Howling Blast - A Tank's Perspective

#0 - Jan. 16, 2009, 4:20 p.m.

With the recent change to howling blast, it seems as though many tanks will be sticking with Unholy. The change I am referring to is howling blast back on a 5 second cd. This makes it extremely awkward to keep in rotation when tanking. I understand the nerf from the pure dps stand point. We have people in guild that are 32/39 already doing insane dps numbers. But for a tank this was such a relief as it seemed we could now spec into frost without totally gimping our AoE threat.

One idea in order to help tanks would be to reduce the cool down with +Defense just as you did with Icebound fortitude. For every 125 defense it would knock off 1 second of the cool down. So at around 540 defense, you would have the cool down reduced to .68 seconds. It seems to have worked so far with IBF, and I think it would have a lot of tanks still consider going frost.

I for one will not be specing into frost from unholy tanking with this nerf. There is really no incentive from the frost tree over the unholy tree. This will ultimately keep most tanks in the unholy tree which if I am not mistaken is what blizzard was trying to change. Unholy is so dominate over frost once a certain level of gear is achieved. The HB cd from +def would change this and even out the playing field.

Ghostcrawler

#16 - Jan. 17, 2009, 7:56 p.m.

Howling Blast was designed for AE dps, for which it was doing too much damage without a cooldown. We totally understand the concern about having a cooldown being awkward to work along with rune cooldowns, which is why we removed it. But that change made the spell too powerful, as we feared.

We will continue to iterate on the design and the ultimate goal is to remove the cooldown. There are some ways we can reign in the damage (such as a smaller AE cap or the damage falling off after the initial target) that will take some more time and testing to implement.

The DK is a new class, and while it is working well overall, you can expect to see some iteration on it compared to the classes that have been tested and upon which players have experimented for four years.