Capped – Yeah We Are

For those who aren’t already aware and thus I must safely assume live under rocks, yesterday Ghostcrawler answered a slew of Death Knight related questions and issues. Although it certainly wasn’t everything we possibly wanted to know  – which would have been quite unrealistic for him to type up – it was a series of excellent posts, just the sort that we’ve been waiting for these past couple months. If you haven’t already read these writings, I would highly recommend going ahead and doing so now.

Essentially, he hits six main points:

• 2H Frost is indeed still intended to be viable.
  • Which wasn’t really in doubt, but is still good to know!
• DW Unholy is not intended to be taking over the tree.
  • Once again, no real comment necessary, except thanks. It will be interesting to see how they tackle this issue – simply nerfing/changing/removing Sudden Doom isn’t sufficient at this point.
• Pestilence wasn’t intended to be an AoE so much as a means of preventing us from having to tab PS/IT constantly. Unfortunately, the damage makes it difficult to balance, and although they aren’t thrilled with the 50% mechanic, they aren’t really thrilled with any of their options.
  • Understandable. Tab PS/ITing isn’t the same as tab dotting; it’s much harder to do the first due to the melee limitations, not to mention the actually meaningful resource cost. There’s a few different ways Blizzard could take the skill while avoiding this issue (and also avoiding the current one of Pestilence being a single button wonder which deals 30k damage to all the mobs around you!), and I’ll delve into it tonight/tomorrow.
• There are still too many passive talents.
  • Confirmation is godsend!
• There’s nothing wrong with Icy Touch and Howling Blast hitting decently hard, as long as meleeing is more important for optimal damage.
  • Doesn’t quite address the Howling Blast single target/AoE conundrum, but it is nice to know they don’t mind it hitting decently hard in any which case.

All in all, excellent stuff.

You’ll notice, however, that I left out one big issue GC touched upon: us being GCD capped. He attributes it to the large remenants of haste we’re still likely to have on gear from Icecrown and the ArP conversion. Although that logic is sound enough, even at 0% haste, we’re still capped as bad as ever!

Picture time, naturally:

Frost

Unholy

These don’t need a ton of explanation, but still:

I assumed each spec was running in its respective presence, and that Outbreak is intended to apply Ebon Plague. I ignored Dark Simulacrum usage, Empowered Rune Weapon, Glyphs, Raise Dead (for Frost), Blood Tap (for Unholy), Anti-Magic Shell (for Unholy), the additional Runic Empowerment procs from the Death Coils casted off the runic power from Runic Empowerment Procs… and so on.

In short, I gave both trees as much benefit of the doubt as I could while still remaining as accurate as possible.

And the end result? GCD capped, for both specs, even without utilizing all of your abilities to the max, and even without considering how much worse the numbers are for 2H Frost and DW Unholy (although, admittedly, the latter isn’t intended, and thus doesn’t particularly matter).

I’ll probably make some videos of extended dummy testing with 0 haste rating to toss into the thread and further show our GCD issues are very real, and are experiencable with no haste and on paper, and primarily because of Runic Empowerment (the topic I, personally, am most curious about at this point in time!). But, hey, Ghostcrawler is only human. Can’t expect him to get everything perfect, and all of that beautiful blue feedback easily outweighs this easily proven mis-conclusion – now it’s simply up to us to show him otherwise. Fortunately, it’s an easy job ^^.

Anyways, I just wanted to get a post with a more positive tone (since so many misunderstood where I was going with the last one) on the front page, not to mention blue posts of substance are the stuff we’ve been dreaming of for months now.