Lets talk about the state of DK in Dragonflight

Classes Death Knight
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Possibly unpopular opinion, but bringing in more basal passives with unique interactions is more my style, as I’ve always appreciated Machine Gun FDK for that unga bunga feeling.

Unholy is a different story as there aren’t many melee classes that have that much ramp up required for basic success except maybe Assassin Rogue. Unholy to me just needs a bit of a smoothing out of its process, as right now it feels like probably the worst “pet” spec for gameplay (Though the new rotation incoming for Demo locks looks like a GREAT competitor just on the opposite end of the button spectrum.)

Quite frankly as well I want to see more with runeforging, I appreciate them being “better” enchantments and I don’t mind that remaining the core idea, I just want more done with it. Even trying something as basic as “double runeforging” might be worth a shot at this point because frankly DKs are just not in a good spot at all and random numbers changing will bandaid it at best until next expansion.

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Hopefully this doesn’t become too long winded, but I think a large attributing factor to DK’s population decline also is in large part due to how they play in m+. With m+ having a larger impact on the game as a whole compared to past expansions it really highlights DK’s flaws. I really want to emphasize, dk’s performance in m+ is not an issue, our dmg is quite high actually. It’s a rare occurrence when I’m not top damage, but both specs feel terrible to play for different reasons.

Dk’s lack of utility inside m+ is shockingly back comparatively to other classes. I know this has been touched on a lot, but with the addition of incorp and afflicted we are the worst class to bring during these weeks. There are a shockingly high amount of mobs that are immune to DG. DG does have good value, but it does not outweigh the value that other melee are bringing, especially during incorp and afflicted weeks, Unholy DK having even less. There is no incentive to bring a DK over a ret paladin now, especially giving paladins brez.

Unholy in m+ is in a really rough place gameplay wise. In any given pack, we are locked into ~7 gc’ds for every single ad pack before we get into our core aoe rotation. On fortified weeks this is usually ok where the mobs live at least 30 seconds, but anytime under that and we are severely gimped, creating a cascading effect of not having CD’s available. This becomes significantly worse in tyrannical. Further, dungeons that have primarily a 3-4 target pull count unholy really falls off. To add onto all of this, defile covering the ground of swirls is absurd. Even experienced players can die to a one shot swirl in defile and anytime this happens it feels bad and is so absurd its even part of the game.

Frost runs into some similar problems as unholy, outside of CD windows you are lower dmg than tanks, and not by a small amount. All of frost damage is baked into pillar of frost and dnd oblit cleaves. If there is any movement whatsoever during this window, your dmg is gone. There are so many frontals, ground swirls, and forced movement in an aoe pull that its extremely common you cant stay inside your dnd during a pillar window. Having a pug tank makes this problem even worse when you roll into your pillar/dnd windows and the tank starts pulling another mob pack that you weren’t expecting and now you’re moving out of your dnd during pillar window. A lot of classes this really isn’t and issue for but for frost dk is murders any damage you might’ve had, and again, feels bad.

It blows my mind that blizzard can rework mage Rune of Power and specifically target how its unreasonable to force someone to play in place in the current state of the game yet not address DK’s at all with DnD and defile. Blizzard saying, “In Raid, Mythic+, and PvP, having a player commit to a small space for 12 seconds is a large ask and one that just doesn’t feel fun to play around”. Please fix this for DK, its even worse than mage RoP.

Regardless of damage, if the class or spec feels bad to play, people wont play it. I think Taez’s post highlights this extremely well, but it can also be applied to m+ where a lot of casual people play in. If you cant get invited to groups, you play a class that does. In the current state of the game, there are very little to no reasons at all to bring a dk. Making this even worse is that other classes are getting reworked and bringing more utility than ever before.

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Absolutely agree with this post. Have been maining DK since Wrath with only small break for a few classes and those were primarily because I was sick and tired of playing breath spec for 5-7 years straight. It was fun an fresh when it first came out and added a whole new playstyle but hasn’t changes since then. I can only bear to play it now because I play 2H obliterate spec since its actually somewhat viable these days (particularly in M+)

Another problem I have seen with DK vs other classes as of late is mobility. Once upon a time it felt like we were able to hustle around when we had both Wraith Walk and Death’s Advance (And the NF thing in Shadowlands, I miss that) but now its difficult to talent into Wrath Walk and DA feels like its always on cd so we are just at base run speed. Even if my feely-crafting about run speed is lame I find it makes the class have a sense of being ‘stuck in the mud’ compared to other classes, particularly melee. even back in the day being able to swap to unholy presence helped some of the running, but I digress.

