DPS DKs might be the worst designed specs for casuals

Classes Death Knight
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TLDR: DK only feels good in raid and very high m+ and horrible for casual content because of too much stacking modifiers, standing in dnd, chaining multiple gcds to even start ramping and low impact spells outside of cds.

Every way to play damage DK feels exactly like old ret paladin pre rework. Your spells do 0 upfront damage, require 2-3 30 second to 1 min cds to do anything, and is clunky and cumbersome in any setting that ISNT raid.

Let me be clear, in raid dk feels alright, frost feels ok with full uptime, unholy actually has the structure to plan its cds, and things work out.

But as soon as you enter ANY other content form it feels REALLY bad to play.

Ok you are playing breath in open world, what, are you going to pop Breath of Sindragosa on a damn plainstrider?

Oblieration as well, you do healer levels of damage outside of pillar, and pillar requires constant uptime and no missed globals to actually be effective. This is very unfun in pvp and questing.

Many new players that play dk will fall off of it even though the theme is AWESOME because the moment to moment gameplay of the dk in non raid setting is so scuffed.

Problems I see:

  1. All dps dk specs are too focused on damage modifiers, Unholy should have a giga cd way of play with gargoyle 100% and breath is unique but my criticism is MOSTLY aimed at obliteration and disease unholy. Frost stacking str increase in pillar, as well as ignoring armor (frostreaper), as well as getting mastery bonus suddenly (frostreaper) is SO much extra damage that the base line spells have to be tuned terribly.

For oblieration, you can CLEARLY tell the devs notice this is an issue in pvp because of the obscene pvp modifiers obliteration (honestly unholy as well) has. 80%+ damage to obliterate ONLY when it IS NOT Killing Machine, what is this nonsense? All the str and % increases in PVP are squashed as well, because there are SO many.

  1. Death and Decay. This ability is HORRIBLE when your damage is tied to standing in it AND it has a 30 second cd AND you already are a class that needs to string cds together. This is part of why ret felt bad (and got reworked) and its even WORSE because you CAN’T cleave within being in it!

  2. Too many cds used in conjunction to feel actually smooth.

Chaining dnd into pillar into ERW and then needing to stack the strength feels awful outside of raid. In times you can plan (raid) it feels ok but good lord it feels bad in lower dungeons when things die fast and you cant get full value or if you are forced off something because the tank moves out of dnd.

The same goes for unholy but even worse, unholy blight, defile, dark transform, apoc, ok thats 6 seconds into the pull and the dh and ret has already blown it up. But wait, all of your damage is ramp as well so it takes even longer to get it going.

Now LARGE caveat, at HIGH keys unholy feels ok (other than the multiple global set up, that is still garbage), but at low keys it is unfun and tedious because it has no instant damage AND a ton of set up.

Basically, dps dk feels really bad at low levels of play compared to almost every other class I’ve played in melee. That is the end of my rant, I hope Blizzard, you can get the ret rework guy on frost dk because man, he did a great job of making ret fun (if a little simple).

Edit: Bonus points, WHY does death strike not proc obliteration, it makes frost even worse in pvp because you cant be defensive during cds.

7 Likes
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Lower dungeons you can just use whelp for more upfront damage.

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That isn’t really what I mean, it is also tied to a cd. DK spells are tuned very low in general to account for the insane levels of % damage stacking the class has which ends up feeling bad compared to most other classes.

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Good post. Good points.

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Thanks for reading it! I think many dks would at least a rework to the frost tree, I feel that unholy is fine as a ramp spec but could just use a couple cds condensed into 1 at least.

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Completely agree, and I’ve ranted to friends about this before.

There is just so much passive bloat in the DK kit right now, that it makes neither DPS spec perticuarly fun outside of high end content where you go in with a reliable tank and a reliable gameplan.

BoS is the single most tank-dependent dungeon spec in the entire game. You either do tank dam or mega dam depending on the tank’s pull cadence.

Unholy, even after 10.2, is basically tuned around PI and Augvoker, because of the way Gargoyle works. If you don’t have the support classes dedicated to you, the spec feels like trash.

Obliterate Frost is the only DPS spec that feels like it has healthy gameplay outside organized play w/ voice coms, but the abundance of damage mods and passive rotating buffs still feels incredibly unhealthy and unfun to play.

Base spell damages are way too low across both specs, and both specs are so loaded into CDs, that you basically do tank dam outside of them.

