Feedback: Death Knight Updates

In Development The War Within Alpha Test
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In this thread, we’ll be testing and talking about Death Knights in The War Within. Look here for posts from the development team as adjustments and bugfixes are made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

Thank You

Before we continue testing The War Within, we’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who read and responded to the Hero Talent previews we posted over the last few months.

Looking to the Alpha

In this first Alpha build, every single class has at least one new Hero Talent tree available for testing, with the rest coming in the following weeks. We’re asking testers to initially keep several things in mind:

  • There are UI elements on the talent panel that are placeholder, including things like talent icons, text, or final UI art.
  • Some talents may not be functioning yet, or may be marked as not yet implemented (NYI)
  • New spell visuals and audio for several new Hero Talent trees are still a work in progress. Many trees are using placeholder assets for now that will be updated over the course of Alpha.
  • There are some talents that are not fully tuned yet. This is expected, and we will implement tuning adjustments throughout testing.

The combat design team has two big areas of focus right now that we are prioritizing over other concerns such as tuning or generic class updates/maintenance:

  • Finish building the remainder of the Hero Talent trees that are not yet available.
  • Fix bugs that are blocking testing of new talents.

With the Alpha build being playable and all of the discussion that will occur around the flood of data, we wanted to reiterate that the responses to our blog previews were highly valuable. The feedback we received allowed us to make some early improvements or revisions while we didn’t yet have a public test environment. It allowed us to take some big early swings on certain trees, and then react to early feedback quickly.

Going forward, we aren’t planning to publish any additional Hero Talent previews in blog form, since we’ll add the remaining classes to the Alpha as soon as they reach their ready-to-test state.

Working from Feedback

Several Hero Talent trees have received changes after reading feedback to the blog posts. Some of these were tuning changes to ensure that the Hero Talent tree felt competitive, while others were significant design changes. The feedback thus far has been of great benefit to us.

Going into Alpha, we feel good about the shape of the Hero Talent tree designs. Keeping a consistent number of utility and defensives nodes across all trees, having parity between number of choice nodes, and the overall structure of the trees are things we’re confident in.

We’re also working on tweaking some core class designs as well. In some cases, it was necessary to make adjustments to the class or specialization talent trees before significant work was done on a Hero Talent tree. In other cases, we did work seeking to improve base class talent tree designs.

Alpha Feedback

Now that we’re in Alpha, we’re looking for feedback on how it feels to playtest these trees. We’re specifically curious about:

  • Hero Talents that you feel are “required” for your spec in a type of content, such as raiding or Mythic+, or that push you towards picking a specific tree.
  • Hero Talents that create frustrating or unsatisfying gameplay or rotations for your spec.
  • Hero Talents whose functionality is confusing, unclear, or difficult to track during gameplay.

Throughput comparisons of Hero Talent trees are helpful, but we’re more interested in gameplay, feel, and choice feedback at this stage. Also, when possible, we appreciate it when you focus posts or articles on a single spec and Hero Talent tree, rather than combining feedback about multiple issues.

Again, Thank You

We greatly appreciate all your feedback on Hero Talent trees and are very excited for you to see everything else we’re working on. Thank you!

– The World of Warcraft Combat Design Team

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Hello Death Knights,

We wanted to take a moment to let you know that we are planning some updates for the Death Knight talent trees going into The War Within. While we’re still a few builds away from deploying the changes to the War Within Alpha, we’d like to outline some our goals with the changes, to give a better idea of what to expect.

DK Goals

  • Reduce the amount of resource flooding that affects each spec to varying degrees,
  • Reduce the throughput nodes toward the end of the tree. It currently has 9 such nodes that add a lot of tension and make it hard to flex into utility you’d otherwise like to take. While we don’t plan to outright cut the DPS throughput nodes, we will rather make them easier to pick up as you naturally progress through the tree. This will allow us to focus the capstones on much more utility or defensive focused talents.

Blood

Blood suffers from a lack of viable build options because it has to invest so heavily into the tree to feel like it functions. To some degree, all Death Knight specs suffer from this a bit more than other specs due to their unique leveling experience comparatively. We want to see where we can shift some abilities/talents learned in the spec tree that would make more sense baseline, to not only smooth out build diversity but also improve the leveling experience.

Frost

For Frost we want to take a look at Breath of Sindragosa to get it back to the more appropriate ~30 second duration to allow us more tuning knobs. This starts with the first note of reducing the flooding of resources available, one of the big offenders being Rune of Hysteria, which will see an update.

While we understand Breath is a very divisive ability it offers a very unique gameplay experience that not many of our other specs offer and while have no plans to remove that we do want to explore a potential alternative that feels fresh and exciting for players that wish to try something a bit different. Likely introduced as new capstone replacing Frostwyrm’s Fury which we plan to shift higher within the tree as a more easily accessible talent.

Unholy

As for Unholy, we have some plans to reduce the opener complexity. It’s not nearly as intuitive as it could/should be. Unholy also suffers from the amount of things it needs to track to really function optimally and it is less than ideal and we are looking to reduce the amount of “plates that need to be spinned”.

Gargoyle is one area we’d like to explore offering a new playstyle. While we don’t plan on removing it we do want to create a choice node with it that offers a less bursty option and leans a bit more into a more sustained damage alternative.

We’d also like to revisit Sudden Doom and diseases to offer a little bit more gameplay experience than the two currently do for Unholy.

Lastly, while we don’t have plans to remove Festering Wounds we do want find ways to make the friction of playing with them less. Vile Contagion was an ability introduced in Dragonflight that had some excitement around it but it never quite got its time. We plan to reduce its cooldown to 45 seconds and we plan to update Festermight to function similarly to Ironfur so playing around the act of bursting wounds feels less punishing and doesn’t require as nearly as much set up.

More to come

While the above isn’t exhaustive and doesn’t encompass all of our planned changes, we want to start the conversation so that players have a general idea of what’s coming.

Thank you for your continued feedback and we look forward to hearing more when we unveil the changes.

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While it is understandable that a full rework is a big effort, I’m personally extremely disappointed to read this as the current direction of Unholy Death Knight. Festering Wounds have always been disliked by the vast majority since their introduction in Legion Alpha, and their perception has never gotten better. Festering Wounds have been consistently buffed and had talents added to increase their relevance, and yet we are still in a situation where they feel more like a barrier to the core Death Knight toolkit than an enjoyable mechanic.

