I’ve noticed a distinct trend that Blizzard seems to follow: they like to scrap everything that isn’t as popular as other things.
Take the conduits, legendaries, and covenant abilities from SL that are just straight up being removed from the game in favor of the others.
Do they ever stop to think that remorseless winter only saw the light so much because of tuning? That biting cold was popular because of output and not because anyone genuinely finds it fun to play around with?
I’ll personally miss eradicating blow as an option to juice up frost strikes, shackle the unworthy for the mastery and extra bit of damage reduction, and even some of the forgotten az traits like killer frost.
I’m happy to see that we retain some things, but I wish the devs would understand that popular does not mean fun in every case and that tuning is the primary driver behind it.
Also have no idea why remorseless winter needs 3 different buff nodes while frost strike gets two, glacial advance gets zero, and frostscythe gets zero. Is it because nobody used these abilities when they were poorly tuned and even below suboptimal?
I just hope they add more options to what’s actually viable so interesting builds can not be bad builds. (I seriously don’t know a single person who thinks remorseless is a fun and interactive cooldown).
The Fantasy of RW is fun but it lacks interactivity in our kit.
Right now gameplay wise it’s a snowball. You turn it on and it keeps getting bigger.
That’s… it. Like could we merge Breath and RW so that RW can be a big storm but takes power to maintain? Maybe standing in Death and Decay makes it grow so it has a larger radius? Repeated ticks makes targets affect by frost fever explode with icicles? Soemthing?
This has been happening since Legion → BfA. This should end with this expansion as we shouldn’t be having borrowed power that is scrapped at the end of the expansion. After this expansion, we’ll probably get 10 more levels and 10 more talents (either more per spec or 5 for baseline and 5 for each spec). We’ll just have to wait and see, but the point is that the base philosophy you mentioned was inherent with borrowed power systems.
I suppose that this was happening before Legion, but as they were mainly adding abilities the losses were few. Thorns and Eyes of the Beast are some examples of things lost in the past.
To be fair conduits were basically Glyphs but with multiple ranks for 0 reasons and a pain to acquire. Shadowlands legendaries were good on paper but required a massive cost to be able to learn the rank 4 recipie and because only a few people had that kind of gold we could see max rank legendaries going for over 100k each. Prices have dropped dramatically now that its easier to be able to get the EXP to craft a rank 4 base item.
Legion Legendaries were good… once 7.3.5 came out with wakening essences to buy individual legendaries.
Covenant abilities in actuality only 1 or 2 of the 4 class specific were BiS and people usually went to the BiS. Some of those abilities such as Abomination Limb and Convocation are coming back as talents.
The idea with the current talent rework is that it will last for the next few expansions. Something we haven’t really had since Glyphs from Wrath to WoD and Talents from MoP to Shadowlands.
RW has a good bit of lore tied to it, thinking of arthas in the halls of reflection. It is a neat ability in concept, the implementation is what is lacking. I don’t mind the playstyle of a growing storm, but I agree it’s lacking.
We have DnD which is a low damage low impact aoe that doesn’t function with the kit outside of abilities that directly improve it (deaths due, leggo, etc.). We have RM that is a short CD growing aoe that peaks and falls off entirely, there isn’t much playstyle to keeping it going because you’re hamstrung by runes and after we add 2 seconds to it were at the mercy of rune regen. We have BoS that’s a long CD long big damage that we have more agency in keeping it up. We also have howling blast and frost scythe but these are single damage events so I’m not including them here.
I agree that RM and BoS are playing in the same sandbox and can probably be combined at this point. I’d rather see a talent section that offers shorter uptime and big burst or a slow build and maintain forever if able at lower damage. This way you get the arthas theme that is stronger in gauntlet encounters (that we have very few of, think sanguine depths) and the BoS playstyle that shines in most m+ environments where you can combine pulls for effectiveness.
For raids the BoS playstyle should benefit from high damage phases (think 3rd boss in spires when he’s charging, or 1st boss of mists), where as the lower damage maintain forever would be preferable for longer flat damage fights (think last boss of theater of pain).
