3.1 - Holy Nerf Storm Batman!

There's a fair bit of 3.1 info coming out, in a frenetic storm of posts from Blizzard and PTR info from testers. I'd advise keeping a sharp eye on what's happening, since there's a LOT. A few of the major things coming out are;

Dual-Wield Nerfage

• Hungering Cold and Howling Blast have switched places in the talent tree.
• Howling Blast (Tier 11) now deals 50% additional damage to targets infected with Frost Fever. (Previously dealt double damage)
• Summon Gargoyle moved from Tier 5 to Tier 11.
• Blood-Caked Blade (Tier 4) now has a 3 sec internal cooldown.
• Necrosis (Tier 3) now only affects main hand auto attacks. (Previously affected all auto-attacks)
• Rune of Cinderglacier now procs per minute instead of a 5% chance.

Ouch. Blizzard's going as hard as they can go for killing dual-wield specs. With an internal cooldown on BCB, and Necrosis only triggering on autoattacks, there's very little point anymore in dual-wielding at all. Plus the nerf to Howling Blast and making it a 51-point talent greatly limits the available specs for dual-wielders.

Glyph Buff-Nerfage

Pretty much every DK glyph is being redone. Minor rant - Glyphs are striking me as a really dumb idea. Abilities are balanced against their glyphs, and the glyphs are nerfed / buffed as the abilities are. So, what's the point? Why were they even put in the game? Most glyphs don't change functionality of the ability, they just make it more powerful, which makes them mandatory if you use those spells. In essence, Glyphs just make respecs cost more. It's starting to bug me. Anyway, enough of that.

• Glyph of Plague Strike -- Your Plague Strike does 60% additional damage. (Old: 20% additional damage if a disease was on the target)
• Glyph of Death Strike -- Increases your Death Strike's damage by 2% for every 5 runic power you currently have. The runic power is not consumed by this effect. (Old: 2% regardless of runic power)
• Glyph of Hungering Cold *new* -- Reduces the cost of Hungering Cold by 10 runic power.
• Glyph of Unholy Blight *new* -- Increases the duration of Unholy Blight by 10 sec.
• Glyph of Death Coil *new* -- Reduces the cost of Death Coil by 8 runic power.
• Glyph of Pestilence *new* -- Your Pestilence ability now refreshes disease durations on your primary target back to their maximum duration.
• Glyph of Howling Blast *new* -- Your Howling Blast ability now infects your targets with Frost Fever.

The biggest DPS changes here are for Pestilence, Howling Blast, Unholy Blight, Death Coil, and Plague Strike. Pestilence I'm discussing below.

The Howling Blast glyph looks interesting. You want your targets to already have Frost Fever when you HB. But on the other hand the Glyph should reapply Frost Fever when you HB targets, meaning you should never have to waste a Frost rune on Frost Fever if you are using HB. Overall I expect it'll be a nice damage buff, but again you'll still want to have Frost Fever already applied to your victim, which you can do with Hungering Cold, I guess.

The Unholy Blight glyph looks good. Unholy Blight is a good use of RP, but it's a pain to have to keep reapplying it and wasting Death Coils. Extending the duration looks good, but I wouldn't blow a Major Glyph on it.

Death Coil looks great. Reducing DC to a 32 RP cost permits 2.3 DC's in one rotation (a PS -> IT -> SS -> SS rotation generates 75 rp), which represents a good upgrade. Might be worth using.

The Plague Strike glyph looks like it's going to really be worth using. While Plague Strike tends to be the red-headed stepchild of the Strikes, it's getting some pretty major buffs, and a 60% increase (!!!) to its damage may represent quite the glyph for Unholy.

For Blood, I'd likely set my glyphs as Obliterate, Icy Touch, Death Coil, with minors in Pestilence, Blood Tap, and Raise Dead. For Unholy, I'd go Scourge Strike, Icy Touch, Death Coil, with minors in Pestilence, Blood Tap and Raise Dead. For 2H Frost, it'd be Icy Touch, Frost Strike, Obliterate, with minors in Pestilence, Blood Tap and Raise Dead.

Pestilence Nerfage

• Pestilence is now 1 rank. It now spreads existing Blood Plague and Frost Fever infections from your target to all other enemies within 10 yards. (Previously dealt damage)
• Glyph of Pestilence *new* -- Your Pestilence ability now refreshes disease durations on your primary target back to their maximum duration.

Now, I'm in two minds about this. I see the point - it's to force DK's to actually use Blood Boil instead of just Pestilencing all the time. Fair enough, and having a reason to use BB is good for Unholy specs since it generates Death Runes.

