Me neither, but it’s unacceptable that Howling Blast doesn’t do damage unless you have Rime and Obliterate doesn’t do damage unless you have KM and Remorseless doesn’t do damage unless you dedicated 4 talents to it and roll GS & Everfrost and FS does no damage unless you have Shattering Blade.
With a better designed spec, two of these abilities at a minimum could easily do some actual damage without being locked behind conditions or procs.
I’m someone who generally avoids playing frost as much as possible, but I’ve been playing 2h frost a bit to support my friend’s desire to play Devestation Evoker in 3s. Honestly I don’t enjoy it that much, and the main reason is because of the wide variance in damage with obliterate. Pressing obliterate with no KM proc feels really bad, where KM procs give like 50k+ Oblits and during pillar I see 80k+ (no 2set for me yet). I feel like I’m actually playing the spec during pillar of frost, and the rest of the time I’m just waiting and feeling bad.
Been pointing this out for years. Its kind of pointless to point out because no one cares that its the reason why everything has such a low floor. As long as it has flashy numbers then who cares.
Game designers already abandon frost dk. There’s no change for frost since ptr server, even it’s the weakest in M+. Here’s ezest way to buff frost that just makes breath CD to 1 min.
Why would there be any changes on a PTR server for a patch that comes out in 3-4 days? And Frost’s issue is it needs design work, not damage work, and reducing BoS’ CD to 1minute doesn’t help at all with the design of the spec, it just makes it more forgiving for M+ and makes it brain dead easy for raiding then.
I think they mean since beta.
What would you do for design? Would you roll back design to an earlier design and then rebuild on top of that or just wipe the board and redo everything?
This is just my 2 cents.
I agree that blizz really missed a trick with frostscythe. I played frost in legion and towards the end when frostscythe was meta for frost. It was really a joy to play. A lot of button smashing but was a good spec.
In m+ blizz frost dk devs really need to open their eyes. Is it normal for a dps spec to be below tank during non cd periods? Thats is what is happening to frost dk. Out of breath windows the tank will easily out dps you.
With the hit cap and dungeon design blizz implemented, there isnt much reason for tanks to pull massive when things are so far apart.
For the 10.0.5 patch, im shocked that frost dk has no buffs but they cont to buff fury warrior when they are already a good dps spec. Whats the logic there???
Where is the balance? Where is the fairness? Where are the frost dk devs?
This literally isn’t a thing. There isn’t a dev for every spec, let alone every class, and I don’t know where or how this narrative came to be a thing.
I dont think there is a specific person in charge of frost dk but i do believe that certain dev are in charge of certain classes (mayb a few classes) rather have 10 people sit down and go “what are we doing with frost dk”
There is a lead for the entire team and they all work on everything. They do split the work, but these people/teams will be working on multiple classes at the same time.
While this is probably true, this does not excuse Frost from recieving 0 PvE changes over the past 5 months and 0 PvP changes over the course of a year+. Before the “they are happy with frost” Bonegrinder has been bugged since beta… not only that, they increase the duration of Icy Talon for all DKs but not the duration of Unleashed Frenzy in the Frost tree which has the exact same way to activate it with a slightly different effect.
Because BoS, objectively the only thing that makes Frost interesting, has been middle of the pack/upper middle of the pack in the raid since the start of Season 1, and therefore the spec is fine in the interim while they work on a design change.
No amount of damage or duration tuning will fix the actual, underlying issues with Frost. Any change would just make BoS more stronger than it currently is which wouldn’t sit well at all with the demographic that’s currently been posting on these threads recently.
Spending time working on talent revamps and/or design changes >>> Spending time parsing through the data to determine what to buff for bandaid fixes.
This is my hope as to why we’ve had radio silence and no changes in the various patches we’ve seen since the launch of DF. It’s hard to say what Blizzard is working on, but I would be shocked if they weren’t fully aware of frost’s plight. Now, do they care? that’s a whole different ball of wax.
There’s a lot of other specs that are bad and have fundamental issues too, in comparison I’m sure they’re not even focused on frost.
I could write a whole long post. But im not going to.
