Dev for a Day, DK Tree Updated 6 Sept

[Malchior-frostmourne (Malchior)]

UPDATED 6th September

So we have seen a few changes over the last few weeks and it has highlighted to me the overly lazy approach to our talent design. More the general tree than the specialisation trees, although we have not yet seen Frost yet so who knows how that will turn out.

The goal with this rebuild is to provide more choice and interesting talent options, and as far as general tree design goes, the Warrior tree is by far the best IMO. Plenty of fun talents with interesting choices throughout, and a capstone layout that gives them MORE ways to customise their class.

Starting off the following abilities are now baseline.

Death Strike
Mind Freeze
Death and Decay
Death Coil
Dark Command
Rune Strike
Runeforges
Path of Frost
Control Undead
Death Grip
On a Pale Horse
Lichborne
Death’s Advance
Runic Corruption (New changes below)

So the first issue I’d like to address is our rune regeneration being tied to RNG. There will be times the God’s do not smile upon you resulting in you sitting on your hands. Here is how I would address this.

Runic Corruption
For every 5 Runic Power you spend, reduce the cooldown of your regenerating runes by X sec.

Base rune regeneration and the above talent would need tuning, but it would be easy enough to adjust the numbers so its a neutral change throughput wise, but VASTLY improving the gameplay experience for all specialisations, where you do not need to jam a whole heap of Haste onto Blood just to get it to play smoothly.

For those of you who have used the Talent Tree Manager built by Tobias Mielich (https://github.com/TobiasM95/WoW-Talent-Tree-Manager). I have built this tree using it so you can have a play with builds and was a tremendous help with placement of abilities.

Pastebin Link to copy into Talent Tree Manager
https://pastebin.com/WMGUusG3

Row 1

Frost Presence
Embrace the presence of Frost, radiating intense cold slowing the attack and movement speed from all enemies within 10 yards of the Death Knight by 5% every 3 sec up to 15 for 6 sec.

Passive: Increase your runic power generation by 10%.

Blood Presence
Assume the presence of Blood, increasing Stamina and armour by 20% and reducing damage taken by 10%. Unholy and Frost specialisations deal 10% less damage.

Passive: Increases your Leech by 5%.

Unholy Presence
Empower your Unholy Presence, disrupting the flow of magics around you slowing the casting speed of enemies within 10 yards by 5% every 3 sec up to 15% for 6 sec.

Passive: Your global cooldown is reduced to 1 sec.

Row 2

Icebound Fortitude
No change.

Veteran of the Third War
Increase your stamina and armour by 10%.

Anti-Magic Shell
No change.

Row 3

Anticipation
No change.

Choice Node

Acclimation
Reduce the cooldown of your Icebound Fortitude by 90 sec.

Ice in Your Veins
Increase the damage reduction of Icebound Fortitude an additional 10% and Death Strike heals for 50% more for the duration.

Improved Death Strike
No change.

Choice Node

Anti-Magic Barrier
No change.

Mirrorball
Anti-Magic Shell removes all negative magical effects from you and reflects incoming magical damage and effects for the duration.

Blood-Caked Blade
Approximately 11 procs per minute

Your auto-attacks have a chance to cause a Blood-Caked Strike, dealing (20% of attack power) physical damage and generating 5 runic power.

Row 4

Death’s Reach
Increase the range of your Death Grip by 10 yds.

Anytime a target you have attacked dies, reduce the cooldown on Death Grip by 3 sec.

Wraith Walk
No change. (Animation change would be bloody nice though, has been a place holder since before Legion launched)

Anti-Magic Zone
No change. (Removing the health scaling so its equally beneficial for Blood and DPS specs would be nice)

Cleaving Strikes
No change.

Recurring Infection
Your diseases have a 15% chance of instantly dealing their damage again.

Row 5

Choice Node

Blinding Sleet
No change.

Icy Touch
1 Rune, 20 yd range

Deal (10% of attack power) Shadowfrost damage and remove one beneficial magical effect from the enemy.

