Idea: New Mastery for Frost

So as many of you might know, I’m a strong advocate for the return of 2H Frost Death Knights. Now I understand the heavy sighs coming from all of you at this point, but I want to improve Frost in more ways than just giving them the ability to use a 2H weapon. I want to start by changing the boring mastery we have now, and giving more flavor for the rest of the spec as well.

New Mastery, Old Talent:
The idea I had for Frost’s new mastery was bringing back an old talent, Might of the Frozen Wastes. This made Frost unique and provided players two ways of playing the spec. Yes, most of the time, dual-wielding was the mid-max thing to do. So, what can we do to make them pretty even? Well we need to look at what made dual-wielding superior in the first place. The chance for your off-hand to proc Killing Machine was a huge reason, back when Killing Machine affected Frost Strike. Another reason was that dual-wielding scaled really well with our current mastery, Frozen Heart.

After Legion, Frost is a hollow shell of both the playstyles, an abomination fused into one. My suggestion is the following;

Mastery: Might of the Frozen Wastes

  • Wielding a two-handed weapon increases Obliterate damage by 50%, and deals an extra 25% damage as frost damage.

  • Dual-wielding increases Frost Strike damage by 100% and gives your off-hand weapon attacks a 40% chance to hit for full damage.

  • Increases the damage of your Frost abilities by 16%.

Now in theory, this should be the perfect balance for everything. Will it? I don’t know, I really want to test it. Could this perhaps make dual-wielding stronger still, maybe. Some of you might think that all of this together is broken, but really it is just our current mastery tied with a revamped version of an old passive.

Beyond this though, we also need to fix the Rune System. Dual-wielding will still be favored do to Rune of Razorice and Fallen Crusader combo. Which can be fixed with a new passive;

Master of the Rune Blade:

  • Allows the Death Knight to emblazon their two-handed weapon with two runes.

With this and the new mastery, this should make both choices fairly even. Of course, we won’t know until we can test the idea. More improvements to frost involve the;

  • Merging of Pillar of Frost and Empowered Rune Weapon
  • Making Breath of Sindragosa and Horn of Winter baseline.
  • Change Obliteration back to its Legion version.

There is more to add but I am still compiling thoughts for that currently. I will give you guys more on a later date but for now, let’s here what you think.

Do you think it will work? Will it not? Let’s discuss.

9 Likes

i like this idea alot and im sure it could be tweaked to work in game.

Why settle for just 1 2hander? Fury warriors dual wield 2s. Equality and all that

I feel that Titan’s Grip is unique to Fury Warrior and it should stay as such. I’m also not a fan of TG so I would never ask for it lol.

That’s about the only way that I’d be able to stand dw frost. I don’t think it’s realistic for any spec other than fury though.

Regarding the OP, that’s exactly how it should NOT be done. No damage modifiers to abilities based on weapon type. That’s a huge factor when it comes to why frost was so hard to balance compared to ww monk during MoP/WoD. I desperately want to use a 2h weapon as frost, but I also don’t want to return to 2 separate subspecs with different rotations and stat priorities based on weapon type since that makes it much harder to balance.

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That’s fair but also janky. D2 barbs can dual wield 2hander but get a dmg drop. That would be acceptable for non fury, i think.

Mostly I just want to xmog very light sabre so lol blizz, make it work lol

After more thought on the matter, you are completely right. I guess I was trying to rationalize this from a RPG standpoint instead of what is easier for the development team. So the best course of action would be to remove the off-hand chance at triggering Killing Machine, give Obliterate a scaling frost damage component and add the Master of the Rune Blade passive I wrote about. This way, no matter which weapon you use, it will be the same.

My main point was to make it so that your choice strengthened one of the two abilities, considering Obliterate and Frost Strike hit like wet noodles. I want two handed Frost back as well as a way to make the class unique. Of course balance is the enemy of all and mid-maxing is the devil you know.

Kinda think mastery should also improve your killing machine crit damage, give it a bit of a modifier to help both sides of frosts damage since oblit. Isn’t a frost damage move

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That would be sweet.

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I think your first paragraph is absolutely correct and I agree with that. I am glad that you can see where I’m coming from.

Regarding the second paragraph, I’d rather have both abilities hit harder but just not one or the other based on weapon type. If the devs wanted to make 2 talents, one that buffed frost strike (MoP/WoD dw masterfrost build playstyle) and the other that buffed obliterate (MoP/WoD 2h frost obliterate build playstyle) then I’d be ok with that as long as there were no weapon type requirements for those talents. I do think it’d still be a challenge to balance them, but without the weapon type restriction that we had in MoP/WoD, it wouldn’t have the issue where if the obliterate build fell behind that “omg 2h frost is terrible you need to use dw” that we had in the past. If you wanted a 2h masterfrost build or a dw obliterate build then those would both be options because you could have either playstyle with either weapon type.