When Festering Wounds were introduced, they fulfilled the same function as the old Festering Strike and how it originally interacted with the old rune system. The core Death Knight ability system has always functioned as a trio: a button you want to press for the most possible damage, a maintenance button you need to press that you don’t immediately benefit from, and finally a runic power dump. That design has never been the flaw, the flaw lies purely in the implementation. Festering Strike occupies the space of the maintenance button due to the existence of Festering Wounds. In the past, you were still forced to press Festering Strike due to Rune restrictions, but you had more freedom of choice on when to press it based on the player’s discretion of how they used other abilities available to them. This created a positive feedback loop for the player as they were able to best decide how and when to use their abilities within reason.

Currently we are forced by design to constantly press that maintenance button that feels restrictive and unsatisfying arbitrarily throughout the fight, when it’s supposed to occupy an unsatisfying “investment” button that leads to something. The initial design of Festering Wounds stems from the flaw in the Rune system rework which failed to restrict you enough and direct gameplay, and as a consequence, it needed a way to direct resources. Comparatively, the original Rune system still forced those unsatisfying “investment” casts to be able to be manipulated into something that felt like you were in control of your own resource flow rather than being dictated by an external rule that sticks to the target - even if the end result is the same, losing that visceral feeling sucks. Instead, we are currently forced to press the same old button that does very little outside of moving the ebb and flow of the spec in an encounter. It feels a lot like we are pressing buttons to fill time instead of there being a rise and fall that goes with buildup and payoff mechanics.

This feels like a turning point where we could finally get rid of a restrictive and unsatisfying mechanic that has been plaguing this spec for such a long time, and the chance is about to slip through our fingers. As such, it is hard to get excited about Unholy Death Knight’s prospects in The War Within.

Wounds have existed in-game for almost 3000 days, or more than 8 years now, before this expansion is released (Launch of Legion Pre-Patch until an approximate release date of Sept 1, 2024). This will be considerably longer by the end of the expansion - assuming an 18 month release schedule - than the original version of Death Knight existing (2805 days from WotLK Release, Nov 13, 2008, to Legion Pre Patch, July 19, 2016) if nothing changes. Quite simply at this point, it’s an immensely unfulfilling experience playing this spec after all this time with the small amount of iterative changes that we have seen over the past 8 years. Attempts have been made to fix this version of the spec, and this reads like another attempt, when it feels past time to let the experiment go. I understand that reworking this class/spec is an extremely large undertaking, but considering DK has seen a decrease in playerbase since this design was introduced, it feels like it will only get worse trying the same thing over and over again.

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Rider of the Apocalypse Feedback

To start this strong, the hero talent tree for Rider of the Apocalypse is absolutely perfect in theme, class fantasy and lore for a Death Knight. Linking back to everything we had previously done in Legion in order to give us more power in The War Within is honestly brilliant.

But, I’ll be blunt, the gameplay just isn’t there. It’s probably the most bland, boring hero talent tree I’ve played with when it comes to any sort of gameplay interaction because there just isn’t any. You do what you always do, but, sometimes there’s a Rider there with you. Maybe sometimes you’ll get some more strength, or stack a DoT, but that just isn’t engaging at all. Would absolutely love to see some sort of active interaction with each Rider while they are helping us, not the same old passive pets we have been complaining about for so many years. With a tree so insanely well done in terms of fantasy, I’d love to see this also be something that’s just REALLY fun to play as well.

Each of the Riders need something more, something that makes us think about our gameplay while they are active, and actively change our rotation in some way. While I’ve had some ideas about what could be done, the best I can think of is actively changing the way some of our abilities work while each one is up. For example, Whitemane could just turn Outbreak/Howling Blast into Undeath, so that we can control when it starts. Putting that agency into players’ hands, rather than letting it come down to a random proc would probably make this one of the best trees in the game. This does come with the downside of each of the Riders spawns being random though. But, do they have to be…?

Idea number 2, is heavily inspired by another game in the same genre with a specific… summoning job. Why not give us the agency to pick what one is summoned at any given point in time, limiting it to 1 of each Rider per cycle? While this does have the downside of leading to a bit more button bloat (4 buttons to summon riders might be a bit unruly), if the rest of our kit is properly whittled down, could fit in quite well, and lead to some real thought in the order we summon them in. If you know there’s a large group of enemies coming out shortly, you could choose to save whatever rider is best for that purpose, rather than praying to the RNG gods to give you a good rider for that task. Actively choosing the order of each Rider you summon in the cycle to best suit your scenario could lead to some incredible gameplay benefits and skill expression for players when combined with proper gameplay-altering mechanics while each one is active.

I know this is a lot to ask, but for a Hero talent tree with such strong theming, fantasy, and love from the community, dropping the ball on the gameplay aspects could be disastrous for community perception.

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The problem I feel mostly is wounds in aoe situations is a pain to add/burst outside of the Dark Transformation and Infected Claws then DnD. Why not just make Vile Contagion consume up to 6 wounds to spread a DoT based off wounds instead? (Like reverse Unholy Frenzy). Would make how DKs have always been with single target aoe cleave. Example is Howling Blast and Rime procs.

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One thing I really feel needs to change is that as a frost dk, breath of sindragosa just does not feel good to play, while obliteration is much more fun and yet I feel like I have to work twice as hard to get half as much single target dps. There isn’t enough single target options in the talent tree.
I love the idea of cleaving strikes for AoE and I know the ability is getting reworked somehow but I also cannot express enough how awful it feels to use in a game where we are constantly forced to move during AoE encounters rendering it a very limiting ability and destroying my AoE output on the regular.

My class feels like it is majorly disadvantaged in both AoE and Single Target Situations quite often.

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Greetings, Death Knights.

This week’s alpha build has our first round of changes to both the core class tree and the Unholy spec tree. As stated in our initial messaging our goals for the core tree updates were to shift some of the damage throughput at the end of the talent tree to earlier in the tree. For Unholy our goal was to address some of the flood of resources, reduce the number of things that need to be tracked to play optimally, increase pathing as well as choice, and reduce the number of nodes you need to pick up to play the spec fluidly. We will go into a little more detail below for both the core and Unholy changes.

Core

The core tree has undergone a decent reshuffling of talent placement, node pathing, ability’s becoming baseline and talent rank reduction.

Due to the unique leveling experience Death Knights have and not starting from level 1, they had a reduced amount of abilities baseline and had to “buy back” several abilities that other classes and specs would have normally earned as they levelled. Heading into The War Within we are reassessing the stance on this for Death Knight not only for abilities they had to talent into in the core tree but also their spec trees. The hope here is by freeing up some of these talent points you had to spend to make a functional leveling experience you gain a few points that allow you to flex into more optional talents without locking you into one build.

