What happened to DK damage? It slowly evolved into tickling someone to death with a million small hits. Its a very odd way of dealing damage, and isn’t satisfying anymore.
Unholy always was somewhat like this way, but its gotten a lot worse. It feels like our damage comes from a million different sources.
I just want our abilities to deal damage again, I wanna see some big crits and chunks in enemy heath pools, especially as frost.
Even something like breath used to do big chunks of damage, instead of a bunch of small hits. I really makes no sense and isn’t satisfying at all to look at a bunch of tiny numbers.
Apparently this was due to some 300-IQ development squad that thought Frost DK needed a way to be “unique”, so we become a dual-wield only spec so we could be the only one-handed dual-wielding plate spec in the game (I… think?). Though for some reason, that translated to us going from juggernauts with death magic to battle-mages. I’m sitting at 451 item level still hitting people for 12k Obliterates, meanwhile I’m getting hit by demon hunters for 300k Chaos Strikes during meta.
Unholy was always going to be a spammy number vomit spec because of pets, diseases, necrosis and whatever other dots that spec has had and lost over the years.
Frost being spammy because of DW, a focus on sustained damage and a buff with high uptime with breath of awfulgosa is just Blizzard picking a weird hill to die on.
I blame diseases going from primers to make our strikes hit harder to just being boring dots.
cold heart has a 70% nerf in pvp it takes 40 secs to get the full buff and one FS hits harder than cold heart hits for at the full buff.
frostwyrm’s fury also has 70% nerf in pvp and thats on 3min CD.
and BoS has a 30% nerf in pvp and that’s on 2min CD.
death strike the healing component part of it 50% nerf in pvp so that’s bleping useless.
slow moving and hard hitting juggernaut yes we are the slowest class in WoW but very far from hard hitting.
Its not spammy because of DW. Its not the weapon that makes it spammy and never has. Want to see a spammy spec go back to before runic empowerment was a thing.
You can only use abilities as fast as you get resources and I dont know why you guys think you get more resources due to equipping a certain weapon.
Unholy’s damage composition feels like hot trash because so much of it is invested in our cooldowns and cooldown overlaps.
The core rotation is fun, but between Auto Attacks doing WAY too much damage and all of the major CDs we have, there’s no way to make Festering Strike/Scourge Strike hit hard at all. The more major spells they add to Unholy, the more the core rotation loses punch. I’d call Unholy’s damage composition very bloated and top heavy, and it can result in pretty unfun situations. There’s not even really any talent options that make our damage more stable, it’s just bursty no matter how you slice it.
in order to fix this, I’d avocate for
-Reducing player and pet AA damage. WAY too much of our damage is passive, considering how powerful our Cooldowns are. both should be reduced by at least 40%. AA damage is VERY overtuned and has been overtuned for all of BFA.
-Rework or RemoveArmy of the Dead. This spell is iconic, it’s great fun in raid, but outside of raid, the spell is really hard to use nicely, unless you take the Armies of the Damned talent. I don’t feel like a 10m offensive CD has a place in the game anymore. We pay for that burst of damage in the rest of our rotation, and we get Army off so infrequently that it’s just a net loss in a lot of dungeons. As a raiding cooldown, i love it. In any other content other than raiding, Army is a burden our damage composition without AoTD. Apocalypse is a strictly more interesting and fun spell than Army in most forms of content.
-Do not re-add Gargoyle. Garg is a very dominant spell. It will dominate the Unholy damage composition, and it is a build around spell. This spell is so playstyle defining, and so damage heavy, with no AoE, that I feel we’re going to acutely feel it pretty badly.
-Bake Soul Reaper Runes into Apocalypse. Soul Reaper is a stupid button, it does a lot of damage, it feels good to get the runes, but UH’s opener is too bloated already. Feels great in M+, but this button is WAY too strong and has been meta by a mile for the entire expansion. Rework Soul Reaper back into its old functionality, Death Knights having a thematic execute was cool and good gameplay.
One thing i hope for in SL is that they change how DW vs 2h works. Make DW focus on AOE ( like today ) and reduce 2h AOE-damage and buff single target damage. For example, as 2h your howling blast only attacks 1 target but do more damage.
No, just no. You just force people to get 3 weapons at that point, and more gear with different stats depending on what you are doing. People already complain about getting 2 weapons.
Unless you needed it for aoe. Or you just dont take the stubborn 2h frost player. Which then you just stop taking frost players completely when forming a group because you dont know if they are playing at their best with multiple weapons and gear sets, or if they are just playing 2h or DW because “I think frost should only have 2h”.
I guess what people mean by a 2h playstyle as well is just equal to equipping a 2h weapon.
I will say looking at shadowlands I see a lot of potential for a single target obliteration build. The legendary that buffs oblit, along with the conduits for obliterate and frost strike could be pretty strong.
Obliterate and frost strike might actually end up hitting pretty hard
