So we aren’t getting back our presences, ouch. Presences were extremely useful and I would massively prefer them over things like Death’s Advance and such. Blood Presence also helped massively in high stress high damage moments. Also minor thing I’d wanna see the return of death siphon as a PvP talent or something. Two-handed frost DK was great but our ranged heal was a massive boon to PvP combat. Once they got rid of it I mostly quit DK also in part to Death Strike now requiring runic power. I would love to see the return of Death Siphon as a ranged heal costing runes and possibly Death Strike requiring runes as well so you can focus on Frost Strikes in duels and such as an FDK. So far, at the moment, all we’ve really gotten was the return of being able to use abilities from other specs into our other specs not really any proper abilities “returned” so to say that were pruned. These current changes are fairly minor.
This… Of all the changes I would like to see to the Death Knight, it’s this.
It’s the trade off between dealing damage and healing. Frost Strike is simply the spender ability.
As it is right now, you could go a while (a while being a few seconds) without being able to get a heal off. But if it were tied to our runes, we could literally heal any time we had runes up, and wouldn’t have to wait for both runes and runic power.
They might bring presences back, we are not 100% yet, if they don’t in the Alpha, we need to make some noise.
Well, no… You should start making noise now… Make them change their mind before they get too far along.
Blizzard, please bring our Presences back.
They were a class defining ability of ours you gutted, and helped make the class and specs feel different and better. You really should bring them back.
Them not bringing presences and army of the dead back would be just a spit in our face.
And 2H frost DK.
I had to look up what the presences used to do . Blood was decreased damage, increased threat, meant for tanking. Frost was increased damage, reduced threat, meant for dpsing. Unholy was increased movement, decreased cooldowns, meant mainly for pvping.
I see problems here. Why would Blood spec ever want to swap out of Blood presence?
How do you distinguish between Frost and Unholy? I suppose they would have to be carefully balanced so that Frost gave slightly more damage than Unholy, while still making Unholy more desirable for pvp or for some types of pve encounters. Or would players be expected to constantly shift between these two presences in pve and pvp?
For me as a MoP/WoD PvPing FDK I would keep in frost presence when I can focus on my dps you only ever switched to unholy if you needed to catch up really because it lost a massive amount of DPS you gained from Frost Presence since it made frost strikes cost 15 less runic power. You’d of course switch to Blood Presence whenever you were under extreme pressure and needed to be healed up however because of the increase in HP it took a bit more effort to heal you up but would always give the little bit of time needed to recover. It was extremely useful and a core part of how DK used to work.
As for Blood spec I played it a decent amount as well. Unholy presence as before was mainly just a useful utility but also helped out a bit in DPS whereas Frost Presence wasn’t overly used. But for the most part you’d wanna stay Blood Presence as a BDK in PvP.
And Unholy I’m not entirely sure I never did much unholy play during MoP/WoD except close to the very end in season 3 of WoD.
In all in all, having our presences was just extremely handy and gave us better control over our class in general. It never really had too many balancing issues and was very easy to work with. It was removed mainly due to all other stances and such being removed from the other classes since they wanted to focus on “spec identity” instead of class identity (as you might imagine a frost DK in blood presence using a 2H went against that in a way).
It sounds like a lot of fun, if you did fairly high end PvP and were good at it. But by the sound of it dynamically changing presences was something only high end PvPers did. For the great majority of players, I bet the only time they changed presence was when they changed spec.
This would have been the reason why Blizzard removed them - presences simply weren’t interesting gameplay for most players, and removing them would have freed up development resources a bit.
They mentioned Aura’s are back, they MIGHT include presences too.
I would love presences back but there is a difference between them and auras. Presences are what allowed frost and unholy to tank and blood to dps. I dont think blizzard wants all 3 dk specs to be able to tank. Dont get me wrong I absolutely loved tanking as frost. But I just dont see blizzard kicking back and saying they are down with all 3 specs being able to do everything. I guess the presence could do half of the job and a passive in the spec could do the other half. I would love to see the class be able to off tank a few hits in a close call pull. Or be able to simply enter a psuedo defensive stance in pvp vs a speed stance vs a more “goatcha!” dps stance.
Well, they wouldn’t necessarily have to be the exact same spells.
Blood could provide a health and armor boost, but no threat boost. (Possibly a healing boost… but that might be op.)
Frost could provide a haste boost and maybe each attack slows the enemy by 30%. (Or possibly your disease adds a slow, but with that being aoe it might be too op.)
And unholy could add 30% movement speed and increase all your magic damage by 15%
That way blood stays the tank spec and the other two can’t tank. If a blood tank needs more mitigation they use blood presence. If they need more control they use frost. If they need more damage and speed (for m+) they have unholy.
It works for all three specs depending on your play style and situation.
yes. death knights are truly the antithesis of the paladin. a mirror image, so to speak. they had auras, we had presences. two sides of a coin. if they’re getting theirs back, we should get ours back
No presences were always bad, you would just sit in the one for your spec and in its last days you would just sit in blood otherwise you would melt with anything thrown at you. No presences.
It really depends on how far back you want to go. In Wrath Blood was an increase in damage and I think healing, Frost was tank, and Unholy was attack and movement speed (could of been haste so long I cant remember).
Agreed. As a PVPer, presences were just “sit in blood, forget them forever.”
Have**
You had your Presence that was suited for combat in your defined spec, sure. But being able to swap them when the time was right added a large and fun aspect to the class as a whole.
If you were say in Frost spec, but you needed to tap into your Unholy aspects to move quickly from one area to another, you could swap Presences and boost your speed for a short bit before you went back to Frost presence. Maybe you knew you were about to face some bad incoming damage and could swap to Blood Presence to add in some extra damage mitigation. These things added complexity and fun to the class.
If you were just sitting in one presence all the time and not swapping when the situation called for it, you were not playing the class to it’s fullest. And that’s fine, but that aspect should be brought back.
And Blizzard has stated they want to get away from complete Spec differentiation and back to the classes themselves having identity. This is one way to do that.
Plague Strike - Removing Buffs from Target
Spell Deflection - Based on DK Parry % had a chance to reduce all direct damage spells by 55% so for Frost and Unholy it was base 20% Parry chance to reduce damage. This was passive and baseline in addition to being able to use AMS and AMZ… (One of the key reasons why DK’s where the Paladin Killer and Caster Nightmare in WOW)
Horn of Winter (As a Group/Raid Buff) - Provided 10 Runic Power but also increased all Party and Raid members AGI and STR for 20 seconds. (Gave DK’s a group and raid buff that provided a good reason to have them as it buffed the Melee group damage)
Gorefiends Grasp - on all specs only the Blood Spec grasp taunted for Unholy and Frost it just pulled the mobs to the targeted NPC, Player, Self
Icy touch + glyph… Just to annoy paladins even more…