The time is here to revisit DK pvp modifiers

Classes Death Knight
41

What a lot of people dont understand is that when a spec is balanced at least, if not designed, its for pve then it gets pvp modifiers.

They either dont understand or dont want to hear what the root of the problem is. Why isnt Frost Strike being buffed? Obliteration builds. BoS has no say in what damage it does because it drops other rp spenders almost completely depending on durations.

When you have Obliteration builds have such insane Obliterate crit % (98%) fed mostly if not entirely by KM procs, it leaves no room for other damage sources. More Frostreaper placing so much importance on KM procs.

Frostscythe is another issue that arises and cleaving strikes should be deleted and just baked into Blood and Unholy.

42

Naw frostscythe should just be baseline and frosts way of actually dealing consistent cleave damage. It isn’t taken purely because of tuning and was perfectly fine before frost reaper was in the game (shadowlands).

But yes, blizzard tunes around pve first pvp second. It was very obvious with ret paladin.

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I dont mind that it costs a talent point, it just has to be worth it. It isnt worth the risk.

A problem with the talent setup is if you want Brittle, you have to take Cleaving Strikes. Its a mandatory talent at that point. So these 2 talents will directly compete against each other. Frostscythe isnt mandatory, its a branch off, but if it was good enough it would be for aoe and that would make Cleaving Strikes feel like a wasted talent because its mandatory for the reason listed before.

This isnt there for Blood or Unholy. Blood is going to use Heart Strike and its already a cleave plus there is no alternative to pick up. Unholy is going to use Scourge Strike and the “alternative” to Scourge Strike is Clawing Shadows which is basically original Scourge Strike with some range so its also not competing with Cleaving Strikes.

Frost is entirely different in that it had an alternative for AoE so it never needed Cleaving Strikes.

Technically you could try squeezing in Frostscythe right now on 2 targets. But thats if DnD isnt available and you dont have a KM proc. For instance my Obliterate does 5.6k damage without anything. Frostscythe can crit for me for 12.8k without anything but RI. A KM Obliterate for me however is 33.5k without anything but RI (I dont know where this 4x the damage comes from since mine is almost 6x the damage) which means you have to hope Frostscythe doesnt eat a KM proc. I would need 3 targets for Frostscythe to do better than a KM Obliterate and at that point you might as well Cleaving Strikes and get vastly more damage out. My Obliterates with Cleaving would be doing 100.5k damage without anything.

Frostscythe would need 8 targets at full strength to beat out cleaving Strikes, and if it were to get a buff it would need to do about 3x the damage right now making Cleaving Strikes useless. Not only that but it probably would take over Obliterate completely.

Obliterate baseline = 5.6
Buffed Frostscythe with RI = 8.4k

KM Obliterate + RI + 2pc = 33.5k
Buffed Frostscythe with RI + 2pc = 38.64

This buff to make Frostscythe worth it against Cleaving Strikes at 3 targets makes it so that Frostscythe would beat out Obliterate in all scenarios. Thanks Frostreaper.

The only thing you could do is make Frostscythe worth it at 4+ targets and this number is different for DW and 2h. None of this was an issue until SL which certain people on this forum want to ignore.

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I think obliterate is fine as is tbh.

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The resource you dont start with is your spender resource pool

For warriors thatd be rage, For DKS its runic power

You have to build runic power like you have to build rage

The only difference is warrior has cooldowns on their buttons, while we have free use to spam but we have runes so we cant overspam, Runes act as an indirect way to give our builders cooldowns as well so we cant infinitely build runic power

The primary purpose of runes is to build, And with BoS being the main design point for FDK since bfa its 100% true

The real reason is a mix between it being the spam builder for BoS, And its proc damage from killing machine

If you buff the base ability to consistently always hit hard then KM becomes busted

I wouldnt call it a design issue, Its a tuning issue

And it would be one that wasnt a big deal if all the other abilities on our action bars did damage. Thats what you dont understand

Who cares if obliterate is weak af without pillar and KM, Its not meant to always do damage, its meant to do your hardest hit when you get the proc.

