Glacial Advance needs updates and support

Classes Death Knight
1

Glacial Advance is a skill that has (as of this expansion), not seen much value. And i’m not primarily talking about Arctic Assault, I mean the actual active skill Glacial Advance.

As we all know, Glacial Advance was given a whole bunch of nerfs to balance Arctic Assault, and then later, Arctic Assault was given its own seperate tuning knob as it does 80% of the damage of an actual Glacial Advance. I have no issues with Arctic Assault as it gives Killing Machine some visual information about when you’re actually consuming them, procs razorice and just generally feels awesome, however, this did also come at the expense of our (non breath) runic power aoe spender. Now, Glacial Advance does less damage in a 2 target encounter than Frost Strike does which is simply not okay given the role this ability is supposed to play.

Speaking of which, Glacial Advance is now also in direct competition with Frost Strike due to the Shattered Frost talent which makes Glacial Advance redundant as a spell while also making it even more difficult to balance Frost Death Knight’s Single Target and AoE independantly, since all 3 of our rotational spells have aoe components now due to Cleaving Strikes/Arctic Assault(Obliterate), Howling Blast being inately aoe, and Frost Strike having Shattered Frost.

I have multiple issues with the design of Shattering Blade and Shattered Frost. Firstly, i can’t even tell if Shattering Blade even has a distinct visual which should be somewhat important for visual clarity. this was the same issue i had for Killing Machine before Arctic Assault was introduced, but this time its worse since now you need to directly track Razorice on the target akin to festering wounds on Unholy. Secondly, Shattered Frost requires annoying tab-target gameplay to be at its most effective. I don’t see a single reason why you should be using frost strike to shatter stacks in aoe encounters when we literally have an entire aoe runic power spender button ready to go, which would feel significantly better to use as it would completely remove any tab-target swapping gameplay.

I understand that Glacial Advance is not really a popular spell, and I primarily believe this is because the model used for the animation is absolutely archaic. It just looks terrible. I don’t think there is a spell in death knight’s kit other than death coil that looks quite as bad as glacial advance, and neither of which have recieved a proper visual upgrade yet which is a pretty big shame. I don’t think many people would be complaining if it actually looked good. it should be a bunch of jagged ice spikes piercing our enemies from the ground, not a bunch of clearly copy-pasted classic era ice crystals.

Its for these reasons that i think the following should happen.

  1. The visuals of Glacial Advance (and Death Coil) should be reworked and should look much more powerful and modern than what they currently do.
  2. Glacial Advance’s previous nerfs due to Arctic Assault should be reverted, and Arctic Assault’s Scaling reduced further to keep it at it’s current power level while allowing Glacial Advance to have a place in our kit again.
  3. Shattered Frost should be reworked to use Glacial Advance as it’s basis. Not Frost Strike. but with added stipulation to Arctic Assault that it cannot interact with it.
    Probably looking something like this:

Shattered Frost:
Glacial Advance deals 15% more damage and now benefits from Shattering Blade. Glacial Advance from Arctic Assault does not benefit from this effect.

If these types of changes can’t be achieved, its probably for the best that Glacial Advance is entirely removed as an active spell and just replaced with another rework to frostscythe. But either way, I do not believe that Frost Strike being used in AOE is healthy for Frost DK moving forward.

I also think its a related but seperate issue that we have a bunch of optional active abilities that do not have any/much support in any of our major passives. Chill Streak, Frost Scythe and Soul Reaper have little interaction with any of our kit where as everything is given to Obliterate and much less given to Frost Strike and Howling Blast.

2 Likes
2

Rippling GA :drooling_face:

With that aside, I find it funny that GA is basically Epidemic for Frost and yet is overshadowed by Frost Strike at times when used with Shatter Line. In an AOE context.

If Unholy has Epidemic as Baseline, I don’t see a reason why GA costs a talent point.

2 Likes
3

Right, but even if it was made baseline it would still be horrendous and likely rarely ever pressed because they nerfed it so hard trying to balance Arctic Assault

1 Like
4

I’m saying that in addition to your suggestions. I love the idea of GA shattering Razorice en masse.

Of course, the visuals need to be updated. Yet they are updating Worgen 2h animation for… some reason.

And yeah, I do agree that GA dammies should be reverted and Arctic Assault damage tuned accordingly. Since Arctic Assault’s main purpose is to merge a Rune Spender and a discounted Runic Power spender in a single global.

Kind of implies how little the developers play the class.

2 Likes
5

Oh i see. Yeah I’d like that. I just don’t know why they thought it was a good idea to tie shattered frost to frost strike when we literally already have an aoe runic power spender right there.

It already would feed into the effect too since it procs razorice.

6

Considering this is coming from a dev or group of devs responsible for a ST ability and passive rng proc being most of your AoE damage (DnD obit and IDT), it’s not surprising. The overall design of Frost is so flat and boring. They then just tacked on wound popping like gameplay to frost with SF coming into TWW because they can’t spend a second to properly work on either spec.

Would be nice if they’d remove AA tbh and made talents like GA and FSC actually worth pressing and thoughtfully integrated into a meaningful rotation. Visual update on GA is massively overdue as well.

I’ve resigned myself to not expecting anything but being over tuned on expac release, only to have both specs repetitively nerfed in the first few weeks to generally being a pointless dps slot in a raid group.

1 Like
7

I’ve been pretty happy with how frost has been so far this expansion. But there’s a couple of things that do bother me still. This is the main one at the moment since it looks like we might be incentivised to play rider of the apocalypse shattering blade over deathbringer omnifrost. I’m otherwise pretty okay. This is by far the best iteration of Frost Dk ive ever played.

8

Rider is much smoother when it comes to m+ imo, but limited to oblit. This is due to the simple fact you don’t burn 4 runes going into pillar and riders take care of the first DnD.

DB BOS build is the least enjoyable iteration of the spec I’ve played, all the same feels bad elements remain with the exception of BOS duration. The entire spec is RNG and passive procs/dmg.

9

I get not enjoying it because of the rng but i personally enjoy the gameplay varience of having 2 cooldown sets at 45s and 2 mins. I feel like I’ve always got something around the corner and gameplay isn’t stale. Not like rider obliteration which is just pressing obliterate and frost strike

1 Like
10

Both variations are effectively spamming oblit and fs (outside of bos obviously). And the problem isn’t necessarily with the hero specs, its that the base rotation is pretty bad without them.

If epidemic is baseline, so should GA be. Spec needs to move away from passive damage (AA and IDT). Whole identify of the tree is really a bucket of mud. It’s been covered by class writers so I’m not gonna waste my time.