BlueTracker

Hello, Death Knights–

This week’s Alpha update includes another round of changes for Death Knights – this time focused on the Frost tree. Like our last round of changes for Unholy, we looked at talents that felt more appropriate to be baseline for the spec and talents that worked better as 1 rank instead of 2. Notably, we made Fatal Fixation and Rime baseline, reduced Frostwhelp’s Aid, Enduring Strength, and cut both Cold-Blooded Rage and Invigorating Freeze and reduced their new talents to 1 rank.

The goal with the above changes is to cut down on build friction allowing for more customization as you spec through the tree. These changes alongside other talent movements and new pathing connections should help create a better experience for build variety.

We’ve also created a variety of new talents and added 2 new capstones that focus on your auto-attacks which should help give some better sustained damage outside of Pillar of Frost windows. These talents also complement both Obliteration and Breath of Sindragosa builds and add some unique gameplay that expands on the Shattering Blade talent node.

We’ve added Razorice to the targets unit frame to allow easier tracking on when to use Frost Strike. Frostscythe has also seen an update to move it out of the regular rotational rune spender to a big heavy hitter on a medium cooldown. Its rune cost has been increased to 2 and its damage has been greatly increased and is always guaranteed to critically strike. It also has unique mechanic that reduces its cooldown when you consume Killing Machine which has some fun synergy with the suite of new auto-attack talents we’ve added to help your Killing Machine procs.

Lastly, we increased Breath of Sindragosa damage to compensate for the loss of uptime from our first round of changes which should lend itself to a burstier playstyle with less focus on “infinite” duration buffs. We are keeping an eye on its current Runic Power cost which is unchanged since its increase in Dragonflight. From our internal testing, we’re seeing 30-40 second breaths, based on situations but the are many scenarios where it can feel extremely tight as you wait for Runes to replenish, which means we may need to look at its cost per second and pulling out some runic power generation elsewhere.

We would love your feedback on how the current iteration of Breath of Sindragosa feels on uptime. Tangentially, we still have some work we’d like to do on Obliteration build resources especially as it pertains to Runic Power consumption as it can still be flooded a bit inside cooldowns.

Thank you for the continued feedback. Our next round of changes will be focused on Blood updates, Unholy, and Core talent iteration based on feedback we’ve received so far.

Hello again Death Knights!

Today’s new alpha build has some further updates to the Class and Unholy trees, mostly as it relates to their respective layouts. We heard plenty of feedback on how the Class tree fell short in some of our stated goals especially in the latter half of the tree. To address this, we’ve split out the newest choice node into individual nodes at the capstone level and added a new talent Unyielding Will that removes harmful magic effects when activated.

Blood Draw is no longer at the capstone level and has moved to an optional location in the 3rd gate. We’ve also reduced the ranks of Osmosis, Subduing Grasp, and Runic Protection which feels more appropriate for their effects. We’ve also restructured talents throughout the 3rd gate of the tree to something that should feel better to navigate in addition to the latter talent half restructure we’ve done some updates to the pathing in the 1st gate.

Mind Freeze and its follow up talent Coldthirst are now available on the left side of the tree and are completely optional based on your talent preference. To accomplish this, we shifted Icebound Fortitude to the starting position for Frost. We hope this latest round of updates feels much less restrictive and generally more exciting to navigate. Thank you for all the class tree feedback and we look forward to hearing your feedback on the lates revision.

Unholy’s talent tree changes were a little smaller in scope, but we aimed to address the primary concerns for the natural flow of the tree and some choices feeling at odds with each other and what your build is asking you to do. The general idea of the changes shifted the left side of the tree to be more “disease focused” and the right side “pet focused” while the middle has choices that are appealing to both types of builds. The biggest shift you will notice is the movement of Unholy Assault and Festermight functionally swapping locations with Morbidity and Superstrain.

Ruptured Viscera has moved to the right side of the tree and is less of a “gating” talent pick for something that should feel more optional. Lastly, this build has a functionality change for Sudden Doom to help address a few of the problems with the most recent changes as it pertains to Runic Power overflow and Festering Wound generation. Sudden Doom will now reduce the cost of your next Death Coil/Epidemic by 10 Runic Power (was free).

We tested removing the Runic Power cost reduction completely but found that it was easy to become starved outside of cooldowns leading to some higher than desired downtime. What is also nice about this change is it gives us a better tuning hook for future balancing of resources if we find the amount to be too little or too much. The second part of this change is a bit experimental in nature, but Sudden Doom will now make your next Death Coil/Epidemic burst a Festering Wound. Internally with testing we have found it creates a natural cadence in which you want to press Festering Strike instead of relying only on passive wound applicators.

The other perk of Death Coil bursting a Festering Wound when consuming Sudden Doom is it helps ease the friction of what to press during your cooldowns. This has created a little additional complexity in your rotation outside of cooldowns as it can require you to pre-plan a little more when Apocalypse is coming off cooldown. That said, we’ve been playing with it and while it does require a bit of forethought during your rotation the tension hasn’t felt negatively impactful. We are very eager to hear your thoughts on this change when you have a chance to play it in game.

Our next round of Blood changes didn’t make this build, but we would like to address the concerns over Abomination Limb and it no longer generating Boneshield charges as the last round of changes heavily impacted Blood more so than the other specs. With the update to Bloods talents, we are looking at ways to compensate the change to Abomination Limb to ease the loss of Boneshield charges on pull.

We are also aware of an issue with Frost’s newest talent Arctic Assault generating Runic Empowerment which is not intended and will be fixed in an upcoming build.

Thank you for all your continued feedback and we will see you next week for an additional round of updates.

Greetings, Death Knights.

In today’s new Alpha build, we have updates to the Blood talent tree and new talents for the not-yet-implemented talents for both Frost and Unholy.

Our focus for Blood updates were heavily focused on the tree layout, updating existing talents to have more synergy with Blood’s kit, reducing the amount of 2-point talents, and moving a couple talents baseline (like Crimson Scourge and Death’s Carress). One major pain point we’ve heard expressed with Blood is how much friction there is to pick up Gorefiend’s Grasp in content where you may need it. In response to that we’ve updated the tree to have Gorefiend’s in a much more accessible location. While we generally like the accessibility it has in the new tree, we’ve been testing it internally and have realized that its new location has made it a bit difficult to avoid in scenarios where you might need the AoE grip. We will update the pathing again to make it still accessible but a bit more optional.

The other big point of contention for Blood is just how many talents you had to “buy in” to have a functioning baseline as a tank. We hope the combination of the reduced 2-point nodes, new pathing, and baseline abilities that there will now be more variety in your builds and flexibility when tackling different content.

We look forward to hearing your feedback. We will have some further updates to the pathing, especially as it pertains to Gorefiends as well as two new talents that are not yet implemented.