DK DPS Mastery Spec May be a core issue?

Classes Death Knight
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I am curious if others have though something similar with the understanding that both the Frost and Unholy Talent trees are disjointed and dysfunctional with no symmetry or interaction with either mastery setup all that well or even azerite traits.

The key problem that I feel creates some of this issue it a simple element of what each mastery effects and doesn’t effect in terms of talents and skills.

Frost Mastery provides a % damage increase to Frost based Damage only 16% while Unholy Mastery provides % damage increase to Shadow Damage only by 18%.

The key element here is that while there is both Frost and Shadow damage in each case large junks of the damage are either partially or even fully Physical Damage hence the Mastery does nothing for these abilities. On top of this as unholy a lot of our damage is done through pets yet our Mastery has zero effect on the pets damage and in turn really their scaling compare this to a Hunter where their Mastery. Survival has a % increase to all abilities which use Focus for them and their pets so consider this could be like Runepower based abilities or the like etc. Then look at Marksmenship for a comparison to Frost as they are the Hunter without a Pet they get a % increase to all their abilities regardless of what type of damage it’s doing. So if this was applied to Frost then Obiliterate, Frost Scythe and the rest of the abilities that do some either no Frost Damage or just Partial Frost Damage. It would mean that Mastery fully worked with Obliterate which would substantially increase the issues with this ability and the lack of Frost Damage attributed to that skill.

In essence I think the Mastery for Unholy and Frost should be something like this:

Mastery Dreadblade: All Shadow Damage Increased by 18% in addition you and your pets receive 1% increased damage for every 2 points of Mastery the you have

Mastery Frozen Heart: All Frost Damage increased by 16% in addition you receive 0.5% haste for every 4 points of mastery and your non Frost Based Damage is increased by this amount as well.

Do others think a change like this could be a good start to fixing things and providing some level of scaling to the class as well?

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have booth masteries affect rune regen and runic emp and corruption

corruption for every x amout of haste you have it inscreases cor speed by 100% and shortens the time by .25

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Mastery has issues with unholy now(in single target) for a few reasons.

One, as you pointed out, is that army does not benefit from it. It used to via the ghouls explosions, however the Azerite trait ghoul explosion does not benefit from Mastery. In BfA, they changed unholy’s mastery to only interact with its intristic abilities, meaning it does not effect procs coming from items, which includes Azerite traits as I recall.

Two, the spec is much slower with significantly more downtime than in Legion, thanks to the loss of a few resource-oriented artifact traits; this means stacking heaps of haste is necessary to just make the spec play decently. In BfA, a lot of damage was also shifted over to AotD damage, which is yet another reason why haste, crit, and vers are valued so much more.

The funny thing about unholy is that in any event mastery is not a high priority stat, it usually means the spec sucks. Why? Because it does not synergize with other stats particularly well, and scales poorly with strength because every ability is “low-balled” in its tuning to compensate for RFC’s 50% uptime.

In addition to that, unholy’s core abilities are further down-tuned in order to compensate for army. This is why the spec feels so unimpactful outside of it, with the only exception being massive AoE pulls(which is why it’s currently popular for reaping, but once that goes away, it’s back to the gutter.)

There is nothing inherently wrong with unholy’s mastery, just that if something does not scale with it, it’s immediately poop. To change this would require a full overhaul of the spec itself, likely even including changes to RFC.

Otherwise, to make mastery more valuable means that AotD ghouls would have to scale with mastery once again, as would non-intristic sources of shadow damage. Downtime would have to be inherently lessened, through which there are a number of ways to do.

The new Azerite system with the trait involving death coil refunds doesn’t quite solve this, as it appears more like it’d cause a flood of GCD’s spending death coil, and other times nothing, leading all the way back to the feast-or-famine gameplay of 7.0. Yuck.

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Finally, someone that understands why UH is in such a bad state

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Lahgtah,
I guess you broke this down for others that might not have been aware of the changes that happened over a period of time to the DK Mastery not just for Unholy though Frost suffered very similar issues.
What I was trying to explain without going through everything that you did is that a simple change to the DK mastery to actually make it scale correctly with both Talents, Abilities and Class based changes like Azerite would in fact actually fix some of the DPS issues.
Obviously there is other elements as well but this change is one which actually would be a good universal change that would be a great start at some repairing of the class issues.
At least the class would actually functionally scale to some degree with gear, levels, abilities and effects. Which classes like Druid (Boomkin), Priest (Shadow), Warlock (Affliction) Hunter (BM) etc do right now and is why they are doing so well over many of the other DPS spec’s that actually have poor scaling Mastery with DK have the worst of them all currently