Patch 4.2 for Death Knights

Patch 4.2 is live now. What impact will it have on the Death Knight?

General
    *     New Daily Quests: The Regrowth and Molten Front
          o         A large assortment of all-new daily quests and rewards are now available in Hyjal, where players can help the Guardians of Hyjal push back the allies of Ragnaros and establish a forward operating base in the Firelands! In order to partake in the Regrowth and Molten Front daily quests, players must have at least completed Mount Hyjal up to and including the quest Aessina's Miracle. Once this quest has been completed, players should speak with Matoclaw in the Sanctuary of Malorne to take part in the Regrowth efforts.

These new dailies will eventually reward item level 365 gear, in the ring, trinket slots plus one other, depending on whether you are tank or DPS. So there is a lot of grinding to be done (around 31 days to unlock one vendor and thus some rewards but not all), but the rewards are there if you are into soloing or just running 5 mans. Raiders may not bother.

New Quest Chain: Elemental Bonds
    *         A New quest line is now available to level-85 Horde and Alliance characters, bringing brave adventurers to Thrall's aid. The Call of the World-Shaman, the quest which will point players toward Thrall and The Nordrassil Summit, can be obtained at the Earthshrines in Stormwind or Orgrimmar.

Lore-tastic, but also for the loot whores among us, the quest rewards an item level 365 cloak at the end, with a choice of tank or DPS item. So this one is well worth doing. Even maybe for raiders!

Classes: General
  Crowd Control
    *         Many crowd control abilities no longer cause creatures to attack players when they are cast. The creature will not attack the player when the crowd control wears off, and nearby creatures will not become hostile to the player either. However, if a visible player gets too close to the target creature, the creature will remember and attack the player when the crowd control effect wears off. The intent is to make it easier for dungeon groups to manage crowd control assignments and pulling packs of hostile NPCs. The abilities affected by this change are: Hibernate, Entangling Roots, Wyvern Sting (will still cause hostility when it begins to deal damage), Freezing Trap, Polymorph, Repentance, Shackle Undead, Blind, Hex, Bind Elemental, Banish, Seduction.

Now this, if you are a tank, should make heroics easier, if you bother with crowd control at all. Certainly I've seen that no one does bother with crowd control in 5 mans, and I hear not even in the new Troll instances. If you are DPS, move along, we have no crowd control to apply anyway.

Pets
    *         The Aggressive pet stance has been removed and replaced with the Assist stance. This stance will cause the player's pet to attack the player's target. The pet will not change targets unless the master attacks a new target for a few seconds.
    *         The Defensive pet stance will now only cause the player's pet to attack enemies which attack the pet or the master.

Now for those Unholy Death Knights with their Ghoul pet, this change has potential. Assist sounds lovely for instance work, and no more Aggressive means no more pet running off aggroing everything.

Stats
    *         Death knights, paladins, and warriors no longer receive any bonus to their chance to dodge from Agility. Their base chance to dodge is now a fixed 5%.
    *         Death knights, paladins, and warriors now receive 27% of their Strength bonuses as parry rating, up from 25%. This conversion still only applies to Strength above and beyond their base Strength.

This means you should never use Agility on anything, Strength all the way. It also looks like a small buff to parry rating.

Death Knights

# Obliterate base damage has been reduced to 150% weapon damage, down from 160%.
#     Talent Specializations
    *         Frost
          o             Hungering Cold now has a 1.5-second cast time.
          o             Might of the Frozen Wastes now increases two-handed weapon damage by 3/7/10%, down from 4/8/12%.
    *         Unholy
          o             Unholy Might now increases Strength by 20%, up from 5%.
#     Glyphs
    *         Glyph of Dark Succor has been redesigned. Rather than placing a 15% maximum health floor on Death Strike healing while in Frost or Unholy Presence, it causes the next Death Strike within 15 seconds after killing a foe that yields experience or Honor Points to heal for at least 20% of the death knight's maximum health (still requires Frost or Unholy Presence).
#     Death Knight Bug Fixes
    *         The talent Killing Machine can now properly be triggered from off-hand attacks as well as main-hand attacks.

