Are you guys looking foward to 8.1?
I’m happy with the changes that will be coming with it, and i believe it will make us stay in a better spot.
But, at the same time i’m afraid that it will not be enough to make the dk population to increase back, since even if we are strong, there are other classes that are stronger and with a better playstyle.
BoS spec is not fun, and should not be the only option for frost dks, at the same way the wounds are not fun on Unholy and i can easily say that the WoD DK was in a much better spot than it is not, regarding fun.
What do you guys have to say about it? Use this thread to verbalize your feeling about the class and hope one more time that blizzard will listen.
Damage needs to be put back into our active abilities and taken out of passive mechanics. Its not fun hitting for 10k with a 2h weapon or an ability called “Obliterate.”
Rogues can Rot better than us, can hit harder with active abilities and have way more utility. WTF.
We need utility. Abilities already exist as pvp talents. AMZ, DarkSim, and Lichborne should be baseline.
We should be able to heal our pet.
Mirror ball should be brought back.
Bring back the horn of winter raid buff. 10% haste.
Do DKs get any allied races? No
Does UH get any ST buffs? No
Does frost get any changes to fix their low apm? No
Are we now viable in pvp? No
Are DH’s/rogues being nerfed? No
Are the transmogs cool? No
No im not looking forward to the next patch at all.
the stam change might help in pvp, but honestly none of the changes they made actually address our(UH) problems in pvp or pve. we take too much damage, our mastery scaling still sucks, and we don’t do enough ST damage.
the new pvp talents look like they might be fun to play with a bit, but its not gonna help us. so no, im not looking forward to 8.1, because of the changes a dev is going to pat himself on the back thinking “i fixed dks, now i can move on to the next problem” when the reality is he barely understands the class and has no clue what we actually need, so we won’t get fixed and will instead have to hope for fixes in 8.2, assuming any of us still play at that point.
I think you’re being a bit over pessimistic. There certainly are some real issues with UH (frost too but that’s not the subject here,) but I’d like to present a counterpoint to one thing in particular. We’re gunna be a lot tankier, and you’re, in your post, severely undervaluing the changes that are happening.
In reality, the 10% stam is the smallest part of our durability changes in 8.1, it’ll be still rather helpful, but you gloss over a few big changes by saying ‘it wont help’ when it’s literally impossible to not help. What it won’t do is fix everything, but that’s asking too much out of targeted changes. And then you completely didn’t even talk about the death strike buffs which imo is huge.
So, to actually get to the changes we’re getting and how they’ll be very impactful. So the biggest thing here, is you don’t even mention the death strike buffs. Death strike is already an absurdly strong active defense tool, and it’s very clear to me the difference between playing against good DK’s in pvp and crap ones, often the difference I notice most is how well, and often, they death strike.
It’s already an incredibly strong tool, but a bit costly. So in 8.1, its cost is being reduced by 22%, but not only that, ALSO its healing is being INCREASED, not even reduced to match the lower cost. Precisely, the relative difference is about 13-14% more potential healing. ~15% healing increase to our non-cooldown main defensive mechanic, AND ~20% cost reduction.
Then we have three BIG new pvp talents for durability for unholy. Transfusion is really strong, lichborne has some drawbacks but is still rather good at what it does, but more importantly the life and death new pvp talent is DISGUSTINGLY strong, stealing 10% healing from potentially even all three arena enemies? That’s just… I just… I can’t even articulate how incredible I think that is.
Any three of these pvp talents alone will be enough to make unholy feel nigh on unkillable with the other changes (death strike buffs, and 10% stam buff which affects death strike,) if you ask me. Of course that’s exaggerating a bit, but not a whole lot, in my honest opinion.
we get 10% stam, idk if we get an armor bonus or not, but the big issue is that our armor doesn’t do its job already, 10% more is like putting a bandaid on a bullet wound.
deathstrike’s change is good, but at the same time, deathstrike doesn’t help when you are being kited or are rooted or otherwise can’t get in melee range. it also doesn’t help as much against melee because they can just keep whacking on you while you are trying to get DS hits in, assuming they aren’t whacking on you while you are desperately trying to get RP in order to DS.
our other talents help our self healing, but this really isn’t the problem. we shouldn’t be taking that much damage to begin with, spending all your time keeping yourself alive means you are not spending time putting pressure on enemy healers or killing your opponent.