It's also fairly nice that the new Glyph will refresh disease durations on the primary target, since that means you can retain your diseases with a Blood rune alone, and thus retain a Frost / Unholy for a Scourge Strike / Obliterate. For Unholy DK's, this is doubly good because it means that when your Glyph of Scourge Strike fails to proc, you'll only have to waste a quarter of a Scourge Strike to refresh your diseases (one Blood Rune = half a Scourge Strike every two rotations). This should push up overall damage quite nicely. But it also means that Pestilence will have a much shorter range.

The Good Stuff

• Blood Boil’s damage increased to make up for Pestilence no longer doing damage.
• Blood Boil now does some damage to undiseased targets and extra damage to diseased targets. Its radius has been decreased.
• Blood Plague: Now lasts 15 seconds untalented.
• Frost Fever: Now lasts 15 seconds untalented.
• Sudden Doom now procs a free Death Coil instead of requiring you to push the button. Ranks reduced from 5 to 3.
• Scourge Strike: Damage increased.
• Unholy Aura: Replaced with Improved Unholy Presence. Allows the Deathknight to keep the movement speed bonus of Unholy Presence in any presence, and increases rune regeneration rate while in Unholy Presence.
• Blood Strike now instantly strikes the enemy, causing 40% weapon damage plus 305.6, increased by 12.5% per disease on the target at rank 6. (Previously caused 50% weapon damage plus 191, and an additional 95.5 bonus damage per disease)
• Heart Strike now instantly strikes the target and his nearest ally, causing 50% weapon damage plus 368, increased by 10% per disease on the target at rank 6. (Previously caused 60% weapon damage plus 220.8, and an additional 110.4 bonus damage per disease)
• Plague Strike now deals 50% weapon damage plus 189 and infects the target with Blood Plague, a disease dealing Shadow damage over time. (No longer removes a HoT)
• Outbreak (Tier 3) no longer affects Blood Boil. It now affects Plague Strike and Scourge Strike.

Phew. There's a lotta stuff there. Most notable is the change to Strikes to directly scale percentage-wise on disease count - I expect this is directed at killing diseaseless specs. Other notable parts is Outbreak giving such a large modifier to Scourge Strike, and diseases lasting 15 seconds by default.

DPS Unholy

Given all the multipliers, I'm expecting 2H Unholy to be a serious powerhouse in 3.1 - it's actually getting quite a lot of buffs, which is peculiar since it was one of the premiere DPS specs anyway. Plague Strike is receiving massive buffs, Scourge Strike is getting buffed, and the Pestilence change benefits 2H Unholy which wants diseases up but also wants to avoid actually applying them.

Given the changes, I'm looking at this spec; 17/0/54 2H Unholy (3.1). Scourge Strike will hit hard with that spec, with Vicious Strikes, Outbreak, Ebon Plaguebringer and Rage of Rivendare. The spec should be able to maintain 2.5 Scourge Strikes per rotation if the Glyph goes off, or 2.25 Scourge Strikes per rotation if it doesn't.

The Blood runes are consumed with either Blood Strikes or Pestilences to maintain diseases, by casting with Pestilence -> Blood Strike to consume the two B runes and return a BU rune pair, to then be used with Blood Strike -> Blood Strike on the next rotation to return a UU rune pair. If diseases are up, Blood runes are consumed with Blood Strike -> Blood Strike to return a UU rune pair. When two Death Runes are present and Diseases are up, a Scourge Strike is used.

The bad bit for 2H Unholy is the removal of Shadow of Death (costing 2% strength and 2% stamina), and the nerf to Night of the Dead. It's a nerf because it sets the minimum Ghoul CD to 1.5 minutes, which means no more Ghoul spamming on a raid boss, or Corpse Explosion trickery with Ghouls.

DPS Blood

Blood is getting nerfs in one place and buffs in the other. Blood Gorged changed to ignore armor is a buff for those who are Expertise capped anyway, but I'm not convinced it's a buff to those who aren't. Blood is very physical-damage heavy, of the order of 60%, so it's likely to break even.

The nerf to Might of Mograine is going to hurt Blood's overall damage output, and is likely intended to curb Blood's burst in PVP. However, Bloody Strikes is now going to affect Blood Boil, which represents a big upgrade to Blood's AOE capabilities.

Sudden Doom looks great. Automatically proccing a DC should eliminate the issue where people at high latency would miss SD procs when in the 6 x HS portion of their rotation and overwrite them. Plus it saves GCD's. I like.

DPS Frost

Too much has really changed for me to comment at this time. I'll get on the PTR and have a mess with it over the next day or two. The whole tree has been shaken up and it needs experimentation to see what's good and what's not.

