How to make Soul Reaper work in Frost's rotation

Classes Death Knight
1

Hi everyone, today i wanted to share my new ideas about soul reaper and how to get it to work in frost’s rotation. obviously there’s the arguement that soul reaper should be reworked entirely and i don’t necessarily disagree. However if blizzard for whatever reason wants to keep soul reaper the same as it is currently on the class tree, i have gone through several iterations until i came to where i’ve gotten to today regarding a way for it to work in our rotation without necessarily changing it’s base cost.

here are my ideas and the reasoning behind them

Ideas:

  • Rime now additionally causes your next Soul Reaper to consume no runes and it’s initial hit deals 225% additional damage.
  • Improved Rime now additionally increases Soul Reaper’s initial hit damage done by 75% to enemies below 35% health.
  • Rage of the Frozen Champion: Soul Reaper now benefits from this talent while Rime is active.

Reasoning:
This change adds some more mastery and thinking into the rotation. instead of clicking howling blast asap to consume the proc, you can either use your rime proc in aoe and from a distance and to add razorice and frost fever to your target, or to do more single target damage in melee range with additional initial hit scaling starting in execute range in addition to the explosion proccing after 5 seconds in execute.
Because of Soul Reaper’s cooldown, this means that your rime procs will not always go to Soul Reaper, especially as Howling Blast is still needed to apply razorice (through avalanche) and frost fever.

Regarding the individual capstone playstyles,

Breath of Sindragosa: Soul Reaper will replace some of your howling blast casts in single target as it will also generate 8 runic power in place of Howling Blast as i updated RotFC to include it.

Obliteration: Like stated above, it will replace some of your howling blast casts over the course of your parse, thankfully as it would now benefit from rime, it will no longer eat up valuable runes from casting killing machine obliterates, and, as it currently works, it will give a proc of Killing Machine during your Pillar of Frost windows just like howling blast does.

I often see the suggestion that soul reaper should consume killing machine, however i’ve always thought of soul reaper as a supplementary skill rather than a major outputer, especially now that it generates a killing machine proc during obliteration pillar. i don’t feel like killing machine is a good proc for soul reaper due to it’s existing 1 rune cost, and the fact that using killing machine on it would only guarentee a crit. However, with these 3 talent changes alone, soul reaper would fit extremely well into our existing rotations and would increase the skill ceiling if you talent into it. it would make soul reaper a rotational button regardless of being in execute range or not and give the potential to make the spec more than just a 3 button rotation that it’s often memed on as.

it would also be great to see Soul Reaper and Glacial Advance added towards icecap.

2 Likes
2

I like the thought process but it’s just high time blizzard make it function like an execute. Hit hard and instant damage. Warrior execute does this, Hunter kill shot does this. Why is Deathknight stuck with this clunky garbage?

3 Likes
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while i agree, the cost will remain a problem if it stays as 1 rune on frost.

1 Like
4

it costs a rune to use which makes it clunky

it could be baked into oblit via obliteration passive at 35% oblit applies soul reaper.

or

put all the damage into the proc

or

have to cost alot of RP

also i like you ideas as well

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i don’t think it should be baked into any active skill, i think the button itself should need to be pressed. we already have very few rotational buttons.

6

understandable just throwin out ideas

i like the idea of loading all damage into the proc and maybe have some rime in it.

same but make it cost 2 runes and the initial hit does something other than damage while the proc does mac truck of damage

1 Like
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There’s a lot they could do, but whatever it is, they need to address the cost dilema. My suggestion also aimed to make the rotation more interesting and the skill cap higher.

1 Like