Historically, Blizzard has always been extremely quick to put out heavy handed nerfs to DK when they’re in a strong spot while at the same time, exceedingly slow to trickle in some minuscule buffs when we’re weak overall because we’re strong in one extremely specific area of the game. Why can multiple Rogue and Mage specs occupy half of the strongest spots in the game for months on end while DK sits at or near the bottom for both DPS specs and often have very low representation numbers for Blood at the same time? All 3 specs are in the gutter overall and thats fine?
I remember the beginning of Legion where Frost DK was unquestionably the lowest performing DPS spec in the entire game. On top of being a slow moving class and having no group buffs or actual utility outside of death grip. They remained that way all the way up until 7.1 when Frost got a whopping 2 abilities buffed. Obliterate did so little damage that people were actually straight up taking it off their bar and just using Frostscythe instead. And that wasn’t the first time that Obliterate was ignored. Anyone else remember Master Frost? In MoP, Obliterate had 0 scaling so people took it off their bars and spammed Howling Blast and Death and Decay to convert the runes into Death Runes. Imagine being a melee class with such terrible design that you only used a single melee ability and spammed spells outside of that.
Looking at DF and TWW, DK is pretty good in M+ but only under certain circumstances. If your group doesn’t pull big, theres no real reason to bring a DK. And big group pulls like that are more or less only actual premades with comms. You aren’t joining a discord for a random M+ you found in the group finder. While at the same time, we have poor raid DPS and poor representation in high end PVP. Why is this acceptable? Why are we doomed to do one specific piece of content and putting in extra effort to shine? So if I want to play a different aspect of the game, I’m greeted with poor results regardless of how well I play my character? Thats not fair, nor is it fun. Its discouraging. I could understand if this happened occasionally. Balance changes over time, I get that. But why are we pretty much always there? At best, we’re mid pack raid DPS and terrible at everything else. The poor performance of DK in DF Season 1 is the specific reason I stopped playing for the entire xpac.
So not only are numbers themselves usually pretty bad, but the design of the class has gone downhill in every expansion. Legion turned Unholy into a pimple popping joke that has the majority of its damage come from summoned Undead. You apparently forgot that we’re still a plate wearing Knight with a Two Handed weapon. Why is Unholy the only spec with pet that doesn’t actually depend on in the game that gets forced to use it? Huntes and Warlocks, known as “pet classes” both have options to get rid of them in addition to having a spec where the Pet(s) are the main focus. Why don’t we? We have a spec that gets forced to use a Pet that it doesn’t interact with whatsoever outside of Dark Transformation and situational use of Gnaw. The rotation doesn’t depend on the pet whatsoever. Except despite that, the majority of our damage comes from the main pet and the summon cooldowns. Which wouldn’t be that big of an issue except Frost usually performs poorly so we either give up a massive amount of DPS or we get forced to deal with a Pet that more or less is nothing more than a glorified physical manifestation of a DoT that gets automatically applied and has an infinite duration and doesn’t modify or change our rotation in any way. It doesn’t buff a particular ability or anything. Its just there. Doing damage. Without any input or thought from the player.
And what you did to Frost in Legion…oh man. I applaud you for going out of your way a little bit to make sure Frost could use a Two Hander again, but you didn’t change the tree to mesh with it. You just hamfisted it back in and bandaid buff it every once in a while. The spec itself is still almost identical to its Legion design which was designed around having 2 Runeforges and a higher number of melee swings. But even with the bandaid buffs, the often very low raw numbers that 2H puts out makes the spec straight up non viable in high end play. And as usual, you leave it like that for entire seasons. How hard is it to at least try and bandaid it by buffing MotFW? 2H Frost spends 80% of its time being completely non viable for Heroic raid or anything above a +8 and the other 20% being mediocre at best. Once you get gear beyond LFR or base Mythic dungeons, it gets immediately outclassed by nearly every dps spec in the game. Just for frame of reference, my 597 Ret Paladin does 750k dps while my 615+ DK struggles to do even 10% more damage than that with 2H Frost.
And then theres the topic of our visuals. They look like they’re from 2008. Oh thats because most of them are from 2008. All of our main abilities look exactly the same as they did 16 years ago. Death Strike, Scourge Strike, Heart Strike, Obliterate, Frost Strike, Death Coil, Raise Dead, Chains of Ice, Anti Magic Shell, Anti Magic Zone, etc. There are other abilities that were introduced in a later expansion but are still just as bad as the earlier ones and still haven’t been touched since before covid.
The entire class from top to bottom feels intentionally neglected and treated as an afterthought that has to be hastily added in at the end because everybody forgot they exist except one guy in a meeting that asked about them as everyone was getting up to leave. Do you have nobody at Blizzard that is passionate about Death Knights? Whats the deal?