The Frost patch notes have already been hot fixed, so are just included for reference. However the Unholy change to buff the strength increase of Unholy Might by 15% is new for 4.2. What this means is that maybe Unholy is back to being the "best" DPS spec, maybe Frost is. The Elitist Jerks threads seem to indicate that its either Frost Dual Wield or Unholy 2 Handed, but only raid logs will tell.

The Hungering Cold fix was for PvP, which means 1.5 seconds plus some being beaten on while you try to get it off, but hopefully won't affect PvE too much. Apart from it being bloody annoying to have a cast on Hungering Cold.

The Glyph of Dark Succor change means its only useful for PvP or soloing, but even only soloing after you kill something. It is making Death Strike pretty damn useless during soloing or instancing for recovering health, if you are DPS spec. This is mildly frustrating but I guess I'll have to learn to run away instead.

Currency
Valor & Justice Points
    *         All existing Valor Points in the Currency tab have been converted to Justice Points. Any points above the Justice Point cap will be converted into gold at a rate of 47 silver per point and mailed to characters.
    *         The maximum number of Valor Points which can be earned in a week from any and all applicable dungeons and raids is now 980, down from 1250.
          o             The maximum number of Valor Points awarded for completing Rise of the Zandalari dungeons remains at 980.
          o             The maximum number of Valor Points awarded for completing Heroic dungeons remains at 490.
          o             The number of Valor Points awarded for killing a boss in the Firelands is 120 in 10-player mode, and 140 in 25-player mode.
          o             The number of Valor Points awarded for killing Occu'thar in Baradin Hold is 120 in 10-player mode, and 140 in 25-player mode.
          o             The number of Valor Points awarded for killing a boss on Heroic difficulty in The Bastion of Twilight, Blackwing Descent, and Throne of the Four winds is 35 in 10-player mode, and 45 in 25-player mode.

Is someone trying to drag out Tier 12, by limiting how quickly people can gather Valor? Looks like it, doesn't it? If you are over 4k Justice + Valor, best spend some before the patch drops.

Dungeons & Raids
Baradin Hold
   *         Occu'thar has broken free from his cage and presents an all-new boss challenge to players in 10- and 25-player arrangements who control Tol Barad.
   *         All Tier 11 raids nerfed by 20% (my words)

A new boss to pug in Baradin Hold, plus all Tier 11 nerfed by 20% means grinding this content in PUGs has become easier. Sadly Tier 11 normal now only drops Justice points, so you are better off using the Dungeon Finder to run some heroics.

Items
# If a player wins a Need roll under the Need Before Greed system on a Bind on Equip item, the item will become Soulbound to that player. The item will remain unbound if won via a Greed roll.

So no more needing on BoEs to sell on the Auction House, now the only place you'll be selling them is the vendor.

#     Applicable tier 11 items now cost Justice Points.

Rendering all the changes to crowd control utterly pointless, soon everyone will be in 3 piece Tier 11 (I assume the token pieces are not applicable) and associated boots, cloaks, trinkets, etc. Thus crowd control is no longer needed in instances, and we can face roll everything! (This is sarcasm). Still, now there is once again a reason to run heroics, plus the JP I stock piled beforehand can be spent on something shiny and epic.

#     The Keyring bag slot has been removed to make room in the user interface for new features.
    *         Keys which no longer serve a purpose in the game will be removed from player inventories. Compensation for the keys will be automatically provided in the form of each key's vendor sell price in gold.
    *         Keys which are obsolete quest items will be removed from player inventories.
    *         Keys which may still be of use to players will be transferred to regular inventory space. If a player's bags are full, these keys will sit in a backlogged inventory until sufficient space is made available. Once space is opened, the keys will appear in regular inventory upon the player logging out or switching zones.

I remember when they added the key ring to the game, before then my bags and bank were choked with bloody keys everywhere. Now they are taking it away, but giving me back any keys I need? I am really hoping there are no keys I still need, otherwise I'm going to be quite mad I've got more useless keys to fill my bank up again.

