What would you like to see changed? I’m not talking about numbers. We would all love Death Strike to actually be worth pressing without Dark Succor and for our DPS to actually be competitive, etc.
But I mean mechanically/visually. Would you like to see our resource generation RNG removed? Maybe given a new raid buff? Or perhaps some more functionality with Death Grip?
The main things I would like to see are
Runic Corruption being made baseline. Runic Empowerment is utter trash in its current form. You either hit the lottery or you’re in the gutter. Theres no in between and it feels like garbage. Or just remove the RNG from our resource generation completely and go back to the old Rune System that was around in Wrath and adjust the CD time accordingly.
GCD reduced. 1.5sec GCD makes us feel artificially slowed down for no reason. I’ve been playing Ret lately and its so much smoother and more satisfying than DK. You have a wee bit of downtime here and there, but they don’t feel like they’re chained up on a leash like DK does. Even a 1/4 second reduction would go a long way.
Actual visuals. Our spells all feel low impact because they’re barely noticeable. When I’m playing Frost and have PoF popped, I can barely tell if I have Remorseless Winter rolling or not. My character just looks like he has blue smudged over him. The Strikes have basically no visual effect at all unless you go out of your way to look for it. Obliterate is a small flash of some blue. Scourge Strike/Clawing Shadows? Oh hey look I saw some purple!
You know what’s funny? It’s passives like RE/RC that makes Runes just makes inherently better resource of the two. One is spend and contributes the other, the other just spends… and doesn’t contribute. Blood kind of have this problem while Frost and Unholy have RE and RC that makes the Runes and Runic Power ebb and flows.
Whenever I use 2 or 3 globals on Frost Strike on my Mechagnome and it doesn’t give me my Rune back, it feels so bad that I am very tempted to punch a wall. A bit dramatic but it just shows how bad it is to spend a global to a Runic Power feels to spend for me. I have no agency but RNG to have it giving my runes back.
Personally, I would like Blood Tap back so I can actually control the flow of runes. Too bad it is exclusive to Blood now.
Does your Ret Paladin have haste? Because I’m certain that Haste reduces the Globals no matter which class.
I do agree that Haste shouldn’t be a bandaid fix of how sluggish the Death Knight as a class are in terms of weaving Globals. But I don’t think something like the OG Unholy Presence will return as unfortunate as that sounds.
Man, you know. Those Worgens back flipping with their 2-handed weapons? IT IRKS ME. IT HAS HIGHER PRIORITY THAT NEED TO BE CHANGED!
Glacial Advance? Shooting crystals instead of LITERAL ICE SPIKES? Totally doesn’t need a makeover. No sir.
EDIT: Apparently the latest PTR has GA visuals updated.
Its literally not that bad. You arent taking into account that runes recharge on their own, RP doesnt.
Want to see a bad spec, play Ret in cata. 1 ability generates holy power (or divine storm if it hits 4 targets) you have to keep up Inquisition so it can be 24 seconds before you can even use your big hitter, then going into your burst that happens every 2 minutes you have to use Zealotry, guardian of ancient kings which happens every 5 minutes, make sure Inq is up, then you are able to actually play and within that window you cant use Divine Storm because it doesnt work with Zealotry so you are reduced to a ST rotation unless you are just using wings, haste does nothing for your melee GCD and you cant actually get enough haste currently to get your crusader strike down to a 3 second CD.
Its bad, worse than ANY iteration of DK at any point ever.
Honestly, I would love if they went back to the the old rune system. Unholy feels really bad to play, for me at least. Too many buttons to press. Dot, Raise Abomin, Dark Trans, Unholy Frenzy and then Apoc. After replaying Cata for a bit, I really miss that style of gameplay. Simple. Apply diseases, stack dark infusion (giving purpose to death coil, sudden doom and reducing the amount of GCDs), festering strike converting runes into Death Runes (giving it a reason to cost 2 runes) and the strength of Death and Decay. Every button just feels worth pressing. Plus not a fan of festering wounds. They feel like combo points that don’t transfer to different targets unless you talent into it.