We have also updated several pathing nodes and moved around a few nodes to better fit the new tree philosophy. Structurally the bottom of the tree no longer holds 9 throughput talents and they have been shifted to earlier in the tree and many of them have been reduced to 1 point. Again, allowing for more build variety and the ability to pick up situational talents when you might need.

We hope that the update to the core tree allows for more expression when building out your talents and not as if you are locked into one talent build with very wiggle room to pick talents reactively for the situation you are facing.

Unholy

The Unholy talent update focuses on reducing the number of talents that you had to pick to make the rotation function in a reasonably coherent way. This includes Epidemic and Outbreak baseline and addressing the number of ability cooldown reduction talents. Unholy suffered from having to choose multiple talents that reduced their cooldowns to align in a way that made sense from a gameplay standpoint. This made playing the spec any other way unreasonably convoluted especially if you were new to the spec and trying to learn to play the spec. We have removed any talent that had any sort of cooldown reduction to abilities and baked them baseline into the spec (this includes Army of the Dead which is now a 3-minute cooldown).

Secondly, we wanted to address Sudden Doom which has been feeling lackluster for awhile now. Most notably we’ve updated its proc functionality to be more consistent instead of using our RPPM system which is usually found on trinkets and other item procs. It now has a base 25% chance to proc with bad luck protection built in. The hope here is this feels more fluid and a normally occurring proc that fits well int your rotation instead of one that feels like you can go long periods of time without it. We are still noodling on the base percentage chance and values are subject to change, but we’ve found this to be a good starting point. We’ve also updated its functionality to cause your next Death Coil or Epidemic to crit to add a little extra punch to the proc. Alongside some talents that interacted with Sudden Doom and the new talent Doomed Bidding we hope that Sudden Doom feels much more impactful as a class proc.

We’ve also cut several talents that felt somewhat lackluster or just did very little for Unholy, most notably Feasting Strikes and Replenishing Wounds. We hope that with the reduced amount of must pick Cooldown talents, never picked “useless” talents, and new talent choices there are more appealing choices to be made within the tree that allow you customize in a way that fits your needs. Lastly, there are a couple talent nodes that have temporary “Not Yet Implemented” talents. We will be updating in the future build and eyeing talents that add a little more interaction with diseases in potentially exciting ways.

Thanks for your patience! We look forward to hearing your feedback on the above. Next up-- we’re working to get our planned Frost and Blood changes in.

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The changes to the class tree seem great overall, it seems like there’s a lot of flexibility in the first and second sections and that feels good, though I am worried about the prospect of optimal builds for DPS death knights not wanting to take death strike.

With that said, there is still throughput in the bottom third of the tree whose positions seem likely to cause problems. Firstly, runic mastery being easier to get cements it as a permanent 2-point investment of the 11 available past that gate, and as long as abomination limb does damage the next 3 points to get that will probably be needed for max damage. (abomination limb probably doesn’t need to do damage any more? not sure though.) Its positioning also makes me curious if there is any specific reason that DPS Death Knights should not have access to Gorefiend’s grasp.

There is a third throughput node in the bottom of the tree as well, which based on the tally above may have been overlooked in design: Death’s Echo. While the second charge of death and decay doesn’t increase throughput for frost and unholy in single target (except when unholy takes defile), it is a throughput increase for blood in all scenarios and a throughput increase for both DPS specializations in aoe as well.

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With the changes to the Unholy and Death Knight class talent trees today, I’ve been playing around with the new layout trying to come up with some builds that people would use.

While there are still a few nodes in the Unholy that are unfinished at the moment that could very well change pathing, there are a few major pain points I’m starting to come across already. First, and most important of which is the placement of Ruptured Viscera. To put it plainly, this talent sucks and it is blocking the route we would generally take to get to Unholy Assault in single-target. This has a bit of a knock-on effect when talenting into Raise Abomination as well. While Ruptured Viscera at full power is nothing of note to begin with, taking Raise Abomination reduces its value further since well, it’s not 8 ghouls exploding with a chance for Festering Wounds and dealing damage.

Due to this, it heavily encourages Unholy to path through all of the more AoE-centric talents on the left side of the tree just to avoid wasting their point on that nothing-burger of a talent. If Ruptured Viscera is to stay in the tree, it CANT be where it is right now.

Next up, Eternal Agony. This talent is incredibly sought after due to the power that Dark Transformation brings in both AoE and Single-target, but, right now it just feels like it has been hidden in the corner of the tree where it is hard to really justify pathing to, as it is behind Reaping, which isn’t great in AoE, and the generally lackluster All Will Serve. While this may get easier to justify with the node currently below it whenever it is revealed, currently just doesn’t really feel like you can reasonably justify the lackluster points to get there.

Other than this, in general, just feels like there’s just not quite enough points to go around. With the changes, all in all there’s 1 more node on the tree, but, the point costs of the node placements hasn’t changed at all. feels like giving us more choice in theory, but in practice it ended up not quite reaching that mark. I will absolutely applaud the work that’s gone in to make sure there’s no useless nodes on the tree, got 95% of the way there, just need to get rid of Ruptured Viscera, and potentially rethink Unholy Aura. As Unholy aura was issue prone in every single raid tier of Dragonflight, its not engaging to the player to have to make sure they are in range of whatever arbitrary distance was set from the boss, and just creates more work for QA and developers whenever it doesn’t work properly. Should seriously be re-evaluated.

The Class Tree on the other hand, feels WAY more free than it did before. Taking the pressure off pathing to the bottom of the tree in very specific ways to get all the DPS increase talents really opened it up to some choice. While quite a few of the new talents in the tree are a bit… unexciting, at least we can just choose to skip them now. Outside of the 2 pointer in front of Abomination Limb which feels a bit lackluster.

Onto the non-tree related feedback. The gameplay!

The biggest issues I’ve come across in my few hours of testing so far are 2 things.
First thing, Sudden Doom still making Death Coil free, with its now very, very frequent proc rate floods the living hell out of Unholy’s resources. This really can’t keep being a free cast if you want to keep Unholy’s resources in check. Outside of the resource situation, the proc rate does feel quite good currently, more so when combined with Doomed Binding, even with no gear equipped, i was able to maintain a Magus from this effect nearly 100% of the time, which does really increase the positive feelings associated with Sudden Doom.

