Feedback: Death Knight Updates

[Kaivax]

In this thread, we’ll be testing and talking about Death Knights in The War Within. Look here for posts from the development team as adjustments and bugfixes are made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

Thank You

Before we continue testing The War Within, we’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who read and responded to the Hero Talent previews we posted over the last few months.

Looking to the Alpha

In this first Alpha build, every single class has at least one new Hero Talent tree available for testing, with the rest coming in the following weeks. We’re asking testers to initially keep several things in mind:

• There are UI elements on the talent panel that are placeholder, including things like talent icons, text, or final UI art.
• Some talents may not be functioning yet, or may be marked as not yet implemented (NYI)
• New spell visuals and audio for several new Hero Talent trees are still a work in progress. Many trees are using placeholder assets for now that will be updated over the course of Alpha.
• There are some talents that are not fully tuned yet. This is expected, and we will implement tuning adjustments throughout testing.

The combat design team has two big areas of focus right now that we are prioritizing over other concerns such as tuning or generic class updates/maintenance:

• Finish building the remainder of the Hero Talent trees that are not yet available.
• Fix bugs that are blocking testing of new talents.

With the Alpha build being playable and all of the discussion that will occur around the flood of data, we wanted to reiterate that the responses to our blog previews were highly valuable. The feedback we received allowed us to make some early improvements or revisions while we didn’t yet have a public test environment. It allowed us to take some big early swings on certain trees, and then react to early feedback quickly.

Going forward, we aren’t planning to publish any additional Hero Talent previews in blog form, since we’ll add the remaining classes to the Alpha as soon as they reach their ready-to-test state.

Working from Feedback

Several Hero Talent trees have received changes after reading feedback to the blog posts. Some of these were tuning changes to ensure that the Hero Talent tree felt competitive, while others were significant design changes. The feedback thus far has been of great benefit to us.

Going into Alpha, we feel good about the shape of the Hero Talent tree designs. Keeping a consistent number of utility and defensives nodes across all trees, having parity between number of choice nodes, and the overall structure of the trees are things we’re confident in.

We’re also working on tweaking some core class designs as well. In some cases, it was necessary to make adjustments to the class or specialization talent trees before significant work was done on a Hero Talent tree. In other cases, we did work seeking to improve base class talent tree designs.

Alpha Feedback

Now that we’re in Alpha, we’re looking for feedback on how it feels to playtest these trees. We’re specifically curious about:

• Hero Talents that you feel are “required” for your spec in a type of content, such as raiding or Mythic+, or that push you towards picking a specific tree.
• Hero Talents that create frustrating or unsatisfying gameplay or rotations for your spec.
• Hero Talents whose functionality is confusing, unclear, or difficult to track during gameplay.

Throughput comparisons of Hero Talent trees are helpful, but we’re more interested in gameplay, feel, and choice feedback at this stage. Also, when possible, we appreciate it when you focus posts or articles on a single spec and Hero Talent tree, rather than combining feedback about multiple issues.

Again, Thank You

We greatly appreciate all your feedback on Hero Talent trees and are very excited for you to see everything else we’re working on. Thank you!

– The World of Warcraft Combat Design Team

[Kaivax]

Hello Death Knights,

We wanted to take a moment to let you know that we are planning some updates for the Death Knight talent trees going into The War Within. While we’re still a few builds away from deploying the changes to the War Within Alpha, we’d like to outline some our goals with the changes, to give a better idea of what to expect.

DK Goals

• Reduce the amount of resource flooding that affects each spec to varying degrees,
• Reduce the throughput nodes toward the end of the tree. It currently has 9 such nodes that add a lot of tension and make it hard to flex into utility you’d otherwise like to take. While we don’t plan to outright cut the DPS throughput nodes, we will rather make them easier to pick up as you naturally progress through the tree. This will allow us to focus the capstones on much more utility or defensive focused talents.

Blood

Blood suffers from a lack of viable build options because it has to invest so heavily into the tree to feel like it functions. To some degree, all Death Knight specs suffer from this a bit more than other specs due to their unique leveling experience comparatively. We want to see where we can shift some abilities/talents learned in the spec tree that would make more sense baseline, to not only smooth out build diversity but also improve the leveling experience.