Rune Mastery 2/2
Each time a rune is spent increase the damage and critical strike chance of your next Runic Power spender by 5/10% stacking up to 6 times.

Permafrost
No change.

Choice Node

Decimate Magic
When you cast Anti-Magic Zone also remove all negative magical effects from allies within.

Magical Suppression
Reduce the duration of Anti-Magic Zone by 50% but increases its damage reduction by 150%.

Asphyxiate
No change.

Runic Power Mastery 2/2
Your maximum Runic Power is increased by 10/20 and you regenerate 1/2 Runic Power per second whilst in combat.

Choice Node

Death Pact
No change.

Unholy Endurance
No change.

Row 6

Runic Command
Runic spending abilities have a 20% chance to immediately refund 20% of the Runic Power spent.

Choice Node

Unbound Wraith
Increase the duration of Wraith Walk by 1 sec and it is no longer channeled.

March of Darkness
Death’s Advance now increases your movement speed by an additional 25% for the first 3 sec and its passive effect increases your minimum movement speed by an additional 10%.

Choice Node

Grip of the Dead
Increase the radius of Death and Decay by 50% and slow all enemies within it by 50%.

Unholy Ground
Whilst you stand within your Death and Decay gain 5% Haste and each rune spent increases the duration by 0.5 sec.

Reanimation
Every 8 runes spent discharges excess necrotic energies from your rune weapon, raising a random undead ally to assist you for 10 sec.

Row 7

Proliferating Chill
No change.

Instructor’s Final Lesson
Increase your Parry chance by an additional 5%.

You also have a chance equal to your Parry chance of taking 30% less damage from a direct damage ranged spell or physical attack.

Death’s Echo
No change.

Row 8

Icy Talons
Your Runic Power spending abilities increase your melee attack speed by 3/6% for 9 sec stacking up to 3 times.

Blood Draw 2/2
Whenever you are brought below 30% health, your next Death Strike costs no Runic Power, deals 75/150% more damage and healing and is removed from the GCD.

Cannot occur more than once every 45 sec.

Will of the Necropolis
No change.

Rune Etching
Your runeforges are 25/50% more powerful and you can now etch a second runeforge onto a two-handed weapon.

Row 9

Empower Rune Weapon
No change.

Abomination Limb
Sprout an additional limb, dealing [(28.4% of Attack power) * 13] Shadowfrost damage over 12 sec to all nearby enemies. Deals reduced damage beyond 5 targets. Every 1 sec, an enemy is pulled to your location if they are further than 8 yds from you. The same enemy can only be pulled once every 4 sec.

Death Siphon
Replaces Death Strike

45 runic power, 20 yd range

Blast the target for (47% of Attack power) Shadowfrost damage healing for 100% of the damage dealt and 25% of all damage taken within the last 5 sec, minimum of 7% of maximum health.

Soul Reaper
2 Runes, 6 sec cooldown
Strike at the targets soul, dealing (100% of attack power) Shadowfrost damage and applying Soul Reaper to the target. Only usable on targets below 30% health.

After 5 sec, Soul Reaper detonates dealing (200% of attack power) shadowfrost damage.

Necrotic Plague
Replace your specialisations disease and instead apply Necrotic Plague. A disease that deals increasing amount of damage every 2 sec for 30 sec. Will jump to nearby targets that are in combat with you each time it deals damage. Duration cannot be refreshed.

Retains the secondary effects of your specialisation diseases.

Row 10

Hungering Rune Weapon
Empower Rune Weapon instead increases your critical strike, mastery and haste by 2% per rune spent during its duration in addition to generating 1 rune and 5 Runic Power ever 5 sec for 20 sec.

Choice Node

Hand of Death
Abomination Limb now deals 100% more damage but deals reduced damage to secondary targets.

Deadly Grasp
Abomination Limb is now a passive ability and is applied to your Death and Decay, dealing 25% of its normal damage for the duration of your Death and Decay. Will only grip targets trying to flee the Death and Decay.

