Diablo 2 & DK predictions for BGs

So with the elemental invasion making me rage whenever I login and there being a plain lack of things to do on WoW with the current state of the game me & my cousin decided to take a look back at the game that really defined who we are as gamers today. Note that this has very little to do with WoW it's more of a retrospective so if you want something about WoW then scroll past this wall of text, as I know a lot of people played Diablo 2 religiously though I know some will find it interesting.

Lessons learnt in Diablo 2 and how they could be applied to WoW

It was maybe 8 years ago now that we stumbled upon this 'battle.net' function in the first Diablo, a few days later we were sitting high and mighty with our Armageddon Staff and Godly Plate of the Whale thinking we were the shit. A few weeks later we discovered Diablo 2 existed, shortly after convincing our parents to shell out on a copy of a Diablo 2 Battle Chest for us we headed on into Sanctuary for the birth of a 5 year of what I suppose could be classed as an addiction to the game. We only had one PC though between the two of us, so hourly shifts it was with many arguments over who took an extra 10 minutes because hey, when you're 12 that 10 minutes is a lot of time.

Many things come to mind looking back over the years spent on that game and how much fun it really was due to the sheer amount of customisation and build options that were available. There was no standard gear/stat/skill choice for PVP, everybody built slightly differently. A few of the more memorable things to me were -

1. Cow runs, leveling to 99 over a few days in the 1.09 patch was awesome.
2. Swe ping lamers, Blizzard servers were located in Telia giving the Swedish among us 5ms. Me? Well me & my cousin spent our time with 300-400ms being shouted at because his Dad didn't have a telephone anymore due to dial-up internet. UK broadband saturation was in it's infancy at this point.
3. The bugged items, US servers had retarded 99999999999 stat charms with +7 skills which created a completely different metagame for them. EU just had bugged items which made characters incredibly strong. I had a full bugged Amazon myself for a brief period and being able to easily 1v7 duel games without dropping below half hp was amusing.
4. Guided arrow piercing people 5~6 times in 1.09, shame the Burizazon died with the 1.10 patch.
5. 1.10 adding teleport to everything, even though it was banned in Euro-PVP (shout out to anyone who played in that, post your nick in comments!) it added a new dynamic which was seen in the American leagues and public duel games.
6. The ability to 1v7 duel games, this is the thing that I miss the most in WoW. No matter how good you are, whether you're the world champion or not, you're not going to win when outnumbered to that extent. Compared to Diablo 2 where the skill cap with an ability like teleport is so high; if you were good, numbers were never an opponent.

One of the things that I did in my years spent playing Diablo 2 was being a part of the rule making for the private European PVP community (Euro-PVP). This involved adding restrictions to the game to make it balanced for 1v1/2v2/3v3/4v4 and for the most part succeeded incredibly well even when the new patch came that changed literally everything. Sadly the community died out a bit when WoW was released although the admins that ran it are still playing today in the guild Sunday Union on Zenedar. There was very rarely times when one class was clearly overpowered and never ever was it left for an entire season, glaring imbalances in the rules would often be fixed within days if the reasoning behind the changes was good. This is quite a stark contrast to the current balancing system that Blizzard have employed. What surprises me the most though on this topic is that the players have not taken Blizzards game into their own hands yet again and imposed their own restrictions to add a semblance of balance.

If players were to take the game into their own hands again, what would actually be possible? Arenas would be a bit of a logistical nightmare outside of TRs due to people not all being on the same server/bg. But the main thing that does come to mind is duelling. Duelling has always been something that a lot of people have enjoyed, to the point where big money even exchanges hands from it. What if there were a ruleset in place that actually made 1v1 competitive? Limits on certain stats/items as were imposed in Diablo 2 worked incredibly well while still keeping the heart of the game intact and in some cases actually made the game even more playable. To put that in perspective, 4v4 with everyone able to teleport was a nightmare, 4v4 with map control mattering and laying down invisible hammers/blizzards while your barbian blocked the enemy amazon turned the game into a tactical masterpiece.

What I propose from this is really as follows; when pvp is more established in Cataclysm, people sit down and look at duelling and what could be changed to make some of the match-ups more balanced. A proper duelling tournament could be great fun with the right restrictions imposed as obviously you don't want druids killing people with thorns and nor do you want mages Ice Lance spamming people to death and using nothing else. While some may argue duelling is somewhat 'balanced' as it is, it's often an uphill battle for one side in the hope that they can win rather than playing right so that they know they can win, see the current state of mage vs rogue from the rogue's perspective. In any game built like WoW and Diablo 2, player enforced restrictions can change the metagame and enhance it greatly. I hope that in Cataclysm we see something similar to Euro-PVP crop up and change the face of duelling as it would certainly be a worthwhile pursuit!

