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.