If they were to rework Unholy, I would love to see talents that removed the wounds and put strength back into diseases. Hell, just a list of talents that would let you play like you did in Cata would be sick. I also miss WoD’s Necrotic Plague build. So much fun back in the day. Maybe I have been drinking the Classic Kool-Aid lately, but it just feels good to play and that’s what I miss.
Frost, for me, hasn’t really changed throughout the years. I would like them to just give the original Empowered Rune Weapon back (Refreshes all runes and gives 25 runic power) and have the gradual one in the talent tree. If they want to give ERW back to Blood and Unholy too, that would be neat. Might of the Frozen Wastes needs Rune of Razorice built in so it can compete with dual-wield and so it can benefit from Frost’s mastery.
Well said. I think it might be interesting to have MotFW make every other melee a double strike or something as well so the auto-attack advantage DW has isnt so noticeable. But thats assuming that Frost is kept as an RNG auto attack based spec.
-More gameplay variance in unholy builds. As much as I’d love to see Breath of Sindragosa buried, removed, and its grave pissed on at least it gave a little gameplay variance to frost vs obliteration/shatting blades.
-I want an actual end game viable build to Frost outside of BoS like was promised. Blizzard outright acknowledged a big portion of the community doesnt like it. Whether they just tweak numbers for current side builds or make the left side of the tree biased towards 2h with a 2h focused capstone I don’t care. The alternative being 2h or DW really doesn’t matter to me. Outside of the legendary in Dragonflight it’s been breath or bust with the only alternative being “go unholy” since legion.
-I don’t tank as much as I used to, but with the healing/DS change, very minor tweaks could probably put Blood in a better spot.
-Soul Reaper needs to be reworked or removed. It’s just not fun. That’s it. In Frost it messes up the flow due to using a rune vs runic power. In Unholy there’s just nothing exciting about using it when it’s time. I reap a soul so maybe make the energy I absorb from that soul give me a mini blood lust? That would at least be exciting. Just something else other than what it is now. Even just removing the asinine countdown might make it fun.
Graphics/fun stuff:
More pet model glyphs
some DK themed scythes
more customization outside of the 3 slightly reskinned faces each race has (Some allied races didnt even get them)
-Better sound effects, some abilities sound really bad being just little whisper sounds. Especially for strikes. It makes things feel weak.
Thats off the top of my head, ill either make another post or edit this one if I come up with more.
Little to no RNG. I do agree runic empowerment is worse than runic corruption, I just wish we could all still use the old MOP bloodtap. I also think other random elements (like runic power gains on auto attack) should be structured to be reliable and consistent instead of random (like X runic power gained every 3rd auto attack or something like that) and none of this random festering wounds between 2-3, pick a number and give us reliability (more on festering wounds later)
I agree with the GCD reduction and have basically been complaining about it on and off since they decided to change it to 1.5 in legion. Death knights, especially unholy have a lot to manage all at once, and being limited to such a slow GCD means we stumble over our own feet just getting started. 1.0 GCD unholy just feels better, and I don’t mind the downtime, in fact I see downtime as a feature not a bug, as we can use it to manage movement scenarios without losing damage IF we have the presence of mind to pull it off. This would also mean we are free to have cooldowns that just do cooldown stuff instead of unholy assault being required to add festering wounds or dark transformation/abomination being required to apply our diseases or gargoyle being required to grant us runic power, all just to save us GCDs.
I want Festering wounds to kick the bucket in favor of a resource that resides on the unholy death knight instead of on our target. We could have a new resource named something I don’t know like “Necrotic Power” we can still build them up using festering strike but you would be able to consume them for more different effects, not just “extra damage”. You could use them to spawn ghouls for damage over time, empower scourge strike for more direct damage, heal yourself significantly (but lose out on the damage), or in PvP even apply a necrotic strike. But best of all you could actually swap targets, and you don’t have to worry about them expiring or otherwise getting removed. Another idea is that the ghouls themselves could become our resource, summoning them consistently and deliberately through the fight only to consume them later for powerful abilities and combos. Like a festering strike that summons a ghoul every time, because summoning the ghoul is the setup and not the payoff.
