Edit: Pillar Scaling is gone! Wooooo! 1. Pillar of Frost scaling Str.
Timing the last seconds of PoF to contain Frostwyrms Fury and Frost Scythe is unfun to me.
It contributes to Cleaving Strikes taking up too much of our damage profile.
It makes baseline abilities need to be tuned lower to compensate for how high the bonus can get.
The new The Long Winter talent is making all of the above potentially worse.
2. Cleaving Strike.
Takes up to much of the AoE damage profile.
It’s fundamentally impossible to balance without taking up the majority of the AoE damage profile due to multiplying a primary source of single target damage for all builds leading nerfs to AoE to also be a nerf to single target.
That’s it. Two issues that seem like easy fixes to me. (Only one now!)
My Suggestions
Cap PoF Scaling.
You get the exact same gameplay of needing to ramp before using certain abilities, but you now have leeway to perform them and don’t potentially lose the window to mechanics or other variables because you would have time to respond and still use your heavy hitters.
Reduce Cleaving Strikes damage to secondary targets.
This would allow them to tune Obliterates AoE and single target damage independently, Thereby allowing them to control how much of the damage profile Cleaving Strikes takes up.
Also if you are going to comment “THEY SHOULD JUST DELETE SCALING AND CLEAVING STRIKES!” Please do because it gives the post engagement, and maybe they will see it but its clear they want to keep the gameplay attached to frost so I’m just suggesting a fix that should be relatively low effort for the Developers.
This 100%. Pillar if changed to a flat 45 sec cd, without scaling, then the issue to problem A of holding skills is gone, and B, it will allow other skills to actually do some damage. With the most recent change, Pillar is even more of a crutch. The spec relies so heavily on it. Imagine if you could use skills and have them feel fun to use without cds…
I think the talent Enduring STR is already enough so give people something to strive for, so when Pillar ends, they still have a nice little str boost. But that being said, that talent in combination with The Long Winter, and everything else just makes for such heavy reliance on Pillar in general.
As for cleaving strikes, I was never a fan of it. I’d much rather have it changed (assuming they keep it) to only be a % of your obliterate damage affect others so other skills can have damage increased to compensate. *Or hear me out, what if we had an aoe rune spender that could be used repeating for aoe… We have the new scythe, which is dope af, but that is it. Remorseless winter I don’t count as it is used in single target as well. I mean a real AOE rune spender.
The playstyle of hit like a wet noodle without Pillar, to hit like a freight train at least to me, feels bad.
I don’t actually mind PoF getting a lot of CDR as holding abilities for when a CD is up can be a fun decision IMO.
It’s the needing to time it with the very last second of pillar. It gives the spec an absurd amount of ramp and having situations where a mechanic come up that needs your attention so you have to send it early or miss the end of the window and don’t get the ramped damage.
Even CC feels bad. I asphyxiate a mob and all my brain sees is -4% strength because it cost a global.
I think the a flat CDR would be better overall. Can still hold it for when you need it, but would help with giving the devs a reason to bake damage into the base kit instead.
That’s the most convincing point to remove or cap Ice Cap I’ve heard so far.
Limp wristed Obliterates feel so bad and I’ve always preferred frost to be a consistent under all conditions spec.
Agreed. Imagine if FS actually felt good to press so you didn’t want to ignore rp. Howling blast actually feeling like a fun skill rather than a frost fever supplier.
I admit the new scythe is really cool and feels fun. I wish they could just finish and make the rest of the kit fun too.
the push for mobile high aoe is mainly coming from M+, raids have predictable scripted moments where you learn to use them and pvp has its own uses for these spells.
how long would M+ last if you hadn’t had a new dungeon since 8.0? and keep in mind that Reddit had to brigade the poll to knock PVP off the top spot and put M+ there.
and in terms of the playerbase, the best players are all PVPers.
Mythic raid for most people is something to be left on the table for later, most do heroic.
its a bad argument to use popularity as a metric because its easy to water the part of the garden you want to grow. the devs control what part of the game they want people to play and Ion has always been very anti-PVP.
but beyond that, they could also overhaul the dungeons to have hard locked checkpoints which require groups to stop, or just leash the trash so you can’t chain pull anymore. but its hard to not blame M+ for its affects on other parts of the game, class designs around M+ and how they have altered the PVP meta is a big one. IMO the game as a whole would be better off if M+ had never happened. but then again, the same is true for LFG and LFR.
