I mean, it is weird that Blood and Unholy abilities cleave with it, but not Frost. I guess it’s supposed to replace Death and Decay’s normal interactions, but it feels kinda bad, when reading the tooltip.
Still, looking at the spell coefficients right now, Death and Decay should be worth casting in AoE even for Frost, so in net effect, Death’s Due will have a similar impact on Frost as Unholy: inserted into single target rotation, used the same in AoE.
I guess for me, the part that frustrates me so much is seeing Blizzard implement a much desired thing like 2h frost back in, but only half-
it and ignore it, leaving it crippled and a false promise.
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I wish there was a way to make sure the analysis that Xaedys and Bicepspump have done in this thread along with suggestions on how to balance 2h/dw reached Blizz to help balance both weapon types.
This should be the perfect time to give feedback and suggestions. It isn’t even beta yet. I really want 2h frost without Breath of Sindragosa to be viable in raids and M+. It’s definitely easy to get frustrated and discouraged by the lack of response from blizz.
I don’t want to give up hope. I was so excited when Blizz announced frost would be able to effectively use 2h weapons again.
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After BfA’s beta, where I spent literally months posting, with similar levels of detail and math and concrete examples as above, about MM’s issues and what it needed with the revamp (you can still see most of them in my hunter’s post history), and got nothing but silence and being ignored until literally patch 8.1, I’m pretty discouraged about the likelihood of Blizzard listening.
Like, I’d love to think they’re listening, and still care, and are going to implement the simple and obvious and so clearly needed changes to DKs, rogues, DHs, hunters, etc, I just…I’ve held out hope, and had it dashed, too many times.
The 37% crit number is outdated in the 2H vs de debate. Currently, DW always gets 2.7 times more KM procs compared to 2H. This means that even if every single crit auto procs KM for 2H, it would still not get as many proc.
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That’s higher crit chance, not proc rate on crits. However, it’s not a fixed additive, like 37%. DW gets 277% as many KM procs at X crit level, so 2h needs 2.77 * X crit chance to equal that. If DW has 10% crit chance, 2h needs 27.7%. If DW has 20%, 2h needs 55.38%. It’s clearly not a workable balancing force, but it does serve to show how psychotically separated the two are on proc rates.
What would you make cleave with the ability though? So much of the kit naturally cleaves it’s better to list things that don’t cleave.
The only reason I’m looking at it is the str buff.
Ya, no, I’m not saying it should have a cleave. Blood and Unholy need it to cleave, because they lack a solid form of AoE baseline (though Unholy certainly makes up for it via talents). Frost has a bunch of cleave built in already.
It makes perfect sense that it works the way it does, because it’s literally just “Death and Decay, except better”. It just feels weird to see a single tooltip explicitly grant a benefit for two of the specs, and not grant it to the third.
Basically what I’m saying here is, it makes perfect sense the way it is, and should be solid for the same reasons. But I can also understand where people are coming from when they say that Night Fae feels like its gyping Frost.
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Yeah, but they are just looking at those 2 abilities thinking something should be applied to frost. Depending on the str buff and how it works which it sounds like we steal str based on the damage reduction. It sounds like the increase in str should increase with mob density or overall mob difficulty say an elite or raid boss. At least it’s how it’s worded and if that’s the case it would be very beneficial for a non breath build. Pillar going to 20% instead of 15%, then fallen crusader, trinkets, Icecap making it more frequent though you are still limited by the covenant cooldown, obliteration for a burst window.
It should play well with frost, we just don’t know if it’s any good. It has some really good potential for those that don’t like breath. Damage reduction as well on it, and passive damage ticks? Yes please. It’s kind of how the old icy talons worked, apply frost fever and the attack speed slow buffed your attack speed and those of your party or raid if you pick up improved icy talons.
Icy talons now doesn’t really have any reward to it for playing properly when you have cold heart that does a lot more damage and is easier to use. Even inexorable assault which works a little different than I thought, but it’s still missing about half the damage it should have to compete with cold heart.
Or playing blood every once in a while, then playing say a prot pally, it’s a world of difference. When healing and I get a blood dk I just loathe it. I don’t even like playing blood even though I just spent a few weeks doing the balance of power questline to get the artifact appearance.
Frost however in terms of damage output is in a pretty good spot. That being the case and knowing Blizzard who looks at stats before actual feedback might not make any other changes. Along with many just saying they don’t care about 2h dps they just want the choice, they might not do anything with that and continue to balance frost from the mindset of having 2 1h weapons.
