These abilities are struggling to remain relevant. Between Obliterate firing free Glacial Advances (and cleaving in DnD) and Frost Strike doing massive cleave when shattering 5 Razorices, Howling Blast Rime and Remorseless Winter are wet noodles that are rarely worth pressing. The best solution would probably be new talents that buff them in an overhaul of our direly outdated spec tree, but honestly I’d take a flat buff to them in the meantime.
I really miss Rime Howling Blasts feeling like a strong button press. We basically don’t have AoE anymore, just cleave. It’s very strange feeling for my aoe to be literally tab targeting between 5 Razorice targets to repeatedly shatter them with Frost Strike.
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For what content? When you take talents for Remorseless Winter it becomes a very high damage button for most PvE situations. I think it could use some extra flavor, and the 20 second CD is a bit lame, but overall it’s a powerful spell.
Rime/Howling Blast are underwhelming though outside of the DoT application. I agree there. But I guess if every spell were powerful you wouldn’t appreciate the harder hitting ones. Still, the talent design just forces you to take Rime/Howling Blast talents as a talent tax which is bad design for something so weak.
Agree. Rime feels terrible to press even when fully buffed by Deathbringer and Ice Breaker. Feels even worse using it with the Shatter build but there are understandable tradeoffs there.
It hurts traditional obliteration builds the most. Ice Breaker kind of feels like its in the wrong spot on the tree. You cannot buff Rime a lot without making BoS build OP.
FDKs has AoE built into every ability. They need to use something specifically for single target. They should drop the HB splash damage (keep the DoT application) and use it as the single target tuning mechanism. Also bake a Rime damage increase into MotFW for a buff to 2h traditional Obliteration. Would still have the option to spec Avalanche if you want it to AoE.
For 3-4 talents it really is not that impressive. ~5% Single target ~8% damage in AoE. Frost Fever competes with it lol. Not sure what you are looking at.
I would steal damage from Icy Death Torrent, Hero talents, and Tier set and put it back into these core talents. Can at least take the damage from the DB Reaper’s Mark slot machine and put it back into Rime and RW. Mark RNG feels the worst.
More pipe dreams
I think the talent taxes in general are an issue, not just in this case.
I’m looking at my sim. Remorseless Winter does on average 1.5M damage, per target, per cast, with 1 GCD time investment, and no AoE cap. It’s the third strongest button in the kit next to Frostwyrm’s Fury and Reaper’s Mark assuming that’s the hero spec you took. Its pitfall is that you only get to cast it 3 times a minute. But OP claimed that:
Which is just not true. If Remorseless Winter is not worth casting then neither is Frost Strike nor Obliterate, because those do less damage per cast.
You’re being pedantic and taking my statements too literally. You know what I mean. The ultimate issue is that both Howling Blast and Remorseless Winter do little of our overall DPS and have low impact. Yes, Remorseless Winter technically does good damage per-rune but that doesn’t make it good or exciting to use. Looking at my logs, Obliterate almost matches my average Remorseless Winter cast and my Frost Strike average cast exceeds Remorseless Winter. Even on AoE pulls, I have to dig down into my logs to find Remorseless Winter.
What I’m trying to say is, Remorseless Winter feels like an entirely unnecessary button in its current iteration, even if it is technically worth pressing for one GCD at the cost of one Rune from a pure optimization standpoint. It feels vestigial.
Blizzard should buff it (and take damage from elsewhere to compensate if need be), remove it from the game (Howling Blast can easily apply the aoe slow in its place), or revamp it entirely. I personally would like to see it be Frost’s Death and Decay, but barring any major changes (that won’t happen until at least Midnight anyway), I’ll take a buff to keep it as a meaningful button press.
Edit: I would also argue Frost could use a bit more AoE DPS anyway since Unholy has been cleaning our clocks.
Maybe this is me but I also can’t help but notice that a lot of Talent Nodes in the Frost DK tree are heavily weight towards spending runes and not Runic Power.
Like why can’t Runic Power extend the duration of Remorseless Winter by a 0.1 second for every 10 Runic Power you spend? And Runes only increase its damage.
And if you’re about to mention BoS. Don’t.
Meanwhile I always find it odd that damage wise, Frost Fever deals the most damage. Now, I really don’t know if that’s the case anymore but I do agree Howling Blast feels a bit bad to use. A pure ST abilities seem to be desired. Maybe Cold Heart? Maybe Icy Touch as a nuke?
The possibilities are endless.
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The only place to take damage from is KM Obliterate and these forums are heavily against that even though it’d objectively fix a majority of the complaints about the spec by doing so.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that even though Frost is branded as the “RP spec”. Lots of specs have talents that focus more on the “builder” abilities rather than the spenders.
Maybe because people were pushing the whole Obliterate thing for 2 entire expansions that is what Blizzard focused on.
Then why have all the ST abilities been turned into aoe abilities? Obliterate was ST, now its cleave / aoe. The same with Frost Strike for DW at least. How about we get rid of the fluff and actually make the ST abilities ST and the aoe abilities aoe.
The issue comes in with talent layout in where you cant pick up both.
Obliterate as a GCD does WAY too much. Its a “nuke” it does inexorable assault damage, arctic assault damage, cleaves with Cleaving Strikes, keeps BoS going for as long as possible… it just does too much.
Do you like where the playerbase has pushed Frost? It doesnt look like you do and maybe you guys shouldnt just push the “you dont play the game” and listen to people that actually want a better game.
I guess.
I just wish RP have a bit more value in terms of restoring runes and anything else. Because everytime I use Frost Strike to restore runes through Runic Empowerment, it feels really bad if it doesn’t. Especially if done MULTIPLE TIMES.
And do more than just BoS Dammies go BRRR. I use it to restore runes. 
You can take damage from the hero talents especially Deathbringer. Reapers Mark and Exterminate are like ~25% of total damage. Nerfing those would be a round about way to reduce the insane dps variance DB FDK has too. Double benefit.
An ability called “Obliterate” should hit hard. I’m good with that.
Rime is a core thematic ability and should hit hard as well. It could fulfill the single target tuning function. Buff Rime a ton. It should truck. Take out its splash damage while maintaining the Fever spread and use it for Single target tuning. FDK lacks a single target tuning knob.
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