FEEDBACK: Frost Dk Class Changes

In Development Ghosts of K'aresh PTR
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First off I want to say thank you for taking a look at Frost DK.
It’s in dire need of some love.

There are lots of great things with these changes but unfortunately the bad is outweighing the good currently. Luckily that can change over the future iterations which I’m sure we will see in the coming weeks.

These are my thoughts after about 5 or 6 hours on the PTR playing with different builds.
For the most part I will not be talking about tuning as abilities have obviously not been touched and are placeholder.

A wise man once said “don’t come to me with problems, come with solutions” so I’ve offered my civilian recommendations as someone who has mained Frost DK since the end of WOTLK and Mythic (old heroic) raided since original cata with many CE’s.

All thoughts are from a PVE Raid and M+perspective.

General thoughts

I truly feel like spammy Frostscythe does not need to exist when Howling Blast does. They are the same exact idea, an AOE frontal with some slight changes. I feel like you could just get rid of Frost-scythe, buff naked Howling blast, make it cost 2 runes and it would feel better. Howling blast is incredibly iconic to the spec and also allows us to do a bit of damage from range, which is huge as we still have issues with mobility.
You could even change HB back to interacting with KM.

Nobody wants “Master frost” coming back but if tuning is correct we would press HB for aoe, obliterate in ST and the rime proc can hit like a truck.
This would also allow us to retain the current S2 TWW Frost-scythe which I think is well designed it just needed to be tuned better.

The good

Dnd cleave is gone! Thank you! :smiley:
Frostbane feels really good to press, although it is currently bugged and not reducing the cost of frost strike.
Riders can now path into “the long winter”.
Killing streak feels really good.
Icey onslaught feels really good.
The change to rime to be off FS/GA feels great.
Glacial advance baseline is great.

The bad

Resources.- Oh man does it feel clunky on the ptr. 684 ilvl, tried with high haste and crit to get more runes and it doesn’t seem to help. You need to use Empower rune weapon on CD to keep resources flowing and even then there is lots of downtime where you just cant press anything. You are forced into taking every single talent that helps with resources meaning we don’t get a lot of meaningful choice in the talent tree.
It feels like I’m in start of the expansion blue gear, not full BIS from season 2.

Change: Buff resources to make it feel more like live.

Rime - We have 8 talents that modify or increase rime procs and it still doesn’t feel great for most builds. BOS can go full in on HB damage but most other builds can’t really path into the rime damage. It feels slightly better to press now with all the nodes but it just does so little damage.

Change: Buff baseline Howling blast and nerf some of the nodes that buff it.

ERW + Frostbound Will - Cool idea, but feels terrible in any non BOS build.
I feel like the majority of the player base will hate having to press this every 10 seconds.
It does however feel great in BOS builds.

Change: Make this a node under BOS and merge it with Frostbound will into one.
Tune other builds resources around not having to spam this.
BOS already hits rime and takes all the rime buff nodes so it feels way better for BOS builds.

Frostreaper - Cool 2 target cleave idea but I feel like it will either be super niche or see no play similar to current cold heart. I also find it strange that it procs off obliterates when I believe the idea is that you are pressing Frost-scythe in AOE? Even if its tuned so you only press Frost-scythe with KM it will feel bad losing out on those chances of a proc due to our high KM proc chance

Change: Make it proc off of Froscythe so we see more procs in aoe + increase the current very low proc rate. Have it trigger from an obliterate after, similar to Frostbane for DW.
Increase the target count for the tether and have it deal increased damage when wielding a 2h weapon.

Remorseless Winter- Most builds can’t path into these nodes meaning we will no longer press this in ST or AOE. This feels a little weird but maybe its a welcome change since we have been playing the GS extension game since it was added in legion

Howling blades - Cool idea but why is there no visual for this?
In general I feel like Frost didn’t get many visual updates like Ret Paladin did with their rework. Playing ret looks and sounds incredible. The new animations we did get are kind of hard to see and there is no sound to accompany them.

Frostwyrm’s fury - I feel like this talent should just be baseline. It also means that Riders will always have 1 less talent point to pick from which feels terrible.
It’s follow up node Frozen dominion also doesn’t feel great to pick when riders doesn’t have any extra points to play around with.