The button that IS actually designed to be the source of your sustain dps, Is froststrike, and thats the button that needs to be targeted for increases ST wise, The damage needs to be significantly higher baseline around 50-60% higher to start, and it needs to provide more functional purpose too like farming Cold blooded rage more often, and lowering PoF’s cooldown more often

FDK does not need obliterate to do sustain dps, We need a better froststrike, howling blast, remorseless winter, and better talents for these respective abilities. Talents that arent massive % increases to the raw damage of the button, but are instead gameplay impacting and change the way we rotate through abilities

Me too, I just think froststrike, howling blast, and remorseless winter have fallen grossly behind in damage, and also depend far to heavily on their talent modifiers for % damage

Gut the total % you get from the talents, or even rework the talents, Bake that damage into the base abilities, And then even consider just straight buffing all those abilities by 30-60%

Damage might be to overtuned after that, So instead of removing the extra damage from the abilities directly, remove it from Pillar of Frost and give us back its old duration so we dont burst as hard, but also dont get destroyed from 1 single disarm

4 Likes
46

Just add damage in terms of damage done to player mods. There is a specific player damage done mod on every individual spell.Simple.

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1000% agree. They did it with ret paladin where now all your buttons feel good to press and impactful, I don’t see why they really need to take a whole lot away especially considering how lackluster it is outside of ideal conditions for raid, M+ and especially pvp.

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Did you see the chart made about burst vs sustained damage? With all the data collected it has both but the chart isnt 100% accurate because the data collected didnt include pets.

It was in solo shuffle, and its win rate was between 46.25-46.5% with about the same amount of matches played outside of Ret which was an outlier.

They could do pvp adjustments, i just dont think Blizzard likes doing that outside of very specific reasons. They also seem to not have the manpower with people quitting.

Damage also isnt the answer because some specs that had high damage were one of the worst specs in pvp. Like affliction.

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This is true, the biggest problem with frost is it has a contradictory playstyle. The class is supposed to be a brawler style melee like a warrior, staying in the fight keeping pressure up, and that’s how it’s designed with deathstrike a continuous heal to stay in the fight. We don’t have escape tools like a monk teleport or rogue vanish, the class is meant to stay in the fight. Yet frost has to play completely opposite of that. It’s fine for a class to have burst and that be a playstyle as seen with monk WW or MM hunters, but the problem with that being on DK those classes have escape tools, we don’t. On top of that at least those classes can still do decent damage outside their goes, FDK has zero pressure. So what do we do? Were forced into running until pillar is back. And the only way to land kills is pillar cleaves which can be shut down countless ways. What I believe the FDK community wants, is to have decent sustain damage and still good burst like ret has now. I think the way to achieve that is get rid of all the micro modifers and bring the base damage up. Chillpills has really good ideas on how the spec should work from a pvp perspective and how it should be balanced

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Found it when you mentioned it.

Ret isn’t an outlier, there are 11 specs within 3% of its win rate for solo. Demo has the same win rate. Easier to filter on PC as opposed to phone.

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It wasnt just win rate. I think it was rin rate with matches played on the graph. Everyone was around 2k matches when ret was at almost 10k matches or around there.

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Yeah lots of people swapped off warrior, which was in the exact spot ret is now prior to the rework. You’ll see the same with Shadow after 10.1 if the rework is decent never mind if they’re op.

I’ve been watching it on

which I like better because it lets you break down by rating.

Prior to the Ret rework Arms was beating out the next two combined for rep which were healers, sham and disc. No one cared about that at all, but suddenly ret is as good and the forums explode. War was the top at every single rating filter, 1800, 2200, and 2400.

This is reg 3s, @1800+

The difference between Ret and War is slightly less than 300 players.

Why did this happen? Literally every other melee was nerfed into the ground while Ret/War were buffed into the sky. Warrior after buffs was stronger than Unholy/Feral/Sub/Assassination/Enhance/Frost/Ret/Survival/WW after nerfs or with buffs (WW) and on par with DH at launch. After the rework Ret was slightly stronger than Warrior, they’re realistically even now though funny enough both are trash into Lock/Mage.

3:17:45, Echo Vs The Agents

All these classes have mods coming out of their ears, some have spam cc and infinite mobility which Frost does not have. Looking at this I don’t see any excuse why 80% of the nerfs that went out up to 10.0.7 shouldn’t be reverted, and why Frost specifically shouldn’t have its consistent damage brought up.

@Chillpills- the team wanted to kill Master Frost which is why Frost is designed the way it is. The answer isn’t less mods its far more procs same idea as Ele sham/Frost mage. The development team doesn’t want us spamming Howling Blast/FS and ignoring Obliterate which was also what the player base wanted. If there were more procs of KM outside obliterate and Howling/FS did real damage the spec would look a lot better. This is a spec with low mobility no mortal strike and one team utility button (AMZ) so it’s going to need a lot of work for it to be ‘good’ in any meta never mind what we have now.

BTW even duel wield Frost suffers from lower consistent damage, even with more KM procs and reliable Razorice stacking for shattering strikes.

2 Likes
53

I wondering if to improve DS would be to look at a system that we had back in WOTLK but with the change that it would affect DS instead of Obliterate.

