Greetings Deathlings and Deathnooblettes. We have a lot of chatter about Death Knights on our favorite news sites this week. The two biggest items to cover are the buffs to Icy Talons and Will of the Necropolis.

Frost DK’s will be happy to hear that Icy Talons and Improved Icy Talons are getting buffed. This new change will add approximately 20% extra melee haste to your attacks. I’ll let Ghostcrawler tell it like it is:

You put 5 points in Icy Talons. While fighting (and applying Frost Fever), you swing 20% faster. If you have talented Windfury Totem on you, you swing a total of 40% faster.

You now put a 6th point in Improved Icy Talons as well. You have a passive personal 25% haste at all times. When you engage in combat and apply Frost Fever, you now have 45% melee haste. If you have Windfury also, you still only have 45% haste since Windfury and Improved Icy Talons are exclusive.

This is basically a 20% haste buff to any DK who has Icy Talons and Improved Icy Talons.

  -  Ghostcrawler ( Source )

What this means to you is that if you have 5 points in Icy Talons, you gain 20% melee haste, and this haste now stacks with Windfury Totem, providing a total of40% melee haste as long as Frost Fever is up and active.

Now, when you add a point to Improve Icy Talons, the effect of that talent is now passive, apply a passive personal melee haste of 25% at all times. So when your frost fever is up, Improved Icy Talons provides a total of 45% melee haste, 20% of which is debuff dependent; 25% which is passive and always up.

Unfortunately, the passive effects of Improved Icy Talons does not stack with Windfury because the two are mutually exclusive, however, as a Frost Death Knight with Improved Icy Talons, you are assured of having 45% melee haste.

You all got that? It’s a little complicated to think about. What it means for you is that we get more melee haste, essentially a 20% buff. This is awesome, especially if you don’t have a shaman backing you up (my guild really doesn’t). Some things to think about are this. There’s some buzz right now on the Death Knight forums that there’s a concern that the haste buff will cause problems with unused Killing Machine procs. The theorycrafters over at EJ’s are suggesting that the standard spec drop a point from Killing Machine as a result. After that, we need to free up a few points to put those into Endless Winter, which has been redesigned to increase strength.

PTR Spec:0/53/18

My blog is primarily about damage, but I’m going to take a second to talk about Will of the Necropolis. With this new patch, they’re removing the internal cooldown on the Will of the Necropolis effect. This is a significant buff to Blood Tanking. Many abilities in Wow have what is known as an internal cooldown. That is, that at most, there is a limit on the number of times within a given period that an effect can occur. For WotN, that internal cooldown was 15 seconds. This means that once Will of the Necropolis is triggered, it can’t be triggered again for another 15 seconds.

The cooldown was meant to counter specific fights were Will of the Necropolis gave Death Knights a singular advantage. Examples are melee-intensive fights like Patchwerk (in-fact, the cooldown was put in place because of Patchwerk). Because most fights are now designed with WotN as a factor, the designers felt that the internal cooldown was now unnecessary and confusing to players. As of 3.3.3, this cooldown has been removed, and the designers feel that this change won’t have an impact on the class of tanks that guilds choose to use on high-end content and heroic modes.

I dabble in the tanking a little bit. When I choose to tank, I usually use Blood or Frost, so I’m a fan of this, and we’ll see how this impacts those abilities.

Also, I plan to spend some time on the PTR. I hope to have some hard numbers to digest on Frost DPS performance.

Good evening, sorry its been a few days, there was a death in my family, then I got really sick; blah, blah, blah. I've finally had time to take a look at these hot new patch notes. There is good news for Frosties, Tanks, and Unholy Pvpers. Here's what's been published thus far:

Icy Touch: This ability now causes a very high amount of threat while the death knight is in Frost Presence.

Misc
Rune of Razorice: Now stacks 5 stacks of 2% Frost Vulnerability instead of 10 stacks of 1% Frost Vulnerability. Proc chance changed to 100%.

Blood
Abomination's Might: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc on certain strikes. Rank 1 is 5% attack power and Rank 2 is 10% attack power. The self strength buff remains unchanged.

Will of the Necropolis: There is no longer a cooldown on the frequency at which this talent can be activated. In addition, this ability can now also be triggered by damage which deals less than 5% of your health.

Frost
Endless Winter: No longer causes Frost Fever to be applied by Chains of Ice, but instead grants 2/4% strength. The previous functionality of this talent can now be attained via the Glyph of Chains of Ice.

Improved Icy Talons: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc. The self haste buff remains unchanged.

Nerves of Cold Steel: Now increases off-hand damage by 8/16/25%, up from 5/10/15%.

Unbreakable Armor: The amount of strength granted is now 20%, up from 10%.

Unholy
Scourge Strike: Now deals 70% weapon damage, plus 12% of physical damage done as shadow damage for each of the death knight's diseases on the target. The net result should be larger strikes with no diseases present, while maximum damage with all diseases applied to the target should stay the same.

Raid Buff Goodness

First off, this makes our major raid buffs passive, that is they don't have a chance trigger or length. This pretty much moots the discussion we were having here on DKT about separating Heart Strikes to maximize AM uptime, since uptime is no longer an issue.

Frost Goodness

It feels to me like this patch is all about buffing underperforming raid and pvp specs. Unholy and Blood are doing ok, but Frost has fallen out of favor among raiders. These targetted buffs are meant to make Frost viable again.

First, Blizzard has made the effect from Razorice 100%, that means it applies its proc on every hit. Plus, they've changed it to apply double the effect (2% instead of 1%) and made it have half the stacks. This means that the buff from the proc will be easier to maintain at its maximum stack count.

