Let's Discuss: Frost DK Resource Management

Classes Death Knight
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About me:

I added this part since I’m planning on making a few more posts over the coming days, discussing more difficult and complicated topics (like Breath, or Obliterate, or damage buff windows, or DnD Cleave…) and I’d like you all to know where I’m coming from when I share my views.

I’ve played many private servers over the years (though I’ve spent the most time on a certain Legion server) and recently got enough spare income to allow me to finally start playing retail. I’ve always loved playing DK on every expansion I’ve played and I’ve been following retail news and changes all the time (even though I wasn’t playing it). So I know what our class has been through and all its different iterations and would consider myself qualified enough to talk about it.

Since this spare income comes at the cost of free time, I’ve mostly been playing M+ since joining retail, and I’ve only managed to play Frost (as it is my favorite spec), without trying Blood or Unholy. That’s why my posts will focus on Frost.

I’ve posted my first topic on this forum last month talking about my thoughts on the biggest problems with Frost DK, but I noticed something interesting with the replies on that topic. Talking about too many things at once failed to generate a deep and intricate discussion that I was hoping for (probably my fault, since I wasn’t really responding to people too much) and the topic stands right now with the last few posts arguing about DW vs 2H damage scaling on abilities , which is probably the least of our worries.

I realize that this is a very, VERY long-winded way of saying “prune most of the effects that give free RP or Runes”, but some people like to read and this might lead to a good discussion.

I also apparently have no self control and lack the ability to condense my thoughts into something manageable.

I want this post to be hyper focused on just one of our problems and I will be making other posts in the future talking about the others. Please refrain from going off topic and starting arguments like “delete BoS” or “delete DnD cleave” or “nerf Obliterate damage”.

For TLDR, skip to the next box with this same formatting.
This is mostly a history lesson and in-depth analysis of how this even became a problem in the first place, but after the part you skip I start making some suggestions about what could be done.

With all that out of the way, let’s go!

Starting with the Legion rework, since the spec is still fully shaped by what was created back then:

Frost is naturally in a weird spot compared to Unholy and Blood, since our main Rune spender and RP generator is an ability that costs 2 Runes. This naturally leads to us generating more RP per global, but also introduces the problem of us requiring more Runes back from spending that RP. That was solved by us having Runic Empowerment + Frost Strike combo = for 30 RP your Frost Strike has a 60% chance to instantly get a Rune back. That is unfortunately not enough, and we would still have a lot of downtime without outside factors, so we got some more toys to play with, like Murderous Efficiency talent, or our artifact weapon giving Obliterate a small chance to generate additional RP. We also got some legendaries that interacted with our resources and we were generally in a good spot.

Over the years, with different expansions coming and going we got more and more different ways to generate more resources, starting with BfA changing Empower Rune Weapon int what was previously a talent called Hungering Rune Weapon, and making Breath generate Runes on initial button press and when it ran out, and many many more. Their reasoning for introducing all of those changed from time to time (maybe at some point they wanted to help Breath upkeep, or help you get more chunky Obliterates etc.), but they were introduced nevertheless.

The biggest problem came with Dragonflight: our shiny new talent trees, which are basically a collection of “greatest hits” along with some new additions. With no fundamental changes to how the spec worked, giving us access to all of these previously mutually exclusive abilities and passive effects, we became a resource overflow machine.

Breath is pretty much permanent, Obliteration can have upwards of 5 or 6 KM buffed Obliterates in a row, and the flow of our rotation is completely non-existent. For both builds, there’s no reason to press any button other than Obliterate 90% of the time. The other times, you just refresh some upkeep cooldown, use up that Rime proc that was sitting there unused since it does abysmal damage even on AoE, or you finally stop overflowing RP to use Frost Strike (if you’re not playing Breath).

The solution seems simple, but it’s probably a lot more intricate than it seems.
(skip to here for TLDR)

That’s the main reason I wanted to make this post. After seeing Blizzard talking about this issue, I hope we can collectively come up with some ideas to help them make the right choices when working on our favorite spec and class.

