TIER BONUSES
2 pieces (Frost) : Remorseless Winter grants 8% Critical Strike while active.
4 pieces (Frost) : Consuming Killing Machine fires a Glacial Advance through your target.
Looking pretty good for the 2h Oblit gang. Looks like we can finally rock 2 Rune wep enchants.
Overall underwhelming for the DW / BoS folks, but still ok. Happy to see anything to close the gap between DW and 2H
I wouldn’t say underwhelming. That glacial advance spread in multitarget scenarios of any size will be a lot more powerful if positioned well enough. Still nice for 2h in st, but that’s about it.
So far it’s looking like I’m playing survival.
The set bonuses are decent, and not as bad as others for sure, but they still need to address the fact frost has no baseline aoe spender, and no baseline cleave ability, too much loading of talents/ borrowed power/and multipliers forcing talents into 1 dimension.
I don’t understand why heart strike and scourge strike get the ability to cleave in DnD, but nothing does as frost. Also, chill streak should be a baseline ability.
BOS existing as a talent is hampering the base class design.
We’ll have to see how these pan out after a series of adjustments.
For the FDK bonus specifically, because most people don’t run it right now they don’t realize that Glacial Advance actually procs KM. Which would turn FDK into just pressing Obliterate over and over again while you’re in PoF window assuming the free GA procs KM.
The BDK bonus’, that wasn’t tested. There’s no current ICD on the interaction and would force all BDK into NF for M+. There are also a lot of questions about it’s interactions that would have to be answered.
-Does the free HS cleave in DnD/DD
-Does the free HS benefit from the now 2 rune weapons
-Does the free HS provide RP
-Does the ERW STR and extension have an ICD or a limit
This theoretically could move BDK to having over 50% avoidance passively, generating a full RP bar almost instantly, and having 100% uptime on DRW while doing more damage. more parry, more health from the meat shield conduit, and more armor each second you’re in a trash pull, and considering trash is way more threatening to BDK than bosses are this is broken.
Like would they really go live with a version of this where you would pull all those small slimes onto the first boss of PF and within 5 seconds you have double the HP and double the STR for the rest of the fight?
8% crit during BOS will be nice.
Stacking even more crit with ME we could see longer breaths and more RW extensions. Our AOE will get much stronger too during these bursts.
Nice buff to 2H.
What if deaths due counted as consuming KM twice and you got double GA during obliteration? That be kinda cool. Assuming they finally do a balance pass on GA… they wouldn’t forget to do that again right?…right…
I SEE NO PROBLEM WITH THE BLOOD DK SET. NOTHING TO SEE HERE BLIZZARD. LOOKS GREAT.
There’s no way the free HS give RP.
Yeah blood dk set looks kinda nutty to me.
No nuttier than the prot Pally 4 piece.
Why couldnt DW have 3 runeforges? If RI is taken care of through the 4 piece, DW can get something like Hysteria. Even with BoS and the 30 sec internal CD for runeforges when swapping weapons, if you time stuff right it could be a non-issue. Stack up RI quickly with it being on a weapon, swap that weapon and your passive KM procs firing GA will keep RI up so you basically still have RI and should have FC since its not being swapped out, unless all runeforges go on a 30 second CD and you cant get FC procs, and then you have 3 runeforges, 20 extra RP and a chance to generate 20% increased RP for 8 seconds. That would take place after 30 seconds but on a Patchwerk type fight that might be absolutely huge on subsequent BoS usages.
You could possibly even do that with DW Obliteration builds or just ignore RI completely and use Obliteration windows to stack up RI and have 2 other runeforges and not worry about weapon swapping.
Even the 2 piece can allow for DW to ignore some crit to get another stat if wanted. 2h too for some extent, but there are many many ways this is absolutely great and could just mean DW needs a 3rd weapon depending on if FC still works if you change out your MH or OH depending on which weapon FC is on (doesnt matter which weapon has it unless you are using Frostscythe).
