Source: WorldofRaids.com

(I’m having some trouble formatting the text, if you’re having trouble reading it, please check out the Forum Post.)

Due to significant talent changes, all death knight talents will be reset for players.

Blood Strike: The bonus damage this ability receives from diseases on the target has been increased to 50% per disease.

Chains of Ice: Now reduces movement by 95% instead of 100%. The main effect of this change will be that targets of Chains of Ice will not have to re-issue a movement command to continue moving.

Frost Presence: 10% bonus health reduced to 6% bonus stamina.

Frost Strike: This ability can now be dodged, parried, or blocked. Weapon damage bonus reduced to 55%, down from 60%.

Icebound Fortitude: Cooldown increased to 2 minutes.

Talents

Blood

Dancing Rune Weapon: This ability now has a fixed duration of 12 seconds (which can still be modified by its glyph) and a fixed cost of 60 runic power.

Veteran of the Third War: Stamina bonus reduced to 1/2/3%.

Frost

Blood of the North: Reduced to a 3-point talent. Increases Blood Strike and Frost Strike damage by 5/10/15%. There is now a 33/66/100% chance whenever you hit with Blood Strike or Pestilence that the Blood Rune will become a Death Rune when it activates.

Lichborne: Duration reduced to 10 seconds, and cooldown reduced to 2 minutes.

Threat of Thassarian: New 3-point talent. When dual-wielding, your Death Strikes, Obliterates, Plague Strikes, Blood Strikes and Frost Strikes have a 30/60/100% chance to also deal damage with your off-hand weapon. Off-hand strikes are roughly one half the effect of the original strike.

Toughness: This talent now grants 2/4/6/8/10% armor instead of 3/6/9/12/15%, placing it in line with similar abilities of other classes.

Unholy

Desecration: This talent has been reduced to 2 points for 25/50% snare and no longer increases damage done by the death knight. It has also been moved one tier earlier in the tree and its spell effect has been made more transparent.

Desolation: New talent. This talent is in the position formerly occupied by Desecration. It causes Blood Strikes to increase all damage the death knight deals by 1/2/3/4/5% for 12 seconds.

Scourge Strike: Weapon damage bonus reduced to 40%, down from 45%. Damage increased by 10% per disease on the target, down from 11%.

Summon Gargoyle: The gargoyle now flies lower to the ground, making it susceptible to melee attacks. This ability now has a fixed duration of 30 seconds and a fixed cost of 60 runic power.

Unholy Blight: This talent has been redesigned. It no longer deals damage to nearby targets. Instead, when you deal damage with Death Coil, the target will take periodic damage for 10 seconds equal to 30% of the damage done by Death Coil. This damage accumulates in the same way as Ignite and Deep Wounds.

Our first look at Ice Crown raiding is an in depth commentary on the first boss of Ice Crown Citadel, what will become the final frontier for Wrath of the Lich King raiding. I had the unique privilege of flying across the landmass commonly known as the US of A to interview a few Blizz developers, who treated me like the god that I am. So we sat down and I had pretty limited time so I got right to brass tacks about this new boss.

Plaguechill: So Ice Crown Citadel’s going to be full of about a million undead baddies right? I mean can we expect that like Naxxramas, most bosses will be undead?

Nameless Dev: Well yes that’s to be expected! There will be a few surprises however to add flavor. I’m sure everyone remembers The Maiden’s hallway in Karazhan well ICC will include a full on brothel area, in which lusty undead will be after more than your souls.

Plaguechill: Wow that sounds… pretty creepy. So what can you tell me about the first boss of this instance of undeath?

Nameless Dev: Well graphically speaking we’ve really intended to push the bar in this instance. The first boss will be a completely new sprite. An undead crab.

Plaguechill: You mean… a Ghost Crawler?

Nameless Dev: [Laughs] Exactly.

Plaguechill: So what can we expect of this boss which I’m sure it’s going to generate a ton of buzz just for what it is? Will it be hard or just a nice way to kick off the first raid night of the week?

Nameless Dev: It will be very challenging; we want to make sure that players reaching the ICC level of play have sufficient challenge even on normal mode. Incidentally this boss will have an extremely challenging hard mode.

