This feedback will focus mostly on “how do these talents feel and how cool do they seem”, “how the talents will play and impact rotation/gameplay”, and “how these new talents would affect existing talents”. The perspective is from a Blood Death Knight who primarily does Mythic+ Tank Theorycrafting for the specialization as well as higher-end Mythic+.
Reaper’s Mark Debuff Windows, Explosions, and Exterminate
So, the core mechanic of this hero class appears to be Reaper’s Mark, a (assumed to be strong) single target attack that applies a debuff of the same name as well as unleashing a Wave of Souls that does AoE Shadowfrost damage with a Shadowfrost damage vulnerability effect. The Reaper’s Mark debuff does incentivise the use of Frost/Shadow damage to generate stacks (especially Shadowfrost damage that has superior stack generation potential via Bind in Darkness), which explode for a set amount of single target damage per stack at the end of the Reaper’s Mark debuff, which does more damage (and potentially a Soul Reaper) when the target is at low health due to Grim Reaper while also doing relatively lighter AoE damage via Shuddering Soul. Depending on final numbers, the debuff windows have the potential to increase the relative priority of superior stack-generating abilities over less efficient stack generators due to the potential damage benefits. Via Exterminate, these explosions also provide super-charged Marrowrends that cost no runes (likely generating no RP because of that), that provide more damage for ST/AoE, potentially apply Blood Plague, and potentially reapply Reaper’s Mark. Much of the tree is built around making the Reaper’s Mark and the Exterminate abilities feel impactful in what appears to be a mostly damage-oriented way. Blood DK Mitigation and EHP is not majorly impacted by the main Reaper’s Mark gameplay loop; this is mostly limited to Exterminate lowering rune requirements for Bone Shield maintenance (to counterbalance Reaper’s Mark having a rune cost itself without the superior Runic Power generation of Heart Strike) and Shuddering Soul providing some amount of physical damage reduction. At first glance, the mechanics seem like they would make the standard Blood DK rotation more interesting.
There are also conditions in place to try and give Reaper’s Mark more value on targets who die quickly or are about to imminently die; with the debuff bouncing targets in multiple target situations or having the debuff immediately explode at 35% unit health on a 3 minute cooldown. As long as this still allows us to generate stacks for the full Reaper’s Mark duration after the enemy dips below 35% (with existing stacks exploding), there isn’t any real issue with that.
Functional Flavor Talents (Shadowfrost Expansion and Execution Theme)
While not providing any major gameplay implications, giving Blood Plague ticks a Shadowfrost proc effect with Blood Fever is a nice touch and, like all Shadowfrost damage, has synergy with the Reaper’s Mark debuff. Wither Away plays into this by making Blood Plague tick faster, so it also has an indirect effect of increasing stack generation potential through faster Blood Plague ticks. For similar reasons, Blood Boil providing Shadowfrost damage through Bind in Darkness as well as Death Strike providing Shadowfrost damage through Dark Talons are cool features.
Choice Node #1: Death’s Bargain vs. Rune Carved Plates
Death Pact has a lot of “feel bad” qualities, in general, when it comes to its use, especially for blood. It’s basically a Death Strike without a Blood Shield, on a long cooldown, and with an anti-heal shield (that is the same size regardless of how much actual healing is done by the Death Pact, which also has PvP dampening implications). So, even though Blood would often have healing to spare to heal off an anti-heal shield, the net upside of Death Pact is often limiting and there are many situations where it can be a net negative to use. Even in a best-case scenario, a net 20% health heal every 2 minutes is not particularly impactful. There’s potential to do some sort of satisfying kiss/curse ability with an anti-heal, especially for death knight that has plenty of self-healing potential on-hand, but I don’t think the current iteration of Death Pact has an upside that makes it feel satisfying; I don’t think this is just a numbers issue, something conceptually probably needs to change with it if it is ever going to see the light of day or feel satisfying to press.