Frost

For Frost we want to take a look at Breath of Sindragosa to get it back to the more appropriate ~30 second duration to allow us more tuning knobs. This starts with the first note of reducing the flooding of resources available, one of the big offenders being Rune of Hysteria, which will see an update.

While we understand Breath is a very divisive ability it offers a very unique gameplay experience that not many of our other specs offer and while have no plans to remove that we do want to explore a potential alternative that feels fresh and exciting for players that wish to try something a bit different. Likely introduced as new capstone replacing Frostwyrm’s Fury which we plan to shift higher within the tree as a more easily accessible talent.

Unholy

As for Unholy, we have some plans to reduce the opener complexity. It’s not nearly as intuitive as it could/should be. Unholy also suffers from the amount of things it needs to track to really function optimally and it is less than ideal and we are looking to reduce the amount of “plates that need to be spinned”.

Gargoyle is one area we’d like to explore offering a new playstyle. While we don’t plan on removing it we do want to create a choice node with it that offers a less bursty option and leans a bit more into a more sustained damage alternative.

We’d also like to revisit Sudden Doom and diseases to offer a little bit more gameplay experience than the two currently do for Unholy.

Lastly, while we don’t have plans to remove Festering Wounds we do want find ways to make the friction of playing with them less. Vile Contagion was an ability introduced in Dragonflight that had some excitement around it but it never quite got its time. We plan to reduce its cooldown to 45 seconds and we plan to update Festermight to function similarly to Ironfur so playing around the act of bursting wounds feels less punishing and doesn’t require as nearly as much set up.

More to come

While the above isn’t exhaustive and doesn’t encompass all of our planned changes, we want to start the conversation so that players have a general idea of what’s coming.

Thank you for your continued feedback and we look forward to hearing more when we unveil the changes.

[Miniaug-illidan]

@Kaivax

Lastly, while we don’t have plans to remove Festering Wounds we do want find ways to make the friction of playing with them less.

While it is understandable that a full rework is a big effort, I’m personally extremely disappointed to read this as the current direction of Unholy Death Knight. Festering Wounds have always been disliked by the vast majority since their introduction in Legion Alpha, and their perception has never gotten better. Festering Wounds have been consistently buffed and had talents added to increase their relevance, and yet we are still in a situation where they feel more like a barrier to the core Death Knight toolkit than an enjoyable mechanic.

When Festering Wounds were introduced, they fulfilled the same function as the old Festering Strike and how it originally interacted with the old rune system. The core Death Knight ability system has always functioned as a trio: a button you want to press for the most possible damage, a maintenance button you need to press that you don’t immediately benefit from, and finally a runic power dump. That design has never been the flaw, the flaw lies purely in the implementation. Festering Strike occupies the space of the maintenance button due to the existence of Festering Wounds. In the past, you were still forced to press Festering Strike due to Rune restrictions, but you had more freedom of choice on when to press it based on the player’s discretion of how they used other abilities available to them. This created a positive feedback loop for the player as they were able to best decide how and when to use their abilities within reason.

Currently we are forced by design to constantly press that maintenance button that feels restrictive and unsatisfying arbitrarily throughout the fight, when it’s supposed to occupy an unsatisfying “investment” button that leads to something. The initial design of Festering Wounds stems from the flaw in the Rune system rework which failed to restrict you enough and direct gameplay, and as a consequence, it needed a way to direct resources. Comparatively, the original Rune system still forced those unsatisfying “investment” casts to be able to be manipulated into something that felt like you were in control of your own resource flow rather than being dictated by an external rule that sticks to the target - even if the end result is the same, losing that visceral feeling sucks. Instead, we are currently forced to press the same old button that does very little outside of moving the ebb and flow of the spec in an encounter. It feels a lot like we are pressing buttons to fill time instead of there being a rise and fall that goes with buildup and payoff mechanics.

