Areas to improve DK in 9.2 and beyond

Classes Death Knight
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Although we have yet to see any class tuning changes in 9.2 I wanted to take this opportunity to bring up some areas to look into.

Damage/Scaling
Across all three specs damage has either been lacking (blood) or not scaling too well (frost/Unh) so this is the first thing I would like to see addressed.

Frost and Unholy both do respectable damage during CDs (breath/Army), but offer little outside of them and fall behind, whether or not we see flat aura buffs I would not be opposed to targeted buffs to abilities like Frost Strike/Death Coil to bump up damage outside of CDs.

Blood needs help in damage accross the board, a 10-15% aura buff + an additional 10-15% for Heart Strike, Marrowrend and Death Strike for ST

Conduits
Another issue with DK is the scaling of conduits or the benefit of additional conduits. Everfrost and Eternal Hunger were great first conduits, the rest of the conduit options offer very little. Blood has no good conduits, one was so bad a 600% buff in 9.1.5 wasn;t enough to make us even consider it.

Frost
-Accelerated Cold gives 10% RP generation instead of CDR

-Eradicating Blow: Killing Machine increases damage of yor next obliterate by X%

-Unleashed Frenzy: Increases attack speed in addition to Strength.

Unh:

Convocation of the Dead: Bursting a wound reduces CD of Apocalypse by 1 seconds fixed, Wounds deal 10% additionnal damage scaling with ilevel.

Embrace Death: Death Coil deals 8% increased damage Scaling with ilevel, Sudden Doom quadruples this benefit.

Lingering Plague: Virulent plague deals 10% scaling with ilevel more damage and has a chance equal to criticial strike chance to erupt as if the target died.

Blood

Withering plague: Scaling increased by 25%

Debilitating Malady:Now also increases Blood boil damage, Duration increased to 12 seconds, stacks twice instead of 3 times for same buff.

We can also look to talents as many are never used due to undertuning or poor design, I leave those changes for a 10.0 type patch but all the above should be at least considered going into 9.2.

Thank you for reading and consideration.

1 Like
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I don’t think we’ve scaled as well as some, but we do scale quite well on both dps specs. Mastery is very valuable to both, and it’s essentially the % increase with Ilvl you are asking for. For UH specifically the mastery nerf in the beginning of S1 knocked us down a few pegs and was warranted. That kit has a metric ton of passive damage that is mastery driven (shadow/pet damage). We lost a significant chunk of throughput and still had good representation in the top guilds. Bubble and grip were both great tools for progression.

Blood scales better with higher stm levels than any other tank because our primary gimmick is % of hp based.

I do think we need more damage as blood, but honestly I think we’re probably 10-15% undertuned at upper keys, and it’s because we don’t have the kyrian sigil or ashen hollow fluffing our numbers, we have no large aoe threat tool as blood. Rest of the kit is in line with rest of the tanks rotations IMO. Give blood a big button to press and we’re probably better off then other tank specs comes upper Ilvl gear in 9.2.

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I’d rather see each rune used when ERW reduces cooldown of it by whatever the duration would be based on conduit rank. Since it is accelerating based on rune spent.

Eradicating Blow is used in PvP, even more so ever since FS gets a 30% damage buff. It’s trash in PvE since we don’t get the 30% damage buff.

I really like how you didn’t even address the issue where you have to use Frost Strike EVERY 4 GLOBALS with this conduit.

Convocation is fine. It has its niche uses but it’s not a bad conduit overall.

This sounds bonkers with Death’s Certainty build. If anything, I’d rather have the Mastery nerf reverted than have this. Unholy Dk lack personal damage and moresothanever: Rot Damage… speaking of rot damage.

This will not see play as Unholy does not prioritize crit. I appreciate you’re trying to bring back BfA Virulent Plague though.

Pestilence and Hypothermic Presence…

As for Blood, I’ll just… defer it to someone else. But as for Frost and Unholy, none of the proposed changes are actually addressing the QOL issues the DPS Dks have.

They could use some good scaling though. Unholy has been sadge since the Mastery nerf.

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I honestly think both dps specs of DK needs a rework. None of them have “the setup”, that one moment that they say: “damn, i don’t have my X, they’re gonna use Y and I’ll die”

Frost is the closest one to have something similar, but nothing compared to the abusive numbers of WW, warrios, ret paladins, mages, etc.

They should just give our presences from WOTLK back, that would fix a lot of stuff if they’re too lazy to think of a solution.

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I feel like the devs don’t know what to do with empower rune weapon. The whole reducing it’s cd but not reducing it enough to make it pressed outside of Breath is really silly and feels bad. The conduit + leveling perk should make it 1 minute or just buff your damage more instead of CDR.

Better talent tuning across the board for frost is also needed but that was brought up countless times during beta testing.

2 Likes
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yeah I’ve always questioned ERW and its CD reductions…it either needs to hit a 1min or 2min CD cycle and giving it CD reduction that lands in between is pretty useless. Would love to see a talent in future that reduces CD per rune spend or something so that you could potentially get it down to 1min.