Lichborne: A quick patch 4.1 primer for death knights
by Daniel Whitcomb 
Apr 26th 2011 at 9:00PM
By the time you read this, there is a very good chance that patch 4.1 will be live, or the servers will be down while patch 4.1 is being implemented. If it's not this week, chances are that we'll see it next week. With that in mind, today seems like the perfect chance to get in one more quick rundown of patch 4.1's features for death knights. We'll discuss all the latest class changes, as well as look at a couple of other general changes that will affect death knights.
Class changes
New abilities and general changes All non-damaging interrupts off the global cooldown, including Mind Freeze, will now always connect. DPSers should almost always be hit-capped anyway, of course, but this will be especially useful for blood tanks who take some interrupting duties, which can happen quite often in 10-mans.
Many player-generated persistent ground effects, including Desecration, will now have a different visual effect for friendly and hostile players. If you're an unholy PvPer, this may help your teammates stay out of the bad stuff, so that's sure to be a welcome change.
Raise Ally now functions as a battle resurrection, costing 50 runic power to use with a 10-minute cooldown. It will share the global cap with Rebirth and Soulstone. How much you'll use this probably depends on your raid makeup and what other sources of battle rezzes you have in your raid or group, but it can't hurt to get it figured out. If nothing else, you'll probably want to create a quick mouseover macro to allow the casting of Raise Ally on fallen group members as easily as possible. This also means that the Glyph of Raise Ally will be changed so that it reduces the cast time on Death Gate. So I guess if you're really impatient to get back to Archerus and respec one of these days and you don't really want any of the other minor glyphs that badly, you're all set now.
Frost Frost got a nice little single-target DPS boost. Frost Strike and Howling Blast now do more single-target damage. Unfortunately, in return, Howling Blast now has a facing requirement, so no more spamming Howling Blast when you're running around kiting or avoiding standing in the fire unless you can take a page from the old hunter book and do a mid-air turn to get it off.
The biggest frost change is to Blood of the North, which will now permanently convert your blood runes to death runes. This is a change that should bring frost's mechanics into a bit more parity with the other two trees. Both the other trees' death rune producing strikes offer significant utility and are a meaningful part of their rotation, whereas Blood Strike for frost offered little more than a bit of filler damage. Rather than create yet another new strike or buff Blood Strike to ludicrous levels, they just let us bypass the blood strikes altogether. With the ability to throw out more Obliterates, we should also see an increase in damage from this change.
Unholy Unholy has seen very little in the way of changes this time around. Rage of Rivendare has been buffed a bit, and Desecration no longer triggers on snare-immune targets.
It is worth noting that there's some concern among min-maxers that frost's buffs have caused it to eclipse unholy in a major way in the PvE DPS department. We'll see how it plays out in actual practice in patch 4.1, of course, and whether unholy gets some buffs to make up the difference in the supposedly soon to be introduced patch 4.2.
Blood There've been some murmurs about blood receiving healing nerfs, but don't worry too much. Most of the reduced numbers you've seen out of datamining are nothing more than tooltip language fixes for existing hotfixed nerfs. In other words, we do heal less than before, but the nerfs have been live for a while, so those of you who are tanking veterans have already, in theory, gotten used to them.
There are, however, two relatively important nerfs to blood's capability. The first is that the Blood Shield mastery will now work only in Blood Presence. That means no more trying for large glyphed shields. This nerf is probably focused mostly on PvP and extreme soloing, but either way, keep it in mind if you want to try presence swapping for any reason while blood specced.
The other nerf is to our AoE threat. The healing portion of Death Strike will no longer cause threat. If you've ever had to peel a mob off a druid who stacked HoTs on you during a pull, you know how annoying heal threat can be. For a while, we had it working for us, but no more. It's unclear how much that healing threat was helping us, but at most, it'll probably just mean we need to use a few more Heart Strikes or Blood Boils. Regardless, watch your AoE threat a little more closely for a week or two so you can judge how much this nerf hurt you, if any.
Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman are new 5-man dungeons coming with the patch. They'll drop ilevel 353 gear, which is not quite as good as tier 11 raiding gear in most cases. If you're a non-raider or even a raider who's had bad drop luck or is looking to gear up an off-spec set, you may find some useful loot drops out of these dungeons. Check out our rundown of death knight specific drops for more information.
If you're looking to grab more PvP gear, you can also buy PvP currency with PvE currency. It may be just the thing you need to get a jump start on your resilience without having to put up with multiple battlegrounds of pain while you gear up.
Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms
The new dungeon finder Call to Arms feature will provide an extra rewards bag containing various useful treasures and a chance at rare mounts and pets to the role most in demand at the time of queueing. Since that role is likely to be tank almost constantly, death knights are in a good position to take advantage of that. Get yourself properly geared and specced for tanking with the following columns:
- Blood Death Knight Tanking 101
- Gemming, reforging, and other gear tweaks for blood death knight tanks
- More blood tanking questions answered
Learn the ropes of endgame play with WoW Insider's DK 101 guide. Make yourself invaluable to your raid group with Mind Freeze and other interrupts, gear up with pre-heroic DPS gear or pre-heroic tank gear, and plot your path to tier 11/valor point DPS gear.Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Lorendi Apr 26th 2011 9:31PM
good stuff, can't wait to try it out
talkaboom Apr 26th 2011 9:53PM
Just finished ZG on my tank, and AoE threat seems to be an issue, had trouble on some trash packs, and on the Panther Boss fight( which was retarded-ly easy, unlike what most videos or guides suggest), after dropping D&D and using pestilence off the boss to get diseases onto them, i could not hold aggro after our feral druid started his swipe spam.
.
On a side note: Most guides seem to suggest pulling 4 adds at a time, we found it very easy even after pulling 8 at a time( one side), made the fight finish faster. I did pop IBF, but i dont think it was really needed.
Necromann Apr 26th 2011 10:47PM
Part of the aoe threat problem is that many classes got big aoe boosts, like priests, frost mages, and hunters.
Ez Apr 26th 2011 10:42PM
Unholy is pretty much the same, except it seemed the Ghoul nerf has a major cool down now.
Zaet Apr 27th 2011 12:18AM
Why this column always fills outdated, repetitive and a copy/paste of patch notes?
chinese.fish Apr 27th 2011 6:24AM
So a question --- does the new designation of Blood Shield being accessible only in Blood Presence mean that if you switch out of blood presence, you don't receive any mastery? I'm just curious if you spec frost but switch to blood presence, if you still maintain the frost mastery, or if you also lose the frost mastery by switching to a different presence.
And the same for the unholy mastery.
Velror Apr 27th 2011 2:43PM
just wondering but...
Does the facing requirement for howling blast mean the AoE only hits people facing you as well? Sort of like a cone attack
Revynn Apr 27th 2011 3:50PM
The AoE portion of HB is centered on your target, not your field of view. The facing portion aonly applies to the target you're casting it on.
For example, if you have 15 mobs all around you (including behind), casting HB on the one directly in front of you will still do AoE damage to the ones behind you.
Tland43 Apr 27th 2011 3:56PM
No. It doesn't mean that. It functions the same as the rest of your melée attacks but it has a longer range. Previously you could be running and someone could come up behind you and you could target them and damage them with howling blast. Now you would have to turn around to damage them. Bosses won't be facing you. And you will be able to attack them. In fact I can't think of any damage abilities which would require the victim to be facing you.
Revynn Apr 27th 2011 3:52PM
Changes to Frost and more incentive to tank might just mean that I'll dust off my DK and gear her up. After leveling her to 85 she's mostly just been used for mining and continuing my grind for Thunderfury and Sulfuras.
Too bad, since she was my main in Wrath.
OPH May 3rd 2011 8:25AM
Has anyone else had a problem with Death Strike getting a 13 sec cd. There has been times since the patch that my Death Strike on cd and no runes coming back. That is actually 2 seperate issues. Normally after the long no rune cycle I can do 1 DS. Then I have to wait 3to 4 sec to do another 1. I have never had this problem before I don't know what i can change.
Brent May 3rd 2011 2:22PM
My question is about a blood dk.