Bring back 3 diseases to all spec. DS heal for a base % improved by the numbers of diseases you have on your target and every disease is added by one separate dmg skill.
So you can manage to get some big heals with the trade off that you become more focused on a single target for a period of time and you do get some kind of rotation going when it comes to skills.

Wotlk used a similar system but it affected Obliterate and dmg.

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The dev team built those modifiers into the tree, the problem is for DS anyway that the player damage value for the heal is nerfed and the base heal is nerfed.

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Wasnt it early this expansion that Havoc and Shadow made up the majority?

So many other classes have modifiers as well. MSW, Icestrike for Frost Shock, wolves, crashed lightning, stormstrike on itself that can proc off of the proc which is like a modifier, hot hands, primal lava actuators (or whatever they were renamed to), flame shock on lava lash, ascendence and thats just off the top of my head for enhance.

Frost has them, but if people are going to list modifiers list them all. Unleashed Frenzy, improved Obliterate, MotFW, Shattering Blade, Frostreaper+Killing Machine (almost a 600% modifier baseline without anything else but RI for me) Bonegrinder, another 15% Obliterate damage from whatever Koltiras was renamed to, cold heart, RW talents, Improved Frost Strike, Pillar, Whelps, Citadel (renamed), brittle. And im probably missing some.

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Not really, Unholy, Havoc, Shadow, Assassination, Sub, WW, all had good rep and were pretty close. Havoc was probably the best or easiest melee where Shadow was probably the best caster. Nearly every spec outside those with the exception of Outlaw either got buffed or scaled with gear to be on par or better than the afore mentioned (not Havoc)

Now the population dps wise is divided between Ret, Warrior,BM and Demonology and the meta is way worse for it because of the power difference between Ret/War/Demo and everything else. Even though caster cleaves are still hella strong, I just started doing arena again on my Spriest after 8 years and games at 1700-1800 cr (playing off my partners cr) don’t end till a healer is out of mana and damp is at least 20%.

With what they’re planning for Feral, and how strong hunters are outside AWC alongside mage/shaman buffs the classes they gutted Unholy, Havoc, Shadow, Assassination, Sub, should be brought back to where they were at launch or near it. Affliction needs something as well, not sure what it is because I haven’t touched my 'lock since the legion rework.

Frost’s issues in pvp are pretty clear cut. Big burst, easily shut down, slow moving, no mortal strike and very limited team utility outside stuns and a silence and blind. Bad damage outside CD’s/procs because the dev team doesn’t want us trying Masterfrost ever again. Those CCs are all being nerfed. Everyone is getting nerfs to cc duration which is idiotic.The pvp talents for Frost are god awful. Each one comes with a draw back, which is a rarity or flat out non existent in pvp.

The new spell warden is asinine. No idea why it’s nerfed, with the general strength of casters that talent will be worthless.

Death Chill is also bad; the root applied by the second chains of ice breaks to any damage, so with the fact that Remorseless Winter does damage means that the spell that applies the root right before your go breaks the root.

Bitter chill isn’t terrible but it’s not great either, I have to double check if the haste redux is applied when using proliferating chill.

Shroud of Winter on the other hand is worthless unless you’re sitting on an Evoker Healer playing a wizard cleave.

Dead of Winter isn’t great either, reason being the amount of time added to RW which hurts our consistent damage as well.

Delirium is questionable at best, it doesn’t seem to affect Shadow Step on my rogue only sprint. It didn’t feel very impactful when I was doing Solo’s last weekend.

Whoever implemented Rot and Wither ought to be moved off the team. Also the person who designed it. I think that about covers it. The talent is an actual troll from the company and anything I’ll say about it further will result in a forum ban. Its bad.

Dark sim used to be great but with everyone having the best abilities moved off mana and into a second or third resource it needs a rework.

Strang and Necro Aura feel great; funny that the general talents are actually the best.

The new pvp talent for Death Strike is looking not bad, but for it to be good it would need to reduce damage for 5s not 3 to line up with the heal timer on DS. Even when you’re getting blasted by Ret/War spamming DS isn’t good you need to time it. The other thing that talent gets invalidated by disarm, when we’re most vulnerable and nearly all melee have a disarm. Are you always disarmed? No, but the duration of the effect being 3s means that most ccs in the game are still going to be long enough to let the buff run out before going DK and disarming off that to prevent DS and the buff. This is a much bigger deal for frost than unholy for obvious reasons, that being gnaw. I can stop or slow the cc chain while cc’d with pet. I can’t do that with frost.

