The new talent introduced, Hyperpyrexia, makes BOS more enticing to play.
New Talent: Hyperpyrexia – Your Runic Power spending abilities have a chance to additionally deal 30% of the damage dealt over 4 seconds.
Since Breath of Sindragosa is an aoe RP spender, it’ll make that “chance” to add a dot much more easier. This talent basically makes BOS much more powerful. Glacial advance nor frost strike can compete with it.
I really dislike this split of players who hate BOS and those who don’t. That’s literally all I see. Blizzard please add BOS further up in the talent tree and add talents that can benefit both parties. Simply having the talent as capstone is divisive.
Imagine if they added BOS where they currently have howling blast and made howling blast baseline. They could then add talents that modify breath to make it less punishing, to synergize better with Obliterate, talents that modify it, etc.
Here are a few ideas just off the top of my head that they could do:
Sindragosa’s Remorse:
Functionality: Breath of Sindragosa and Remorseless Winter are combined into a single ability, now called Sindragosa’s Remorse. While active, it creates a 360-degree field of frost damage around the Death Knight, slowing all enemies within the area. The range of Sindragosa’s Remorse increases by “X” yards for every “Y” seconds it remains active. The ability has a 1-minute cooldown.
Glacial Trail:
Breath of Sindragosa now leaves a trail of frozen ground in its wake, lasting for 10 seconds. Enemies standing on the frozen ground take an additional 15% frost damage from all sources and have their movement speed reduced by 30%. Each second they remain on the frozen ground, they take “X” additional frost damage.
Wings of Sindragosa:
Breath of Sindragosa and Pillar of Frost are combined into a single ability now called Wings of Sindragosa. Activating this ability gives the Death Knight frost wings that absorb all heat from surrounding sources, causing enemies within a 15-yard radius to suffer from the Brittle Bones debuff, increasing their physical damage taken by “X”% and causing them to take escalating frost damage each time they move, with the damage increasing based on the number of Brittle Bones stacks. While Wings of Sindragosa is active, it increases the Death Knight’s strength by 25%. The ability has a 1-minute cooldown, lasts 12-30 seconds depending on runic power, and is a buff that drains runic power.
Twin Breaths
Breath of Sindragosa now has two charges, allowing for more frequent use. However, the duration of each Breath of Sindragosa is reduced by 50%. This talent enables the Death Knight to strategically apply Breath of Sindragosa in shorter, more controlled bursts, maintaining high flexibility and adaptability in various combat situations.
Frostshard Infusion:
Breath of Sindragosa is reworked into Frostshard Infusion. Activating this ability infuses the Death Knight’s weapon with frost shards, increasing attack power and causing the weapon to deal additional frost damage with each strike. Each critical attack causes the frost shards to fragment and explode, dealing additional frost damage to the target. The frost shards last for 30 seconds or until consumed. During the duration of Frostshard Infusion, which lasts as long as the Death Knight has runic power, the Death Knight can add more shards to their weapon at the cost of additional runic power. The ability ends when runic power is exhausted. When Frostshard Infusion ends, the Death Knight retains the accumulated frost shards for an additional 30 seconds.
Glacial Onslaught
Obliterate: Obliterate now leaves a Glacial Scar on the target, dealing frost damage over 6 seconds. If Breath of Sindragosa is active, the Glacial Scar also slows the target’s movement speed by 20%.
Breath of Sindragosa: When Breath of Sindragosa is activated, it consumes all active Glacial Scars on enemies within its range, dealing instant frost damage equal to the remaining damage of the Glacial Scars and healing the Death Knight for 10% of the total damage consumed.
By adding more talents that modify BOS and could potentially work with Obliterate better, it would help ease the divide between BOS lovers and BOS haters. That aside, I would love for frostscythe to be the equivalent of epidemic for frost. It should be baseline, use RP, and debuff targets with razorice.
tl;dr: Frost DK could be so much more if we had a proper dev working on it.
Thank you. I really thought about cool ways that players could enjoy BOS or not if given the option. Definitely feels like they should move BOS further up the tree. That talent is not going anywhere without upsetting quite a few ppl.
I also wanted to consider the Obliterate build enjoyers.
This is hard to do because even when Dk’s were being created the devs didn’t know what they wanted to do with the class. They basically threw a bunch of cool things together and hoped it stuck.
They tossed pieces of Runemaster, Necromancer and Death Knight (warcraft 3) together and here we are. This is what causing many problems at the moment. Everyone things they know what Death Knights should be but the devs at the time didn’t know back then at all.
Runemaster spells/abilities: Runes, runeblade, anti-magic shell, anti-magic zone, and other abilities that use runes.
Death Knight (Warcraft 3) spells/abilities: Death Coil and Army of the Dead
Necromancer
I do agree that they should do more “cool” thins since even in the video they mentioned that that was their aim. I believe they called it “Concentrated coolness.” I would love for Dks to go back in that direction.
The “Wings of Sindragosa” talent you made sounds cool. It punishes players for running away. Neat.
Here’s the video in case you wanted to watch it: Death Knights
I feel like most of those devs got fired, replaced, or reshuffled elsewhere.
Technically speaking, they should add more runemaster abilities into the game and split the unholy spec into necromancer vs dots (which is the direction they seem to be going), or add a 4th spec necromancer.
Since the creation of DKs has taken up the slot of 2 other possible classes, they should add more options to make those missing classes present in game via dks.
Here’s a brief description of what Runemasters can do (which should sound familiar):
A runemaster has the ability to scribe and empower runes. A runemaster does not prepare spells the way other arcane spellcasters do. Rather, a runemaster has a certain number of rune patterns that he simply knows, and he may empower any rune within those patterns.
