This is from a PvE perspective.
Right now, Rune of the Fallen Crusader is our baseline, go to enchant. Nothing beats it unless you’re frost or a BDK who is struggling for survivability.
Now, not every rune needs a place in every spec, and there’s nothing wrong with having an all-purpose, good for everything default Rune like fallen Crusader. But I need a reason to want to pick the others too, otherwise, what’s the point? Are they just newb traps?
Here are my suggestions, with what I know as a BDK:
Rune of Sanguination
I’ve heard this has a niche in PVP, but I can’t imagine why you’d take it over razorice or fallen crusader considering the low proc rate.
First off, the heal is useless as blood. It’s not at all uncommon to drop to 35% and then heal straight back up with a death strike or two, so it’s going to get popped early when it’s not needed. This turns it into a raw hps-generator and its hps is worse than Fallen Crusader. Fallen Crusader heals about 45% of your health every two minutes. Sanguination heals 48% every 5 minutes.
From what I can find (there’s not much info) the death strike damage also only increases to around 30% which is nothing considering fallen crusader gives you (basically) 15% more damage on everything with a 65-70% uptime.
So as we can see, Sanguination is just straight-up worse than Fallen Crusader and is a complete newb trap.
If it popped at 10% or maybe 20% that would be a different story. It might actually save you and become a pseudo cheat-death. If we changed the damage modifier to instead do exponentially increasing damage and healing on targets below 35% health, and boomwe have an actual execute mechanic, with a unique execute-style heal. Absolutely amazing for fights like Sludgefist and sire D.
Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle
Stoneskin Gargoyle needs a buff. It’s not worth taking unless you’re at risk of being one-shot (and even then, it’s probably not saving you).
5% strength and stam is nothing compared to the 6% heal and 15% strength from Fallen Crusader.
Here are some stats from my BDK:
Baseline (with bone shield):
43.69% armor
16.65% parry
Stoneskin:
45.39% armor (+1.7%)
16.95% parry (+0.3%)
Total mitigation increase: 2%
Fallen Crusader:
45.14% armor (1.45%)
17.55% parry (+0.9%)
Total mitigation increase: 2.35%
Average total mitigation increase: 1.65%
Considering Fallen Crusader has a 70% uptime, the average mitigation difference is around 0.3% in Gargoyle’s favour. However, comparing the 5% stam and 6% heal, the heal wins. A single 6% heal is worth 6% effective health. I mean, just do the numbers on that; every minute Fallen Crusader is healing for 18% health. Even considering Death Strike heals off of max hp, the 6% heal wins for survivability every time.
Fallen Crusader is straight-up better for survivability and damage.
We don’t need to do much with Stoneskin Gargoyle. Instead of 5% extra armor, you take 5% less physical damage (or increases your armor to the point you take 5% less physical damage).
We can also increase the stamina to 10%. This gives the death knight a proper health pool buffer to help offset our spikiness (keep in mind that the 6% heal still wins in terms of increasing our effective health).
Anyway, with these changes, Stoneskin Gargoyle now actually makes sense as a defensive option.
As a side note, it might be a good idea to experiment with giving BDK more stamina, even at the cost of mitigation. At most levels of play, healers don’t understand how to heal BDKs and panic when we spike, and then there’s every chance we haven’t been saving our RP to react because the healers have kept us topped off most of the dungeon. So more health = less panik.
Fallen Crusader
This is the standard that every rune should live up to. It’s powerful enough to feel like an actual addition to our toolkits as deathknights. Any nerfs to Fallen Crusader in an attempt to balance runes would, I strongly believe, make the whole system feel even worse. Bring everything else up to Fallen Crusader’s level, not the other way around.
Rune of Spellwarding
So this is something that’s going to be hard to balance for both PvP and PvE. Here’s my suggestion:
I don’t think that 3% is enough. Especially since the 10% bubble doesn’t proc very often at all. I’d be willing to bet that, again, Fallen Crusader is better in terms of survivability.
Make Spellwarding proc enough so that it’s comparable to the 6% heal from Fallen Crusader.
Then, we can use the deflection to offset the (average) 10% loss of strength and the (1-2%) physical mitigation that comes with it. Let’s ballpark a 10% deflection (this might be too high in PVP, though). You do far less damage, but you’re more survivable against magic damage.
Rune of Hysteria
Now, as I said earlier, Hysteria is mainly used by Blood DKs for extra survivability, but with the Stoneskin Gargoyle changes, that will no longer be the case.
The fact that Fallen Crusader gives 10% average strength means that it’s going to beat the 8% average increase of RP generation for DPS (hysteria has around a 40% uptime). I don’t play the DPS specs much, but I don’t think the spenders are that powerful.
This could probably just be tuned to increase haste at a 10% average for a passive that smoothens your rune regeneration rate. Increasing runic power generation is nice, but you generally can’t hold back on spending runes to make the most of the increased generation, making it feel largely wasted.
Rune of the Apocalypse
Although I don’t play Unholy, but from what little I do know it’s not even used by them. Maybe up the proc rate and let it apply from, not just ghouls, but any target we CC with control undead. Might be fun in Theatre of Pain.
You could also not re-balance the rune enchants and let all specs duel wield, giving us more options. Gargoyle needs a buff tho, straight up.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.