3.3.3 Patch Notes

I think attributing so much power to Will of the Necropolis is one of those consequences of trying to covert everything into effective health. In fact, the reason we took the cooldown off is because we don't think it will be that noticeable.

In the theoretical case where the DK is ping-ponging between 40% and 20% health, it's crazy good (as is Ardent Defender), but those situations don't happen often. (They might happen more in Cataclysm, where it would be nice to see tanks at 50% health for more than a fraction of a second.) Most of the time, Will of the Necropolis is just extra health, which was the case before we removed the cooldown.

We added the cooldown during PTR testing in which we had a Patchwerk who kept stacking his own damage. When he was hitting for 110% of the tank's entire bar, the DK with Will of the Necropolis could survive, and nobody else could. Duh. In retrospect we probably overreacted, since we don't actually make boss encounters like that. You have say Steelbreaker Fusion Punch, but those hits aren't so often that the 15 sec cooldown is the issue.

Q u o t e:
It's really, really not that. It's fight mechanics. Things like Soul Reaper were balanced around WotN being 15 seconds ICD. Ditto things like Festergut.

Do you not read the thread?

Believe me, I know what they were balanced around.

Q u o t e:
Considering the bombshell they've just dropped on the forums (and the inevitable fallout that will ensue), my guess is he was on his second mug before he even posted.

Oh, I consume far more than that.

Seriously though, the only thing that changed on Will of the Necropolis was the cooldown. The health savings were always there. Tanks typically are at full health, avoid every other attack, get hit, and then get topped off. We typically don't hit tanks more often than 15 sec with really big attacks. It will perform as it always has against periodic attacks, including Soul Reaper (which is a 30 sec cooldown IIRC). If the pure melee hits from the Lich King allow DKs to literally take 15% less damage from him at all times, then we might put a 5 sec cooldown on it instead or make it work like Ardent Defender (which only reduces the damage that took you over the threshold). Against most bosses I'd be surprised if you even noticed the cooldown was gone.

Remember, you're looking at current content with current gear and we are forecasting slightly into the future with changes like this.

Q u o t e:
They found that the hit-increasing Patchwerk showed that a no-cd WotN was overpowered.

Somehow this logic wasn't applied to AD. Not only was it not applied, that logic - by which WotN recieved it's nerf - is now apparently wrong?

Ardent Defender and Will of the Necropolis work differently. Ardent Defender reduces less of the damage of a big hit that takes you over the threshold, but it has the Cheat Death component instead. They are just different abilities.

Initially we were worried when all the tanks but the DK with WotN fell over to the Patchwerk test on the PTR. Since then we haven't designed any bosses that actually hit like that, and convinced ourselves that the cooldown wasn't really doing much in reality.

Arthas hits very hard, but he'll hit less hard when you have better gear and the raid-wide buff. If you think that WotN is what's going to allow you to beat that encounter, we suspect you are mistaken. But like I said, if it looks like it's going to be a problem, we'll add a small cooldown or something back on. I think it's too premature to do that yet.

Q u o t e:
To be fair, using two tanks and doing a tank swap for soul reaper is much, much, MUCH easier than single tanking it. Will of the Necropolis won't change that, and you're really overestimating the power of this change.

Yeah. This has become too much of "We got GC again!" thread. I know how Soul Reaper works. We talked over the WotN change with Daelo and the guys who made Soul Reaper. They're not convinced it will be a problem. When someone trivializes the encounter with an undergeared DK, then we'll start worrying about it.

Q u o t e:
WotN pre-nerf allows survival of ridiculous situation
WotN receives nerf
Devs realize that balancing on that basis is wrong
Devs introduce Ardent Defender buff, which allows survival of ridiculous situation
Devs take a second look at WotN
WotN receives buff

Yeah, I agree with that too, with the caveat that "Balancing on that basis" means "Devs realize ridiculous situation that sparks balance concern doesn't ever really happen."

Q u o t e:
Warriors are currently the baseline tanking class, and by baseline I mean their EH levels are the worst, with Unholy DKs having 4% more, Blood and Frost DKs having 6-7% more and Paladins have 11% more.

