Feedback: Death Knights

In Development The War Within Beta Test
287

The Frost changes are absolutely great. Currently the DPS from this week’s M+ testing is worse than the prior, but that’s purely a tuning issue. From a gameplay standpoint, this is a massive improvement to the fundamentals of the spec.

There’s still some talents that could use some love; here’s some examples (with some example changes):

Cold Heart
Every 2 sec, gain a stack of Cold Heart, causing your next Chains of Ice to deal (11.235% of Attack power) Frost damage. Stacks up to 20 times.

This will never be taken. Even in 2 target scenarios, it costs a point and isn’t really worth it over Scythe.

Something that could make it better could be:

Cold Heart
Every 2 sec, gain a stack of Cold Heart, causing your next Howling Blast to deal (11.235% of Attack power) Frost damage. Stacks up to 10 times.

Reasoning: Moving this off of Chains and onto Howling Blast would have a talent that’d make Howling Blast always good with Rime and something that’d feel good to press, instead of just being something we press because there’s nothing else. Procs should feel good and be engaging and Rime is failing on that front.

Avalanche
Casting Howling Blast with Rime active causes jagged icicles to fall on enemies nearby your target, applying Razorice and dealing (22.47% of Attack power) Frost damage.

This just exists as a talent tax for the Shattering Suite. It’s entirely boring and unimaginative and adds nothing of real value - especially after AA’s addition - to the spec.

Something that could make it better could be:

Avalanche
Casting Howling Blast with Rime active causes jagged icicles to fall on enemies nearby your target, applying Razorice and dealing (22.47% of Attack power) Frost damage and causing it to deal 100% of its damage to 4 additional enemies and reduced damage to the rest.

Reasoning: For the same as above, Howling Blast (and Rime) feel horrible in ST. Avalanche specifically feels meh at best to get Shattering Blade, and bad at best when you need to get Shattered Frost. Making Avalanche have some actual AoE implication would do wonders for the talent without putting any extra ST damage into it.

Shattered Frost
When Frost Strike consumes 5 Razorice stacks, it deals 50% of the damage dealt to nearby enemies. Deals reduced damage beyond 8 targets.

This talent has just been horrible from the start. It requires 2 talents to get to and contributes around 6% damage for DW Obliteration builds from my M+ testing. Not only that, it’s only hitting with the mainhand, requires Razorice on a weapon to effectively use, and has no benefit in ST scenarios. For comparison, I could take GA and just use that in AoE and get that same 6% damage boost, if not more.

Something that could make it better could be:

Shattered Frost
When Frost Strike consumes 5 Razorice stacks, it deals 50% of the damage dealt to nearby enemies and grants you Shattered Soul. Deals reduced damage beyond 8 targets.

Shattered Soul
Your next auto attack is guaranteed to critically hit, trigger Icy Death Torrent at X% effectiveness, and [generate a Killing Machine stack / generate a Rune / generate X RP].

Reasoning: Shattered Frost has 0 single target benefit and is pretty weak in AoE as well. If the % is tuned up then it just becomes a strictly better GA. Something like this would give it both a ST benefit and a separate tuning knob to boost its AoE damage.

And lastly, these Frost changes are indeed fantastic; however, 2h Frost is now very behind from DW, instead of being relatively equal.

With that I propose something like:

Might of the Frozen Wastes
Wielding a two-handed weapon increases Obliterate damage by 30%, and your auto attack critical strikes always grant Killing Machine.

Additionally, while wielding a two-handed weapon, activating Pillar of Frost, Frostwyrm’s Fury, or Breath of Sindragosa grants a stack of Killing Machine, and your RP spending abilities encases your next Obliterate in ice, shattering when cast and causing icy stalagmites to hit the target for X% additional damage and nearby enemies for Y% damage. Stacks N times. [Xms CD]

Reasoning: 2h Frost is going to be behind on KM procs and losing the degenerate Icecap-Pillar combination essentially tanks the damage. Having something like this would help stabilize the lack of KM procs a bit (but not too much!) and gives additional damage to Obliterate casts but not Obliterate directly, similar to the Thronebreaker artifact trait with Crystalline Swords.

Again, really glad you’ve decided to not tune FDK around 70%+ Pillar uptime and that more of the base kit and/or capstones will have the power in them instead. And it’s clear that Frostreaper is here to stay at 100%, so now seems like a great time to put power back into some “forgotten” abilities (like Howling Blast/Rime) and create a healthy way for 2h to be an option instead of forced into only Obliteration.

6 Likes
288

I really like these suggestions.

*side note, I do really want the lone winter to be changed.

