I actually think they work better as passives given the way talent trees are now. The third talent in that row would likely never be chosen and that means we would have a dead talent and a whole row with no real choice in it.
As a passive that still provides the needed balancing and (hopefully) a meaningful choice to be made in a talent row.
I think you gotta stop taking my ideas bro 
Hunters in 9.0 Prepatch - #10 by Foctordreeze-fenris
https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/2534775-Triple-Playstyle-Trees-A-Talent-System-Idea
And what is your point exactly? Like I have said ToT has been baked into the spec.
A lot of classes do have options, Shadow Priests have a good deal of options with only very few talents not worth taking because the other 2 perform their job better. Like Surrender to Madness just doesnt meet up with the other 2 choices because it kills you and a long void form isnt as powerful as it once was. A dead dps is going to do less damage and dps than those that stay alive.
With the Frost dk a lot of the choices just pale in comparison.
I just really dont know why people have a problem with fixing the actual issues between the weapon sets and rather come up with something that is potentially hard to balance and is pretty complicated overall. Keeping things simple for a relatively simple issue is almost always the best possible choice.
How about instead just come up with a spec that you just like to play ignoring the weapon set. I was DW in wrath with heavy hitting Obliterates some people getting as high as 28k obliterates in pvp, and on average people were critting 24-26k in ICC gear.
Look at it more like a warlock that is picking up a staff instead of a main hand off hand set. Just make a spec you would like to play, and the talents to accompany it.
I for one would bring more damage to abilities, change Frostscythe to replace Obliterate, cost 2 runes, and be less than Obliterate so it doesnt take over in single target (have to solve for mastery stacking) becoming the cleave option. Change KM to do something other than just give a crit when its entirely based on critting regularly enough to get a steady flow that the ability becomes useless since it gives a guaranteed crit. Maybe it changes your Obliterate to a 3 strike frost attack, maybe it just bypasses all armor.
Rework talents or just remove them that clearly arent worth picking up. Inexorable Assault is just Obliterate frost damage every 8 seconds. There is absolutely no way someone is going to sit around in a fight for 40 minutes to get a full 5 stack to obliterate. If thats the case you would use it like 4 times in a fight so ultimately its Obliterate does additional frost damage every 8 seconds. Either just change it to do a portion of frost damage all the time, or replace it. Icy Talons is another one where it just doesnt live up to Cold Heart.
Frostscythe Frozen Pulse and Avalance is another row, since Frostscythe puts up Razorice on all targets and with enough mobs it works well with Icecap the other 2 just dont live up to what it actually does. It can even replace Obliterate with KM procs since a single Frostscythe does more than half an Obliterate crit so for the resources spent its a better option since 2 Frostscythe crits would be more than a single obliterate.
Member when icy talons was a group buff? I member…
Who necro’d this thread? Pretty sure Blizz knows most DKs want an option to Duel Wield/2h with any Spec, just like Warriors who want to at least be able to Duel Wield 1hers as fury.
You’d think they could find a way to make it work with transmog if they can’t balance the specs with different weapon types but that would take precious time away from designing new shop mounts and pets for Shadowlands.
Yes Improved Icy Talons, pretty sure it was 20% attack speed to the raid, you got another 5% on top of the 20% you got from Icy Talons and then with Unholy Presence it put you at 30% attack speed. Not clunky and double what it provides now.
Did Frost DK use to tank? With 2 handed weapons?
@Graendoll: I figure that having them as a talent would probably make it easier to code in regards to loot drops. Otherwise, they’d have to put an extra button in the loot choice drop-down, which would be messy, or have both types of weapons drop for everyone, which would cause some gnashing of teeth on the forums.
@Foctordreeze: Well, great minds think alike, and sometimes I get lucky!
There’s a lot more to this post, but I’m gonna hone in on this part, because I think it’s the crux of the issue; a fundamental difference in design philosophy. Let’s start with some ground work here and lay out a base level of things we (probably) agree on.
People will always find something to complain about.
The world first pushing theorycrafters will always do all the math, figure out what is numerically the best, and use that. People will use their work to make guides, and for the most part the people who are trying to optimize their numbers will follow along.
There will always be people who don’t give a poop about being optimized.
Ok, are those all things we can agree on? Good. Let’s move along to the main event, design philosophy. I like player agency, I like RPG elements in my RPGs. At WoW’s inception, there was a good amount of this. We had full talent trees, you could make hybrid specs between them or go all out and specialize. There were tons of options for gear depending on what stats you were going for. Sure, it was an unbalanced mess, but it was a fun mess.
