I would be fine with that if we also got the option of the complete opposite with a disease/dark knight unholy channeling shadow into the blade for actually good feeling strikes whereas now all globals feel pretty bad on dk.
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No, they really don’t. That is far, far away from any actual legitimate problem with Frost right now.
Great post, you clearly put a lot of effort into it. I’m just going to add I disagree with people playing what’s new. I think people just gravitate towards the meta or even just more powerful specs. There were a LOT more DK’s in PvP earlier in the season before all the nerfs.
The only other thing I have to say is it’s embarrassing how many specs are getting attention/reworks while this class has received NOTHING.
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DPS DK consistently one of the bottom least played in m+ even when good in raid.
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Yea it doesn’t need a damage buff, but a serious reshuffling of where damage comes from. Obliterate can’t be ALL of the builds damage and frost strike and howling blast need to not feel like garbage.
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The spec is just designed with only raid in mind, it is like the designer forgot pvp and m+ exist.
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I can agree with this.
Got ksm last season on my DK first, its always my main class, unholy is my fave class fantasy in the entire game alongside enhance shaman.
Being built around/forced inclusion of a bad mechanic imo (wounds), and the extreme reliance on Army has become pretty stale. Army is cool thematically, but it carries so much dps that it almost leaves a sour taste outside army.
Now this right here, this is it. I force myself to have fun on my DK because I love the class, but this season its very much taken a back seat. I dunno… I’m tired of wounds. The CD’s are fun and I really like apocalypse thematically, but outside those CD’s its not fun.
I have green fire on my warlock, and the destro spec, while very simple, has such an enjoyable gameplay loop that is only getting better. Infernal going to 2 mins soon. Buffs everywhere. The spells are visually pleasing and the warlock class as a whole is a blast.
I have swapped to maining enhance shaman this season. The class has imo the best gameplay loop in the entire game and an incredible design now. As the elementalist build, the dps is always high and spikes even higher during CD’s.
Don’t get me wrong, unholy is still tuned decently, but ALL the dps is crammed into CD’s. Not particularly enjoyable for me personally after season upon season of the same thing.
I’d love the class to get some real love.
Oh yeah, this is so, so annoying. Last season it was ‘get puzzlebox + PI or go home’. This should never be a thing for any spec
I really hope they are cooking up something nice for DK’s, but for now I’m just keeping mine semi-relevant rather than pushing on it, which is kinda sad to say about my fave class.
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I just came back 3 weeks ago after a 7-9 month break.
And leveled my warrior first but I just didn’t care for it for some reason and just said making my DK my main.
Sometimes it pays to be a scrub. Been having a blast and I won’t ever do anything too hard so any fellow scrubs out there, come on down class is just fine for us. 
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Buf Unholy DK
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Well written and I agree with many of the conclusions.
Posting from my Hunter to highlight the fact that Unholy DK takes an incredible amount of time, a long wind up to begin DPS.
A minimum of 3 or 4 CDs, and in PVP it takes too long.
Warriors, Hunters can slap you silly while DKs are staking curses, takes tooooo long.
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Every DK spec feels bad to play in PvP right now.
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Raid reply: Great representation of data from sources that make sense here. I agree with the over-arching call-out that things do feel a little stale. There are some fundamental things that DK does bring to the table very well in raids that I think are core to the class and shouldn’t be tampered with. AMZ and grips for instance. Death’s Advance for player enjoyment and mechanics exceptions when applicable is also very satisfying when used. I would also put AMS in that category. If we had a raid buff or could talent a raid aura of some sort I think that would help secure DK in raids a bit more. 100% agree that talents and abilities could use some refreshing as well as the specs. Especially that of frost. I generally play UH, so I feel like UH did get a minor re-work recently, but for the most part many things stayed intact. Another thing that would be better for DK is raid design. If some encounters were made much easier/achievable/fun by having a DK in raid that would also help. I feel like mechanics and design are often overlooked, but can make the class feel much more impactful and wanted. This in turn, makes the player feel useful and that they have some power that benefits a raid. Love the spirit of this call to action though. 100% agree and echo these thoughts overall. Great write-up Taez.
