While the raid damage output of Frost DK is solid, the spec has significant design flaws that make the spec unenjoyable to many.
First off, the spec is once again reliant on Breath of Sindragosa in raid environments. This is not inherently problematic, but the current iteration of this build could be classified as degenerate. Currently, Frost DK has really low damage output outside the Breath window, as such Frost DK essentially revolves around having 70+% uptime on Breath to have reasonably competitive damage. This means that anytime a player loses breath too soon, they feel utterly useless until the next breath window. It is fine to lose damage from making errors but the level of punishment for messing up breath is not commensurate with the reward of executing it super effectively. It also creates a type of play that a large number of players find exceedingly nerve-wracking.
Secondly, Obliteration, the alternative to Breath, is also considered a highly punishing build. A two-handed Obliteration build was theorized to be the best during SL Season 3 but was generally not adopted by top players because it is super reactive and also brutally punished for losing uptime during its Pillar windows. You also have to have excellent reflexes and timing to not overwrite natural KM procs during your Pillar window. It doesn’t help that the Tier set for Frost DKs exacerbates this problem, by having KM not be consumed sometimes, which creates more opportunities to overwrite KM procs during the pillar window.
Third, there are too many dead and awkward talents. Soul Reaper from the general tree is functionally a dead talent for Frost. It does not interface with Frost’s kit at all and even if it did crazy damage would still feel bad to play. Frostscythe is a dead talent, it doesn’t do enough damage to be worth taking and it isn’t affected by the talents that improve Obliterate despite functioning as a replacement for Obliterate in AoE situations. There are 3 talents that affect Remorseless Winter, which feels a bit overkill for an ability that isn’t a fundamental part of the spec’s rotation. Unleashed Frenzy feels really bad at a 6 second duration now that Icy Talons duration was extended to 10 seconds.
Finally, all of the above create a very irritating environment for players. Baseline abilities feel very unimpactful most of the time (Pressing Obliterate outside of KM feels really weak). The most popular build, Breath of Sindragosa, causes players to throw away their battle rez utility during their damage window, which not usually a problem for raids becomes a huge problem in M+. Heck, there isn’t currently a well-defined build for M+ for frost right now. The Tier Set feels more designed for Obliteration but also succeeds in making it more challenging to play. Frost, while performing well in raid, feels very disjointed and awkward at the same time.
Its always going to be go breath or go home. Those of you that love it, happy for you(not trolling, im glad you found something you like).
Obliteration has its flaws too, but as far as enjoyment/fun factor goes it’s imo WAY MORE DK-like and fun than breath. Even if the devs continued trolling of putting 2h frost back but making it suck compared to DW continues I’d be happy DWing with obliteration instead of with a 2h(even though I’d prefer a solid 2h build).
If it wasn’t for windwalker monks having terrible scaling, I’d main one but I don’t like needing to have bandaid buffs towards the end of every raid tier once people are geared.
Soul reaper could be key in perfecting a single target non breath build for pve and pvp alike
They just have to rework it a little bit to be less awful to press rotationally. Make it compliment our rotation.
For frost make soul reaper a runic power cost, Proc Killing machine during obliteration, And make it instant proc rather than waiting 5 seconds
For unholy, Make soulreaper a disease, dealing huge dot damage over a course of time, and can be interacting with things such as plaguebringer in the talent tree like even morbidity
Honestly the spec feels weak outside of CD windows because they put WAY too much power into them and took it all out of the core abilities.
Remoreseless Winter is garbage and requires 2 massive booster talents to even make it worthwhile to press. RWs base damage needs a massive increase in combination with just removing Biting Cold and Everfrost. Make it apply Razorice so 2H doesn’t have to talent into Avalanche and get bent over by RNG with having no Rime procs and RI falling off.
Obliterate should just be changed to flat Frost damage at all times. Seeing it crit for 18k base and then seeing it crit for Frost damage for over 90,000 10 seconds later with a single CD and a couple of procs is ludicrous.