Plaguechill: Can you share with PC viewers a boss ability or two?

Nameless Dev: We’re still hammering out a lot of that, but conceptually there should be an ability in which some classes will become either extremely powerful or extremely weak for a portion of time. Swapping roles and DPSing during these times will be critical. We’re thinking of calling it Unbalanced Game Mechanics, with the buffs/debuffs being called Temporary Buff/Nerf.

Plaguechill: I see wut u do thar. Lemmie guess he has a Timestop ability called “Lag?”

Nameless Dev: You should see what happens when he uses “Rolling Restarts”

Plaguechill: Well it’s been wonderful talking to you, can I steal some of your pens?

Nameless Dev: Yeah. They aren’t mine.

Plaguechill: Great! I’m probably going to take this mouse too, the ones you guys sell cost like a million dollars.

Nameless Dev: You should probably leave.

About then he called Security and I was escorted off the premises. I got away with the pens.

Edit: The pens will be on ebay tomorrow.

P.S. if you haven’t guessed by now, I’m bored and this is fake. Blizzard dev’s don’t talk to me, I don’t fly to California, I’m not that charming in person, and most importantly Blizzard doesn’t give out those kind of details or let you steal their pens. So don’t spam them about this, it’s a joke.

Crazy week for Azeroth! Yogg-Saron has been killed in 10 and 25man versions of the instance, many hotfixes had to be pushed through for certain encounters to work, the masses are either thrilled or angry at the latest changes… But, hey what else is new?

There are now 2 Yogg videos available (there may be more out by now but I haven’t seen them yet), one by The Legacy in a healer’s perspective, and another by Epicfabriken as a Ret Paladin. Inner Sanctum has had some world first Hard Modes down already!! Grats to them – hard mode is hard! (seriously. have totally seen the 10man versions of some of them. >.< )

The Blue Boss this week has some things to say about Death Strike, Dual Wield, and Gargoyle~

Can we please get some feedback on the status of buffing a dual wield build for us?

This is one of those categories, like the Conflag nerf, that we feel like you have options. We needed to kill the DW spec where you pretty much ignore weapons and just try and proc big spells. That was not the DW DK style we wanted. We felt like we had a choice between OP DW DKs and no DW DKs and thought the second was a more acceptable risk.

As we have explained, one of our ideas long term is to give Frost a couple of DW talents. It might not take much more than “Your Frost Striks and Oblits now hit with two weapons.” Having 3 tanking and PvP trees is challenging enough. Expanding that matrix by also having DW Blood PvP and DW Unholy tanking gets to the insane level. But having DW Frost PvP, DW Frost PvE and DW Frost tanking (only) may be more manageable. We are not at all sure if this is the approach we will use, but it’s an idea.

DKs were overpowered in a few ways. Fixing that was more important thank keeping DW at equal dps to 2H. That does not mean we have given up on DW for DKs in the same way that we no longer support 2H for Enhancement shamans.

Q u o t e:
I think it’s time to drop the “Let DKs be able to tank/DPS/PvP with any spec” thing. Other classes don’t seem to follow that design, I don’t understand why DKs need to. If each tree had a focus, then it’d be a lot easier to balance DKs.

It would also be a lot less interesting. We don’t like the trees being that narrow for any class. Arms vs. Fury or Arcane vs. Fire or whatever should be a style choice, not what you pick for a certain role in the game. It’s going to take some time to get everything there, but it’s something we want to do.

Q u o t e:
I understand your situation, but please don’t kill Frost 2H. I feel for the dual wielding death knights, but I don’t want my spec killed in the process.

Absolutely. We would not turn Frost into a DW tree. We would just make sure all DW DKs were Frost. And again, this is just an idea. We may reject it for some reason. As I have said many times, we want DKs to be a class that uses 2H or DW. We do not want DW to dominate, as it typically does in classes that have that option.

Q u o t e:
What’s wrong with a spec of DKs that has an emphasis spell damage?

Some spell damage is fine, and an interesting niche for them, but they are designed primarily as a melee class. When you face Arthas, I guarantee he is going to hit you hard with Frostmourne.

