Hero Talents
Deathbringer (Blood/Frost)
Death’s Bargain renamed to Pact of the Deathbringer.
Exterminate now deals reduced damage beyond 8 targets.
San’layn (Unholy/Blood)
Visceral Regeneration renamed and redesigned: Visceral Strength – When Crimson Scourge/Sudden Doom is consumed, you gain 5% Strength for 8/5 seconds.
Infliction of Sorrow now deals 100% of the remaining damage of the consumed disease (was 200%).
Fixed an issue that prevented Blood Beasts from spawning.
Unholy
Infliction of Sorrow now only functions with Virulent Plague for Unholy Death Knight.
Blood
New Talent: Bloodied Blade – Parrying an attack grants you a charge of Bloodied Blade, increasing your Strength by 0.5%, up to 4% for 15 seconds. At 8 stacks, your next parry consumes all charges to unleash a Heart Strike at 200% effectiveness, and increases your Strength by 10% for 6 seconds.
Several talents have moved around on the Blood tree.
Frost
Obliteration now has an additional effect – While Pillar of Frost is active it will now also increase the cost of your Frost Strike by up to 15 Runic Power to deal up to 52.5% additional damage.
Unholy
Foul Infections now correctly increases disease crit chance by a flat 5% (was previously multiplicative crit chance).
Unholy Blight is now passive and now surrounds the ghoul instead of the Death Knight. New Tooltip – Dark Transformation surrounds your ghoul with a vile swarm of insects for 6 seconds, stinging all nearby enemies and infecting them with Virulent Plague and an unholy disease that deals damage over 14 seconds, stacking up to 4 times.
Sudden Doom no longer causes Epidemic to burst Festering Wound on targets.
When talented into Harbinger of Doom, Sudden Doom now displays the activation overlay images separately, left and right, for each stack.
IDK if I like that Unholy Blight change, although having you pet charge in while you stay behind to dot everyone will be nice at times.
New Blood talent seems awesome, but it should empower your next heartstrike so you have agency,
Its just people getting what they asked for with the Frost Strike chance during Pillar with Obliteration but its not really going to do anything overall. Why would you want to spend runic power in pillar windows when KM procs are abundant and you still have runes to spend? This is really just going to be good for DW Obliteration builds since they can make use of Shattering Blade and all these things stacking up. So 2h going for Obliterate, DW going for Frost Strike, they just need to make it so that Frost Strike can consume KM procs as well so DW can get full crits on their weapon strikes.
Not for 2h, thats the point. On average for 2h Frost Strike is roughly half of that of Obliterate. Increase Frost Strike by 50% when in Obliteration windows with a flood of KM procs and you still arent going to spend RP with a 2h.
Even for DW without FS KM procs, it might be better to just use Obliterate because its a full crit instead of a non-crit or a partial crit. Many people forget about DW crit mechanics with strikes like Obliterate and Frost Strike, seems like Blizzard has forgotten about it as well since they are pushing DW to go with Frost Strike again along with just more stable damage.
The beta Blood tree pathing is super wonky and restrictive. There are 3 nodes that lead to Improved Bone Shield and Rune Tap. One of those source nodes is… Dancing Rune Weapon for both? You WILL be taking Dancing Rune Weapon. The 2 other source nodes are redundant and a poor design decision, since all they do is block pathing for other nodes.
This is an amazing change. We’ve been begging them to reduce our cd bloat. Now if they’d just get rid of Vile Contagion, preferably by improving Festering Scythe, Unholy will be in a great spot as far as cooldowns are concerned.
We need a reliable wound spreader. We need Festering Strike to be a fun button press. We don’t need another cooldown. Festering Scythe could potentially fix all of these.
Then the only thing left that feels bad in terms of gameplay, will be cleaving strikes. Of course wounds are still hot garbage, but who knows maybe we’ll get a major patch update.
what gets me is the fact the devs mentioned “less friction” in terms of wounds. Let’s be real, wounds will never not have friction. Why they continue to try and make it work is beyond me.
Easy fix for cleaving strikes is to just dks a runic spender that does aoe damage. This would help fix frost and UH in terms of the cleaving strikes.
As for wounds, well I am not entirely sure, but I do like the idea of festering scythe to just replace Vile contagion.
I understand this for Foul Bulwark and Preservation for the Ebon Blade, But Heart breaker and Hemostasis are really good.
For me the only issue atm is that Leeching Strikes, and Blood Feast are so redundant that even the next best talent is several times better than them and that Rune tap is a situational talent and is too centralized for being situational.
I’d like to see Coagulopathy moved to Rune Taps location. Rapid Decomposition moved down and Rune Tap in its place.
I agree its great, but I wish it was still centralized on the player or us and the ghoul so we could control exactly what’s in it for the rare case where your ghoul happens to be a spot that’s not optimal.
The DK dev is tone deaf, has blinders on, or who knows really… . The number of times that the community has brought up scaling, stacking modifiers, and the over reliance of pillar/pillar dnd to do damage being bad, is borderline gross negligence at this point.
They just continue to stack new problems on underlying issues without properly fixing/addressing one of the core issues with frost. Bandaid design at its best, and complete clown behavior on the devs part.
Why engineer and pave a decent road when we can just put gravel fill or asphalt patches every couple feet after each season stressed the infrastructure more and more…
Dk dev is a dept of transportation employee in large north eastern metro confirmed. Only sensible explanation at this point.
Poking fun aside, wounds are old combo points and (no surprise) feel terrible to play with. Which is why they removed them from rogues. Instead rogues only have energy and combo points. We have rp, wounds, and runes. More systems with the same broken asinine garbage the old dev team rightfully removed.
More systems, antiquated systems, and a convoluted mess for aoe math. Who else has quadratic math in calculating aoe damage.
I’m still flabbergasted by that statement…they recognize wounds suck and they must see the overwhelming negative feedback around them, but they just choose not to do anything about it? It’s a new expansion, when if not now?
8 years later, wounds still feel like a half baked mechanic. They could be good, but the devs have never invested the time into properly improving them. They always feel bad in single target and only somewhat enjoyable in AoE when their damage is ridiculous, which always leads to nerfs.
Combo points, ground based AoE activator, inconvenient talent trees, dated visuals…it really feels like DK is just stuck in the past. They have made some decent changes, but it definitely does not feel like enough for a new expansion.