And the second issue is Festering Wounds. With a lot of the talents this tree encourages (Ruptured Viscera, Raise Abomination, Infected Claws), we generate a near-infinite amount of Festering Wounds. While this does reduce the friction they have when applying them, it also pushes us further into resource flooding, as we have basically no reason ever to cast Festering Strike, which then feeds more into pressing Scourge Strike/Clawing Shadows, taking up 1 global for 50% of the rune cost. Currently, I expect people to need to press Festering Strike maybe 3-4 times per minute, which is abysmally low. Would much, much rather see less passive Wound generation and a more impactful Festering Strike press. The direction things are going right now, we might drop Festering Strike from the rotation altogether.

Other than these 2 major issues, rotation does feel smooth to execute, and generally a bit more intuitive. However, not much has really been done to simplify the opener if we were to go with a similar build to what we did in Dragonflight (Unholy Assault and Commander of the Dead capstone talents, with Summon Gargoyle taken). The Festermight changes help a little, but, we still have to juggle buff overlaps on Army/Abomination and Gargoyle with Unholy Assault, Festermight, Commander of the Dead. The only thing removed so far is Empower Rune Weapon, which we just macrod into Unholy Assault anyway.

Granted, if we were to drop Gargoyle for Doomed Bidding, and grab Raise Abomination, this does simplify the opener immensely, don’t need to worry about wounds since Abomination will just, do it for you. don’t need to worry about gargoyle buff overlaps since it doesn’t exist, and Festermight rolling makes it so Abomination is just feeding itself damage. While this does simplify the opener, and general gameplay loop, it does feel a bit unhealthy to do when it removes any and all thought required for Festering Wounds.

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Class Tree Feedback

This feedback is given from a Mythic+ and Mythic raiding focused perspective.

I have mixed feelings about the class tree updates. The tweaks to the talents we had in Dragonflight are all welcome. Pulling the throughput higher in the tree and making them 1-point talents increases my number of flexible points for utility. Putting Unholy Ground near Cleaving Strikes makes that talent package feel natural to pick up, and I like how Cleaving Strikes was adjusted to give us some leeway on staying within Death and Decay. The new connections make pathing feel better, though the positioning of Death’s Reach behind two Raise Dead upgrades feels odd. Ice Prison is positioned well as a situational talent. All in all, the changes are a big improvement on the tree until I get to the bottom two rows. The goal to reduce the feeling of being locked into one build is met, but it’s done by filling out the bottom with talents that feel unremarkable.

  • New Talent: Subduing Grasp – When you pull an enemy, the damage they deal to you is reduced by 4% for 6 seconds
    Subduing Grasp will feel awful, especially since I’ll have to spend 2 points on it when my raid group wants Abomination Limb. The DR it offers is weak, if it does anything at all. Many enemies are immune to grips, and many I can grip will not damage me immediately after. Most grippable mobs are autoing the tank or casting something I aim to stop with a grip. The relative weakness of Abomination Limb also contributes to Subduing Grasp feeling underwhelming. Abomination Limb is the last tool I use when controlling mobs due to its random nature. I will first rely on Death Grip with Death’s Echo as much as possible. I expect the talent tax here to feel particularly bad in Mythic+ where I will always want Abomination Limb for its significant throughput.

  • New Talent: Osmosis – Anti-Magic Shell increases healing received by 15/25%
    This concept is neat for giving AMS some use against encounters that are heavy on physical damage. But, it undermines itself outside of that. AMS is a proactive defensive. If I’m using it properly, I won’t need extra healing. For the increased healing to be significant, I would need to take a huge amount of damage, or I would need to mistime AMS. The huge amount of damage scenario is plausible, but at that level of damage, the rest of the group is probably taking so much damage that a healer is using a cooldown anyway.

  • New Talent: Null Magic – Magic Damage taken is reduced by 15% and the duration of harmful Magic effects against you are reduced by 35%.
    By far, this is the most powerful of the new capstones. I would take this into almost every encounter. The debuff reduction is my only concern. Similar effects have, in the past, had unintended consequences for certain mechanics, like having less time to run out with a debuff. I would not expect this to come up often, but there may be times we want this talent and cannot take it because we need debuffs to last their full duration on us.

  • New Talent: Vestigial Shell – Casting Anti-Magic Shell grants 2 nearby allies a Lesser Anti-Magic Shell that absorbs magic damage and reduces the duration of harmful Magic effects against them by 50%
    I’m not sure how I feel about such a limited party buff. In its current state, I would not pick this. Lesser Anti-Magic shell is far too weak. (45k shield when health pools are around 700k). Even if it were strong, it would be a tough sell to pick, helping just two of my allies sometimes when I could always have a strong magic DR.

  • New Talent: Rune Protection – Your chance to be critically struck is reduced by 3% and your Armor is increased by 3/6%
    I assume this is a PvP-focused talent. This talent is useless for a PvE player on a DPS spec in group content. It’s a shame it is so unappealing because the reworked Blood Draw might be a compelling option if I did not need to waste 2 talent points to unlock it.

The changes in this build are a fantastic step forward, but the new talents in the bottom two rows are generally underwhelming. I hope to see some tweaks to the new 2-point nodes in particular, so they feel less like a tax that steals points without offering tangible benefits.

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Runic Protection and Subduing grasp are sus like mentioned multiple times already. Moving past that.

New class tree feels alot better with choices. That is until all the new ones with the last set where all the new ones are just passives except Abomb limb. Idk maybe swap Death Pact with Runic Prot, but honestly it just feels like class end nodes is for Blood DK.

Unholy class tree is much better. They are talking about resource caps and wounds. I think Scourge Strike should proc 1-x wounds like it did before. One wound per Scourge Strike is why Vile Contagion has problems getting traction imo. Rotation would be 2 Festering Strikes to DnD to VC (Vile Contagion) at which point you have 1 rune left before needing to use Runic power to generate more runes. But lets say you do all that and do double DC and get all 6 runes back. The next problem is casting 6 Scourge Strikes in a DnD hoping mobs dont get moved before 6 globals, or they die before that. Maybe make VC have SS proc 2 guaranteed for the next 3 SS’s or something like that with a the old cooldown timer.

Other problem is the end nodes for unholy still. Festermight all but is required for DPSing in all content, but is still on the far left node. Why not swap it with Superstrain as a node choice?
Yes ReMoVe FeStErInGs WoUnDs is what most people will say, but if you are going to force the playstyle, at least make the best talent choices for it available for all.

