Against Runic empowerment.

#0 - Sept. 16, 2010, 10:37 a.m.

Im sure im not alone in thinking that Runic Empowerment in its current state is a bad thing for DK's as a whole. Personally im primarily concerned with the DPS side of the class, 2h Frost in particular from the PTR, but i belive that my concerens are valid for all apsects of the class.

While the idea for randomly refreshing runes is a solid way to add some reactivity to the class, it could be cleaner. Frost in particular has problems with a single rune proc unlinking pairs for obliterates.

2 options could fix this. The first being spec specific variants that will refresh runes relevant to the spec and in relevant quantities. So single blood/ unholy runes for blood/ unholy and sets of frost and unholy runes for frost essentially granting each specs signature rune strike.

The second option is for runic empowerment to refresh death runes after they are generated, as all 3 specs get their conversion talents for free. the specific thing being that the rune has to be cooling down as a death rune for runic emp to proc. This could still cause linking problems for frost but it would be at least more managable.

Admitedly, im biased to 1 of 4 possible specs of the class, maybe others have other options on how this could improve this but as it stands i plan to simply not train runic empowerment when it goes live.

Ghostcrawler

#19 - Sept. 17, 2010, 9:35 p.m.

We think Runic Empowerment is an important mechanic because without it, the rotation becomes very predictable perhaps even metronome-like. We are trying to make sure all specs have some random mechanics so that they need to react to what happens instead of just pressing the same buttons over and over as fast as they can. Some players react badly to random mechanics because they make the rotations less predictable and therefore more challenging to manage. That's the entire point.

However, coming out of LK, Frost had a more random rotation that was more about priorities than set rotations, and Unholy was the opposite. This let players gravitate towards the play style they preferred and made the specs feel more different when you swapped from one for the other (more than just replacing Frost damage with Shadow damage). We are working on an Unholy talent that will essentially turn off the Runic Empowerment system in place of something more predictable, like the runes just refreshing more quickly. Ideally the talent would be optional, so that Unholy DKs could stick with Runic Empowerment if they prefer it. It will still require you to keep on your toes a little bit rather than letting you know for certainty what buttons you will be hitting at second 148 a battle.