Recent In-Game Fixes - 6/25/09The hard mode of the Mimiron encounter has received the following changes: the damage of the flames has been reduced, the damage/health gained from the Emergency Buff has been slightly reduced, the range of the Emergency Fire Bot’s Deafening Siren ability has been reduced in heroic difficulty and this ability is no longer cast in normal difficulty, the damage of Heat Wave in phase 2 has been reduced, and the damage from Plasma Blast in phase 1 has been reduced. Class Q&A: Death KnightToday we continue our class Q&A series with Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street and the development team, in which we’re taking a look at each class and answering some of the top questions brought forward by their communities. Next up, we take a look at the most asked questions from the death knight class and find out more about the design philosophy behind the first Hero class, the expectations for the class, and what may lie in store for it in the future.
Death Knight Q&A with the Voice of the Class Design Team, Ghostcrawler
Community Team: We’d like to start things off by asking a question that players often ask in regard to the very purpose of each class. Death knights are the newest class in the game, the first Hero class, and the only class to be added since the original launch.
Q: Where do death knights fit into the larger scope of things currently and where do you see them going from this point forward?
Ghostcrawler: Death knights are the only current Hero class, which means they are supposed to be the best class in the game.
No, no, I mean that death knights are an anti-magic tank, which means you bring them out for fights like Hydross and curb them for Patchwerk.
I jest again, but my point is that we introduced a new class to a game that didn’t really have a niche that needed to be filled. The closest to a gap that existed was that we wanted to have more tanks available, especially for pick-up groups. But adding the dual-spec feature as well as improving some of the limitations of the existing classes has helped to fill that hole as well. Yet we did want to introduce a new class. World of Warcraft has been going on for several years now, and we thought it was time to shake things up a bit. We succeeded. Perhaps too well.
Players are obviously enjoying death knights for tanking, dps, or PvP and we’d like to think there is more going on there than just power. Some players really enjoy the rune and runic power mechanic, and I think it’s fair to say that the class requires a good amount of skill to play really well. Between Death Runes and all the various cooldowns, there are a lot of opportunities to play less optimally and push the wrong button. We’ve asked ourselves several times if the death knight is overly complicated -- perhaps you could accomplish 90% of the design with a 3 rune system instead of a 6 rune system -- but we aren’t changing it to that large a degree soon.
In terms of 3.2, we want to chill out the death knight AE damage and defensive cooldowns a little. It’s fine for a melee class to have strong area-effect, but they shouldn’t be so much better than warriors, rogues, and Enhancement shamans. One culprit here is Unholy Blight, which we are considering changing to be more single-target in nature. We are also likely to split Desecration into two abilities: a PvP-oriented snare and a PvE-oriented self damage buff. We are considering shifting some of the damage from Scourge Strike and Frost Strike into Blood Strike, which still hits for fairly paltry amounts for Frost and Unholy. We’ll talk about some additional changes below. |
RSS 