Overall hard agree that DK needs a refresh if its going to stay afloat and be desirable to play.

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The state of dk? I think the devs forgot about the class since no ones playing it now

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This week my dk has won 1 round of 25 played.
1.

Not even always the kill target. All of a sudden everyone seems to have permanent root with no DR against me. And if I do manage to get on the target…my “burst” is about as effective as a wet fart, while everyone else’s passive non-burst dps is 2-3x higher.

DK main since DK’s were released, and this is the worst its even been.

Frost DK is PVE only now.
For PVP it’s garbage tier.

The devs can get bent.

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Want to revive this thread a bit, and present a few more examples of why unholy should be included in a rework, even if people ARE playing it, unlike frost.

So, lets first look at some official blizzard descriptions of what unholy is meant to do.

First off, the specilization selection screen
Imgur

“A master of death and decay, spreading infection and controlling undead minions to do their bidding.”

a MASSIVE portion of unholy’s lore is related to being a plaguebringer. A being that, if you see coming, will spread diseases throughout, causing death and destruction with those diseases.

Yet, in the game itself, diseases play an insanely small role in our overall dps. To give an example of this, lets use some simulations to see what the dps difference is if we just, never apply our plague to our target.

So, to start, lets present a baseline. Here is what things look like playing as intended, applying diseases, popping wounds.

Now, lets compare it to a simulation that just, never presses outbreak.

Can see in the breakdown presented in the sims, there is no Virulent Plague damage present anymore, and the sim lost… ~1200dps. thats, well… less than a 1% damage loss by ignoring one of unholys main themes, being the plaguebringer, using diseases to rot your enemies away.

Some may argue that Wounds are meant to fill that disease role though, while i disagree, lets explore what the DPS loss would be if we ignored festering wounds, outside of making sure we have 4 wounds to properly use Apocalypse.

Same talent build as before, same gear, only difference here being it now only presses festering strike before apocalypse.

Total dps loss? 2700dps. Almost exactly a 2% dps loss by entirely ignoring a core mechanic in the default build. Through some past experimentation, ive been able to get the dps loss to ~0.7% for never pressing festering strike, with some build changes and gear changes to push more damage into clawing shadows/death coil. But, i believe it would be disingenuous to push that value when its not a build people actually run.

So, the spec thats meant to be a plaguebringer, master of disease and bringer of pestilence to all, has very, very little incentive to actually utilize these abilities.

Too much of our damage has been taken out of Virulent Plague, and our other diseases. We are a master of disease, and have a weaker disease than Frost DK.

Our main disease, doesn’t even have any core interactions anymore, with the removal of Virulent Eruption on tick. Its an absolute shell of its former self.

Don’t believe me? well, lets compare.

Utilizing the Best in Slot simulations for the current tier.

Virulent Plague:
Average Tick Damage - 5662 damage
Extra Effect - Virulent Eruption if enemies die with VP applied to them. 0 DPS impact in single target.

Frost Fever:
Average Tick Damage - 17237 damage
Extra Effect - 5 Runic Power on tick (as long as memory serves, this is a 30% chance against a single target, 40% chance with Invigorating Freeze if the tick crits). Ignoring invigorating freeze, would be an average of 0.5 runic power per second. A small but quantifiable DPS increase.

So, Frost DK’s DoT is more than 3x as strong as unholys, and has a substantially more impactful extra effect.

So, wheres unholys plagebringer aspect? That theme seems to be almost entirely ignored these days. You could argue that Epidemic in AoE is a substantial increase, which is linked to Virulent Plague, but, thats an arbitrary limitation. Theres no reason why it couldnt work without Virulent Plague applied to the target. If thats a pseudo justification for our DoT being so weak, why not remove that limitation and let our DoT be stronger? Doesnt make much sense to me for it to be such an arbitrary limitation anyways.

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I feel like unholy could draw a lot from the d4 necromancer. Make apoc baseline, 4 minions and a mage up all the time. Make unholy blight not only apply virulent plague but also ramp/increase disease damage during that window. Make army of the dead minions explode on death, spreading disease. Hell, make DT baseline and active all the time, reducing our cd bloat, and increasing our sustain dmg. We’ll still have more cd’s than other classes in unholy blight, army, garg, UA, and ERW.