Deaths Knights in Cataclysm - Part 2

Lets face it, with the current state of our beloved "Knights of Daeth" every team will want at least one, most would like two, maybe three. Death Grip will be one of the biggest and most influential cooldowns of all of the BGs due to the logistical commitments required to win and often because singling out key players with it can sway a team fight greatly in your favour. Being able to coordinate double grips will give the teams that do so a large advantage especially in CTF bgs, this would instantly take their flag carrier 65+ yards away (can be even further if gripped into a knockback).

Other than grip being the premier utility skill of bgs, DKs also bring AMZ to the table of which the uses are fairly obvious. They also prove to be an interesting and probably the most viable flag carrier, lets take a look at the cooldowns available -

7. IBF - 3 min cooldown - 50% less damage taken, stun immunity, 12 second duration; this is obviously 'the big one' that you want to use when being opened on, even more so when the other team has a rogue/warrior.
8. Vampiric Blood - 1 min cooldown - +15% hp +25% healing taken - 10 second duration; great when under huge pressure that you can't escape, glyphed it gives an extra 40% healing taken but is very situational as to when the glyph will be more useful than the base ability.
9. Bone Shield - 1 min cooldown - 20% less damage taken, +2% more damage done; This has a minimum of 6 seconds duration and can be precast before entering any big fights, the fact that it reduces magical damage makes it a very valuable cooldown to have when you know a big burst is inc.
10. Rune Tap - 1 min cooldown - 10% of HP healed; Not much to be said here, another free heal.
11. Dancing Rune Weapon - 1 min cooldown - 20% parry - 12 second duration; 20% parry vs melee is never a bad thing with DKs having an innately high parry chance to begin with.
12. Will of the Necropolis - 45 second cooldown - 25% less damage taken, refreshes Rune Tap cooldown - 8 second duration; This procs automatically at <30% HP and is one of the best cooldowns in the game as far as survivability goes, a straight 25% less damage taken and a free rune tap when combined with any other cooldown is very likely to see you living through most things.
13. AMS - 45 second cooldown - up to 75% of hp in magic damage absorbed - 7 second duration; No DK will run without this being glyphed, I can see it being used both to stop big wizard cleaving destroying you and for avoiding debuffs such as roots that will destroy your mobility. Either way the best thing about this is it's an ability unique to Death Knights and one of that main things that makes them a far superior flag carrier to other classes.
14. Death Strike - The UF strike for tanks still remains and while the rune cost is outdated, the new design is great. The Mastery for Blood DKs is based upon how much your Death Strike heals, your Death Strike heals for up to 25% of the damage taken in the last 5 seconds or a minimum of 7% of your maximum health. Now with mastery stacking each Death Strike can provide you with a shield for over 100% of the healing done. To put this in perspective here's a Death Strike heal from Heroic Lich King - Capitalism Death Strike Capitalism +0 (O: 81912) - 82k overheal is still an 82k+ shield with a good amount of mastery. Mastery will easily be the primary stat for any DKs that are aspiring to carry flags within the BGs because of the ridiculous shields that are possible due to this.
15. Death Pact - 2 (3) minute cooldown - 40% of HP healed; I say 2(3) because Raise Dead is on a 3 min CD whereas Army Ghouls can also be sacrificed. Similar uses to Rune Tap as I don't see teams killing your Risen Ghoul anytime soon and Blood has very few ways to effectively spend RP.

Personally I think that when the carrier is under pressure nothing will come close to Blood DKs. while druids may be able to run circles around lesser teams, when it comes to playing good teams you're going to want something meaty. Another great thing is that they can still provide utility with grip/strangulate/DS/NS and the damage is far from bad with a quick gear swap to DPS items. The ridiculous amount of cooldowns will also let them run far less resilience and still be a target that you won't want to touch in a fight and even if they do take a bit of a battering the Vengeance makes Necrotic Strike scale to ridiculous numbers, we're looking at an extra 7.5k healing reduction per strike although the limited amount of Unholy Runes for Blood limits this a little.

Another thing that could be overlooked is the 20% mount speed talent that DKs have, a built in Crusader Aura is always going to be amazing for making it back into combat. Something that has changed a lot though from the previous incarnation of DK is their spread damage, before 4.0.x came diseases were something to be feared (ok maybe not feared but they did a lot more damage). With the current state of diseases they tick for 500~600 at level 85, this makes the Contagion talent to offset the pestilence nerf not even worth taking as whether your diseases are ticking for 300 or 600 on the entire enemy team, who actually cares when you have 150k HP. Only big use for diseases other than their synergy with skills will be antirogue as they have such a huge duration now, rather than the spread pressure that you could achieve before.

I do feel that the rest of the DKs uses in BGs crosses over very heavily with the arena part that I wrote last week so check that out if you missed it as they will also be able to play the same very disruptive/class that sets up swaps in BGs. So with that I'll leave you to ponder over these thoughts, until next time - Karuki