The new rune system

Zarhym

Rune System Changes

While we're satisfied with the way the rune system works overall, we're making a few major changes to the mechanics that will ultimately help death knight players feel less constrained. Here's the rationale behind the changes, followed by an explanation of how the new system will work.

• In the current rune system, any time a rune is sitting idle, death knights are losing out on potential damage output. By comparison, rogues spend most of their time at low energy levels, and if they're unable to use their skills for a few seconds, that energy builds up and can be spent later, minimizing the net loss from the interruption.
• A death knight's runes, on the other hand, cannot be used until they are fully active. If a death knight ever goes more than a few seconds without spending an available rune, that resource is essentially wasted. Because the death knight is pushing buttons constantly, it can be difficult to add new mechanics to the class because the player doesn't have any free global cool downs to use them. We can't grant extra resources or reduced cost, because there is no time to spend them. Missing an attack is devastating, and it's impossible to save resources for when they're most useful.
• Additionally, each individual death knight ability has a fairly low impact on its own, making it feel like most of the death knight's attacks are weak. The death knight's rotations are also more easily affected by latency or a player's timing being just a little off. At times, it feels like death knights aren't able to take advantage of their unique resource mechanic, which can diminish the fun.
• The new rune system will change how runes regenerate, from filling simultaneously to filling sequentially. For example, if you use two Blood runes, then the first rune will fill up before the second one starts to fill up. Essentially, you have three sets of runes filling every 10 seconds instead of six individual runes filling every 10 seconds. (Haste will cause runes to fill faster.) Another way to think of this is having three runes that go up to 200% each (allowing extra "storage"), rather than six runes that go up to 100% each.
• As this is a major change to the death knight's mechanics, it will of course require us to retune many of the class's current abilities. For example, each ability needs to hit harder or otherwise be more meaningful since the death knight is getting fewer resources per unit of time. Some abilities will need to have their costs reduced as a result.
  

Got that? If not, you're not the only one, don't worry. Both Gregg Reece and I were up half the night trying to figure out exactly how the whole thing was actually going to work. I really wish they had spent less time outlining the "problems" with the system and more explaining the system. Ghostcrawler did come to the rescue with a somewhat more understandable explanation that helped us work out the kinks a bit, but it still looked somewhat puzzling.

Essentially what you need to do is consider the new rune system as three separate energy bars, similar to a rogue's energy. They each regenerate independently, going up to 100 at a steady rate. It's unclear yet whether they have to be individually at either 50% or 100% before you can spend each bar, or if you can, say, spend a bar at 60% and have 10% of a rune left, but the general idea is very similar to having three separate rogue energy bars. Before, Scourge Strike cost 1 frost rune and 1 unholy rune. In Cataclysm, while the tooltip may say the same thing, you can consider it as essentially costing 50 unholy energy and 50 frost energy (or alternately, 100 death energy, if we assume the death rune mechanic stays in by turning blood energy into death energy).

In some ways, it's hard to understand at first, because it seems like they're trying to reinvent the system and fix what isn't broken by making some purely arbitrary tweaks to how runes regenerate. It really takes some hard thought to see the possible advantages of the system.

The big thing this system will do is get you through your standard "rotation" faster and leave you waiting longer for individual runes to regenerate, meaning more downtime. That's where the innovation comes through in the system. It will leave large chunks of downtime where you have free time waiting for runes to regenerate, giving you time to recover from bad latency or use utility skills. That's the idea, at least.

If you have all this down, or even if you don't, be sure to check this spreadsheet that Gregg whipped up. You can enter rune costs for each strike in your rotation and see the projected cooldown and fill status of each rune type based on our projections and theorycrafting on how this whole thing will work, based on our understanding of the above.

I can see a few ways this will turn out, myself:

First, you may see a whole lot more Death Coil and Frost Strike spam. As we have more downtime on our runes, we may just find ourselves spamming our runic power dump. This can be mitigated a bit by the scarcity of the resource, but then again, frost is straight up getting runic power regeneration as their mastery. Honestly, just spamming one single runic power dump is going to be a bit boring, though. It would be nice to see some more interesting places to spend runic power.

That brings us to the next possibility, which was pretty solidly implied by Ghostcrawler: Most of our non-strike abilities will be headed off of runes and onto runic power. So during that downtime, you'll be able to Strangulate or Ghoul Frenzy or Corpse Explosion or any other such skill or talent -- and if you've tried running some numbers on the spreadsheet, you've probably realized by now that there could be a lot of downtime.