Avalanche - Feels like this talent should be moved closer to talents a 2h build would take? Maybe swap with “Howling Blades”. We already have our runeforge and GA stacking RI, this talent feels wasted and we don’t have the spare points to path into Icebreaker, which is much weaker than 1 point in northwinds.

Smothering offense + Icy death torrent - These talents are super boring and completely passive, but tuned very high (rightfully so) due to them being at the end of the tree.

Breath of Sindragosa - It’s better, but not perfect. I had the most fun playing the 8 sec 1 min breath but I doubt that is the intended play style.

Change: I loved the BOS version that was on the ptr a few months back where It consumed a chunk of runic power then you extended it based on runes spent like GS.
This would mean we could actually press spenders instead of spamming Obliterate + Rime. I like the idea of choosing the length, but what if instead of choosing it via empowered cast we chose it by when it ended? So if it gets botched because a tank rolls across the map in m+ we can just hit BOS again to drop it and get CD reduction or if it times out before a certain time has passed. Or alternatively it could buff the next cast of BOS?

The tuning in s2 for BOS VS SB is very good, please make sure to continue that <3.

Hero talents

I feel like riders has such QOL with the added movent speed that playing Deathbringer feels terrible.Maybe there is a world where DB has a talent node that adds additional movement to DA?

Riders requires many pillar macros to play optimally, I feel like something needs to be done about that as it feels terrible compared to DB which can just do 1 macro for every situation.

Utility

The community is very upset with the lack of utility DK brings to raid.
Many other specs bring similar utility but also have a powerful raid buff.
Ring of peace and typhoon to name a few off the top of my head.
Yes, we are better than them at moving 1 single enemy but I don’t think anyone believes that justifies not having a raid buff?

On top of that if you do need a DK in the raid the better choice is to just bring a blood dk.
They have a lower CD on grip + have aoe grip which is massive with the removal of slappy hands :(.

I also feel like the solution isn’t to just design content around having a death grip.
I would imagine it limits creativity for encounter designers when they are told “we need an enemy here that can ONLY be death gripped so that groups bring a DK and it must be on the last couple of fights in the raid”.

Change: Give DK’s a raid buff. Ret one from Dragonflight is easy to add back.
Make Gorfiends grasp a “class node” so both dps specs have access to it.
Reduce the CD of deathgrip for frost and unholy to match Blood at 15 seconds per charge (not 25 seconds)

Like I said at the start lots of great changes but sadly there are some bad ones as well.
If you asked me if I would prefer current Frost DK on live over this I would probably say the live version despite absolutely hating dnd cleave.

Keep up the great work! :smiley:
I’m sure with iterations it will get much better!

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I haven’t had a chance to test yet, but I’m hearing that frost is feeling bloated on PTR. I’m hoping this isn’t the case, or if it is, that it gets changed. And I like your idea of just deleting FSC in lieu of HB. There isn’t much to differentiate the two aside from spell animation.

Personally not a fan of charge spells and so I’d like to see BoS get reverted.

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Was hoping to post more feedback after raid testing but sadly that fell through.
Feedback based on the most recent changes as of 6/27/25
I would say the majority of the changes this week were all positive.

AOE gameplay loop needs work.
Spamming Frostscythe as our rune spender for aoe and Glacial advance as our RP dump doesn’t feel great. I feel like we need one, not both.

Frostscythe existing while howling blast does still feels weird to me.
They are the same idea with different names.
You could change Frostscythe to “empowered Howling blast” making howling blast do all the things scythe does (including costing 2 runes)
The howling blast nodes would then need to be tuned.
This would also free up 2 keybinds for the insane amount of macros we need for pillar of frost these days.

Alternatively Frostscythe could be changed to proc whenever Obliterate crits at 100% effectiveness (just like the current tier set).
Then we could still have our Frostscythe on live which I think was just under tuned but a great idea.

Frostbane - Still needs some major work

There are two scenarios where this feels terrible for players

  1. Arctic assault procs Glacial Advance, then that proc takes .5 seconds or whatever travel time to register hitting the enemy giving you Frosbane but you’ve already pressed Glacial Advance essentially wasting a proc. The delay feels terrible and is super clunky and frustrating.

