The Death Knight is either an awesome class, or a forgotten one.  I’m not entirely sure which is the more accurate description, although there are days when I can roll through any capital city and maybe see one DK checking his mailbox.  Poor guy is probably just waiting to see if anyone’s responding to his raid resume.  Or any resume for that matter.

Whenever a major patch comes along, every class tends to tighten their sphincters.  Some do it because they are excited about the changes coming to their class.  Some do it because those changes are going to screw their class up royally.  Death Knights can finally unclench, because Patch 5.2 has gone live and it was pretty good to us.

The Dev’s  discuss their thought process on the 5.2 changes to the Death Knight in a Class Discussion Blue Post –

We had three main goals:

• Make some less attractive talents more compelling.
• Improve quality of life for Unholy Death Knights.
• Give a small PvP buff.

We didn’t feel like Death Knights needed many changes overall, and we try not to change classes for change’s sake, especially midway through an expansion, so you’ll see fewer changes here than for some other classes.

To address some issues with less attractive talents, you’ll see buffs to Death Siphon (more damage dealt) and Conversion (less Runic Power over time).

Unholy’s quality of life changes were mostly to solve the problem of “orphaned” runes. A Death Knight would, for example, Blood Boil twice and then Scourge Strike, leaving two Frost Runes, which weren’t sufficient to use Festering Strike. Now Icy Touch activates Reaping, which will allow those Frost Runes to convert to Death Runes. We also made Plague Strike apply Frost Fever to reduce the need to use Icy Touches. We also made Summon Gargoyle no longer cost Runic Power and changed the damage done to both Shadow and Nature to synergize better with Unholy’s Mastery, Dreadblade.

While we think Death Knights are in a good place in PvP overall, we did agree with the feedback that Strangulate has a very long cooldown for what it does, so we lowered its cooldown and also lowered Asphyxiate to match. Finally, it is worth pointing out that the tier 14 2-piece ended up being overbudget to the extent that we were concerned DKs would keep using it in the 5.2 raid. We nerfed the set bonus and buffed Death Knights to compensate. Blood is in a good place overall, but we did buff Blood Parasite dramatically, because it was just undertuned.

There you go.  Straight from Blizzard themselves.  “We didn’t feel like Death Knights needed many changes overall.”  That is due to the fact that Death Knights are Awesome.  DK = OP.  Simple as.

Champion of all the things.

So what exactly were the 5.2 Patch changes for the Death Knight?  Let me drop them on you… BOOM!

• Death Siphon now heals for 150% of the damage dealt (was 100%).
• Conversion now costs 5 Runic Power plus 5 per second thereafter, down from 10 Runic Power plus 10 per second.
• Death Knights now maintain the same health percentage when switching into and out of Blood Presence.
• Blood Plague now deals 15% more damage.
• Frost Fever now deals 15% more damage.
• Strangulate cooldown has been reduced to 60 seconds (was 2 minutes).
• Asphyxiate cooldown has been reduced to 30 seconds (was 1 minute).
• Blood Parasite now summons Bloodworms with 15% of the Death Knight’s health (was 18%) and Blood Burst now heals for 25% per stack of Blood Gorged (was 30% per stack).
• Frost
  • Howling Blast now deals 8% more damage to the primary target. Damage to other enemies in the area-of-effect remains unchanged.
  • Icy Talons now increases attack speed by 25% (was 20%).
  • Might of the Frozen Wastes now increases melee damage by 15% (was 10%).
• Unholy
  • Reaping now also applies to Icy Touch.
  • Summon Gargoyle no longer costs Runic Power.
  • Gargoyle Strike now also deals Shadow damage, in addition to Nature damage.
  • Ebon Plaguebringer now causes Plague Strike to inflict Frost Fever, in addition to its other effects.
  • Scourge Strike now deals 3.8% more damage.
• Frost and Unholy Tier-14 2-piece set bonus has been reduced to 4% (was 10%) increased damage on Frost Strike, Obliterate, and Scourge Strike.

Death Knights just went from “pretty damn good” to “OMG jacked”.

Born to wreck shit.

But that’s not all!  Oh no, there’s so much more that has changed, but I’m not about to copy and paste every damn thing.  You can just click yourself right over to MMO Champion, home of all things World of Warcraft where they cut and paste from Blizzard themselves!  GO THERE NAOW!