I would like to go beyond fruitless banter and find a solution benefiting both sides of the argument. So here is my suggestion:
Killing Machine proc have different effects depending if the character is dual wielding or not.
1 - Frost DKs who are not dual wielding will keep the same effect of Killing Machine as a guaranteed critical strike on their next Obliterate. This would fulfill the “Hitting Like a Truck” fantasy of 2H enjoyers.
2 - Frost DKs who are dual wielding will have a new Killing Machine effect causing their next Obliterate to hit additional targets and inflict them with an empowered disease that deals higher damage as well as buffing the character with a stacking attack speed increase. This would fulfill the “Death by a Thousand Cuts” fantasy of DW enjoyers and compensate the removal of permanent BoS with increased cleave.
Then Might of the Frozen Wastes can be removed, the base damage of Obliterate can be adjusted, and the proc rate of Killing Machine can be decreased so that spec feels less spammy.
In addition to trying to fix the Might of the Frozen Wastes controversy, this would make it so the Reaper’s Mark ability would work with both 2H and DW builds similarly because the guaranteed crits of 2H and the DoT Frost damage of DW would balance each other out. (Bind in Darkness Hero Talent)
Let me hear your opinions besides simply removing 2H or DW.
Here is a fact for you: dps DK is the lowest represented dps in the entire game. That number is unholy and frost combined, btw. This is despite it being exceptionally durable, doing very good damage, and having access to a legendary weapon.
Number don’t lie.
Perhaps you’d be willing to share with us why you don’t currently play the class you like so much and don’t want changed.
That depends. Without some changes to runic empowerment, increasing the cost of frost strike would lead to more runes. Your suggestion would lead to harder hitting frost strikes and even more runes during PoF in a spec (class, really) that is already waaaaay too cooldown dependent to do any damage. Most people do not like doing healer damage outside of cooldowns.
If you don’t believe us then perhaps you’d like to read through some of the many threads on this very forum from people begging for a rework to frost (unholy too). If you like it as it is then you are entitled to your opinion, but all evidence shows that the masses do not agree with you.
People don’t play DK because of the bad talent tree where you are forced to go to absolutely absurd lengths to gain every node of power and you still miss out. DK has a very unfortunate tree.
I enjoy many specs in this game. I can’t main every single one, I am actually currently playing dk and mog farming the season three amirdrassil elite set which I should have relatively shortly after I get back from vacation. It is unrealistic to put in the time for me to play 8 different classes with multiple specs and keep them up at all times. I’m a full time college student with a fulltime job. And unfortunately Wow doesn’t pay me LMAO. But yeah I’m picking up draco cleave this tier and will at least hit 18 if not 21 in pvp. I have very little interest in M+ in dungeons I’ve already done this expac so I doubt I’ll do much of that.
Besides the fact that you literally can be in pillar for 12/30 seconds and then increase strength afterwords for another 12/30 seconds?
Yes, but capping resources all the time 1) isn’t the worst thing in the world especially when its optimal damage 2) due to the random nature of the proc you still are likely to be flooded with resources or be starved of them
some people like a nice and varied damage profile and hate the fact that while the ret rework was great overall, made our spenders hit only slightly harder than the generators and the only time you feel like your doing omega spender damage is with fr.
I much prefer the strong when in cooldowns and like trash when outside them I think that provides very fundamental and understandable gameplay. I do not think every spec should be like that. But dk as a whole is a very cooldown oriented class and I don’t think that should change.
I can’t speak about unholy as pets and minions don’t vibe with me and zombies have always felt too edgy. Frost dk Is just a frost knight to me in fact if I didn’t have to take the minion to get death and decay cleave I wouldn’t take it
yes because the forum andy’s represent everyone and have perfect opinions. LMAO the forums represent almost nobody in wow. and even then have some hot takes. thats why you can’t say phrases like “most people” because until you do testing ya don’t know. I can tell you enough of my current friends who have dabbled in dk in former mythic 20, mythic raids, etc. enjoy more obliteration because it FEELS better than breath. There is a reason frost dk community is divided between breath and oblit. Like they are both viable play the one you enjoy Jesus christ
This is from raider io. This chart is every timed key (logged obv) for season 3. All keys from +2 to over +30. Dps DKs being disliked isn’t some “forum andy” thing. DK is dead last and by a significant margin.