Now add to all that suck salad the fact that we have all these interesting abilities that are conditionally good but not great and quite frankly overshadowed by every other melee in pvp atm, with the exception of maybe Outlaw rogue. Even funnier it’s not because of pvp modifiers, we have negatives on FWF, Big Chains and Breath. 33%,33%, 66% of regular damage. Frost strike has a positive value and is still somehow bad outside Pillar. Its not super great even playing DW with Shattering which was a let down. It won’t be long before people figure out (again) how to shut Frost down b/c its the same as SL season one.

3 Likes
57

I dont think the issue is with Blizzard not wanting us to play masterfrost again. Masterfrost was the single worst thing about frost because it ignored an entire mechanic of the spec due to mastery pushing howling blast to a point of being worth more to press than Obliterates.

You also have to look at what these CD’s are doing in order to fix the problem. Are these CD’s good if you didnt take Obliteration in pvp? No. Even if people changed to crit vers priority it still wouldnt.

Obliteration is what is pushing this CD window importance because it forces one of the strongest procs in the game. My Obliterate does almost 6x the damage without any CD’s or modifiers outside of RI which is just on my weapon and gets applied in the first place. 6x its normal damage. Prior to SL it was 2x and that 2x could happen even without KM procs. The build crit to proc KM change was dumb. They had it in Wrath and then changed it for a reason and it was that way until the Legion rework.

So if people want damage to be there outside of CD’s then certain things have got to go. Frost heavily relies on KM procs, even with BoS builds its better to have KM procs than not because you are using Obliterate anyways so why wouldnt you want it to do 6x its normal damage at a minimum?

In pvp Frost is looking to be what happened to Demonology. They dont want people to play it because there is an issue with it. I think it would be more healthy for the spec for Frostreaper to go. The average Obliterate for 2h Obliteration builds its around 120k. You can get that easily with 80k normals and 160k crits for Obliterate. Thats for 2h but DW average Obliterates for Obliteration windows is hard to find since there arent many that will DW Obliteration.

Frost PvP is at the mercy of PvE design. Certain people want to think you can just wave a magic wand and do what they say and everything will be fixed, but in pvp its still going to be reliant on CD’s due to the nature of Obliteration and the design of KM procs. It doesnt matter if you take away Bonegrinder, it doesnt matter if you take away Brittle, Unleashed Frenzy, Rune Mastery, Citadel, Whelps when the biggest modifier is still in play and you have to rely on a CD window which would have the same issues regardless of these other modifiers.

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That was the exact reason they gutted howling blast outside Rime, took Frost Strike off of the Killing Machine modifier. The same ‘issue’ exists with Frost scythe currently vs Obliterate. In reality the issue was easier to solve, just buff Obliterate to be better in single target than either Howling or Frost Strike. By the way, I actually played Master Frost and by no means did we ‘ignore’ Killing Machine procs, we used them on Frost Strike. The ‘ignore mechanic’s’ line is a straight falsehood.

Not even remotely close, many abilities hit as hard or harder than Obliterate in pvp and pve under the same conditions meaning in cooldowns with procs. In PvP: Ice lance, Aimed Shot, Templars Verdict, Chaos Bolt, Execute/Mortal Strike, Rising Sun Kick, Kill Command, Earth Shock, Elemental Blast with or with out echo, Shadow Word: Death

first 5 seconds. Not sure if this is still possible but SWD is a great contrast because it has a modifier on it for low hp that is applied on a proc from shadow word pain via a talent.

Not to mention Ret Judgement, Warrior Mortal Strike/Execute/Overpower, WW RSK which can or do all hit numerous times for one global through different mechanics. A warrior hitting a 115k MS getting a proc for a second at 90k is a regular thing, Monks getting 120k RSK off with the clones doing 80k+ on their RSK (2 clones) or Ret judgement hitting 50k x4 on a single target.

Please go on more about how ‘op’ obliterate is though. BTW two of the abilities I (MS/RSK) apply healing debuffs. Automatically making them 2-3x more powerful than Obliterate at all times.

Not even remotely true, all the abilities I listed and more hit harder than Obliterate with no mods/cds going and all of them do equal damage or better with mods/cd’s going. I’m missing abilities as well, Evoker can erase an entire team if they’re sleeping.

I agree, making it a chance of a chance for no particular reason was a mistake.

Try 45k, max. Pretty easy to see though this because I actually q arena. People stop/interrupt your go.

45-55k actually with no cds on a proc.

120-130k. My personal best is 115k but I’m missing about 5% mastery.

Where are you getting these numbers? Are you watching someone hit into a target with no vers? Or is this pve?

You actually can, raise the base damage of the spells, on pvp modifiers which would have zero impact on pve. Though the base damage there needs to come up as well.