Devs:
From a pvp standpoint, any chance Frost can also get some type of necrotic wound like pvp talent or ms affect? One of the tiny remaining specs that doesn’t have some type of MS or healing asorb.

Rider: Please give us an option to toggle a red version of the horse for those who completed the shadowmourne quest chain. This would be such a cool addition.

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289

agreed, most of us asked for these exact changes lol

1 Like
290

With the rebalancing of damage back into abilities, we saw these 2 changes, the math works out so that when playing dual wield obliteration, frostscythe is only worth pressing in 4+ target cleave situations instead of Artic Assault cleaving strikes killing machine obliterate. this feels really bad for this skill, seeing as people were extremely excited to use it rotationally in single target. in order for it to beat out Artic Assault Killing Machines, it needs to do like 12% more damage in order to match it. Frostscythe also should have recieved a 23% damage buff, not a 5% one. this does not bode well for the health of this ability seeing as its a 20-25 second cooldown depending on killing machine consumption rates.

8 Likes
291

Urgent! Emergency! Emergency! Emergency! Urgent! Emergency! BUG ！！！！！！！
Serious bug in San’layn after today’s update ！！！！！！！！！
Infliction of Sorrow’s second effect, Scourge Strike, consumes Plague, deals 100% of the remaining damage, and is no longer affected by Defile and Death and Decay inflicting this effect on up to eight targets, but now only inflicts this effect on one target.
This is absolutely inexcusable, this is a very serious bug ！！！！
Must be fixed immediately ！！！！！！！
We in no way endorse this change ！！！！！！

292

I second this.

293

Hello Designers.
Your changes to Frost DK have been seen by our DK players in China. We have collected some opinions from Chinese DK players to give you feedback on these changes:

Firstly, the changes to Ice DK are devastating, it has destroyed the cap, playability and options of this profession, which is totally unacceptable.

Second, the change to Frost Pillar does not take into account the fact that this skill once weakened Frost DK’s base power bonus during the Battle for Azeroth 8.0 test due to its stackable power, making the current Frost Pillar burst very low quality.

Third, Icecap’s tweak is actually a nerf; before the tweak, as long as you played Pillar of Frost normally, even if you hung out for the rest of the time afterward, you were able to reduce the cooldown by 15 seconds, and by reducing the cooldown by 15 seconds, you guys completely failed to take into account that Frost DK’s other skills can’t be aligned with Pillar of Frost in the timeline, for example: Remorseless Winter (20 seconds), Cold Heart (40 seconds), Breath of Sindragosa (2 minutes), Empower Rune Weapon
(2 minutes), which pretty much kills the possibility of a play style built around Breath of Sindragosa.

Fourth, the removal of Frost Strike’s new mechanic (consuming 45 Runic Power in exchange for increased damage) is also puzzling; it would have been a great solution to Frost DK’s Runic Power overflow during Burst, making Frost Strike not only a useful skill, but almost as important during Burst as Obliterate, which is a very healthy change, and I don’t see why it would be removed.

Fifth, Breath of Sindragosa needs additional balance, especially for the CD; Breath of Sindragosa is now the equivalent of recreating the previous Unholy dk, and wasn’t Unholy dk optimized for 11.0 because there were a lot of burst skills and none of them aligned in the timeline?

To sum up, I think this change needs to be rolled back as a whole, this change is already destroying the specialization, it’s a very disappointing change, I hope you guys can reconsider, do you really want the Ice DK to be a newbie-only specialization with no depth? I’d like to ask you one question in particular, is the so-called rework of Frost DK just going back to 10 years ago?

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294

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Numbers tweaking for base kit needs to be adjusted still, but this is the healthiest change for frost dk in quite some time. You will actually be able to do damage outside of CDs. I don’t understand in what world that is a bad thing.

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295

horn of winter going back to to attack increase with some rp again

296

Agreed. We asked for this and got what we wanted. I’m very positive on these changes, though I’m not happy with the adjustment to frostscythe being so small that it removed it’s place as a fun 25 or so second cooldown button in single target for obliteration builds

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297

I am happy overall. But I do agree. I think frost scythe should have damage up. Using it as a rotational button added some fun flair.

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298

I like that I have a DK talent to be a somewhat off tank type DK if I want with some crit reduction. Not enough to be a tank, but enough to definitely off tank it seems. It feels nice having tools and flavor talents like this to adjust my playstyle, especially in solo Delve content.

If the old system still applies under the hood then I think it was 6% crit reduction or so makes you able to tank and not be crit? Or it was some weird math like that.

I don’t know what the plate armor reduction value in pve is but it felt kinda bad in DF. Not sure when/if armor reduction got tuned down but it feels like plate doesn’t matter as much these days… maybe I’m remembering wrong. Instead of more armor by 10% multiplicative of what you have why not you get 10% more reduction additive on what you have for example.

