Thematically Rider is interesting, but, and exclusively my opinion, mounted combat (limited) has no place in WoW and comes across very gimmicky. I’m very disappointed it’s significantly ahead DPS wise atm.
Deathbringer has alignment issues, and seems very clunky/unintuitive rotation wise based on discord commentary. The significant 180 with these recent changes will require re-looking at DB imo.
Rider exists in its current form purely so you, the player, can have a hero tree with 0 actual changes to how the spec functions. If you want to play DPS DK in TWW and want it to play exactly* the same as DF, you can pick Rider and have the damage be completely passive and hidden to you.
There’s still 10 weeks~ until Season 1 tuning so it being ahead is not an issue at the moment.
It functioned very well before the changes. Now it’s feeling a bit clunky and I’m not sure why. Maybe the resource reduction makes it harder to justify as 2 runes, or maybe having it be a 30/60s was fine when Icecap would basically make Pillar line up every time but now it doesn’t.
Not entirely sure which is the exact reason it’s feeling bad for me now - and it could be all of the above - but it definitely needs to be looked at.
huzzah we shoudn’t have had it in the first place and im glad its gone
that icecap change hmmm 45 sec pof…i still want it to be 20 sec on 1 min cd but i guess baby steps we got something good today
I’d bet my car that it’s entirely unrelated to this statement. The design motivation was likely first and foremost, the fact it’s a thematic fit into the lore and class, and nothing to do with them specifically wanting to add passive additions as new talents/hero spec. In fact thats what makes Rider so un-interesting from a gameplay standpoint, and largely plays into unholy; we don’t need two minion master specs.
With that said, I feel attempting to mold hero specs to fit two class specs was a mistake. Design wise they would’ve had a much easier time and more mechanically sound hero spec if they were exclusive to specs (rider-unholy, db-frost, vampires-blood). Would have also preemptively solved the many hero spec balancing issues going forward, especially if they tie tier set bonuses to the hero specs.
Regardless of how this plays out, at least the “Death Knight” is being looked at and changes are coming.
Now. Unholy Note: Where are yah!
Suffer Well
I honestly think they went with 45 seconds because of FWF. The Riders tree completely revolves around it and I think its safe to assume that Riders will be the more popular pick up.
Obliteration is keeping Pillars CD shorter. I knew things were heading into a balance nightmare and something was going to pop and it did.
Maybe im wrong but maybe with the DB tree frost DK should see a revert to murderous efficiency.
do not touch unholy.