EDITED FOR 11.2 PTR
DKs in general need to he modernized, Frost in particular. Once my favourite melee spec since MoP, now unplayable in PvP.
Turn Frost and DKs in general into a modern melee mid range caster class like they were originally envisioned.
These are the issues that I would like to see addressed.
Equalized ability Damage for both 2H and DW. If WW Monk can do it, so can we.
- Introduce 2H runes enchants like Rune of the Frozen Crusader that combines Razor Ice and Fallen Crusader into one.
- Remove Might of the Frozen Waste.
OR
- Simply change Might of the Frozen Waste to give 25% extra attack speed and Rune of Razorice instead of the buff to Obliterate damage.
Reliance on Crit for KM procs.
- Make KM proc from a baseline auto attack chance rather than crit.
- 20% for 2H and 8% for DW should even it out since DW lands 2.5 hits for every 1 hit 2H gets, if Might of the Frozen Waste doesn’t receive the above change, that is.
- This fixes the crit scaling issue where crit gear becomes too much and the procs increase exponentially over the course on an expansion.
- By making KM rarer, you can make other abilities stronger so that players would prioritize Rime or Frost Strike when KM isn’t available.
- Basic Obliterates should be used as a generator, not a priority.
- Have Killing Machine increase damage base on your curent Crit chance, like Chaos Bolt does for Warlocks. This change should only be applied in the event of removing Crit based procs, so as to maintain some crit scaling but to a lesser extent.
- The new “Killing Streak” talent should be removed, its a dps loss to invest in it anyway.
Mobility.
- Make Death Charge baseline for the class. Allow us to use comestic glyphs to change the mount like paladins do.
- Reduce the cooldown slightly for Rider of the Apocalypse Hero specs.
Dealing at least some damage at ranged.
- Allow Rime to accumulate 2 stacks.
- Greatly increase Howling Blast’s baseline damage, increase the cost to 2 Runes to avoid “Masterfrost” spamming.
- Nerf the damage modifier for Rime to compensate for the much stronger baseline HB, but maintain “free” cast. Rime should deal far more damage that in currently does but basics Howling Blast should be worth using when a target is out of range.
Healing
- Bring back Death Siphon. Have it replace Death Strike for those who chose it in the class talent tree.
- Make it a choice node between “Improved Death Strike.”
- Have it cost Runic Power just like Death Strike and allow it to benefit from Dark Succor.
- Healing against ranged enemies in pvp is currently impossible.
Execute
- Soul Reaper rework to upfront damage followed by a 5 sec dot. Give it a 30y range and 20s CD that resets if enemy dies within dot window.
- These changes would actually make it a desired ability in PvP while the 20 sec CD would keep it from being spammable on raid bosses, therefore it wouldn’t have to be nerfed into the ground like the current version.
- Also the CD getting reduced by haste would make haste more desirable for DK players since it’s currently the worst stat for both Frost and Unholy.
Less reliance on Pillar of Frost damage window, even out our damage.
- That means less talents that force Pillar of Frost as the only game in town.
- Just merge Pillar into Frostwyrms Fury as a dps CD.
- Remove the talents that rely on Pillar of Frost, like Obliteration, and replace them with something consistent or interesting.
- This would also keep KM less abundant and easier to balance.
- Tune damage numbers to compensate for the loss of Pillar.
Remorseless Winter/DnD
- Remorseless Winter clearly should have replaced Death and Decay, yet we still have so many talents that rely on DnD, this also causes button bloat.
- Give all the old DnD function to Remorseless Winter, 2 charges and all.
- Bring back Obliterate Cleave. Nerf the damage of cleave to 25% of damage on 2 enemies and roll more of the damage into Remorseless Winter instead.
- This allows us to still do well in 3 target cleave scenarios without being OP while putting the bulk of our AoE damage against larger groups into other abilities.
Frostscythe/Glacial Advance/Empower Rune Weapon.
- The new design for Empower Rune Weapon is interesting, I like it alot and seems like a better version of what Frostscythe used to be, a hard hitting AoE cooldown.Empower Rune Weapon is now filling that role better than Frostscythe ever did while providind resources.
- Have Frostscythe replace Glacial Advance as a Runic Power Spender.