  2. Frostbane procs, you don’t have enough RP to spend it (especially bad with Icy onslaught) so you have to press obliterate with 2 stacks of Killing machine which most likely overwrites that proc and wastes it.

These two scenarios feel really bad.

I’m not sure how you solve issue number 1?
Making the proc stack or increase in effectiveness might lead to people just pooling it.
Is there a way to make the Glacial advance trigger at the same time as obliterate so there is no travel time but we still get the cool animation?

Making Frostbane free would solve issue number 2.

Icy onslaught - RP increase feels clunky.

Most DK’s don’t look at their action bars to see when they can press RP consuming abilities. We look at our Runic power.

This will force players to most likely use a WA to track the cost to press FS/GA or look at their action bar instead of their resources. That feels terrible.

I feel like this talent doesn’t need to have the increased RP cost.
If you ware worried about it being too strong just reduce the additional damage.

BOS - On the PTR currently feels like the go to talent but still isn’t very fun to play IMO.
It be nice to keep the shorter one up longer.
I also feel like moving from Runic power consumption to Runes spent (just like gathering storm) would feel 100x better as it would allow people to press abilities other than obliterate and rime. It also feels weird that BOS is forced to pick Froscythe to get to all the Remorseless winter nodes.

Howling blast still feels super weak for being our most iconic spell even when buffed with all the talent nodes.

Frostscythe spam doesn’t feel fun.

Riders of the Apocalypse is still punished by losing 1 talent point.

Remorseless winter has 6 talents buffing it and requires BOS to feel impactful due to the obliterate and rime spam.

Frostscythe new animation does not look great, especially when you compare it to the Deathbringer animation. It feels like a placeholder.

Looking forward to seeing next weeks changes.
Keep up the great work!

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I agree with most of what you’re saying. Although I don’t know why you have so many PoF macros, sound like min maxing to gain an unnoticeable amount of damage which isn’t necessary to play the spec, even at a high level.

Playing DB on ptr feels like there are far too many buttons in the rotation. I think you’re pretty right in suggesting that frost scythe is unnecessary. I always wondered why DB didn’t replace scythe with reapers mark like the way riders used fwf. I actually quite like how scythe is on live with a small ish CD with CDR mechanics (although tuned poorly), which is what they are turning ERW into. So yeah no need for it tbh, and it does feel bad to spam regularly on the rotation on ptr.

Love the idea of HB being a harder hitting ability adding more range to our kit. Also would love to see RW stay relevant as our core aoe, potentially as an alternative to BoS.

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Sadly it is a noticeable amount of damage when playing at the higher end.
Gives you one extra GCD during POF which is when we are doing the majority of our damage.

Assuming nothing changes you will want these macros for Riders.
Each one is situational.

POF + FF
POF + HB
POF + Oblit
POF + Fscythe
POF + FS
POF + GA
POF + ERW (possibly?)

For DB you can just macro POF + Reapers Mark

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It’s nice to see more people talking about Frost. There is another, bigger thread about FDK if you wanted to consolidate.

Frostcythe and Glacial Advance being our AoE versions of Obliterate and Frost Strike is a little weird in terms of keybinds. It’s something that’s, to some extent, a necessary change. A lot of the tuning issues for Frost for the last few years have revolved around the fact that all of our AoE abilities are just our Single Target abilities, making them very hard to balance between Single Target and AoE properly. I hope they do something to make it feel less clunky, but I’m not sure what the best option would be.

Frostbane can feel a little clunky at times. I agree it would have felt better if it was free, like in the original tooltip. I’m not sure it’s something that totally needs to change, as long as it’s not a massive loss to overwrite a proc here and there.

Breath always has, and probably always will be a divisive cooldown. I’m personally hoping they remove the empower aspect of it, and leave it as a strong 2 minute cooldown. If they want to cap its uptime at 30 seconds (or whatever number it ends up being), I’m totally fine with that. The 8 second and 15 second maximum versions of Breath just don’t feel like Breath at that point to me.

I wholeheartedly agree that more power needs to be given to Rime and Remorseless Winter.

