Haven’t really played DK since WoD. In WoD, it was amazing for DPS. Obliterate did just that; it was like hitting 5-run home runs. Unholy was this intricate rune twisting spec where you’d get 6 death runes and just go nuts. Two different but rewarding playstyles.
Now, from the little I played on them, their identity seems gone. Why play frost when I can play Fury or Combat, or even Enh? What even is Unholy? Am I like a plague warlock? The class design for Death Knight doesn’t feel good at all.
When did it change? Legion? BfA? Why? Have they given their philosophy on the class?
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you played halls of reflection? the devs did and thought that was our class id and legion happened
here read this
slow moving juggernaut only we are just slow moving
we are fighting to go back before legion
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DK is more of a …kill securer in pvp as it’s defensives and burst generally aren’t as good as other specs (unholy does alot of damage when army and apocalypse are both up though, sadly these can be snared) you’ll want to look for ways that grip, chains and asphyxiate can help a teammate kill someone and if possible use your offensive cooldowns with them or to force someone to blow a defensive so your friend can obliterate them.
PvE it’s okay and Deathstrike can help you feel resilient by healing for huge amounts if you get hit hard, your healer will appreciate anti magic zone as well and anti magic shell can allow you to ignore a small amount of mechanics and your DPS for frost and unholy can both burst well enough to chop a particular elite down.
We could be better and have a more interesting design, like when legion came around they took so much away in their desire to make each spec feel unique that for the most part each one felt like it was gutted but we’re functional. Oh and you can also dominate those ugly sludge spewing undead in theater that reduce healing taken, easier to kill them after the rest are dead than let them leap around.
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Yes, we all played Halls of Reflection and Arthas was just messing with us. He could have ran up on us without a care and sliced down every single one of us without an issue. He was playing with is, trying to bring fear and panic. Once he got mad and you kept defeating his minions and breaking his walls, he ran at you like a freight train at full throttle.
If this is what we are based on no wonder why the DK is a shadow of its former self. People cant see that HoR was not a showcase of a juggernaut, but a predator playing with his prey.
Not to mention that there is nothing about a juggernaut that says it has to be slow slow. Its just huge powerful overwhelming force.
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DK is a setup bot in arena, nothing more.
Frost needs a talent/skill revamp big time, and unholy is just a clunky mess in my book.
I like all the specs, theyre just not worth playing when other classes specs are infinitely better in all regards.
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I’ve been stating this for months, even with numbers provided by arenamate and literal professional wow players, but somehow there are some people here in this forum that are ok with dk’s being “balanced” while warriors are gods.
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If all classes are godlike, then none are, and not every class can be godlike because there is always going to be one that is on top.
Frost hasnt been touched the entire expansion and its only about 7% behind the top and the top.
You are talking about pvp though, but you can thank the playerbase for that. They pushed what the class has become.
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Hey Kel do you like cheese. There’s gotta be something in your life that you like.
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if all classes are godlike the game will be balanced, the dev can’t even do a simple 3% buff/nerf per week
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Been a fair bit of this for me. DK was always my fave class since WotLK (tied with enhance shaman). But my DK has been on the shelf for a hot minute now.
Frost feels like a poor man’s arms warrior. Arms has better gameplay, better damage, better identity. Frost, especially 2H, feels lackluster and missing the -death- knight theme. It needs way more work than the iteration it’s currently in.
Unholy, my all time favourite… The necromancy and death magic theme is there, but it feels so soulless and done wrong.
Plus, all the intricacies of the different plagues is gone, and the shift to a complete minion spec takes a little away from feeling like the powerful overlord, and I believe there are other ways they could have iterated on the spec to make it more interesting.
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There cant be perfect balance without homogenization. There are different classes, with different playstyles, and different tool kits.
Enhancement shamans dont even complain this much.
Are you going to tell the OP that Obliterate is fine. Its pretty poetic that we were just talking about Obliterate and that you think its fine, yet here is a returning playing asking WTF happened to Obliterate.
And yes, there are plenty of things that I like. I dont like cheese though, and I certainly dont like wine which is what the DK community is full of.
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I’m just worried for you because you’re very worked up about this
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Why are you worried about me? Im not actually worked up at all. Just tired of people complaining about the very things that they wanted implemented. Its like the people in Cali that voted in people and voted for bills and then those things backfire (which was obvious) and now they are fleeing to other states because of whatever reason.
The state of the DK is the playerbases fault for suggesting and pushing for the things that are in place right now, and the suggestions made in certain threads so far is a perfect example of that. The OP hit the nail right on the head for the most part.
They talked about Obliterate feeling like you hit 5 home runs, and with a 2h with all the things going in to it, you could 3 shot a mage without something like Obliteration because it didnt exist yet. Killing Machine was just triggered by auto attacks.
Unholy was a different beast as well. Talents werent all specific to one spec. Necrotic Plague for example could be chosen by every spec. Defile could be as well. But people saying all they want to use is shadow for this spec or frost for this spec has taken everything out of the class that makes it a death knight.
I want to play a damn death knight again, not a melee frost mage.
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All the wrong changes started from Legion in my eyes. Unholy had a mixture of rot and minion damage. Now, Frost does more rot damage than Unholy as well as Frost has become a consistently hard-hitting spec now with some abilities modified beyond belief.
Don’t get me wrong, I love summoning the big bad frozen dracolich that unleash frozen havoc to everyone in front of you as well as nuking enemies with Cold Heart. But that’s completely not the case for 2h version that just recently returned this expansion as well as Obliterate has evolved into a Rune-Spending Ability to feed Pillar of Frost and Gathering Storm.
Unholy is just a minion damage spec, rather than rot damage spec. This started from beginning of this expansion as well and then got scaling nerfed shortly afterwards, including your own personal shadow damage which I think Unholy desperately needed. All the pet damage buffs revolving your dammies around Army and Dark Transformation (Esp with Helchains now called Unholy Pact which is just a free strength at this point against its contenders) sounds nice in all but as Grievus described, it does feel soulless.
Oh, and not only Unholy lost a lot of free haste from Unholy Presence, let alone a GCD redox. They doubled down on the GCD requirement on your burst setup by introducing Festering Wound. Now don’t also get me wrong, the WUUND itself is fine on paper. it’s just a shame that it’s only just runes and runes themselves that interact with it unless you’re running Doomburst in PvP.
Necrotic Plague needs to return for Unholy in place of Gary and Gary needs to be baseline, benefit from Army of the Damned. At this point, they’d rather keep the minion damage aspect of mastery for Unholy which I did not like since its inception. If I want to play a minion spec, I’d play Demonology.
… even Demonology has its problems but it does certainly feel better to play than a DK class. >:L
8 Likes
so obliteration needs to change
how bout this it changes oblit damage to frost from physical and changes km rank2 to do 100% rime damage as well. would that help
Death Knights are a lot more fun than when they turned Combat into roll the bones rng fiesta or the removal of Enhancement flame shock spreading fire nova into rockbiting maelstrom resource trash
sometime during legion then? 
no thank you before legion is what people want
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Infinitely better is an exaggeration. There’s still good DKs out there. A boost would be nice.
They reworked all classes in Legion. I suspect the rune system was gutted reworked at this time too. Legion came with the artifact weapon which was made to complete our class. At the end of the expansion, they removed the weapon which gutted the classes even more. No system since then managed to make us feel whole again, because none of them was tailored specifically to our class.
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