Frostscythe just needs its damage doubled or tripled or have it be affected by the Obliterate talents. Its supposed to replace Oblit for AoE during Pillar but it just isn’t worth the button press. Especially now that Oblit can cleave with DnD.
Glacial Advance needs a massive damage buff or something. This talent has literally never been actually good. Even with it applying a stack of RI, its not worth taking.
Howling Blast should have its base damage brought up and have Rime damage toned down so its actually worth the button press in AoE without Rime.
Frostwyrm’s Fury’s CD is obnoxiously long for the damage it does and should be cut in half off the rip. That way you can talent the CD and have some good burst AoE for every other pack or have it be used more than once per dungeon boss.
Pillar is too punishing. Its a super short window and being forced out of range during it is a death sentence if you’re trying to parse. Less strength and longer duration would be a welcome change IMO.
Finally, Breath of Sindragosa. Where do I start? This talent has pretty consistently been the go-to in both ST and AoE. This NEEDS to change. It absolutely should not win out over Obliteration in ST and 2-3 enemy cleave situations. I don’t care how risky it is. Thats just making excuses for garbage design. It’s still an AoE talent and should not be competitive for ST. Personally I think they should just scrap its current iteration and make it similar to Fire Mage’s Dragon’s Breath. Give it charges and have it do a single hit of burst AoE. Sustained AoE damage has always been Unholy’s niche. Frost doesn’t need that. Frost is burst. Lean into that harder and get rid of the current Breath.
How about you give everyone a Merry Christmas and shut up about other players. Good job at derailing the thread and not actually putting forward anything to advance the conversation.
Frost doesnt need a rework.
BoS takes away damage from Frost Strike for itself. You upkeep it and are rewarded for it. its not degenerate and it promotes knowing and learning the fights as well as learning how to keep it up. People dont like it so they try to make up reasons as to why it should be removed instead of just being content in using something else. Dont use it if you cant keep up with it. Simple.
The reason why people feel useless outside of CD’s is because of KM rank 2 / Frostreaper. Obliteration gives KM procs which makes using Obliterate feel good, outside of KM procs its worse than a wet noodle. But this is what the playerbase wanted so whoever agreed to this type of KM design has absolutely 0 room to complain. Rime holds a lot of power too, kind of has to be to kill Masterfrost which was actually degenerate play since you ignored a large portion of the spec just like the “morb” spec in wrath classic is degenerate gameplay even though it does good damage.
2h still has the same problems as I said it would how many years ago but you guys just dont want to hear it because you dont want to face reality. 2h isnt going to be as good with things like Icecap, Cold Blooded Rage, BoS and many other things.
Soul reaper sucks and in my opinion always has. I dont know why people have this love for a delayed execute that doesnt play well into the specs.
There are many dead/awkward talents. Frostscythe died as soon as KM was changed to make Obliterate frost damage and the last nail was Cleaving Strikes making it have to do massive amounts of damage to actually beat the cleave.
I find it absolutely hilarious that the playerbase suggestions that were implemented had a detrimental effect on peoples enjoyment of the spec and mostly those that supported these changes. At least have the guts to say my name if you are going to talk about me.
I think BoS is like “blizz’s baby” for frost. I just don’t see blizzard getting rid or heck even greatly reworking BoS anymore than I see the zit popping going away for UH.
Now yea I do wish that BoS wasn’t the go to for everything in PVE but I am guessing Blizz is hesitant on buffing obliteration (would affect pvp maybe?).
But yeah I would agree that the design space for Frost DK is somewhat hindered by the fact that BoS is king for everything.
I don’t really have a problem with BoS, but I very much wish that Obliteration was a more competitive alternative.
Oblit is generally easier to use and on a shorter cooldown, but as someone who mostly does M+ it can’t even begin to compete on AoE. The two target cleave with DnD is clunky and not really that useful in most dungeon pulls. Heck, even in the raid there are not that many situations where it’s particularly useful.
If we’re going to tie cleave to DnD, I’d like to see something like “Obliterate’s damage is evenly split to each enemy within your death and decay.” Better AoE, same total damage.