Pillar of Frost macros are nice for some people, but I don’t think they’re all hard required at all. Both before and after the introduction of hero talents, I’ve only used two, and have had no issues. One is Pillar alone (now with Reaper’s Mark in there too), the other has ERW, trinket, and now Reaper’s Mark or Frostwyrm’s Fury, depending on my hero talents.

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Only when you have barely enough haste to reach a breakpoint. If you press PoF and any of those abilities manually at the same time it might not be millisecond accurate but it’s pretty close.

I won’t doubt that macroing all of those abilities is maxing output, but I wouldn’t say it’s required by anyone outside someone trying to get a 100 parse.

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How do they feel clunky? Its just a different keybind or modifier.

I think its due to it never proccing Rime like Frost Strike does.

Most likely. In terms of gameplay I think frost is pretty good. In terms of balance, it definitely needs a balance pass. Maybe a few of them.

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I just personally find Frostbane clunky to use, hitting Frost Strike on the proc over Glacial Advance. I’m sure some of the overall feeling is just tied to the fact that Frostscythe hasn’t been used in a very long time, so I’m just not used to it. I do like Frostbane, but I wonder if having it transform Glacial Advance instead of (or in addition to) Frost Strike would feel better.

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Ahhh… so the switching in the middle of aoe. Just takes something to get used to since the playstyle was just Obliterate… Obliterate… Obliterate… and did I mention… Obliterate.

I think its always going to be Frost Strike in what changes because of Shattering Blade and Frostbane working with that. Maybe there is some macro you could use to prioritize Frostbane over GA for ease of play.

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If all you’re doing is pressing Obliterate, you’re probably not doing very good damage, especially with Shattering Blade. I understand the “Obliterate is everything” place the spec has ended up in, but it’s a little oversimplified and frankly irrelevant to my point.

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Yes it was a grossly oversimplification of Frost but the intent was to say that people would need to get used to the slight change in gameplay.

You can make a macro so that Frostbane is used when it procs and GA is used otherwise

#showtooltip
/cast Frostbane
/cast Glacial Advance

I cant get it to show the tooltip for GA, but its functional so its a 1 button press when AoEing.

The thing that feels clunky for me is not getting Rime Procs and getting back to back to back Frostrbanes. Hopefully that gets addressed.

Used that macro on the PTR though and it works and might help the clunkiness you feel?

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Feedback based on third round of changes as of 7/7/25

Frostscythe still feels like a pointless button when Howling blast exists.
Just change Howling Blast to cost 2 runes, buff it and have it consume KM like WOTLK.
You could even swap the RW node locations with the BOS ones so the right side of the tree is more Howling blast focused.

The Breath of Sindragosa change feels better in some ways but worse in others.
It is much more punishing to movement now on top of super RNG based which is what 99% of players complaints were. If you pop breath on pull and get the “run out with this debuff” your breath goes poof as you have no procs to generate extension, ams or even horn of winter.

I still think the best possible change is to just make it extend based on runes spent, and then cap it at something like 30 seconds so it can be tuned properly.
If naked Howling blast were to be changed to do actual damage (as per my above proposal) you could at least spam these and glacial advance from range.
Overall I think the change is positive though and being able to press Frost strike/GA during breath feels way better than just oblit spam and occasional rimes.

Icy onslaught still feels clunky and will require a dynamic WA for players to know when they can frost strike/glacial advance.
Just remove the increased RP cost and this will be 100x better

Frostbane proc issue from GA travel time still feels bad.
This on top of icy onslaught does not make for a smooth game play loop.
The talent is great, just needs to be fixed.

I think GA guaranteeing the proc would also feel better as in low target counts its quite punishing.

Also, this goes without saying but the talent needs to be tuned to make sure frostbane ALWAYS hits harder than Frost strike.
Players will be very upset if they need to make a cancel aura for single target.

Soul Reaper feels bad for frost.
Both to press and the damage component.

Riders is still punished by requiring a talent point which limits pathing for rider builds.
Why not just make Frostwyrms a baseline 1.5 min cd?

Runic command feels like it should be baseline.
2 talent points in here are not fun just to get the increased rune re gen for a smoother rotation. The increased rp also feels a bit pointless now with the BOS change.

