Let's Discuss: Pillar of Frost

Classes Death Knight
1

Another long post from me, hyper focusing on a single spell. Hope y’all are ready to read and share your thoughts.

TLDR:
I firmly believe this spell is way too overloaded. It holds so much power that all of our spells need to hit like wet noodles outside PoF windows to compensate. It has proc based CDR that forces 100% uptime even outside the buff window when you’re doing healer level damage. It’s even getting a proc based RNG duration increase in TWW apparently, making it even more powerful. It just does way too much!
End of TLDR.

Let’s look at what PoF was prior to Legion:

  • 1 minute CD
  • 20 seconds duration
  • 20% strength buff
  • immunity to knockbacks, which was later moved to Death’s Advance (good change imo)

That’s it! Nothing more, nothing less.

Then Legion started messing around with the ability by adding increased frost damage during PoF in our artifact weapon trees and introducing a legendary that does the same thing. Icecap was also first introduced at the tail end of Legion.

After that, it all started going downhill in BfA and it just kept piling on every expansion since.

Now we have this:

  • 1min CD
  • 12s duration
  • 25% strength buff
  • additional strength stacking from spending runes
  • 20% strength buff after our PoF is over, the duration of which stacks during PoF
  • additional mastery for 15s after pressing PoF (very weird duration, lines up with nothing)
  • proc based CDR that forces 100% uptime even when the ability is on cooldown
  • our main gameplay altering talent, the one that is supposed to be the most powerful, the most impactful, the most build defining ability we have, Obliteration, is just built into PoF (it used to be a separate button on a longer cooldown)
  • now they’re apparently adding RNG duration increase, which makes the strength stacking and Enduring Strength even more powerful, as well as giving us even more uptime on Obliteration…

We went from a simple, reasonable damage buff for a fixed duration on a fixed cooldown to all of that!

How are we supposed to do any damage outside PoF when it does all of that? If we do decent damage outside PoF, it goes through the roof once we press that button, so the only way to balance us is to make us do healer level damage when the ability is not active.

But even during those times, you can’t chill, you can’t do mechanics, you can’t lose any uptime, because you need to keep proccing the CDR to get back into the mode of actually doing damage. It’s ridiculous!

The gameplay pattern this creates is the most toxic thing I’ve ever experienced (aside from DnD cleave of course, but that’s a topic for another day):
Just think about that one person that does abysmal damage, but refuses to do any mechanics and wants to just stand there and hit the boss. That is every Frost DK outside PoF windows. And that’s by design, not by choice! That is simply ludicrous!

My proposed fixes:

  • completely gut the ability and most of the talents that interact with it
  • remove the stacking strength buff
  • remove Enduring Strength
  • either remove Frostwhelp’s Aid, or make it last as long as PoF (I like the idea of a specific talent that makes our CDs stronger on AoE only)
  • rework Icecap into a fixed reduction (I think 40s CD would be ideal to line up with every other RW cast and make every 3rd PoF line up with Breath)
  • make Obliteration into a separate button with double the cooldown of PoF with Icecap taken (so 80s CD)
  • buff the baseline PoF duration back to 20s
  • make the new duration increasing talent into a fixed duration increase, or a power increase that interacts with auto-attacks specifically (increase the chance of Icy Death Torrent to 100% during PoF or something like that)

All of these changes would make PoF much weaker, so we could receive a sweep of buffs to baseline damage to compensate for the extreme loss of power. I believe this would make Frost infinitely better and more forgiving to play, while still keeping PoF as a meaningful damage cooldown.

14 Likes
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MY TAKE:

  • Change Remorseless Winter to 30 second Cooldown.
  • Buff Remorseless Winter base damage to compensate.
  • Pillar of Frost to a passive that activates when casting Remorseless Winter
  • Remove Strength stacking aspect of Pillar of Frost.
  • Make Ice Caps add the Pillar of Frost’s Strength stacking to Remorseless Winter.

