Hello my name is Axiom. A little background context: I have around 60000 total hours playing Frost Death Knight. I have consistently played above 2400+ MMR in 2s, 3s, RBG and Shuffle throughout my time in world of warcraft.
I can not stress this enough Blizzard. These are the absolutely most out of touch changes you have ever made to Frost DK. I do not know who is play testing these things but the numbers are actually laughable. I would prefer you did absolutely nothing to my class if these are the changes you have in mind. You can play test this spec for 60 seconds on the PTR and Retail and I can tell you that you will understand the changes are bad immediately.
Whoever made the changes does not even understand how the class works considering Killing Machine scaling, how your Mastery works, how this would effect stat priority, etc.
I have plenty of ideas and opinions when it comes to what should change on this class. If Blizzard wants to contact me directly for advice I’d be more then happy to give suggestions.
You dont even have to play it to see this is basically saying “we dont want you playing frost dk in pvp until further notice”. But these changes are along the lines of what was asked in these forums.
“We want deathknights to not pillar hump all game waiting for pillar of frost”.
Maybe you shouldnt have absolutely gutted the defensive arsenal of this class we could. We’d love to in fact! … so out of touch just buff deathstrike at the very least.
I think this is a step in the right direction. more sustained profile rather than heavy burst, but we just have no defensive potential to stay in the fight that would allow this kind of sustained profile to work. A lot of other melee specs have outs that let them instantly gtfo when the heat gets turned up. I think unnerf DS and ams and we might be in a better place.
Except it isnt. Even if you could stay in the fight you still lose because you literally have nothing in terms of damage output. People in mythis are hitting for like 13k Obliterates, with the Obliterate “buffs” that increases to 24k outside of KM procs with these changes. KM procs will use 15k values to determine its KM damage.
If you are DSing with these changes you are just reducing your damage even more in order to stay alive and when you “burst” comes up you have nothing because its been so heavily nerfed. You are basically a glorified dot.
Scroll through the forum. Lol these forum posters have asked literally for exactly what they did. They are listening to the player base… just the wrong ones unfortunately.
You are going to be pressing PoF and HOPE you dont get a KM proc. Sounds fun
Developers’ note: We’re making updates to Frost Death Knights in PvP with the goals of a rewarding the spec for uptime by increasing its overall sustained damage and lowering its reliance on cooldowns.
The base Strength increase from Pillar of Frost is now 40% effective in PvP combat (was 60%)
The stacking Strength increase from Pillar of Frost is now 50% effective in PvP combat.
The Mastery increase from Frostwhelp’s Aid is now 50% effective in PvP combat.
The Frost damage increase from Bonegrinder is now 50% effective in PvP combat.
The Frost Strike damage increase from Shattering Blade is now 50% effective in PvP combat.
The Remorseless Winter damage increase from Gathering Storm is now 50% effective in PvP combat.
The Remorseless Winter damage increase from Everfrost is now 50% effective in PvP combat.
The Strength increase from Enduring Strength is now 80% effective in PvP combat.
Frost Strike damage is now increased by 45% in PvP combat (was 30%).
Obliterate damage is now increased by 20% in PvP combat (was 8%).
Obliterate damage is now increased by an additional 60% when Killing Machine is not active in PvP combat.
Remorseless Winter damage is now increased by 80% in PvP combat.
Howling Blast damage is now increased by 30% in PvP combat.
Frostscythe damage is now increased by 50% in PvP combat.
Glacial Advance damage is now increased by 50% in PvP combat.
Frost strike did 500% weapon damage, no Frostreaper, no cleaving strikes, Obliteration was its own CD just to name a few key differences from Legion to now.
I feel like their heart is in the right place with wanting to push sustain damage on frost but the notes read like they are absolutely terrified of the spec being good, SO many compensation nerfs to cds.
A lot of frosts issues just stem from it’s pve design when it comes to damage profile and obviously the lingering defensive nerfs. Even in PVE you do 0 damage outside of cds. They need to take a look at frost specific defensive buffs if they keep nerfing general things for unholy like in the past.
It looks like their aim is to remove Frostreaper from pvp, without removing Frostreaper, but still having to balance around having Frostreaper.
Flark is also biased because he made all the suggestions. The thing is the spec is designed around having crit and mastery to an extent. Crit to get KM procs, mastery to boost them, haste then increases the amount of procs. I dont know what he means by “does damage” but with what… 600+k Healthbars. Even 30k Obliterates isnt going to really do much of anything.
You are going to have to mix stats now. There is no way around it. I would even say you would need 50% mastery minimum to not lose damage with KM procs over regular Obliterate crits. You have to have KM Obliterates get enough damage to beat out the 60% increase of non KM Obliterates. That means 50% minimum mastery if you also add in 15% from RI. That is going to reduce KM procs outside of Pillar because you have to send a lot of stats to mastery just so your procs arent garbage.
Moving away from CD based damage is fine, but this isnt the way to do it especially when they are trying to work around the real issue which is Frostreaper. Thats what the 60% increase to non-KM Obliterates is for directly, to combat this garbage modifier that shouldnt exist.
Pillar of Frost now grants +10% Str and +1% per Rune, instead of +15% and +2% per Rune.
Frostwelp’s Aid now grants +4% Mastery per unique target hit instead of +8%.
Bonegrinder now grants +10% Frost Damage instead of +20%.
Frost Strike damage increased by 15%.
–Shattering Blade now deals +50% additional damage instead of +100%.
Remorseless Winter damage increased by +80%.
–Everfrost now deals +3% damage to enemies it hits, instead of +6%, stacking up to 10 times.
–Gathering Storm now deals +5% damage per rune spent, instead of +10%.
Obliterate damage increased by 12%. Obliterate damage is now increased by 60% without Killing Machine.
