If you remember playing during Wrath of the Lich King, particularly in the first year of the expansion, you knew that there was just a massive number of these guys running about. While DKs are by no means an unpopular class these days, the novelty of them has worn off, and those people who preferred ranged dps or healing, or perhaps just a different system, have moved on, perhaps leaving their DKs as alts if not abandoning them entirely.
If you're like me, however, you still freaking love Death Knights. Frankly, I sometimes wonder if my Death Knight ought to become my main, but then I look back at my Paladin, Jarsus, and think, "no. Primary Alt is fine for Oterro. Gotta stay righteous."
While the change to the rune system was a bit of an adjustment to make, and the limitation of Blood to tanking and the other specs to DPS was a bigger one (especially for the Blood DPS and the Frost Tanks - did anyone tank as Unholy?) was huge, for the most part, DKs weathered the storm and came out looking pretty decent during Cataclysm.
The Death Knight resource system is fairly rigid, so you might find that each spec's rotation is more or less unchanged. Overall, DKs feel much as they did before, but considering how good they felt before, that's probably ok.
On the Glyph front, two very important ones have finally been introduced. Glyph of Tranquil Grip will turn off the taunt aspect of your Death Grip. I recommend that every single DPS DK gets and applies this glyph. You will be able to grip things (like those hunters in Hour of Twilight) and the tank will retain aggro on them. Simple, wonderful glyph. The other is Glyph of Army of the Dead. How many times have you used Army, only to have the ghouls turn the boss around, making it shoot out its cone-effect attack everywhere and making the lives of Feral Druids and Subtlety Rogues a living hell, trying to get behind a boss spinning at a thousand RPM? Well, now you can turn the taunt off those ghouls, which will frankly probably increase the damage slightly, as the ghouls won't get smushed by the boss.
So, let's spec-by-spec:
Blood: Unlike the other tanks, Blood got its Active Mitigation ability an expansion early, when Death Strike was re-worked to function wildly differently. While it was a strange change to get used to then, today the Blood tank works almost exactly the same. Blood is also the only tank to retain two taunts, because taking Death Grip away would be tantamount to treason... or something. I believe Blood Worms are healing for more now, and some of the numbers have been shifted around slightly. One of the bigger changes is probably that Runic Empowerment is now a talent, so you can choose Runic Corruption or a very re-worked Blood Tap instead.
Frost: Again, the basic rotation has remained untouched. You're still going to prioritize Obliterate, and try to use it when Killing Machine procs. Much like Fury, the two variants on Frost are now baseline to the spec, so you will get both Threat of Thassarian and Might of the Frozen Wastes, allowing you to switch out between Dual-wielding and 2-handers. I don't know how the math works out, but I've got Oterro's off-spec as Dual-Wielding and Lorconis' mainspec as 2-handed. The other big change is that they've buffed Frost Presence (or maybe nerfed non-Frost Presence RP-generation) to make it more attractive to Frost DKs. Again, i don't know the math, but I'm running with it.
Unholy: The only major change to Unholy is that Ebon Plaguebringer no longer counts as a separate disease. However, Scourge Strike's power has been buffed to compensate for the lack of a disease. Ebon Plague now gives the catch-all physical vulnerability debuff, but also buffs the individual Death Knight's diseases.
Now, there is one major change that affects all Death Knights. It's the kind of monumental, huge, enormous thing that I really felt I had to save for the conclusion of this article. That is: the return of...
CORPSE EXPLOSION!
One caveat: It's a purely cosmetic ability, dealing no damage. That said, once again, you can express your disdain for your slaughtered foes by making their corpses explode in a blast of gore. Oh, corpse explosion. We missed you so much!
No comments:
Post a Comment