There is so much you can do with this class, it seems so wild to me clawing shadow (shadow) and death coil are our core rotation when, exactly like you stated, we’re the masters of disease. Also, on that note, would it be crazy to give unholy a disease dispel? Isn’t that our thing? This would also help with afflicted. Adjacent to this, control undead should not replace our minion, it should add to it.

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They should just bring back icy touch/glyph of icy touch in some form to provide dispel utility. Maybe change lichborne to a shorter CD and have it convert diseases/poison on you to healing instead of providing x% leech.

I’d also note, taez’s post made me miss old school disease management back in wotlk. All the various prunings have destroyed how a lot of classes work over the years.

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Have they really played that big of a damage contributor? Even when diseases were really important they were only about 5.3-7% of your overall damage depending on the spec (in Wrath) but you lost way more damage if you didnt have them on due to talent / ability interactions.

I think thats the problem more than anything. Without the interactions they used to have they just became antiquated.

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Shift damage out of gargoyle and back into our core rotation.

In fact, remove gargoyle.

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I just want to bump this RQ, to make sure it isn’t lost in the tumult as it were. I want to preface this by saying the I think the DK Dev is doing a really good job with a really bad toolkit.

Unholy and Frost feel old, and no matter how precise he/she is with their buffs, no matter how exact they are with the numbers tuning, it’s not going to feel good because DK just doesn’t have anything to feel good with.

Wounds is just not an enjoyable system in 2023 to the point where Festermight which is a very well designed and fun mechanic, feels bad because of how wounds are designed. It’s even crazier in AOE, UDK thrives in my opinion when it can set a pack up and then get rewarded for putting in effort, but current UDK just doesn’t do that, it pressed DT and puts defile down, and doesn’t even think about getting high festermight stacks. Then it just presses Epidemic until it can’t and builds RP. There’s nothing thoughtful about it, there’s no planning out a pull, you aren’t considering how fast a pack will die and when you should pull the trigger.

Straight up if you didn’t have a prio target that’s worth setting apoc up on, then you just wouldn’t press festering strike in AOE. The only situation where wounds and festermight feel good in the current iteration of UDK is four target sustained cleave like primal council, and that’s a fight design that just doesn’t happen often. (and Frost usually is far better for it which means most people will never experience it)

Frost DK’s resources just don’t feel right. It doesn’t feel fun to be overflowing with the wrong sort of resources, and it doesn’t feel fun to have starvation windows because of the way the resources regen. It doesn’t feel fun to be so completely tied to DnD for damage, even more so than blood and UDK. Blood obviously controls where things stand so DnD feels fine for them, and UDK aoe globals at this point feel like they don’t matter so it just doesn’t care. But if you have a pack moved out of FDK’s DnD, they just lose everything.

We learned with Ret that tying AOE to a ground effect, especially for a class that has such an important emphasis on CD’s, feels bad. So why have we, since shadowlands, been making DnD more and more important a mechanic for DK? For unholy it’s always been fine because it has options and it’s GCD’s have always been lighter than Frost’s, but why is 50% of Bloods damage tied to DnD? The class already struggles GCD to GCD with how it’s designed in high damage situations, so why does it have this cursed GCD randomly mid way through a pack that generates so little RP and has no defensive benefit?

That’s not even talking about ST at any point too, both DPS specs are so CD loaded with their damage, that any other time they just feel terrible. UDK has 30 seconds at the start of a boss to feel like an impactful class, and then doesn’t feel impactful for the rest of the fight, even in the second three minutes. If you didn’t need to CDR Army, you could probably reasonably just afk past the first CD set and still do 50%+ of unholy’s damage. Frost is almost somehow worse, because even though it’s CDs are more often, it’s non-CD damage is worse, and if Icecap didn’t exist you could afk between pillars and do 80% of Frosts damage.

But the problem with fixing that, is that at least with unholy, if you start buffing it’s rotational abilities, it’s going to get out of control in AOE.

Anyway I’m getting lost in the sauce and just listing issues. But my point is, the systems that the specs are functioning with, and the abilities they are using, and their design just is not functional. No matter how good the Dev is at tuning the instrument of DK, it does not matter because the wood has rotted through, and the entire thing needs to be remade.

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Absolutely agreed here. The current designer is doing great work. but, working on a flawed foundation can only get you so far. Can only polish a turd so much, as in the end, its still a turd.

