So after playing on the PTR for a few hours I’m really confused by the direction for 2h Frost.
Mainly that Obliterate is currently critting for 800 and Frost Strike is critting for 1.4k?
I thought the the main objective for 2H frost was to have Obliterate be the hardest hitting ability for a DK’s core rotation? How can Blizzard fail in tuning something so simple?
Now I’ve just found out it’s been nerfed even more. I’m really confused and a bit disappointed as I just paid for a DK Xfer/Faction change only to be nerfed even more.
It feels so silly to have the animation be this slow and weighty hit, only to slap our target for less than our resource dump?
they nerfed frost dk cause ppl were waited 5 years to try it and there is so many frost dks and for blizzard is unacceptable to have so many frost dks around and not playing their babies like mages paladins dh’s and rogues. Suffer well my fellow dk’s, they cant kill us like enhance( cause we are already dead).
Frost DK’s were hitting for less than rogues and mages but still got nerfed this much. I guess Blizzard really wants the whole game to be warriors, mages, rogues and paladins.
Totally understand that, just saying that in the current state Obliterate hits like an absolute wet noodle and until we are max level with the right legendaries and build does Obliterate become useful. Just feels weird as it is THE iconic Frost DK spell. Honestly wouldn’t mind a minor nerf to Frost Strike to make base Oblit better.
3 Globals isn’t a 1 shot though… But yeah, i have beta and not once did i feel like Frost was OP. They felt like they were right in the middle, if not even a bit on the lower side of “middle”.
Unholy was great though and arguably deserved the nerfs.
With these changes, a fully buffed Obliterate will hit for about the same a completely unbuffed Templar’s Verdict. Meaning Oblierate with PoI, a crusade proc and Killing machine will deal about the same damage as a TV without either Righteous Verdict, judgement, Wings, Divine Purpose, Virteous Command, Templar’s Vindication or Final Reckoning.
On the Beta i’ve seen TV crit for north of 15k, while the highest i’ve ever seen Obliterate was ~6-7k. Without any external buffs (like the covenant buffs). And this was before the nerfs.
How much of the overall damage is obliterate though?
I’m asking because a comparison to TV may not be right, at least not a hit per hit comparison.
As far as I could tell from the PTR, you Obliterate more frequently than you TV, so having the same damage would likely mean frost strike and howling blast would need to do no damage to achieve parity…
The day our runic power abilities start being feared and doing the damage in short burst like any “spender” abilites should obliterate can go be a builder filler for all i care (implying the entire frost spec is completely backwards in design with our spenders really being our builder and our builders dont really being builders but dont have the damage of spenders even when we spend a GCD on our baseline “spenders”) so no you dont get to make that argument because this whole class has been done dirty ever since mid cata.
When you say “overall damage” you are talking about the damage breakdown, right?
I hopped on the beta and did a couple of test to find out for myself. I spent 5 minutes on a target dummy with 2 different builds for both Ret and Frost. The recent nerfs are not in the Beta yet. So these numbers are pre-nerf.
For Ret it was a Crusade build and a Final Reckoning build. Ret does not have a Legendary that boosts TV’s damage, So i used the the Legendary (Mad Paragon) that extends wings duration for the Crusade build, and the Final Verdict one for my Reckoning build since im pretty sure every Ret will use it. TV ended up being 45.3% of my damage with the Crusade build and 46.7% with the FR one.
For my Dk, i used an Ice Cap build and an Oblteration build with Koltira’s Favor legendary which boosts Obliterates damage. With the Icecap build, Obliterate did 30.5% of my total damage and with the Obliteration build it did 41.9%.
But i do agree with you that Obliterate can’t hit too hard due to it’s spamable nature. Problem is that both Ret and Frost are doing rather poorly on the Beta. So im not sure where the nerfs are comming from. Pvp maybe?
Maybe…
Though that’s a different test if the pvp coefficients come into play, they usually adjust abilities differently.
Overall I think from your tests and the damage breakdown the difference between how much these contribute to overall damage is small. 5% is within reason.
But yes, you maybe do 3 obliterates to get the same damage of 1 TV.
I don’t think the nerfs were warranted either, i mean there are other classes/specs which are outliers. On the other hand, I don’t think we’ve seen the end of tuning. I suspect people would like to see some frost strike damage shifted towards obliterate, but then for others that would be reason enough to complain. I mean there are players who don’t like that killing machine crit obliterates will do frost damage and scale with mastery, which in my mind is a welcome change, but here we are.
At the end of the day I would say ability to ability comparisons should not be made, it is just normal for some to hit harder than others, and a spec cannot be tuned in such a way to appease everyone.
I’d even say these nerfs should be welcome. They don’t matter right now, so there’s plenty of time to gather data for them and reverse them as needed by the time the first raid tier/season arrives.
I don’t get it why they take the Single Target pressure from frost when frost has clearly a lack of it.
Obliterate never did great damage it should be buffed instead of nerfed.
I would rather give up the Frostwyrm Cooldown for Obliterate damage so I can have fun again with 2H.
I hope they revert the nerf… this makes me want to quit