The tree is unfortunate because it has to account for 2h and dw having access to all the talents. It also has to account for Obliteration and BoS needing very different things to make them work.
The DK General tree is unfortunate the general tree? no its unfortunate as they put way to much throughput in it between the specs. If you take a look at some good class trees such as shaman or the new monk one in alpha, or even in say the evoker tree (not going to just keep listing them) there isn’t much mandatory player power there. with DK there is not a single point to spare in pathing to get cool stuff.
two hander and dw doesn’t matter really it can very easily be just a preference very easily that not the problem. the problem is nobody wants the easy solutions to balance them.
This I 100% agree with for the base frost tree, but unless you remove breath or Oblit you will be hard pressed to solve the issue. Although I feel personally breath has a lot more issues as you lose access to half of your already limited rotational spells during the breath, but this one is completely my personal opinion. I think this divide between builds could be solved with doing a few things:
Baking the 30% obliterate damage from MotFW straight into Oblit rather than have it be 2h only.
Making RotFC baseline or a seperate talent from frigid executioner
allow 2 weapon enchants on 2h so that they are comparable with dw and normalizing proc rates between both sets of weapons.
At this point (in my opinion, and I won’t be able to create a whole new wow or even mod mine to test as I lack the skills to be a programmer) would solve both issues between the 2hand and 1 hand allowing for both. But I cannot solve too much in regards to the talent tree issue is thats a little to complex for me.
I appreciate you trying to be as detailed as possible in your post, but if they’re going to fix this mess then 2 things need to happen-
1- They need to pick a weapon type and stick with it. I prefer dual wield because frost has been DW since Wrath, but if they go 2h so be it. Just pick one.
2- They need to take some power out of both BoS AND obliteration to redistribute that damage back into the rest of the kit.
I don’t necissarily agree, but for me at least its 2 hand due to the ability to offspec. If this is the chosen route (which I doubt as they have spent how many expansions trying to do both builds) then they need to make it a transmog thing as well
I agree 100% Although I feel like this is going to be extremely difficult to achieve with how feast or famine the runic empowerment passive is. Do we know if its Psuedo random or if its fully random? If its completely random I think a good change and step forward would be psuedo random distribution. but idk if that would end up working.
Its fully chance, but frost has had runic empowerment since Cataclysm. We always made it work. It wasn’t so bad back when Howling Blast was actually worth hitting (rime was a happy button). If you were stuck on one rune going into ERW or an intermission or something you would just dump the rune in a Howling Blast. You could also spend a KM proc on a frost strike if you had to.
Runic Empowerment feels worse now than it ever has because of the spec being completely dependent on obliterate- a 2 rune ability. Its a big part of why the spec “feels bad” to so many people. The whole rotation is just obliterate and the stuff you don’t want to press.
I would be more than happy if power is pulled away from Obliterate and Killing Machine by reducing how many times we press the button instead of nerfing its damage to the ground.
Our main rune spender should be an impactful ability we use to deal big juicy hits. That is why I suggested that KM empowered Obliterates can deal Shadowfrost damage to make the ability a more of a stack generation tool for Reaper’s Mark and reduce the proc rate of KM. This would allow for a more balanced damage profile with more emphasis on Hero Talents instead of seeing all Obliterate on damage meters.
I personally feel these kinds of effects should be psuedo random. I cant count how many arena’s I’ve been in where I’ve been destroyed because I got unlucky with the transfer rate from RP to Runes
one of the reasons I’m attracted to frost is the very simplistic priority system and rotation. I don’t know how you change it without changing that drastically. I would be fine with moving obliterate to frost instead of phys and having less reliance on KM, but honestly I got no clue how you solve these issues. outside of just saying “we are going to make certain people angry and thats OK”
[All i know is I love the regular rotation and then basically the super sped up version during pillar.]
