Death Knights
The Rune System
The rune system is essentially divided in to two:
- You have runes (2 Blood, 2 Frost, 2 Unholy). Many of your abilities require a rune or a combination of runes.
- You have Runic Power. Runic Power is generated every time you use an ability that consumes Runes. Many of your abilities require Runic Power.
As such there is a simple cycle: Use your rune based abilities, which will deplete your runes (they will regenerate automatically, 10secs per rune). When using rune based abilities, your Runic Power will fill up which you use on Runic Power consuming abilities while you wait for you runes to refresh. Runic Power is generated only by using Runes and will not regenerate on its own.
The rune system has several defining features:
- Runes of the same sort (Blood, Frost, Unholy) will now only recharge sequentially. In practice this will mean that only one rune of the same type will regenerate at a time. For example, if you use both Unholy runes the first will begin to recharge and take the standard 10seconds. Upon its completition, the other Unholy rune will begin to recharge and complete 10seconds.
- Runic Empowerment is a new passive spell given to all Death Knights. Runic Empowerment gives each of your core Runic Power abilities a 45% chance to regenerate a random rune. The core abilities are Rune Strike for Blood Death Knights, Frost Strike for Frost Death Knights and Death Coil for Unholy Death Knights. Each time you cast your ability, there is a 45% chance each time to fully recharge a depleted rune. Due to the nature of how Runic Empowerment works, your rotations will have an element of unpredictability to them as you cannot predict what resources you will have available.
There are two major impacts upon the game play of Death Knights. The first is that you will not be maxed out on your global cooldowns and that you will only waste possible regeneration time of runes when both of one type are full (eg two Blood runes are available). This means there is less panic to use runes as soon as they are available; the focus shifting to avoiding having two of one type up at the same time. The second impact on game play is that Runic Power becomes far more important rather than the 'dump' when you have nothing else to do. You need to spend your Runic Power now to ensure that you have a chance of refreshing your runes with Runic Empowerment. It sets up a cycle where using Runic Power has the chance to refresh runes, which in turn will generate more Runic Power when used.
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