This way you can tweak the ability to function based on content. I would love to see talent load outs be encouraged per dungeon. I know a lot of people hate how Single Target focused ToP is, but it’s a breath of fresh air. There is only 1 or 2 skips in the dungeon and the first pack is hardly necessary.
Which is why I’m excited for Classic Wrath, Glyphs (not conduits which were Glyphs in a nutshell but with various ranks) were fun to use to improve your gameplay. Ya like talent tree’s of old they were cookie cutter but often has some choice in the minor glyph selection. Major Glyphs you would swap out for AoE or Single Target situations (which even though I didn’t play in Cata, MoP, WoD it was pleasing to know you had a glyph library and didn’t need to waste gold on repurchasing glyphs).
Ideally if we were to get glyphs back, they would be called something else (because I still love my cosmetic glyphs), not have ranks/ilvl to them and are easy to obtain but you only need to obtain them once.
I honestly don’t even find the old trees too cookie cutter. I’m excited to try out a prototype for a semi-viable 2h frost dk in classic wrath (really hoping they put dungeon finder back in the game for personal time constraints though).
Remorseless Winter should just be a modification of Death and Decay, like Defile. Anything that affects Death and Decay should affect it instead. Its the easiest solution. Death and Decay has never served any purpose for Frost DK (besides the very limited purpose of breaking stealth enemies), even in WotLK, because of Howling Blast.
Unless they go back to WotLK style class design instead of the ridiculous predefined specs since Cata, there’s no reason for Frost DK to have Death and Decay. If players still want access to Death and Decay for whatever reason, don’t spec into Remorseless Winter.
In an unrelated note, any Shadow damage abilites that Frost DK has access to should deal Shadowfrost damage, with the exception of Diseases (ie Superstrain). It can be a hidden passive while your spec is set to Frost for all I care–“All abilities that deal Shadow damage instead deal Shadowfrost damage, with the exception of Diseases.”
Would give us an actual reason to drop DnD too. Overall though, I’d like to see less emphasis on remorseless winter in favor of chunkier frost strikes, glacials, oblits, and soul reaper actually being viable on fdk. I just want a few more impactful buttons to smash and add more depth than just lining pillar up with buffs and praying to rnjesus.
Interesting idea making RW replace death and decay. Death and decay has always felt out of place for frost, and even now the only reason you drop it is for the obliteration cleave. It doesn’t offer grip of the dead or any other synergy with the spec. But RW could fill that role really nicely.
Tbh I’d love to see some mix up in how the kit works together. More talents that allow interaction between abilities would be a good way to add customisability.
Something tells me that Shadow abilities for Frost such as Death Coil and Death and Decay are supposed to be a supplemental abilities that supports Frost Playstyle such as it granting Obliteration Cleave.
That being said, if the game was to create a bigger gap of creativity and customization, I could see it being done Shadowfrost damage based on the would-be toolkit is given from a developer to a player.
Overall, while it is an interesting idea for RW replacing DnD, I am not sure if I’m on board with it.
I think making DnD worth using would be better just because Frost is so limited in button presses as it is. We lack a major single-target cooldown, we lack a major rp spender for single target burst, we don’t have any real filler abilities (short cds / no resource) like overpower for the warrior does, and I personally think pillar is almost too focused on in our kits instead of just being an extra reward to line up burst windows in. Whether you play icecap, oblit, or breath, you’re always left feeling like you’re lacking something major (i.e. solid burst window for icecap, feelsbad downtime for oblit and breath), and they could do things in our core rotation to alleviate some of those pains imo.
It’s actually been a dps gain on 3+ targets to drop death and decay (being a non night fae) all expansion.
Prior to legion it served as a way to convert an unholy rune into a death rune. In legion it felt like the ability was replaced with RW. I think it only got added back because of their idea for the night fae ability.
Maybe the solution is to make the night fae ability (that will be a talent) only be active for a set duration after skill use, that way we can still have gathering storm and have it changed to trigger from RW not dnd.