Talking of end nodes comes back to what I was talking with another dev. In what universe will Festermight/UA with Unholy Aura/Commander of the Dead ever be an actual build? You lose out on almost all center nodes which is Magus and Army of the Dead.

I love the new talent Doomed Bidding, but that comes at the cost of superstrain because Festermight is always required.

I think the end nodes should be rearranged to reflect what is forced into rotation gameplay vs passives buffs.

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I am posting this mostly in the words of Kyrasis from Area 52, who primarily does Blood Theorycrafting as well as higher-end Mythic+ on Blood after some joint testing yesterday.

This feedback will focus mostly on the Core class talent tree changes from a Blood perspective; particularly “potential bugs”, “the enjoyment level and impact of the new talents”, and “overall talent tree dynamics”.

Potential Bugs

(1) The 4 seconds of lingering Cleaving Strikes (and associated buffs) extends past the base 10 seconds of Death and Decay and up to 14.
(2) Osmosis only affects raw healing and does not appear to impact absorb healing in any way (Blood Shield included)

New/Updated Talent Lightning Round

Ice Prison - PvP Talent, so no comment

Assimilation - Old Assimilation was awkward in many ways and had weird gameplay incentives, though Blood was never using it in that form. While the new version is more straightforward gameplay-wise, I do think it is a more satisfying approach to enhancing Anti-Magic Zone than what we had.

Suppression and Blood Scent - The value of these tertiary stat nodes for Blood DK is still near-nothing (they are admittedly more valuable for the dps specs, who are more threatened by AoE damage, gain more effective healing out of leech from more baseline damage, and have lower natural healing throughput), so their greatest impact in their new positions is applying a tax to all talent they gate. This wasn’t as noticeable before because they used to be in ignorable locations, but their location is particularly constraining for Blood.

Runic Protection - For Blood DK, the armor increase is enough to give the talent slightly higher consideration than Rune Mastery and (old) Unholy Bond in Mythic+ settings, which is to say that the nodes would likely have trouble competing against situationally-useful utility talents; in raid settings the relative value of armor goes down and it would be even less desirable than that. That being said, this is also in a less accessible location than (old) Unholy Bond and (old) Rune Mastery.

Subduing Grasp - An odd talent, for sure, especially since the effect works on knockback immune enemies, but I respect that it is trying to stay to the theme of Abomination Limb. Death Grip weaving for an 8% DR against certain single target abilities is a gameplay pattern that some will likely take issue with. If resource levels drop to the point where rotational downtime is a thing again, I guess weaving in Death Grips for otherwise empty GCDs could be a consequence of this talent in situations where they are not needed for their actual grips. I have mixed feelings about this myself.

Osmosis - This talent provides more value to AMS (especially in situations where AMS would normally have no value, such as when there is no magic damage), I do think that part of the talent is neat. Granted, the fact that it doesn’t interact with absorb shields/blood shield makes the effect a bit more lousy-feeling for Blood, since much of our healing is absorb-based. There seems to still be the pattern of the pre-capstone talents being purposefully weak to justify stronger capstones after looking at all of these. It is also weird a talent making AMS better in pure physical damage situation is gating an anti-magic capstone.

Blood Draw - In its current design, it is a questionable (but possible) pickup for PvE purposes if it wasn’t gated by weak talents, but its strength does not justify its tree position. Low-health triggers are awkward for Blood as it is given how volatile our health bars are, but the AoE life drain (as well as the new buff effects) are not powerful enough to justify a 3 minute cooldown with such low buff durations.

Null Magic and Vestigial Shell - Both of these talents are interesting and potentially impactful, though Vestigial Shell has weak tuning at the moment. Definitely one of the more exciting talent nodes in the tree if it is tuned properly.

The (reworked) Assimilation, Null Magic, and Vestigial Shell look like satisfying-to-take-and-use talents, but that’s hard to say for the others.

Overall Talent Tree Dynamics

The changes to the overall talent tree greatly increase the ability to pick up utility talents in the first- and second tier of the tree. You are able to effectively grab all talent nodes of significant value for Blood in both Raid and Mythic+, with some amount of flexibility remaining to easily swap into some of the more situational options. For Blood, Ice Prison, Proliferation Chill, Death Pact, Sacrificial Pact, and Enfeeble remain especially unappealing, Permafrost mainly gets points when situational alternatives are not needed, and Death’s Reach is still a situational pickup, but in a more painful location to take due to its Enfeeble/Sacrificial Pact gating. As a result of all of this, build variety in the first two portions of the tree will likely go down for better or worse; while it will definitely go down in the final talent section…

The pathing from Blood Draw to Suppression and Blood Scent is littered with low-impact talents that make navigating into that portion of the tree generally undesirable for Blood in M+. Suppression and Blood Scent themselves have near-zero value for Blood, Rune Mastery is only appealing enough for purposeful pathing in raid settings, Runic Protection has ok appeal in M+ (but is gated by a number of things much less appealing in M+), and Blood Draw just does not have a power level befitting being a capstone talent. So, the situations where you go into that side of that tree are mostly limited to when incoming magic damage is particularly irrelevant for both you and your group and other situational utility options are not generating value. Abomination Limb continues to look like a capstone that is generally desirable, while the Null Magic/Vestigial Shell capstone is very dependent on the presence of magic damage (but satisfying when it exists).

That being said, it has to be said again that Blood’s utility greatly benefits from this new tree. Before, we’d generally be allowed to pick 4 talents between Acclimation, Coldthirst, AMB, AMZ, Asphyxiate, DnD grip, Lichborne DR, and March of Darkness. Now we can gain all of these effects at the same time, with a talent point to spare. Wraith Walk is also now in a more accessible location, even if it comes at the cost of Death’s Reach being less accessible. For better or worse, Blood now would always take Soul Reaper, which moves our overall damage profile more towards single targets in Mythic+ situations. Some people don’t like the gameplay that talent brings, since it is very clunky with a fixed 6 second cooldown, but it is a strong talent that noticeably impacts gameplay.

The changes to Cleaving Strikes is also very nice from a gameplay perspective, though I imagine the extra duration is a bug.

Overall

I do think the general class tree changes help address resource bloat (with the Abomination Limb changes and Empower Rune Weapon removal), while also providing more flexibility to take utility talent options. Granted, actual competitive options remain limited due to legacy low-value talents remaining and several new talents having questionable value, as well, so build variety may actually go down. Soul Reaper being an auto-include for Blood is an interesting side effect of all of these changes. If future iterations occur, changes to talents that feel unsatisfying or have near-zero use-cases would probably be the best thing to focus on from my subjective perspective. Particularly trying to repair the situation in the bottom left of the tree and the key positions being taken by Suppression and Scent of Blood (which have very low value for Blood). Thank you for your time and effort working on the Death Knight talent tree!

