[3.1] Ulduar Preview - NOW WITH PATCH NOTES

[Gobbeldygook]

Summary: Every DPSer except for druids, mages, ele shaman, shadow priests, and rogues got nerfed.  Healers and tanks are marking their doors with blood.

[Ingmar]

Summary: Every DPSer except for druids, mages, ele shaman, shadow priests, and rogues got nerfed.  Healers and tanks are marking their doors with blood.

Looks to me like marks hunters were improved, I don't see much change to beast either way, and I can't tell about survival.

[Fordel]

My Moonkin enrage talent was totally nerfed 

[Azaroth]

I'll need that dual spec feature to quickly spec the fuck out of Ret so I can get into a raid now.



What's funny is that GC was quoted as saying he wanted Ret DPS (already proven to be higher only than feral as far as single target) to remain the same for Ulduar, which meant some buffs since all of our undead powers were going out the window.

They then decided that this would be in the form of replacing exorcism, holy wrath, undead glyph, and crusade with, uh... exorcism.

Now a huge single target DPS nerf?

Oh, thanks. Cocksuckers.

[K9]

Dual spec costs 1000 gold.

[Azaroth]

People shouted me down when I said it'd be expensive as hell.

I'm surprised it wasn't more, honestly.

Edit: Actually, I'm not. Even at this price it won't make sense for a lot of people people to do it. People who both PvP and raid seriously, and dedicated guild hybrids. Beyond those people, it only makes sense if you have money to burn.

[K9]

A website listing the new achievements in 3.1

Noble Garden has evidently been reworked, that's nice.

Insane in the Membrane   Raise your reputation with the areas listed below.   Title Reward: The Insane
   Honored with Bloodsail Buccaneers
   Exalted with Booty Bay
   Exalted with Everlook
   Exalted with Gadgetzan
   Exalted with Ratchet
   Exalted with Darkmoon Faire
   Exalted with Ravenholdt
   Exalted with Shen'dralar

[Zetor]

Fitting name for that achievement. I mean.. Shen'dralar rep? srsly?


-- Z.

[WindupAtheist]

I'll buy it if I ever decide to PVE again. As it is, PVP spec is plenty for crushing daily quest trash for gem money.

[kildorn]

Dear god, the death knight changes.

Frost got it's Ass kicked. Howling Blast's damage is down the tubes. Which is amusing, considering that actual deep frost specs were the lowest damage output.

Blood .. I'm not sure how blood's doing. Blood Strike massive boost, what appears to be a slight nerf to heart strike? I need to actually run numbers on gear to see how blood fared.

Unholy.. appears to have been buffed?

Across the board DW builds got smacked down no matter the spec. Diseaseless spec found dead in it's sleep.

The aura alterations are cute until you hit Unholy, at which point WHAT THE FUCK? You're letting it reduce rune cooldown? WHAT? Inc every deathknight being unholy again.

[Jeff Kelly]

I like the changes for the most part. Some specs really have gotten ridiculous and the current incarnation of the DK is just too über.

Also 1000 gold ist not that of a big deal anymore, especially for a Level 80 toon. My Level 51 Draenai Priest already owns 1600 gold just from selling ore and herbs that I gathered while leveling. At that pace I will be half way to the epic flyer by the time I hit 70.

[Nevermore]

* Howling Blast: Swapped positions with Hungering Cold in the talent tree (HB is now at 51, and HC is now at 31). In addition, the damage bonus for targets with Frost Fever is now only 20%.

Saw this one coming.  Makes me a 

Edit: after seeing the rest of the DK changes, it seems my DW Frost DK is dead and buried.  And no, mine wasn't one of the cookie cutter split Frost/Unholy specs.

[Merusk]

Apparently, Blood was damn uber if you did a diseseless rotation using Heart Strike/ Oblivion and had 3500 unbuffed AP. I haven't tried it myself as I didn't want to buy the fucking 200g oblivion glyph. 

Dual Wield looks pretty buried in terms of dominance. 

Unholy looks to have gotten a boost if you were running the 17/0/54 build using the new plague strike rune. You weren't running diseases too often anyway with only a 25% proc rate.

Raise Ally got fucked.. which sucks because it was a useful PvE talent, you'd wind-up only having a guy down for a minute on long fights.