But I suppose with things like M+ and pro gamers out there I can’t have this cause the meta would dictate plate wearers are now the best option to push. Especially with the reduced value from leech and avoidance.

I say this cause in the old days for me at least it felt truly heroic to have a plate wielding, pet using, dot class that heals through damage. Was a cool rule breaking theme, or unique one back during Wrath and felt awesome (kinda like you were cheating in a way). Especially if I’m not currently spec’d as a blood dk and using frost/unholy you know?

Anyway just my morning blurb as I’m waking up.

299

You’ve said this a lot in your post but I think that’s you (and the people you’re speaking on behalf of’s) bias.

Blizzard very clearly took everything you’ve written into account. They specifically decided that they didn’t like how the Icecap-Pillar-Obliteration experiment played out, or how the Icecap-Pillar-TLW experiment played out from the weeks before of beta testing.

There’s nothing wrong with liking the current DF design but not recognizing how toxic the design is & how that’s directly resulted in suppressing the entire spec’s damage, and then trying to pass that off as good or even reasonable design is unacceptable.

Damage tuning aside there’s still.some changes that need to happen - mainly to keep Obliteration builds equal to BoS ones - but Icecap returning to just a flat “You do X% more damage for Y seconds” is entirely the right move. If you want ramping damage, RNG, and skill expression, Breath is quite literally right there and has been for 8 years now.

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300

Devs… pick a direction and go with it…frost is trying to do so many things and fails at each. So much so, that with these changes, the best simming build is playing obliteration+arctic assault and bos at the same time… you need to buff the nodes up to shattered frost and the last winter, so we arent forced into playing oblit+ bos at the same time. the nodes to The last winter and shattered frost just dont do much when theyre capstone talents…

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301

Replying to my original post to bring it back into the limelight. Obviously, iterating on the mechanics come first since everything in Beta is subject to change. Id just like to see some spell effects tied to the mentioned talents though once everything is more concrete.

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302

The current best simming build is “Omni-Frost”, named because it takes both Obliteration and Breath. Looking at the existing tree, there’s not really much that can be done to fix this.

The Long Winter & friends and the Shattering Suite are all too weak, and buffing them to make them more enticing for Breath results in Obliteration falling further behind, unless talents explicitly start mentioning Obliteration having different functionality which just sounds incredibly messy.

So, I’m proposing a radical change: remove Icecap and put a choice node of Breath of Sindragosa / Obliteration in its place instead.

Inside of Obliteration, I also propose an additional change:

Obliteration
[Same as now], Pillar of Frost’s cooldown is reduced by 15 seconds, gain a stack of Encroaching Storm every 3 seconds, and when Pillar of Frost ends, your next X Howling Blasts becomes Hungering Cold, based on Encroaching Storm stacks.

Hungering Cold
1 Rune
Expel the frozen winds of the storm, dealing X% AP Shadowfrost damage to all enemies in a cone in front of you and apply Frost Fever. Deals reduced damage after 5/8 targets. Can consume KM to crit and gains half the benefit of Rime.

Reasoning: The talents didn’t need to be mutually exclusive before; CBR and Invigorating were both horrible for the other capstone and kept them independent. However, now that there’s talents that are good for both of these abilities, making them exclusive is the only real way to balance them effectively.

By making them mutually exclusive, it lets more power be out into Obliteration that can be independently tuned. The idea would be that Breath and Obliteration would function the same while giving Obliteration a “burst” effect at the end, which is now lacking with the Pillar ramp being removed (still a great change :+1:).

Additionaly, if the two powerhouse abilities were moved up and made to be mutually exclusive, Hyperpyrexia coudl be moved above Arctic Assault and align that side as the “RP and Frost damage” part, TLW being the “Auto Attack” part, the Shattering Suite being the “Strikes” part, and then beneath Icebreaker could be talents to alter other abilities, like Howling Blast or Remorseless to make it the “freezing effects” part.

My personal preference there would be something like:

Hypothermic Hysteria
Frost Fever is now affected by haste and each time it deals damage, it has a chance to erupt and deal X% AP to all targets within 8yds.

And/Or

Frozen Soul
The first time Remorseless Winter damages an enemy they are afflicted with Frozen Soul. Casting Obliterate on a target affected by Frozen Soul shatters all Frozen Souls within 8yds, dealing X% AP damage to all enemies that were afflicted and generating 1-2 RP per soul shattered, up to Y RP total.

Regardless, something needs to be done to make Obliteration either exclusive with Breath OR to make Obliteration unappealing to Breath but still strong enough to not be bad on its own.

