Death Knight 9.2 Tier Set Bonuses - Guide Writer First Impressions

RPT Publié 27/11/2021 à 03:41 par Jaydaa

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We've datamined Tier Set bonuses for all 36 specializations in the 9.2 Eternity's End PTR. Check out all the bonuses and armor models below.

9.2 Tier Set Bonuses for All Specializations9.2 Mythic Tier Set Models

Our Guide Writers have provided initial first impressions on the 9.2 Tier Set bonuses. Check out all of our released opinion articles below.

First Impressions of the 9.2 Tier Set Bonuses

Death Knight Tier Set First Impressions
Demon Hunter Tier Set First Impressions
Druid Tier Set First Impressions
Hunter Tier Set First Impressions
Mage Tier Set First Impressions
Monk Tier Set First Impressions
Paladin Tier Set First Impressions
Priest Tier Set First Impressions
Rogue Tier Set First Impressions
Shaman Tier Set First Impressions
Warlock Tier Set First Impressions
Warrior Tier Set First Impressions

First Impressions of the 9.2 Set BonusesBlood Death Knight Writer First Impressions

2-Set - Valse runique éternelle - Frappe au cœur increases your Strength by 1% and the duration of Arme runique dansante by 0.5 seconds, persisting for 10 seconds after Arme runique dansante ends.

4-Set - Valse runique éternelle - Parrying an attack causes your weapon to lash out, Heart Striking your attacker. Arme runique dansante now summons 2 Rune Weapons.

A Prelude to Endless Rune Waltz

The Blood Death Knight set bonus, aptly named Endless Rune Waltz in game files, is almost entirely centered around Dancing Rune Weapon.

On the face of it, one can discern some old friends in these set bonuses:

The 2 piece set bonus is a slightly tweaked Arme runique éternelle, with the strength bonus being a multiplier instead of a fixed amount, and lasting a bit after DRW is over.
The 4 piece set bonus is comprised of two effects:

A retaliatory cast on parry, which is completely new.
Bouche de l’enfer.

While some of these effects look very straightforward, others require a lot of caveats and hypotheses to evaluate. Let’s deal with the obvious first.

A Requiem of Old: Arme runique éternelle & Bouche de l’enfer

The two traits highlighted in the introduction to this article are the centerpiece of this set bonus. They strike a chord by modifying Arme runique dansante in old and innovative ways:

Bouche de l’enfer spawns a second Dancing Rune Weapon to copy your abilities, and grants the same benefits as the first Arme runique dansante except for the parry bonus (which isn’t tied to the weapon, but to the buff). You can clearly see the bonus 5 RP whenever Heart Strike is cast and the bonus 3 bone shield charges (+ 1 bonus from the other Mouth of Hell effect, which we are not recovering this expansion) by sifting through old logs.
Fundamentally, coupled with the second Arme runique dansante from the 4p, the 2-piece bonus will work in a very similar fashion to Eternal Rune Weapon - each time you hit Heart Strike (which you will do a lot as you will start with 9 bones instead of 6), you will gain 1% total strength and increase DRW’s duration by 0.5s. Expect DRW to roughly double in duration and to gain an effect similar in magnitude to Fallen Crusader’s 15% strength under normal play (assuming the buff and extension have no cap), with either combined 20% uptime or up to 50% uptime when playing Arme runique cramoisie.

The very last effect of the set is a lot more complex, as there is a lot of potential moving pieces. They all revolve around the retaliatory Heart Strikes on parry - the first half of the 4-piece effect. To grok this, we’re going to have to dive below the hood and explain a few things.

What is a Frappe au cœur, anyway?

Frappe au cœur has a number of defining properties in the way it is implemented in the game. A lot of them are visible from the tooltip:

It deals a moderate amount of physical damage to a target and its neighbor if outside of D&D, and up to 4 additional targets while in it.
It generates 5 bonus RP (plus another 2 per target hit if playing Heartbreaker).
If playing as a Night Fae and inside Dû de la mort, it also grants Dû de la mort stacks.

One additional property stemming from how DK spells are implemented is also going to be hugely important for us here: Frappe au cœur costs one rune and -10 RP. The 10 RP gain from “consuming” the rune is a negative cost on the spell, rather than being a spell effect.

Due to the way the set bonus is explained in the tooltip, it would make sense for this retaliatory Frappe au cœur to cost no resource. As a result, unless the developers remember this peculiarity, one can expect at the very least that this 10RP gain will also be gone.

One thing is certain: the Frappe au cœur will likely do its amount of AP damage to at least the initial attacker, and potentially cleave. As a result, you can expect around 300-400% total AP damage from this over a minute, scaling based on the number of attackers.

For every remaining element, we can think and reflect on what effects could trigger.