The above Death Pact discussion is relevant because Death’s Bargain heavily utilizes Death Pact. to be fair, this type of effect is a lot more economical as a trigger-based healing effect, but the overall impact of this for Blood is going to be small (in addition to %-health triggers practically proccing on cooldown for the specialization) and the cooldown reduction on Death Pact, itself, is not going to be utilized with the current state of the talent trees nor would it be worth much even if Death Pact was baseline.
Which brings us to what people will pretty much always be using, Rune Carved Plates. An up to 10% damage reduction talent that can permanently be maintained is very strong for Blood (and likely Frost as well). That being said, with only a 5 second duration, there is some potential that it will force some amount of purposeful rune staggering to maintain this buff (you can’t go 4 globals without using a rune-spending ability), which could potentially be awkward since Blood often needs to Death Strike sporadically in response to incoming damage and 5 seconds is not a lot to work with. This potential issue will be understood more by us later as we move into alpha and take a closer look at the exact rotational implications, but a longer duration would reduce the chance of this having weird rotational implications if that ends up being an issue.
Choice Node #2: Swift End vs. Painful Death
Swift End obviously doubles Reaper’s Mark/Exterminate debuffs/procs potential, where Painful Death has a lower potential for Reaper’s Mark/Exterminate debuffs/procs, but a higher stack cap and less need to actually spend cast time on Reaper’s Mark it self relative to Exterminate procs. Again, it is hard to say for sure, but I’m not sure if there is enough differentiation going on here, so one talent (let’s say Swift End) may end up being superior to the other in all circumstances. Stronger 1 minute marks (with more chain proc potential) vs. 30 second marks just seems like a tradeoff that is hard to not make one-sided; a different approach may be warranted.
Choice Node #3: Dark Talons vs. Wither Away
Unlike the other choice nodes so far, this one seems to have a clear single target vs. multi target performance differentiation, where both could be situationally competitive. I would only comment that Dark Talons appears to have a goofy mechanism for raising maximum Icy Talons stacks (where it could just simply “raise max stacks by 2” without anyone batting an eye), while Wither Away is pretty straight forward.
Choice Node #4: Death’s Messenger vs. Expelling Shield
Death’s Messenger provides a mix of small single target damage (Raise Dead) and survivability (Lichborne, when talented) benefits, which just seems superior to a small and clunky casting speed slow debuff on magic damage taken during Anti-Magic Shell from Expelling Shield. In PvE, this effect would only get value against chain-casting enemies that are almost exclusively casting on tanks and a lot of effort is often put into disrupting their casts, anyway, so the value gain is extremely limited regardless of the number put on the cast speed slow. With aggressive enough tuning, something like the auto-application of a (reasonably large) cast speed slow debuff in an AoE on casting Anti-Magic Shell would maybe be appealing enough to consider, but the mechanics of applying such a debuff after something damages Anti-Magic Shell is going to be a hard sell regardless of numbers.
Deathbringer Rotation, Talent, and Build Considerations
Rotationally, there is some potential for Reaper’s Mark debuff windows to situationally incentivise Blood Boil casts (Shadowfrost with Blood Fever) over Heart Strike casts (Physical) with a large enough damage incentive from the extra Reaper’s Mark stacks, though this would need to overcome the lack of Runic Power generation and, subsequently, the impact that has on our ability to mitigate incoming damage. In any case, Blood Boil is cast frequently enough that Wither Away would not be incentivising more Blood Boil casts than usual, when taking both the shorter Blood Plague duration and Exterminate proc Blood Plague applications into consideration. And, without an elevated Reaper’s Mark priority on Blood Boil, the core Death Strike/Heart Strike/Blood Plague loop would be relatively unaffected by these hero talents, as a whole, unless Rune Carved Plates ends up requiring us to purposefully stagger our rune usage to maintain uptime.
Soul Reaper (as a 2 hit shadowfrost ability) and Abomination Limb/Bonestorm with Dark Talons (as multi-hit shadow damage abilities) would have enhanced stack generation potential relative to most other abilities (though Bonestorm has some fundamental issues which probably preclude its use); Abomination Limb/Bonestorm with Dark Talons, in particular, may get synced up with Reaper’s Mark debuff windows for their stack generation potential, if used.