This I feel is the core issue frost has and it is based around Pillar of Frost. To me Frost is trying to be similar to a Feral druid where you wanting to be on target for these short burst windows and then off target for a while, but Ice Caps is forcing you to stay on target 100% of the time to get any form of value out of Pillar. If you are off target during pillar, you lose tons of damage, if you are off target while Pillar is on CD you are losing tons of damage. It is a lose lose like you said.

Personally I think actually playing into the Strength stacking would be better as it has extremely high synergy with the Gathering Storm talent and rune dumping is the core of every build in Frosts kit, even obliterate since it has a back and forth feel with the Frost Strike Obliterate back and forth. Resource dumping DURING burst feels like the best part of Frost but having to manage all the time due to Ice Caps is killing the spec. I know Pillar feels iconic but with it off the GCD it feels like it should play a lot more like Feral’s Tiger’s Fury spell

3 Likes
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I am firstly going to focus on this:

I see what you mean, but Strength stacking and Gathering Storm are fundamentally different in what they do.

GS only increases the damage and duration of RW, a single damaging ability. It existing only means that the damage of that one single ability has to be balanced around the uptime you can reasonably get with optimal play. And it also has a cap on the damage increase, meaning it can never get out of control.

Strength stacking, on the other hand, involves everything you do, and means that your entire kit has to be tuned around it existing. It also means that your most damaging abilities (like FWF or the new Frostscythe or the last KM Obliterate on st) should be used at the last possible moment, when the buff is the most stacked, for optimal damage. And those abilities are also tuned around the damage they do when used that way.

But what happens if you miss your timing? What happens if a mechanic stuns you or you get a lag spike or other classes with front-loaded AoE kill the enemies before you’re done stacking your strength buff or any one of the 100 different things that could make you miss the big moment? What then?
You are then sitting at the bottom of the meters depressed, wishing you weren’t forced into this awkward mini-game of waiting for buff to stack up, in order to use your cool spells.

Glad we agree on something. This is, without a doubt, the biggest issue with PoF in it’s current form.

As for this big cook:

Pillar with 30s cooldown but 15+ seconds duration every single time, with Strength stacking (from Icecap) and Obliteration (i guess it would still be part of Pillar in your example) would be absolutely ridiculous. And remember: with Bloodlust and/or ERW, getting RW to 20+ seconds duration is fairly easy.

Having Obliteration for all that time, while also stacking strength astronomically high from Icecap, would be like current PoF, but 100x worse. You would never do any damage outside RW windows. If you got bad rng and dropped RW early, you might as well just walk away from you PC until it comes back from CD.

I like the idea of combining RW and PoF, but it has to be without strength stacking and without Obliteration. Having those two things with so much uptime would completely break the spec.

1 Like
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The idea would be that Pillar would remain a shorter 12 second window. This would act as a short burst phase allowing high damage burst windows with weaker 20 second down times in between, simular to an unholy ramp but you get that instant strength bump, a 30 second instead of 45 second window, and more front loaded damage. Kinda more in line with the “Snap shotting” style that Feral has.

Well, you would lose damage. But that can be said about any class. Uptime for melee is always a balancing act. Either you can have high amounts of consistent damage like fury or demon hunter, or you can have higher burst DPS where windows are important like a ret paladin or a monk. Thats not to say any of these don’t have some sustain or burst either, but rather their focus of where the major niche of their damage profile comes from. Paladins are incredibly good at bursting down large packs of enemies on a 1 minute CD, but outside those windows do lower average damage making it important to time their CDs more so then other specs. DH do incredibly high sustained damage but require lots of uptime compensated by their high mobility allowing easy following fo targets.

Frost DK I would argue lies closer to wanting to be like Ret. It has the lower mobility, a 1 minute CD (at base) and Remorseless which is somewhat compareable to Wake of Ashes. When Ice Caps is brought into the mix, it basically is a 30second version of Rets 1 minute CD windows damage profile wise. The way I see it they can either dial into a 30 second window profile or elongate the damage windows to be 1 minute. Setting it to 1 minute might make it closer to Ret style of play though which would remove uniqueness from its damage profile.