6 Likes
13

RE: Interrupts

Why is Mind Freeze a talent on a class that has no healer spec? Warrior has the same roles as DK, 2 dps and 1 tank spec but Pummel (warrior interrupt) is baseline.

15 Likes
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Feedback on Sudden Doom Proc Rate Changes

So to start, new system appears to be incredibly similar to the PRD system utilized in DotA2, where every failed attempt increases the chance of the next attempt. Due to this, it ends up spreading out procs a decent bit unlike RPPM, which could frequently proc multiple times in a row, this is more likely to be more evenly spaced.

For reference sake, the mean number of auto attacks before a proc without Harbinger of Doom ends up being 3.99 (essentially 4). With Harbinger of Doom, this is 3.10.

Auto Attacks Before Proc Sudden Doom Harbinger
0 0 0
1 8.54% 13.52%
2 15.31% 23.54%
3 20.39% 25.30%
4 19.13% 20.54%
5 14.76% 12.01%
6 10.82% 4.20%
7 6.58% 0.80%
8 2.90% 0.11%
9 1.11% 0.00%
10 0.42% 0.00%
11 0.05% 0.00%

This was compiled from around 25000 auto attacks with, and without Harbinger of doom talented, for a total of around 51000 proc attempts. Something I find quite nice about this new distribution is, quite frankly, there’s an incredibly low chance to chain proc Sudden Doom, while at the same time, its proccing significantly more often. This will lead to a bit more freedom when we are high on Runic Power and want to spend it. There’s unlikely to be situations where you’re just chain proccing Sudden Doom and raging at all the resource waste its contributing to.

The downside to this though, well, Sudden Doom is still free, and proccing WAY more often. This in itself is leading to a massive influx of resources to Unholy. So even though Empower Rune Weapon was removed from unholy, Abomination Limb was changed to not give Runes through Runic Corruption, we have significantly more resources now than we did before, even more so during cooldowns where we can endlessly spam Scourge Strike/Clawing Shadows due to the Wound Generation provided by Raise Abomination, Infected Claws, and Ruptured Viscera, leading to us being incredibly more Rune efficient than previously. With no reason to press Festering Strike and more Sudden Doom procs, Unholy is feeling more flooded than ever.

So, did this change achieve its stated goals below?

Lets break this down piece by piece

Is this more consistent? I’d say, yeah, it’s less “Feast of Famine”, and more, you’re going to get a pretty constant stream of procs every 3-4 auto attacks on average. There’s still a fairly low chance to go an incredibly long time without a proc baseline, with around 0.1% of all the non-Harbinger of Doom talented procs taking up to 11 auto attacks to proc. At 0% haste with a 3.6s swing time weapon, that’s up to around 40 seconds between procs at most, which RPPM’s bad luck protection would instead probably perform better at.

Next up

Is Sudden Doom more impactful now? Absolutely. 100% crit chance on it does help on its own, and Doomed Bidding makes it feel like a REALLY good proc to press. The only pain point really, is the resource situation. I’ve said it before, but, ill say it again. Sudden Doom really needs to not give us free casts if it’s ever going to proc as often as it is now. Reducing its proc rate would feel a bit bad after playing with it currently, just feels great, but man the resource situation is dire.

Now, this system isn’t perfect by any means. It could potentially be exploitable by equipping faster attack speed weapons, such as a 1h weapon, or just going unarmed. This is unlikely to ever be the best thing to do since Unholy just cant utilize most of its abilities while in this state, notably tho, it CAN cast Death Coil in this state. If there’s ever a scenario where we are doing incredibly little damage already, unequipping our weapon may be a viable strategy to force and bank 2 faster Sudden Doom procs (with harbinger) before re-equipping our weapon and using them for Doomed Bidding.

As mentioned though, this is unlikely to really be the case, but, still something to keep an eye out for.

For anyone still reading who wants a bit of a deeper dive into how Sudden Doom’s proc rate now works, it appears to be 8.475% * ( 1 + auto attacks since last proc ) = proc chance on that auto. while with Harbinger of Doom it appears to be 13.788 * ( 1 + auto attacks since the last proc )

Auto Attacks Sudden Doom Harbinger
0 0 0
1 8.54% 13.52%
2 23.85% 37.06%
3 44.24% 62.36%
4 63.37% 82.89%
5 78.13% 94.90%
6 88.95% 99.10%
7 95.52% 99.89%
8 98.43% 100.00%
9 99.54% 100.00%
10 99.95% 100.00%
11 100.00% 100.00%

With Harbinger, around 95% of all your procs are likely to happen by your 6th Auto Attack.
Without Harbinger, around 95% of all your procs are likely to happen by your 8th Auto Attack.

6 Likes
15

Regarding Rider of the Apocalypse:

I was REALLY hoping to see this be usable in Outdoor Dungeon and Raid Content. I understand that 100% movement speed in that context is absurd and a balancing nightmare (especially for mechanics which require a soak or something else, a RotA would be infinitely better than any other spec to run out and get a soak)

But, could there be a compromise to have a reduced speed (60% like non-epic mount speed, or even slower with an added power benefit) just to fulfil the fantasy of mounted combat even further? It’s disheartening to think that Death Charge will just be taken 100% of the time no matter the circumstance in instanced PvE.

3 Likes
16

Hello, Death Knights–

This week’s Alpha update includes another round of changes for Death Knights – this time focused on the Frost tree. Like our last round of changes for Unholy, we looked at talents that felt more appropriate to be baseline for the spec and talents that worked better as 1 rank instead of 2. Notably, we made Fatal Fixation and Rime baseline, reduced Frostwhelp’s Aid, Enduring Strength, and cut both Cold-Blooded Rage and Invigorating Freeze and reduced their new talents to 1 rank.

The goal with the above changes is to cut down on build friction allowing for more customization as you spec through the tree. These changes alongside other talent movements and new pathing connections should help create a better experience for build variety.

We’ve also created a variety of new talents and added 2 new capstones that focus on your auto-attacks which should help give some better sustained damage outside of Pillar of Frost windows. These talents also complement both Obliteration and Breath of Sindragosa builds and add some unique gameplay that expands on the Shattering Blade talent node.

