It’s horrible how much of a mess they are as a class, when you think death knight you imagine something cool yet there’s almost nothing so about current death knights. A class that has one of the coolest class fantasies and yet it’s plagued by huge issues that have been around for so long.
The class was in a horrible spot for YEARS, and last time it was “looked at” Blizz just quickly added the 2h capability back to frost and people were suddenly happy even though all they did was return something to us we USED to have. But now, 2h frost is not even used since it actually sucks, badly. It’s not balanced whatsoever. In fact, the whole class is not balanced at all and that’s not even touching on the actual playstyle issues.
Have you ever leveled a death knight? Leveling scaling is absolutely horrible, Obliterate does like 300 dmg at level 40 with the proc crit. It should be called Ticklerate. When your top dmg dealer until max level is frost fever or virulent plague by a country mile, that’s an issue. Player input should be rewarded, and proper use of procs and what not doesn’t even matter - at least while leveling.
Of course even at max level balancing is crud. Both unholy and frost are bottom of the pack, in fact the only redeeming factor of the entire class is unholy in m+, and even there it’s not anywhere near top tier. If you want to raid you may as well reroll - unless you want to play blood.
Just kidding, blood is absolutely horrible too. As a tank, it has threat issues, DPS is pathetic, and worst of all, even self healing is pathetic. A paladin or bear or even DH nowadays heals for more. Death Strike was nerfed so hard that the only time it even does decent healing is if you get hit for 90% of your HP out of nowhere, and the HP yoyo-ing has many healers just completely not wanting to play with blood because they just don’t want mini-heart attacks every 20 seconds.
It’s a slow moving, low DPS, barely able to produce enough threat spec, that now also lost it’s only edge it had since day 1 - self healing. Which is also the entire class fantasy, you’re a BLOOD death knight. Although to be fair, day 1 had frost as a tank and blood as a DPS spec, which just goes to show how little idea was given to DK’s since the very start. Do you know another class that had two of it’s specs completely swapped with each other? (Demo doesn’t count, demo was just completely nuked from orbit it’s different okay). Blood DK’s need more healing, or more dmg, or ANYTHING. Relying on a big parry rate while dancing rune weapon is up is NOT fun. It’s NOT the class fantasy a blood DK should have, and relying on RNG for your entire survival is NOT fun. They’re quite honestly actually bad at everything. There’s no redeeming factor at all in blood. And yet they’re thematically one of the coolest specs, it should literally be a vampire tank that is a beast to take down.
And let’s not even talk about trying to take blood in any form of PvP, it’s an absolute joke, the death strike modifiers in PvP (as if that was needed, it barely heals for anything) just completely ruined the spec.
Since I’m already all over the place with this rant let’s go back to frost. There’s only one fun button to press while playing frost, and it’s Frostwyrm’s Fury. The fact that DK’s are YET AGAIN forced into stupid Breath of Sindragosa playstyle is absolutely mindblowingly horrible. Show me a spec that does actually close to 0 DPS except every 2 min if they pull off breath, and let’s hope you don’t get stunned or anything cause there goes 90% of your damage. What a horrible talent, it’s not even fun, and yet it’s the best we have.
Even though people complained for YEARS about this. Just about the only time frost feels good with Obliterates is during pillar, and even then the Obliterate crits are not even big. Thing is, they USED to be. Obliterate was basically a melee Chaos Bolt a long time ago, and it was SO fun. It was fantastic and felt visceral. And now it hits about 1/13th of what a kyrian mage’s arcane barrage hits for. I’m dead serious about the 1/13th btw.
Legendary wise - the most fun sounding legendaries are completely unviable and considered a waste to craft. You know that legendary for unholy that makes a zombie pop up and shamble over to enemies and then goes boom? Sounds fun right? Well I sure hope you didn’t craft it because it only pops up like once every 2-3 minutes and half the time it doesn’t even reach the friggin target. What a joke.
Well at least you can always play around with the different talents right? WRONG. Like all the specs are pretty much dead set into what the best talents are by an actual mile. There’s not even any options as your dps suffers even THAT much more, as if it wasn’t bad already.
Do yourself a favor and don’t even bother playing DK, it’s quite possibly the worst designed, worst balanced class out there right now. It REALLY needs help, every single one of the three specs does, and yet nothing is being done. But at least void elves now have blonde hair right? Incredible.
Thanks for listening.
