Frost DK feels so bad to play

Classes Death Knight
1

It’s clunky, the need to get certain talents otherwise you’re severely neutered doesn’t help.

Gotta love dropping DnD and everything gets pulled out, there goes a large portion of AoE, Unleashed Frenzy at 3 stacks, too bad you got targeted by a mechanic and need to drop it by running to a safe distance, dps loss…

Then there’s the alternatives… Frostscythe, should be better than it is. Frost Strike still hits like a sack of pillows.

If I am doing something wrong, someone tell me, maybe it’s the animation, it just doesn’t feel good swinging and connecting with FS.

Overall, it just doesn’t feel good.

21 Likes
2

Yup, the only fun button to hit is Oblit, and even that hits like wet paper outside it’s window.

Frostscythe should be MUCH better than it is, I would do anything for that to be the major cleave spender, similar to Oblit.

Every ability needs a visual rework, I am tired of ‘Haha icy mist and more mist’. My friend joked in arena you can’t tell what ability a frost DK uses unless you have some very good nameplates, because everything looks the same at a glance.

11 Likes
3

i like they gave us as an option for more tankyness. its helped out alot this expansion
could they do more yes, yes they can

1 Like
4

Blizzard made the mistake of oblit cleave. Frost strike should be the ability that cleaves imo. Dk is in a sad state. Was my main for years after I swapped from paladin. I tried to play DK this xpac, but its so clunky and meh. I am a little upset I swapped back to my first main before Frost and unholy became OP in raid gor the last few weeks

3 Likes
5

That’s because you’re a Warrior, silly.

2 Likes
6

Agree, the idea behind the rotation is… ok, but in practice it’s clunky as hell. I switched from mage this expac and frost dk pillar window feels like fire mage combust if fire blast weren’t off gcd, was a melee range rotation that’s locked to an immobile ground circle. I would almost say it feels like arcane mage but at least have to give frostdk credit it’s not THAT over-designed lol.

Meanwhile Unholy is the chillest spec ever, doesn’t give an eff just does huge dps while facing any direction basically lmao, I love unholy. Minus not being able to see swirls under defile, but whatever just xylophone your keyboard and move around and you’re good.

My fix would be this: unholy gets a dnd upgrade ability, give frost one too. This dnd moves with you though as an aura like remorseless winter. and Increase the melee range of frostdk so it can play at more of an unholy range.

7

A normal froststrike as 2h does a bit over 61% of your attk power. A normal obliterate does around 87% of attack power. There isnt much difference there, 20% attk power which is fine considering frost strike is a filler. Now you get a KM proc, and that just boosts obliterate by a lot, with mastery scaling.

Now the issue with frost right now is obliteration. Right now, the spec is getting catered to boost obliteration in actual gameplay. Before, sims for it were unachievable because of how perfect you had to play, and yes obliteration has a higher ceiling than breath in terms of skill to performance. Double KM stacks, was a recommendation from the DK discord community in order to fix obliteration. Increasing Breath cost and damage, was a recommendation from the DK discord community to make breath shorter. Most of the changes were given as an example to fix the spec. The DK dev followed them but didnt hit the mark. Adding an additional target to cleaving strikes just killed frostscythe even more, when they even buffed it in the same notes. Personally i think frostscythe needs a rework. If it worked exactly like improved whirlwind, it would be great for the spec. Change cleaving strikes to work with remorseless winter. Thematically it makes sense that in a frost dks winter, you can hit multiple people. Take the power from cleaving strikes and just give it to remorseless winter. This is something a lot people in the dk discord feel it should be like.

Went off on a tangent but continuing on to why obliteration is the problem of Frost Dk currently.

In all of frosts life, you could never get two main talents at the same time. These talents being Breath of Sindragosa, Obliteration, and Icecap. Now icecap is fine for Breath because it doesnt really change anything. You get pillar back every 40sec or so. The issue arises when you pair obliteration with icecap, but change the spell to where obliteration is based on pillar. Never in obliterations life time has it been tied to pillar. It has always been a 1.5min cd.