Choice Node

Soul Reaver
Soul Reaper can now be used on targets below 45% health.

Reaper of Souls
Your auto-attacks have a chance to allow you to use Soul Reaper regardless of the targets health.

Plaguelord
Your Necrotic Plague also increases magical damage taken by the target by 5% and your auto-attacks increase the duration of your Necrotic Plague by 2 sec.

Ok so that’s it, I would be extremely happy if our general tree looked something like this. Hopefully you will all agree with some/all the changes made here and MAYBE we can affect some change on our tree by getting this some DEV attention.

PS Devs, feel free to take any ideas here.

[Locûtus-kelthuzad]

This is quite a read, but I’ll make it short and concise.

@Malchior-frostmourne

FROST

• Rune of Razor Ice removed. Frost Fever/Remorseless Winter/Empowered Rune Strike/Death and Decay now apply Razor Ice up to 10 stacks per target.
• Rune Strike cost two runes. Benefits from Cleaving Strikes.
• Obliterate replaces Rune Strike during Killing Machine procs and thus can be tuned to be as devastating as it name suggests.
• Howling Blast deals single target frost damage, dealing signficantly more damage during RIME, will cleave to targets with Frost Fever on them (Pestilence spreads disease on demand)
• Frost Strike will consume 5 razor ice stacks to deal additional damage.

Don’t turn Razorice into Festering Wounds, man! Frost Strike is a filler RP ability and Shattering Strike should be optionally taken. I do think RI should be remain as a debuff and depending on an expansion, I’m not sure how strong removing Rune of Razorice would be for the DW Dk.

Interesting way to turn Howling Blast into a MASS Icy Touch. As for Obliterate/Rune Strike thing… I’m not sure about that. It does sound awesome though.

@Malchior-frostmourne

UNHOLY

• Scourge Strike now costs two runes and bursts two runes.
• Festering Strike now costs one rune. Applies 2-3 Festering Wounds.
• Epidemic (Unholy talent) causes Pestilence flare up damage to deal signficantly more AoE damage and MASSIVELY increase disease damage on nearby targets as well. Gets rid of quadratic scaling shenanigans and frees up a few GCDs by having Pestilence on a short cooldown.

@Malchior-frostmourne

2:3 Pestilence

10 runic power, 6 sec Cooldown
Cause your diseases on your target to flare up, dealing (X% of attack power per disease) shadowfrost damage to the target and up to 5 nearby targets and spreading your diseases to nearby targets.
Reasoning:- Incidental AoE no. On demand. YES

So Pestilence Spreads while Epidemic Treads (Can’t think of a better rhyme).

I like the idea of making Epidemic not so spammy. But I hope you can come up with an AoE RP dump that Unholy is gonna miss from this.

That’s a lot of wuunds, champyen.

@Malchior-frostmourne

BLOOD

• Blood Strike costs two runes. Benefits from Cleaving Strikes
• Marrowrend costs one rune. Applies 3 Bone Shield charges.
• Blood Boil deals instant shadow damage to enemies within 10yd.

You mean Heart Strike or Blood Strike? Because if memory serves, Heart Strike was designed to be most RP efficient Rune Ability we have, proportionate to the amount of enemies struck.

Swapping costs of HS and Marrowrend is interesting, making Bone Shield a bit easier to maintain. Although I want a way to make Marrowrend when out of combat, a return of Bone Shield perhaps for all specs?

@Malchior-frostmourne

GENERAL TREE (Utilising the same tree layout)

1:1 Frost Presence (New)
3 sec cooldown

Strengthens you with the presence of Frost becoming a cold blooded killing machine. Your critical strike rating and critical strike damage are increased by X%. If Blood specialisation, deal reduced threat whilst in this presence.

1:2 Blood Presence (New)
10 sec cooldown

You assume the presence of Blood, increasing Stamina by X%, and base armor by X%, and reducing damage taken by X%. If Blood specialisation, there is no cooldown and you do not lose runic power switching into Blood Presence. Frost and Unholy specialisations deal X% less damage whilst in Blood Presence.

