We all know frost needs fixed. IMO the problem with frost isn’t the numbers (because those can always be adjusted), but rather how clunky and unfun it is to play. I believe this stems from the resource system and how it creates a “constantly losing” feedback loop when spending runes on any ability that isn’t obliterate. So here is what I would do.
-Go back to having 2 frost, 2 blood, and 2 unholy runes. No death runes at all.
-Make obliterate cost 1 blood and 1 unholy rune
-Make howling blast, D&D, remorseless winter, soul reaper, and every other rune ability not named obliterate cost 1 frost rune
-Replace runic empowerment with runic corruption to give a steady flow of all 3 runes and never leave you sitting on half an obliterate
The playstyle would still be to use obliterate as much as possible, but you would be weaving frost rune abilities in-between them. The skill expression would be in using the correct abilities in the correct situations. Obliterate could still hit really hard becuse you would be more limited on how many you can use. Additionally, I would:
-Remove the cleave bonus from D&D
-Update killing machine to- Empowers your next obliterate or frost strike- Empowered obliterate does what KM does now and empowered frost strike cleaves all targets in front of you. Using either consumes the buff.
-Update rime to refresh a frost rune instead of buffing howling blast
-Update obliteration to proc killing machine when spending a frost rune during PoF
-Update empower rune weapon to give one of each rune and no runic power per tick
-Runic power abilities unchanged as I feel they are the only part of the spec that actually feels right
Howling blast could be buffed to actually be worth using, D&D could retain it’s utility, soul reaper wouldn’t completely bork your rotation, and BoS would still work just fine. I really feel like this would create a smooth and fun rotation that would make frost feel less like a button mashing one trick pony.
So what do the masses think? Would it be fun? More smooth? I think it would make the spec quite fun to be using all the other abilities in between a steady flow of obliterates. Frost has quite a few interesting abilities just collecting dust and this would allow them all to be used situationally.
Edit for a typo