Death Knight Changes

Nothing too major for this morning’s death knight changes. The change with the largest impact is definitely rune regeneration on misses. Now, when one of your attacks is missed / dodged / parried your rune regenerates in 1 second as opposed to 2, similar to the way only a percentage of energy is consumed when a rogue misses a finishing move.

Should certainly help to further improve damage output for the class. It’s unclear yet if all of these changes will make it to the next PTR build, at least the black ice change has been confirmed for inclusion in the next PTR build. The others are still up the air.

Here is my standard caveat that if you read notes from other websites, take them with a grain of salt.

* Black Ice - Frost damage doubled (Now 6/12/18/24/30) (Old 3/6/9/12/15)

Black Ice no longer affects Shadow damage. Unholy was continuing to do too much damage, even if you ignore the fact that they get more dps from their Ghoul.

We had to buff Frost’s expertise to keep their threat per second up there with Blood and Unholy. Frost doesn’t get enough boosts to white damage, even with their haste, to compete with things like Bloody Vengeance and Ebon Plague. Their dps is pretty close when doing dps though. They were just falling down tanking a little. Expertise and Rune Strike should help them make up for it, without changing their dps that much. Unholy has the lowest expertise, but they get enough buffs to damage (especially damage that can’t be parried, like Death Coil and diseases) to make up for it.

Yeah, I can’t tell you how pleasant that is. I’m also sure a lot of it is that DKs have gotten a lot of presents the other classes never got (mounts and blues from quests etc.) and that nobody has a DK with 3 years of /played on it yet. Meet me back here next year and we’ll see if it lasts. :)

Yes, we test with and without Ebon Plague and with and without Sunder and other buffs and debuffs too. We test on dummies and Mr. Patchwerk, front and back. And a lot more.

The Black Ice tooltip may very well still be wrong. Sometimes text doesn’t get updated at the same time. But the spell effect should be that Black Ice only buffs Frost. Frost got some other buffs and Unholy got some other nerfs too. These might not all be in the build. I am also going off of memory here, so I may be mistaken.

• Tundra Stalker buffs Obliterate and Howling Blast. Adds double expertise.
• Acclimation buffs Rune Strike (in addition to its normal effects).
• Crypt Fever down to 10/20/30%.
• And the big one… when you miss, your runes activate in 1 sec instead of 2. This makes misses, dodges and parries a lot less painful.

We are also getting reports of Tundra Stalker not causing extra damage as it should. I can’t verify that, but keep it in mind. (source)