1:3 Unholy Presence (New)
3 sec cooldown

Embrace the unholy magics used to shackle your soul to your body. Your attacks have a X% chance of having your wraith form also attack your target with the same attack 2 sec later dealing X% less damage. If Blood specialisation, deal reduced threat whilst in this presence.

(Animation would be your wraith walk form appearing near the target and attack for melee attacks and appear beside you whilst launching ranged attacks.

Stances themselves are not OP at all and do have an opportunity costs of pursuing them. Each Warrior stance has a damage increase and a defensive utility.

What if instead of Presences are not just stat sticks but make our globals more interactive? Because I remember Unholy Presence reducing our Global Cooldown by half of second and it was very strong. So strong in fact that other presence felt slow as all heck. Not to mention, it would make Presences very stand out compared to Stances and Auras.

Blood Presence makes “Death” Abilities have their own set of Global Cooldowns. (Death and Decay, Death Grip, Death Coil, literally any ability that has the word “DEATH” on it)
Frost Presence makes Rune Spenders and Runic Power Spenders not share Globals.
Unholy Presence reduces global cooldown of all abilities by 0.5.

Does mine sound absolutely bonkers compare to yours? Maybe. But it does sound fun though.

@Malchior-frostmourne

2:1 Death Rune Mastery (New)

Anytime Runic Corruption activates, have an X% chance the first available rune regenerated will become a Death Rune. Death Runes empower certain rune spending abilities with additional effects and consuming a one will also empower the next specialization specific runic power spender.

• Rune Strike dealing X% more damage and applying (X% of attack power) frost damage and applying 2 stacks of Razor Ice, this attack cannot be dodged or parried.
• Frost Strike deals X% more damage and breaks off 5 stacks of Razor Ice.
• Blood Strike deals X% of its damage done as a Bleed effect on the target.
• Death Strike deals X% additional damage and the Blood Shield generated cannot be reduced below X for 3 sec.
• Scourge Strike becomes Clawing Shadow fire a shadowy projectile dealing X% of attack power) shadow damage to the target up to 30yd away. Festering Wounds burst by Clawing Shadow will always critically hit and deal that damage again as damage over time for 3 sec.
• Death Coil deals X% additional shadow damage and fires an additional 3* times as if consuming Sudden Doom.

Death and Decay now gains an additional effect

• Frost smash a huge glacier into the ground dealing instant frost damage and leaving a frozen mist behind dealing frost damage over the duration.
• Unholy raises a Shambler to run into the centre of the Death and Decay exploding for shadow damage and applying 2 Festering Wounds to up to X targets.
• Blood Bone spikes rise up through the decay, impaling targets within and knocking them into their air and inflicting bleed damage over time.

So not only you made Runic Corruption baseline but you made it proc based? Also Frost Strike is not a Rune Spender! Death Strike is not a Rune Spender! Death Coil… Also not a Rune Spender.

This is a bit much man. Make RE baseline for Frost and RC baseline for Unholy and call it a day. We don’t really need any of this. Sure it would make a lot of stuff more exciting with RC procs but… have you thought about if it HADN’T procced often enough??

I"M LOOKING AT YOU COINFLIP STRIKE.

@Malchior-frostmourne

3:1 Hungering Cold (New)

2 min Cooldown, 1.5 sec cast time
Plunge your rune weapon into the ground expunging all heat from a 10yd radius around the Death Knight trapping enemies in ice for 10 sec. Damage other than diseases will break the effect.

I’m not trading Sleet for this. Paladins can keep Blinding Light that they took from us.

@Malchior-frostmourne

3:8 Control Undead (Changes)

Learn Dominate Undead and Raise Dead

Dominate Undead
6 sec cast time

Casting this on an undead creature attempts to permanently dominate the creature to serve as your minion. If you lose the creature’s attention for any reason, the domination process will fail.

You must dismiss any active undead minions and have an empty *Raise Dead slot before you can begin taming a new beast. Only Unholy specialized Death Knights can dominate intelligent undead.