Another idea would be just moving Obliteration or Breath to the other’s point and making them exclusive that way and then just adding a single talent (maybe DF season 2 4p FWF on Pillar cast? :wink:)

9 Likes
303

An Obliteration/Breath Choice node would completely solve omnifrost. I agree with this

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304

Quick bug report (reported it in game for a few weeks already): The Glacial Advance from Arctic Assault will apply a stack of Razorice and that stack immediately falls off if Razorice isn’t on a weapon or if you don’t have Avalanche or Glacial Advance talented.

Steps to reproduce:

  • Talent into Arctic Assault and not GA or Avalanche and don’t have Razorice enchanted on your weapon.
  • Get a KM proc through any means.
  • Consume KM proc on the target.

Expected Result: GA should fire through the target and apply Razorice.
Actual Result: GA fires through the target, applies Razorice, and then Razorice falls off a GCD later.

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305

I’ve casually enjoyed DKs since their introduction in Wrath of the Lich King, and I really enjoyed the old days of 2H building towards Obliterate and Dual Wield building towards Frost Strike. So I came up with a few ideas of what I think that could look like in today’s modern Frost DK plus extras:

2H vs. Dual Wield

In the first talent gate, below Frost Strike, place a choice node of: Might of the Frozen Wastes or Threat of Thassarian. MotFW works the same as live. ToT will provide a 30% damage buff to Frost Strike (MotFW boosts Obliterate dmg by the same value) while dual wielding. This choice allows you to define your talent build for 2H Oblit, DW Masterfrost (see below), or you can choose neither and gear towards Breath of Sindragosa.

Masterfrost:

On the Obliteration talent node, add a choice between Obliteration and Masterfrost. Obliteration works the same way as live. Masterfrost works as follows: Killing Machine is now consumed by Frost Strike and Howling Blast instead of Obliterate. In addition, Empower Rune Weapon now also grants an additional 10% haste while it’s active.

Consuming Blade

Shattering Blade will be reworked from consuming 5 stacks of Razorice from the target and instead consume up to 15 additional Runic Power to deal up to 50% more damage.

Frostwyrm’s Fury Cooldown:

First, remove Absolute Zero. Then, Icy Death Torrent and The Long Winter will be replaced by Crystalline Swords and Thronebreaker:

Crystalline Swords - melee attacks and abilities have a chance to spawn a sword that deals damage to target and up to 4 enemies surrounding the target for reduced damage.

Thronebreaker - each time Crystalline Swords damages an enemy the cooldown of Frostwyrm’s Fury is reduced by 2 seconds from the main target plus 0.5 seconds for each additional target Crystalline Swords damages.

Remorseless Winter:

Remorseless Winter would replace Death and Decay and gain all of it’s benefits, including Cleaving Strikes (which now also includes Frost Strike), the 5% haste buff, and the 2 charges. Will have it’s cooldown increased from 20s to 30s to compensate.

In addition, there are currently 4 talents that directly increase the damage of RW. Given this proposed change, RW would become the central figurehead of AoE gameplay for Frost as it would enable the cleaving of your abilities, but it does not need 4 talents that all simply increase damage in different ways. So I think it would be wise to cut down on these talents by increasing the base damage of RW and bake some of the functionality of these talents directly into the spell.

Gathering Storm - Remorseless Winter extension mechanic. Bake it in and allow spending of RP to also contribute.

Cryogenic Chamber - Frost Fever stacks a damage buff - Scrap it

Biting Storm - Gain a Rime proc the first time RW hits 3 enemies - Keep it

Everfrost - Stacking damage over time. Rewards good play with the extension mechanic - Keep it

Howling Blast/Rime:

Much like Remorseless Winter, condense the talents that increase Howling Blast/Rime damage into one or two and buff its base damage to free up some design space on the talent tree.

There’s always lots more that could be done, but I think this would be a good start for a Frost Strike-centric build option.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

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306

They have gutted Obliteration in the process of buffing Breath. No reason to pick Obliteration over Breath, which is why so many people are opting to pick both, because if you don’t pick Breath in Obliteration builds you are effectively gimping yourself because none of the changes made were done with Obliteration in mind, it was made for normies that love to play Breath builds. Now you are forced to pick Breath to even contend if you prefer Obliteration over Breath. Frost Strike is back to being worthless, even though it’s our only spender worth pressing in single target for using Runic Power. We are now back to capping RP and not having a reliable button to use it up effectively during pillar, unless you have Breath lol. Obliteration may not be the best designed playstyle, but it sure as hell feels better than playing Breath. Talk about taking 1 step forward, and then taking 3 steps back.

2 Likes