Before I rant here is the solution to the problem
The Problem & Solution
Right now, the main thing holding dk back are the hero talents - both of them are simply non functinal in pvp while also pigeon holding the specs.
Rider of the apocalypse: With this tree, all of the damage is locked behind rng horse procs, and abomb/frostwyrm spawning 4 horsemen. THE BEST PART IS THAT THEY DON’T ATTACK YOUR MAIN TARGET. How many time have you seen 4 horsemen run at the healer all the way in narnia instead of the target the dk is hitting. The pet ai they put on the horsemen is beyond reproach. They need to make pet commands work for it like it does for abomb.
Additionally, riders comes with Pact of the Apocalypse. This is effectively a 20% wall for 20 seconds on a 1 min 30 sec cd on a class that is made of paper. With this as strong as it it, you can NEVER look at the other hero trees as you will simply get deleted every game.
Pact of the Apocalypse must be nerfed AND have its power redistributed into the base kit. Compensatory buffs and Dk doesn’t go hand in hand, I know, but this is what is needed so that dk can play more than one hero tree.
Suggestion: Baseline bloodforged armor, and introduce spellwarding. This might seem overkill, but if they nerf pact of apoc by 70%, you will see how quickly dks get deleted. And the fact that dk doesn’t even have an advantage into magic damage these days in kinda hilarious considering they still get dunked on by physical damage.
At this point we’re just taking it from both ends vs any comp every single game.
Sanlayn - all your damage is wrapped into having 7 stacks of the blood queen which not only is tied into an uptime dependent RNG PROC, but also requires you to spend 7 globals spamming scourge strike every opener as you get tripled in damage.
Now the idea is that you get to your second burst window(dark transformation) and you pop off, but in reality, your just going to get ccd, and kited and have your stacks fall off any ways, and even if you do pop off somehow, you’re doing less than a warrior does outside of their cooldowns, so wtf is the point here?
Deathbringer: This entire tree is nerfed by 50% since before beta testing even started and hasnt been looked at since. Not even exxagerating here. GGS. When warrior gets a mountain thane buff every other reset, it’s very discouraging to see this.
So with all of that said, dk has to pick the least terrible choice between 2 hero trees, and its always going to be rider of the apocalypse because it has the wall. The problem is, that the horsemen attack random targets(including pets) 90% of the time. If the horsemen always attacked kill target, I can confidently say that both dk specs would move up a tier.
Overall Solution
Baseline Bloodforged - Even with the recent buffs, death strike is still a very bad global in this meta(esp in shuff). And even if you take the bloodforged pvp talent, i swear you still get ran over by melee. It simply is not worth talenting into because the defensive benefit you get is equalized by the offensive loss you get by spending globals doing 0 damage on a class that NEEDS to do be doing damage every globlal.
Spellwarding: Not as strong as DF Season 1, but like 60-70% of that power level is what is needed. I think its fair to say… dk isn’t the wizard counter that people think it is. You can’t say dk is a wizard counter when wizards would rather train a dk than any other class(even other wizards)
#1 precog exists, which means that dk, the class with like 8 micro ccs, has been arguably affected the most. Not only can you not just spam your 8 micro ccs back to back if u miss ur kick, but also, you accidentally give precog when you death grip a cast that your teammate was going to kick anyways(this is especially the case in shuffle)
#2 AMZ is useless. It’s very rare to find a wizard team in shuffle or 3v3 that doesn’t have a knockback. On top of that, you have to stand still inside the zone VS WIZARDS. Even further, AMZ used to be a 80% wall, which is 2.5x stronger. You could stack 2 zones on top of eachother, and it still wouldn’t be as good as the zone dk has for over 10 years(became 50% in dflight)
#3 AMS used to be an actual shield. Since the dflight nerfs(which we got when spellwarding was the problem) AMS has become a shield that you can remove in one global. Effected by dampening, so in shuffle it gets to the point where its like a 10% shield? Vs before, dk was designed around shielding like half its healthbar. AMS being a big shield is very significant because a lot of its power comes from negating cc for those 6 seconds. Now, wizards can break it in 1-2 seconds. So it becomes largely irrelevant.
Rant for Frost
Real talk… what the actual f have they done with frost dk? Like what was the plan with death’s cold embrace?
Last patch frost dk, for the first time in 3 expansions(since bfa) could actually play in the fight. It wasn’t insanely tanky, but it had a unique defence vs melee, in that it could stun them every 30 seconds for 4-6 seconds. Also, it had good sustain damage with shatter frost strike, which meant that all of its damage wasn’t locked behind a 1 minute go.
So for the first time in 6 years, no frost dk player and no other class had to suffer through the chains of ice, ring around the rosie, gameplay that has plagued frost dk.
Nobody like this playstyle…
and blizzard actually figured out how to get dk to play in with that 45 second 1 hander pillar build. The last time dk had a good reason to play in was heartstop aura.
So what did they do the moment frost dk started to play in?
They removed the stun, and replace it with talent LOCKS ALL YOUR DAMAGE BEHIND A 1 MIN BURST WINDOW.
I cant anymore bro. why tf did they do that.
Not only that, but they made you RP walk the whole time. So not only is all your damage locked behind a 1 minute window, but you and your teammates need to save all of your roots, deathgrips, cc drs to ensure that they stay in. Why would they create a design like that when most people play solo shuffle these days? The previous 1 hander design worked very well in a shuffle environment since it moved dk away from that 1 shot cheese design that relied on clean goes with untouched stun DRs(impossible in shuffle)
And so what we have here is the most obvious step backwards that blizzard could have ever made. It doesn’t take a design genius to see that removing the remorceless winter stun and replacing it with death’s cold embrace, would make the spec worse by design. So at this point… it’s hard to say blizzard was ignorant to this.
Rant for Unholy
What does this spec even do anymore? Seriously. Why does it even exist.
Pre dflight, before every class had passive aoe, you could say Unholy was a cleave spec. It was great at doing a lot of damage spread between multiple targets and if the healer wasn’t pumping, they would fall behind and lose simply because of that damage. But unholy also had very limited cc, and it didn’t have a mortal strike.
But nowadays, every class has ridiculous damage(on top of whatever other utility they brought to the table). Unholy has a mortal strike but it’s one of the worst in the game. Actually, it IS the worst in the game. Who cares if it stacks with other mortal strikes when it takes 4-5 back to back globals to even get its effect(it also lasts 15 seconds, which means if it took you 4-5 globals its already halfway to resetting to 0).
So now, for unholy to ever be good, it has to do the most obscene damage in the game, but what’s interesting is that historically, it has always done ridiculous damage. Look at wrath classic and cata classic and unholy straight up doubles or even triples the other teams damage.
And for the spec to be tournament viable it also has to be very tanky. Something that not even unnnerfed death strike is able to do for the spec right now. Yes, death strike is COMPLETELY unnerfed like it was in bfa, but it is so weak because shuffle dampening and also because you cannot waste a global on death strike when death coil is your top damage. In bfa you never pressed death coil so it didn’t matter.
It’s just rough all around, and the worst part is that the moment unholy is competing with any of the other specs it gets instantly nerfed. And when a dk spec gets nerfed its totally different than any other spec, as dk doesn’t get compensatory buffs lol. And dk doesn’t get “lets start small and wait and see” either.
When balance is so obviously biased, it makes the game feel meaningless, because sure, i could just reroll warrior, but deep down, even if i do well on warrior i will know that it’s only because the game was designed(as in tuned) in that way. So the accomplishment doesn’t even matter as it’s based on arbitrary tuning.