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i really like how current frost dk feels but i’ve only been raiding since sanctum of domination and playing since shadowlands prepatch. my only major problem with the spec recently was that i think that soul reaper should actually be viable on obliteration. i was previously opposed to a rework, but i see the points everyone’s been making from various points of view, pvp, m+, raid etc. i absolutely adore the current tier set as it focuses on my favourite frost dk ability frostwyrm’s fury and i’ve been saying for a little while that we should have more talents that focus on that.
for the rotation, i see it like this, raw obliterates feel like whatever to press, they feel great with killing machine which we generate absolute tons of, howling blast isn’t worth crap without rime, and frost strike just feels like a punishment to press since it feels like it doesn’t even give back runes half the time. Frost Dk is the most “melee” melee spec in the entire game as in raid environments, we literally just have to run to the boss. even unholy has more ranged options than us. we can’t raw cast howling blast from range without effectively wasting runes. we just lack options, which is bad. breath of sindragosa feels awesome when you can just sit turboing on a boss and/or an add pack, but those situations where the boss suddenly decides to sprint or teleport to the other side of the room, or do some big aoe that you have to get clear of (neltharion is the best recent example of this) just destroy any hope you had of dealing damage. obliteration is back to being worse in most situations in raid when i think it could easily excel with a viable (runic power costing) soul reaper to back it up, but it just doesn’t.
and lastly, the damn visuals, can we get a seperate effect for consuming killing machine obliterates? or an animation update to show what we just did? can glacial advance look a little less bad? please?
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I’d be happy if they made some significant changes to Breath of Sindragosa. I despise it as it is and has been. It should either be a cooldown with no additional upkeep or have a super low / no cooldown with upkeep similar to slice and dice. Ideally with capstone talents that (optionally) augment that playstyle rather than forcing these changes on the 1 or 2 people that enjoy it in its current form.
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This is what I meant. I didn’t word it very well. It’s a viable build, they just need to tweak it.
Frost overall DOES need some buffs though. It feels extremely limp right now.
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Frost is really strange rn because the data is really incomplete and all over the place, I’d say obliteration definitely needs one no questions asked, but look at the wow logs data on mythic over the past week. Look at specific bosses where it’s the top with barely any parses. Then look at it in heroic and normal where it’s mostly bad. I have no idea what to make from this data
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It’s none of what you wrote, it’s the wishy washy balance every expac, except this where dk got a good start it got nerfed into the ground shadow lands style. BFA was a dead launch after beta tuning, Legion ultra nerfs, WoD had one good raid tier, mop was bad for both vata was bad for both.
BTW the discord community brought most of these issues in the class with heavily biased and bad takes on what is and is not over powered. This shallow virtue signaling posing as feedback is as much to blame as poor design decisions from the devs.
To your suggestions the core of every class is nearly the same except demo destro. My rogue is largely unchanged in terms of globals used, same could be said for boomkin hunters etc going back to Legion or even further.
Dks have gone through a tonne of changes since Legion. Both unholy and frost had lots added in DF the issue is that frost is built around only breath and that impacts tuning for the rest of the sub specs. Unholy would be ok but it was seemingly balanced around a trinket and PI.
The actual issue is and always will be tuning. The devs prefer dk weak and are supported by the community, much like you were supporting the nerfs and extremely underpowered rework in SL. Remember that? You saying we just needed conduit buffs and then when we got them still being hot garbage? The team ended up having to buff damage by nearly 20% to have unholy come out of the bottom 5.
The answer isn’t a rework which would using history as a reference not be favorable to the DPS specs. The answer is consistent balance philosophies which we won’t get as long as we have devs and a community that is into virtue signaling nonsense.
Also raid and mythic plus don’t favor slow moving classes. Swapping of dk to rogue last expac after raiding in dk since wrath was huge qol gain.
BTW fun and power are correlated. You may want to be Pollyanna about it but in the first weeks off SL Unholy was one of the highest repped specs. It got nerfed and the rep plummeted. That happened because people don’t have fun with weak classes.
Frost DK, best performing spec this raid!
Frost DK, 2nd least represented spec in this raid!
power and representation are not correlated. Youd have realized that if you actually looked at any of the data i provided.
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Tbh obli without KM is fine but frost strike needs to hit 2x time harder after all that’s your main spender to get KM
I would say UH suffers more from CD drought then frost because your epidemic and disease damages are dependent on the pull size
Yea I totally agree, it’s still mind blowing to keep clunky mechanics like that especially on melee whose gameplay demands you to be mobile
A rework is definitely needed. I’m not saying to throw all the current aspects of the specs to garbage but just tweak and redesign some abilities like frost strike. I just want to add that Ret was fine before the rework too, what made them garbage was the gameplay and no amount of buff can do that
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