San’layn Death Knight Hero Talents
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Interview Highlights
We’ve summarized the interview below. We encourage you to watch their videos, linked below, if you want to listen more about any specific questions.
What’s the goal of Hero Talents?
The goal is to make your class/spec more than they are. They aren’t intended to change the roots of your spec; add a twist. That said, their intention is to create opportunity and fun, not to be overly complex.
Do any new Hero Talents touch into more pet summoning abilities for Death Knights?
Yes, one of the examples is Blood Beasts on the San’layn tree. There is nothing to announce for baseline abilities yet, but especially for Unholy, there are some things Blizzard has been discussing internally.
Are you looking to add more options to a ‘disease’ build for Unholy?
While Dragonflight had some passive disease-build options, Infliction of Sorrow, a new hero talent from The War Within, works more actively, making you interact with your diseases. Pet summoning has taken center stage lately for Unholy, with diseases falling backstage, Infliction of Sorrow is kind of a first step into making diseases more interesting.
Will Vampiric Strike work with Epidemic?
Yes. With Dragonflight, we learned to make everything that procs from Death Coil also proc from Epidemic.
With a strong feedback loop from Scourge Strike and Death Coil, are you worried that part of the rotation will end up out of the rotation?
With hero talents, the intention is not to change your core rotation but to enhance it, adding flavorful gameplay. The design has this in mind and Blizzard has it on their radar, monitoring hero talents that may drive other abilities out of the main rotation. The idea is not to make hero talents so strong that they change the main rotation loop of the spec, for instance, making Infliction of Sorrow so strong that you always want to consume all your diseases with it frequently.
How will the duration of Essence of Blood Queen work?
The duration refreshes when you use VB/Dark Transformation, so it is always up for those windows. In other circumstances, Incite Terror gives you more breathing room outside these windows, but there might be room for a cap to reach tuning expectations.
Both Unholy and Blood already have a lot of buff management, so the intention isn’t to make a new festerblight; it should feel smooth.
Any comment on how Blizzard intends to combat talent/buff convolution with so many new options/interactions being added?
It is one of the top priorities with Hero talents. Blizzard is happy with the overall structure and play of talent trees; adding 5 more points and a line to each tree would upset this balance. Hero talents became an option to bring bite-sized pieces of fantasy to certain specs.
Talent convolution is one of the top-of-mind priorities when designing the system, but there is nothing specific to share now. Some specs, like Unholy, already have very complex and fleshed-out openers, for instance, so adding new active abilities would increase the complexity there, and that’s not the system’s intent. Additions like Essence of the Blood Queen are supposed to happen during your rotation and feel good, not something you need to manage.
Button bloat is something Blizzard is keeping an eye on; for instance, recently, Brewmaster received some updates that made some active spec tree abilities into choice nodes with a passive option. This was made in an effort that if someone doesn’t want to have those extra buttons, they don’t suffer performance-wise too much.
What are your thoughts about having Death and Decay becoming a single-target ability? With Blood-Soaked Ground, it also becomes punishing to move around, which can be hurtful, especially in Mythic+.
The idea with Blood-Soaked Ground isn’t to over-incentivize single target Death and Decay more than it already is in Dragonflight. Blood, for instance, has a lot of control with being the tank and the extra charge plus proc given by its talents, but with Unholy and Frost, it definitely will feel worse and it is being considered.
With San’layn, one of the concerns with Blood is that the gameplay loop will become very repetitive; what are Blizzard’s thoughts on that?
It is a concern not to get back to Season 3/4 of Shadowlands, a gameplay that, while powerful, was very one-dimensional when you just hit one ability repeatedly to maintain a buff. If Blizzard observes that the loop for San’layn is reaching levels close to that, where you just spam Heart Strike, it will be missing the mark and is not the intention.
Are there worries about having Vampiric Blood used as an offensive cooldown due to Gift of the San’layn capstone?
It is a bit contentious to tie a defensive CD to an offensive CD like that, and, while in the past there were other examples for tanks, it might be something worth revisiting and tying it to Dancing Rune Weapon instead, which, while a defensive CD as well, has offensive properties too.
Can you tell us anything about other DK Hero Talents, Deathbringer and Rider of the Apocalypse?
The names are great! Both are very excited about Rider of the Apocalypse.
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