The fact is that Blizzard is looking at DK being in a good spot. Even if the forums dont think so, it is in a good spot. Frost and unholy are both doing well in solo shuffle. Frost is pushing over 2900 and unholy is over 3k. In mythic raids currently there is only a 3% difference betwee the top and Frost, and only a 5.5% difference roughtly between unholy and the top. Blizzard admittedly aims for about 5% difference between spec performance. DK is there.
Not to mention we absolutely know there are no dedicated class / spec developers. Holinka is lead dev for class design and balance, and when they were working on tier sets one person had the responsibility of like 3 classes, which is about 9 specs.
The last thing, Icy Talons and Unleashed Frenzy are in different talent trees, so one of them has to be good for all 3 specs. Unleashed only has to be good for Frost, and what have people been talking about on here? That Frost has more RP than they can spend… so whats the problem? I bet youll say something that Frost Strike doesnt feel like its worth pressing. Feeling is subjective and thats a you problem. Frost Strike does a lot right now and if you are only looking through it as just a damage ability then again, thats a you problem.
I could keep going but ill stop right there.
I agree that frost is decent enough in Raids. For PvP, I have no real expertise, but I will take your word for it that it is in a good spot.
But can you really say that Frost is in a good spot in M+?
To be entirely honest, I don’t care how the devs change our class. Yes, some people really want big Obliterates, and I suppose that’s why it’s such and important part of our kit right now, but for me it does not really matter which ability hits the hardest, only that our overall performance is adequate.
While I do dislike the Breath of Sindragosa builds, it’s more because it makes the Frost Death Knights really bad at handling any mechanic that requires them to step out of melee range for more than a few seconds. It we want to be team players and let’s say soak a meteor or something, we lose half our damage for the next minute and a half. It a really bad play style. The supposed advantage of BoS, is that if you can stick to the boss and maintain it for a really log duration, you will be rewarded with great damage.
The thing is… they made that really easy to maintain in raids this expansion. There are 3 factors that made breath builds really great. First, we have a lot of Runic power generation, just from our talents. Also, none of the bosses this raid have really bad mechanics that we have to move away from the boss to do. Also, they made all the raid damage magical, which give us loads of extra RP. Even bad players like myself can maintain 75%+ uptime on the bosses with breath.
Right now, frost is good in raids, mainly kept alive because of BoS. But what if the next raid has really bad encounters with lots of soaking mechanics, lots of movement, where we cannot capitalize on Breath builds to keep our damage high? Our damage will sink to the gutter.
If they have to scrap Obliteration completely and give us a new capstone, I will gladly welcome it, as long as it’s fun to play and give us more options outside of BoS. Heck, if they rework BoS a bit to increase it’s damage and give it a shorter cooldown, that would be also fine by me.
It does not really matter to me whether it’s Obliterate that does big damage, or Frost Strike, or Howling Blast, or Frostscythe. I believe that we just need to have a few decent builds that can shine depending on the type of fights or encounters you are in.
You dont have to take my word on anything. Just open up leaderboards and see where people are. People on these forums were saying you couldnt get to 2200 with frost in its state… well they were wrong, clearly, by about 700 rating. People were saying Frost was the worst of the worst for raiding or pve or whatever they wanted to say… wrong again.
I dont take dungeon content seriously. In fact I hate M+ and think its a detriment to the game. But yes its still good in M+ as well. Went through this before, people are doing +20 like everyone else is and some are going higher than that.
BoS promotes learning the fight, its risk vs reward. Flub it and you might as well just run something you enjoy.
As others have said for a long time now, along with me bringing it up several times, too much of the damage of the spells and abilities that Frost uses is locked behind a door. Its almost all of them at this point. RW, Obliterate, Frost Strike, Howling Blast, Frostscythe as well but its always had that interaction but it was designed to compete with full physical damage Obliterate.
As always, great feedback post by Taeznak.
With the exception of Blood, I think Blizzard has put themselves in a weird spot from a design standpoint for both UH (to a lesser extent) and frost (to a greater extent). While both specs are performing well in a raid setting from a numbers standpoint, they suffer from a number of buttons that feel bad to press with some dead/lackluster talent choices. We also lack an identity in M+ since we bring less overall raid/group utility and require more skill from the average player to do DPS comparable to other “meta” classes.
