Blood
Going into Midnight we had a few pain points with Blood Death Knights that we are looking to address. On initial pull, Blood has an incredibly long ramp up time to both get their defensives rolling but also their offensive power. The main culprit is due to how we turned Boneshield into a damage throughput resource because of the existence of Shattering Bone and Insatiable Blade. Going into Midnight we have removed Shattering Bone and re-distributed its power into Blood’s baseline damage abilities for a more consistent throughput that doesn’t require all the hoops to jump through to start dealing damage. On the topic of Boneshield, we’ve also reduced the number of abilities that deduct from it such as Tombstone and Bonestorm. As a tank you have a lot of things to consider in your role and adding what was essentially a third resource to spend felt like it was slightly too much. Not to say we can’t explore this design in the future, but we will need to be much more cautious and deliberate with these ability designs to ensure its not encroaching on the already existing resource system of Death Knights.
The other notable change for Blood is focused on making them more reliable in high end Mythic+ keys. Blood historically (outside of the very strong Sepulcher of the First Ones tier set) has been great at low to mid-level keys but started to fall off at higher end keys where their Death Strike healing can’t overcome the damage they start to take. To alleviate some of this we’ve made a pass on Death Strike and all its modifiers to reduce its overall healing but at the same time we’ve re-distributed that power into their baseline defensives, talents, and Boneshield. The goal being to make their damage intake a little more predictable at higher keys and prevent them from “falling over” before they can start to get their other defensives rolling. We love that Blood has carved a niche for itself as the self-sufficient tank and we don’t want that to change. We look forward to hearing your feedback to the above changes as well as the other changes not mentioned as we continue into Alpha and beyond.
Frost
In Midnight, we are looking to iterate on the Ghosts of K’aresh Frost Death Knight rework by implementing better tuning knobs that allow for the two prominent builds, Frostbane and Breath of Sindragosa, to be able to compete in single target situations.
We’re also updating Obliterate to be partially dealing Frost damage, so that we can fine tune the throughput difference between casting it with Killing Machine or without where we believe is needed.
Unholy
In Midnight, our primary goal for Unholy Death Knight is to deliver fantasy and gameplay that truly embody what it means to be a master of disease and raising the dead. We found Festering Wound to be mechanically overbearing and decided to move away from it. We’re overhauling the core abilities of the spec to create a new rotation that interacts more deeply with your diseases and summoning powers.
To deliver this vision, we’ve introduced a new type of summon called the Lesser Ghoul, placing it at the heart of Unholy’s baseline rotation. Festering Strike now grants a buff that empowers your next couple of Scourge Strikes to summon a Lesser Ghoul—instead of applying a debuff to a single enemy that needs to be spread and tracked throughout an encounter. We’re also updating Army of the Dead to summon these new Lesser Ghouls, and restoring it as Unholy’s primary cooldown by reducing its cooldown to 1.5 minutes.
We recognize that simply having cool ways to summon armies of the dead doesn’t necessarily create meaningful gameplay. That led us to design a new Rune-spending ability called Putrefy—the third rotational partner alongside Festering Strike and Scourge Strike. With Putrefy, you’ll sacrifice your oldest summoned Lesser Ghoul to explode and deal Shadow damage to nearby enemies. We’ve intentionally placed Putrefy early in the specialization tree to enable further fun and meaningful interactions you can opt into. And for those wondering about targeting—don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Just press the button and enjoy the show as your Lesser Ghoul explodes spectacularly.
Now that we’ve covered summoning, let’s talk diseases. In Midnight, we’re introducing a new single-target disease called Dread Plague, which will work alongside your AoE disease Virulent Plague. As with summoning, simply applying cool diseases isn’t enough—so we’re redefining some core abilities and bringing Runic Power spenders like Death Coil and Epidemic into the mix. Scourge Strike will now cause your diseases to inflict an additional tick of their periodic damage at a percentage of their effectiveness, while your Runic Power spenders will extend their durations. Extending disease duration becomes important because we’re also introducing a powerful disease consumption mechanic via a talent called Blightburst. When talented into Blightburst, the explosion effect of Putrefy will consume a significant portion of your diseases’ remaining duration and deal that amount of damage instantly.
By leveraging the concepts of Lesser Ghoul and Putrefy, we aimed to unify the summoner and master-of-disease fantasies. We hope you’ll find all the other talents we introduced fun and engaging—especially the new Apex Talent, which we believe will fully immerse you in this redefinition of Unholy Death Knight.