I know, I know, I’m a horrible blogger! Once again I’ve taken another sabatical from blogging and without any warning either. FAIL! Well once again another week has gone by and the much awaited patch 3.1.0 hasn’t been released yet. In my last post I went over the basics on Death Knight presences and when/how to use them. As some of you may or may not know Death Knight presence talents are being revamped. Currently each talent tree has a 2 point talent which applies an aura that gives affects similar to the Death Knight’s presence to the rest of the group/raid. They’re each a tier 7 talent in their respective talent tree: Blood Aura, Frost Aura, and Unholy Aura.

In patch 3.1.0 (that is unless it gets changed) instead of getting auras Death Knights will have those talents replaced by talents to improve upon the presence. Personally I think it’s a nice step in the right direction since Unholy Aura is unarguably the best aura to have, whether it be PvP or PvE. Blood Aura’s 4% heal is too little to make a difference and Frost Aura only gives 80 resistance to all which is made moot by Paladin Auras, Hunter Aspect, Shaman Totems which all give 130 resistance to one school (which is all that is needed in most fights anyway). Unholy Aura is widely accepted as the best one since the 15% movement speed buff is just huge for raid DPS and especially handy in Arena. Removing the auras will allow for more diversity as DKs won’t feel like they have to specc Unholy to be useful.

Alright enough of my rambling, the new talents are still in tier 7 and replace the old aura talents:

• Improved Blood Presence – While in Frost Presence or Unholy Presence, you retain 4% healing from Blood Presence, and healing done to you is increased by 10% in Blood Presence.
• Improved Frost Presence – While in Blood Presence or Unholy Presence, you retain 10% health from Frost Presence, and damage done to you is decreased by an additional 2% in Frost Presence.
• Improved Unholy Presence – While in Blood Presence or Frost Presence, you retain 15% increased movement speed from Unholy Presence, and your runes finish their cooldowns 10% faster in Unholy Presence.

Out of the 3 the one that seems weakest to me is Improved Blood Presence because 4% healing from damage done is still weak regardless of what presence you’re in, I can see this being nice for tanks. The extra 10% healing received while in Blood Presence would be great as a tank but as DPS you don’t need that much healing and in PvP where it could have some use Unholy Presence provides much better burst. I’d have to try it out and see but it might be a viable alternative for PvP specced Blood Death Knights to stay in Blood Presence instead of Frost when being focused on in PvP.

Improved Frost Presence sounds intriguing for PvP (not much use for the extra health for PvE DPS and the extra 2% less damage is just icing on the cake for tanks) since often times we find ourselves in Frost Presence in order to survive focus fire attacks. With this talent a Frost specced Death Knight could stay in Unholy Presence the whole time for the added burst benefit without sacrificing total survivability. Perhaps we might actually start to see something besides Unholy in Arena.

As before the Unholy version is still quite attractive but it no longer gives a movement bonus to the rest of the group/raid. Even moreso than the Frost Version this one seems to be purely made for PvP as you can still chase down your prey while in Frost Presence. The added bonus of your runes finishing 10% faster while in Unholy Presence, essentially reducing their cooldown to 9 seconds instead of 10, should help burst even further in PvP. What’s got me thinking though is if this could also be used to DPS with, would reduced cooldowns compensate for the lack of our DoTs doing 15% extra damage while in Blood Presence? I haven’t done the math on this yet but I’m willing to bet that in the long run Blood Presence would still be top dog in DPS although I could see this talent being useful for short fights.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 06:23 am and is filed under Death Knight, Patch Notes, Talents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.