the attack for a second or two. If you “fail” and “waste” a
Máquina de matar on the occasional
Golpe de Escarcha, your DPS won't drop that much.
Q:
needs to do Shadowfrost damage.
A: We made a couple of talents do Shadowfrost damage because we want them to be of relatively equal value for both Frost and Unholy. That's not necessary of core abilities, because there is no risk of a given player not taking the ability. We're fine with Shadow doing more damage in execute-range, so long as Frost's damage is higher the rest of the time to make up for it.
Q:
Ejército de muertos feels weak.
A: That's entirely possible. It's on a long cooldown so there's no reason it should feel wimpy. There is probably plenty of room to buff it.
Q:
Forja de runas is boring.
A: We agree that this feature has not lived up to its potential. We still have plans to address it, though it's not on our "must fix" list for Mists. The current system works fine and we'd rather not monkey with it unless we have a system that we are certain will be an improvement. We don't want to cause a lot of confusion about which runeforges various DKs are supposed to use.
Q: I hate casting
on Fury warriors.
A: I'm not quite sure I understand the issues with this concern.
is haste (not attack speed, but actual resource-generating haste). There should be plenty of classes who like haste. Even today we see a lot of guilds just use it on their highest DPS player, which often is not the Fury warrior. We'd like to keep the design as a buff you can put on someone else, just because that's what it was back in the Warcraft RTS days.
Q: Why is
Absorber plaga a dps increase compared to the other talents?
A: It isn't intended to be. All of those talents are rune conservation talents.
gives you free
Hervor de sangre.
Añublo profano likewise saves you disease runes.
EDIT: I switched Frost and Shadow in execute above.
I think you have this backwards, right now Unholy will do much higher execute damage because they have 25% strength and Master effects Soul
because it's Shadow damage. This would be fine if Frost still had Merciless Combat but they lost that ability.