Plague strike doesn't remove HoTs? wtf?! Yay no ability to kill healers.  Strangulate is also pretty useless now.. 1 min cd, no damage. 

They're working hard trying to make Unholy a viable presence.  Combine it with the new desecration and you're getting a nice buff to damage, indeed.  Too bad they removed Unholy Aura, that was a nice runspeed boost for raiding.

[Nevermore]

They're working hard trying to make Unholy a viable presence.

Wat?  Every DK I've ever seen on my server outside of my own is already Unholy.

[Mazakiel]

Presence as in the stance-like deal. 

That being said, it does seem like they're going to make unholy as a spec even more popular.  I know these things are bound to change, but..bleh. 

[kildorn]

Yeah, unholy presence had issues, it was only viable in pvp and certain blood rotations that were GCD starved.

The changes to unholy are brutal. Increasing SS's damage, fixing garg again, new glyph extends UB's duration. Glyphed, SS procs diseases enough that I only reapply every third rotation or any time I have to back out of combat (arch jumps, etc), so the new PS glyph is enh.

New Pest glyph appears to still be minor, but now **refreshes disease duration on the primary target**

[Paelos]

We all kinda saw the DK nerf coming. They were topping meters in mid-level gear with little effort. One of the guys in my run was putting out 3.5k dps while also working on a paper and raiding.

I'm a little disappointed in the Titan's Grip nerf, but I suspected that was coming as well to bring it more in line with Arms.

[Phunked]

Dear god, the death knight changes.

Frost got it's Ass kicked. Howling Blast's damage is down the tubes. Which is amusing, considering that actual deep frost specs were the lowest damage output.

Blood .. I'm not sure how blood's doing. Blood Strike massive boost, what appears to be a slight nerf to heart strike? I need to actually run numbers on gear to see how blood fared.

Unholy.. appears to have been buffed?

Across the board DW builds got smacked down no matter the spec. Diseaseless spec found dead in it's sleep.

The aura alterations are cute until you hit Unholy, at which point WHAT THE FUCK? You're letting it reduce rune cooldown? WHAT? Inc every deathknight being unholy again.

I would imagine that Howling blast will get a base line damage buff to compensate for lower burst (which was already... not really that big). This basically kills the 32/39 DW spec though, since not only did they take away their gargoyle, their necrosis and whatnot, but they also moved HB too far for them to get. Ironically, the diseaseless blood rotation (which is already very good dps, especially on fights where perfect rotations for other specs break down) got a buff since they don't even have to press a fucking button for Sudden Doom anymore.

This is pretty much the last blow in the DW coffin. They should simply remove the ability to use the one handers and consolidate the DK into a 2-handed class. 

Also, if it's anything like the other auras, Unholy aura is going to be changed to reduce GCD instead of Rune cooldown. Hopefully that was a typo, since the other auras basically make the presence ability apply to all other presences.

What amuses me the most are the warrior changes. One talent change? Yeah baby, arms is going THROUGH THE ROOF!


EDIT:  They posted the rationale for the plague strike change. It was basically: resto druids already suck in arena, you don't need more tools to curbstomp them harder. Also, you had OP as hell surivivability and self healing, and we didn't like that. But here, have some more damage. Because you couldn't already own a resto druid after a mindfreeze --> strangulate combo.

[Merusk]

If it applys the GCD reduction of UhP to other presences, meh.. no biggie. The Rune cooldown is HUUUUUUGE.

No more DK raid buffs, though.  What speccing for one of; a 15% run speed, 4% damage->healing or a magic resistance Aura, was too much?

[kildorn]

Diseaseless got murdered by altering the disease damage boosts on strikes to be % based across the board. It's pretty solidly aimed at diseaseless specs which were based around the static damage increase being useless after X AP.

Sudden Doom change is to make blood less GCD starved, and very welcome. Sudden doom was a great talent that could also randomly fuck up your rotations if you weren't in unholy presence.

Improved Unholy Presence though, depending on the rune cooldown amount, is ungodly. Like, what the SHIT.

[Phunked]

Depends how much PS got its damage boosted. Diseaseless is currently great damage largely because of the fact that oblit has the best weapon and glyph scaling, far above that of the PS and IT combo.