You change it by making the other abilities hit harder. Think of how many times you have been kited in the arena. Now imagine Howling Blast does enough damage that kiting the DK isn’t a great strategy. Or perhaps a BG where everyone spreads out when they see you because they feared your diseases and didn’t want them on the whole team.
When DK was first released a big part of the reason for their lack of mobility was how much damage could do at range. Using Howling Black and Death Coil to keep pressure up while your opponent burned all of their defenses and movement only to deathgrip them to their death was a lot of fun.
It worked well in raids as well. Any time melee were forced out for a mechanic it hurt DKs a lot less than the others because we could keep dpsing when they couldn’t.
Idk, I guess yeah. I guess just me personally I don’t like the damage normalization that happened to ret in terms of numbers it just doesn’t feel right anymore. I am all about having one big move (obliteration, final verdict, mortal strike) that have a sick af name that do all of the damage and the other moves feed into it. This also extends to other games I play not just WoW. For example in Diablo I love hammer of the ancients, or in last epoch I loved judgement/erasing strike/ forge strike.
But seeing as this is a fundamental difference in opinion I doubt we will be able to compromise on this aspect.
One aspect I think we both can agree on is that both during pillar and after pillar capping on rp isn’t a fun time and that needs to be addressed somehow.
Agreed that it isn’t fun, but its necessary with how the spec is designed. Obliteration is strong because of what it does mechanically, not how it is tuned. Breath has to be able to compete with Obliteration, and to do that it (currently) needs long uptimes and lots of resources.
This amount of resources absolutely floods Obliteration, but that isn’t a big deal from a development standpoint because Obliteration can’t spend it all anyways.
Unfortunately for all of us “works” and “fun” are not the same thing.
I am also a fan of some degree of pseudo random effects. It makes us experience thrilling moments like getting back to back procs in PvP and one shot the the healer.
Power could be pulled away from obliterate but Frost DKs should not become a semi-ranged or disease class. I think it is the class that best represents the Knight aspect of Death Knights by being melee centered dreadnoughts with huge rune weapons.
One thing I did not like about how the spec plays is the lack of execute mechanic but Reaper’s Mark and Exterminate sounds very promising to close that gap.
They are changing the uptime of BoS, but what do you do in those windows of non-BoS? They could just very well nerf Hysteria and increase the cost of BoS heavily to reach that 30sec window and call it a day because that would achieve what they want. But that just brings up more issues that Obliteration presents, and that is keeping other damage sources weak.
Obliteration should really be replaced with something that deals with RP. BoS is an RP spender so it would make sense that the other option also deals with RP so to not just lock things out of being tuned. Much easier to tune and its not degenerate gameplay that Obliteration has caused.
There is nothing to take from Breath. It’s essentially doing the same amount - if not less - than it did in prior expansions & tiers while being infinite.
You can’t get blood from a stone. If people want other abilities in the kit to do meaningful damage it means gutting Pillar or gutting KM. Those are the only two places that there’s damage to take from.
They’re not even remotely the same button, but as an incredibly easy baseline, one of:
Remove Frostreaper
Remove the guaranteed crit portion
Slash Frostreaper to 50% and adjust downward more if needed
Any of those three “guts” KM and frees up millions of damage, which means you could slap a 50% damage increase on Frost Strike and 100% on Howling Blast and still have the same ST DPS.
that would mean my obliterates base do 30k on my 545 pvp honor gear character…
honestly if those changes happened I would immediately drop frost dk. those changes would have immediately destroyed the fun of obliteration for me personally. Honestly I personally would be very upset if those changes happened as that would personally ruin frost for any enjoyment I had of it.
[i personally play oblit for the big obliterations thats why I have come to like frost. and even when oblit isn’t meta I will still always play it]