Less cooldown focus for unholy and more damage over time focus. We have way too many cooldowns and not much else to do outside of those cooldowns, it’s getting too far away from the soul of the spec being about “rot and decay” and is starting to feel like “burst dps class, just worse”. Instead of abilities like Apocalypse being a cooldown we use, have ghouls for a bit, then have nothing, we could have a system where we are periodically summoning more ghouls (like 1 ghoul per festering strike) so our pets function as less of a burst mechanic and more of a rotational damage mechanic. This could also open us up to mechanics that sacrifice these pets for fun results, like how in WOTLK we could sacrifice any pet for death pact heal (not just timmy), or adding in the ability to explode our ghouls for some spike or AoE damage. Could also take the idea further and come up with new reasons to sacrifice our ghouls to give additional determents to our opponents, or even boons to our allies. Make ghouls, spend ghouls, make more ghouls! Important part is I’m talking entirely about things you can do rotationally anytime your resource state would allow, not cooldowns you must wait on.
Glyphs to customize all our temporary pets. I’m visually not a fan of “Tommy the Abomy” from our summon abomination talent, but I would be more excited for the talent if I had other large undead options I could choose from.
2h/DW parity. I personally prefer the look and feel of 2h, but I know many people enjoy dw as well. I just want to be able to play the one I want rather than the one that’s better/mechanically required.
BoS changed to not be a constant RP drain. I enjoyed the minigame for a while, but I’m just physically exhausted playing BoS at this point. Something along the lines of the datamined changes would be good.
This would both allow us to use our full rotation during BoS, and also help balance 2h/dw since we won’t be as reliant on auto attacks and their many side effects to sustain the RP drain.
A reduction in auto-attack and/or crit based procs. Moving some of these procs onto our DoTs instead of auto attacks would feel more natural (imo), and again reduce the reliance on dw attack speed.
Remove DnD/Cleaving strikes (and maybe arctic assault). As much as I love big number and free damage, I also like using my whole kit.
I’ve always liked Frost for its general simplicity, and the pairing of obliterate/frost strike for single target and scythe/advance for aoe always seemed like a natural and straightforward skill set. But we just use our single target skills for aoe and don’t even talent into the aoe ones, and that’s kinda sad.
For Unholy:
A proper DoT/Disease option. I don’t really play UH because I’m just not a minion guy, but I’d be all in for some kind of 2h sword wielding, plate wearing, affliction/assassination hybrid thing.
Blood, just honestly put back to how it was before this xpac with more thought into our talents.
Unholy, remove pimples and bring back real disease play. More thought into actual pets. There are so many assets in game they could use to make it feel like an actual necromancer or plaguebringer.
Frost, a complete rework so rng is removed. As long as km works as it does now, the spec will always be held back. Feels bad to so have so mamy cool thematic abilities that just feel meh.
Update to breath so there is an option to play it differently. (Imagine something similar to eyebeam in a sense, or fel barrage)
2h to actually be viable.
Updated rune forges so it isn’t the same thing as it has been for years. Just make Fallen Cusader part of the class, even if nerfed while updating old forges(and brinf back cinderglacier)
Updates to all 3 hero talents.
I wouls love for DB to not be so rng. San just feels… well it really needs an overhaul.
And rider is dope cause of horse, but is so damn passive in general. It be cool of we had an actual new ability you could toggle from depending on rider choice.
Pvp modifiers and talents actually looked at. Deathstrike still overnerfed, not to mentiom things from legion are still heavy nerfed as well.
MS effect for frost.
If they keep silence as is now, make it a choice node in the general tree, not a pvp talent.
