The biggest pieces of news so far, on the heels of 3.3.3 is some Blizzard chatter on the new Mastery stat and talent tree changes in Cataclysm. Mastery is a new stat that Blizzard is introducing to replace redundant and inconsequential stats which make itemization and gearing more difficult than it should be. As a Death Knight, you will no longer see stats such as Attack Power, Armor Pen, or Defense on your gear. These itemization points will be devoted toward things like Strength, Stamina, Haste, Crit, and Mastery.

Blizzard is using this opportunity to remove talents that are not dynamic; talents that give passive bonuses or are really not that interesting. In exchange for these changes, you will gain Mastery with that given tree as you spend more points in it. To give an example, Blizzard used Frost for Death Knights, they said that some Mastery bonuses for this tree could include increased Damage, Haste, and Runic Power generation. The amount of the bonuses you gain would depend on how many points you’ve spent in that tree.

I’m fairly excited about this. I started to get annoyed with item stats back in Zul’Gurub when Blizzard started adding hit rating (or at the time hit %) to gear. After hit came haste, and armor pen, and these other stats. This has had two unfortunate results; It’s harder to understand gearing for people who aren’t experts and It’s forced Blizzard to make a greater variety of gear sets to suit all these different play styles; This, I’m sure, has made dungeon itemization a nightmare for the designers.

While I see the potential benefits of this plan, it has several major issues, especially for Death Knights. I’m sure maybe that I don’t understand everything, because all has not yet been revealed, however at this moment I see this potential pitfall. Eyonix mentioned that Mastery bonuses would be in line with that spec’s specific role. However, the Death Knight trees are built so that no one particular tree is for tanking, dps, or pvp. Out of all the classes, Death Knights idealize the take the player not the class (or in this case talent tree). They expect all the trees to do everything, so I don’t see how you can apply this same Mastery philosophy to Death Knights as you would to a Druid or Paladin, whose trees each have specific roles in mind. To answer this very concern, Eyonix stated the following:

I hate the fact that I need to be extremely vague here, but there is specific information that we're not quite ready to discuss that will alleviate your concerns in this area.

We have quite a bit of information coming regarding the next expansion, so just hang tight, and have faith. I know many players will naturally be skeptical of what I'm about to say...

I've honestly never been more excited about this game with what's to come (and I've been playing for over 8-years), than I am now. I cannot wait to share more information with you, and I can't wait for you all to experience it first hand.

And to be honest, I can't wait for me to experience it first hand!

  -  Eyonix ( Source )

Required Reading

    Mastery System Preview

    Cataclysm Stat & System Changes

So I was working on my druid the other day. I queued up for a Blood Furnace to get the two quests knocked out. The group ended up being myself (feral), Death Knight Tank, Priest Healer, a Mage, and a Hunter. As soon as we zoned in, the Hunter remarked “finally!, a Death Knight Tank that knows what he’s doing.” I’m not really sure what the Hunter was referring to, maybe it was the fact that he was using a two-hander instead of trying to tank DW with crappy gear. I, on the other hand, smelled the foul odor of a DeathN00b

The guy’s gear was so-so. He had a mix of tanking and dps blues and greens. His spec was a mess. Aside from the obligatory 5 points for the top tanking talents, he had some points in unholy, and most in frost. He actually uses a little death grip on the pulls, and does a decent job taunting the stragglers.

All is well until we pull up to the area right outside the room of the first boss. He proceeds to pull the entire room; a room that would normally be broken up into 3 separate pulls. The priest heals his heart out, I jump out of cat form and start throwing on hots and heals. Eventually, he just dies because he doesn’t have the avoidance or mitigation to hold them all. The group wipes, and I get blamed for not shadow melding >< . The Hunter then warned him against pulling so many. To which the Death Knight responds “ok sorry”.

We pull into the boss’s room. The Death Knight is a good boy for two pulls before sliding back into his old ways. The Hunter then warns him again to stop pulling half the room. The Death Knight responds back this time with “used to a different kind of heal; sorry”. Now in my mind, the only kind of healer that could heal a piss-poor geared Death Knight Tank through an entire room of mobs are his 80 friends that have decided to go slumming in Blood Furnace because they feel bad for him. It wasn’t the healer’s fault, it was him. He had both the main healer, and myself trying to keep his sorry backside alive.

Following this little exchange, he decided to drop group and the dungeon run quickly disintegrated. I only got one of my two quests done.

Loot Whores

Another disturbing trend I’ve been noticing in my heroic runs is that always seems to be a person in the group that just stands there when final loot is being rolled on. They wait until everyone else has left the group to roll on stuff because once you leave, you forfeit loot rolls. I saw a similar situation like this on my 2 out of 3 heroic runs last night.

I would hazard a guess that most people just click greed greed greed, and then don’t stop to notice if the loot was actually rolled on before making a quick exit to start the next run. I’m not a fan of douchbags that use dirty tactics such as this for their personal gain.

That’s all for this post, keep on raiding and hopefully we’ll see 3.3.3 pretty soon here.

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.

After you’ve killed Pestergut, your next target is Rotface (well, technically, you can do either first). Rotface is a “Do Your DPSers Suck” check. While healing and tanking are important, I think the fight relies more on situational awareness than tanking and healing savy or gear.

The main gimmicks of the fight are Rotface, the Big and Small Oozes, and the Ooze Flood. You want to tank Rotface in the center of the room, and have a zone around the boss set aside for your ranged dps. Healers can float in the middle because you’ll be using your second tank for Ooze Kite duty. In a way, this fight is a lot like Grobbulus, but with some fresh gimmicks.

The first major problem is the Ooze Flood. It lasts for 20 seconds and covers about 20% of the area on one side of the room. The flood causes around 4500 damage every second to those standing in it, as well as reducing movement speed by 25%. Stay the f out.

Secondly, Rotface will occasionally target a player, turn, and cast his Slime Spray. It hits for about 5,600 a second for 5 seconds. It’s easy to avoid by not standing in front of while while he’s casting. Stay awake and it’s not really a big problem.

Lastly, a player will get targeted by Mutated Infection. It causes a small amount of damage, and reduces healing, but when the infection is cleansed or ticks off, a Small Ooze will be spawned. The infected player needs to kite his ooze to the outer ring where the Ooze Tank will be standing by.

If this is the first Ooze, the dps’er will need to hang with the Ooze Tank until another Ooze is brought over. The two Oozes will merge, forming a Big Ooze, and the dps’er can return to the boss. The Ooze Tank kites the Big Ooze around the room until the Big Ooze absorbs 5 additional Small Oozes. When this happens, Unstable Ooze Explosion is triggered. This fires off several Ooze missiles which deal quite a bit of damage (around 10k nature damage to an area). So you’ll want to be aware of where those are heading and avoid them.

The biggest problems in this fight are remaining situationally aware while dpsing away. The key to the fight is doing this as tight as possible, and reducing damage taken by the raid via Ooze Fields, Slime Sprays, kiting your Small Ooze out asap, and staying the f away from Unstable Ooze Missiles.