I wanted to point out that Frost DK still faces 2 fundamental issues when it comes to how the spec interacts with secondary stats, primarily Crit and Mastery.
First, Obliterate still natively deals Physical damage. This issue was given a band-aid fix (called Frostreaper) by allowing Killing Machine to convert Obliterate’s damage type to frost so it would be able to scale with Mastery. This “fix” is one part of the over-reliance that FDK currently has on Killing Machine to do meaningful damage.
To help curb some of that reliance on Killing Machine, I propose that the damage type of Obliterate gets changed to a new damage type that is a combination of Frost+Physical, “Froststeel”. This kind of change was given to multiple specs in Dragonflight, most notably Flamestrike damage for Enhancement Shaman and Holystrike/Holy Fire damage for Retribution Paladin, and it makes perfect sense to make this change for Obliterate too. It would allow Obliterate to natively scale with Mastery without relying on Killing Machine all of the time to hit big numbers.
Second, Killing Machine contradicts the value of Critical Strike chance. As a FDK, Crit is a high value stat because the more often your auto-attacks crit the more often you will proc Killing Machine. However, once you have Killing Machine the value of Crit effectively becomes 0.
To help solve this issue, I’m proposing to (contingent w/ the Obliterate changes above) re-purpose “Frostreaper”. Instead of changing Obliterate’s damage type to Frost, it could give Killing Machine extra Critical Strike damage equal to a percentage of your Critical Strike Chance. This would maintain the integrity of Crit by allowing it to scale better into the later stages of the game (more Crit = more Killing Machines AND bigger hits).
Both of these changes would make Frost DK feel a lot better when not consuming Killing Machine while retaining its “big hit” feelings.
Frost reaper was suggested by these very forums. Doubt it’s going anywhere. They listened to the playerbase and gave them what they wanted and the playerbase instantly complained.
Obliterate already carries a lot of responsibility and it doesn’t need to hit any harder. With your suggestions expect Obliterate nerfs and have the playerbase whine more.
I agree with it. Frost doesn’t feel good outside of Pillar windows at all. I had the same exact thought of converting base Obliteration into Froststrike damage so that it can actually do damage without cooldowns. I’ve been using Unholy for delves and outside content for this reason alone. I’m sure it’ll scale better but at the moment it does feel bad.
You’ll run into the same problem of damage being locked behind KM - only that frost scaling is swapped for a crit damage modifier.
The spec is just very dependent on Crit to proc KM and Icy Death Torrent. And like Frostzadan said, Crit never loses value because of Bonegrinder.
If anything, I’d agree with Obliterate just being turned into Froststrike. As we scale further in the expansion most, if not all, of our Obliterates are KMs.
My sims are saying that Crit and Mastery are about as valuable as STR for me, point for point, with Verse and Haste being half the worth of STR/Crit/Mast. Poorly itemized pieces have to be like +15-20 ilvls in order to be worth equipping right now. Things are skewed in a weird direction rn.
But, as time goes on, we can swap to 2h, which eventually has a threshhold where it actually takes advantage of excessive stats, so that’s our hypothetical solution to stat bloat. DW has more KM procs baseline, but as stats go up, we’re eventually have enough KM procs without that second weapon,
While TWW Frost does just straight up feel better than DF Frost, spells doing tank dam outside of perfect lineups is still kinda a problem imo. Better than before, still the spec’s Achilles’ Heel. It’s really, really noticable when I play my Ret and Havoc alts. They just need less setup, and while their cooldowns are absolutely massive, you can launch into them faster, and they don’t feel useless when they don’t have a major CD rolling. Frost will start to shine when M+ drops and things actually live long enough to maximize Pillar, but right now the spec overkills during cooldowns, and is useless outside of Pillar, which isn’t that great in the current meta of 10~ second pulls.