During this expansion, we have seen a large amount of week 1/2 of season large swings in performance via adjustments to bring egregious outliers down. However, there hasn’t been much in the way of propping up the weak options to be more competitive.
Whilst yes, there have been some buffs to weaker performing specs which were welcomed, these buffs all came during major content patches. I don’t see why if you roll bad on the tuning dice you should succumb to being statistically weaker for an entire season of content. Tuning should be much more aggressive for propping up lower performers. From the last round of tuning many outliers remain such as Frost/Unholy Death Knight, Enhancement Shaman, Survival Hunter, Windwalker (Single Target), Feral Druid (Cleave/AoE) and Moonkin (too high in a Frenzy Window, far far far too low outside of it).
Some of what I’ve listed above might look a bit weird so I’ll delve into it a bit more:
- Should a spec ever do less than tank DPS when they’re not in cooldowns and pretty much carry a raid DPS check when they’re in cooldowns. The peaks are just way too high for Venthyr Moonkin and the periods in between is weird, you are competing for minuscule levels of DPS.
- Should a spec have such an extreme preference for the damage profile that they hold? From a gameplay perspective, yes absolutely. Should they be entirely locked into that either by talent selections (Enhancement) or Spec Design (Feral/Windwalker)? I don’t feel as though that is a good player experience.
There are a lot of outliers in the talent space with regards to Talents that are not chosen at all (Death Pact as a Blood DK example) or ones that are default choices and at this point should be Baselined (Hemostasis as another Blood DK example).
This is a good opportunity to get very creative with new talents/ideas, but it’s very rarely utilised outside of expansion launches. Why should talents be doomed to redundancy just because the talent row they sit on is so one-sided? Some cool talents have been lost in the past because of this from presumably low usage metrics.
There are even day 1 outliers from the Conduit space which still remain today. Some were buffed by hundreds of percent and still not competitive
I also wanted to latch onto this particular point from the external buff thread.
Would like to purely focus on this point from the perspective of Warrior DPS v Death Knight DPS.
If you compare these two purely on the fact they are STR melee with 2h/1h weapons, and Raid Utility, they are pretty even.
However, Warrior absolutely destroys DK on damage.
They both have an impactful raid cooldown but the lingering effect of the justified nerf in Nathria reared its head this tier and honestly, it’s just not acceptable for this gap to exist when they are on paper the same.
So to draw back to the goal here, to maximise your chance of killing a boss as a DK simply is to play a Warrior. Infrequent tuning does not protect your class/character identity.
In short: Buff DK.
Edited: DK/Warrior Comparison Text.