Death and Decay already has a high priority, but the debuff windows would make it even more valuable as a multi-tick shadow damage ability.
Grim Reaper has the potential to make any change in rotation conditional on enemy health %, since enemy health can increase mark damage up to 30% damage.
Exterminate Marrowrends are assumed to have an obvious damage benefit to their casting, even if they do not immediately impact our Runic Power economy. Their existence means that we have less need to spend runes on Bone Shield management and increases Heart Strike potential (which would normally crowd out Blood Boil casts). Reaper’s Mark cast requirements are also to an extent where they are only cutting into potential Blood Boil cast time, which isn’t overly problematic.
IF Razorice damage instances generate Reaper’s Mark stacks, then that, in combination with a large increase in shadowFROST damage that is amplified by the Razorice debuff, could potentially give that runeforge more consideration on Blood (on single targets in particular, since Reaper’s Mark is very single target focused). More details and numbers are needed to say if Blood would ever actually consider using that.
Weird item effects with frost/shadow damage instances are something that this hero talent tree could take advantage of, should they generate stacks (for better or worse).
Dark Talons (if taken) increase the value of Icy Talons, while reducing the value of Bloodshot for obvious reasons.
Defensively, Death’s Messenger increases the value of Unholy Endurance.
Wave of Souls and Bind in Darkness provide bonuses that have some amount of scaling with Critical Strike, a stat that traditionally gives relatively high damage at the cost of having severely less defensive value than the other three secondary stats, which generally makes it an undesirable stat in any content that puts the tank under reasonable threat. Not enough information is available to know if these perks change decision-making with regard to secondary stats.
Overall
I think this hero class likely meets any class fantasy/thematic goals with Deathbringer, which seem to emphasize execution, shadowfrost, and a general “death” theme.
The main gameplay consideration is working with Reaper’s Mark for a powerful amount of mostly single target damage that is enabled via magic damage hits, along with empowered Marrowrends via Exterminate, for blended single target and AoE damage. An option exists to significantly amplify Blood Plague damage if a larger AoE contribution is desirable. This is in contrast to San’layn emphasizing the Heart Strike → Death Strike loop with a maintenance buff that enhances the damage of both of those abilities along with bonus rune regeneration, haste, and aggressive Vampiric Blood usage; which, from a damage profile perspective, is a lot more heavily focused on 1/2/5 targets than the profile being provided by Deathbringer which generally either deals in pure single target or uncapped AoE.
Defensive benefits are more centered around improving Effective Health than improving overall Death Strike effectiveness, mostly through Rune Carved Plates and, to a lesser extent, through the Shuddering Soul debuff. This is in contrast to San’layn’s defensive benefits being more mitigation-oriented (lower external healing requirements/having a higher degree of self-sustainability) via Haste and Rune regeneration improving Death Strike mitigation effectiveness.
Talent implications from the normal class/spec trees are pretty minimal at first glance, though part of that is due to the fact that Blood Death Knights don’t have too much wiggle room in their existing talent trees in the first place in combination with Deathbringer mechanics not putting emphasis on the more borderline talent tradeoffs that currently exist within the tree. In contrast, the Vampiric Blood talents for San’layn were more naturally competitive in the first place, so it was easier to tip the scales to lock them. While San’layn props up haste, a stat that is usually of above average value for Blood, Deathbringer provides some incentives for what is generally our worst stat, critical strike; neither hero talent tree is likely to have an overly large impact on overall stat considerations. More informed feedback will become available once alpha is available to iron out mechanics with testing.
I’m fairly happy with the general concept of both hero talent trees for blood, though there are potential pain points in both trees that could maybe use iteration (in Deathbringer’s case, some of those choice nodes have conceptually weak talents as well as Rune Carved Plates potentially creating some wonky rotational incentives given how short the buff duration is and the need for sporadic Death Striking).