3 Likes
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Yeah it REALLY bothers me how bogged down by passive modifiers obliterate is, I think there is a place for heavy modifiers (make some options for unholy burst) but it just feels bad when obliterate hits half of crusader strike without KM. Frost needs a MAJOR look before adding hero talents on top.

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when cast out of combat remorseless winter now grants a stack of killing machine*
after having it’s cooldown reset from the “deaths reach talent” death grip now grants rime.
That would pretty much alleviate open world ramp issues.

Frostwhelps aid and cold heart are a waste of talents that only further tilt into cd reliance, should be replaced by modifiers for frost strike or interactions between rp spending and other abilities, like having rp spent increase the duration of RW and runes spent increase the damage. Chill streak should be a frost mage ability since thematically it makes your target want to stop following you, they’re already running from a dk.

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That seems pretty self explanatory there to me.

Entirely a problem with KM Obliterate doing a heavy majority of the spec’s damage and not so much DND.

Remorseless Winter and GA should be the top abilities in AoE, not Obliterate. I’ve been thinking a lot how to achieve that recently, and Remorseless Winter (and possibly Gathering Storm) should be stronger and there should be a choice node against Gathering that makes Remorseless Winter deal 200% more damage for each target hit.

Remorseless currently does 28k~ for me without any buffs, 84k against 3 targets. Obliterate does 30k, so about 106k~ with with KM. That’s 300k~ per cleave. If Remorseless had a flat damage ramping talent against Gathering that would take Remorseless from that 84k over 8 seconds to 336k at a 200% modifier over 8 seconds in AoE. Gathering Storm would obviously be far better in 1-2 target scenarios, but against larger 4+ targets it would easily pull ahead.

With this hypothetical talent, if you entered a fight with 10 stacks of Gathering Storm (56k/8 seconds) and kept it up for 16 seconds, you’d do 112k damage against 3 targets for 336k. Add in a fourth target and you’re up to 448k. In comparison, 4 targets with the hypothetical talent would yield 28,000 * 6 (200% for 3 extra targets) * 4 (total targets) =~ 672k. And that’s with a nerfed Remorseless Winter so that Obliterate can “chunk” and whatever.

DND is an issue because the damage is loaded all into KM Obliterate. Remove damage from KM Obliterate and the DND “issue” ceases to exist.

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I don’t see them letting the ability just sit as dead weight though. More than likely they will continue trying to make it viable to force it down our throats. Just think what a dev would do in 2-3 years if they took a look at the class to make improvements and saw DnD sitting there as a worthless spell. First thing on their agenda would be to improve it and we’re right back to them trying to get us to stack mobs/players in it again and being balanced around that happening.

The ability is simply outdated for what it’s supposed to do and needs to be removed so it’s no longer a threat to the design of the class.

2 Likes
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I never said it’d be deadweight, just that the DND issue won’t exit if they redistribute damage from KM Obliterate elsewhere.

Take my hypothetical Remorseless Winter above. That’s 672k on 4 targets over 8 seconds, or 84k DPS. 8 seconds is about 5 GCDs, 4 of which can be used on regular Obliterate.
30k * 70% (-30% for armor reduction) * 3 (max cleavable targets) =~ 63k DPS for a total of 252k, ignoring any KM procs.

It is incredibly easy to remove damage from KM Obliterate, redistribute it elsewhere, and still have DND feel meaningful because Obliterate being able to cleave will always be meaningful and, by removing damage out from KM Obliterate, that allows Obliterate to cleave to more targets like the other builders do for Unholy and Blood.

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I guess I just don’t understand why the push isn’t to completely remove DnD from the kit of Frost/Unholy. It’s such a clunky bad ability that is severely outdated and hinders the design of both specs. I wish every DK player would thoroughly reject it and demand it’s removal, and with a new xpac coming it’s the perfect time to do so imo.

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Yeah, this is why DK is, imo, the most pain in the butt class to level. I think I mostly just try to run dungeons as Blood mostly? Because both DPS are so reliant on CD windows to feel like you’re actually doing any damage, but like you said…you gonna pop your CDs on a random mob you’re killing ten of for a quest?

Although, maybe Rider of the Apocalypse with charger in combat outdoors could be fun as it would make pulling a bunch of mobs to AoE down easier…

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Yeah leveling it makes it very obvious and probably means new players bounce off it compared to something like ret which just does damage with spells and no set up.