Secondly, Nerves of Cold Steel and Unbreakable Armor have been buffed. NoCS now increases offhead damage by an additional 10% at max level (25% instead of 15%). UA now increases strength by 20% instead of 10%. These buffs are aimed to increase Frost raid damage.

These changes should hopefully make Frost competative again. I'll test this out once I can get on the PTR.

Unholy (Pvp) Might

Scourge Strike has been altered a little. It has been redesigned to cause more damage with no diseases present, but do the same damage when diseases are up. This should silence the individuals whining that Unholy doesn't do enough pvp damage.

Everyone like buffs, this latest round is designed, in my opinion, to make Frost more competative in raid dps because a majority of raiders have shifted toward Unholy and Blood. Blizzard doesn't seem to like it when specs get polarized to this extent.

I'm hoping this will buff Frost raid damage closer to Unholy, and I'll test this with real world numbers when I can.

I'm not sure how much I support the changes to Scourge Strike. I'm just affraid that they'll do something to bug it out or damage Unholy Raid dps more than expected. Scourge Strike has an inconsistent history and has been redefined too many times as of late. I'd like it if they supported one specific version of SS and stuck with it. Overall, this patch is good news for us.

Here are the tanking specs I’ve picked out for 3.2. For the most part, blood and frost are pretty similar to 3.1. Unholy has had notable changes made to it that affect both dps and tanking. The first and most obvious change is that Unholy Blight has been redesigned as a single-target effect that increases Deathcoil damage. As a tool for AoE tanking, UB has lost its allure.

Each tree provides their own perks for DK Tanks. The Blood tree provides enhanced health regeneration. The Frost tree provides enhanced mitigation as well as several wicked cooldowns, as well as enhanced AoE tanking through Howling Blast. Unholy has classically been best for AoE tanking, but recent nerfs\changes have dimmed this a little. Talents like Bone Armor help to provide additional avoidance. I’d say that each one is perfectly viable. Unholy seems most challenged by recent nerfs to our class.

Blood Tank
53/8/10

Perks:
Enhanced Health Regeneration
Improved RP Generation
Hysteria
Improved Vampiric Blood
Will of the Necropolis

Frost Tank
10/51/10

Perks:
Improved Mitigation
Unholy Armor and Lichborne
Howling Blast provides better AoE control

Unholy Tank
5/8/58

Perks:
Improved Damage Avoidance
Anti-magic Shield\Zone
Bone Shield

I’m excited to get into the new dungeon and see what these can do. I may just stick to the 3.2 variant of my Frost spec; it seems to work nice for aggro. I’m most interested in trying the Blood spec. It seems like Blood has been working out well for a lot of the world 1st guilds. I’m least interested in dabbling in Unholy tanking. I’m concerned that the changes have made it less attractive. While trying to dumb down Unholy AoE dps, I’m concerned that Blizzard may have sacrificed some of its AoE tanking control In the process.

Wow, looks like DKT is back up and running. Apologies to those of you who were trying to view the site and had problems this week; I host this site myself and unfortunately I had some issues with one of my hardware firewall appliance boxes that does my firewalling stuff. I’m really trying to make it sarcastically obvious that I know nothing about IT. If you’re reading this, I must have figured it out.

We have some news today about 3.1.2. We got some good news, and some “meh” news, and some bad news. For those of you who use cross-role specs in raids, Equipment Manager, the official Blizzard answer to “Outfitter” will be released in this patch. If you remember, it was supposed to be in 3.1, but got delayed because The Blizz ran out of time. I think this will be a good asset to people who both tank and dps in raids. This is another example of Blizzard gobbling up the functionality of a widely used community add-on with an in-house variant. I just hope it’s a little more pro than the blizzard threat meter.

The patch will also bring a number of talent and ability changes. The Improved Death Strike talent from deep blood now increases healing done by Death Strike by 25%/50% in addition to the damage increase. I’m a fan of blood and am happy to see it get a little more love. Since 3.1, it’s become a much more dominant raid spec. Following the beta, I had predicted that Blood would be the talent spec of choice because it is melee centric. I was surprised to see Unholy come out in front, and kinda stay that way until now. I criticize Blizzard’s handling of the Duel-Wield situation, but in the case of Blood, they’ve really done a great job of balancing it against Unholy and allowing it to be pretty much just as popular as a raid spec.

Secondly, Ghoul Frenzy now has a 10-second cooldown, as opposed to no cooldown. It got nerfed because people were exploiting Ghoul Frenzy by spamming it to generate burst RP. This problems contains two things Blizzard seems to hate, 1. Spamming things, and 2. Burst Damage, so a nerf is expected.

vWe’ve saved probably the biggest smack of the nerf bat for last. Buried at the bottom of the list under the items section is this gem of a change: “Scourgeborne Battlegear 4-Piece Set Bonus: The runic power gain has been reduced to 5 runic power from 10 runic power.”. This is the thing that made our T7.5 armor so good, as well as eliminated the need for extra talents or glyphs that help generate extra RP. The set bonus allowed an extra 10 RP when using Obliterate, Scourge Strike, or Death Strike (The basic two-rune attack of each spec).

I usually bring up this set bonus a lot in discussion about RP-Starvation. This is a state where you can’t generate enough RP during your rotation for the extra two Death Coil’s at the end of the rotation. I’ve seen this most often with under geared unholy DK’s. Surprisingly, I’ve gotten a lot of email comments on this problem. It’s not cool to see this reduced. Those of us still in our old Naxx gear will probably see some dps loss. The reason for this change, I feel, is that the DK Community (and bloggers) felt that T7.5 w/ the set bonus was superior to the T8.5 gear. Blizzard nerfed our bonus to encourage us to upgrade to Ulduar gear.

Thanks for reading my expert commentary. If you have some comments, drop me an email at questions@deathknighttactics.com; Xeeon Out!