We’ve added Razorice to the targets unit frame to allow easier tracking on when to use Frost Strike. Frostscythe has also seen an update to move it out of the regular rotational rune spender to a big heavy hitter on a medium cooldown. Its rune cost has been increased to 2 and its damage has been greatly increased and is always guaranteed to critically strike. It also has unique mechanic that reduces its cooldown when you consume Killing Machine which has some fun synergy with the suite of new auto-attack talents we’ve added to help your Killing Machine procs.

Lastly, we increased Breath of Sindragosa damage to compensate for the loss of uptime from our first round of changes which should lend itself to a burstier playstyle with less focus on “infinite” duration buffs. We are keeping an eye on its current Runic Power cost which is unchanged since its increase in Dragonflight. From our internal testing, we’re seeing 30-40 second breaths, based on situations but the are many scenarios where it can feel extremely tight as you wait for Runes to replenish, which means we may need to look at its cost per second and pulling out some runic power generation elsewhere.

We would love your feedback on how the current iteration of Breath of Sindragosa feels on uptime. Tangentially, we still have some work we’d like to do on Obliteration build resources especially as it pertains to Runic Power consumption as it can still be flooded a bit inside cooldowns.

Thank you for the continued feedback. Our next round of changes will be focused on Blood updates, Unholy, and Core talent iteration based on feedback we’ve received so far.

7 Likes
17

The new frost changes are pretty cool! I think my main concern is that our obliteration cleave is still tied to death and decay. The class fantasy would be more solidified with our obliteration cleave coming from remorseless winter. Just replacing dnd with remorseless winter when specced into frost would be fine. This would make the flow of frost so much better.

I have secondary concerns regarding the new auto attack talents. I think that they should account for when using a 2h weapon (most oblit players). Otherwise they seem great.

Overall, if we could replace the dnd mechanics with remorseless winter I would be over the moon. This seems to be the general consensus.

PS…I would love some new visuals to replace the our dated effects. But I understand one thing at a time :stuck_out_tongue:

28 Likes
18

Thank you for these exciting new updates. It is always amazing to see what new ideas are being toss around during the alpha and beta periods.

Class Tree - Gate 3
Currently I think one of the issues with the DK class tree is the feeling that the capstones and the points leading to them [penultimate nodes] are lacking. When I think of a capstone ability on the class tree I want it to be something defining to my class fantasy, something that takes an existing ability and amplifies it, or something that sets me apart from the other classes in the game. Right now I think that there have been some positive steps taken and that there is some room for growth in this for the class tree.

  1. Runic Protection and Blood Draw give way to a feeling of the unstoppable death that will not relent. The theme is good, but the impact of the skills themselves leave the player without much excitement. A Blood DK can very confidently take both of these nodes knowing there is a direct use for them but without ever really needing to interact with them. I think the nodes leave little to be excited for as a DPS DK who would prefer never to have to worry about physical damage from attacks, or the reduction from being hit from criticals by them, by never taking direct physical damage. Blood Draw feels incredibly undertuned for its position as a capstone. Its a grueling 3 minute cooldown with an arguably unnoticeable heal for Blood DK, who is the only one likely enough to spend the previous points to get to this capstone, and the buffs are a nice addition but again too short/underpowered to warrant the 3 minute cooldown. The relative position of this pair is also peculiar. These two, along with Insidious Chill above it seem to be more synergistic and thematic to the ability Will of the Necropolis that is more center right justified compared to the leftmost positions of the other talents. If Blood Draw continues to exist in this position, it would make much more sense to have Will of the Necropolis feed into the capstone and have a new talent take its position on the tree. We could go a step further and move Rune Mastery to where Will was and give a more clear definition of theme to the tankiness of Death Knight on the left side of the tree. This would leave the right side with more of a definition of the mastery of ‘death magic’ through manipulation of runes (Rune Mastery), shielding (Osmosis and Null Magic/Vestigial Shell), and spells (Death’s Echo).

  2. Subduing Grasp and Abomination Limb are both thematically brilliant. You truly feel like you are not only pulling an enemy but also pulling the fighting spirit from the target. And as I am sure the feedback was given during Shadowlands, Abomination Limb just feel and looks great as an alternative to Gorefiend’s Grasp (from the DPS perspective). My current issue with Subduing Grasp is that it feels like a hidden penalty for getting to the thing I truly want in Abomination Limb. I can think of many scenarios where Subduing Grasp will almost never be used by a DPS Death Knight but I can see a need for Abomination Limb, the only throughput capstone, to be used by every Death Knight. On the design aspect of the talent, I can see a terrible situation where Subduing Grasp is being used to augment my defensive layers in Mythic Raiding. Every time a boss is about to proceed with a large hitting ability, a common theme in today’s raiding environment, I will take the following steps: 1) apply an off GCD defensive or Anti Magic Shell, and then 2) cast on GCD grip to apply an 8% damage reduction to the boss. And while it does not seem like a big deal the difference in damage taken from 70% damage taken (1 - 30%) to 62% damage taken (1 - 30% - 8%) is about 11% in the damage that I would take ( 1- (62/70) ). It adds a chunkiness to the defensive layers that would not need to be there. And an even worse scenario would be that this 8% reduction never applies to the boss because it cannot be “pull(ed)” like the tooltip indicates and the 2 talent points I spent to get Abomination Limb are functionally worthless.

  3. Osmosis and Null Magic/Vestigial Shell (NM/VS) hit very squarely on the strongest ability in all of WoW, Anti Magic Shell (AMS), and the theme of control over magic that permeates all of Death Knights fantasy. This ability has to be the bane of all raid designers, and these talents seek to increase it’s effectiveness. Out of all the changes NM/VS is the most interesting choice node presented to Death Knight since the introduction of the talent trees in Dragonflight. At its current tuning, Osmosis makes very little sense to me. In my experience with Cutting Edge raiding, I barely, if ever, press AMS after a damage event when I need healing. 99/100 this ability is used before the application of a magic debuff to avoid it or to soak a large magic damage hit. Also given the current state of raid healing, I am very often already max HP or near max HP when these hits occur thus reducing the effectiveness of this node. NM/VS both are incredibly exciting and are situationally useful to every spec of Death Knight. These may be too strong and may need adjustments but only the first real raid season will show how creative people can be with VS.

