Feedback: Deathbringer Death Knight

If your enjoyment of the spec comes solely from being able to press 1 button and seeing big numbers at the expense of every other button in the spec, then you don’t really enjoy the spec, you enjoy the simplicity of pressing 1 button and seeing a big number.

no? its just I like powerful moves that are visceral in sound and make big numbers? Youre attacking a strawman of my point instead of my actual point. Can be as complex or not. doesn’t matter I just like at the end of the day having a powerful move be the main focus.

Oblit feels good to me and it would reduce my enjoyment significantly if it wasn’t strong and was the weakest move.

I mean it is called obliterate. I would be dead if a move called Obliterate was really just the tiniest poke.

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It’s a spammable builder with 0 real constraints on how it does damage. Why shouldn’t it be the weakest move in the kit? Frost Strike is an actual spender, Cold Heart and Howling Blast have constraints to hit harder. The entire reason they’re all weak is to supplement bigger Obliterates so why exactly should Obliterate hit harder than abilities that require some form of setup?

Because runes are still a limited resource? because runes are super thematic to the dk class? not every class needs to be the same.

how does howling blast have a constraint to hit harder? you can spam that if you wanted to just as easily?

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Runes aren’t a limited resource and haven’t been for a while now. If you start the fight, the Rune abilities are usable, just like every other specs builder/filler. If you’re out of Runes they’ll passively recharge, just like energy, a CD, or a charge system.

If they were a limited resource as you say then you’d have the manage them, but Frost hasn’t had to for years now.

Howling Blast’s constraint is the damage is locked behind Rime, so spamming it gets you nowhere. Obliterates damage is locked behind and KMs which are far easier to get and more numerous than a Rime proc.

Frost Strike requires you to build RP and is a factual spender, except RP doesn’t matter in an Obliterate-centric Frost so the ability gets to be a spender and deal little to no damage.

It’s not a hard concept: everything in the kit is weak so Obliterate can occasionally be strong. Because of that, the only way to buff the damage of the kit outside of CDs is to take damage from Pillar or KM, and taking it from Pillar doesn’t result in as much damage to be distributed as from KM.

You gut KM and uou can buff Obliterate so the baseline hit is 60k-70k without any issues. You keep KM as is and Obliterate will continue to ruin the spec’s damage and have massive damage variance.

for PvP, Reapers Mark is going to have to see its 3m internal CD removed entirely or itll be bad

Wave of Souls cant be tested yet, tuning will likely dictate if this is good or not

Shuddering Soul cant be tested yet, tuning will likely decide

Swift End VS Painful Death: Swift end will be bad if you cant keep getting value out of the explosion on reapers mark, but otherwise is very good, and painful end is interesting will have to see how powerful exterminates are

Bind in Darkness is a interesting talent thematically, dealing shadowfrost damage is almost cooler, i think this talent should also change deathcoil into shadowfrost damage for frost as well, providing better scaling for the self healing by dipping into our mastery

Deaths Bargain VS Rune Carved Plates: Rune carved plates completely annihilates bargain, Theres 0 reason i would ever choose bargain and possibly risk just randomly offing myself with the very nasty healing absorb that is tied to death pact

For a long time now death pact needed that healing absorb removed, or at least have it scale with the amount of health that is being given, if pact heals for 25% hp the absorb should be 30% of 25% HP

Even then, even without the absorb i could argue rune carved plates is just always going to be stronger

Bargain could have its uses if there isnt a very obnoxious healing absorb attached to it. Rune plates will be the pick for arenas

Deaths Messenger VS Expelling Shield: Finally a talent to reduce the CD on lichborne. the raise dead reduction is a bit weird on frost though since you really mainly summon the ghoul to heal from sac. Sac pet should be reduced by 30s as well in this talent

Expelling shield is a waste, I feel like there should be a much different talent in this slot to try and compete with messenger and a small reduction to cast speed is definitely not it.

Blood Fever is just a boring passive

Grim Reaper is only cool on paper, its going to be absolute dog in pvp indefinitely unless there are some serious changes to how soulreaper works. Perhaps its better to keep the idea of this talent alive, But make it its own ability not called soulreaper, so that it doesnt have to abide by those rules. If i manage to get this talent to proc in PvP, I want a guaranteed hit from the talent. I dont want to gamble it being dispelled off instantly or just not even going off because they got to 36+% health in 0.1s left

Dark talons VS Wither Away: For 2 passives they are somewhat interesting, Wither away is definitely going to be more raw passive aoe damage, and since frost fever is already the best DK dot, having something akin to plaguebringer is going to up frosts dot to be perhaps a threat

Dark talons on the other hand, a bit more boring, but because DK procs are still largely tied to autos, will see a lot more procs overall, hard to say exactly how good itll be i cant test it for a while, but the idea is there. Id say the biggest issue about this talent in pvp is that unless FDK is incentivized to stay inside the fight rather than run out of it, youll just always play wither away

Exterminate: Its a passive, But a cool one i will say. Tuning will be everything i expect it to do some really solid ST pressure

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I agree that Obliteration is tough to change. It doesn’t have a tuning knob, and any mechanical change breaks the whole thing. All they can really do is reduce the uptime.