Time Management and Pug Elitism

One thing I often spot in LFG that I find rather amusing.

LF1M RaidInstanceHere, healer needed. Must be well geared, experienced X!
... five minutes later ...
LF1M RaidInstanceHere, healer needed. Must be well geared, experienced. Prefer X, tipping!
... five minutes later ...
LF3M RaidInstanceHere, healer + 2 DPS needed. Must be well geared, experienced, tipping well!
... five minutes later ...
LFG RaidInstanceHere.

And so on. This sort of thing is a study in time and personnel management. The RL is being fussy about the person who comes into the available slot because they don't want to get held up, but then they let themselves get held up waiting for Mr. Right. And in the meantime everyone's twiddling their thumbs, getting bored, and then the raid finally haemorrhages people and falls apart.

Sometimes it's a better idea to just take the person who's available to keep things moving and keep people interested.

Dual-Spec Coming in 3.1

For those who've been living under a rock, dual-spec is coming in with 3.1, according to MMO-Champion. Many are looking forward to. So am I, but in many respects I feel it's bad for the game.

Why I'm looking forward to it...

I play a lot of characters. A really stupid number, though fortunately I'm cutting back. Anyway, here's why I'm looking forward to it from the perspective of each of my characters (only two are 80, btw);

• Death Knight - Looking forward to having a 2H Unholy spec and either a DW Frost or a tank spec. Not so fussed with him, but being able to swap to a proper tank spec will be nice.
  
• Warrior - Will be great having a tank spec and a TG Fury spec for soloing / dps / tanking.
• Druid - He's Moonkin, so I'll probably go a Moonkin and a Resto spec, which will be very nice indeed. I'm not really interested in Feral at all with him.
  

I'm not so fussed about my Rogue, might go with a full-DPS pve spec and a pvp spec. Same with the Warlock, I'll probably dual-spec as Affliction and Destruction. All in all, it looks good, it'll give my classes some options in what I do with them, which is frankly awesome.

Why I think it's bad for the game...

It homogenizes the enforced talent choice penalty of hybrids. See, hybrids have always been designed so that they can do anything well, but they can't do everything well at the same time, where 'time' is defined as the one instance. So while the one character can swap on a daily basis between tanking, DPS, healing and so-on with respecs and a LOT of gear, they can't perform as well as the inflexible 'pure' classes in their unspecced roles. That's fine and dandy, and as a hybrid class lover, I don't mind that.

But dual-spec eliminates that. It allows a hybrid to, with the right gear of course, swap between roles at full strength in the one instance, even between encounters for trivial cost. That's great, for the hybrid player. It's great, for the raid. It's not so great if you're the poor bastard playing the inflexible non-hybrid class. Especially with Blizzard's stated motive of having hybrids perform at basically the same level (-5% or so) to 'pure' classes.

I don't think that's a good thing. I think it's bad. Now, keep in mind that most guilds don't care about min/max stuff, and this will be a big boon to them - now their tanks can swap to DPS when tanks aren't needed, and back to tank for the right fights. But for the min/maxers (and the great irony here is that pugs are often the worst min/maxers of the lot), they simply won't take a 'pure' class when they can take a two-role or triple-role hybrid and not lose significant DPS and still only need to gear up one person.

I feel kinda bad for the mages, warlocks, and rogues.

Weekly Update - 2H Unholy

Last weekend, I did something rather out of the ordinary for me - I went and did a whole bunch of pugs. And to be frank, I was rather surprised - it went well, and I had a lot of fun.

We went and knocked over Obsidian Sanctum 25 (tried with one drake and failed, did it with none), knocked over Vault of Archavon, and the next day I did Construct and Spider wings in Naxx-25. I was 2H Frost for OS25 and VoA25, and 2H Unholy for Naxx-25. I revised my 2H Unholy spec slightly to drop Corpse Explosion and one point in Virulence to take 5/5 Necrosis.

The performance of 2H Unholy was quite pleasing - I pulled 4285 DPS against Patchwerk, and was top overall. The raid was composed of quite a lot of very competitive DPS - the top seven were near me in overall output.

Now, the question is why did 2H Unholy perform so well on a single-target fight compared to say, DW Frost or 2H Blood? I put it down to a combination of the Sigil of Arthritic Binding and Glyph of Scourge Strike. I also popped Army of the Dead as soon as Patch was pulled, and the Ghouls from that added about 96k damage to my overall amount dealt. That's a heck of a lot from one ability.