Hypothesis 1: The Retaliatory Heart Strike causes the DK to gain Runic Power (but not talents)

This effectively means that every parry in Arme runique dansante and outside it grants 5 RP. Since the 4-piece bonus has a 100ms ICD, slightly desyncing an 8-target pull in M+ will cause you to gain enough RP to hit Frappe de mort every other GCD while Arme runique dansante is up.

In a single-target scenario, this is a lot more lackluster, and even more so if bosses do not require the Death Knight to tank 100% of the time. Depending on these situations, you may expect to see ~25-30RP per minute.

Hypothesis 2: The Retaliatory Frappe au cœur triggers talents, covenants and effects

As a Night Fae, this means that you literally will no longer need to stack up Dû de la mort just by yourself, as the 4-piece will massively help you with it every pull. Outside of this, you may get random refreshes while in Dû de la mort, but those would be pretty unimpactful.

When playing Bourreau des cœurs, this can amplify the RP gain from those retaliatory Heart Strikes (assuming hypothesis #1 holds) by 10 additional RP. This means that, in M+, you will literally cap on RP every time you hit Arme runique dansante, which leads to a difficult choice:

Do you spend that RP?
Do you spend the runes you have and waste even more RP in the process in order to extend Arme runique dansante thanks to the 2-piece bonus?

This would also change the dynamics of when we decide to hardcast Mort et décomposition, as this decreases the opportunity cost by providing more opportunities to generate Runic Power.

Hypothesis 3: The Retaliatory Frappe au cœur interacts with the 2-piece (i.e. it doesn’t cost a rune but counts as a rune spent to extend Arme runique dansante and provide Strength)

This unironically fixes hypothesis #2 in Mythic+ by making sure that the Arme runique dansante extension is done largely passively. And, if the duration extension has no cap, you would be looking at 100% Arme runique dansante uptime in Mythic+ in high density dungeons.

In raids, things get a lot more boring, since it would provide maybe 4-5 extra seconds extra of Arme runique dansante in pure single-target, and that assumes that your target swings at you relatively fast, if at all, while you have Arme runique dansante up.

Where We Stand

Raid Content

I’ll be honest, both the 2-piece and 4-piece are a pretty flat, dissonant note in raids.

Amping Arme runique dansante is a good idea, as it has lost power each and every expansion so far (it lost power first between Legion and BfA when we lost the second weapon, and then between BFA and today when we lost Eternal Rune Weapon as a possible choice). Having some of this power back, even if it is temporary, is not a bad idea.

That said, the set is mired in problems:

We’ve seen a large majority of encounters this expansion with 50% tanking uptime or with bosses that spent a ton of time casting. This tanks the value of this set bonus as it means you get less of a chance to parry, assuming you’re the person drawing the shorter straw on those encounters
The set bonus also double whammies on the strength of Arme runique cramoisie, a legendary played primarily in Mythic+ for the same reasons. There may be a point based on tuning of both the set and the legendary where every other legendary choice is eclipsed. This is neither good for balance, nor for the economy, nor for anybody who crafted anything else (and we all know how frighteningly expensive base pieces are still). It honestly was great to have two great legendaries, with one being universal, and a second one filling a niche - and this set ruins this fragile balance.
Finally, the entire set screams of something designed on a spreadsheet while assuming more than one target wailing on the Death Knight. It feels largely weak in raids, although not entirely useless.
I forgot to mention - in every case, a rogue "helping" you by having Poison ankylosant on their blades is actually a loss for you now. This is what happens when you tie a throughput bonus to auto-attacks.

So, yeah. Kinda lackluster, but kinda worth getting anyway.

Mythic+

Boy. This is some spice. Assuming that the Heart Strikes do anything more than just AP damage - if it even gives some runic power or interacts with the 2 piece bonus, it’ll literally go from providing a large amount of RP very often, to straight up having Arme runique dansante at 100% uptime on large target density instances.

Like, the set screams "Designed For Mythic+", to put it bluntly. It is disgustingly strong even if you include the most conservative hypotheses on how it will work (i.e. Heart Strike does AP damage and triggers 2p bonus).

This raises the question even further - should tier sets coming primarily from raids, and only after a period of time from other content, not be focused primarily on raid content?Frost Death Knight Writer First Impressions

2-Set - Assaut arctique - Hiver impitoyable grants 8% Critical Strike while active.

4-Set - Assaut arctique - Consuming Machine à tuer fires a Avancée glaciale through your target.

The Frost Death Knight set bonuses act as two very independent buffs to our kit. Especially the 4-set can potentially have profound implications on the talent and weapon meta.

2-set

Assaut arctique - Hiver impitoyable grants 8% Critical Strike while active.