AMS needs to be returned to its former glory: absorbs ALL magic damage for 8 seconds and generates RP.
IBF needs a 1 minute cd and its damage reduction upped to 50%
ghoul shield needs to make a comeback, only 2 defensive CDs on a class with low mobility is a joke. other classes have the option to run away, we generally don’t.
lichborne is pointless as long as it is a talent and not a baseline CD. IMO the biggest issue with all of our new pvp talents is that they are talents and not baseline. taking transfusion means missing out on something you may potentially need, same with lichborne, or life and death. if you take all three you will live long, but you wont have necrotic strike or reanimation, or the new abom.
Well, sure 10% stamina isn’t gunna feel like much alone, because it’s one defensive change among many. I don’t think armor is an issue, adding any reasonable amount wont change much, and in todays day and age physical damage isn’t all that prevalent anyway. Ours is better than mail wearers and leather wearers, that’s about all I think we can ask for.
Something that may indeed be a problem is that armor DOESNT affect magic damage as I mentioned. But that’s what we have AMS for (and AMZ,) which imo is actually fine right now. What you’re asking for is a cloak of shadows on a 1min cooldown with a longer duration that generates RP. Personally, I don’t think AMS needs any changes, there are traits and talents to make it absorb more substantially more.
IBF being 1 min baseline with a damage reduction of 50% is also asking for way too much. The point of the 3 min cooldown is because its a stun break AND immunity for its duration, which is CRAZY valuable. Gladiators medallion is a 2min cooldown, for comparison.
But even if we took that out, lets compare to something like shamans wall which would be similar, 40% damage reduction 1.5min cooldown 8s duration. So your proposed IBF would not only be a better wall in every single way,it would also still have stun immunity and break. That doesn’t sound like an issue to you?
Lichborne is basically exactly what you’re asking for IBF to be baseline, but the effects that either you describe that IBF should have baseline, or the effects that lichborne has currently, is WAY too strong to exist without significant drawbacks. I don’t see why it should be baseline, of course competing with other pvp talents is gunna happen but to me that’s a good thing. It should be a CHOICE to change my IBF to be significantly stronger but with a drawback.
Because it needs a drawback, otherwise it couldn’t exist while being so strong. And again, if there’s a drawback, I want it to be a choice so I don’t have to play with the drawback version if I dont want to. Notice the only defensive options that have significant drawbacks for DK, death pact and now lichborne, are both OPTIONS, not baseline.
Honestly, maybe ghoul shield would be rather helpful. But I think you put way too little value in non cooldown related durability mechanics that unholy is getting in spades. And the two cooldown related ones are incredibly strong, and 100% worth at least a single pvp talent slot, and both would be absurdly strong and strange to have as baseline imo.
Everything you’ve said here and in your previous post, and I don’t mean to offend in any way but instead just offer an opposing perspective, everything you’ve said indicated to me that you have rather unrealistic expectations for the class you play in a desperate prayer for it to no longer be considered crap.
And while I sympathize with that, because I too play DK, I think it’s incredibly important to remain realistic with proposed changes, because overbuffing only to receive a severe nerf bat and be back at square one doesn’t help anyone. And imo, very little of what you’ve suggested is in the realm of what already exists in the game, they’d all be above and beyond the comparably best defensive options out there available to other classes.
[EDIT: I forgot to touch on death strike a bit. It doesn’t help while we’re being kited, but that’s what grip/stun and chains of ice is for, and there’s no shortage of specs with pets that you can grip for easy death strike access. Unholy certainly can be a bit of a problem to always be in melee range of someone when you need it, because you’re designed to be a semi-ranged spec, but grip and chains is really enough to still make it have incredible impact against anyone who’d kite you.
But more importantly, you say it doesnt help much against melee because ‘they can just keep whacking you while you are trying to get DS hits in.’ I just don’t really get the logic behind this statement. Melee hitting you doesn’t in any way hinder you from death striking. CC does, but that isn’t specific to melee.
In fact, by the very design of death strike, it works BETTER when you’re taking a LOT of damage. It literally scales its healing to how much damage you’re taking. I’ve had death strike heal for over 30k at a time. Like literally by its very base mechanics it does its job much better while under fire than anything comparable. If you aren’t getting enough RP to use it often enough, then that’s not a defense issue that’s a resource generation issue.]
