I started this game because of my friend showing me his death knight back in wrath of the lich king. I found it incredibly cool and started playing the game shortly after and maining a DK as soon as I unlocked the class. For the rest of my time playing this game I have mained a DK. I play a variety of content in this game primarily mythic plus and raiding but I also do collecting/ world content and occasionally pvp. After reading the announced plan for changes I have decided to end my subscription to world of warcraft as I am very disappointed with the intended changes to these specs and donât expect more changes for a long time as DK has gone long stretches without getting needed attention. If the changes end up being great, I will continue my subscription and am writing this in hopes of making this rework better so I and other DK players can continue to enjoy this game and class.
I have been waiting for the class to receive a rework that addressed the issues and outdated designs present in the class. Looking at the DK goals for the overall class I agree both should be changed, however I do worry about how you will go about it. Well, having too many or ââfloodedâ resources does not feel great, it is much better in my opinion than having dead gcds due to a lack of resources which DK has had to deal with in the past. The bullet point about throughput versus utility nodes is great. I find the DK class tree quite lacking in its pathing and DK has lacked utility that makes it desirable for group content. I hope that by focusing the capstones on more utility you are adding additional utility to the class along with a raid buff as every class brings a raid buff besides death knight and 2 of the shaman specs. This lack of a raid buff does not just make us less necessary in raid but also less desirable in m+ content. Which along with not having the tools to deal with many affixes makes it much harder to play DK in m+ without an organized group.
I primarily play unholy DK, so I wonât comment heavily on the blood sections, but I think the stated goals for the spec seem good. I would specifically point to the line in the blood paragraph
âTo some degree, all Death Knight specs suffer from this a bit more than other specs due to their unique leveling experience comparatively. We want to see where we can shift some abilities/talents learned in the spec tree that would make more sense baseline, to not only smooth out build diversity but also improve the leveling experience.â
And suggest that this should be applied to all DK specs and shouldnât be only in the blood section as DK has very few baseline buttons compared to other classes which makes leveling DK worse but also makes our talent trees feel worse at max level compared to other classes. The 2 and 1 rune abilities such as, heart strike, obliterate and scourge strike to name a few along with disease-based applicators like outbreak and basic runic power spenders like frost strike. Having some actual basis of a rotation at lower levels and not having to spend most of your early points to gain access to it would go a long way to making the process better for leveling and makes more room for compelling choices at max level instead of spending large amounts of points getting necessary buttons for your base rotation.
The frost section of the tree seems to have some good ideas. I personally do not like breath of sindragosa. I donât think it should be removed and donât want this thread to spend much if any time and space discussing that. Please! do not use this thread to have an argument about breath of sindragosa. Instead, I would comment on current obliteration which has a terrible damage breakdown completely dominated by one button which in my opinion does not feel good. I also hope that frostscythe is more usable as the animation looks great, but it has been basically unused for two straight expansions now. I would also point to the glacial advance ability and say its animation needs to be updated as it looks ridiculously wimpy and uninspired.
Something that affects both dps DK specs and to a lesser extent blood is death and decay. I know that a previous blue post suggested that we are getting changes to death and decay but I would just like to say that ground based effects that are heavily impactful on your damage do not feel great in modern world of warcraft. Acknowledging that death and decay is a historical ability of death knights I think it should just be removed or made some kind of passive. The best comparison I can make to death and decay is consecration from paladins a very historic ability for paladins and something that you made a non-factor for retribution paladins in their rework. I would strongly suggest doing the same for dps DKs. Well, I donât want death knights and ret paladins to be made identical, I do think that death and decay is a frustrating mechanic to play around and does not feel rewarding as much of whether it works or not is based on the tanks positioning rather then your own. If you do keep death and decay as a relevant ability for dps DKs I beg you to remake defiles animation as it is incredibly frustrating to cover up so much of the ground and causes you to miss mechanics that you need to dodge.
The Unholy section is what disappointed me the most. I will be trying to address the expressed ideas one at a time as I have many thoughts and do not want to make a massive wall of text. I agree that the opener is on the more complex side and isnât that intuitive. I also think that making less things needed to be tracked or âplates that need to be spinnedâ is at least neutral and could be good. However, if we are simplifying the opener for the most part I would suggest you accomplish this primarily through removing the festering wounds and the related mechanics. I will elaborate on that idea later in this post.
Gargoyle as it currently stands is problematic to either balancing or just redundant as it fills the same niche as army of the dead a long powerful single target cd. Both are effectively a 3-minute cooldowns. If I had to choose between the two abilities, I would much rather have army of the dead which I think is the more iconic and cool looking ability. Well, the sustain gargoyle might work well if the burst focused gargoyle is meta it just is another button to add complexity and would suggest that instead have gargoyle be a modifier to army of the dead where if talented it spawns at the same time as army with the same duration.
The next line discusses making sudden doom and disease more interesting and yes please do exactly that. Unholy DKâs central themes are undead minions and diseases which the disease gameplay has been extremely lacking in recent history. I do wonder though if making sudden doom more interesting and diseaseâs have actual interactions will likely make the opener more complex and less intuitive. Well, I hope these changes are made. I do worry that things like unholyâs cooldowns will be pruned and make the spec far less enjoyable in raid. The simplest way to allow for the further complexity of diseases and sudden doom is to eliminate festering wounds and the related mechanics. If you are seeing a pattern already good job. If you would like for me to point to any thing to simplify unholy opener besides eliminating festering wounds, I would suggest it feels counter productive to place death and decay in all target counts inside the opener. This is another further example of death and decay not feeling good to use.