- Make Glacial Advance a passive talent that sometimes procs off Frost Scythe, Frost Strike and Rime like Arctic Assault does.
- You could have a 25% chance proc based on targets hit so that Frost Strike would only sometimes launch it, but Frostscythe would always proc it when fighting 4 or more enemies, have Rime always proc GA.
- Frostbane would proc from Frost Scythe and the resulting free Frost Strike would benefit from a guaranteed GA when striking 4 or more mobs.
- This resolves button bloat and taking Arctic Asault away from KM again makes Runic Spenders and Rime actually feel impactfull and further puts more importance to our Runic Power spenders as priority spells.
- With the current PTR direction, all we would be doing is switching from Obliterate to Frostscythe depending on how many enemies we are fighting, it doesn’t improve the gameplay or make it more interesting.
- Like I said, just tie our Oblit Cleave to Remorseless Winter, nerf the cleave and buff RW instead.
- Double down on talents that allow us to dump more Runic Power to deal more damage and/or add extra power and interactions with Runic Spenders.
Raid Buff!
- Give us Unholy Aura. Make it an actual “Raid Buff” that gives either 3% Haste or 2% Haste/Leech.
*Rider of The Apocalypse
- Whitemane’s Undeath stacks should also stack from Howling Blast instead of just Obliterate since we run out of runes too quickly compared to Unholy who can just spam Clawing Shadows.
We need an overhaul in our Spec and Class Talent Trees with these issues in mind. Tune as needed afterwards.
31 Likes
I would have zero complaints if all these changes were made by Blizzard right now.
Especially this,
Combining Death and Decay into Remorseless Winter, something that really has been requested for a very…very long time.
16 Likes
They should make it so all our runes recharge, not this sets of three BS. It was a dumb move in cata when we had multiple rune types and it still a dumb idea.
12 Likes
ive been saying this for years also rune att and corruption refreshes/recharges all runes on cd for even shorter down time
Making Remorseless Winter the thing that interacts with Cleaving Strikes has been said for a long time to be bad and people have also went through the reasoning for it.
You would lose a lot with that change. There would be nerfs as well because when hasnt a “fix” came with a nerf?
It just speaks to how outdated we are.
I get that the original idea was to give us greater upfront burst damage by using up all of our runes and then giving us a lull when we run out.
It was very strong, at the time, during shorts fights and pvp.
But now our damage is mediocre when runes are avaible and practically null when out of ressources.
Our flaws, especially mobility and survivability in PvP, can’t be fixed with simple numbers tuning, we need an overhaul in our mechanics. They can tune the numbers later.
2 Likes
I dig this idea 100%. I hate using D&D for cleaves for one it takes away that extra rune from you making Oblit often unusable when needed in a nick of time since it doesnt last long as defile, second, you have to be in its radius since you are glued in the circle & often tanks kite mobs away from D&D, and last, it is just a waste in your action bar
2 Likes
Oh yeah we are very overdue for a rework.
5 Likes
yeah we need a rework but saying that is a slippery slope
going back before legion for the most part is a good start
7 Likes
Especially considering you can’t just cast it whenever you want because of the cooldown.
It’s a problem in both PvE and PvP.
However, it’s easier to work around our faults in PvE because at least the mobs are predictable and can be herded.
PvP is to dynamic and it means our only chance of doing any damage requires groups of player being really really stupid, good luck climbing to a higher rating with that.
Which is why I suggested that they nerf the Oblit cleave in PvP because it gave a false image of how good Frost was because you could sort of cheese your way to victory in group fights if the players were all clumped up.
But the second you’re dueling someone else, especially a ranged player, your helplessness becomes apparent.
3 Likes
Depends on which part. Many parts of those builds arent great. Pre-legion Frost means Masterfrost which most people didnt like, and these forums certainly wouldnt because Obliterate is rarely even used if at all and the spec was a pretty garbage performer. Unholy could mean you have to stack up what is essentially wounds that takes longer to just use DT.
RW has a CD too so you would want to limit your use of it when you can get the most out of cleaving Strikes and that is PoF windows. They definitely wouldnt allow RW to be up for a long time anymore. Might as well just make Cleaving Strikes just a passive that works all the time and bring about more nerfs. Nerf nerf nerf thats all these suggestions would really bring and all that they have brought when one of these changes have been implemented.
