Dead of Winter PvP talent removed. Replaced with Death’s Cold Embrace

  • Frost
    • New PvP Talent: Death’s Cold Embrace – Pillar of Frost grants you Remorseless Winter and increases its damage by 1000% and its radius by 150%, but your movement speed is heavily reduced for its duration. Pillar of Frost’s cooldown increased by 15 seconds.
    • Dead of Winter (PvP Talent) has been removed.

Personally, I’m kinda mixed on this new talent. On paper it sounds pretty fun and definitely thematic, but in execution it might be kinda jank. Moving at a “heavily” reduced speed during the most crucial part of frosts rotation sounds like a recipe for frustration. Although, if the damage is high enough I can see the potential. May just have to lock down the target down a bit before you burst.

Losing dead of winter is pretty rough but probably a healthy change for the game overall. I’ll miss it.

… Doesn’t Death’s Advance just say “OMEGALUL” to this?

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I imagine they will have it ignore deaths advance and death charge but we will have to see.

Imagine finally catching that mage or druid and then snaring yourself with pillar of frost. Ehhh lol.

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This is a terrible change that kills the spec unless there is further compensation.

With Silence overriding Asphyxiate, it would mean the only stun Frost DK has is Absolute Zero every 1.5 minutes. It would be near impossible to land kills.

Also, that new talent is terrible…enemies just need to leap/port/blink away and we have no stun, speed movement heavily reduced AND it makes our pillar CD back to 1 minute instead of 45 seconds…it’s really bad.

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To add to this RW damage in pvp is utter garbage pad damage.

1000 x 0 = 0

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Also nukes the usefulness of Pillar itself.
By the wording activating Pillar activates the slow…so once we return once again to:
-DK hits his cd
-everyone runs away
-dk cd accomplished nothing

Garbage change.
And thus completely in line with Blizz’s treatment of frost.

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This looks really bad and out of touch. Maybe there’s something we’re missing but the survivability nerfs plus these changes are worrisome.

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I think there’s potential in it if we make a build around it. I think a kill setup could look something like this:

-Grip + chains + potential kill targets.
-Run deathchill to root all targets when you pop your pillar of frost. Frostwyrm will help keep them in place as well.
-Pop burst and do your rotation. 1 minute burst trinket would work well here.

A haste build to stack up remorseless winter damage via gathering storm damage might work nicely. Since you’ll want to be spamming obliterate for this a breath of sindragosa build could be ideal to use.

Remorseless winter damage is nothing to write home about but it does get up there if it builds up. 1000% damage increase is nothing to scoff at if you can get it ticking for 1m+ damage.

I’m trying to stay optimistic here lol.

It’s not impossible that the talent isn’t a total waste of time however let’s not lose sight of what’s being removed here. Personally I do not have a build without dead of winter, it was utility and set up. It had synergy with dragon stun and silence. The compensatory talent being put in here sounds like it’s missing the mark by a long shot. Blizzard needs to do better here, much better.

They can also quit it with giving these talents drawbacks. No need.

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For sure. The changes so far are definitely nerfs overall; dead of winter is incredibly strong.

The speed reduction part of the talent will be brutal. I already have trouble keeping up with other players as deathbringer. Limiting movement speed to 100% of normal would be much more playable (and riders wouldn’t be able to mount up and melt the opposing team with their giant remorseless winter).

If they really really REALLY need to throw a drawback in there then pick 1! 2 is unnecessary and harsh. Unless this new talent is so powerful the only counterplay is ‘run away’. I don’t see it though. Even if it is blizzard will crack down with the nerf hammer before the season even goes live. Rest assured they are rapid quick with keeping dk in check.

In blitz (doubt it would ever happen in arena) But I wonder how fun it would be to try and make a 1 shot with this talent.

Cryogenic chamber in combo with gathering storm and biting cold could be pretty funny. But not worth losing out on the stun imo.

Should have been a PvE talent IMO.

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Does cryogenic chamber add damage to remorseless winter or is it its own thing? I haven’t played with it in a while, I doubt this new talent will interact with it. Would be very fun if it did though.

I wish this new talent just modified remorseless winter instead of adding it to pillar of frost (please stop adding MORE of our damage to our pillar of frost).

What if the talent was something like this:

-Remorseless winter now deals 1000% more damage and is 150% larger. Movement speed and damage taken reduced by 20%. Cooldown of remorseless winter increased to 1 minute.

This would be great for setting up a kill, breaking up a big team fight or defending against physical attackers (lord knows we could use help against physical.) I would take this talent in a heartbeat and get some serious Lich King RP going.

Ah good point, I forgot it is considered its own damage thing. (never really use it)

I’m currently seeing some rw ticks around 70k mark, meaning that now they will be around 700k?

My concern though is fDK can’t land a kill currently with out rw stun. We don’t have Ms so making a healer sit 8-10sec of CC is the only way we can land a kill. If we lose stun then I feel like it’s going to be quite hard to land a kill even if rw is pumping. People will be free to use their mobility to just GTFO. Easy counter.

I would be semi ok with this change if they just removed all the survivability nerfs on all DK talents/abilities. Let us be as tanky as we are in PvE so we aren’t a complete liability.

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