Raise Dead

30 sec cooldown
Call an undead minion into service from your menagerie to assist you

Reasoning:- Everyone had the ability to opt in for a timmy of their own in WotLK, now you have the opportunity to do so again if you desire. Choice is the name of the game here.

These sound cool! I love your idea of dominating an undead and have an option to make yourself a pet-based DK spec. Since it’s a talent, players have an option to opt in for this.

@Malchior-frostmourne

5:2 Veteran of the Third War (Changes) (2/2)

Stamina increased by (10 / 20)% for Blood and (5 / 10)% for Frost/Unholy.
When you kill an enemy that yields experience or honour gain Dark Succor. Dark Succor makes the next Death Strike within 20 sec free and heals for an additional 10% of maximum health.

Very clever to merge this passive and Dark Succor.

The rest is… Okay in my book. I could say something about Icy Talons not belonging to the bottom of the tree or Might of Mograine giving a passive stat bonus (it used to be a passive that consume diseases to nuke people, gonna feel queasy about it) and…

… I’m running out of thoughts. But hey, that’s just my opinion though.

[Kelliste-antonidas (Kelliste)]

Stances arent anything special and people aare just going to sit in one gor 90% of the time. Unless auto attack damage is stronger than 3% crit, there really isnt a reason to take it since fears saps and incapacitates can be taken care of with Berserkers Rage. Tanks are primarily going to sit in defensive stance and dsp are going to sit in the stance that provides the most for that spec. Thats what presences were and became.

Kind of like paladin seals you used the best and forgot the rest.

Runic Corruption is also worse than Runic Empowerment.

Might of Mograine was a passive crit damage increase for certain abilities.

If people continue to look at others to see what they got, want what they got, we will all just be the same. Homogenization is boring and WoW could have 4 classes at that point.

[Inemia-wyrmrest-accord]

@Malchior-frostmourne

Gets rid of quadratic scaling shenanigans

what is the issue with this? all we need is something that makes deathcoil cleave and we would fill our only gap in dps, unholy can do well ST and it is exceptional when it comes to mass damage, but it is weak on small group cleave damage, mainly i would say, 2-4 targets. this isn’t the fault of epidemic’s quadratic scaling, they could just add a talent that causes deathcoil to also hit up to 5 targets in DND, just like SS/CS.

[Malchior-frostmourne (Malchior)]

Runic corruption is only worse because of tuning because it’s 2% per RP vs 1.6 per RP on live. Corruption offers a much smoother experience imo.

Presences could use some work, tbh Blood Presence is purely a want from a PvP perspective. You could probably move them all into one talent and provide per specialisation benefits.

[Kelliste-antonidas (Kelliste)]

Runic corruption, to my understanding, pairs well with haste since it increases your rune regen rate by 100%. Frost just never really wanted haste for the most part. You got enough attack speed from icy talons and unholy presence to cover what you would want it for.

I have always hasted corruption, but high haste could lead to it being better… most likely. At some haste level at least where it would be better to take. I still dont like it, but truthfully I dont like either of them and was something put in because their “rune regen scales with haste and you can only regen one rune type at a time” thing happened.

If you look at the stances, it depends on how the balancing is and what the specs would want. Prot probably wont take any of them other than Defensive and it can gain access to basically all other talents than movement speed and leech but it can lead to everything else. So if you are Arms or Fury, depending on tuning you will just have the stance given to you, and then take defensive stance, and call it a day on stances.

To me they look like a waste of space and they could have just had defensive stance in there somewhere and baked in the 2 passives. I dont see why Prot would want other stances unless they can already survive well enough and just need a dps boost.

Presences, while I liked pressing them and seeing the animation and the sounds they made. I used 2 of them through the majority of play. Unless you made them more like paladin seals I dont see them having much of a place at all. Even the seals were limited in how you wanted to use them. I only used holy for the most part in Wrath, but from what I remember is if you wanted damage you used Seal of Turth/Blood mana return you used Seal of Wisdom? And then there was another seal for slows or something. Could be entirely wrong because again I played holy.

