It’s time’s like these that I miss Death Siphon
-Built for frost and unholy dks more than blood dks
-Scaled with str crit and mastery so it keeps up with damage scaling
-no weird reactive damage mechanic to make pvp balance a pain.
I don’t expect Death Siphon to come back, but I think we can apply some of those lessons to Death Strike.
First would be to remove reactive damage component from unholy/frost dks in PvP. If the reactive damage % is too high we can heal through literally anything that doesn’t global us, if it’s too low we can never heal through damage and it stops feeling like a self heal and just becomes a retroactive damage reduction.
Second is to make the heal actually scale with our output stats, at least crit and haste, but both frost and unholy mastery would also be nice. This way the heal can scale as well as spammable heals from other classes meaning slightly less work for the balance team each season.
Now we have the ability to heal ourselves through lessor damage but not getting nuked down, so we have room to have enough damage reduction and hp to actually survive a kill attempt in arena even while disarmed. Good play would involve keeping yourself topped off with self heals so it’s harder for them to drop you, so playing more proactively instead of just reactively.
Death Knights should be the undisputed best class at self healing, we should not be losing sustain fights to classes that can also run away from us if the fight looks bad for them. It feels oppressive to lose to a demon hunter healing through your damage while you can’t heal through theirs AND they can just run away whenever they want. If they CAN run away from you then they should lose to you in a cage match, else what is the point in a dk. (the previous assumes all characters are well played, anyone can die to anyone if there is enough of a skill difference)
2 Likes
thats the problem, specs have been losing survivability xpac after xpac and the game is becoming hyper damage/mongo
healers whine about how awful it feels to heal, when part of the issue is how incapable dps specs are at taking care of themselves
the more you take away from certain specs ability to self heal, or off heal others, the more stress you put on the healer to do so instead, leading to complaints about even micro cc.
Healer shouldnt even be called healer, it should be renamed to support and most healer specs having less healing and more support based utility so DPS specs can have their flavor back.
For ret that means flash of light and wog actually healing, For DK that means having deathstrike heal again, For warriors it means having ignore pain with die by, or bloodthirst/enraged rebuffed
you get the point, But the more you remove the DPS specs ability to do these things themselves in their own flavorful way, the more stress you directly put onto healers to make up for it. Most high end pvpers dont struggle to bad with that, but for the casual playerbase this makes the experience very tilting
3 Likes
at this point they should just REMOVE deathstrike and give us DKS more “rotational healing” give us as much leech as demon hunters or add a warrior “bloodthirst” like healing effect whenever you consume killing machine
Most specs have in fact been gaining survivability with each xpac, which is why damage has gotten as spiky as it has. Trimming defensives lets them back off on that.
yeah no, sorry games used to last 20m in bfa as a regular occurrence
The increase in defensives has directly led to damage becoming much spikier, with the expectation that you will use your defensives to survive those spikes. A direct consequence is that if you get hit by one of those spikes without a defensive up, you tend to just die.
and in Wrath people were being 1 shot in arena by prot warriors. What does that actually have to do with Midnight?
Different expansions are different. But going into Midnight a lot of specs are losing defensives.
games are still lasting on average significantly less time compared to how it used to be, therefore, survivability is lower regardless of whether or not you have more or less defensive buttons or passives
and the damage being what it is, outpaces whatever was gained
2 Likes