Haven’t done those in quite a while. Ideally, I would like to try and put all negative feedback in one place and hope for the best. I don’t claim to be the best person for the job, but feels like we have lots of threads highlighting one specific issue or random idea how to fix something and not enough “we’re not ok” threads. I don’t think “toxic positivity” from certain communities brings a lot of good in reality. Yes, we’re still very good in M+. But what about raid-focused players, who enjoy competing with the boys on meters and knowing their performance matters for progress? Sometimes even Death Knight can die in the fight, do you enjoy being #1 priority for CR or hearing “res pala” from RL?
So, trying to summarize more or less facts first
- High-end PVE build diversity is non-existent (warcraftlogs, mythic, top 500 for each boss, only 5 non-DB+BoS parses from almost 4k logs)
- ST damage is among the lowest of all on all 3 raid difficulties N-M
- Target design of less bursty, less uptime-hungry was not fully realized and lost a ground again with latest changes which leads to the following points
- Damage highly dependent on random uncontrollable factors - courtesy of DB hero talent tree
- Boss design promotes ST or frequent frontloaded burst AoE on low-health adds, which are not the best damage profiles for frost
- Boss design in current tier is rather heavy with forced disengage group mechanics on random timers
- Unholy is not doing much better and due to different weapon type and very different stat priorities and a new myth track upgrade system changing specs between raid bosses is not a viable option
- Utility in raid is severely lacking
Now to personal and more subjective “feels bad” observations
- Cooldown timers are all over the place and options to sync everything to 30/60/90/120 sec are non-viable
- Resource economy - necessity to sit on procs and waste them to pool resources for pillar burst windows
- In the same vein - fairly long setup for pillar windows and dependency on good rune resets for satisfying execution
- Almost no opportunities for a cool “hero moments” in raid, partially due to class tools such as AMS and DA being for the most part irrelevant in context of personal performance and boss mechanics execution
- Reverse “scaling” with group performance - the more damage group does, the more we lose in personal dps
- A swing from one of the best raid dps to one of the worst in the middle of the season doesn’t bring much joy, especially with how many more players decided to main a spec based on power. And especially heartbreaking for those who stuck with it for years and expansions.
Solutions to problems
Apparently, we as players are good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them. I generally agree with this statement, 4-page essays with ideas how to completely change half of the talents, rotations, damage profiles etc never worked.
Still, I would like to highlight a few things:
- Frostwhelp’s Aid has too much power on 5+ targets and holds back any fair ST tuning
- DB’s Wave of Souls and Exterminate randomness is excessive
- Rider could be a reliable boring ST-focused non-BoS tree
Let’s discuss, please? How do YOU truly feel about RAID performance?