1 Like
59

I dont think Frost Strike being removed from KM was because of Masterfrost. It could be certainly, but I think its because people dont want to make decisions and complain when they have to, or if a proc is eaten when they dont want it to be eaten by that ability.

I wasnt saying we ignore KM procs, but we did ignore an entire aspect of the spec. By basically dropping Obliterate outside of single uses to spend on unholy runes, or just dropping it completely and used Plague Strike to spend the Unholy Rune, we never got Rime procs. Not that it was needed since you just used Rime, it still removed part of the spec.

Killing Machine is one of the strongest procs in the game. Its like a 6x increase in Obliterate damage without anything else. No trinkets, no modifiers (outside of automatic ones with RI). Other things are strong as well, but if people want to get away from the importance of CD’s you have to look what the CD does. Pillar just increases strength baseline. A 12 second window of a strength increase gets better as the expansion goes on, but thats not really enough to be a complaint. Pillar + Obliteration is a whole different story. A Strength increase + forced procs. Thats going to put a lot of importance on a CD window. Im sure you can agree with that. Thats what im talking about.

I was looking at pve for this number. And the 80k and 160k figures was to get a 120k average if Frostreaper was removed giving Obliterate a more stable output and achieving the same thing while buffing pvp from the looks of it. PvE is the primary balancing factor even though Blizzard can do pvp modifiers. So whatever it can do in pve will influence what happens in pvp.

I tried watching some people play Frost in pvp and they just butchered it completely to the point I couldnt watch. Obliterating in Pillar windows with no KM procs, ignoring rime procs to gain a KM proc. Couldnt watch it.

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Na the devs said at the time that they wanted to kill MF and KM Frost strikes were as they thought nearly as important as howling. The ‘last straw’ for them (irony cuz it’s their game and design) was Frost using all its runes on howling/deathsyphon/chains in pvp in Warlords.

Also obliterate weaving is proof that we weren’t ‘ignoring’ any mechanics. One plague strike then the oblit because hopfully you fished a km from ps if not you just spammed howling because obliterate was tuned like trash. The devs created a problem with bad tuning that the player base solved, the devs as usual hated that and the players asked for a better solution. What we got was great in legion but also backhanded because the spec was never as good or fun after the middle of legion season 2 when the nerfs came in to breath and machine gun got killed for whatever idiot reason.

Devine toll is 5x just by itself, then there are several other mods for judgement which bring it up to 8 or 9x.

Lets look at what we actually get for mods on Obliterate shall we? Using my dk as an example for the mastery number.

Mastery 50%
Improved Obliterate-10%
Frigid Executioner-15%
Bone Grinder-20%
Pillar of Frost-25%
Frost Whelp-max 40%
Razor Ice-30%

Where is the 6x? Also please tell me the entirety of the Frost dk community forgot to add the Crit damage multiplier when claiming the 6x? Which if true, is very intellectually dishonest and should null the opinion of anyone spouting that nonsense because everyone has access to the 150%/200% damage on critical strike. 150% is upcoming in pvp, right now its 175% instead of 200%

Please show me this mysterious 6x multiplier, how it’s achieved in formula. If it comes from Biceps or someone IDC I’d just like to actually see that break down.

No sorry not having this argument when other modifiers achieve the same if not better results. As I showed above. Mortal Strike/Judgement/RSK etc all end up being 3-6x regular damage off modifiers or effects, and some of these are mortal strikes on top of that which increases damage against the effective health pool of a player. Which means it’s another 2-3x on top of whatever mods are already there. Esp with dampening because they stack.

Ok going off pve is a really poor way to parse anything because player skill is a real thing. Versatility, Disarms, Defensives that cut down damage or absorb it are all things that take down oblit damage.

Not so, things are buffed against npcs and not buffed against players and vice versa all the time. You’ll see it in patch notes, ‘ability x buffed by % y (not applied in player vs player)’ is how it looks.

The second people drop the foolish notion that everything needs to be a trade off (hint warriors and rets are trading nothing for their amazing kits) the better off this community will be. This is why I don’t main the class anymore, the devs and player base love being balanced at the bottom. Every time people ask for ‘buffs’ its either things that would directly nerf the spec or move performance in a horizontal line, both are pointless.

Also Frost reaper isn’t 6x. That’s a falsehood. It converts KM Oblit to pure frost damage. In my case my mastery is 50%, and playing 2h I have no fast way to stack razorice so my first ‘go’ is usually with someone having 1-2 stacks of RI. Go 2 is on whoever has full stack and no trinket/defensives when heals has no trinket.

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