I’m going to go on a bit of a tangent here with my “wishlist” for the class design. Feel free to ignore the incoming wall of text.
Class Level Identity
Please just give us some class-level utility/buff that ties into the rune forge and gives your party/raid the ability to proc a selected effect (even if at a lower effectiveness/proc rate). Give it a week long CD so your choice matters and have it be applied to your primary target as a debuff (for proc based effects) or a static effect that the DK maintains by attacking a target with Oblit/Festering Strike/Marrowrend. All of a sudden DKs would bring some interesting class utility and give meaning to a bit of a dead system. It would also help make the case to bring multiple DKs for different buff combos.
Thoughts for Unholy:
In my view, the only thing really holding unholy back from a design standpoint is the wounds mechanic. It’s nothing more than a tertiary “resource” we need to manage on top of runes/RP; rotationally, it’s just a glorified maintenance ability with some annoying nuances. IMO, it should be reworked into a stacking/ramping debuff that can only be applied to one target and enhances the ST damage of your primary abilities against that target (or some form of dot). Functionally, this still gives FS a place in our rotation, but makes wound maintenance a lot less annoying (not to mention eliminating the RNG element of wound application).
In terms of talents, the ebon fever/bursting sores node could stay as-is and offer the tradeoff between some sustained passive cleave off your primary target or spread cleave with VP/diseases. In order to make a wounds build relevant, I’d make Vile Contagion a choice node with Epidemic, and change VC to a passive that empowers D&D to absorb RP generated and chain the wound popping effect to targets inside your D&D with damage scaling based on the RP absorbed. I think this would make the left side of the unholy tree more interesting and offer a burstier AOE option with positional requirements (IE: D&D) or more sustained/spread AOE through diseases and epidemic spam.
The giga-burst gargoyle/commander side of class tree is largely “fine,” though having commander be a player buff (as Taez suggested in UH feedback post) and fixing gargoyle clipping would be welcomed improvements. Our insane ST burst damage in S1 is also being artificially propped up by one ridiculously strong trinket (Puzzle box) and a solid tier set bonus, which conveniently hides some issues in the tuning on our core abilities – that’s a rant for another day.
Frost Needs Rethinking
Won’t belabor the points made by others, but +1 for hoping we see some design/class improvements to frost that make it a more interesting and compelling pick for both raid and M+ content. I’m definitely in agreement that BoS needs to be reworked with a lower CD and would love to see BoS be an all-in RP dump that does a burst of damage based on your current level of RP when activated and gives some residual cleave for x seconds following. This shift would still force players to play an RP generation minigame to maximize dps while making BoS be an extra button you regularly push in your rotation and have the spec feel less “dead” if you cucked a breath window.
This logic is too flawed. Just because someone is 2900 on the spec does not mean the spec is good. Every spec has players around 2900, even the worst specs like Boomy and Enh shaman since professional players will always be high on the spec they play. There are only 3 Frost player above 2900 and one of them is Mes which is a AWC player and the other 2 are the same person on their alt. There is only 15 Frost DKs above 2500 while Unholy has 154 players above 2500.
That is why I made a post to bring attention to Frost issues.
Not at all, it procs off of Death Strike and any other runic power spender. The issue is that it lasts 6 seconds and in PvP you can get stunned / kited and the stacks will fall off while Icy Talons do not. Not only that, but it used to only proc off Frost Strike and they made it proc with all runic power spenders just like Icy Talons which was great to make them essentially the same ability. It is just another example of Frost being overlooked. I am sure that it will be increased whenever the Devs start looking at Frost changes when ever they come out.
Frost is not great in PvP but it is not unplayable. It has too many flaws and has issues but it is probably a bottom 10 PvP spec.
Being at 2900 most definitely means it isnt bad. It cant be, and its not like its just 1 person. Quit making excuses for everything. Maybe all the people on here complaining about it just arent as good as they think they are and want to blame the spec. It happens in every game.
Not all runic spenders have the same cost. Come on people, DS has a higher cost than FS, therefore you run out of RP faster and then you have to build it back up at a somewhat slower rate. So yes for QoL for the other specs Icy Talons needed a duration increase.