Im happy with the direction of these changes, they’re pushing a much healthier playstyle and damage profile for both specs. It’s also great to see the effort Blizzard is putting to fix both specs. With all this in mind i think there are a few things that could be done to seal the deal and make the class feel complete and fun to play in PvP.
1- AMS is still drastically nerfed in PvP due to how oppressive the old Spellwarden PvP talent was for enemy magic damage casters. Since then, the old Spellwarden has been removed and reworked into something that doesn’t have much to do with survivability but we are still left with a nerfed AMS with no compensation buffs.
If AMS doesn’t get un-nerfed, i’m afraid DK’s will still struggle to achieve this high uptime juggernaut playstyle which Blizzard is aiming for. Against physical damage, we have the new Bloodforged Armor PvP Talent to help incentivize us staying in and death striking for our survival rather than running which is great for dealing with what used to be DK’s biggest weakness, but now it’s gonna be awkward when the supposed “Anti-Caster” melee is actually hard countered by casters.
2- Soul Reaper is beyond underwhelming in PvP. The secondary effect that comes with the talent is very hard to actually proc in PvP, and even though it’s hard to pull off, it still does very mediocre damage and on top of that it is DISPELLABLE. It is one of our 3 capstone talents at the bottom of our class talent tree, yet it’s not even worth the global most of the time, let alone the talent point investment.
With Abomination Limb and Empower Rune Weapon now both heavily nerfed in PvP, we are left with 3 very underwhelming capstone talent choices in our talent tree, and i don’t think that is good game design and it will lead to some disappointment with most DK players, especially ones coming from PvE playstyles who are used to all 3 of these talents being gamechangers for their class. Soul Reaper should be made Undispellable and it’s secondary damage effect should be heavily buffed in PvP so that it may once again be the unique, high risk and high reward execute ability that it used to be in MoP and WoD.
3- Frost’s PvP Talents are counter-productive. Remorseless Winter is getting huge PvP buffs to make it feel like it can do some meaningful damage finally, but one of our main PvP talents “Dead of Winter” doubles the cooldown of it and it incentivizes players to hold on to their remorseless winter and use it as a stun for a big setup rather than actually using the spell on cooldown as a rotation ability.
The PvP talent “Bitter Chill” which adds a haste slow effect to your chains of ice, that’s a nice idea but the problem is that it’s bugged and it doesn’t work with our double chains of ice talent “Proliferating Chill”, only the main target of your chains of ice get’s affected by this haste slow, and even if it wasn’t bugged, the PvP talent could be much more impactful and interesting if instead of applying an 8% haste slow, it instead stole 8% haste from the target to the DK, similar to the Icy Talons talent from WoTLK, which most DK players loved. and if they don’t redesign it to steal haste, they could at least increase the value of it. It’s very dumb to expect Frost DK’s to pick Bitter Chill over Necrotic Aura when Bitter Chill requires constant globals spent to reapply the effect. What would you rather have? +8% damage for the whole team on everyone around the DK or just -8% haste on 1 target, it’s a no-brainer.
Necrotic Aura is also a boring PvP talent which every DK plays regardless if they are playing a magic heavy arena comp or not, it should be made baseline or the damage should just be redistributed to the rest of the kit so we can leave the PvP talents to be an outlet to make engaging and interesting build choices before every Arena or RBG.
