With the loss of the set bonus from 11.1 and Frostbane procs being very low in Single Target, the talent line of Shattering Blade and Frostbane is effectively dead currently. It does good damage on large amounts of trash, but so does BoS. Shattering and Frostbane don’t deal enough damage on bosses to be better than BoS either. Obliteration, Killing Streak, IDT and TLW are all required talents at this point. The only choice is between Shatter/Frostbane and BoS.
I think that either Frostbane’s proc rate needs to be increased, significantly, or Shattering Blade needs to have a bigger modifier attached, possibly both. To those who inevitably say “It’s a AoE ability, it shouldn’t be for Single Target”, Breath of Sindragosa has no such downside. To those who say “It has less skill expression, it should deal less damage”, BoS already has no more skill expression after the changes in 11.2.
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Personally i think if they do some work on frost during midnight, obliteration should probably be moved to the bottom middle of the tree around where frostwyrms fury is. It’s an essential pickup for every single frost dk build that there’s no reason to not spec into it. Could do some work with frostwyrms fury to give it a choice node to have the stun and additional utility for pvp or non rider m+ settups or have it do some much larger damage in some form for rider builds
It’s not really important but would clean up the tree a bit.
I’m sure the tree will receive work in Midnight in general, but I’d prefer an adjustment to Shattering and Frostbane now rather than Q1 2026.
The important thing for me is to make sure that frostbane/shattering blade (or any other frost dk talent build) is equally viable for both 2h and dw. The number of Razorice stacks needs to be equal regardless of weapon. That can happen a few ways, with options including baking Razorice (or Fallen Crusader so that 2h can use Razorice) into MotFW or removing the Razorice runeforge altogether. I will always use a 2h as frost.
2h is currently just fine and, in fact, does better than DW by ~5-10% when I last checked. However, I would like to completely avoid the semi-toxic 2h vs DW debate and instead focus on the issue that regardless of your weapon preference the Shattering line should be on par with BoS to the point that it should be a matter a choice and not damage.
The 2h vs. dw debate will always pop up when talent builds favor one weapon type over another. That’s the reality of the situation because weapon type is relevant when it comes to how well a particular talent build performs. That is especially true when a build is focused on generating stack of a runeforge effect (Razorice) when one weapon type uses that runeforge (dw) and the other does not (2h). Shattering/frostbane builds prefer dw because dw gets more Razorice stacks, and that’s a problem for me.
While I am enjoying 2h frost being way ahead, it would be better if 2h and dw were effectively equal so that we can all equip and effectively use whichever weapon type we prefer and perform equally with every talent build. That’s the only way the 2h vs. dw debate will end.