Races
    *     All character races now have a /roar sound.

/ flex!

User Interface
           * The order in which characters are listed at the Character Selection screen can now be rearranged and saved.

Best feature of the patch, right there.

So general impressions then. The patch introduces a small number of changes for Death Knights, but no massive heart-tearing rewrites, so that's good. The new dailies are a hell of a grind, but do at least give non-raiders something to do, plus there is a lot of Valor point items on the JP vendor to go hit heroics for. Sadly there are no more Archaeology items, so I guess the best you can get without raiding is still 359 and 365 from the Firelands dailies. The new Thrall quest line looks like it will be very cool, plus there is an epic at the end, so that's all good.

References:

EJ Unholy DPS thread
EJ Frost DPS thread

Ghost Crawler explains 4.2 changes

We have a nice post up explaining the tweaking that has been going on with the Death Knight class in Wow 4.2.

We added the cast time to Hungering Cold for PvP reasons. It is one of the most powerful forms of crowd control in the game, especially in Battlegrounds, and yet was impossible to prevent.

Unfortunately this is a direct nerf for PvP which annoys in PvE, even though it wasn't needed in PvE. Still, I guess we can get used to a small cast time, right?

The nerfs to Obliterate and Howling Blast were made because Frost damage was too high in both PvP and PvE. Note that these values were hotfixed -- you shouldn’t see damage drop further when 4.2 goes live.

The Glyph of Dark Succor change was to keep Death Strike from providing so much healing in PvP.

They nerfed the self-healing from Death Strike, but sadly this again stops it doing self-healing in PvE too. Given the heroics these days involve the DPS not taking any damage, this change is a pain because at the moment I can get some health back using Death Strike, using it instead of Obliterate.

The Might of the Frozen Wastes change was a small tweak to help keep one-handed Frost relatively competitive with two-handed style.

This is intriguing, DW was better in 4.1, however in 4.2 it will be interesting to see if 2 Handed Frost is better or not, given equal weapon item levels. I'll keep my eye on the Elitist Jerks thread.

The Unholy Might buff was to help catch Unholy up to Frost in PvE. Interestingly, we didn’t nerf Unholy damage at all in 4.1, but you can still see a small drop in their DPS because so many talented DKs went Frost. I’d love to have the discussion some time about how close two similar specs need to be before players will play the one that is most fun for them and not the one that does theoretical higher damage. Is it 5%? 1%? 0%?

Well, if you continue to design the game to be unforgiving of mistakes, the answer would be 0%. Otherwise more DPS is always better, given that Frost and Unholy both have their play style issues, I'm fine playing either. Plus I get to dual wield in Frost, and that is cool.

Quest grinding done, now for... more unholy grinding?

I've finally finished Mount Hyjal, quested all the way through it and gotten to Revered with the Guardians. This means I can buy the tasty Waywatcher's Boots and I've gotten a nice boost toward exalted. I even got the Cataclysm Lolmaster achievement. All quests done! So what now?

I am still doing the Ramkahen dailies and some Dragonmaw Clan dailies (when I can be bothered), and haz Ramkahen tabard for instances. No, what is now needed, is some serious dungeon grinding, for gears and JPs.

To that end, I am dumping my 2 handed Frost leveling spec. Sure, its awesome for soloing and going boom with some kick-ass AOE. But it relies too much on random procs, and I tend to spend all my time pressing the same 3 keys (Obliterate, Frost Strike, Howling Blast). I am switching to 2 handed Unholy DPS for some dungeon work.

The Elitist Jerks Unholy thread is very good, and has a nice spec posted. I am taking this one here, putting left over points into Desecration (for the slows needed in Grim Batol), more Magic Suppression (for the crazy amount of magical damage in the 5 mans) and finally I took Anti-Magic Zone, because it looks useful and damn I want to be like Koltira Deathweaver. Even though the effect looks a bit poor, and a point in Runic Power Mastery might have been better.

I've now finished grinding Dragonmaw, and got some tanking boots, although they are epic and the stats are probably better than my 333 boots, so I may use them in the DPS set as well.