If it were me, I would make Obliteration its own button and unlink it from pillar. Give it a two minute cooldown to match breath. It would still give all the happies it currently does, just less often. That should open up enough damage to buff things like HB and FS to not completely suck.

As far as BoS- that one is super easy to adjust. Uptime can be altered by the resources available, and the damage can be changed to whatever they want. What makes it hard to balance is having to make it comparable to Obliteration. Fix Obliteration and BoS is as simple as turning a knob.

its called cleaving strikes lol

yep

Nope 1:30 like it used to be, or 1m

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BoS can also just have a high cost which would reduce its uptime. A 30 second uptime is easy to achieve. Nerf hysteria, and just make it cost enough that it can only realistically last 30 seconds.

We still have 0 idea of what they are really going to do. Is it just going to be a hysteria + cost increase? Are they going to go after things Rage of the Frigid Executioner and Rage of the Frozen Champion as well? Murderous Efficiency? Invigorating Freeze? ERW? Runic Attenuation… there is a lot that goes into an abundance of resources at the moment and most of it will have to be hit or else BoS will just look into getting those.

Until whatever they are going to do is implemented to test… its just speculation. But its going to open a can of worms either way.

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Absolutely agree. I don’t think they have the stones to do what needs to happen to fix the spec, so it will likely be just some more band-aids stuck on top of previous band-aids.

Them refusing to budge on unholy’s pimple popping gives me a pretty good idea of where frost is going. Its a shame, I miss playing my DK.

but they like literally are though? even though they recharge it doesn’t make it not limited. A non limited resource is a mage just spamming fireball.

but you said to buff howling blast not rime. Rime is already plenty strong at a 300% damage increase.

yes thank you for stating the obvious.

you act like this is a big problem if its such a big problem you could choose to play breath if you wanted? I disagree with the fact that its a problem.

you say its ruined I say its not thats very much an opinion statement.

Although we should probably stop this discussion since its a forum post on reapers mark not FDK as a whole.

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Deathbringer is doing work and people like its gameplay. Rider on the other hand is just lackluster in every possible way because you cant see them. They just get lost in all the other pets, and they just… exist.

When they make these changes they are either going to take the easy way out or run into a whole lot of issues. They could even reduce the uptime of BoS but reduce its CD heavily so its basically the same as it is now but can be used in more scenarios because once it falls off you have it up again.

Thats what Shadow basically was there for a while. The window lasted a certain amount of time, then you were back in it once you got a new full bar of insanity. Not like they couldnt just do that with BoS. That would be the easiest thing to do, touch nothing but hysteria, drive the cost really high, and reduce the CD to a point that its basically permanent but you dont have to keep BoS up but 30 seconds at a time instead of 2 minutes.

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Deathbringer is 100% the coolest imo. I love the new animations and gameplay loop it adds for frost. (hopefully frost in general sees changes).

Blood I feel like the other hero talent is just too good not to use.

I am genuinely curious how void elf racial will interact with this as it procs shadowfrost damage.

it ended up doing this!

Shadowfrost Death Coil would be sick

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The ‘grim reaper’ talent is absolutely awful to play with and impossible to optimize, and impossible to balance without being terrible or overpowered.

Guessing group single-target dps to have soul reaper hit is already an issue.

Now we will be estimating aoe group dps to have reapers mark explode only when the pack is below 35%, but 6 seconds before they die. Otherwise it’s a completely wasted talent. In single target this is probably going to equal 1-2 extra soul reapers.

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lol the frost dk discord is a stain pit that cant even take jokes timing people out when they don’t agree with opinion. 2h should be the way its palyed not dw. dw frost players just have Stockholm syndrome.

to people saying 2h has had its limelight its time for a change should really understand that 2h has only been good in DF and that’s towards the end of the xpac.

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Funny how you can insult a whole group of people and try to call others trolls.

2h doesn’t fit Frost. Get over it.

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man the fact you are stalking me is weird man. you okay?

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