For blood, you needed to know when to hit DC. It was the closest that DKs had to a priority system as opposed to a pure rotation.  I hit 100RP and sat there sometimes if dumping would have been an overall DPS loss. The issue a lot of people had was that they felt they HAD to dump their RP when they had excess. It made blood interesting, at least for me, because you had to fight the impulse that excess resources = always bad. I can see why they'd change it though, since it doesn't feel as clean if you're getting used to it.

And yeah, 15% raid wide run speed was stupidly op. Sad to see that go :(

[Azaroth]

I'll buy it if I ever decide to PVE again. As it is, PVP spec is plenty for crushing daily quest trash for gem money.

I'm still not entirely sure what it is that you do in the game.

Unless you're still leveling?

This post would possibly make sense if I couldn't swear I had heard you disregard the last bunch of nerfs because you've "never stepped foot in arena and don't plan to".

[Rasix]

Is a 10% (speculative) rune cooldown going to offset a loss of +15% damage?

The loss of unholy aura is disappointing, but it was likely the most valuable of the auras, and I suppose they just couldn't figure out how to balance the others.

Deep frost nerfs are a little odd. You won't see a frost DK that isn't a tank now.  Not that you ever did before.

[Phunked]

Is a 10% (speculative) rune cooldown going to offset a loss of +15% damage?

The loss of unholy aura is disappointing, but it was likely the most valuable of the auras, and I suppose they just couldn't figure out how to balance the others.

Deep frost nerfs are a little odd. You won't see a frost DK that isn't a tank now.  Not that you ever did before.

I'm not sure what prompted this.


Maybe they're still living in November-08 when DKs were owning fresh 80s with high baseline but poorly scaling HB?

I mean yes, HB bypasses armor and stuff, but even with the double damage to frozen, a lot of people are at the point  where crit HB is about the same damage as a non-crit SS (easily possible with just a Titansteel Destroyer and ilvl200 blues), and HB has a cooldown. I guess they feel that DK AoE damage is a bit high, but really, who cares? When's the last time trash DPS was holding you back?

[kildorn]

Depends how much PS got its damage boosted. Diseaseless is currently great damage largely because of the fact that oblit has the best weapon and glyph scaling, far above that of the PS and IT combo.

For blood, you needed to know when to hit DC. It was the closest that DKs had to a priority system as opposed to a pure rotation.  I hit 100RP and sat there sometimes if dumping would have been an overall DPS loss. The issue a lot of people had was that they felt they HAD to dump their RP when they had excess. It made blood interesting, at least for me, because you had to fight the impulse that excess resources = always bad. I can see why they'd change it though, since it doesn't feel as clean if you're getting used to it.

And yeah, 15% raid wide run speed was stupidly op. Sad to see that go :(

As far as I can tell, glyphed PS is now the highest weapon modifier strike in the game, at 161% weapon damage. I fully expect these patch notes to be HEAVILY edited for DKs soon, because they're fundamentally stupid.

[kildorn]

Is a 10% (speculative) rune cooldown going to offset a loss of +15% damage?

The loss of unholy aura is disappointing, but it was likely the most valuable of the auras, and I suppose they just couldn't figure out how to balance the others.

Deep frost nerfs are a little odd. You won't see a frost DK that isn't a tank now.  Not that you ever did before.

I'm not sure what prompted this.


Maybe they're still living in November-08 when DKs were owning fresh 80s with high baseline but poorly scaling HB?

I mean yes, HB bypasses armor and stuff, but even with the double damage to frozen, a lot of people are at the point  where crit HB is about the same damage as a non-crit SS (easily possible with just a Titansteel Destroyer and ilvl200 blues), and HB has a cooldown. I guess they feel that DK AoE damage is a bit high, but really, who cares? When's the last time trash DPS was holding you back?

That's a bit of hyperbole, a crit HB from, say, sjofn is in the 5-6k range. My titansteel destroyer ass lands SS for about 3-4k, 7-8k crit. All in raid situations, of course.

HB's nerf is pretty much angled towards DW, I'm not sure why it ate a damage nerf in addition to moving it.

edit: from a random patch fight, since it was the only one I could find with sjofn and I both DKing it up. Note she's tank specced at the time:

avg hit, avg crit, crit rate btw.
 Howling Blast (r5)   1,990   4,231      41.7%

Scourge Strike (r4)   2,320   5,628      40.5%

edit2: My mistake, that's her howling blasting in Frost Presence, she was tanking that run. 