Frostscythe new animation is an improvement but still lack luster.
Look at the procs from exterminate.
Those are passive but feel/look so good.
Add some swirls and swipes to it and make it bigger.

Raid buff dilemma…
Even if the raid has 1 or 2 important death gripable adds that have no way to be positioned apart from DG players still wont be happy. You would have to take away the displacement options from every other class like typhoon and ring of peace for this to be even considered a raid buff.

Also with blood being the only spec with access to gorefiend’s grasp the correct choice will always be 2 blood dk tanks if a fight requires grips.

Take the easy win.
Put gorefiend’s grasp in the class tree.
Give DK’s a raid buff like 2% haste.
Bonus points if you call it a “presence” then have glyphs for frost/unholy/blood so that when you press it the old presences animation is activated.

On the topic of glyphs, now would also be a good time to introduce the different colored death grips that were on the ptr in 7.2?

Also, has there been any thought of returning frost to 1 second GCD?
Been playing some mop classic and man I miss the 1 second GCD.

Overall positive changes this week but still a lot of work to be done before the spec is in a fun and playable state.

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I am on the fence with most of these changes. The one major thumbs down I have (other than the removal of abom limb) is for how the new Frostscythe feels. In animation, VFX, and SFX. it does not feel good. Even with Frost using the new Ahune scythe on this week’s PTR, this animation and new spell concept is just awful.

For starters, the class fantasy of this spell is just straight up goofy and not immersive. We are just summoning a physical weapon to do a weird cross slash, even with a 2H weapon equipped? Are we just keeping that scythe stashed in our pockets? It doesn’t make sense for the class fantasy and it does not look good.

My recommendation is that the animation should use your equipped weapons only, in a cleaving strike, with a frost spell visual effect that performs the “scythe” aspect.

This was basically the old animation. Just improve the old one or at the very minimum PLEASE give us a glyph to use the old one. Being forced to look at the new poorly designed ability is going to kill my enjoyment on my main (especially considering with how often we use it).

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I think you’ll (eventually) find it’s less an issue of being clunky and more an issue of just rewiring your brain.

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Agree with all of this. The new look sucks.

IMO every DK specs should have a scythe attack that feels and looks good to press. So far the 11.2 update has botched every [Festering|Frost] scythe animation except for Exterminate.

Agree with Kagesendo on this one, it doesn’t feels great to duplicate Obliterate/FS as AoE binds and I don’t see it changing. Switching to the AoE version just doesn’t add anything really…

Personally I’d like to see GA as a drop in replacement for FS in some way so that hitting your main target with FS fires a GA through it, they could just bake it into Arctic Assault I guess :person_shrugging:

Frostscythe should remain as the AoE rune spender, but with situational talent/empowerment that allows it to be infrequently used in single-target. It used to be one of my favorite abilities before they messed up the animation, so assuming they can fix that I’d like to see it used more.

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I played Frost DK on the ptr for half a day and wanted to like it but I hated it.

There are so many abilities that do similar things and there is so much overlapping especially with aoe. When I play Deathbringer, i end up wanting to press multiple buttons at the same time but can’t which personally is not fun gameplay.
Howling Blast still doesn’t hit hard enough. I hate the new ERW and I hate how they’ve basically created on-demand killing machine procs with it. They took us from smashing 1 button to a much busier rotation.
Frostbane does less damage than FS in single target. That’s just terrible implementation by the developers.

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I agree about howling blast with rime procs.

I totally disagree about the new rune weapon. It is such a massive W for frost. Between the on demand km, and free 40 runic power, it feels so good.

In terms of rotation, it is pretty much the same, if not even easier now that you have the killing streak capstone. The only difference is you now have the new rune weapon to use whenever you wish. I’d argue it is even an easier rotation than before now that RW is only casted during pillar by default. And the new rune weapon helps with the rngness of km procs.

My biggest gripe with frost atm is lack of build diversity. You are locked into obliteration if you play breath and HB rime only feels worth using if leeping breath up or reducing Rube weapon cdr.

Frost bane currently needs a cancel aura macro for ST. That capstone needs a buff for sure.

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Maybe I just need to play it more to get used to it. I want 2H to be viable within a margin of dual wield.

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As it stands now, 2h is doing better than dw in ST, and is close in aoe.

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