You guys are looking to try to fix a gameplay aspect and not wondering how that fix would play out in terms of balancing afterwards.
The bigger problem is that all abilities basically do cleave / aoe damage. That means your ST abilities are going to be cut in power which is exactly what Frost is seeing. There are a lot of things that need to be axed and new things take their place.
It is. Which is why I’m giving specific suggestions to specific problems.
If we don’t explain the why and how, we might end up with something that’s an even bigger mess.
It’s the monkey paw of the forums.
If I had my way, I’d send my feedback directly to Blizzard via the “Submit a Suggestion” function, but unfortunately it doesn’t allow long form submissions in its current format.
They dont even read these forums, making suggestions here doesnt really do anything. Not that people would want them reading these forums or 50% of the threads would be closed based on peoples actions.
Just because you are making a specific suggestion to a specific problem doesnt mean its a good suggestion.
Do you want Masterfrost to come back? Thats what you would have with increasing Howling Blasts base damage. We have what you suggested, I think you said 400% increase in base damage. Looking at my character that would put Howling Blasts baseline damage higher than baseline Obliterate.
Is that what you want? If it is, then that gameplay would be worse than what you have now. You would be using Howling Blast without KM procs, reducing the runes you would have available when you do get KM procs or even multiple KM procs. This would lead to wasting more damage than you would be gaining by the increase in damage.
Obliterate and Frostscythe scaling with Crit% (which would probably have to be through KM procs for Obliterate) would just bring about yet another baseline damage nerf, further pushing this masterfrost like playstyle to an even higher extreme and putting even MORE value on crit because KM procs because even more valuable.
Doesnt sound like things would be fixed with those suggestions. Neither with the RW Cleaving Strikes change because it would probably be accompanied by yet another nerf somewhere due to the duration of RW compared to DnD because Gathering Storm exists increasing its duration to where you could have it up all the time which just makes cleaving strikes permanent.
My posts would literally be rendered useless if people would just ask themselves what consequences would this change have.
1 Like
Frost has to many sources that make oblit do frost damage. There should be one source that does it Obliteration passively changes oblits damage from psyiaical to frost
If frost gets locked out then it just reverts to physical for the duration
Gcd needs to go back to 1
2 Likes
I get why Obliterate does physical damage without Killing Machine. If it were frost damage all the time, then all of our damage would be frost, save our auto attack, and our mastery would have to be nerfed as a consequence.
We would already get plenty out of our Mastery with my suggested changes to Remorseless Winter and Howling Blast.
Having 2 charges of Remorseless Winter, since we are able to increase its duration every time we spend a rune, this would give us stability in Obliteration cleaves since it both lasts longer, so long as you use more than 4 runes during it duration, and follows the player.
1 Like
Back in the day after wrath unholys mastery was way higher than frosts and it’s got nerfd
So I think ours would take a hit as well
Gathering storm needs a change to let rw go on longer or be more powerful
If you include rp spent as well that would help
There is only one thing that makes Obliterate do frost damage, and that is Killing Machine rank 2 / Frostreaper.
It already does both of those things. RW is also already up like 60% of the time.
An extra stack also doesnt actually improve things. It just adds 1 more use to the duration of a fight if used on CD. CRD is universally better when talking about ability usages.
None of this actually improves ST damage. Cleaving Strikes should be removed, that opens up the opportunity for aoe specific things to be buffed and it also allows ST abilities to be buffed. All abilities are in a state of “we cant buff it too much or at all because of the aoe consequences”.
So really… what doesnt cleave? Inexorable Assault… and what else? Soul Reaper and Auto Attacks? Thats the issue. And even then your autos can cleave with IDT. So you have Inexorable Assault and Soul Reaper.
Nothing is actually going to improve and Frost is going to continue being an aoe spec unless things are axed. Thats all there is too it.
Oh what about inex that makes oblit do extra frost damage
That just adds another source of damage to Obliterate. It doesnt make Obliterate Frost damage. Inexorable Assault is its own thing like Arctic Assault.
It’s still extra damage as frost
Ditch all that and put it in Obliteration