Abomination Limb completely lost it’s charm coming out of Shadowlands, right now it’s clunky, unreliable and feels like a waste of talent point in a class tree packed with “This is useful in that specific fight, but I don’t have spare points” items. Happy it will be gone from user experience standpoint, but it’s still sometimes usable utility so is there a compensation in other areas?
Next, Anti-Magic Zone is very fight dependent, often being strictly worse then other group defensives due to mainly smaller radius. From my experience absorb amount is never a concern.
What is AMZ good for then? Consistent continuous heavy magical damage, but at the point where a lot of players are able to stack in one smallish spot. We didn’t have a lot of those recently, and 2nd talent point is thus mostly optional. Now in 11.2 feels like it will be pretty much mandatory, which takes back spare talent point from removed Abom Limb.
All in all:
CD - nerf
Absorb amount - fight dependent, could be anything from a big nerf to a huge buff
Talent points - nerf
Is this really a net positive to force fight designers to add such boss abilities in order to increase value of one single ability? This is btw just an assumption from my side, but if we don’t have a good use case then it’s a 100% nerf. Is this really the right class to implement such risky change? Fair from the viewpoint of normalizing dps specs utility, but they have so much more.
Lastly, grips.
Spec parity is untouched, Blood is still the grip master. Losing aforementioned Limb kinda hurts DPS DK more comparatively without a compensation.
That said, grips are not really universally fun. Skillshots in M+ are nice, yes, but when your raid team is melting 8 adds while you run like a fool to grip another 2 (those run out to get your mage immediately because your enhance cba to drop a totem) losing precious dps uptime it’s not fun at all.
Also grips often do nothing without immediately following with another CC.
And again, is this really a net positive to force fight designers to add grippable adds here and there in order to increase value of one single ability? Now this one bit was basically promised, but isn’t this just back to status quo?
To summarize: utility changes feel more like a nerf and are not fun and not exciting. I would still prefer to have a proper raid buff or strong and unique utility niche, both of which grips&AMZ are not.