Could you please hotfix summon gargoyle? According to the tooltip it’s supposed to last a maximum of 40 seconds, and only lasts 25. It was like that for well over a month on the PTR, and never addressed.

Gargoyle is working as intended. Because of the way it works some of the tooltips are never going to be totally accurate. To be honest. the entire spell is a little complex and I’m not sure we get much from that complexity. We have discussed changing it to something simpler (like no RP over time or something).

Death Strike Healing Nerf Announcement

We hotfixed a change to the amount of healing provided by Death Strike.

Originally, this ability was something you would use only situationally to heal yourself at a cost of damage. Since then we have redesigned the death knight class sufficiently to where Death Strike was a major rotational ability for Blood. Given how much the attack is hitting for, we think the amount of healing it provided was too much.

Healing still scales based on diseases and the damage is unchanged. Blood retains its other tools to heal.

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend in Northrend!!

PS:  Funny thread on Blues and how they evade telling their guilds they are blues!

Is 3.1 making you Anxious? Worried? Sad?

Well, wipe those tears away

because Plaguechill is having a contest!!

From today until May 17th you may email your funny screenshots to contest@plaguechill.com!

Tickle our funny bone and you may win! It can be your character someplace weird, wearing a funny outfit, doing a funny scene with a friend ~ get your guild involved and put together something creative! It can have a caption or speech bubbles if it adds to the scene. We are just mainly looking for the most amusing pictures! We will choose the top entries and have the whole community vote on their favorite.

Our fabulous prize is Warcraft: Dragon Hunt published by Tokyopop! This is Volume 1 of The Sunwell Trilogy, authored by Richard Knaak and brought to life by Kim Jae-hwan. These books have some of the best art I have ever seen, and includes many warcraft characters like Kalecgos, Anveena, Dar’khan, and even see some of the Lich King’s dirty work! You may see a preview of this comic over at Tokyopop’s site, it’s the start of the tale surrounding and leading up to the Sunwell and it’s dirty little secrets!

Here are the rules and whatnots:

1. This must be an in game screenshot. This is not a photoshop or art contest! No comics or fancy edits.
2. Humor must be PG13 at most. Don’t be sharing anything you wouldn’t with your mom!
3. This is NOT a photoshop or art contest. If you want to add some text/captions digitally, that is as far as it goes.
4. You must be registered on our forums, please include your forum name when entering. Preferably in the body of the email, just make it clear.
5. Does not need a Death Knight in your picture. Invite your friends of any race/class to participate as well~ Just have fun with it, anything goes!
6. This contest is open internationally. Our community includes players from around the world and it would be unfair to not include them. Please feel free to enter, regardless of where you live.
7. All entries must be emailed by May 17th to contest@plaguechill.com Do NOT post them on the forums or email them elsewhere. IT WILL NOT COUNT.
8. Multiple entries are allowed. But don’t send the same screenshot/idea again and again because you wanted to change something last second. All entries must be finalized, so triple check your screenies before mailing them! Entering the same screenshot more than once will not improve your chance to win.
9. By entering this contest: You are allowing us to mail something to your address. We will NOT use your address for anything else or sell it to anyone. I will email you the status of when it was mailed so you can expect it. If you are underage, please ask your parents permission to enter!! Plaguechill will NOT be responsible for any groundings, punishments, or your account cancellation. If the prize is returned in the mail- you are forfeiting your prize to next in line. We are also not responsible for any customs fees that may occur. You do not need to send in your address when entering, but if you win and go MIA/do not provide an address, you will be disqualified.
10. Depending on contest response, we may need to adjust contest rules in the future. So please keep an eye on the blog/forums, I will be sure to add anything as clear as possible – this may include new rules, adjusted rules, or maybe even add new prizes into the mix! But by entering this contest, you are agreeing to these rules and any rule changes that may happen.

We hope everyone has some fun with this, we can’t wait to see your screenshots!! Free to enter, free to win, spread your disease love NOW!

Ah, Rocket Racers.  Cheap fun, HUGE aggro whores.  You know, I made this chart, and now I realize that *this* week, nothing actually messed up our weekly benchmark!

Posted by Amyliz