The SS Glyph is quite powerful, and well worth using. With it, I have had quite lengthy strings on not needing to recast Icy Touch and Plague Strike, instead being able to use those runes on yet another Scourge Strike - this amounts directly to GCD's saved and extra damage dealt. The disadvantage is that fewer Plague Strikes means less chances for Desecration to trigger, but my spec doesn't have Desecration. I've had diseases stay up for two minutes before without me needing to recast, which is awesome to say the least.

Of course, having Night of the Dead means that I can use Army of the Dead every boss fight without fail, and the Ghouls can't taunt boss mobs anymore, so it's quite safe.

Overall I'm fairly pleased with it. Now to lay my hands on a Jawbone or Death's Bite...

2H Frost - Rotation Adjustment

As described in my 2H Frost article earlier, I thought there was something I was doing wrong, since the spec should have been performing better than it did.

I found out what I was doing wrong. I was using Plague Strike. Plague Strike offers way too little damage for its rune cost to bother using at all - it costs a valuable Unholy rune which ruins your rotation and stops you using an Obliterate.

Instead, you can set up a rotation of two Obliterates, an Icy Touch, and a Blood Strike. But how can you do this, that requires three Frost runes? Blood Strike turns a Blood rune into a Death rune, supplying the Frost rune you need for Icy Touch. You start the rotation off by using Blood Tap to issue you a Death Rune. This leads to the following;

1. Blood Tap
2. BS -> OB -> OB -> IT -> FS -> FS
3. Repeat step 2, doing a third FS where appropriate, casting HB every time Rime comes up.

Note that the interaction between your Blood Runes is fairly interesting - on each cycle you cast one Blood Strike using a Blood Rune, and an Icy Touch using a Death Rune. Thus on the next cycle your Blood runes have swapped so that you are still able to repeat this - you effectively have a 'permanent' Death Rune.

This is NOT a bug, in spite of what some hopeful people think. It's a natural consequence of how Blood of the North works. You can even do this without the use of Blood Tap, but your first rotation will be ugly;

1. BS -> BS -> OB -> OB -> FC
2. IT -> BS -> OB -> OB -> FC -> FC
3. Repeat step 2

Using Blood Tap to start the rotation simply permits you to launch straight into your DPS rotation without needing to start with a suboptimal rotation to get the Death Rune you need.

When doing this, it's very important to never blow a Death Rune on anything but Icy Touch or paying the Frost component of an Obliterate. If you do pay the Frost component of an Obliterate, the next Frost rune that comes up must be spent on Icy Touch. If you do accidentally blow that Death Rune on something else, you can resolve the situation by consuming your Blood Runes on Blood Strikes and get back into your rotation that way, but you lose DPS until you can fix the issue. Be careful not to blow a Death Rune on a Blood Strike, it'll cost you.

The thing about this rotation is it's very single-target focused, and hits really really hard. It will benefit hugely from a Sigil of Awareness because it's so focused on Obliterate. It's entirely feasible to intersperse Howling Blasts in amongst the Obliterates without interfering with your rotation, so do so if there's multiple targets.

There's another rotation which focuses heavily on getting six Death Runes (using Death Rune Mastery) in order to cast as many Icy Touches as possible. Even with my mediocre weapon, I found the Obliterate-focused spec worked better. Your mileage may vary.

Spec Review - 2H Unholy

Before I specced 2H Frost to check it out, I was 2H Unholy for a week, as 17/0/54. This spec performs well in single-target, AOE, and supplies quite a lot of raid utility. While I initially never liked Unholy, I realized it was because of Desecration. With this spec, it's good and I like it.

Recommended Sigil is the Sigil of Arthritic Binding, until you get a Sigil of Awareness. Recommended glyphs are Scourge Strike, Icy Touch, and something else (like Death and Decay). The Scourge Strike glyph doesn't look like much, but with this spec's prodigious use of Scourge Strike, you can often go for quite long periods of time without needing to recast diseases (I've managed two minutes without a single recast before).

This spec comes jam-packed with a huge grab-bag of utility and power. Key things are;

• Corpse Explosion - Can be comboed with Night of the Dead for powerful AOE. Also decent in its own right.
• Master of Ghouls - Your Ghoul is permament and strong. Use it.
• Dirge - Scourge Strikes generate 20 rp each now.
• Ebon Plaguebringer - Increases everyone's magic damage done to your victims by 13%. This also empowers Scourge Strike.
• Wandering Plague - Effectively lets your diseases crit, but it's much more than that. A Wandering Plague proc damages everything nearby, which means that if you're in a big AOE situation where your Diseases are on multiple targets, the damage contribution by Wandering Plague can increase very rapidly, resulting in huge AOE.
• Scourge Strike - Your main damaging ability. Hits hard, scales OK, does Shadow damage.
• Unholy Blight - Doesn't look like much, but even on one target it does more damage for 40 rp than Death Coil. On multi-target encounters it really shines.