This bugs me more than I can put into words. Sitting on abilities to use them not just during your CD window, but at a specific GCD during that window is just not fun for me. I would much prefer to be able to use those abilities when it makes sense.
And you’re right that this massive scaling strength leads to the spec being anemic outside of pillar windows and that doesn’t feel good. Cooldowns should feel impactful, but the damage swing is just too large.
Cleaving Strikes doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it bothers other people, though. I don’t really mind it.
Did anyone play frost in legion/bfa? To me, that was the peak of frost DK gameplay. Frostscythe was actually good and we had an aoe spender. In BFA particularly, we had a relatively flatter damage profile and could contribute damage outside of pillar. Good times. Now we’re deeply reliant on pillar windows during which, we also have to drop dnd, which might be the worst feeling global in the entire game. Would love to see our concerns addressed.
I did and I agree, and moving back to that is something I’ve been pushing for a while now. To be fair, we’ve made some okay progress towards that, but Frostreaper & ramping Pillar will prevent any actual changes towards that, especially Pillar.
And now with this FS change during Obliteration, Rime/HB becomes essentially worthless to press and it’s indicating that they don’t actually want to address the core issues with Obliteration & resources. So the Legion/BFA version of Frost where buttons & resources generally matter is entirely dead at this point.
It feels bad to me but it’s what the community wants (to be always blasting like Ret without a care about resources) but they could’ve at least made the FS change apply to outside of Pillar instead so there’d be more areas that could be directly buffed to help with damage outside of CDs.
BFA Frost DK after the introduction of Frost Whelps Indignation and Enduring Strength as azerite powers was my favorite frost build ever.
The rotation was so simple but the constant positioning to maximize the number of mobs in damage zones and avoid sending a frost whelp into the next pack was so much fun to me.
I am and always will be an absolute simp for gameplay that is challenging in ways that draw your eyes to your character and not your action bars.
They have stated that they want to address resource issues, but unfortunately that is an extremely complicated task with how the new talent trees allow us to take so many effects that were never intended be able to be used at the same time. Like obliteration and ice cap.
At least the FS during obliteration change is a step in the right direction.
They can just hit Murderous Efficiency since it’s actually the root of both Breath & Obliteration’s resource influx and go from there.
But adding this new passive to Obliteration is basically saying “We don’t actually want to address Obliteration’s issues so here’s another band-aid”. Just endless band-aids instead of actually taking a bit longer to fix things. Ridiculous.
I thought PvP was more about class changes than arena maps? Most arena maps are very similar. Do people actually PvP because a new arena is implemented .
This is like saying basketball players are better athletes than hockey players. There is no way to prove this as these are two completely different activities. It also makes taking anything you say serious impossible. By your logic, pvpers should form a guild and win the world first race and every mythic+ event.
Posts like this prove the game is too hard. Why can’t we just play the character and select the abilities that we think are cool or fun, why do we have to get locked into some playstyle that feels like a job to play. What used to make this game fun was playing with other people to kill the bad guys, not worrying about if people were optimizing their character and playing them perfectly.
What blizzard should do is:
Make Mythic raids easier.
Permanently ban all combat addons including logs and damage meters.
Agree with all your points here and I also miss the days that Frost had more consistent damage outside of cooldowns. I think some of the issues you outlined also apply to Obliteration. It is not a fun cooldown IMO and further exacerbates Frost’s problems.
Frost has some bonkers strength stacking and enough mechanics tied to KM/Oblit. I would gladly give up some of that for more meaningful abilities and cooldowns that are exciting. I don’t really get that from Pillar/Obliteration right now.
This just needs to go tbh. I’m sure there are many ways to mitigate its problems, but I doubt any of them will make it a fun mechanic. We were much better off when Unholy’s AoE damage came from diseases and Frost’s came from its actual cleave abilities.
There is a reason that every other dps spec in the game that had a similar mechanic complained until it was removed for them. Even the tank specs don’t love it despite having control over positioning.
yes, but its still true, the hyper competitiveness of M+ has had ripple effects in the rest of the game in terms of class balance and design.
arena is about classes, a new arena map is basically some new combination of pillars and how many sides they have. i was referencing bgs where we haven’t had a new map since seething shore.
i disagree, if we did a cross comparison and took a top 1% PVPer and had them do M+, and a top 1% PVEer and had them do PVP, it would only be a matter of time before the PVPer is top 1% again, while its a question of IF the PVEer in PVP can do the equivalent. (assuming they are stepping into game modes for the first time each)
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