The History of Death and Decay DnD (Vanilla WoW to Mists)

Channel:

hirumaredx

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313,000

Published on November 25, 2013 3:25:32 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lpv0bUmodM

Game:

World of WarCraft (2004)

Duration: 1:43

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Death and Decay is a signature spell of both the Death Knights of Warcraft II and the Liches of Warcraft III. In those games, the spell lived up to its lore and destroyed everything in its radius, people, buildings, and terrain.

When Death knights were first added to wow, they had a handful of overpowered abilities that would later be toned down. Death and Decay was one of these overpowered moves slowly tweaked down over time to be a little less ridiculous.

In its first form DnD had a chance to make you cower in fear for 2 seconds each time it did damage. Now a cower in fear is not the same as a Fear. Cower is basically the same as a stun. So once a DK threw a DnD down on you, you did your best to get out of it. but that wasn't always possible, seeing as they had things like death grip and old school chains of ice, which was basically a spammable root that wasn't technically a root.

Now seeing as its effect was just a tiny bit overpowered, they decided to remove the fear effect and add it to a glyph. Then after a while they reliazed that adding it to a glyph was still OP, so they changed the Glyph to increase its damage by 20% instead of the random cower effect.

In Catacylsm the spell was changed to only cost 1 unholy rune down from 1 of each and the glyph was changed to increase the spells duration to 15 seconds from 10, and its 30 second cooldown has always been pretty constant

In Mist the spell was left relatively unchanged, and the glyph was changed to slow targets in its area of effect. Its mostly used for Aoe dps and for unholy this aoe spell is part of their single target rotation. The spells original intent was to be used to help with threat while tanking back when all 3 specs could tank.

At launch, warlocks death coil would deal damage and heal the target for 100% of the damage it did on a 10 minute cooldown which was later changed to a 2 minutes and healed for 300% of the damage. It also applied a horror effect which was a 1 of a kind effect that only warlocks had until Priests were given pyschic horror. A horror is not a fear, so things that prevent fear like berserker rage and fear ward did not work on it. also it does not break on damage. Its basically a stun that is on a seperate DR. So death coil was pretty great. Also until patch 2.1 it didn't have a diminishing returns so warlocks could chain deathcoil after deathcoil as much as they wanted in arenas.

Then in mist it was renamed to Mortal coil and and made into a talent. This new Mortal coil had a shorter 45 second cooldown and healed the lock for 15% of their total health.

The deathknight Deathcoil was used to deal damage to enemies and heal undead allies. When a deathknight uses lichborn they become undead and can use death coil on themselfs to heal. This, combined with old school glyph of deaths embrace which refunded 20 Runic power if used to heal, and glyph of deathcoil, which increased its damage and healing, gave DK's a really nice self heal. Although at the time these two glyphs still worked like that, Deathknights also had a couple other really good self heals. Deathknights were just overall OP in Wrath.

Eventually both these glyphs were changed to only refund runic power when used on ally minions, and the ability to be used on any friendly target to give them a shield that absorbs damage.

Deathcoil is also the main runic power dump for Unholy and as such has gone through a lot of changes for that spec. None of which are really all that intresting so I'm not gonna list them. But Currently when you use deathcoil 5 times as unholy you can use dark transformation to turn your minion into your own pocket warrior.

Warcraft 2 and 3 footage used from Krisw39
http://youtu.be/Z191ACJ0gVM
http://youtu.be/o0Jv7y0LVAA

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