More Death Knight News...
Posted by Bullean on December 04 2008 01:17:59
Following up on our previous news post about that possible DK nerf... they are bent on softening Death Knight Rune Strike dmg output... more on this in the actual news post from Curse.com. Read more to see more.
Extended News
Ebon Plaguebringer Doesn't Stack From Multiple DKs
There are a few cases where classes or specs with the same debuff don't provide equal benefit to everyone. While we don't want the actual debuff to stack, we also don't want to penalize players for not having the benefit or get into a race for who can get the debuff up first. Unfortunately it's not a trivial problem to resolve or we already would have done so, but it is something we want to get fixed.
In the meantime, if your dps is suffering beyond what you can endure, you do have the option of going Blood or Frost.
Is Rune Strike Truly a "Rogue Killer"?
I'll try this once again. I used "rogue killer" as shorthand, but so many players have such blind hatred for rogues that they only noticed those couple of words and missed the actual intent of the change.
We made Rune Strike a tanking tool. Really. We even made the decision in my office, and I think it was just after dinner one night. DK threat turned out to be a lot lower than we expected, largely because if an early hit in the rotation fails to land (miss, dodge or parry) then the DKs runes and rotations are all messed up. We needed an ability that you couldn't just spam, so we made it only light up when the tank dodges or parries. But Rune Strike was packing such a punch (and it needed to) that we didn't want to let it miss or we weren't really solving the threat problem.
The problem is this makes it a very good PvP tool vs. melee classes, because they are attacking the DK (who dodges or parries) and they often rely on their own avoidance to escape melee damage.
It's dangerous from a design perspective to have an ability really overbound like that. If DK threat was too low, we couldn't buff Rune Strike because that ends up being a big PvP buff. If DKs needed to do more PvP damage to melee classes we couldn't buff Rune Strike, because that makes them better tanks.
Our intent was not that the DK is all about Rune Strike the way the Arms warrior is all about Mortal Strike. Rune Strike isn't even that interesting an ability -- it doesn't use runes and isn't tied to diseases which are actually the core mechanics we want the DK to be concerned with in PvE and PvP.
It's not that we love rogues (or that we hate them). We just didn't want the PvP Death Knight to be a Rune Strike slinging fiend. Use Blood Strike, Howling Blast, Scourge Strike or your other abilities. If those aren't enough to let you stand up to melee, we'll make adjustments, but almost certainly not through Rune Strike.
If it can't help but distract you, forget the "rogue killer" part. We didn't want Rune Strike to be this ungodly PvP tool which it just happened to be.