For blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done.

Now that we've all had a couple of weeks to absorb the latest updates to the Mists of Pandaria talent calculator, it's worth going back and taking a second to look to see if we can dredge up anything else. I've been keeping track of various errata, as well as discussions among the death knight community, and I feel it's worth taking another week to take a second look at a few skills and talents and see where we lie as we wait for a new update, the Mists beta, or both.

Those annoying rune costs

You remember that Death Siphon and Soul Reaper have no rune cost in the current calculator, right? Alas, it's not that simple, and I must make a mea culpa here for not noticing this sooner: Blue posts have clarified that those two skills do cost a single death rune each.

This, of course, throws their proper use into a little more question. Is it worth it to use Soul Reaper when you could be spending that rune on a Scourge Strike or half of an Obliterate? Is the healing of Death Siphon worth giving up the extra damage from one of those weapon strikes? This is, again, where we'll need solid numbers to make that choice. At the least, though, I'd say it makes Death Pact an even more tempting choice for unholy death knights on the level 60 talent tier. As beta progresses, we'll definitely want to keep a close eye on these type of talents and try to answer that question. Are they worth the rune they're spending? If not, how do we fix them?

Magdalena also makes a good point in her article on the Son of a Lich blog. A lot of these updated talents, from Vile Spew to Soul Reaper, make use of shadow damage. Could this be an issue? It's difficult to tell without real numbers, but if frost death knights suddenly find that so many new abilities they're expected to use for damage or utility use shadow damage, it could open a gap between the two specs.

On the other hand, given that unholy still has inferior damage when not using a very specific sword, it could be this will simply cause a needed closing of that gap without depending on tentacles. Unfortunately, that question probably can't be answered with any certainty until we get into the beta, get more solid numbers, and get some real testing going.

The First Talent Tier: Cooldown panic and eruption vs. destruction

In discussing the first tier of death knight talents, two issue come up that may change the whole game when it comes to choosing your talent. First, there's the exact meaning of Vile Spew. It says your ghoul "erupts," which I interpreted to mean that the ghoul explodes and ceases to exist, causing you to summon another one. As some people have rightly pointed out, erupt doesn't have to mean the ghoul dies, and that means the talent becomes much more viable. The second issue is that Unholy Blight, far from being the semi-permanent aura of old, actually has a 90-second cooldown.

Now, a useful one- to two-minute minute cooldown certainly isn't alien to the game or even to death knights. See Summon Gargoyle for just one example. At the same time, though, it becomes obvious this isn't a complete return to the days of old. At the same time, if Vile Spew doesn't destroy the ghoul, suddenly unholy death knights have an on-demand disease spreader that, while it does cost runic power, is also available at a moment's notice and certainly easier to spread than Outbreak plus Pestilence. Certainly Unholy Blight instantly becomes a lot less glamorous, especially for unholy death knights. With that cooldown, even frost death knights might be tempted to choose Roiling Blood so they can spread Blood Plague as quickly as easily as they can Frost Fever.

Personally, that 1.5-minute cooldown makes me think Unholy Blight is either going need some high AoE damage (it currently lists none) or a much, much lower cooldown to be a viable choice for any reason other than nostalgia.

Why won't Blizzard fix Army of the Dead?

In looking at the latest iteration of the Mists of Pandaria skills, one thing did come to mind: Army of the Dead is still there, and it still has ghouls that taunt. Army of the Dead is sort of both an awesome, fun little piece of flavor for the death knight and a constant thorn in our side. It vies with Death Grip for the most hated death knight ability, blamed for wipes and near-wipes, keeping us vying with hunters as most hated class. All this, though, doesn't mean Army of the Dead isn't a useful tool. I've written multiple columns on how to use it effectively. Yet I still get mail about it, and it still remains an issue.

That said, there is one pretty easy way to make this all go away. If you take away the ability for Army of the Dead to taunt, its main bother goes away. There's still the chance that it could aggro extra mobs, of course, but it at least won't taunt the wrong thing, forcing tanks off their game and putting healers and DPS in danger of AoE or frontal cone attacks. Yet with all this, Blizzard still hasn't changed it and has made no sign that it plans to.

Weirdly enough, I was sort of thinking about this relation to Anne's recent musings on how much Blizzard should "force" us into good behavior. Even before Cataclysm, Blizzard did go through a lot of trouble to make the game a bit more newbie- and casual-friendly, creating a new tutorial system, making tooltips clearer, and removing or simplifying a lot of mechanics, stats, and buffs. Even grouping is easier thanks to the Dungeon Finder and the Raid Finder. With this in mind, will simplifying rampant or hard-to-use mechanics like Army of the Dead's taunt be next?

The most popular argument for keeping it the way it is would probably be that Army of the Dead is a precision tool, not just another button to mash, and that taking away its downsides is another step in the dumbing down of the game. The opposite argument would be that Army of the Dead, as it is, is so specialized that it stays inactive for far too long, too poorly designed to be of any real use to a death knight except in a handful of situations ... which then leads to another question: Should every single ability a class uses be immediately useful, or is it OK to have once-in-a-blue-moon type utility?

Me, I think the best choice is, as always, to let the player choose. We've already heard hints that glyphs will be used in Mists to bring back or change abilities on a very base level. So, let's put the removal of Army of the Dead's taunt on a glyph. That way, it's now up to the choice of the user. If you blindly use Army of the Dead, you still cause issues. But if you do your research and understand the choices, you can slap on the glyph and use it in a wider variety of situations to your heart's content. It may even be a great way to introduce new death knight players to whole concept of glyphs and their proper usage.

 

We bring you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our feral cat edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. Let the face clawing begin!