[Phunked]

Is a 10% (speculative) rune cooldown going to offset a loss of +15% damage?

The loss of unholy aura is disappointing, but it was likely the most valuable of the auras, and I suppose they just couldn't figure out how to balance the others.

Deep frost nerfs are a little odd. You won't see a frost DK that isn't a tank now.  Not that you ever did before.

I'm not sure what prompted this.


Maybe they're still living in November-08 when DKs were owning fresh 80s with high baseline but poorly scaling HB?

I mean yes, HB bypasses armor and stuff, but even with the double damage to frozen, a lot of people are at the point  where crit HB is about the same damage as a non-crit SS (easily possible with just a Titansteel Destroyer and ilvl200 blues), and HB has a cooldown. I guess they feel that DK AoE damage is a bit high, but really, who cares? When's the last time trash DPS was holding you back?

That's a bit of hyperbole, a crit HB from, say, sjofn is in the 5-6k range. My titansteel destroyer ass lands SS for about 3-4k, 7-8k crit. All in raid situations, of course.

HB's nerf is pretty much angled towards DW, I'm not sure why it ate a damage nerf in addition to moving it.

Hmm, I may be understating HB damage a bit since the only time I ever use it is when tanking, so my AP will obviously be a bit lower. Still, even double crit back to back (say it had no CD), that's what ~10k damage (factoring in resists and whatnot)? Doesn't seem broken unless you can hit 2 people with it (PvPwise).  Either way, HB is always going to fall behind (unless changed to have a higher AP constant), especially with BOH or better weapons (ie. Ulduar loot).

Also, where are you getting the PS numbers from? My DK still hasn't copied.

EDIT: Just saw your numbers. What weapons are you using?

[kildorn]

I use a titansteel destroyer, she's using Demise. She's also in full tank gear for that parse.

HB hits relatively hard until very high gear levels.

PS numbers are off EJ. Essentially the glyph breaks it, and won't make it live. It's 50% weapon damage +180ish, but stacking talents and the +60% glyph onto it turns it into a 1U oblit.

[Merusk]

 

As far as I can tell, glyphed PS is now the highest weapon modifier strike in the game, at 161% weapon damage. I fully expect these patch notes to be HEAVILY edited for DKs soon, because they're fundamentally stupid.

EH? How much damage does the PS glyph add?  The undocumented notes say Plague Strike is now 50% WD +189.  To go to 161% is a big fucking glyph.


Also: I thought they were giving Discipline Priests an AOE Divine Shield spell.   Now it looks like it's just a decrease in the cooldown plus a mana cost reduction... while increasing CoH again. 

[kildorn]

As far as I can tell, glyphed PS is now the highest weapon modifier strike in the game, at 161% weapon damage. I fully expect these patch notes to be HEAVILY edited for DKs soon, because they're fundamentally stupid.

EH? How much damage does the PS glyph add?  The undocumented notes say Plague Strike is now 50% WD +189.  To go to 161% is a big fucking glyph.


Also: I thought they were giving Discipline Priests an AOE Divine Shield spell.   Now it looks like it's just a decrease in the cooldown plus a mana cost reduction... while increasing CoH again. 

Glyph 60%, a few talents that increase it's base damage by 30-50%, it's all kind of nuts. They upped the base damage and didn't remember that anything that altered PS's damage had HUGE modifiers on it because PS's damage was so horrible.

[Simond]

One of the new mounts is a flying hovercraft/giant robot head. 

[Khaldun]

I don't think you can get exalted with Ravenholdt, can you?

[Khaldun]

Ack, never mind, you can, it only takes 3000 junkboxes or so.

<boggle>

[Lantyssa]

No more DK raid buffs, though.  What speccing for one of; a 15% run speed, 4% damage->healing or a magic resistance Aura, was too much?

I was planning a spec that had both the Blood and Unholy Auras, 'cause I like to be different.  Yeah I can still do it to give the benefit to myself, but half my motivation was to give some benefit to my group in return for making them play with some spec that makes them scratch their heads.

[Gobbeldygook]

Ghetto hearthing is dead.  You are now ported to the nearest graveyard.

I say without a drop of hyperbole that this is the worst change ever.