Looking at paladin though, they are complaining about their trees, warriors will probably complain about theirs, shamans were complaining about theirs, priests as well. Everyone has been complaining about their talents. I just dont see the benefit of looking at other class/spec trees if its going to lead to people not feeling good about their own trees wanting what other people have.

[Bicepspump-galakrond]

@Kelliste-antonidas

Runic corruption, to my understanding, pairs well with haste since it increases your rune regen rate by 100%.

To anyone reading this, this statement is incorrect. Runic Corruption scales inversely with haste ensuring the same amount of Runes regen every time. Regardless of haste, you always get a total of 0.9 Runes back!

[Zynthiax-moon-guard]

Glyph of Icy Touch

We need thing like this back. It is time to become the true menace against healers / paladin that we once were… Especially today when several classes has got some kind of absorb bubbles. To be able to dispel those classes would be so awesome…

[Malchior-frostmourne (Malchior)]

Well today is another day where I am forced to sit and complete more online training for things I’ll never do. I shall make some adjustments!

I’d love to see icy touch and it’s magic dispel return. Let’s see what my brain can dream up as I’m bombarded with manager speak for the next 10 hours…

[Thrymyrden-stormrage]

It’s thematic and cool. It doesn’t need to be being used every 5 seconds

[Thrymyrden-stormrage]

A lot of cool ideas here and it just makes me realize how utterly boring DK has become since Legion. If there aren’t major changes to the trees we’ve seen so far I might just reroll

[Malchior-frostmourne (Malchior)]

Updated the original post after taking on some suggestions for you guys above.

Presences gone, agree that you’ll sit in whatever is best most of the time. Could be an idea to make them our spec cooldowns as the animation of the rune activating above your character was always cool.

Reverted back to original rune cost of strikes and also removed ALOT of words from Death Rune Mastery and making it buff just the damage of any ability it consumes. Quick and easy.

Added some new defensive and ally based defensives. The fact we are walking undead yet don’t have any type of fear ability is crazy. Almost as if undead aren’t scary or anything!

Frozen Throne is a pseudo Cauterize but with a very nice death Knight flavour. No 300% turbo speed away, just a block of ice and a dream. A dream someone will heal an immobile block of ice giving you that third chance at existence.

Empower Rune Weapon is a bit bland of a cooldown, not sure what it could do otherwise. I thought about making it changing it with an Avenging Wrath 2.0. Become some kind of wraith like king leoric from Diablo and go to town with bonus damage and crit.

Incidental AoE is out. And the option for a Timmy for all specs is in. If I do another unholy tree rejig, it’ll have alot more of a beast mastery flavour. Unholy should be the pets/dots spec thus I’ve made the diseases for Blood and Frost just deal damage, they don’t do anything special. It’s not their bread and butter.

[Kelliste-antonidas (Kelliste)]

Presences? Yeah, I agree. It was cool seeing people get ready for battle. Dk’s going into presences, Paladings putting up their seals and auras, Horns blowing, Shouts, Stances, buffs going up. It was immersive.

But it would only really happen once, or after a wipe. I would be happy to just have a glyph that gives us presences back visually with a cool little effect.

DK also has been a pretty simple and straight forward class. Each spec had the same basic design and there were slight differences to each spec. Keep up diseases, convert runes and do your rotation. That was basically it for the DK.

[Zynthiax-moon-guard]

Presences gone?

I know that i used to stance dance a lot back then. Especially in PvP.
I played mostly as frost and when:

• I needed to put on some more pressure: Frost Presence
• I needed to increase movement speed: Unholy Presence
• Improve heals or got focused: Blood Presence

[Malchior-frostmourne (Malchior)]

Yeah outside of PvP you sat in your specific presence and never moved. Unless you died and used unholy aura running back to the boss.

They could be good options for PvP talents. Blood presence at least.