This week, I want to take a closer look at the proposed Mists of Pandaria level 90 talents for feral druids. This tier of talents has received significant criticism on the WoW forums and other discussion boards, with the most common appellation being "useless." I couldn't disagree more. Given the constraints that Blizzard has to operate under, I think these talents offer up some interesting new game mechanics.

Heresy, yes, I know. Before you bring out the pitchforks, remember these key facts about how talents are supposed to work:

    Talents are no longer the prime determinants of player power; they are now merely utility skills. You can fulfill your core DPS/healing/tanking role in a raid with no talents at all, you'll just be slightly less good at it. Rogues, as a comparison, only have one tier of talents that affect their DPS, just as we do; everything else is survivability, crowd control, or movement.
    Talent choices must be reasonably balanced; otherwise, we're back to everybody picking the same thing, which leads to the developers balancing around everyone having that thing, which causes complaints about not having choices. This balance has to extend to both PvE and PvP.
    The benefits granted by talents can't be so strong that they cause significant changes in class desirability, or we're back to the shaman stacking model again. Admittedly, any advantages are still going to be min-maxed by heroic raiding guilds, but the perception that it's required cannot be allowed to exist.

At least, that's the theory. The ideal is for all six talent choices to be equally valuable for each PvE role and PvP (cynics are free to substitute "equally useless"). Unfortunately, having four specs makes this exceptionally difficult, so I expect we'll likely end up with two to three no-brainer choices and two to three actual decisions after the balancing and theorycrafting is done. That ends up being pretty similar to the Cataclysm model but with much less added cruft -- perfectly fine with me.

Talent analysis

Heart of the Wild This talent is, to put it mildly, controversial, though the controversy itself is quite old. The irresistible force of "I rolled a cat/moonkin/X to do just that; I want to min-max that and don't want to do other stuff" slams right into the immovable object called "developers want to encourage being a hybrid." Any class that has had the option to use procs for healing or DPS (shaman, paladins) has seen this before. While I generally come down on the Whatever Best Helps Your Raid side of this argument, I can understand how it pushes people out of their personal comfort zones if they're expected to help fulfill the responsibilities of a role they didn't sign up for.

Looking at the talent itself, though, it's far too broad. I think a big part of the initial negative reception to this talent was the idea that this will let druids of all roles do all things. This is a bridge too far; the mechanics changes needed in order to have all four specs be able to fill any of the other three roles in a useful yet balanced manner would be overwhelming.

Instead, I think a much more likely role for this talent is to let you fill a single different PvE role effectively. Feral and guardian druids will be able to do each other's jobs, as will restoration and balance druids, but that's it. Don't get too wrapped around the numbers/text yet; I'm confident that Blizzard will add the necessary changes to make the off role performance effective, such as crit immunity for ferals. Certain bits will definitely disappear as well, such as the hit rating increase by 100%; if that stays, that incentivizes the purposeful reforging away of hit to make HotW a DPS cooldown, which it is not intended to be.

Actually, a better question for discussion is how effective the off role capabilities should be. You obviously don't want ferals/balance with HotW to be more effective than standard tanks/healers, but if it's too underpowered, then nobody will bother to talent or use it. Some 80% to 90% capability is probably a good target. It wouldn't be something you use all the time, obviously (see key fact #1), but for those occasional encounters where the raid leader really needs 2.5 healers or 1.5 tanks, it could definitely work well.

Dream of Cenarius Let's break out the old SAT analogies. In my view, Dream of Cenarius is to Heart of the Wild as Soul of the Forest is to Incarnation -- a choice between a short cooldown/passive ability that's less effective, or a bigger cooldown that's more effective. That's a good choice to be forced to make.

Blizzard has to be very careful how it plays this one, however, as the possibility to incentivize unwanted behavior is definitely there. Damage spells increasing healing done by 30%? Heals increasing next ability's damage by 30%? Hey, this talent is now mandatory, as your resto druids all now have to hardcast a Wrath before they pop a preplanned Tranquility, and your ferals/moonkin end up having to toss out a random Regrowth on anybody before they Rip/Starfall to max their DPS. Is this good design? I don't think so. It wouldn't surprise me, if this talent stays as is, to see DoT and HoT effects excluded from the buff.

Disentanglement This isn't a bad talent (though obviously much more PvP-focused than PvE-), but it's out of place in this tier as is. This is supposed to be a tier that gives druids reasons to deviate from their primary role, not the crowd control or healing tier, and this is elements of both. This isn't motivating people to use different roles; it's motivating people to use a shift for a buff, which means people will simply powershift every 30 seconds to proc the heal.

Talent design recommendations

Even though I think these talents are much better, there are still a few tweaks I'd like to see made. Any other changes you'd recommend? Let me know in the comments!

    Give Displacer Beast its DoT removal back. It's useless otherwise.
    Swap the level 90 and level 60 talents. When leveling/soloing, you have to be more hybrid than in a group. Why wait until 90 for the hybrid-encouraging talents? Make Force of Nature and Incarnation appropriately awesome, and it motivates people to get to max level and pick them up.
    Drop the heal from Disentanglement and make it baseline. As it stands now, Disentanglement is effectively baseline, since the other two abilities are not appealing for PvP. The heal portion is too similar to Renewal, also, and would simply lead to its being spammed on CD in PvE. Make it a proper utility ability.
    In exchange, add a better hybrid talent to that tier. I'd like to see something that lets a druid trade a resource for a heal, such as costing rage/energy/eclipse power for an instant heal on a CD. You could even call it something druid-flavored, like, I don't know, Gift of the Earthmother or something.