I will preface this with giving a little information about my background as a DK player, to be transparent about any personal biases. If you don’t care about this, you can skip the next paragraph.
I am a mythic raider at the Cutting Edge level and have only played Death Knight at this level, so I’m definitely in the higher end of play, but I’m also nowhere close to the top echelons within that niche. I mostly care about raiding, it’s why I play this game. I also spend a lot of time in the Acherus Death Knight discord server, where I help out players who are new to the spec and keep in touch with others at or above my level about all things DK. While I have occasionally tanked on a boss or two in the past, I am mostly a DPS player and only really have deeper knowledge about mostly Unholy, but also Frost.
Coming from this background it has become impossible to ignore how unhappy players at pretty much all tiers of play are becoming with the state of both Frost and Unholy. There are even clips of the Liquid race to world first being happily shared, where Frost and Unholy are being called garbage tier specs, because we are so desparate for any attention being brought to our current state at all. I would like to write out these frustrations in hopes that others will join in in voicing their opinions and so that ideally the devs will see this and start working on solutions beyond just making our numerical output higher.
Of Death Grips and Raid Buffs
From dev interviews it has become clear that the balance teams believes that Death Grip is strong enough as a utility to justify Death Knights not needing a raid buff of their own. On certain fights, we can all agree that this is true. However, the issue is that this is only really true on those specific fights. Why do Shamans, Druids, Warriors, Mages and so on get to have something that is useful on every boss and DKs’ raid buff is only good on maybe two bosses per raid? Everyone probably agrees that having every fight in a raid require grips is a bit too much, so this narrative that Death Grips are equal to a raid buff simply does not hold up.
On top of that there is also an enormous difference in the utility that a Blood Death Knight brings, compared to what either Forst or Unholy brings. Gorefiend’s Grasp alone makes Blood do things that no DPS DK can and then their regular Death Grip also has less CD. Having a tank DK is strictly better than a DPS DK. The only time where that isn’t the case are when you need multiple DKs, but you can just bring a second tank DK again. Additionally, Anti-Magic Zone is also stronger for a Blood DK on account of their higher hp as a tank spec. Shamans have had this same issue with a raid utility disparity between specs and they were brought in line with each other. So why not do the same for DKs? Bringing the three DK specs in line with each other also makes it so guilds above a certain level don’t have to force one of their tanks or dps to play Blood for specific fights (like Ovinax just last season.)
Frost Death Knight
Currently Frost is a dual wielding spec. Two-Handed weapons are strictly worse than dual wielding and the passive that is supposed to overcome that gap isn’t able to compete with the higher attack speed one-handers and the second Runeforge. This means that half the weapons you get as Frost lootspec are worthless, unless they are a ridiculously big upgrade and even then you are locked out of playing certain talents, because they aren’t created with two-handed Frost in mind. Either remove two-handers from the lootspec or buff the passive to bring the weapon types in line. There are many players that would love to play with two-handers and it would make off-specing a lot easier, so personally, I’m in the camp of buffing it.
Frost’s Hero Talents are in a weird place. Rider of the Apocalypse requires two talent points to be spent on Frostwyrm’s Fury and Absolute Zero to function at all, which completely locks you out of playing it with Breath of Sindragosa. Even if you could pick it up you would be looking at various CDs that simply don’t line up:
- Breath (2 min), Empower Rune Weapon (2 min), and Remorseless Winter (20s) align
- Pillar of Frost (45s), Reaper’s Mark (45s; as the 30s talent is never chosen), Chill Streak (45s), Frostwyrm’s Fury (90s/3 min) align
- Frostscythe is 30 seconds, reduced by Killing Machines spent in that time so it randomly aligns or doesn’t align making it very unreliable
If we had actual choices in our talent tree around the various CD reducing talents that already exist, this could all make sense. With current tuning however, those talents are currently either always or never taken and there is no room for choice. So optimal play means you just never use your 2 minute CDs at 2 minutes and instead wait 15 extra seconds so they line up with your 45s CDs. This is unintuitive and feels weird to play.
Speaking of Hero Talents, Deathbringer still has a 30% chance to just reapply Reaper’s Mark, which feels great when you hit the jackpot or awful if you don’t. I would still prefer some deterministic way to reapply it - or just no reapplications at all - instead of pure chance.
Lastly, Frost currently has simply too much passive cleave in its various abilities. While this is obviously not a bad thing, it means there are almost no decisions to be made between content types. You pretty much always play the same regardless of AoE or Single Target. A lack of abilities that can be buffed for a purely single target gain, also make balancing more difficult than it needs to be. Probably as a result of exactly this issue, Frost lands consistently near the bottom on pure single target encounters like Kyveza.
Unholy Death Knight
Unholy has lost its identity. Maybe it never had one. It now competes with Frost as a 45s/90s spec. Army of the Dead is no longer a thing and its pets are getting outpaced by other damage sources with the advent of San’layn. But this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Unholy needs a new, stronger identity and this is the perfect time to build one.
The talent tree always had the issue of not really knowing which class fantasy it wanted to lean into. We are doing a bit of shadow magic, a bit of master of undead and a bit of pestilence all at the same time. Instead focusing the spec more on one or two of these aspects and providing a coherent fantasy could that strong identity for Unholy.
We have many talents in the tree that are entirely useless, never see play and also haven’t received any attention from the balancing team: All Will Serve, Ruptured Viscera, Unholy Pact, Decomposition and Runic Mastery are 4 spaces that are immediately available and wouldn’t be missed much. These could easily be swapped out with new things that amplify one of our themes. There is also the choice nodes of Plaguebringer/Clawing Shadows and Gargoyle/Doomed Bidding that need attention. Clawing Shadows is losing to Plaguebringer in all but one build and Gargoyle is not seeing any play at all. Some of these options could be pulled into the baseline to make more space.
Festering Strike and Outbreak are two baseline abilities so weak, that our rotation and talents are built around pressing them as little as possible. Playing around wounds in Raid encounters also does not feel good. It makes Unholy’s target switching needlessly worse, since out pets are already bad at it.
As Rider of the Apocalypse, the Horsemen don’t listen to pet commands. Saying that it’s annoying when they run off to the wrong boss on Silken Court, fight spider eggs instead of real enemies in Delves, or somehow aggro the 2nd boss in Grim Batol from across the room is an understatement. We also have Raise Abomination now, which is painfully slow. I remember situations where I would watch him waddle over to a boss that was moved by a tank, counting the seconds in my head to math out if he’s taking long enough to make it worth applying Virulent Plague manually instead of waiting for him to get in range. Blood Beast is also another pain point in AoE for San’layn specifically. Having it be entirely random just wastes its potential.
Another massive issue with the current iteration of Unholy is Sudden Doom’s automatic crit effect on Death Coil and Foul Infections’ increased crit chance on diseases. These two talents make Crit a worthless stat for Unholy. It’s gotten to the point where we would rather have Versatility than Crit, even though Versatility is by no means close to Haste or Mastery in terms of gains. This will cause more and more issues the further we get into the expansion, as we will reach higher stat thresholds on Mastery and Haste, forcing us to eventually pick up more and more of the other two stats. It also makes gearing weird, because only items with Haste and Mastery are actually good and everything else feels bad to get. Off-specing is also hurt by this, as Frost loves Crit and Unholy loathes it. The spec desparately needs more interactions with Crit in its kit to bring it back in line with other stats.
I believe that Unholy could massively benefit from a proper rework if attention and care is put into it. The aesthetic, theme and gameplay all require attention right now and there is a lot of potential with its base as WoW’s closest thing to a necromancer (customizable ghouls anyone?)