As World of Warcraft: Shadowlands comes closer and closer, Blizzard has been actively making changes to the alpha build for the title. Their most recent changes include some alterations to the Death Knight.
One of the primary goals for the upcoming expansion, it seems, has been to “unprune” some of the classes. While on recent expansions Blizzard has tried to simplify things, this time around they’re adding back some of the things taken away.
The concept of pruning the classes came about in an attempt to make things easier to understand, especially for new players. After so many expansions, it got to where some of the classes had so much in their toolkit that it was filled with redundancies and unneeded abilities.
However, in taking away the abilities in the pruning process, Blizzard ended up upsetting quite a bit of the fanbase. With this newest expansion, they’re undoing some of their removals and adding in a few new abilities through all of Shadowlands.
With that in mind, Death Knights are up on the slate for the latest batch of changes in the seemingly-endless onslaught of alterations. While the changes made in the most recent patch are decidedly minor, they join a mountain of changes that will be active by the time the expansion arrives.
“Death Knight(s) will see a couple of abilities tweaked in this Alpha update, based on feedback received,” Blizzard announced, confirming once again that they’ve been paying attention to their player base. “We think these should help their usability going forward. Thank you very much for your continued feedback.”
The changes are rather simple, on the outside, and seem to be based on some balancing tweaks. For example, the global cooldown on Rune Tap has been removed for Blood Death Knights. Blizzard states that they’re reverting the change they previously made to keep Rune Tap at its current functionality.
Unholy Death Knights have had their Virulent Plague buffed, with the duration increased to 28 seconds up from 21 seconds. Additionally, Outbreak has had its AoE range increased to 10, up from 8.
Blizzard states that the need for these changes was to help compensate for a loss of uptime on Virulent Plague. By extending its duration and increasing the AoE, their intent is to make it so that Unholy Death Knights don’t need to spend half a fight bunching up their opponents for AoE.
Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any changes for Frost Death Knights, which many consider to be the most overlooked of the three possible specializations for the class. Hopefully as the massive amount of updates continue on, we’ll see some changes for the Frost players.