You have some good points but this is just wrong. If there’s 2+ targets, GA wins ahead of FS just about every time for Obliteration. But you can’t buff GA because it’s already like, 60~ 70% of a FS, and if you buff it without FS, there will be a point where the opportunity cost of a higher rune refund and stacking RI quicker outweighs the possible crit from FS with the lower cost.
This (Obliterate hitting “hard”) is literally what these forums cried about for almost 2 years leading up to Shadowlands. I understand you might not have specifically asked for this (Obliterating hitting “hard”) but this is most definitely a “reap what you sow” situation.
Frost forum players wanted 2h Frost. They wanted Obliterate to “hit hard” like “the old days” of Cata/MoP/WoD. They didn’t actually think how that’d be achieved when you can spam 3 Obliterates in succession because they either:
Saw Arms hitting hard with MS and wanted to have that same power, without having the entire kit and setup that Arms has to go through to achieve that
Refuse to accept that the game isn’t built around 2010 design anymore, that they won’t get free massive hits just to existing, and that Frost’s kit - along with only one rune type - literally doesn’t support a playstyle of consistently building up to massive hits.
Frost is RNG all through, which isn’t a problem necessarily but is when all the damage is being baked into CDs and RNG.
The dev team think’s BoS is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s so terrible to see the spec in a state like this.
The pure AoE build is parsing on single target right now. The internal health of the spec is absolutely abysmal. Very happy that Unholy got buffed so I don’t have to play the spec on most fights, but Unholy has trash cleave right now, so DKs looking to maximize are forced to play both.
The issues aren’t with Obliterate, and I wish that that talking point died. That’s the last thing that actually needs to be changed about the spec. The problem is with auxilery spells. Frost Strike, Howling Blast, BoS, Frostscythe, etc. Current rotations deadass just want to minimize FS counts. Your RP bar for Obliteration may as well not even exist, because you have no spender worth actually using, you just FS every 4 globals to keep UF up. RP actually just isn’t a mechanic for Frost, unless you play BoS.
Everfrost is also a really dumb ability, that’s harshly punishing if you drop, and IMHO a comparable issue to BoS when it comes to uptime affecting throughput.
I think that’s indeed a large part of the problem with Obliteration builds. The reason why BoS is so far ahead is that they can actually turn all that runic power into real damage. Outside of BoS, our rotation really becomes messed up. We actually have more resources than we can spend, so the real bottleneck becomes the our global cooldowns. And since our runic power generators usually do more damage than our runic power spenders, that can lead us to making counterintuitive choices.
Like preferring to use a KM proc at 100 runic power, and waste 20 runic power, than to Frost Strike and then use that KM proc.
Design-wise, it would make more sense for our runic power spenders to do at least comparable damage to the abilities we use to generate said runic power.
It’s so much worse than just a KM proc having a higher prio. If it was just KM, I could forgive it. Unless you drop Unleashed Frenzy by missing it, you’re better off using unaugmented Obliterate, HB with a proc, or RW. FS actually just does so little damage, that it’s effectively a buff uptime button that you need to weave in once per 4 globals, not a damage spell.
Obliteration builds actually just don’t interface with Runic Power, and instead operate off of a strict priority system, without caring at all about resource management. RP overcap unironically doesn’t affect Oblit Frost’s damage, because Frost Strike is a lower priority than any other ability.
If i dont have anything going on what does it say about you guys? You must really not have anything going on if you 2 constantly troll the forums looking to insult others.
Its like you guys cant control yourselves. How about just taking your own advice and stopping? Yes?
someone had a suggestion called slab avalanche, that expends all of your runic power instantly to deal a ton of damage to an enemy and i think it also had some form of execute range scaling. would definitely help with alieviating the issues obliteration has about not giving a crap about runic power. provided it has a reasonable cooldown it shouldn’t act like breath of sindragosa where every build turns to spamming as much runic power as possible, but it’d at least give a worthy button press to expend it for both ton of damage and also a bunch of runes back.