They continued with this design philosophy through WotLK, and it was my favorite era for the game. Balance was never (and will never be) perfect but the got better with it as time went on. Cata cut down a bit on the player agency by making you hit the bottom of one tree before picking a second, and MoP, for all it did right, introduced our current talent…not tree, chart I guess? Regardless, it started us down the path we’re on now, with spec fantasy over class fantasy, to the point that today every spec is basically its own standalone class. This is not where I want to be.
I want fun choices. I want talents to fundamentally alter the playstyle. I want to play around with strange combinations and just see what happens, experiment and see if I can find unexpected synergies. I don’t care if it’s balanced, I’ll find it fun.
Your design philosophy seems to be to simplify things in pursuit of balance. For you, balance is the highest goal. In your post you even advocating removing talents entirely if they can’t be balanced properly. You say to come up with a spec that you find fun and make it consistent, but as shown throughout the various scattered threads, not everyone is going to find the same things fun.
It seems our design philosophies are fundamentally opposed. Can we agree on that too?
The way I am approaching the problem though does not prevent what you are asking for, it just wouldn’t come into play with having a different weapon. That’s why I said to think of it like getting a staff or main hand offhand for the warlock. It’s just basically turning the weapons into stat sticks.
Then you can freely do things with the talents like they were intended. Different combinations for different situations. We have 2 different playstyles right now, Icecap build and breath. It’s not drastic like say DW perma-pet blood that you could do. The talents are to be situational, it’s just the frost dk talents are pretty bad in that regard.
Every 8 seconds obliterate does x more damage. Wow that’s really going to shake things up. Auto attacks pulse frost damage if you have less than 3 runes. Consuming Rime does x extra damage to targets hit.
I just don’t think it’s smart to split the weapons. Like you said with wrath, it was your favorite era yet there was no difference between DW and 2h frost other than you didn’t pick up 2 talents and put them in something else. They played the same, diseases up, convert blood runes to death runes, use obliterate and dump with rune strike. There was also rime, and you didn’t worry about km since it was up so much.
There are maaany things I want back. I want to see how long runes would recharge like we used to be able to see, I want obliterate to play with diseases again to reward good play, I want the wrath rune system back, pestilence to spread diseases to again reward proper play, Rime to give runic power like it used too just to name stuff that came to my head.
But at the end of the day, there can be different builds with this talent system, it’s just a problem with blizzard, and they said there wouldn’t be any major changes.
Even with my solution for the weapons, there are still other problems like say for example loot. How would they do that with the loot system now? So you tell the system frost gets either a 1h or 2h weapon, and all you get are 1h weapons, or someone likes DW and just gets 2h weapons.
It’s a different game made by a different dev team than what was back then though it doesn’t mean you can’t look back to see what worked and what didn’t. It just seems like this dev team can’t do it.
I guess we agree on more than I thought, not the least of which is that frost talents are garbage right now. The biggest difference seems to be that you seem to not want them to implement big changes if they can’t be balanced, whereas I don’t care about the balance as long as it’s fun.
That was part of my initial suggestion there. I don’t want to necessarily require a talent to equip either weapon set, but it could definitely enhance one or the other and have some kind of system flag that tells the loot system which weapons to distribute.
Oh wow, kelliste just can’t stop even when people start ignoring her huh?
I’ve never seen someone so avid to antagonize everyone on these foruns
I mean. To be fair, we were having an actual conversation, so I’m fine with that.
Want a friendly advise? Don’t bother with her.
The exact same conversation has been done with a lot of people here and it aways falls in the same arguments with walls of text (by her part).
Trumpknigh, Dreadmoore and a few others had fall in the exacly same trap you are falling with, and a lot of them just decided to ignore her.
This recent back and forth is the best discussion this thread has seen. It is civil, each of them are building on each other’s ideas and looking to where they see eye to eye. I appreciated reading it.
Begone with your dismissive antagonizing behaviour Grommar.
Seriously, focus on discussing how 2H could work for you. Not on trying to bait people into pointless arguments.
And if that is too hard for you, then take your own advice: ignore and move on.
If you want to read the same arguments as the other dozen 2h threads gor for it.
Didn’t imagine someone would be so butthurt about my post lol
It was not an argument, that is the problem. It seems like you missed the transition.
It was finally a discussion and I would hate for it to go downhill again.
I deliberately tried to break the argument cycle but apparently you missed that part. We were covering ground we hadn’t directly covered before and were being civil about it.
Or, and its something I completely overlooked, was if you want 2h you just choose Unholy for your loot specialization, and stay Frost for 1h weapons. They pull from the exact same loot table its just one has 1h drops and the other has 2h drops.
That is correct.
If they gave unholy the option to DW as well they could just rename the loot options “Dual Wield” and “Two Handed” to avoid confusion.