[Zynthiax-moon-guard]

I guess you never tried to solorun stuff? Sure you could always swap to blood spec but sometimes you saved time by going in Blood presence and soloed dungeons etc.

Another example would be in MoP. The main cities where indoor cities. No mounts allowed. I guess most dk’s swapped to Unholy Presence back then… Same with dungeons / raids when you were just running around.

[Kelliste-antonidas (Kelliste)]

Swapping presences like that was a no no. A big time no no because you lost any stored runic power. It wasnt as punishing in Wrath but if I remember correctly it was still 75% of your current runic power.

And even when you soloed stuff, you wanted to be in the tank presence, especially in cata and onward since defense rating was axed and it was just put in Improved Blood Presence. That reduction in being crit was big. 6% meant you wouldnt be crit by enemies that were 3 levels higher than you.

Most dk’s back then just sat in unholy presence. Like in Wrath, Frost is going to sit in Unholy presence 100% unless tanking something. You get everything that Frost would want out of that presence. Increased attack speed by 15% great for Killing Machine procs, 15% increased movement speed, and it reduced the GCD of all abilities by 0.5 seconds putting the DK at a 1 second GCD without having to get 50% haste.

Blood Presence was pretty lacking compared to it. 15% damage and healed you by 4% of damage dealt. 15% increase in damage couldnt overcome what Unholy Presence gave unless you were high in haste.

Then if tanking you just used Frost Presence. Stamina increased by 8%, armor contribution increased from items by 60%, reducing damage taken by 8% and increases threat generated.

That threat generated on a DPS was kind of a death sentence.

These are for Wrath, this is what people are going to be talking into come late August when we can level DK’s to level 70.

Thematically and when it comes to immersion presences were pretty good, but in practice they just baked them into the specs and removed them. Being punished for swapping wasnt a good thing either which was just more incentive to sit in a presence.

[Malchior-frostmourne (Malchior)]

Agreed, the warrior 3 talent point Stances won’t stay, because it’s pretty much 2 points wasted doing nothing for alot of the time.

Make all 3 presences a single talent point. Blood as the defensive stance styled option. Unholy and Frost could be tailored around a specific secondary stats. Maybe Unholy could randomly summon in ghouls. Frost presences has kind of a frost mage icicles or Legion crystalline weapons.

Food for thought

[Kelliste-antonidas (Kelliste)]

Could be like GW2 signets.

Signets are basically passives / actives. For example on the necromancer (usually play Reaper) I use Signet of Spite. Its passive is that it improves Power (attack power basically) by 180. Thats like 2-3 pieces of gear worth of power. The active applies conditions to the target but then you lose the 180 power when its on CD.

Thats something that the presences could be. You have access to all 3, but you choose one. It has a passive and an empower but then if you empower you lose the passive.

So like Frost could increase runic power generation, you empower it and instantly gain like 50rp but lose the increased rp generation while its on CD.

Thats really just an example and they could be anything.

[Malchior-frostmourne (Malchior)]

@Malchior-frostmourne

2:1 Death Rune Mastery (New) Deathly Presence (New)
Gain Blood Presence, Frost Presence, Unholy Presence stance abilities
Consume all of available runic power to switch into a presence.

Blood Presence
3 sec cooldown
You assume the presence of Blood temporarily, increasing Stamina by 20%, and armor by 30%, and reducing damage taken by 10%. Reduces damage dealt by Unholy and Frost specialisations by 10%.

Frost Presence
3 sec cooldown
Assume the presence of Frost, radiating intense cold slowing all enemies within 10 yards by 15%.

Unholy Presence
3 sec cooldown
Embrace your Unholy nature, disrupting enemy casting speed within 10 yards, reducing casting speed by 15%.

New additions to the tree! Non throughput for DPS so they hopefully wont be set and forget. Unfortunately Blood will definitely want to still be in Blood Presence because its BLOODY good. Possible idea to have whatever specialisation you are currently be in always active OR have passive and active effects as suggested above, but I’m hitting a wall thinking of things that are both useful and not overpowered.