DK Design Rework Idea

Classes Death Knight
1

I would love to see a return to the original niche design that made DKs awesome - the ability to tank/dps in any spec.

“But they tried that and it didn’t work” , you say? Well that’s because they did it wrong. Here’s how it should be done:

NOTE: For simplicity sake, let’s assume that a DPS spec is meant to do 2x the damage of a tank spec, but also takes 2x the amount of damage.

Decide on a DPS output that you feel is a fine baseline for a tank. Design the attacks and buffs such that if a good rotation is sustained, this is the amount of damage it will do.

Now, you need two auras. One aura is for DPS (Onslaught Aura), the other is for Tanking (Domination Aura).

When Onslaught Aura is active, all damage is increased 100%.

When Domination Aura is active, armor class is increased by xx%, health is increased by xx%, threat generation is increased by xx%.

Blood focuses on leech and bleed effects. Self-healing and DOTs

Frost becomes a control spec, with slows, spell blocking, etc.

Unholy focuses on diseases using strikes and spells to apply several diseases to targets, then casting epidemic to cause all of the DK’s diseases to spread to other nearby targets.

“But…”, you say? No. Just no. No this doesn’t cover every “what if” possibility. It’s a design scheme. Just think of the possible.

2 Likes
2

The “all 3 specs can tank” design didn’t exactly fail back in wrath. Each spec had it’s niche.

Blood was all about effective health and self healing.
Frost was all about armor and physical mitigation.
Unholy was more into avoidance and magic mitigation.

Now the problem here was the tank meta of that era. The first tier of content was incredibly undertuned with the exception of 3 drakes sartharion (who funnily enough favored an unholy spec) so you saw all 3 flavors of dk tanks.

However from Ulduar onwards boss damage got MASSIVELY buffed to the point where bosses on 25m difficulty could 2-3 shot a tank. At the same time, the replenishment buff meant healers were never going oom, so the only viable way to build tanks was to stack as much stamina as you possibly could. With this in mind, from Ulduar onwards, blood was the only viable option for raid tanking. Blizzard misconstrued this as the other 2 tank specs were not worth trying to balance out so blood became the tank spec, to the dismay of many dps blood mains.

Truth is the other 2 tank specs worked fine, it’s just that the meta didn’t have any place for them to shine.

8 Likes
3

i like frost as is but it just needs a couple of skill changes.

4

Did your tanks not have defense or avoidance or something? Thats the only way I ever seen tanks on any difficulty get 2-3 shot.

They were all viable options. In fact most of the healers that I played with said I was one of the easiest tanks they ever had to heal.

The reason why they chose Blood as the tank spec, wasnt because the other specs werent viable raid tanks (they absolutely were) it was because someone solo tanked heroic 25m LK. That was their reasoning. How do we know that? Because they said it going into cata. People were asking them their reasoning and in a Q&A they specifically pointed to that as their reasoning.

5

If we want to talk about this, and this is just my take. I want Blizzard to do something completely different to the game that isn’t completely exclusive to Death Knights.

  • Stats and Attribute Overhaul while Primary Stats serve the same purpose.
    • Crit Chance and Crit Damage.
    • Attack Speed and Cast Speed. Movement Speed is tertiary but still nice to have.
    • Unique forms of Mastery.
    • Different defenses for each tank class like Blood specializes in Leech, Warrior and Paladin specialize in Block, Demon Hunters and Druids specializes in Evasion, etc.
  • Talent Trees and not like classic wow iteration or mop tieration. Talent Trees that may or may not completely drastically change your playstyle.
  • Gear becomes gear. Not a slot with a glyph effect unless it is uniquely build defining to warrant such damage/survivability gain/loss or grind.
  • Differentiation between added damage vs increased damage vs more damage. For instance, I think Might of the Frozen Waste should add MORE damage to Obliterate than Increase with the same value. Multiplying all damage done with Obliterate by 1.35 after calculating the additive scaling of it such as Frozen Heart Mastery.
  • Difference between Attacks (Obliterate, Frost Strike) and Spells (Howling Blast, Chains of Ice)

Overall, I think the game is in serious due of a massive overhaul before reworking the class. I don’t think they’re ever going to do it but it is something like this may catch my interest and have more accessibility to customize your character rather maximizing it.

I don’t think the game can handle if there is something bonkers like Mageblood or Headhunter so powerful items like these should not be in the game. There should be a healthy mediation between the two.

2 Likes
6

From the horse’s mouth.

7

what does that prove? we dont like ghostcrawler

8

The reasoning and rationale behind the original change is more relevant today than ever.
This idea is a non-starter in modern WoW.

9

with so much simplicity going on now it very much is a starter convo.
people want change big changes little changes

this path this class is on is crap

10

Specialization is just a part of the game. For a change like that to even make sense, they’d have to completely overhaul everything from the ground up.

12

I don’t entirely support the idea of frost being just a utility. My vision of frost has always been a slow moving dreadnought that when he reaches you will hit you with big hits

13

got the slow moving part right now if we can get the other parts put in

14

If a class can have 3 of the same roles, deeps we have so many of, why can’t we have a class with 3 tanks. That must have been part of brainstorming sessions at start of DKs. But originality is enemy of any motherships -and that is a long lost battle. We’ll get a pony pet class before we get changes to be a true war-tool

15
Wipe clean the slate.
16

so the 3 can tank in different ways but sorta similar

leach and migration blood is best at it while the other specs have some form of it
diseases and army and raising unholy is best at this with a parma upgraded ghoul and bigger army
frost does the cold shrugging off damage with ice armor and total frost damage oblit and other attacks with backed up diseases and Rimed KM that amp its damage via certain talents

17

“With Frost as a dual-wield, spell and runic power focused tree”

So can we stop with the whole juggernaut thing now? There is Blizzard saying it was looked at as a dual-wield spec.

But the article doesnt explain their reasoning as to why they chose blood specifically, just a few things that I never heard at all. Like “I look at the protection tree and im jealous of all the cool tools they have to help their tanking.” I never heard that once and in fact dps talents were often needed for threat. Most of the tanking ability was from gear. Defense so you could no longer be crit (baked into tanking specs now) and avoidance like dodge and parry (or block for warrior and paladin) to avoid hits. Blood even carried over a lot of dps talents like Improved Death Strike which turned Death Strike into a nuke with vengeance.

Complete reworks however can be a huge issue. Look at survival and the many people that had complaints about it. Its not like we needed more melee with limited melee slots available. If you change the fundamentals of the spec or class it can be a pretty big hit to its popularity. League of Legends went through that same thing with complete reworks of champions. While they arent completely different, it loses something in the rework the majority of the time.

Just throwing things out there hoping that something sticks is already what Blizzard is doing. Trying to create a spec with visuals or what would seem cool over the function doesnt make for a good spec.

First you have to figure out what the spec is going to do. Trying to create something without a core design in mind is just a waste of time.