Dk's just got messy

4.0 is on the ptr right now and all the class changes (up to this point) are on there. Glutton for punishment that I am I downloaded all 15 gigs of it and copied over my DK.

I chose my talents and set up my bars and proceeded to barf diarrhea of a "rotation" all over the ebon hold dummy.

First I purposly decided to not train runic empowerment so that I could try to see how close to live the new rune cooldown system plays.

Even with RE not trained the "rotation" is clunky to say the least. With SS only costing one U rune and festering strike (FES) costing B/F runes it becomes a mess to start out your rotation. You have to PS,IT, to get up diseases then you want to SS x2 for damage then you have a FES to use a B/F rune set then you have a B rune left over. OK so you BS ONCE and never touch the button again. How pointless is that?

OH and don't forget that Death Rune Mastery (each spec has its own name for it) is passive so it cant be skipped.

The problem with this is that you will always have a single strike that hits the hardest and want to use your death runes for that strike. That means that any "rotation" you had went from 10 seconds and repeat to about 30 seconds. Try to memorize a rotation that long I dare ya.

Now enter Runic Empowerment. HOLY CRAP! It's like a chimp is behind your computer randomly mashing buttons on a console hoping for a food pellet to drop out of a chute. The only difference is that instead of food pellets for the monkey it makes A RANDOM RUNE reset its cooldown.

So bye bye "rotation" and hello "priority". Even then its crap because you know that the priority would be Diseases up, DC if sudden doom or you're gonna rp cap, SS, FES, DC. What it turns out to be is every time you DC it pocs RE so you hope an U rune shows up so you can SS. God forbid a F or a B rune shows up. You have to see if the other of the B/F pair is up so you can FES. If not is a U up and is it close to time to refresh diseases? Do you wait for the other of the pair to show up to do a FES. Oh and did I mention that FES extends your disease time by 6 seconds? Oh and even better you can have a Death rune pop up. GREAT! so now you got to decide if you want to hold that D for a FES or use it right now for a SS. Choose wrong and you have runes sitting there not being used.

But, don't hesitate! If you take too long to decide its a dps loss. Split second decisions for hours on end, how fun. NOT!

Runic Empowerment is a mess. It was a good idea to give us a way to shorten our rune cool downs, but the randomness of it will make for huge swings of good and bad damage. I hope they address it before it goes live.