I would love all talents be viable. Ruptured Viscera as an example on paper it sounds like a neat ability but damage is low and there is a higher chance your minions explode with nothing near them to the point the talent is dead.
Rune of apocalypse should be able to switch to using without it feeling like a downgrade but again no one uses it.
All abilities should be viable so we can play without feeling forced into certain abilities for the best damage.
get rid of the leaderboards then and just go back to just killing the boss. 2h is viable, as is not using BoS. Its just that there are leaderboards that rank you and if you care at all about those leaderboards then you follow the meta instead of just whats viable.
Dots are fixed so them being on auto attacks is actually better in this case. Also, if you make diseases tick faster with haste, then you just look to getting to haste breakpoints and if you cant reach that breakpoint then haste is usually worthless. So the breakpoint would be a level where you get 1 extra tick per duration. I suggested KM being based off of FF ticks back in SL when people asked me how I would fix the issue that DW gets more KM procs than 2h. I also included that it would just feel worse to play since diseases only tick every 3 seconds so you could do like 3-9 seconds without a single KM proc and that even more changes would have to happen. Like Obliterate no longer being the rune spender.
agree, but that ship has sailed most likely.
So like the Rift Reaver soul. Its basically what you are describing except its a tank so sword and board. I think people did do dps builds with it though.
I would love Frost to tank again. Apologies if you are a Frost DK and love the DPS. I have had this issue since they took it away in Wrath. (We all hold our grudges ok?)
Frost DK would use Ice as a Shield. This ideally would give Block rating to DK. They specialize in slowing mobs around them. Mastery stat would increase Runic Power Generation.
A) Pillar of Frost is now stacking Ice Shield. Runic spender. Would love for this to be similar to Ironfur, as our main mitigation. Try and have this as maximum uptime.
B)Frostwyrm fury renamed Sindragosa’s fury. Current Breath of Sindragosa would be eliminated as it is a DPS talent.
C) D&D converts to Permafrost at level 10. Similar to Defile, this could at base decrease movement speed.
D) Frost DK now has an aura similar to devotion aura.
E) Could still Dual Wield. Maybe have one side of the Spec Tree to DWing, and the other side Two Handed. DW could have a Riposte like mechanic for counter attacks, while Two Handed could have a better Parry rating.
2)Unholy
A) AoE is Disease spread and epidemic
B) Single target is festering wounds burst.
C) The center stays the same.
D) Unholy aura applies movement buff.
E) Defile is no longer on the tree Granted at 10.
F) Frost fever and blood plague added to spec.
Blood
A) Stays relatively the same. Death strike has blood specific buff to revert changes.
B) Abomination limb is blood specific pull in.
C) Blood aura provides priest stamina buff or Death and Decay applies stacking debuffs increasing damage taken to hostiles.
Class changes
A) Capstone talent for permanent pet. Unholy Talent grants 2nd pet.
While I dont necessarily agree with you since Blood DPS is just a knockoff Warrior, Frost was indeed originally supposed to be the tanking spec. I mained Blood DPS back in Wrath because it was just cool, it had major issues with scaling which was why Unholy was always the go-to for 2H damage later on in the xpac.
Blood currently just does physical and Shadow damage, but it would be heavy on the physical as a DPS to differentiate itself from Unholy. So it would still be a knockoff Warrior.
And other than red spells instead of blue spells, how would it be different than 2H Frost? Blizzard outright said 2h Frost only exists to fill the gap that Blood DPS occupied in being a petless 2h spec.
I did love me my frost tanking in wrath, such a versatile and fun tree when all 3 had a mix of tanking/dps talents. Then there was that weird tanking spec needed to do a 3 drake sarth run which gave me a rush when we did it.
I would like my rune abilities and runic power abilities to feel more cohesive with each other. Often when im spending runes or need to spend runes i have to stop and first dump runic power. Either to get runes for the setup i just made or to maintain a buff.
Also remove the spinning plate buffs and forced uptime abilities. They dont feel “rewarding” because specs/classes are balanced with each other. Try something else.