AMS never removed debuffs, it does for frost now with a talent, but it never has for other specs or before legion.
pvp talent, means you are losing something else
stun breaks are not as valuable anymore, there are less stuns in the game. 50% was also what it was originally, but it wasn’t a stun break, it was more like a free action pot, it prevented new stuns, but didn’t break your current.
shamans can also ghostwolf away and have slowing and rooting totems/thundershock.
defensive play is more than just blowing a CD, sometimes its escaping, and more often than not, we are not mobile enough to do that anymore. hence my suggesting for vastly stronger defensive cds. atm other classes have much better defensives than we do yet are able to mix them with hit and run tactics.
no it doesn’t, this is thinking like an abused child, everything we get has a drawback for no reason other than the devs are dicks. plenty of other classes have abilities with no drawbacks. we can’t just have our cake, we need to forgo supper to get it, or get the moldy cake.
how good is deathstrike when you have been disarmed or rooted? its not that it doesn’t help much against melee, it helps, but its like a wasted effort, your health doesn’t go up, it just stays static until you are out of RP, at which point you are a sitting duck. and with so much on GCD, you won’t be generating a ton of RP fast enough to stay alive.
i don’t disagree that the changes will help, i just don’t think they are enough, and we are forced to chose 3 things when we need 6 of them. IMO necrostrike, reanimation, and dark simulacrum need to be baseline, atm its a hard choice between them and any of the new talents, it feels like giving up capability and choice we are supposed to have for survivablility we should have had all along but don’t because the devs failed.
I’m not looking forward to 8.1 at all. In fact, i dont plan on playing my geared FDK again until they make major changes to the class.
10% hp and more deathstrikes in pvp…gg big whoop. We’re still gonna get pancaked and be spamming DS in order to live and do low dps.
Another tier of BOS? Its fine when it works, but screw up that opener, or it falls off due to mechanics and your dps is hot garbage the remainder of the fight.
WQ sucks with dk too. Critting for 4k is a joke. Too much damage on dots, and not enough on physical attacks. Outside big CDs i’m killing mobs faster with my 350 ilvl rogue. Sick of DK, and 8.1 isnt making me come back to my favorite class.
My fault, I forgot to mention that part. Still, the loss of that particular mechanic not only doesn’t impact as as much because it’s specifically designed to work well to set up a vanish. Secondly, I dont think that one mechanic is worth giving it 50% longer duration and 50% lower cooldown, personally. And I think it’s plenty strong in its current version. Also, frost doesn’t have a talent that does anything like that, that I know of.
I don’t see why that means we shouldn’t count it, just because we have to choose it over something else just isn’t the end of the world. We have to make choices all the time. It sounds to me like part of this is you pining for a time long past when everyone had a large majority of their kit as baseline.
This just isn’t the case anymore, across the board for everyone. In the current system we simply have to work a huge portion of our kit is coming from CHOICES we have to make, either as talents or pvp talents. You saying that just isn’t news, it’s something I’m very well accounting for in my conclusions.
I… just disagree. I’m not sure what you are counting as originally, but looking objectively at the current patch, stuns still have an enormous influence on every single arena match, and are hands down the most influential cc in the pvp world. I don’t really have anything more to say than that.
A lower cooldown on IBF baseline might indeed be needed, I dont mean to discount the potential of that, just not drastically. 2min cooldown for it sounds about as low as I think objectively sounds reasonable, personally I’d say 2min30s with the consideration that there’s the inner ring trait coming out in 8.1 for us which reduces the cd by 15s.
I was comparing one single ability to another because doing more than that is way too complicated to clutter up this forum post with.
We can compare one ability to one ability, or we can compare an entire toolkit to entire toolkit but that would take a lot of man power and time, or maybe general sections of toolkits like ‘defense’ and ‘mobility’ and ‘offense’ and ‘cc.’ But comparing things across categories willy nilly is, sorry if I’m being frank, just rather obvious cherry picking.
I kinda already addressed this, ‘CC does [hinder death strike,] but that isn’t specific to melee.’ Or really specific to any other classes non-cooldown active defenses. Can specs like ele sham, or ret pala or any of the hybrid healing classes, can they use a basic heal while stunned?
That’s just how active defenses work. Defensive cooldowns often come with the premise that they can be used while cc’d but non-cooldown active defenses like these don’t, I cant think of a single example of a non-cooldown active defense that a dps has which can be used while hard cc’d.