This is quite a bland tier set that doesn't change the current playstyle at all. It has obvious synergy with Tempête grandissante due to the extended duration. However, since Tempête grandissante is such a default pick in the current meta we won't see any mixup with talents. The set brings even more of the Frost Death Knight's DPS into Hiver impitoyable windows. When it comes to throughput, we generally see ~60% uptime on Hiver impitoyable, making this 8% crit buff an overall 4-5% or so. Since the Frost Death Knight already likes to stack crit, this will be helpful and nice in all scenarios, but not too impactful.

4-set

Assaut arctique - Consuming a proc of Machine à tuer fires a Avancée glaciale through your target.

Now this is where it gets really interesting. There are two aspects of this tier set that we need to consider. The damage component, as well as the possibility of equipping an additional Runeforge.

Avancée glaciale deals roughly 55% worth of an Obliterate in terms of damage. For pure single target, we can therefore consider this 4-piece as reading "your Machine à tuer Anéantissements now deal 255% damage, instead of 200%". The extra portion can of course crit so it's 255% to 310%. For AoE, the extra procs of Avancée glaciale will significantly increase our throughput. Avancée glaciale isn't generally picked as a talent, but it's not because it's bad, it's because Tempête grandissante is just way too good.

Oblitération is the build that wins the most in AoE with this tier bonus, due to the increased proc rate of Machine à tuer. Every Pilier de givre window will pump out procs of Avancée glaciale, potentially making the build superior in AoE situations! Looking at this from the 2H vs Dual-Wield debate, Dual-Wield gains more raw damage from this set due to its increase proc rate of Machine à tuer. However, as you will see, 2H gains the most overall due to the runeforge factor!

Avancée glaciale naturally applies Trancheglace to all enemies it hits. By equipping this 4-set, we essentially get our Trancheglace runeforge for free! Sure, it doesn't stack up the debuff quite as fast, and you'll have difficulties target swapping, but overall it will be very similar to the runeforge itself. It opens up the possibility of equipping another runeforge! For Dual-Wield, this actually doesn't turn out all too well. Frost Death Knights don't have many viable alternatives to the Rune du Croisé déchu + Trancheglace combo. We have Rune d’hystérie which works okay with Souffle de Sindragosa builds but still only adds 2-3% damage increase. This can be compared to the 8-12% damage increase we get from our two best runeforges. Rune de la gargouille peau de pierre might look like a good alternative with a flat 5% stat increase, but it's unfortunately restricted to 2H weapons for some reason. Dual-Wield Oblitération builds really get the short end of the stick, having Rune de l’apocalypse be the only option that would actually provide a damage increase?

2H builds win big time when it comes to the second runeforge, gaining a huge amount from equipping an additional one (8% or so). Early simulations really highlight this fact, putting 2H Oblitération ahead of any Dual-Wield build by at least 2% on single target. I can definitely see 2H being a competitive and possibly superiour build in raids. It's important to remember that Dual-Wield Souffle de Sindragosa tends to be the more popular pick due to its versaility, but we'll see.

Finally, the 4-set provides an excellent way of efficiently spreading Trancheglace to all targets in AoE scenarios. We do have this functionality in 9.1.5 through the Faux de givre talent. However, it's actually not picked up due to the low damage of the spell itself. The 4p will now provide an easy way of getting that juicy 15% frost damage taken on all enemies in any given pull!

There are some questions that only testing the test on the PTR will answer. Avancée glaciale triggers procs of Machine à tuer during Pilier de givre when specced into Oblitération. One can imagine that the 4p will trigger this effect, resulting in Oblitération windows where you'd use spam Anéantissements buffed by Machine à tuer. I think it's unlikely that it works this way but it would be very powerful if it did. It's also interesting to see if the 4p works with the Dû de la mort Anéantissement cleave. Again, a very powerful interaction that I think is unlikely to work, but we'll see. Finally, Avancée glaciale usually has a chance of proccing Renforcement runique. One can imagine this would work with the 4-set providing a lot more resource regen.

Summary

The Frost Death Knight receives a somewhat bland 2-pieces and an exciting 4-piece. Mostly geared towards AoE but definitely strong in single target as well. The 4-piece allows us to pick up an additional Runeforge, something that 2H builds will see the most gain from. Furthermore, the 4-piece also pushes the Oblitération forward, especially in AoE scenarios. I think we might see 2H Oblitération becoming the new meta in raids, and possibly also in Mythic+.Unholy Death Knight Writer First Impressions

2-Set - Moissonnage - Every 5 Griffes des ombres / Frappe du Fléau casts Faucheur d’âme on your target. Faucheur d’âme grants your Goule 20% attack speed for 10 seconds.

4-Set - Moissonnage - Whenever Faucheur d’âme's secondary effect triggers, summon an Armée des morts ghoul.

