id love it if our dancing rune weapon did vampiric strike aswelll.
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It think that might be a bug. Seems completely counterintuitive for DRW not to copy Vampiric Strike.
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thats such an obvious thing that i didn’t even think to test that it wouldn’t work. quality code from indy company.
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Quickly tested it on some training dummies and my rune weapon was actually doing vampiric strikes as well, not sure if/when this was fixed but right now on live this appears to not be an issue.
It was defiantly worthy of the time to test, and it is interesting that the rune weapons heal themselves instead of the death knight, but I wouldn’t call that a bug like the potential of rune weapons not doing vampiric strike at all would be a bug.
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I play my dk off handedly so I maybe completely wrong with this but having to consistently hit vampire strike and be sitting at full runic power just to maintain the buff or hitting death strike as you said even when you don’t need it feels really weird.
Also building up the stacks feels weird because it’s so important it feels like you neglect everything else over it.
And lastly wholly agreed on blood beast, proc on a proc is kind of ridiculously.
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ten characters.
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sick but idk if this will help smooth the clunkyness of this newest itteration.
thanks for testing that! i missed it through it n ot healing me.
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why dosnt rune weapon increase its own blood plague duration through vampiric strike?
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I have 3 main gripes with sanlayn and 2 of them would be fixed with the removal of rng blood beasts. You do no damage without procs on bigger pulls which also means you will have aggro problems, having a blood beast spawn on Gift or anything really would fix both these problems. My third problem is the lack of boneshield interaction. whether we get more runes somehow or otherwise gain boneshield somehow, either would be fine. Right now as of 11.0.5, i have to use death grip as part of my rotation so that my bone shield doesn’t fall off as opposed to pressing marrowrend.
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The damage buffs will be good for helping with threat. However, I feel like they still aren’t addressing some of the mechanical issues in the tree. Excited to play with them nonetheless.
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Tomorrows changes look mildly promising.
My main problem with the tree is I just don’t feel like a San’layn much at all
It’s hard to explore a Hero Spec that with some are based on Hero Units when DK is the Hero Unit. It’s the thing Hero Specs are supposed to explore.
What other aspects of the DK are there? There really isn’t any. Rider was for the people that wanted mounted combat and should be called Harbinger. Death ringer should be Reaper since it doesn’t reflect on anything of Deathbringer Saurfang which is the only Deathbringer I know of, and San’layn should just be scrapped and something else put in it’s place.
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Has entirely different connotations in game now with Xal’atath.
Herald of the Apocalypse or Caller of the Horsemen perhaps
And Reaper? What ties does that have to DK? Where have we had anything DK that’s a Reaper? Sounds more like a Warlock thing due to the Black Harvest.
Death Knights are unfortunately a very vague class from the get go, unlike say Rogue, a Warrior, a Mage or a Priest. When two people or more people talk about death knights we don’t all picture the same thing. Are we warriors with a bit of spellcasting, or are we spellcasters in plate? Are we just scoundrels that use forbidden magic and techniques or were we infused with dark powers? Were we mind controlled to be evil or are we Anti-heroes who just happen to be on the right side this time? Are we based on Warcraft II Death Knights? are we based on Warcraft III Death Knights? both? neither? Are we based upon other scourge Wc3 hero classes? Are we just the class to dump all the Warcraft III scourge aesthetics into? Are we fallen paladins or something different entirely? Do we keep our souls in our rune blades like a lich’s phylactery (like wc3) or do we even have souls?
The rabbit hole goes even further when you start to bring specs into the mix. What is “Unholy”, is it an anti-healer to counter “Holy”? is it just another word for necromancer? is it a spellcaster that practices that which is unsanctioned by “The Light”? Are we simply spreaders of plague and decay? Are we swordmasters who lean into dark magic? Are we fast like unholy presence? unholy frenzy? wc3 unholy aura? wc2 haste? or are we slow unstoppable juggernaughts? Does this mean we attack fast and move slow, or move slow and attack fast, or both fast or both slow? Does this differ from frost or blood, or is this the same across two or three specs?
Unfortunately all the answers to these questions are both very subjective, and seem to change based upon expansion, spec, playstyle, pve vs pvp, who is writing ect, which doesn’t give us a very good starting point.
