I have been reflecting on my time playing Shadowlands. I haven’t enjoyed playing my death knight as much as I thought I would. Granted, haven’t had much time to raid with my guild and get that juicy 226 raiding gear. I was thinking about nyalotha, and although corruption had its problems- I really enjoyed the ICECAP, FROSTWHELP build. I actually miss how awesome frost dk’s were in the last portion of BFA, and how much damage we could crank out.
Never thought I would miss BFA, but here I am, thinking about how much more I enjoyed DK during the latter-parts of BFA. Anyone else miss playing icecap?
That’s always been the woes of development though, right?
You would think that blizzard would naturally gravitate towards letting players have more control over how they gear; letting players working towards perfecting their character. But at last- blizzard need to have those continues subs going so they opt for RNG instead.
a simple fix would be to have the icecap talent reduce pillar of frosts baseline cd to 45 seconds ( or whatever number of seconds it is that makes it the same as bos)
I think the icy citadel addition would probably be enough, even if that had been a legendary (and maybe it will be), I have toyed around with icecap in SL and I’ve been able to get up to 44% PoF uptime in a dungeon, it’s not TERRIBLE right now I can still do 4kish overall dps in a dungeon with it, but its not like 4.8k from oblit or BoS. It takes the burst from obliteration and flattens it into a boring line atm it seems. And that uptime was with like 32% crit and some soulbind shenanigans like bonesmiths marrowed gemstone crit thing and captain korayn First Strike
Yeah they should, and its weird build crit to get a free crit idk why they changed it in the first place
I hope not, the talent is pretty weak rn have to take a legendary to make it work feels like a bad design for me, like locutus i think frost need a talent rework.
I think a lot of people forget how much borrowed power you needed to have to get Icecap to outscale BoS in 8.3. You needed both roughly 50% crit and haste to which you stack haste and crit corruptions and once you hit that amount you got corruption that increased your crit damage.
As for traits I’d argue Icy Citidel was more important over Frostwhelps since your opener was defined by getting your second PoF off CD fast enough so you could use your burst abilities while benefiting from both Icy Citidel and PoF at the same time. Even Frozen Tempest was a good alternative for Frostwhelps for the cleave aspect as well as just single target damage since you had such high APM you could do back to back Remorseless Winter casts and hit 10 stacks of Gathering Storm very quickly. Then you had generics like Unstable Flame and Overwhelming Power for more haste and crit procs.
You also need essences heavily since you need Lucid Dreams to have enough resources to make it work with such high APM, Focusing Iris minor for haste, and Reaping Flames so you actually could do execute damage. For majors you basically either took Blood of the Enemy on single target and heavy AoE or Conflict and Strife for 2-3 target cleave fights like Mythic Ra-Den and Hivemind and used them the same way: use em when you got your second PoF to overlap with the first so you can double dip with Icy Citidel. Those two majors were your burst otherwise you just end up doing flat damage most of the time except when you get ERW off CD. Even the minors were needed since Conflict gave you a bunch of verse which just made your cleave damage skyrocket and Blood minor gave enormous amounts of crit and short haste burst which just made you build back up to like 15 stacks of Blood Soaked from increased APM.
As much as I miss it as a reluctant Unholy player now, I don’t think they can bring back Icecap as a viable trait without some crazy broken borrowed powers to synergize it. 8.3 Icecap only happened due to the clown show that was BFA borrowed powers at the time. You need corruption, essences, and traits to make that work, not just one thing. They could merge it with Obliteration like Locutus but that would just make 2-Obliteration scale like crazy and apparently Blizzard does not like that.
I mean it is the most simple solution of a mess that Icecap is in right now. It’s really sad that a talent that is at its strongest form is considered an absolute weakest since there aren’t enough secondary stat (or borrowed power synergy) to support it anymore.
Yes they would have to buff icecap in some way to make it compete. Icy citadel was by far stronger than whelps. I just enjoyed whelps for m+ and pad fights.
For icecap they could easily do something like.
POF increases crit and haste by 25% and grants icy citadel upon expiration. They could even build it into a tier set.
It’s sad that they just gave up on so many of frosts talents. Hopefully we see some balance in 9.1