Of course, while this should be nice for PvP and for tanks, it's a little less nice-looking for PvE DPS, who will be looking to maximize their DPS and thus will probably be spamming Death Coil or Frost Strike anyway. I'm hoping we gain more talents or skills, or revamps of existing ones, that let us offer reasonable damage and utility without just spamming the basic damaging dumps.

Of course, this all depends on whether we're regenerating runic power fast enough to use all this stuff. If not, we may just see a lot of death knights standing around auto-attacking while they wait for their runes to refresh. That honestly doesn't sound amazingly fun. While they may have needed to make the system more flexible for players with low latency, I'd hope they have a plan to keep the rotations as dynamic, fun and fast-paced as they were in Wrath.

And all of this is so much speculation, just because we don't know how things are changing. Ghostcrawler has implied some abilities may straight up change in rune costs, and regardless, most abilities will get a significant damage boost since we'll be theoretically using them less often. So without solid numbers on what rune costs will be or how much haste will affect rune regeneration, there's little we can really say how this will shake down. I suspect we'll need to get into the beta to really truly understand the inner workings of this system.

Overall, I'm still not sure about this rune system, but I'd wager a big part of that was a poor introduction. With more time to speculate and theorycraft, it starts looking a lot more solid. Its success, I think, depends on how they rebalance the damage and cost of the major weapon strikes and how they handle providing runic power based and free skills to fill in all the new downtime.

Still, we need beta to really start to understand the rune system and to be able to provide real, solid feedback to Blizzard.

Talent changes

Zarhym

Talent Changes

Next we'll outline some of the death knight talent-tree changes we're planning in Cataclysm. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it should give you a sense of how we're intending each death knight spec to perform.

• One of the biggest changes we're making is converting Blood into a dedicated tanking tree. While we feel that having three tanking trees was successful overall, it's less necessary in a world with dual-specialization. In addition, the current breakdown isn't as compatible with the Mastery-based passive talent-tree bonuses we want to add (see below). We'd rather spend time tweaking and balancing one good tanking tree rather than having a tank always wondering if they picked the "correct" tree out of three possibilities.
• Blood seemed like the best fit for tanking. Unholy has always had a strong niche with diseases, magic, and command over pets. Frost now feels like a solid dual-wield tree with Frost magic damage and decent crowd control. Blood's niche was self-healing -- fitting for a tank -- as well as strong weapon swings, which could easily be migrated to Frost and Unholy.
• Our plan is to move the most interesting and fun tanking talents and abilities to Blood. For example, you will likely see Vampiric Blood and Will of the Necropolis remain, while Bone Shield will move over from Unholy.

source

This is sort of a disappointing section in that it doesn't tell us much we didn't already know from the earlier announcement that blood is becoming the sole tanking tree. The basic reasons for choosing blood as the tank tree are very solid, and I covered most of them in my earlier analysis, so I won't go too much more into depth here.

One thing that comes across both as a solid move and a sort of saddening move is the move of Bone Shield from unholy to blood. Bone Shield definitely shores up a weakness of the blood tree, as blood tanking currently lacks a good talented, proactive tanking cooldown.

However, this is a definitely blow to unholy DPS death knights, since Bone Shield not only provides some extra damage but is a nice buffer against cleaving attacks and a protection against death when the tank loses threat.

In addition, this is yet another iconic ability of the unholy tree that has been stripped from it or nerfed incredibly. Lichborne, Unholy Aura, Unholy Blight, Scourge Strike -- all of them have to some extent been knocked down from great heights, given to other trees or otherwise changed to eliminate interesting parts of their mechanics. To be completely fair, in most cases the nerfs have been justified, but it's left the unholy tree feeling more and more generic. Now, one of the last truly iconic abilities, flashy abilities we could call our own to differentiate ourselves from other death knights, is gone. I'm really hoping we see some major revamps to certain unholy death knight skills to provide back more of that cosmetic flashiness that provided a lot of the initial excitement in playing the class for me. Whether that's a new undead pet to replace the default ghoul skin, the ability to turn off taunt on Army of the Dead, or some other persistent visual effect to replace Bone Shield's whirling bones, it'd definitely be nice to see unholy regain some of the uniqueness it's lost.

But overall, the best I can say about this section is that we need more. The plan to shuffle talents was sort of self-evident when the blood tanking change was announced a few days ago. I would have rather gotten more solid indications of what talents were changing and how, aside from a solitary example of a talent shifting to blood.