The game play would be 12 seconds of stacking, followed by a 10-16 seconds of medium damage from Enduring Strength talent and a 4-8ish second pooling phase where you save runes for your next burst phase.

To that Point I would say that Enduring Strength then is more the issue then Pillar of Frost as Enduring restricts the out of burst dps damage more then Pillar. Pillar restricts peak damage but if Enduring is always buffing you then you always have to have weaker spells/abilities which I think is your point saying you want general spells to be stronger.

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Pillar needs a set cooldown time to sync with other cooldowns better, and the scaling strength needs to be removed and that power built into our abilities baseline. Having to wait until the absolute last second to use Frostwyrms Fury to maximise its damage feels bad.

4 Likes
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Pillar, KM, along with maintenance buffs, are the exact reason why the sustain damage is so piss poor.

Pillar 100% needs to be changed imo. But some people I guess like that type of playstyle? I clearly don’t. I’d love for Pillar to be a regular dps Cooldown, fixed cd, fixed str buff, and give capstones to modify it. Then, buff sustain damage.

Or instead of icecap, make a choice node that modifies Pillar in a way. Maybe 1 has a shorter CD, while the other makes it lasts longer?

4 Likes
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So let me get this straight: you would have RW do it’s current 8s duration AoE damage, with increased damage and duration from GS and all the other talents that affect it, while also putting a random strength buff that interacts with your whole kit into that same button, but keeping it a different duration, so it doesn’t even line up with the ability it’s integrated into in the first place?

The point of combining spells into a single button is to make them act as one, have the same cooldown, have the same duration, achieve the same goal. But your proposed idea is to just give it the same CD, without any other changes. You could basically get the same effect from just making a macro that casts both spells at the same time and calling it a day.

But there’s no front loaded damage if you’re stacking an ever increasing strength buff and waiting for the last possible moment to use your big hitters. That’s the exact opposite of front loaded.

Front loaded would be if there was no strength stacking, and you could just use PoF and immediately follow up with FWF and the new Frostscythe and just nuke the whole pack immediately. That’s front loaded.

Yes, but every other class doesn’t have to wait for the last possible second to use their big spells. DH can just pop everything and keep doing their rotation. Rogues can just pop everything and keep doing their rotation, same for Ret or Monks or Warriors or whatever. If they lose uptime, who cares? They already did their big stuff, now it’s just about keeping it going. And they also have way more mobility to get back on target.

But not us. We have to use PoF, do our rotation optimally (deal with all the other bull$h!t bad design like Cleaving Strikes and Icy Talons), and then, when the buff is about to expire, when it’s the most powerful (when the trash pack is already dead), only then are we allowed to use the cool stuff like FWF or the new Frostscythe. It just feels bad to play.

Isn’t this exactly what PoF does now? 12s of increasing buff extreme burst, 10-16s of Enduring Strength medium damage (except it’s not actually medium, it’s more like abysmal), and the rest is preparing for the next extreme burst? What exactly would be the change, other than nerfing RW’s cooldown and removing a button from your action bars?

But if Enduring is always buffing you, than it’s pretty much part of your baseline damage anyway. And the 20% strength is so miniscule compared to what PoF gives, that it becomes pretty much irrelevant.

Don’t get me wrong, I 100% agree that Enduring is part of the problem and removing it would be an improvement, but I believe that it’s nowhere close to being the biggest issue.

If peak damage is so high from all the strength you can stack up, the 40% mastery (on AoE), the limitless KM procs,… and the cooldown is so short that you get that peak fairly often (every 30 - 40s), then it completely destroys your damage outside the peak window, no matter the 20% str buff you get afterwards.

1 Like
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Obviously just like how damage tweeking is needed, so to would duration tweeking.

You took this WILDLY out of context. My original meaning…

…isn’t that its 100% front loaded like a wake of ashes, dragon’s roar, or Frostwyrm’s Fury, but that it is MORE front loaded when compared to Unholy’s diseases, Undead, and buff stacking wombo combo they have on a 45 second CD. A better example is that a 12 second window every 30 seconds is MORE front loaded then feral druid’s 30 second bleed snap shotting where you apply all your bleeds in a 10-15 second window, but require the target to stay alive the WHOLE time to get max value out of bleeds. The 12 second window would “frontload” what would be Feral’s bleed damage or unholy’s disease and pet damage.

