The War Within continues the trend that Dragonflight started with tier sets. For Blood Death Knights, it means that we get a simple, passive tier set - and just like the previous expansion, as is tradition, the first tier set once again works reactively off
Костяной щит.
The initial intent of a
simple tier set appears to have been missed entirely, with both the 2-piece and 4-piece effects being convoluted and immediately unclear, particularly the 4-piece effect.
How Strong Is It?
Both effects occur independently and do not interact with one another, with the 2-piece effect being a meager amount of purely defensive value, and the 4-piece effect being pure damage. As we'll cover in this section while breaking down and explaining the effects, the 2-piece bonus is almost non-existent, and the 4-piece is so oppressively strong, particularly in comparison to other tanks, that it encourages maximizing stacks of
Разрыв позвонков at the expense of other rotational mechanics or rotational priorities.
Two-Piece effect
First off, the simpler of the two effects: the
two-piece bonus is completely passive, 2% damage reduction. The secondary, temporary increase in damage reduction might as well not exist as it is an
infinitesimally small chance to proc due to a combination of restrictions that likely were forgotten in design:
- Losing a Костяной щит charge is locked behind a 2.5s internal cooldown
- Losing a Костяной щит charge is further locked behind enemy auto-attacks, and with a number of specs (including us!) bringing auto-attack speed reduction effects, the chance to even be able to trigger a Костяной щит charge loss gets reduced further
- The actual chance to trigger the set appears to be extremely small (20% or less)
- This chance to proc, and the defensive element of this tier set, gets eclipsed almost entirely while Танцующее руническое оружие is active
- Manual player-triggered spells such as Надгробный камень and Буря костей appear to not function correctly with this, or at the very least, 20 casts of each yielded no proc.
In addition to this problem, encounter design plays a major part in the relative strength of this 2-piece bonus. Dragonflight has convincingly highlighted, particularly in Season 1 when we had a very similar 2-piece bonus, that tying a proc to a
low chance on
Костяной щит losses leads to set bonuses having virtually zero effect. To take a concrete example, would this bonus have been active on Raszageth, it would average out to ~0.4 procs per minute for the overwhelming majority of kills - with Raszageth being on the high end when it comes to
Костяной щит charges consumed! This is neither interesting nor easy to balance, as the opposite is true in Mythic+ - where
Костяной щит charges get lost significantly more frequently on large pulls.
The simplest solution to this would be to increase the proc chance to 100%, and then to decide on one of two possible paths:
- Is this additional 3% damage reduction buff intended to be a nice but not necessarily relevant bonus? If so, tune the base 2% damage reduction higher, and keep the duration on Несокрушимость (the 2-piece temporary bonus) set to 6 seconds. This makes it a nice reward for getting meleed while the passive part of the set carries the bulk of the value.
- Is this additional 3% damage reduction buff instead intended to be the bulk of the theoretical value of the set, which, looking at other tank tier set bonuses, it looks like it is designed to be so? If so, extend the duration to a significantly large value in order to allow players to roll this buff forward even if a boss decides to start casting.
Either way, a very disappointing entry into The War Within in terms of set: passive, uncontrollable, at the mercy of encounter design and
weak.
Four-piece Effect
The four-piece set bonus effect is on the other extreme end of the scale. As of right now,
Разрыв позвонков, the static buff part of the 4-piece, stacks up a total 10% bonus damage, and it affects everything, including trinkets and third-party procs.
The chance to get an additional
Костяной щит is not more generous than the 2-piece (it is also looking like it is 20%), but as it can be triggered with no internal cooldown from any damage taken, and any damage school or type as long as it is not friendly fire, it ends up being somewhat more generous... as long as you are
already below the threshold. Which, in turn, means that you forsook a significant chunk of
Разрыв позвонков value to do so, or just got
really lucky after casting
Надгробный камень or
Буря костей.
By far the funniest and likely the most unintended feature of the 4-piece is being able to generate
Костяной щит by dipping yourself in avoidable sources of damage instead of using
Дробление хребта. As long as you don't care about the
Разрыв позвонков value, of course, which happens to be the main value behind this 4-piece set bonus.
From a pure power perspective, 10% bonus damage across all sources (including trinkets, borrowed power and temporary abilities attributed to the Death Knight) is
ludicrously high for a first tier set, even when you consider the fact that the 2-set holds no throughput value within it. The relative power per
Разрыв позвонков is also high enough that there is a strong incentive to stay at 10
Костяной щит charges at the expense of other resources, which is something that should be aggressively looked at.
A very simple fix to this would be to cap stacks of
Разрыв позвонков to 5; this would bring it back in line, remove the pernicious incentive to stay at 10+
Костяной щит, and allow both parts of the 4-piece to seamlessly mesh with one another instead of actively competing in optimization conditions.
The Bugs
