In 10.0 we will need some quality-of-life changes that allow the spec to be more flexible. I absolutely love frost, and it feels very hit or miss in encounters.
- Killing Machine - The first thing to be to modified or reworked needs to be Killing Machine. Warlords of Draenor’s design of Killing Machine was a supportive ability and did not have to be played around by stacking large amounts of Crit to make it work. One way is to just have Killing Machine procs be auto attack based non-Crits as it once was in Warlords of Draenor and the past expansions. Once Legion came into play, you changed Killing Machine to only have a chance to proc off a Crit melee auto.
This doesn’t feel good nor rewarding to be forced into stacking Crit for a chance on chance proc to do actual damage with Obliterate. Our new tier set relies on players understanding that without Crit, your 4 piece will not be beneficial as you cannot proc Killing Machine without Crit autos. The best way to deal with this problem would be to bake our Killing Machine procs into our Mastery (Similar to how Enhancement Shaman’s “Stormbringer” in their mastery works), making it scale as the expansion goes on, but also allows for other secondary stats other than crit to be valuable until the very last patch.
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Basic Abilities - The next issue I’d like to bring up is our lack of base ability damage. We used to have hard hitting baseline abilities, but expansion after expansion since Legion, we have been hit with changes to the spec that have reduced the damage of our abilities. Instead, we now rely on abilities like Breath to do our best single and AoE damage.
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Breath of Sindragosa – Lets be real, this needs to be changed badly, its best at everything and only causes issues with balancing, and a major part in why Frosts base abilities and single target without BoS are so poor now. The current state of Remorseless Winter is something that I would like to see in place of Breath of Sindragosa’s current damage profile. With Remorseless Winter you still need to juggle runes to empower it, and it still feels rewarding to pull off successful Remorseless Winter damage. Reminder, that Remorseless Winter is only doing so well because it has multiple sources of damage amplifications from borrowed power that we will lose in 10.0, and these need to be retained for Frost.
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2H Frost - Should be the only weapon choice so juggling the other specs is easier. Every DK spec can use a 2H, and it would make Balancing easier for Blizzards balance team. I know a lot of people enjoy Dual Wield, and as do I, however, the multiple Runeforges that Dual Wield allows it to use makes Frost difficult to balance. 1H from 2H, but also balancing both DK DPS specs because of the multiple Runeforges allowed on Frost.
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Runeforges - Should either be removed or, only have the options slimmed down to a handful. I do not feel as Rune of Razorice is a healthy thing for the game to try to balance the spec around when used on a weapon itself. Rune of the Fallen Crusader is easily one of the best weapon enchants in game, since its release. Runeforges such as the addition Rune of Spellwarding (PVP) and Rune of Unending Thirst (Solo Leveling) have their places in the game. Unfortunately Runes such as the new Rune of Hysteria, which seems like would benefit Breath of Sindragosa, still have no place in the metagame as it looks like when we have a 4 piece, we will replace Razorice with a regular Weapon Enchant from the Auction House (When Dual Wielding). Theres no reason to add all of these extra “flavor” Runeforges when we have so many that do well already.
A flat 15% increased damage of our Frost abilities from Rune of Razorice should be added to the class baseline, or removed completely. Rune of the Fallen Crusader is used by all 3 Specs for a reason, it works well for everyone. If we were to keep Rune of Razorice around to be baseline baked into the spec, then Rune of the Apocalypse (Unholy), and Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle (Blood) should be baseline for our other specs as well.