Good point. I will say it is a dps rotation philosophy change to not have them be used at the end. Personally I don’t mind it as much, but then again I made a custom weak aura to deal with it which is further evidence to your point. Only potential change I could see is if they did something like have FWF and other CD’s do a dot as well where the dot increases in damage the lower health the target gets. That way you dump at the start and let the dot ramp with the rest of your damage. Not saying they should do that but only fix I could see but I agree that shows issue with those abilities atleast.

Yes and no. Yes this is how the buff profile theoretically plays, but Ice caps forces that “medium” and damage phase to be sustained otherwise Pillar is garbage long CD or doesn’t line up.

The change would be that you have a 12 second window (Same as is now) but then you don’t have to CONSTANTLY be in combat. You can go do mechanics, use CCs/utilities that are on the GCD outside those burst windows without directly harming your burst CD line up with every button press, dodge mechanics more easily without losing damage.

Basically make rotation smoother and much less punishing out of burst gameplay.

Yea, thats why I think they should replace it and just bake the damage baseline into the abilites instead (Which I think is something we agree on by the sound of it). I don’t mind strength stacking during my window to buff my window, but it shouldn’t hurt my out of burst damage too if I mess up or something.

Fair point. At the end of the day I think I am looking more to try and make it more like an arms warrior style of play and your looking more for a fury style. I do agree that damage needs to be pulled out of the burst and into some of the sustain, but doing too much will ruin a lot of the current Frost identity. And maybe the identity should change, but I find devs are a lot less willing to completely change a classes/specs identity without atleast try to make the current vision work.

To me the priority should be:

  • Fix Frost CD’s to feel smoother and less clunky
  • Damage tune to see if smooth version is worth keeping
  • Overhaul/prune/redesign properties that fail to work (Like strength stacking)
1 Like
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First of all, I just have to say that I’m enjoying this back and forth very much. You make great points, even though I tend to disagree with some of them.

Yeah, I get it. They could theoretically combine PoF and RW into a single button and tweak talents that affect them around that being a thing. It could work, and it could make the spec better, but let’s not beat a dead horse anymore. The idea is interesting, but we both know it ain’t happening. I’m 99% sure they will never remove or integrate PoF into another button.

I apologize for that, I was half asleep when writing the previous response. I understand now, it wouldn’t be completely front-loaded, just more front loaded than dots and other ramping damage that starts from 0. Pillar starts at 25% increased strength (and 40% increased mastery if you have Frostwhelps on AoE), so it’s more front loaded than those things, while still not actually being fully front loaded.

So the exact same thing that could be achieved by just making Icecap a fixed CD reduction?
The only difference with your idea is that you would also force RW to line up with PoF by cramming them together. This would also introduce downtime into RW as well, since getting enough haste and Runes to keep it going for 30s is pretty much impossible (and since they would probably also do some tweaks to it to make it line up with PoF duration). That downtime in all CDs would definitely allow us to do some other important tasks. That could work.

I personally like the idea of them being separate and PoF being double the CD of RW, but I could see some people liking your idea more.

Yes, we do agree on that. Just delete the talent. It’s in no way interesting or impactful.

Ain’t that the truth.

This is a decent priority list. We can all just hope they actually do something about all of that.