The Unholy Death Knight receives a tier set that heavily focuses on execute and our Faucheur d’âme talent. I believe it has the potential to make Unholy the best execute class in the game.

2-set

Moissonnage - Every 5 Frappe du Fléau/ Griffes des ombres casts Faucheur d’âme on your target. Faucheur d’âme grants your pet 20% attack speed for 10 seconds.

Both a passive increase in the number of Faucheur d’âmes, as well as a pet attack speed increase that has the potential to see Faucheur d’âme being used outside of execute. To bring a specific example, a 5 minute fight would add roughly 15 Faucheur d’âmes, 4-5 of those being in the execute range. Outside of execute, Faucheur d’âme deals damage roughly equal to a naked Frappe du Fléau/ Griffes des ombres, essentially making this part of the set increase your Frappe du Fléau/ Griffes des ombres damage by 20%. During execute, you'd get an extra 25% Faucheur d’âmes, a significant damage increase. The pet attack speed component is also nice, especially since our pet auto attack damage is a significant portion of our damage (~13%). I don't think it's worthwhile to cast Faucheur d’âme outside of execute to keep this buff up. The low damage of Faucheur d’âme seems to make it too costly to use. We might see it used specifically to buff our Sombre transformation windows, but we'll see!

One worry I have with the 2-set is how it will work with overlapping debuffs. Having a Faucheur d’âme debuff on your target and refreshing it with either the 2-set proc or by manually casting Faucheur d’âme could pose a problem. If the debuffs don't properly run in parallel, we might end up with a minigame where we have to track the debuff closely (as well as making the 2-set proc a bit useless in execute itself). Finally, the set doesn't scale in AoE at all. Our pet uses energy to deal AoE, something that attack speed doesn't help with. The number of extra Faucheur d’âme casts wouldn't scale in AoE either, unless Mort et décomposition cleave would proc it more often.

4-set

Moissonnage - Whenever Faucheur d’âme's secondary effect triggers, summon an Armée des morts ghoul.

This is where we get the real execute value. Again, taking the example of a 5 minute fight, we'd manage to proc ~22 Faucheur d’âme secondary effects (18 manually and 4 from the 2-set) during execute. This would result in 22 Army ghouls, almost three full casts of Armée des morts! We obviously don't get to time our CDs with all the ghouls as we usually do, and not all of them will last for their full 30 seconds duration. Overall though, this will increase our execute significantly! Imagine hitting execute range, popping Furie sanguinaire, Armée des morts, Apocalypse and then summoning a large amount of ghouls from Faucheur d’âmes. You'll reach up to 20 active ghouls, a true army!

Another interesting aspect of this 4-piece is its impact on Faucheur d’âme sniping: using Faucheur d’âme on a mob that dies before the buff expires. This is generally not worthwhile, as the Corruption runique buff we get only really refunds the initial cost. As we now gain a ghoul for 30 seconds, the value of doing this has increased significantly. If you previously didn't use Faucheur d’âme on mobs that died too quickly, simply because it wasn't worth the hassle, you'd now aim to snipe as much as possible (obviously prioritising getting the sub 35% damage proc when possible). This all assumes that the on-death proc of Faucheur d’âme actually counts as a "secondary effect", something for us to test on the PTR!

When it comes to power, even if this set doesn't add the most amount of overall output, it might add the most overall useful output. The last 35% of any given boss is most often the most important part (as long as the boss doesn't die at a high %...). Simply bringing the most execute therefore makes a spec desirable. We again have no AoE scaling at all (except the questionable sniping opportunity). Being great at priority damage isn't something one should feel bad about though.

Summary

Unholy gains a tier set that has the potential of making it the god of execute. I believe our damage profile will be hightly desirable, helping us secure that raid spot! We'll potentially see ourselves using Faucheur d’âme outside of execute, and the talent itself will be even more powerful in its row. AoE scaling is an issue with the set but I don't think that's too worrying, especially if it provides us with the damage profile it does.

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Commentaire de SkildarI've enjoyed reading about the blood dk set bonus analysis because I've just recently took interest in the spec after years of raiding and mythic plus dungeons. Very interesting points on its raid value and the power of our kit in raid.

I don't want to be too negative about the unholy analysis, but I feel like much supositions are being made and the biggest being that our spec is in a good place profiting from being an execute spec. Not only is this a new profile for us (soul reaper was restore to this state at the beginning of Shadowlands) but the talent, on which you base this, completely breaks the flow of the spec once it enters your rotation (> 35% ennemy HP). Of course you argue that the damage you can deliver will make the spec so strong it will secure a spot on the raiding team. But this concerns a handful of players and shoud never be the focus. That's not what your analysis should be concerned with, but rather how it enables or not different builds and how to gain as much advantage as possible in this or that situation.

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