Death Knight specs feel clumsy/dated, due to shared design issues

In Development The War Within Patch 11.0.7 PTR
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We’re well into TWW and DKs continue to suffer from common issues on every spec. These gameplay/QoL issues still exist despite the DK community asking for dev attention as recently as the last alpha/beta. As a long time DK player who plays to a minimum of KSH/AotC/Rival most seasons, these are the frustrating issues that continue to plague the class.

Burdened with Button Bloat

Unholy

Unholy can barely push out its cooldowns before most mobs are dead in M+ unless you’re doing higher keys. Even then, this has pushed most players towards the scythe build that completely drops Apocalypse and Vile Contagion.

Raise Abomination and Dark Transformation - both pet CDs that apply diseases and wounds. Abom also takes away Army of the Dead which is not great for our class fantasy.

Apocalypse and Army, both cooldowns that summon a bunch of ghouls. Apocalypse itself continues to be less than impressive even when supported with multiple talents.

Vile Contagion simply exists to spread our wounds and eat up a GCD, just why?? It should be built into DT or Festering Strike should apply wounds to multiple targets by default. This ability does not need to exist.

Unholy TODOs:

  • remove Apocalypse and change its talents to allow for the continuous summoning of fodder undead given a proper rotation
  • picking Abomination and Gargoyle adds them to army, tune as needed
  • Vile Contagion placed in the trash where it belongs
  • Festering Scythe changes Festering Strike to a wound cleave by default and its proc changes damage type to shadow (bypass armor & mastery)

Blood

Blood DKs need to juggle threat, positioning, and survival. It feels like they’re spinning one too many plates currently.

With Bonestorm and Tombstone being on the same CD and mainly serving as CDR for Dancing Rune Weapon, it feels like we’re pressing the same button twice.

It would help if Dancing Rune Weapon was either off GCD or its weapons cast blood boil automatically when reaching their target.

See next section for Death and Decay.

Frost

While Frost might not have traditional bloat like the other specs, it still has issues with its abilities.

A lot of the time we don’t pick up abilities such as Frostscythe, Chill Streak, Glacial Advance, or Frostwyrm’s Fury. While I personally could do without GA and Chill Streak, many players enjoy iconic abilities like Frostscythe and FwF but can’t pick them up due to tuning or tree limitations.

The least exciting cooldowns are resource management buttons, which Frost often picks up 2 of in Empower Rune Weapon and Horn of Winter. This is not particularly fun, especially when Frost DKs are frequently ignoring RP management outside of Breath.

Death and Decay Cleaves our Sanity

Blizzard we begged you all alpha/beta to remove the [horrible] Cleaving Strikes playstyle that you’ve slowly added to all 3 specs. It didn’t feel good when you added it to Unholy in Legion or to Frost in SL. The 4 second extension “fix” does not change the fact that it makes all 3 specs feel bad to play in AoE.

This requirement was removed for Ret Paladins and Mages. The only other specs that continue to suffer through it are DKs and Prot Paladins, who also actively hate it.

DnD does very little damage/threat by itself and only exists in the rotation to enable cleave. An on-GCD cleave enabler that costs a rune and has positional requirements really sucks!

There are so many other ways that each DK spec can cleave. Unholy has diseases/wounds, half of Frost’s kit already cleaves, and Blood just needs to have Heart Strike changed to a Revenge-style ability. Please get rid of this and restore DnD as a utility skill (slow, stealth break, etc.)

Festering|Frost|Consumption-Scythe

I’m a big fan of the scythe abilities for DKs because they’ve injected some much needed flavor to the class. Unfortunately the only one that truly feels good is Exterminate in the DB hero tree, because it looks good and functions well.

While I’m really enjoying the Festering Scythe build for Unholy, it has problems:

  • its wound cleave feels like should be part of default Festering Strike
  • the 20 wound proc has a low duration and popping wounds while its active does not contribute to the next proc
  • the proper way to maximize its build is to waste a TON of resources (wounds and RP)
  • it has no actual scythe animation, just a barely noticeable purple swish

Frostscythe has a great animation and was feeling very good at one point in the TWW beta but it was nerfed out of existence…so it continues to go unused since BfA.

I’m grouping Consumption here just to point out that it could be Blood’s scythe attack, but it has a very weak animation like Festering Scythe. It would be great if it was buffed, functionally and visually, to be a more prominent part of the rotation.

The Worst Execute

Last and certainly least, we get to Soul Reaper. It’s probably the worst melee execute in the game. It’s pretty annoying in both PvP and PvE due to the lag between use and damage, and it interferes with the base rotation on top of doing underwhelming damage.