But while we’re still talking about this, how about this whole redesign? (mostly CD timings, nothing too fancy):

  • RW: still 20s CD with the current timing of GS
  • PoF 1min CD baseline, 15s duration, 20% strength with a ramp of only 1% per rune spent (i would ideally remove the stacking part, but oh well…)
  • Icecap just reduces PoF CD to 45s flat, no procs or gimmicks or anything
  • Remove Enduring Strength
  • Definitely nerf Frostwhelps mastery buff. 40% on 5+ targets is insane
  • Obliteration a separate ability with 90s CD and 15s duration
  • FWF as it is currently (3min CD, 90s CD with Absolute Zero)
  • ERW 90s CD, can keep the current power level to compensate for the loss of the 2nd charge
  • Breath 90s CD to line up with everything else (would require a lot of rebalancing to reduce it’s duration)
  • And of course buff baseline damage of most spells to compensate for the nerf to PoF

The goal is to give us a consistent damage profile with decent 45s mini burst windows and a big 90s burst window to make us feel powerful. It would unfortunately make Breath and Obliteration have the same damage profile pretty much, which I’m not really happy about. But I have no idea how I would fix that without an even bigger redesign. And we all know a bigger redesign than this is not happening.

What do you think about that?

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Pillar and maintenance buffs, sure, but Killing Machine is rotational, and by proxy, part of the sustained damage that’s so low. Killing Machine and the excessive number of % strength buffs in the kit bounce off of each other to hit very high single strikes when the stars align, but at the end of the day, it’s the percent based mainstat modifiers that are doing most of the work. A KM strike, with all appicable talents, without any maintenance buffs or CDs, like Enduring Strength, Fallen Crusader, PoF, trinkets, etc, does very, very little actual damage. Killing Machine is literally nothing without the nonsensical multiplicative self buffing that Frost has been doing for the past couple expansions.

Agree.

Even obliteration proponents are against the way CD loading is right now. Killing Machine being problematic in its curent design has less to do with Killing Machine, and more to do with the excessive number of passive and semi-passive buffs. If our spells actually did respectable baseline damage, we wouldn’t need to line up more than a dozen buffs to strength and frost damage in order to make a spell with baseline tank dam, do a million outgoing damage per swing. Right now, ideal KM procs are basically making Oblit do 10x damage, when it should only be in the range of 3x, with a baseline damage that isn’t in the utter toilet when unaugmented.

When you have to stack a billion and a half modifiers to make your spells do more than tank dam, all of your spells need to have sub-trash levels of baseline damage tuning, otherwise they’ll be amped way too hard. But the issue is, the ramping isn’t fun to do.

Frost is never at its best when it is a spinning plates spec. It is supposed to be a very simple spec. The gameplay identity that DK pushes also suggests that Frost should be a direct damage spec, with heavy up-front and easy to establish damage, while Unholy should be more oriented around setup, backloaded damage, and maintenance. While on the surface, this looks true, after putting a hundred hours into each spec each season, it’s really apparent that Unholy has a much easier to maintain damage profile, that’s both less punishing and less backloaded. I have literally 0 clue how Frost has ended up more backloaded than ‘Cooldowns: The Spec’, but that’s how it feels right now.

8 Likes
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I’ll be honest, I actually like your 40second Idea better with 20 second RW and 60 second Pillar of Frost with a fixed 20 second CDR for it from Ice Caps. the idea of a 20 sec small, 40 sec medium, and X second large burst phase sounds really fun. The main issue and why I was leaning more for the 30 second was kind of because of the way CDs are timed atm as well as the Hero Talent Rider of the Apocalypse tree.

With the RotA tree, a 30 second phase would be ideal because it would line up with both the 2 minute Sindragosa, and the 1.5 minute RotA cap stone where Frostwyrm’s Fury spawns all the horseman for 20 seconds.

This would fix most of the line up issues but introduces 2 main issues.
First, it would line up with Frostwyrm’s Fury and RotA Horseman as you mentioned but I would imagine that would inevitably lead to the conclusion: Why not just build for both? I feel like keeping the 1.5 minute Frostwyrm RotA and the 2 minute Sindragosa build seprate would be best, especially when you consider the new 1 minute CD Reaper’s Mark in the Deathbringer Hero Talent tree.

The other issue of the 1.5 minute (and 45 second) windows is that it would line up exactly with Unholy burst windows, which kinda ruins some unique damage profile potential too which I know the devs like to keep. EXPECIALLY when it comes to 2 specs on the same class.