Changes I think could help:
If the theme of Blood Draw is strong enough to warrant it’s position, I think it would need a tremendous buff to its power or frequency in order for it to be the capstone that satisfies the feeling of being an unstoppable tide of death. As stated above, moving Will of the Necropolis to the penultimate spot would help strengthen this core theme by providing a well defined and powerful penultimate node that continues to play off the 30% health theme. This opens up an additional option to create another tank-like talent leading into the nodes at the position of Rune Mastery today. Maybe this could be some kind of debuff you inflict via and related to diseases or a way to purge your own disease. This could lead into the theme of control over disease, something that is missing from the Death Knight class fantasy but present in all of their specs.

Abomination Limb should be shifted away from its current position to be more accessible to the entire class without paying the 2 talent point penalty through Subduing Grasp. This is a similar move done by Blood with Dancing Rune Weapon in DF Beta, Army of the Dead for Unholy in DF Beta, and Frostwyrm’s Fury for Frost in the latest build. By either putting it in the position where Subduing Grasp is today (coupled with my prior changes Subding Grasp could move into the spot where Rune Mastery is) or where Blood Scent resides in Gate 2. If the first option is done, that allows for a low impact movement that eases the access to Abomination Limb so that it can easily be acquired by all specs. It also opens the possibility to have a choice node below it that amplifies the ability in various ways. A few options I could think of was: reintroduction of the spec resource gen, longer grip or increased frequency (SL S4 Covenant legendary ability), or a debuff respective to each spec (increased critical damage taken for Frost as an example). This would allow most DKs to get Abomination Limb and then allow the flexibility to go further beyond the utility and damage or allow the points to be spent elsewhere. If the second choice is selected, it will create a higher incentive for players to go through the middle beyond the point of Anti Magic Zone. I have often found this part of the tree was “dead” as the options presented on the side are often more enticing for all the specs. Now we have space to create a new capstone that touches on another core theme of Death Knight, such as disease mastery mentioned above, something movement related through Death’s Advance as the unstoppable march of death, or if we are feeling wild maybe turning Death and Decay into an aura letting our pestilence and fear seep from our very bones.

Personally, I think NM/VS is amazing. I think the theme of the idea and I also enjoy the creativity in having a choice node for a capstone. I do have concerns that this pairing is so strong you will always be coming to take it, but this very well could be just my personal feelings. If I were to make a change on this side of the tree I would adjust the conditions under which the healing increase is applied through Osmosis. I think the buff needs to either extend after the dissipation of the shield for a handful of seconds to allow the Death Knight to heal off any excess damage taken, or the buff needs to be tied to all generic shielding applied by the Death Knight through AMS and other things such as Permafrost, or Blood’s Mastery Shielding. Of the two I think that the latter is probably too strong but fits more of a penultimate ability that can be played around instead of one that I get as a benefit every 60 [or 40] seconds, if I even get any benefit from it.

Class Tree - Other Points
I wanted to thank the designer(s) of the class tree for pruning out a lot of abilities we had to ‘buy back’ and implementing a much more fluid design space within Gates 1 and 2. I feel like there is some more space for variety in this build compared to the 1-2 fluid points I had throughout all of Dragonflight. I look forward to more changes like this in the future as we continue to bake in more baseline abilities, and use the class tree and spec trees to augment our abilities in fun and meaningful ways.

Frost
Similar to the comments made about the class tree, I want to thank the designer(s) for bringing more abilities baseline and reducing the pain of having 2 point nodes in the tree. These changes feel amazing on paper and in game. I feel like I can move around the tree now. I would like to comment that if we could refrain from having tier sets that are only enabled with specific points allocated in the spec tree that would be a great change going forward into TWW.

I think one of the major elephants in the room when talking about Frost is that we have 3 main archetypes competing for dominance at all times - 2H Obliteration, DW Obliteration, and Breath of Sindragosa. There exists this delicate balance where you have two very different ways to play Frost in Breath of Sindragosa [Breath] and Obliteration competing on the varying sides of the tree. I think this is probably one of the coolest parts about Frost and the thing that keeps me the most engaged in its success. But I think the less spoken of problem is the struggle between 2H and dual wield (DW) Obliteration for dominance. From a class fantasy angle I understand the want and desire to be something like Arthas, a hard hitting, 2H wielding murder machine that obliterates its targets in a barrage of critical strikes. Meanwhile you have dual wield: the flurry of the knife of many cuts, master of the multiple powerful rune forges, battering you with icy blows. Its the age old competition between that which hits hard and that which hits fast. And try as hard as we can to balance these two there will always be a clear winner in the eyes of the player base.

There has been a lot of great changes made to 2H that has made it the go-to for Obliteration and start to show itself as viable in varying forms of content as Dragonflight progressed. These changes includes but is not limited to the change made to allow frost fever to be applied with Rime allowing Fallen Crusader to be a viable choice, and the baking in of Might of the Frozen Wastes. Looking in to the current build the return of the Season 3 and 4 Shadowlands tier set with Artic Assault is another fantastic addition that helps 2H build more frost fever stacks.

However, I see a lot of changes that seem to indicate that DW may be shifting in momentum and coming center stage. Any introduction of Auto-Attack [AA] based skills signals me a winner in DW who often dominates these talent spaces with an increased proportion of procs when compared to its 2H brother. Smothering Offense, Icy Death Torrent, and The Long Winter are by all means very interesting and cool additions to a spec tree that was dominated by only Obliteration and Breath. I just fear that when the data comes out these are going to disproportionally give the advantage in Obliteration to DW and seal the fate of 2H as suboptimal leaving some players missing out on their class fantasy and leaving the rest of us to hold the bag on a spec with a dead weapon roll. But spending anymore time on how to right these two into a position where they are perfectly balanced may be leading to a point where the rest of the spec suffers in order to over cater to keeping two different playstyles of one capstone of two drastically different capstones in one spec balanced. When the answer may just be its better for Frost to go back to DW exclusively in order to allow for easier balancing and let a more creative space exist. I think this has to be addressed going forward or Frost is always going to be limited in the extent that it can succeed when compared to specs of similar playstyle.

If I could will one thing into existence it would be some way that we can transition back to a DW only Frost and allow ourselves more room to grow, adapt, and evolve in the design space of the Talent Trees and Hero Talents. As much as I have enjoyed hitting things really really hard with 2H obliteration I think we are at the point where we need to settle on the identity of the spec and stop straddling two worlds.

Final Words
Again thank you for the hard work you did updating the current trees. I hope that we can continue to iterate and expand these changes going forward. I eagerly await the Blood changes and cannot wait to see what else is in store for Death Knight in TWW.

4 Likes