Now this being a cd was healthy for the spec. It meant that there were tuning knobs for EVERY talent. This expansion changed that by removing the obliteration cd and just tying it to pillar. This is the core issue of frost not being able to be tuned properly. If obliteration had the 1.5min cd back, or heck give it a 1min cd so people are happy, then the spec would have clear ways in how it can be buffed or nerfed if needed. You could add multipliers to obliteration if it was bad. But everything as a whole would be able to get tuning separately. You buff icecap right now and obliteration gets a massive buff. You buff pillar of frost, and obliteration gets a massive buff. The t29 sets are a great example of this. Simply increasing the dmg of obliterate and the whole set as a whole, was a 15% increase in dmg for obliteration. Now for breath, t29 was barely reaching 6-8% damage increase with the 4piece.

If the dk dev stopped being stubborn, pushing frost into a playstyle nobody wants to play, then the class is just going to lose the faithful players that it has. It’s one of the least played classes in the game. It’s a cleave spec, and it barely competes with others in cleave, as seen on council. Most of the things ive mentioned above, were recommended as feedback during the beta of DF, but of course, blizzard doesnt listen to that anyways.

I’ll just add this. My biggest issue with the spec right now, or dk in general. Is that blizzard insists that we bring great utility. We dont. We have a 30sec death grip on a single mob. A 2min aoe grip, that we use when we want because it grants us rime procs as frost. AMZ and AMS are dps cooldowns that we use at our leisure. Hell AMS/AMZ rp cheese can be nearly 10k in dps increase for breath. We bring nothing that isnt brought by someone else in a more effective way. Give us a version of chaos brand. we are infused with death magic, why cant we get raid buff that increases magic dmg. It makes no sense.

And the first week that we show up on top of the logs, we immediately get a nerf. YET locks have been topping the charts all throughout ptr for 10.1, and have yet to see a nerf when majority of the specs are barely scrapping by 132k or below that

2 Likes
8

unholy does have a dnd upgrade. It’s called defile, and thats whats currently being played.

9

Tying Cleaving Strikes (shouldnt have existed for Frost) to RW would just increase its uptime not just ease of play.

Also, Obliteration was tied to Pillar in BFA. It was a 1.5m CD in Legion only.

Frost has been performing pretty well, but the main issue with Frost not being able to be balanced well, is Obliterate. In 10.0.X it was doing around 40% overall damage for DW Obliteration, and 50%+ with 2h Obliteration. KM procs were through the roof making Obliterate have almost a 100% crit rate. This pushes away anyting else that can be buffed realistically in fear of making an already well performing spec into a monster.

You have to balance the spec for the top players so there will be this gulf between good and bad players. Like a huge gulf. If they buff the spec for bad players then good players are just going to run away with it and make the spec look absolutely broken, and it will be for them.

10

Skill Issue.

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WoW is anything but skill man. lmao.

12

yeah I was saying Unholy does have one, so give frost one too.

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You still couldnt get icecap with obliteration. Which is the problem. Putting obliteration back on a cd, can allow for tuning of icecap. Tying multipliyers to obliteration itself.

14

agreed, frost strike used to have a passive in legion that gave it a 15 yard range

1 Like
15

i see so many of these posts man. clearly you don’t like frost dk so play something you don’t hate.

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Yeah, thats true, but I think the problem is Blizzard listens to people on these forums which have no sense of what would happen with that change. Me and some others were saying that if Icecap and Obliteration could be picked up together it would be nerfed, and it was. Just like Frostreaper introduction nerfed Obliterate which people were warned about and it just lead to “Obliterate sucks outside of KM procs buff the baseline damage” and these people dont understand that you cant just do that without a nerf somewhere else… like… mastery.

17

Agree with all of you, Been saying it for years and nothing ever improves with death knights.

overall dps output is the lowest its ever been since wrath, A level 68 evoker does more damage then death knights at max level. which goes to show there really is an issue with the class.

Buff every single ability across the entire class/specs by at least 65% minimum, that’s how bad things have gotten.

18

I saw, “It’s clunky” and it answered exactly why I am not playing my DK alt right now. I used to love her. So sad.

19

Bring back wotlk fdk :frowning:

20

Already exists with Obliteration, arguably with one extra button but it’s fundamentally there.

Entirely impossible with all the stacking modifiers and all the damage being funneled into Frostreaper. Remove one of those (like Pillar ramping or Frostreaper being a guaranteed crit) and heavy buffs to the baseline kit would be 100% doable.

It was 13 but that doesn’t really matter much when the damage is all in Obliterate and that’s still melee. Frost Strike being 13 was good in Legion because that’s when the spec had an actual design that wasn’t just “mash Obliterate endlessly”, because the rest of the kit was allowed to do damage instead of just Obliterate.