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Unholy was great BEFORE legion.

Especially necrotic plague, that was a fun disease to play with!

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do you know how many times i have suggested reworks that fit withing the current design paradigm? , stuff so easy a working overhaul could go out in a weekly reset. balance changes that could be hotfixed?

the DK dev isn’t even trying.

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People love to say this about their hypothetical “changes” and are usually purposely ignoring that these aren’t just switches that can be flipped.

I read your most recent idea of “changes”. Literally maybe one of them is something that’s “easy” that could be pushed into a weekly reset, and you’re delusional if you think even half of what you suggested could 1) be in a weekly reset and 2) be done within a week.

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I absolutely disagree on this.
From overly heavy nerfs (never reverted once they removed spellwarden), to bad tuning, to horrendous pvp talent rework to now…nothing, while were staring at a wall of spec changes for other classes every Friday shows me pure incompetence.

What it feels like, is there is no dk dev. Instead that a caster dev has us on his “here, take this” list and has it low priority.

You can’t even say “goodjob” from the pve standpoint because the only legitimate change you guys got all expac was epidemic getting swapped.

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The frost 2H changes in 10.7 were huge for frost.

That being said DW frost really needs some love.

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which was? my most recent overhaul submission was suggestions for 9.0 during the 8.3 ptr, (yes its been that long.) i’d applaud you for digging that deep, but i’m going to have to assume you are talking about my recent post in the current ptr forum. and in that case i tried to make things as dev friendly as i can and just posted feedback on whats working and what isn’t and where we need help.

like, you could move abomb to a choice node with army, then add a % increase to the rest of our damage, this would fix a huge chunk of our problems by leveling out the spike and distributing it to our main rotational abilities.

you could add a talent for necrotic plague: festering strike instead infects the target with necrotic plague, infecting the target multiple times, each infection does N(AP) damage over 14 seconds, stacks up to 16 times. abilities which consume festering wounds will consume stacks of necrotic plague instead. when necrotic plague is consumed it instantly does 1.5N(AP) damage per stack consumed.

you could overhaul ebon fever and bursting sores to also work with this, taking bursting sores would cause your necrotic plague to erupt and do AoE damage when it ticks, and ebon fever should be overhauled to allow you to stack VP up to 4-8 times. say 4 normally and up to 8 during unholy blight or abomb.

you could also have another talent option that summons a single apoc ghoul whenever you burst a festering wound or consume a stack of necrotic plague. if you really want to throw it in easy, you could make this a 3rd choice node with BS/EF but IMO you would really want to have them separate so you can have builds with both.

the damage and AP numbers are made up and would need a bit of tuning, but it doesn’t take much to really take unholy to new and fun places. the reason for that is we have been very fun in the past, but we have slowly had bits and pieces of our gameplay sliced off, one at a time, and now there is hardly anything left.

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My simple wish list:
Less or no setup, I want to be impactful gcd1, not gcd7 when everything is dead in m+
More damage outside of cds
Bake all ground effects as an aura I take with me when I move
Less strictly melee abilities, make it like ret, where most things are range and it helps uptime a lot
Make army reducing talent a static number, it’s the most miserable thing to spam wet noodle just for cd reduction
Make PI into a priest self buff and stop factoring it into other classes
Make breath 1m cd and less focused around endless uptime
Replace dnd oblit cleave with dedicated talent (you guessed it, I want for frost scythe to work)

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Absolutely. Or draw on other games as well - I for one have sunk a fair bit of time into Last Epoch’s Necromancer and there are many great concepts to draw from there as well.

Some form of volatile zombie would be amazing for me honestly. I think it’d be interesting to delete Festering Wounds and expand on the combo strike system given to Rets, where a combination of a few abilities/runes (hint, I prefer the old rune system and think it should return in an improved form) allowed the summon of a volatile zombie which upon death explodes for an impactful amount.

I’d like to see a variety of summons, like give a fleshed out talent selection of raise abomination and make that minion available even if it meant choosing it over Army.

I’d love to expand on the necromancer archetype in a way that relies way less on army or DT. Apocalypse is fun and all but there are so many other avenues to go down.

Then theres the plaguebringer playstyle. I’d love a meaningful version of that too that is way more than whats in the game currently. More proper DoTs and separate DoT management, better effects, etc…

Neither here nor there really, just a personal wish-list but I really feel like unholy atm is a hollow shell compared to what it could actually be

1 Like