This kinda gave me another thought that maybe would work well without overhauling/hymoginizing the Sindragosa and Frostwyrm builds.

What if it leaned into the 30 second, 1 minute, 1.5 minute, and 2 minute timers a bit. This would keep it unique from the 45 second, 1.5 minute, and 3 minute timers Unholy has.

CHANGES

  • Remorseless Winter cooldown increased to 30 seconds
  • Remorseless Winter damage buffed
  • PoF changed to a 15s duration and remove strength ramping. Remains 60 second CD baseline.
  • Enduring Strength redesigned and becomes a CHOICE NODE with Ice Caps
  • Damage Tuning as needed of course.

Choice node:

Ice Caps- reduces CD of Pillar of frost by 30 seconds flat.
Enduring Strength- Adds X% Strength per rune spent during Pillar of Frost.

COMMENTS:

This would keep the 2 distinct builds: Frostwyrm RotA using the 30 second CDR of Ice Caps and remove clunkiness of Ice Caps. And Breath of Sindragosa with Reaper’s Mark keeping the 1 minute CD but with the scaling since it likes to dump resources and benifits more from the scaling anyways.

The tuning changes would be far less taxing compared to overhauling all the 2 minute CDs such as Sindragosa and Empower Rune Weapon as well as keep the 2 minute line up with other CDs like the new 1 minute CD of Reaper’s Mark, Abom Limb, and Raise Dead. But would add cooldown line up for the 1.5 minute RotA Horseman and the 30 second Horn of winter too making swapping back and forth much easier without friction

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Yes, I realized this while writing the post, but couldn’t think of a way around it tbh.

I’ll be completely honest, reading this made me half walk, half jump around my apartment like an excited little girl thinking of the possibilities. This is everything I could ever ask for, and then some more. How do we force the DK dev to read this?

A completely unique damage profile, built in protection from taking degenerate talent combinations, multiple levels of CD alignment, gameplay opportunities, the list goes on!

Let’s get the big one out of the way:
I would make Obliteration separate from PoF in this instance and I would make it 90s CD. This is to prevent it from just having a straight 50% uptime, with PoF being 15s duration and 30s CD. This would also force you into picking Icecap to get PoF and Obliteration to line up, thus losing the strength stacking effect.
This instantly removes all the problems of strength stacking from Obliteration builds. No more waiting for FWF, no more waiting for Frostscythe, no more sweating, maximizing every global in order to make that last Obliterate hit as large as possible…

It would also line up perfectly with FWF, thus benefiting from all the buffs from RotA Hero talents. But it would also line up with Deathbringer, since that tree has a choice node to make Reaper’s Mark 30s CD.

This means you instantly have a choice between:
30s mid burst + 90s huge burst or
30s strong burst + 90s slightly stronger burst.
And that’s all within Obliteration!

As for Breath:
You unfortunately get forced into Deathbringer, but that seems to be the case anyway. But you can choose to make it 30s CD or 1 min CD without worrying about it lining up. It also allows you to stack Icy Talons to 7 stacks (with the correct talent build in the main spec tree), which is easy to keep up with Breath.

You can also take the strength stacking version of PoF without the degenerate play pattern of waiting for the last moment for the big hitters, since all your big hitters are just constant damage. So you just pop everything and go to town!
This would also make the damage more front-loaded, since you would get a ramping burst for the first 15s, and then lose the buff for the next 45s, during which Breath would ideally fall off. Making the difference between 30s and 40s Breath much smaller.

Playing this would make me so happy! Please, someone at Blizzard, make this happen!

1 Like
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Imagine if you didn’t need a km proc for a rotational ability to scale with mastery >_< . It wish it wouls be reworked so you didnt need the procs for the button to actually feel okay to press.

But as you mentioned, frost is the cooldown spec currently. I think the current changes are promising,(still beeds work) but really want pillar, km, and the stacking buffs to change or go away.

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If it were up to me Frost strike would be physical damage, cost two runes, and be a moderate damage builder. I would have Obliterate be the RP spender and naturally do high frost damage. I would then make Killing Machine force crit your next Obliterate or Howling Blast.