So then we come to the more relevant question, What is a San’layn? We know the San’layn are the remains of some of the blood elfs that attacked the frozen throne under command of Kael’thas, only to fail and be reanimated as vampiric undead, possibly to replace the niche previously occupied by the Dreadlords of the legion (though ever since shadowlands the Dreadlords make about as much sense as Warhammer 40k Alpha Legion memes). We also know from ICC that the San’layn could be virtually any class as we killed San’layn trash mobs in various class armor sets. I personally would have preferred if they could become an allied race option and I could get my San’layn Death Knight that way, but I also understand there are so many elves in this game that one could call it World of Elfcraft, and with giving out the “Dark Ranger” skins to all blood elves we can basically already RP as San’layn in any of the other classes. So really it comes down to the only part of San’layn that is different from the other elves, which is the vampiric theme.
So considering everything is already so vague, thrown together and full of retcons it all just falls down to rule of cool and I think being an explicitly vampiric death knight is cool. I’ve always gravitated towards the vampiric aesthetic despite official support in past expansions, but now that blizzard have decided to make it a real thing I decided to restart my subscription and try it out. How exactly does one achieve a vampiric death knight? I have my ideas, but I’m sure other people have theirs as well, and honestly my ideas probably aren’t as a good as what we could come up with as a community, and so I started this thread.
Does San’layn need to exist? no of course not, but with how fast and loose they play with the lore these days I don’t think anything NEEDS to exist. I am happy they came up with the idea and gave it a shot? yes, yes I am. Do I think they can do better? Yes I do, that’s why I made this thread. Do I think they should remove the hero talent and try something else entirely? No, I don’t, I want to see them at least try to make this work.
don’t waste your effort arguing with kelliste, they just argue to argue and walls of text do nothing but waste your own time and energy.
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If you have to ask some of those questions then methinks you do not know what a Death Knight is. From our lore we have one of the clearest class fantasies in game.
We are now former scourge, Specifically fallen heroes raised by Arthas to be his champions to command the undead and bring death to the living.
We WERE mind-controlled to be evil, then we broke free and had to choose whether we still walked that path or our own.
We, like Demon Hunters, are essentially an Anti-Hero Champion, using whatever means gets the job done.
That said in terms of gameplay we have been all over the place like Blizz doesn’t know how to properly express our class fantasy or lore in terms of game mechanics. Or at least has a lot of trouble making it work on a spec level.
And after the sheer BS of Shadowlands it just feels like Blizz has tried as hard as possible to just write us out of the story.
Our purpose as a class, story and gameplay wise, has been thrown into and left in flux. Something Blizz sorely sorely need to address.
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Blizzard has put out more than enough information to specify what a DK is instead of leaving it open for interpretation. People say what they think a DK should be rather than what it is.
They are undead warriors of the scourge that wields necromancy and uses runeblades. They spread disease, raise the dead and leave a wake of death behind them. They also had an unholy aura that would buff surrounding undead units increasing their movement speed. This was expanded a little bit in Wrath where Blood and Frost was brought into the picture.
You are asking a lot of questions that don’t need to be asked since they have all been answered already within the lore.
The fact of the matter when people say Death Knight the majority of people know exactly what it is. There are just certain people that don’t like the direction Blizzard took and think their ideas are better. They have given up some stuff to the playerbase because specs are apparently just supposed to involve 1 color therefore everything needs to be Frost or unholy, or all purple, or no red. That type of design is beyond boring.
I definitely agree. I like where they are going with the whole “frenzy” aspect of Gift of the San’layn granting a bunch of haste and Vampiric Strike for the duration, but it loses much of its luster when you realize that there is a whole lot for us to do with that haste. Sure, we get to spam abilities, but those individual abilities aren’t particularly interesting. The most flavorful element of the tree (Blood Beast) is the most unreliable.
It would be cool if we got some real bonuses for taking the time to stack up GotS during DRW windows. Maybe an additional talent like Red Thirst that feeds us CDR for spending Runic Power. There has gotta be a bigger payoff for incentivizing us to spam Death Strike after all the changes they made to how it functions.