  • We need to have a lot of our talents that interact with resources pruned, or at the very least make many of them choice nodes and thus mutually exclusive.
  • We need to reconsider whether having random passive RP generation is a good idea. Getting RP from auto-attacks and Frost Fever randomly doesn’t really feel good at all.
  • There should probably be a large rethinking of the costs of every single ability in our kit. Upkeep cooldowns like RW, DnD, Chill Streak and even non Rime HB all cost 1 Rune each and they are all on the global CD. This makes our opener, on AoE specifically, very clunky and forces us to go into our core rotation with only enough Runes for 1 single Obliterate and gamble on getting our random procs on that very first one in order to have a smooth experience.
  • We deserve to have more options to interact with our resources. At the moment, we only have 1 real Rune spender and 1 real RP spender (2 if you count Breath). Glacial Advance could be made viable, Frostscythe could be made viable, new abilities could be introduced as options…

My questions to all of you:

Which effects specifically should be removed? Which ones can be kept? Should some abilities have their costs changed? Any ideas how to make existing abilities like Glacial Advance or Frostscythe better (outside of just buffing their damage)? Any ides for new abilities that could be introduced?

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Fundamentaly the runes need to remove the 3 at a time and frost and unholys way of bringing runes back needs to bring back all runes on cd. Maybe that could be a talent on the class tree.

Frostscy uses could proc something by making x crit by 200%

To many abilities give oblit frost damage. So axe em all and have obliteration make oblit damage type frost passively

Should runic att that let’s AA sometimes gan rp be baseline and a talent that AA always gets rp and crits gen double or is that to warriorish

I’d like to see the return of attack horn of winter

GA could track the target to make targeting easier

Empower rune weapon are we content on how it works now?

Hb gening rp during rime

That’s my 2 cents feel free to at me

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2nd ERW and Frigid Executioner refund need to 100% go. Horn probably needs to go. AMS/AMZ generation may need a small nerf but nothing massive and are generally fine. Breath runes on cast or end could probably be removed; from the start is likely the better choice.

Obliteration generation, Rage, Murderous, and Runic Empowerment are probably fine as they are, though ME may need a nerf if KM generation stays where it’s currently at.

Runic Attenuation is fine as it.

Rip power out from KM Obliterate and bump scythe to 2 runes/make it an Obliterate replacement and it’ll be good enough.

GA is massive already and doesn’t really need anything to make it better other than being 1:1 with Frost Strike talents like Icecap, but Icecap variable CDR should be removed so that’s not really a big issue imo.

Frost could benefit massively from a 30-45s CD ability like Wake, Eye Beam, and Apocalypse, like:

Icy Touch
40s CD
Deals Frost damage to the target and nearby targets, [generates 1 KM or Rime charge] / [your next 1-3 autos applied Razorice] / , and applies Cold Heart to the targets hit for X seconds.

Cold Heart
Your auto attacks have an increased critical strike chance against against the target. Auto attack critical strikes during this time increase your attack speed by 10% for the remaining duration of Cold Heart, stacking up to N times.

Something essentially to jump start the rotation that has Oomph and will feel good to press. Then there could be talents to upgrade it and make it generate RP, grant other bonuses, etc.

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Thank you for the response, I enjoyed thinking about your ideas. Some of those were really good!

I don’t know if I like that. That would just give us even more resources than we already have, and we have too many right now. Unless you meant just remove everything that gives you Runes back, and fix the starving that would create by letting us regen all Runes at the same time. Hmm, that could actually work.

That still feels like just a damage buff to me. Not a direct buff to Frostscythe damage, but still just a damage buff. I’d rather them play around with the cost of the ability, or making it uncapped targets, or letting it proc everything that can proc from Obliterate, or something else along those lines.

I honestly disagree, but will not elaborate, since this is irrelevant to the resources discussion.

Unless they change how DW vs 2H works, this will just introduce even more problems. DW gets more auto attacks → more of them are crits → DW to 2H gap in RP generation grows even more.

I dig this a lot. This allows them to remove HoW from the resource gameplay without completely removing the ability. Might even get us a raid spot as a raid buff.
Just 1 problem: they already designed a Hero Talent that interacts with HoW, so I don’t see them changing this one.

I’m not sure that targeting is the biggest problem with GA. It just feels useless. Especially if they successfully bring Breath to 30s, every other AoE RP spender will get outshined 100%.

I like it. It’s a decent dps cooldown, as opposed just resetting your stuff so you can functionally start the whole fight over.

You can already get that with a talent. It’s just that it’s on a choice node and the other choice is way better.