I think the spec would flow much better and keep Obliterate as the big hitter ability while still allowing the base kit to not be completely anemic.

I realize this would just be swapping names around, but it should appease both the RP crowd and the gameplay crowd.

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That’s asking to remove either Frostreaper or the guaranteed crit portion of KM. Nothing wrong with that but there’s 0 constraints on Obliterate and wanting it to “feel okay to press” is asking for either the rest of the baseline kit to get gutted some more or for KM to get gutted.

And again, that’s fine, but baseline Obliterate is weak for a reason and that reason is KM with big Obliterates. Making baseline Obliterate do any amount of Frost baseline is essentially asking for a 30% nerf to its tooltip damage to see the same number that you currently would.

This wouldn’t change much of anything for the better. With how Frost currently is, this would actually ruin the spec. And having “Frost Strike” deal physical damage is just worse from an RP perspective than Obliterate “not Obliterating”.

In all I don’t think capitulating more design space to appease a minority crowd again is the right idea.

16

Nah, it’s asking to remove the some odd 40%+ strength modifiers that we hardly have the capacity to interact with. Like fr, check your character’s strength stat out of combat, get to a training dummy, and then get your procs, items like trinkets and potion, and abilities rolling and check that strength stat. It’s actually really dumb, and is a huge problem for Frost’s overall game feel, on every subspec and weapon preference.

Frostreaper and the crits are fine design wise, but they put obliterate in a positon where the crit+mastery scaling leads for Obliterate to hyperscale on main stat. Why have so much % mainstat gain in the kit, when we know we have a hyperscaling ability like this? Like they’ve created an obvious math situation, yea when you have multiplicitive ramp, you can’t feed it flat coaficient, but they decided to feed it flat coafients. Oblit’s baseline tank dam is reflective of this, and it’s really really dumb. Genuinely seems like a bandaid fix.

The rest of the kit doesn’t need the excessive strength and frost dam procs either, and would feel better to use if less of its damage was so conditional. Unironically runeforges feel like a mechanical problem for the spec right now. Fallen Crusader is hard af to interact with effectively, it’s either up or it’s not, but it’s huge, and Razorice is broadly non-interactive. Fingers crossed that the new Shattering Blades build will be a fun way for Razorice to be utilized, but for both BoS and Obliteration, it’s just bloat. Both of these runeforges come from an era of the game that was a lot less about active gameplay than what we have today.

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Because Pillar is objectively a garbage CD for a 1minute CD and with what it lost going into BFA (+15% Frost damage and knockback immunity) it need anything to not feel horrible and ramping Strength was a solid solution at the time that was also unique.

It probably could’ve changed after that in SL but people started saying they wanted really big Obliterates and there’s no way to support that within the kit without either giving the ability a CD, which they obviously don’t want to do, or locking the damage behind somewhere not easily achievable - in this case Pillar ramp & KM.

They could’ve done something like “every 100 RP spent makes the next Obliterate do 200% more damage” and change Pillar a bit but I doubt many people would actually like that gameplay over the current "Press Pillar > mash Obliterate > get bigger Obliterates due to pressing Obliterate.

It was fun in Legion so if you played Antorus Frost it’ll be the same but much better in AoE.

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KM 100% should not give 100% crit imo. The spec would be far better off without it.

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I think that would be enjoyable honestly.

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KM giving 100% crit chance makes sense when it comes to how DW works. A multi hit Obliterate or Frost Strike getting a full crit just makes sense instead of having half of it crit.

It makes no sense when it comes to a 2h because a 2h is either a hit or crit and not 4 different outcomes like DW.

KM didn’t need to also make Obliterate Frost damage.

The big issue came in with Legion when they changed KM procing off of auto crits which it shouldn’t do. Crit has high value until you get a KM then it basically has none and it gets even worse in Pillar windows since you dont need crit at all with Obliteration.

We are in a design spot that both weapons need to be accounted for. What might not make sense for one might make sense to the other.