We get a major nerf to our playstyle and abilities and receive dead-on-arrival talents at the beginning of each expansion, and have gotten progressively worse over time to the point we’re at now where Frost’s damage is mediocre in PvE and straight up F-tier in PvP, but other specs are allowed to remain overtuned to god-tier levels and put out gargantuan damage without requiring significant burst abilities or thought processing.
It also lacks the utility to make it attractive in PvE and the extent to which the anti-mobility utility would be useful in PvP is contingent upon slowing down casters for other classes to kill, since Frost’s damage on its own is too slow. The survivability was also gutted again, which also happened at the beginning of dragonflight, so now our tankiness doesn’t stand out as much.
At this rate, by the next expansion, Frost’s mechanics will involve throwing snowballs from a hospital bed, and Death’s Advance will just put us into a wheelchair for a few seconds before having to lie back down. I tried PvP’ing with Frost a handful of times during the last two patches and it was the saddest experience I’ve ever had in this game.
Honestly I think at this point the devs realize that DK is way outdated compared to other classes and needs a ground up rework for all 3 specs. We never got any big overhauls like some of the other classes because we were pretty modern for a while since we were the first new class added into the game and got some major changes in a few areas so Blizzard left us alone.
But the issues with the class stem back 10+ years at this point so the current dev pool really has no clue how to actually fix it short of literally deleting the entire class and starting from scratch. We see how well that turned out with Evokers.
Given the choice of being turned into a failed class or an old duct taped one with bandaid fixes, Ill take the latter.
That being said, the Undermine RWF should give the devs a neon sign pointing to DKs needing a lot of love. Literally not 1 DK in Liquid’s team, DKs being called trash on stream, etc. Theres a reason we had 0 representation.
Many specs have barely changed fundamentally since Legion. That said, Shadow Priest has somehow seen multiple massive reworks since Legion and Unholy is still dealing with the deeply flawed (and seemingly unpopular) festering wound mechanic it’s had since the Legion pre-patch reworks. It’s kind of sad. I think a great many people play Unholy because they like the idea of diseases (powerful stacking dots) or undead pet armies. I think very very few people play it because they like tracking festering wound stacks.
I went from playing warrior main to dk. Both classes suffer from missing dev syndrome but atleast unholy has uncapped aoe, brez and grips for m+. Warrior on the other hand…
For sure! Also, Heroic leap and charge are the best abilities in the game imo. I dunno how many times ive been able to charge or leap back into position after being knocked back, or falling to be death then jumping to the ground to save my life.
Now DK transmogs, the best hands down…join us brother.
I laughed so hard at this. It’s how I feel every time I cast Howling blast. Honestly it’s baseline damage should be buffed to what its proc is.
The talent layout is terrible and mostly relies on Pillard of frost which makes us mediocre even when it’s active and down right sad when it’s not.
I also would like a way to talent into a stronger Howling Blast while completely bypassing anything having to do with Remorseless Winter, it’s such a terrible ramp up ability even if you are foolish enough to take all the talents.
And please give us class mechanics that don’t favour dual wielding and forces you to spend all your point on crit just to get procs that don’t scale with crit. At least Fire mages get a flat damage buff base on crit chance during combustion, we should have the same for Obliterate procs and Frost Scythe.
Not to mention crit damage is severely nerfed in PVP which makes our mechanics doubly punishing.
Oh, oh no. Some weird masterfrost hybrid would come of that.
2h is even more reliant on those procs because its damage is in Obliterate. Not to mention that anything put into the spec that benefits 2h benefits DW unless it has a “while wielding a 2h” requirement on it like MotFW specifies.
I really think they need to lean into the ideal of DKs as melee casters like Unholy does with Clawing Shadows.
At the moment, our mobility is the worse of all melee classes and we have no means of healing if our enemy is even slightly out of melee range.
Meanwhile, paladins are throwing hammers and swords and get a baseline mount movement cooldown + immunity to snare blessing and self healing no matters what range the enemy is at.
-Give Death Strike a small range, like 10-15 yards.
-Make spells like Howling Blast actually deal damage. Allow us to accumulate 2 stacks or Rime.
Right now, howling blast is just something you cast when you run out of runes to obliterate and runic power and need to use up Rime while you wait for runes to recover.
I’ve been asking for years to get any decent rework or getting duel wield for unholy and the feedback goes into the trash and its been downhill since legion, either the philosophy changed or whoever is in charge of class balancing has a gripe with dk’s for sure and you can feel it! If they have a hard time balancing, call Elon and replace them with robots, they don’t eat, sleep, complain or ask for a pay rise.
True, but the only reason Unholy is even any good is because of the uncapped AoE that get exponentially stronger the more units you fight for pve and abusing stacking Undeath from Riders by spamming Clawing shadows.
Other than that, its mechanics are still pretty faulty in single target notable the whole wound application.
I much prefer Frost as a theme, I’ve mained it on and off since Mist.
However, in pvp you can barely keep hands on ranged enemies, our only range ability barely tickles them and when you are lucky enough to be in melee range, our damage is still petty.
I also miss death siphon as a spell as well, it at least allowed us to survive a bit if an enemy had us snared or slowed while nuking us down.
I just started playing Frost DK again in rated pvp BGs and it is a brutally sad affair.
The fact that my mage, has more mobility, damage and self healing all while attacking from range and slowing and rooting enemies is bloody frustrating. My once favourite melee class since MoP is now only good for solo pve content.
DKs are just soooo outdated. Every other melee class has no trouble closing the gap, and dealing way more damage.
And God forbid you should run out of runes and can’t do anything except auto attack.
It’s 2025, give us a modern smooth DK, with decent mid range abilities. Paladins have had a billion reworks already and DKs are over a decade behind.
And please give us back Death Siphon, it’s depressing to be perpetually out of reach while range dps gun you down and your only option is to slowy shuffle towards them until you die…
Devs design classes for Raids and Deaths Knights can’t even do that anymore…
complain or ask for a pay rise.