Dk’s are capable of doing so much, yet people are hard stuck on their idea of a DK that it prevents them from seeing what they could be. Death Knights, at least to me, are the epitome of edgy and cool. They should add cool things to do dks. That’s it. That should be the job of the dk dev as long as it encompasses one of the three pillar classes for which it was designed after.
Okay, so hear me out. DK healing spec. I love tanking, but raid spots are hard to come by and DK DPS specs are in need of reworks. I also really enjoy fast queues, so why not add a healing spec? I keep hearing people say that DKs don’t heal, or that they only heal themselves. But listen, what if they added a healing spec to DKs where the death knight healed via a chained-up Val’kyr standing behind them (kind of like a Jojo Stand) and had a sentient rune blade (similar to Remornia, but it doesn’t talk) that would increase their range to 40 yards? They could bring back Corpse Shield, and AMZ could be buffed via a talent in the healer tree. To be fair, DKs have always used four runes (Frost, Blood, Unholy, and Death). They could become masters of death and circumvent others dying.
They could also change runic power via runes into mana, or leave it as it is and just increase runic power to the same amount as mana.
Nah, Remove BoS from the talent tree, and from our spellbook as a whole instead
Hard pass, Want nothing to do with that ability anywhere near the legitimate melee playstyle of frost
Dude wants worse remorseless winter
That just goes to show you do not have the slightest idea as to why the divide exists in the first place. Pass on all of those ideas, Prune BoS entirely from the class
Passion doesn’t pay the bills and Blizzard is notorious for low pay in comparison to other gaming studios for the area of California they’re located in.
All I see on this forums are players who hate BOS and want it removed and those who want it to stay. I can see which one you fall on. I’m just trying to create a middle ground so it’s not all just vitriolic feedback given.
BoS cripples the classes resource system and bloats many talents to support its toxic existence
Obliteration just makes obliterate your top damage by miles, And the only reason thats the case is because it can cleave to 3 targets and because blizzard refuses to buff our other DPS abilities like froststrike to actually do more than 30k damage per hit, BECAUSE BoS effectively acts as their replacement
When you talk about bad design, A talent that annihilates our already poor resource system sticks out a lot more than just Killing machine being really strong in cleave situations, and being stronger than our weak runic spender which only is weak due to BoS’ existence
Completely ignoring the fact that universally BoS cripples the class in other arenas of content to like PvP but thats a whole extra discussion to have, As far as im concerned FDK would immediately become both healthier, and easier to balance as a spec overall if that runic drain got pruned from the class entirely. It shouldve never stuck around for as long as it did, It shouldve been removed after WoD when it was taken away from the only spec it was remotely fun on which was BDK
Thematically speaking too, Frost should be the petless melee spec, Its attacks are supposed to be melee attacks, Nobody wants to breathe on people that is lame as hell, go play evoker if you like breathing on people
I don’t disagree with you. All I’m saying is, pragmatically speaking, I don’t think BOS is going anywhere. All I’m trying to do is make lemonade out of lemons. And let me tell you something, these lemons are bitter and stale. Moving BOS further up the tree and adding talents to make it more tolerable for those that do not seem to like it is an easier choice than pruning it.
The only way I see the ability being pruned is if the DK dev was ballsy enough to do it and willing to face backlash for it. However, as it stands, all I’m seeing are auto-attack talents being added to the spec which are boring AF. I understand they’re adding them because it benefits both builds, just not in an interesting way.
If the whole thematic of BoS is “Unending biting snowstorm” I find it kind of weird they don’t just lump in the upkeep effect as a upgrade/replacement to relentless winter.
As is you have a literal blizzard going on around you but the more enticing button is the… blue cone?
As a bonus we get actual synergy talents instead of weird proc effects that just make us invisibly stronger…
Frost just needs better direction other than, “build that hits obliterate” or “build that hits obliterate for RP”
So much power is effectively invisible and unsatisfying. Pillar is boring, killing machine is boring, Rime is boring… Like give me something to think about other than what button glows
BoS isn’t going anywhere and Frost was never completely melee, not to mention BoS is melee range it just isn’t a strike. Just like glacial advance isn’t, just like remorseless winter isn’t and just like howling blast isn’t.
Chillpills is pretty bigoted and shouldn’t be taken seriously at all.
I know. While I do understand the sentiment of the “Zug zug” Obliterate player base, I do wish Blizzard would remove BOS from being a capstone talent. They could do so much more if they do and ease players into breath. Right now, after leveling another Dk in remix, I can tell you that going almost the whole leveling experience without BoS and then having to use it is weird. You get used to pressing obliterate and nothing else. It’s comforting seeing those big crits.
I’ve always seen Death Knights as an undead Magic rune Knight. It just so happens that Frost Death knights specialize in frost runes. Blizzard should lean in more into this magic knight aspect, tbh.
I love the idea of Breath of Sindragosa being higher up the tree and actually making interactive builds based off of it. Idk about merging buttons, but most certainly making Breath more customizable for the content we’re doing is a big W.
Breath should have similar gameplay loops that fire mage Combustion has imo. A big charge of extra stats that excess feeds into other secondaries, a fixed duration, with customizable duration (shorter burst vs longer sustain), a reliable way to get another burst of Breath while its on cd, and maybe some fun effects like what you mentioned. Maybe while you’re shooting out Breath you have a chance to proc an extra Chill Streak (charge system for it mayhaps?), or a reduced effective Frostwyrms Fury similar to our current tier flies by. Spooky undead dragons are rad!
Big agree that Breath should be easier to use/access and have more interesting reasons to push the button.