This feels like a turning point where we could finally get rid of a restrictive and unsatisfying mechanic that has been plaguing this spec for such a long time, and the chance is about to slip through our fingers. As such, it is hard to get excited about Unholy Death Knight’s prospects in The War Within.

Wounds have existed in-game for almost 3000 days, or more than 8 years now, before this expansion is released (Launch of Legion Pre-Patch until an approximate release date of Sept 1, 2024). This will be considerably longer by the end of the expansion - assuming an 18 month release schedule - than the original version of Death Knight existing (2805 days from WotLK Release, Nov 13, 2008, to Legion Pre Patch, July 19, 2016) if nothing changes. Quite simply at this point, it’s an immensely unfulfilling experience playing this spec after all this time with the small amount of iterative changes that we have seen over the past 8 years. Attempts have been made to fix this version of the spec, and this reads like another attempt, when it feels past time to let the experiment go. I understand that reworking this class/spec is an extremely large undertaking, but considering DK has seen a decrease in playerbase since this design was introduced, it feels like it will only get worse trying the same thing over and over again.

[Taeznak-area-52]

Rider of the Apocalypse Feedback

To start this strong, the hero talent tree for Rider of the Apocalypse is absolutely perfect in theme, class fantasy and lore for a Death Knight. Linking back to everything we had previously done in Legion in order to give us more power in The War Within is honestly brilliant.

But, I’ll be blunt, the gameplay just isn’t there. It’s probably the most bland, boring hero talent tree I’ve played with when it comes to any sort of gameplay interaction because there just isn’t any. You do what you always do, but, sometimes there’s a Rider there with you. Maybe sometimes you’ll get some more strength, or stack a DoT, but that just isn’t engaging at all. Would absolutely love to see some sort of active interaction with each Rider while they are helping us, not the same old passive pets we have been complaining about for so many years. With a tree so insanely well done in terms of fantasy, I’d love to see this also be something that’s just REALLY fun to play as well.

Each of the Riders need something more, something that makes us think about our gameplay while they are active, and actively change our rotation in some way. While I’ve had some ideas about what could be done, the best I can think of is actively changing the way some of our abilities work while each one is up. For example, Whitemane could just turn Outbreak/Howling Blast into Undeath, so that we can control when it starts. Putting that agency into players’ hands, rather than letting it come down to a random proc would probably make this one of the best trees in the game. This does come with the downside of each of the Riders spawns being random though. But, do they have to be…?

Idea number 2, is heavily inspired by another game in the same genre with a specific… summoning job. Why not give us the agency to pick what one is summoned at any given point in time, limiting it to 1 of each Rider per cycle? While this does have the downside of leading to a bit more button bloat (4 buttons to summon riders might be a bit unruly), if the rest of our kit is properly whittled down, could fit in quite well, and lead to some real thought in the order we summon them in. If you know there’s a large group of enemies coming out shortly, you could choose to save whatever rider is best for that purpose, rather than praying to the RNG gods to give you a good rider for that task. Actively choosing the order of each Rider you summon in the cycle to best suit your scenario could lead to some incredible gameplay benefits and skill expression for players when combined with proper gameplay-altering mechanics while each one is active.

I know this is a lot to ask, but for a Hero talent tree with such strong theming, fantasy, and love from the community, dropping the ball on the gameplay aspects could be disastrous for community perception.

[Unwieldly-stormrage]

@Kaivax

Lastly, while we don’t have plans to remove Festering Wounds we do want find ways to make the friction of playing with them less. Vile Contagion was an ability introduced in Dragonflight that had some excitement around it but it never quite got its time. We plan to reduce its cooldown to 45 seconds and we plan to update Festermight to function similarly to Ironfur so playing around the act of bursting wounds feels less punishing and doesn’t require as nearly as much set up.

The problem I feel mostly is wounds in aoe situations is a pain to add/burst outside of the Dark Transformation and Infected Claws then DnD. Why not just make Vile Contagion consume up to 6 wounds to spread a DoT based off wounds instead? (Like reverse Unholy Frenzy). Would make how DKs have always been with single target aoe cleave. Example is Howling Blast and Rime procs.