2h might get another runeforge out of it, but so could DW and more resources.
Hey, Remorseless Winter is going to get stronger! … AGAIN.
I wouldn’t say it’s underwhelming for DW / BOS builds but it’s a huge plus for 2h for sure. Giving killing machine more weight for both subspecs.
It seems like FC might pull ahead of RI in 2h but I’ll have to wait and see for sim results.
Doesn’t GA apply stacks of RI? Or was that a bug and fixed? I haven’t played 2H since pre patch.
If so I would imagine FC would always be the play as it would give 2H 2 enchants.
Also It be interesting to see if hysteria sees play as DW with high enough Crit.
The last time I played with GA is that it applied a stack of RI to everyone in front. Basically works as intended.
But it’s been awhile since I checked.
I get that they’re trying to make some of the unpopular talents look more attractive with some of these sets, but I’m not a huge fan of this set since it doesn’t solve any of the existing problems:
As much as it’d be fun to just spam KM Oblits during Obliteration with this set (in theory), until they address most of the above issues 2H is still going to play like driving a car with 3 wheels. As DW, it’s a bit better since it gets more KM procs and will possibly allow the use of a different runeforge while giving a bit more cleave aside from BoS.
Edit: I think they should completely remove the RI application of GA and allow frost damage to apply RI with a 2H equipped. Then we’d just need to tackle the KM disparity and the lack of an AoE RP spender.
I think building and maintaining the stacks will be fine. Your PoF window will instantly stack you up and then you won’t drop unless unlucky.
Was just going just about to say this.
Your opener on any encounter is going to fully stack RI. Maintenance upkeep outside of pillar won’t require any thought as you’re almost never going to go half a minute without a KM proc as DW or 2h.
Would be nice if this makes 2h far more competitive. Now if only obliterate/ice cap based builds had an aoe dump for RP
In raid yes you’ll probably be fine most of the time. However, depending on fight design even then you may have encounters with adds/target switches that won’t allow you to have PoF ready. Also in M+, you will not always have PoF available at the start of the pull, which means that you probably won’t even have RI at 5 stacks before most of the mobs are dead. And lastly, this further locks 2H into Obliteration and it would be nice to have more options.
Having to rely on a major CD and a talent (technically 2 if you count GA too) as 2H in order to do something that DW basically gets for free feels pretty bad and should be fixed for real, instead of being covered up with band-aids.
There are a couple of things that make me wonder about the 4 piece bonus that fires a GA when a KM gets consumed:
If any of the two interactions are solved, we can see the bigger picture of how strong the 4-pieces actually is. Right now, from just 2-piece alone, while boring, makes Remorseless Winter even more important because the ability is not really important enough amirite?
It’s still a huge win for 2h in long term fights while it’s also a nice bump for DW. As RW gets stronger, so shall FC. Heck, maybe Frostscythe might see play with Obliteration if the interactions are in place.
I’m not going to say that it isn’t a bandaide with respect to 2h, but the ilvl increase from next tier, the set bonus during RW and certain covenants soul binds are going to allow frost 40-50%+ crit with fairy high uptime.
Needless to say, 2h will feel better overall with the set bonuses.
Been playing frost a good bit in M+ and I think this set bonus 4 piece adds a pretty crucial piece to the content push for us. I really wish this would have been baked into a spec change instead of a tier bonus, because 10.0 puts us back to square one (minimal cleave outside of specific windows) assuming no major changes to the spec. Seems like a silly gripe, but one of my big pet peeves with these types of bonuses is that they really change how fluid a spec feels. Visually well look like an ice explosion now during pillar windows, which I like.
Actually looking at blood it’s the same deal, we have a tier bonus patching up a weakness we’ve had since launch - low dps and therefore threat.
The blood one doesn’t go live as is, that’s just iteration 1.
If it does go live, I’ll post a video of me soloing a +20.