The big issue with the proposed changes is festering wounds. Festering wounds are quite frankly not a good mechanic. The best comparison to festering wounds is classic style combo points for rogue. The original style of combo points was removed from this game in patch 6.0.2 all the way back in 2014 because they were not fun to play and lead to various problems for the rogue class. However, for some reason the following expansion festering wounds were added to unholy death knight as a third resource to manage. Unholy DK, like other DK specs already has two resources to manage runes and runic power and does not need a third. The festering wounds or classic style rogue combo points as a mechanic was outdated in patch 6.0.2 but for some reason will remain with unholy DK going forward if you follow your current plans. This mechanic also takes up valuable design space by requiring our rune-based strikes to be primarily about generating and spending these festering wounds instead of having any other purpose such as having more in-depth interactions with diseases. Festermight seems to exist to give some further purpose to wounds and quite frankly it doesnât. This is due to it not having a meaningful impact on your rotation and will have even less of one with the change to make it an ironfur style buff. I will acknowledge making festermight an ironfur style buff might make it better to deal with it but makes it even less relevant as now there isnât even moments where you are making sure to not waste a wound at the very end of a festermight window. Festering wounds also just donât feel good to burst the damage is lost in the sea of dot ticks and pet attacks. On the subject of vile contagion, I quite frankly do not want to find another key bind for this button and it still has me spend multiple gcds during aoe set up pressing festering strike to put wounds on the initial target. The current design of festering strike does not feel good to press and rarely if ever leads to a meaningful payoff. Wounds currently take far too much valuable design space well not being enjoyable in most scenarios. The only truly fun festering wound gameplay was when you could use it to heavily empower your cooldowns in battle for azeroth and that wasnât actually good gameplay but instead just extremely powerful. One area that festering wounds truly feel ridiculously awful that I would like to bring up is world content. I have been doing a lot of world content recently to try and complete the dragonflight meta achievement a world awoken. During this you have to kill many low health mobs that do to festering wounds setup taking so long take longer to kill then if you were using other melee specs that donât need to spend gcds setting up this mechanic before they can actually do damage to the mobs effectively. This mechanic has felt bad in every form of content that I have done this expansion and last expansion. Please reassess and go with any other design idea for unholy DK then keeping this outdated and unfun mechanic that regularly leads to frustrating moments when needing to target swap.
An unmentioned major problem in my opinion with the current unholy DK talent tree is having to spend so many points modifying cooldown talents. The three offending cooldowns are dark transformation, apocalypse, and army of the dead. Dark transformation typically takes five of your talent points which is quite frankly too many, these talents are for mythic plus: dark transformation, two points in unholy command, eternal agony, and unholy pact. You would substitute unholy pact for commander of the dead in most raid content. Apocalypse currently takes three talent points to make it to its functional state with apocalypse, magus of the dead and army of the damned. Army of the dead takes three points in m+ and four in raid with army of the dead, army of the damned, magus of the dead and commander of the dead. These three talents also in raid get further modification by the very uninteresting and regularly buggy two-point talent node of unholy aura. That talent is typically necessary for raid content but doesnât feel like it makes an impact on your decisions besides when its buggy on a raid boss and you have to find the correct place to stand until blizzard fixes the bosses hit box. Between having to spend so many points early in the tree to gain key rotational abilities such as my rune-based strikes and my disease applicator along with so many points later in the tree to modify and make cooldowns what they should be leaves me with little interesting actual choices in the tree. If I could make any suggestion, it would be to eliminate unholy aura and unholy command that feel like uninspired point sponges that continue to limit design space for the class.
I would also like to bring attention to the death rot which is something you donât really play around but makes unholy death knight much less fun in relatively easy group content. The specific area I would say this feels the worst is m+ keys before what is currently the 20+ key level but you could say in the 10+ range if wanting to conceptualize with the m+ scaling changes of the new patch. This is because unholy death knight has a long set up before they do big damage which in key levels below what I specified the mobs can be low health before you even start pressing epidemic so for death rot to take multiple gcds of runic power spending after already setting up my cooldowns on a pack leads to when playing with other competent dps a non-maximized damage profile as I donât reach max death rot stacks before most if not all the pack is dead. Death rot taking so long to stack up also further exasperates the difficulty that unholy has with target swapping as I need to get dots, festering wounds, death rot stacks all on any new target to focus it along with dealing with pet ai that can sometimes be slow to prioritize my new target. During this time the original target might also start to lose things like festering wounds or death rot stacks.
Runeforging is another area I would like to mention that hopefully is explored and reworked for the war within. It is an important and, in my opinion, cool part of what makes a death knight a death knight. It however has become an extremely stale just go and put the same runeforge on for years at this point. I would hope they became a more compelling and interesting choice well also not forcing us to go back to Acherus every time we want to change the active runeforge. Perhaps well making it something that is changed more often you could at the same time allow death knights to summon a runeforge next to themselves to change the runeforge with more ease.
The final thing I would like mention is that death knights are the only pet spec that doesnât regularly get new art for our pets. Hunters most patches get a few new pets they can tame and use. Warlocks have for at least in recent patch history regularly got new pet animations or skins or whatever word you want to use. Shadowlands introduced countless new undead npcs and had heavy significance to death knights as runes and domination magic used by death knights came from the shadowlands. For some reason none of this was used to change or expand on the DK pets. Instead, I am still using a default ghoul animation that looks like it came straight out 2008s wrath of lich king. Well, this may not be the perfect area to express these thoughts I figured it was at least worth a mention in this post.
Thank you for reading all of my above thoughts if you have made it this far. I wanted to get my thoughts out early to hopefully make some impact on this rework even though the actual changes are not visible yet. I will try to follow up on this once the actual changes are present and if I get to properly test the changes on alpha or beta.