Rotation for this spec will usually be;

PS -> IT -> BS -> BS -> SS -> Unholy Blight
SS -> SS -> SS -> DC Dump

When you get to the PS/IT part of your rotation, if your Glyph of Scourge Strike has procced recently, just SS instead. Recasts of Bone Shield should either be accomplished via a Blood Tap on a Blood Rune that's just been used, or by dropping a Scourge Strike to do an Icy Touch and recast Bone Shield somewhere.

The above is obviously for single-target applications. In multi-target, you'll typically do DnD -> PS -> IT -> Pestilence -> Unholy Blight, and then maintain diseases on everything as runes come up, Corpse Exploding whenever you can.

The Review

The spec works nicely. It feels fairly consistent, although Bone Shield interferes with rune usage. It's a powerhouse in AOE with disease spreading and does good DPS in single-target. Carries a fair amount of raid utility with it as well.

Spec Review - 2H Frost

I've recently specced into this to give it a whirl. So far, it seems quite impressive on trash, but seems to fall behind on bosses. This could be to my own inexperience, so it'll require experimentation. The spec is here - 27/44/0 2H Frost. I use the Sigil of the Frozen Conscience because I don't have a Sigil of Awareness.

In terms of Glyphs, I found the best mix was: Frost Strike, Obliterate, Icy Touch for majors and Raise Dead, Blood Tap and Pestilence for minors. Note that I use the same minors for every spec, and only change the majors, typically leaving the Icy Touch glyph in place for all specs.

In particular, the Frost Strike and Obliterate glyphs make a massive difference for this build - as a matter of fact you'll typically find your top damage ability will be Frost Strike, followed autoattacks and Obliterate.

Key abilities are;

• Veteran of the Third War - Gives vital extra Strength, Stamina and Expertise.
• Abomination's Might - Supplying 10% extra Attack Power whenever you Obliterate, this ability is rather powerful if you're the only DK in the raid with it. If you are not, I'd suggest Tundra Stalker instead.
• Annihilation - Necessary in this build because of its over-use of Obliterate.
• Deathchill - Typically consumed on a Howling Blast, forces a crit straight up for good damage.
• Improved Icy Talons - In place for the same reasons as with DW specs. It's good, it's powerful.
• Rime - The main reason to have this is not for the free Howling Blasts. It's for the 15% additional crit to Obliterate. Your Obliterates will crit like mad with this.
• Howling Blast - High damage output in an AOE scenario, but does less average damage than Obliterate in a single-target scenario (because of the crit rate of Obliterate). Still worth getting and using.
• Blood of the North - Converts your Blood Strikes into Death Runes for Icy Touches and more Obliterates.
• Frost Strike - Your main DPS ability. It's extremely cheap when glyphed (32 RP), can crit from Killing Machine, gets its damage boosted by Guile of Gorefiend, and also benefits from Black Ice. Oh, and it's all Frost damage. This hits very hard, and you'll be casting it an awful lot.

The rotation to use with this spec is

PS -> IT -> OB -> BS -> BS -> FS Dump
PS -> IT -> OB -> IT -> IT -> FS Dump

Whenever you get Rime procced, hit a Howling Blast. Other than that, you're basically blowing Death Runes on Icy Touches, and blowing Blood Runes on Blood Strikes, and maintaining your rotation otherwise.

The first rotation above generates 75 rp (two Frost Strikes), and the second rotation generates 105 rp (!). This leads me to think that it might better to drop 2/2 Icy Reach and Deathchill to take 3/3 Runic Power Mastery. That will require testing though to check the benefit.

Note that you're better off blowing two Death Runes on two Icy Touches than an Obliterate. It generates 50 RP as opposed to 20 RP, and does more damage. Both benefit from Rime, although Icy Touch does not benefit from Guile of Gorefiend. As weapon damage ramps up, I would expect there to come a point where Obliterate is a better spend of those points than Icy Touch is.

The reason why you Obliterate at all is because Obliterate does more damage than an Icy Touch + Plague Strike. You need something to consume those Unholy runes.

The Review

I won't lie. I like big numbers. Lots of them. This build gives lots of big numbers. Your crits hit REALLY HARD, and you do an awful lot of them. But something feels... wrong. I don't know how, but it feels like it's lacking in DPS output somewhere. Single-target it feels weaker than Blood (obviously), but AOE it feels weaker than Unholy (but with way higher AOE burst). Overall though it seems to position OK.

I need to test it out more. Unfortunately I'm tanking in this coming Naxx run, so I won't get a clear DPS look at Patchwerk.