I’ve been thinking about frost and what problems it has, i believe i know what is going on, maybe not, who knows really?
Covenants
The covenant abilities etc are just not balanced at all as I will explain:
Kyrian
I used this for a while to try and make it work out and while the ability is powerful… it doesn’t actually do anything, it is a powerful DoT over a very long 17 seconds with conduit, for PvE thats not so bad but in PvP it just takes too long and the further issue is that there is a random chance for it to aoe meaning sometimes you will spread it every obliterate and sometimes you will never spread it, for frost it would have synced very well due to it scaling with haste but they lowered the cooldown of empower rune weapon for some reason to 1:45 meaning you canot ideally sync it, with pelagos it works well with obliteration but unfortunately pelagos is nerfed in pvp despite the fact that emeni, a far stronger soulbind is not which brings us to:
Necrolords
Lets be quite frank here, the Necrolords are simply overpowered, especially for a death knight, their soulbind Emeni has the ludicrously powerful tier 1 effect of basically giving any class pillar of frost for 30 seconds when using the covenant ability and thus grants frost 2x pillar of frosts multiplying with each other, pair that with the abomination limb covenant ability that does a ton of damage, activates rime procs for even more damage and then for some reason also constantly grips enemies and you have a recipe for a disaster of an ability. This is further excessified by the fact that it is more or less the only covenant ability that properly scales with mastery in a direct and predictable manner making the necrolord covenant simply beyond broken in comparison to any of the other 3 for frost.
Venthyr
This is sort of the defense covenant for dk, but well, frost has laughable defenses anyway so it barely works alot of the time anyway, the reason i cannot recommend the venthyr is that when you have the howling blast legendary, the necrolords are literally directly better at doing damage which is frosts role, if you want to be alot more tanky then the venthyr can provide but this comes at a significant cost in actual damage output, otherwise this covenant is more or less a waste of time to go into as it scales with neither haste nor effectively with frost mastery.
Night fae
This simply is not a covenant for a frost dk, the ability has one of the worst stacking of the soulbind mastery passive in the game, the ability does not scale with mastery and barely with haste (to stack strength faster) and to make matters worse is almost completely useless in pvp for dk… people will just move out of the deaths due the second it appears but lets face it, because of how bad this abilty is… 9/10 they will not even care that it is down. Overall it is a light mix of offense and defense but generalyl just doesn’t provide anything of value at all.
Overall I would rate the covenants as follows:
Beyond 1st: Necrolord (they are too good even for 1st place)
2nd: Kyrian, as they provide an ok ability and nice utility heal/cleanse
3rd: Venthyr, at least you can cheese up the defenses of the dk and survive longer and the teleport is good for gripping at super range.
4th: Night fae, an almost useless ability and a mobility skill that goes against what the frost dk is.
Overall capabilities
Currently frost dk is in a position that i found my affliction warlockk in during BFA in which i had no idea how unstable affliction was meant to be used as it was not clear or intuitive at all. The frost dk has this issue, but it is present across the entire specialisation, the resources will easily overcap but somehow also easily undercap whith little to no way to skillfully avoid this, it is going to happen because runic empowerment does not make any sense with the rune system nor for the death knights entire theme, this should be one of the classes that has almost no RNG due to the theme it uses and more about budgeting and utilising resources correctly which cannot be done when the entire system is based upon random chance which is the number 1 issue that frost has above anything else.
The defenses are also extremely wierd and don’t even work correctly in pvp, death strike is absurdly weak, for some reason we got sacrifical pact which makes no sense since we have death pact in the talent tree which could have just been made baseline with some other talent replacing it, anti magic shell blocks almost no magic relative to it’s now 1 minute cooldown (up from 45sec) due to all the damage going out, Anti magic zone really isn’t that helpful (it is more the kind of ability that gives the illusion that it is useful but requires a pvp talent to actually do something relevant) and icebound fortitude is just so weak for a 3 minute cooldown… at 3 minutes and beyond you expect to have defense of 40%+ but 30% is literally a passive effect from a cloth wearer and thus provides no real defense other than breaking stuns Finally, lichborne healing probably one of the only good defenses but even then is absurdly weak in comparison to the sheer amount of runic power and the requirement to stop all offense required to do this (a mage can just go invulnerable and full heal just about whenever they want for example which is the closest comparison considering they can reset it meaning the cds more or less match up for the first 3 blocks.)
Then there’s the damaging abilities, for some strange reason the development team have begun removing damage from the core of some classes and the frost dk is one of them, Obliterate, howling blast and frost strike should be doing some of the largest amounts of base damage in this spec and yet both frost strike and obliterate are both doing very little on their own, obliterate has now been ruined by the killing machine change and for some reason was given a passive buffing its base damage this expansion but also recieved an ap nerf before the expansion launched… I think i speak for alot of frost death knights when i say… what??? why??? If you were going to nerf obliterate then why was the passive not just eitehr removed and replaced or nerfed to correctly reflect the damage that was being done in comparison tot he previous expansion Then for some reason 2-handers are getting the obliterate buff of 30% that dual wielders have been waiting to get and then frost strike still barely competes on damage with death strike and is even out done by it in one build and then there is the matter of remorseless winter being an all or nothing ability as in spec entirely into it or never use it at all and that includes aoe (because of rime)
Look this post is starting to get out of hand now so I will have to summarise the rest as I’m not even half done talking about the problems.
To put this loosely:
Other classes have too much mobility for frost to function properly.
Abilities just don’t have weight outside of specifics.
Defenses are absurdly low for a tank hybrid.
The overall capabilities are lacking (slows etc, wheres chillblains, acclimation, hungering cold, unavoidable frost strike, icy talons (the real one), actually useful and varied talent choices ( many are the same thing but slightly different or just achieve the exact same thing but 1:1 better)), why are we forced to use the frostwyrm as baseline when it is overnerfed in pvp (that is wasting damage that could be on actually useful abilities)?, why are all the covenants except necrolord really bad?
There are ALOT of problems and I still don’t think i have even mentioned them all, this is how much of a mess frost dk is right now and it is very concerning that the spec has even gotten into the state in the first place, the entire point in the development team is to ensure that something is actually workable and I don’t see how anyone in in the development or QA team could have approved this current frost dk state. There has been both legion and bfa telling the development team that this frost dk is not working and yet it still was not reverted to WoD when it did technically work then just built upon it in a different manner after.