How is it shaping up on the PTR for DK?
I know right now
Mages
Warlocks
Druid
SHAMAN
(even Hunter?)
has a place in the meta for upcoming 11.1
But DK seems to be a bit hard to tell, I see some good feed back at times but I also see the naysayers give a different point of view.
We talking raid, pvp, or mythic plus?
From testing on Myhic Plus, I think frost will still be very strong. (even more so since shamans are still going to be meta and their buff to other classes is strong af for DK). And the tier set adds even more to your strong cleave.
But Frost in general is getting a big buff, so the cleave is already excelled at in Mythic plus will be even stronger. PVP wise it loses the stun, but unless they nerf the new talent will get kills still.
Raid it will be okay. The ST scaling is still meh, but at least you have cleave.
I can’t speak on UH. I didn’t test it.
Unholy will likely be in a decent spot for raid damage. They’re getting some good baseline rotational buffs. Not one of the top meta specs, but not hanging out on the bottom few specs on every fight.
Frost is also getting some buffs but they’re not enough to put Frost ST damage even up to Unholy’s level as it is on live which is sub-par. The Frost buffs need an increase to make Frost do decent DT damage.
The Frost buffs on PTR amount to like a 8% ST dps increase and Frost is like 15-18% behind top specs just on raw output alone not accounting for the RNG nature of Frost. The RNG is so god awful with the Shatter build that in a 5 minute dummy test, I can end up legitimately doing 100 MILLION less damage than Unholy. Thats utterly unacceptable. Its why I refuse to play Frost outside of M+ and even there, I stick with the 2H Rider build.
They really need to take the Frost buffs and more than double them or its not changing anything. So Frost will remain a non competitive spec for Heroic and Mythic raid. Especially since Unholy scales better than Frost does so the gap will just get bigger as we get farther into the raid. Oh and Unholy actually does even more damage when the bosses HP is low thanks to Reaping and Soul Reaper. Frost used to do more passive damage below 30% thanks to Merciless Combat but chalk that up to another ability Blizzard needlessly took away.
Frost has no business being meta when its a 3 buttom spec and every single spell has a cleave aspect on it and its the same rotation for aoe and ST(even more retarded rotation for breath build since you get to ignore one buttom for its duation).