Considering the above and factoring in its non-existent visuals makes it so that anyone who is using SR, is doing so begrudgingly.

While I’d love to see SR get major improvements, if the devs can’t think of an interesting way to make it better, just get rid of it and compensate for the damage. I promise you that almost no one will care.

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It honestly baffles me how Blizzard ignores feedback like this. I see it for nearly every class, and nothing gets changed for years.

I manage a subscription-based company and we strive to keep our clients happy by having a fast turn around time on improvements. Blizzard management of their resources is the opposite: They let terrible class design rot for years until players quit. I guarantee our churn rate is much lower than WoW’s.

The problems you have brought up have been plaguing DKs for years, and the changes you proposed would take a programmer all of 1 day to implement.

There is a lot of great feedback on the class forums. Most class change requests are usually a simple number change in the code, or copy-and-pasting a functionality similar ability. Your Festering Scythe idea, for example, take Frostscythe/Festering Scythe code, modify it slightly, and add a call to the Festering Strike’s Wound application. Takes all of 5 minutes, and changes like these improves the DK gameplay significantly.

It is amazing how no one at Blizzard can spare a few days per class to keep millions of players happy.

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I’m right there with you. I would personally sign away any notion of player housing forever if the trade-off was having more consistent class design and more frequent tuning/fixes.

I think the fact that there is no set class devs is a real problem, since there is no one to champion classes/specs when they’re not playing well, and I don’t mean just numbers here.

I don’t doubt this. Doesn’t matter how much spaghetti is in the code, there are a lot of low hanging fruit that could be rectified with not much effort while significantly improving life for players.

I didn’t even get into DK’s visual problems for that reason, which have also been present for many years now. The fact that most of our abilities are just generic wooshes or that UH DKs have their own personal affix with Defile covering up ground effects is really quite horrible.

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Death and Decay should be a baseline ability that’s modified by spec mechanics

Frost- remorseless winter becomes you DND
Unholy- Unholy Blight becomes your DND

The soul reaper thing is dumb, too many classes have executes and they should all be taken away but warrior and hunter

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I mean is due to the knowing the og player base isn’t going to leave unless they messed up so bad that is basically throwing the towel.

Look at the amount of bugs this recent expansion. It’s insane that is happening to a game with such a huge marking of annual income it’s producing that you’d think we’d would have some stellar designs/bugs fixes almost immediately.

Story based on each class and such. But blizzard has just been copy pasting each year and when things hits the fan then they do what the customer base wanted. And the horrible well update several specs and leave others till the next 6 months or so to update. You have much smaller studios with less income that what you guys are making doing some fresh ideas / qol changes. No reason this company can’t do it. And sure keep listening to the investors and you’ll likely will end up like Ubisoft/Bioware.

Blizzard don’t be like Intel. I get there not many good mmos out there to make the company think twice but GGG is already going to take some of your diablo base, all it takes is one good mmo to come out with fresh ideas and the playerbase that’s sick of the bare minimum to just say their good byes.

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Unholy needs less ramp up, get rid of either Festermight or Death Rot. Unholy is the only class with this massive ramp and it’s killing us in m+ and any raid fight with adds with low hp.
Festering Scythe would work better as 10 wounds popped not 20.

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same issue on rogue, class tree ties into rotation on all specs

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I think what you’re pointing to here is Cleaving Strikes, which should not even be a thing. DKs worked great for many years without it.

Unholy doesn’t need to cleave with Scourge Strike if it has stronger diseases. This would also allow SS to actually hit harder. Similarly, Frost doesn’t need to cleave Obliterates and it creates so many problems. Its whole kit cleaves! Just buff those abilities instead.

Less ramp definitely would be nice in the modern game, which is why so many moved over to the scythe build in m+. Apocalypse and Vile Contagion are just feel bad buttons.

I think the issue you’re noticing with both Festermight and Festering Scythe comes from the fact that Unholy spreads and spends wounds very slowly, especially outside cds.

I wouldn’t mind seeing Infected Claws have a chance to pop wounds instead, like the talent we used to have in the Legion Artifact, as well as letting SS pop 1-2 wounds for variety. They could then allow Festering Scythe to replace FS or let diseases have a chance to apply wounds. Then spending Festering Scythe’s proc would be much less likely to waste wounds too.

As always the absolute best case scenario for UH would be if they brought back Necrotic Plague. Absolute peak Unholy gameplay!