Finally, something that’s in the realm of realism and reason. They will help, but will they help enough. Well that’s the question isn’t it? I don’t think we could know if it’s going to help until it’s active in a pvp season, unless it’s such severely overtuned changes that everyone can tell that it’s gunna be absolute top tier. Furthermore, where do we define ‘enough’ as? I think that’s a question we don’t often consider, and it’s something I’d like to diverge a bit on.
Are we defining ‘helping enough’ as being as good as something like assassin rogue which is almost undisputedly the most overtuned spec in the game currently for pvp? I’m sure everyone has a different standard that they would like to see the game balanced around, so conversations like these often are starting off from a doomed position.
Which brings me to this:
First of all, that’s rather presumptuous and a bit insulting. But this is the perfect place for me to address this because it goes back to my previous paragraph about what each person thinks the standard that balancing should aim towards is.
From my perspective, the number values in every single suggestion you give is way higher than would be acceptable in my personal version of what that standard would be. It’s not ‘the thinking of an abused child,’ in fact I have problems associated with the polar opposite.
It’s simply my standard for how strong any given spec should be, or any given ability in comparison to similar abilities from other classes. And any given class in relation to that standard is also something that’s going to vary in the opinion of person to person, we each hold bias’ about them.
We tend to want unrealistically good stuff for our classes, but other classes that have less are too strong and we also want them nerfed. It’s rather common in games with ever fluctuating balance like this, but I think we should all endeavor to keep perspective about it all. We all may think we’re perfectly unbias, but I promise you we’re all dealing with different levels of them at all times. Me included.
This is gunna be my last post like this, I felt the need to elaborate to the full extent I could in this case, but it doesn’t feel good cluttering up a thread like this. So sorry about that
Man do I agree, this sucks noodles. There’s literally 0 reason for frost’s single disease to do the damage it does when it’s not a player-targeted-DoT spec anyway, it’s so out of place. We can keep the disease for the runic power generation mechanic, and just have it do minor damage, and simply put that lost damage into the rest of the kit and I’d be happy. Unholy should be the disease guy, hands down.
AMS debuted in a wrath with like a 12 second duration and was nerfed. however for a long time it didn’t have a cap on the amount of damage it could absorb. as long as it was up you were immune to magic damage, regardless of amount. thats the way it should be. we don’t have a bubble like a paladin, there’s no reason for our defensives to be so weak.
hmm, i’ll need to look again, its been a minute since i even switched to frost, but i thought the debuff clear on AMS was still in play, i faced a FDK the other night who wiped out my stack of wounds somehow just before i hit apoc
*rogues, paladins, priests, hunters, druids, and mages not included.
there are fewer stuns in the game now than in the past with more things like roots and slows in their place. having an extra stun break doesn’t help much when you can be rooted or slowed so slow you might as well be rooted in place.
what i mean by originally is that back in the day IBF didn’t break stuns, it only prevented them, i don’t remember when this was changed.
i disagree, in pvp i need to keep track of all other classes tookits, strengths and weaknesses, you use a different strat for facing something that can escape vs something that can’t, your spells are used differently and timed differently. you do need to adjust your playstyle to account for the difference in overall package between classes.
root/slow/disarm aren’t hard cc, you are still taking damage while under their effects, but you can’t DS back to stop from dying.
i don’t think so, DKs have a problem, we get drawbacks and tradeoffs when others don’t, its getting old. its not a matter of number balancing but ability design. death pact comes with an absorb, why? there is no reason for this. reanimation zombies can be killed with a fart, which is fine, but we don’t get RP for the runes spent summoning them so a simple AoE can really hurt us if we invested runes into a few zombies. our brez has a RP cost, again why? there is no reason for this. its just irritating to get a crap sandwitch for half our toolkit for no reason.
This has to be one of my biggest complaints with the class currently. Why make our brez cost something we have to generate from nothing. Other classes with a brez start with a full pool of resources and have to use them resourcefully but that’s how they have always worked.
On the other hand, DK’s have to decided on whether to use DS, or any other ability that uses RP, or brezing. This also happens in situations were I might have just used up my RP to heal and suddenly someone goes down and I am the guy with the brez. I now have to get enough RP to do it, which admittedly isn’t much, and then rez them while I am tanking and avoiding mechanics. It’s a lot to have to deal with in the heat of the moment.