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Some implications of the new findings:
- Simulations underestimate the number of KM procs at above 15% crit.
- Icy Talons is underestimated in simulations since KM proc rate scales with AA speed.
- DW always has 2.7 times as many procs as 2H.
- Dream’s End is undervalued in simulations.
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I wonder if Murderous Efficiency isn’t also undervalued as a result.
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That’s should be correct yes.
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Thanks for writing that up for the alpha forums Bicepspump!
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I’m surprised to see more frost DKs aren’t super happy about getting the Ghoul back.
2H and ghoul frost DK has me set. Although I’m probably sticking with unholy.
I don’t remember if it was cata or MoP but I remember that if you was 2h you would focus obliterate and if you was DW you would focus Frost Strike.
That felt so damn good when you would finally get a beefy 2H wep and your rotation would actually change from fast strikes to big numbers.
That’s what I want back, but sadly I think it’s just for cosmetics / people that don’t care to min-max.
I’m ok with that though. I’ll try not to bite the hand that feeds me. They’re doing good and I don’t want to risk blizzard thinking the DK community is ungrateful or whatever and revert their changes.
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I mean, it’s just different-flavored passive damage, little different than auto-attack. Sure, it’s reasonably thematic, but it doesn’t really add anything mechanically to the spec. It’s more of a “eh, it’s nice to have” than anything else, at least to me.
It was Howling Blast and Obliterate. Frost Strike is a runic consumer, it wasn’t really something you could “focus on” compared to Obliterate.
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Well as for the temp pet i am meh on it I never really used it as frost. I can see how helpful it would be for blood you summon it and if you take massive damage you can pop the sacrifice to gain health back on top of ds I can see that being a good gain.
Howling blast became the rune spender because frost strike was the focus of DW KM. Mastery was a go to stat to make frost strike hit harder which eventually lead to Howling Blast overtaking obliterate thus making it an ability to use to get an unholy rune on cd, or ignored completely which also removed Rime from the rotation as well. People didn’t like it.
So now km only works on obliterate or Frostscythe if talented, and Howling Blast damage was nerfed so that rime can increase its damage basically killing that entire design that brought the spec down because it was a pain to balance.
Ah, yes, if you meant focusing KM procs on Frost Strike, ya, that was a thing. I thought you meant focusing the rotation on it, which is like saying a rogue focused on Dispatch instead of Sinister Strike. It just doesn’t really make sense. =P
To be fair, though, the Howling Blast spam build was a bit degenerate. It clearly moved outside of what the devs intended for the spec. That’s the issue with masteries that bonus only part of your abilities, though. Enough mastery makes them the only part of the rotation that matters. MM, for example, was anticipating Rapid Fire ceasing to be part of the rotation going into BfA, because at the time their mastery only benefited focus spenders. Fortunately, Blizzard caught that before release (thanks in no small part to the absolute uproar over it).
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Thats usually what people mean by the focus at that time.
And yes, the howling blast spam was not how the spec was designed and you had to game the rune system to get as many frost and death runes as possible so you were only using 5 of your runes instead of all 6. Whether it was the masterfrost build or the mastersimple build. Masterfrost used 1 obliterate to get an unholy rune on CD, Mastersimple you just used plague strike instead to get even more howling blasts and made the rotation just easier.
I remember reading the forums during those times where people absolutely hated that Obliterate played such a small role for DW. If you didnt notice that Howling Blasts were doing over half of a single Obliterate then you just played it wrong. You were playing the spec wrong by playing it in how it was designed. It also helped that your KM procs only went to Frost Strike instead of being eaten by an Obliterate when KM procs would proc milliseconds before you pressed Obliterate.
It was probably the worst time for Frost Dk design, at least in my eyes.
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Ya, the rise of that Howling Blast spam build was largely when I lost interest in Frost, and the rise of Breath thereafter completely murdered it for me. Even with Icecap being viable these days, I’m just not sure I’m willing to put in the effort to farm the needed Azerite traits and gear up for it. I am holding out hope, however, that Breath won’t be the singular only option in SL, like it has been for most of the last 4 years. I really do enjoy Frost on a fundamental level, but I just can’t stomach Insanity-esque mechanics like Breath.
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Just need to know the value of the str buff the Night Fae ability provides. If good enough, Icecap and Obliteration would want to use it since the str buff works well with Pillar and the str steroid should be available every Pillar window.
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