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For breath remove hysteria to bring it back close to what was intended, which was a burst button.

For obliteration increase the cost of frost strike/advance dynamically like ferocious bite.

As a general thing, increase baseline rp pool to 150, to reduce the amount of overcapping.

Then do this this is more of a general thing for frost.

Remove death and decay, no more oblit cleave, frostscythe is baseline costs 2 runes, and it either replaces KM obliterate procs doing more damage to main target with both weapons, and reduced to secondary, or just baseline and it replaces oblit in aoe.

Glacial advance works with shattering blade.

Shattering blade adds the 15% from razorice.

A few other ideas, but the point was about resource management here, and i already derailed a bit.

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what should be removed? 1 charge of ERW, assimilation, maybe horn of winter

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Since apparently you can’t post multiple times in a row, I have to make this one giant wall of text to reply to 3 people at once…

I agree with this statement. And as the previous reply suggested, HoW could be turned back into a raid buff so we don’t lose the button.

Yeah, that was the first thought that came to my mind as well. That should be simple enough to implement and good enough to revive the talent.

Apparently I need to do some homework, as I didn’t know GA was good right now. Definitely will be trying it ASAP!
If the damage is good and they did make it 1:1 with Frost Strike talents like you suggested, then I guess the biggest issues would be the visuals and hitbox like the previous reply stated.

Oh I like this idea. And if they listened to your fixed Icecap reduction and made it line up with this, it could be a very strong burst window without sneakily forcing you into 100% uptime (though I would like to see some power stripped from PoF, but that’s a discussion for another day). And I see you made it 40s so it lines up with every other RW, nice!

Yeah, if they nerfed our resource generation and brought some of it back with something like this, it would make the burst window feel very interesting. Buffing not only the damage, but the gameplay as well!

Though I could see some problems rising up from this as well:
Say for example you went Deathbringer Hero Talents and you took the node that makes Reaper’s Mark 30s cd. Would you sit on it for 10s every single time just to get it to line up with your suggested Icy Touch and PoF? That tree also has an option to let Icy Talons stack up to 5. Along with this ability giving you even more attack speed, it could be a bit too much, don’t you think? With that much attack speed and a crit buff for auto attacks, you could get so may natural KM procs, you possibly wouldn’t even take Obliteration?

Still, a really good idea and I see where you were going with it, thanks for sharing!

I completely agree, but Blizzard already mentioned both of these things in their post, so let’s wait and see what they do.

That sounds simple, but very complicated at the same time. Runic Empowerment is a thing, so they can’t make Frost Strike and Glacial Advance cost scale too high. At 50 RP you would have a 100% chance to get a Rune back, which they probably don’t want you to have. And if they did let it scale above 50 RP, you would crate a very awkward play pattern, where you never let your RP go above 50 so you don’t waste Rune recharging by going above 100% chance to recharge. And in that case, having max RP be 150 would be completely irrelevant.
So, all in all, I don’t really see them doing anything like this without reworking RE, which would have a snowball effect on every other current and possible future RP spenders.

I don’t think reducing overcapping by just increasing the cap is a very healthy idea. It sounds like a band-aid solution. If FS and GA stay at 30 RP cost, this would mean 5 of those in a row once you’re capped. And if they do increase their cost and nerf RE to compensate, than we are basically in the same boat as we are right now. Just the numbers will be bigger. Nothing actually gets solved by this.

The derailment was not necessary, but ideas contained in there are ones that I generally agree with. So, nice job!

I agree with you on assimilation. And I would like to add AMS giving RP as well. Both of those defensive cooldowns having RP generation attached to them incentivizes cheesing mechanics to prolong Breath or some other RP spenders if they are ever strong enough. And using defensives offensively might be a fun idea for top end players in mythic raids or pushing high keys, but for 90%+ of players this would lead to them not having those defensives when they need them and thus dying.
And the 2nd charge of ERW and HoW were already talked about enough in this topic, so no need to beat the drum even further.

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What if empower rune weapon became a passive and just was active during CD’s? Only play oblit and in PVP so sorry if it is a stupid idea

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I honestly didn’t put much thought into PVP, since I mostly play M+ and am on a limited time schedule. So I can’t say if what I said so far in this post makes any sense for PVP, but I assume the general gameplay issues transcend content type.