Prior to the recent tanking changes, Paladins had maybe 15-16% more.

This WOTN change is set to put DKs to about the same level, if not higher.

I just think this is one of those situations where trying to convert the talent to EH doesn't tell the whole story.

Consider a tank with 56,000 health. There are two situations in which she will die:

Situation One: Two 30K melee hits back to back. Healers are asleep or something so there is no healing.
-- A paladin with Ardent Defender will take 30K from the first swing, have ~4000 absorbed from the second and will be dead unless "Cheat Death" is off cooldown.
-- A DK with Will of the Necropolis will take 30K from the first swing, have ~4500 absorbed from the second, and will barely survive.

Situation Two: A single massive spike of 60K damage (Fusion Punch, Sindragosa breath, Soul Reaper, etc.)
-- The paladin will have ~4000 damage absorbed, and will still die, unless "Cheat Death" is off cooldown.
-- The DK will have ~9000 absorbed and will survive, albeit with maybe 5000 health left. She's still dead in the next hit without lots of healing.

In those two situations, WotN saved you. Gratz. But the second situation has always existed because we don't do those big hits more often than the cooldown anyway. Losing the cooldown is a buff in the first situation, but if you routinely don't heal your tank between melee swings, you have big problems anyway. It might give you a little more room to be sloppy, but hey, it's a talent. It should do something. It means you don't have to heal as much, but you're probably bombing your tank with multiple 10K heals that oveheal far more than the 500 health she saved over the paladin.

Does Arthas hit so hard that situation one is a pretty common reality? Maybe, but he's supposed to be hard, and I don't think losing the cooldown is what's going to allow you to beat that encounter if you haven't been able to do it by the time 3.3.3 comes out.

Q u o t e:
Warrior population in two tank fights: 40%
DK population in two tank fights: <10%

That's the justification. Nothing else. It doesn't matter that DKs were tanking bosses. It doesn't matter that they were successful but unpopular. They struggled compared to other tanks in 10 mans (where block is a bigger deal), and instead of fixing the reasons why they were unpopular, they decided to just supercharge them.

Sigh. This is my just desserts for trying to counter all the assertions that paladins were taking over the world by pointing out that there were still more Prot warriors than paladins tanking. Ever since then it has been turned into the "they balance by representation" argument. When players wonder why I don't address their concerns more often, this is why. :)

We changed Will of the Necropolis for the simple reason that one of the designers took a look at how often the cooldown made the difference between the DK living and dying. The answer was very rarely. You can't use the talent when you want to as long as it has a cooldown, so we thought it would be a reasonable buff for Blood DKs to remove the cooldown, as well as simplifying the ugly tooltip to make it more understandable in the first place.

If the content has changed enough that the cooldown would have made more of a difference between living and dying these days, then we might add the cooldown back on with a smaller number. If it was sort of meh at 15 sec and ZOMG OVERPOWERED at 0 sec, then maybe 5 sec is the right number. We still want to see more than theoretical fights before we make that determination though.

If you're a paladin and you want to see how often Ardent Defender really saves you, go look at your logs and see how much it absorbs. The Cheat Death part can save you. The damage reduction probably saves you less. It's often just not much damage absorbed, but it kicks in when you most need it.

Q u o t e:
Is there any chance WotN could be made more accessible? Even if the CD is not as much of a concern as is being made out to be, it's a significant enough talent that it will be hard to justify tanking a lot of fights as anything other than Blood if the concern is ever going to be a tank death. Making this sort of a "baseline" tank talent would bring all three of our trees much closer to par across the board.

If you didn't need it before, I'm not sure why you'd need it now. Look through your logs (if you ever played Blood). Does WotN absorb damage more often than 15 sec? If not, you won't notice a difference. If it happens sometimes, then gratz, you got a small buff. If it happens constantly, then gratz, you're overpowered, but something else odd might be going on that would make it happen more frequently for you than for the typical encounter.

Last I looked, most DKs tanking part of the Lich King encounter were Frost, though I admit that may not be up to date as the sample size has grown.