As far as your suggestion goes for PVE, it sounds like a bad idea to me. I assume by active during CDs you mean just add that to Pillar of Frost, since that’s pretty much our only offensive CD baseline?

Let’s see:
assuming 100% uptime and optimal play with Icecap, PoF is anywhere between 30 - 45s CD. Let’s just call it 40s so it lines up with every other RW. It lasts for 12s, which gives it somewhere around 30% uptime. Current ERW is 2mins cd with 20s duration, so around 16% uptime.

Your proposed change would pretty much double ERW uptime, when most people in this thread agree that just having 2 charges is already too much. If they were to do this, it would require serious nerfs to ERW’s effect (and probably brick our class outside PoF just to even it out).

Not to mention the already existing problem of way too much of our overall power coming from PoF windows to begin with. Adding even more to that would be a huge step in the wrong direction.

I just don’t see a world where this makes sense (for PVE).

Please never say this again. There’s nothing to be sorry for. The entire point of this thread is to share ideas! If it turns out they are bad, who cares? At least we get to think and talk about them.

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The general idea is that i want to keep the feeling of this current rotation for obliteration because i do actually like it.

But at the same time make rp spender consume more, you’re gonna generate about as many resources, but also consume them faster. For runic empowerment they can just take inspiration from ruthlessness, where if you go above 100% chance the extra change is simply to give you another rune.

The problem is not rune generation, the problem is that obliteration does not consume enough RP.

And since i’m usually not a fan of resource generation nerfs, i try to come up with alternative ideas that keep the high resource gen while also dealing with overcapping, or at least deal with it as much as possible.

For breath though, simply making it consume more rp is likely not enough, so i’m fine with taking hysteria out of the picture.

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I see, and I commend you on striving towards this goal with your ideas. It is definitely an interesting thought experiment.
But I’m not sure it’s actually achievable. And this is why:

I believe Rune generation is actually the problem here. Let’s imagine a scenario that does actually happen to me from time to time when playing this spec:

You have 3 runes up and 3 recharging. 2 of those are about to come back at the same time, as you spent them on Obliterate. And the 3rd one doesn’t matter, apart from being spent after those other 2.
You have a KM proc up and you press your Obliterate. You proc both Frigid Executioner and Murderous Efficiency. So now you spent 2 Runes, but got back 3 from procs. So you have 4 Runes now, and before your GCD is over, the 2 that were recharging finish that.

You just went from 3 Runes to 6 in 1 GCD by spending 2 Runes. And now you have to spend those runes immediately to not waste the recharge mechanic. Even if you got a Rime proc, even if you’re full RP, even if you don’t like it, you WILL press Obliterate. Because that’s the correct thing to do.

That is ridiculous to me. There should be no world in which you use your highest rune cost ability, and come out of that GCD with more runes than you had going into it.

But let’s imagine they leave it like this, and add your idea:

so we could in theory get 2 (or maybe even 3 if the cost is uncapped) Runes back from a single global while RP dumping? That just means you spend even less time pressing RP spenders and go back to only pressing Obliterate.
At that point might as well remove RP as a mechanic and just make Obliterate our only attack.

My point in all of this is:

There is no amount of RP cost increase that can make any difference if you can go 10+ seconds without spending RP. I’ve had numerous instances where my Icy Talons and Unleashed Frenzy drop off because I have enough Rune generation to not even need to spend RP in the first place. Frost Strike could cost 100 RP for all I care, I would still not press that button if I have 3 or more Runes available. And that’s the real problem in all of this.

We have so many Runes and Obliterate does so much, that you will always press that button if you can. That is just not a rotation. It’s 1 button spam with occasional annoying interruptions.

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They are addressing resources so no you arent going to be generating the same amount as now.

There is a reason for this, the amount of runes gained from spending runes, KM procs giving runes, and getting an asinine amount of KM procs to the point where Obliterate is basically at 100% crit. Its not that it doesnt consume enough RP, Obliteration builds dont want to consume RP unless it absolutely has to. There is no reason to use Frost Strike over Obliterate because Obliterate is going to do over double that of Frost Strike.

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I believe Lenegis meant in their hypothetical situation, where their idea was implemented, you would generate the same amount of Runes as you do now. Not that you’re going to in the next expansion.

Other than that nitpick, I obviously completely agree with you, as we basically posted the same opinion, I just used way too many words to share mine.