Was trying out Frost with the new changes
I’m really happy to see removing power out of our Pillar windows.
The stacking Strength buff was limiting our choice in what to press during Pillar since you always wanted to press your hardest hitting abilities at the end. Now this is freed up a lot and more intuitive to play.
Changes to Murderous Efficiency: I’m sure there’s a reason to why this change was made (probably Breath duration reduction?). Though when playing Frost now with Obliterate build, you can feel those changes a lot. (With my more average skill) I’m running out of runes quite regularly with Obliteration builds. This creates big frustrations inside Pillar when you have Killing Machine procs ready but no runes to press Obliterate.
Since all of our recource costing abilities require runes except Frost Strike and Glacial Advance (and BoS), there’s a high posibility of shortage there…
I’m not sure how to solve it, since increasing the chance on Murderous Efficiency will result in more resource overcapping again.
Some ideas on the top of my head would be:
- increase runic power cost of Glacial Advance → there may be issues in combination with the power of Arctic Assault. If that may be the issue, you could add an “…at x% effectiveness” to Arctic Assault and tune it appropiately
- in my eyes, the addition of higher Frost Strike cost within Pillar was a good one. Maybe you could add this as a separate talent?
Breath of Sindragosa: I don’t understand this wiggling between how much RP cost (16, 17, 18,…) exactly Breath should consume to not make it too long but also make it not fall off too easily. Please just think about how long you want Breath to be. 20 sec? 30 sec? 40 sec? Something in between? Make a decision there and then change the current (constant 17rp per sec) cost to one that increases over time. E.g. make it a linear increase starting at 5rp per sec increasing by 1 every 2 seconds. After 30 sec, you’d have a cost of 20rp per sec which will be very difficult to keep it running. So most players would end up having a 30sec Breath. Playing wrongly will end it earlier but not at 5sec where the cost is still low enough for a player to be able to recover. Playing it very well will lead to a few extra seconds but not more as at some point it get’s mathematically impossible to keep up.
This change would have a multitude of good effects:
- it’s not as punishing for not so good players (like me) since it’s easy to keep Breath up at the beginning.
- there’s skill expression for good players that can time their resources in a way that give them just a little more uptime (couple of seconds) out of it.
- it reduces the problem that exists over the course of an addon which is getting more secondary stats resulting in longer and longer Breath uptimes.
The increasing cost doesn’t even need to be linear as in my example. You could also implement a quadratic scaling or whatever. You can choose what suits perfect to where you want this ability to be. So please start with that and then make the change accordingly.
I’d suggest to aim for a shorter time, somewhere between 20-30 sec. This also makes Bossuptime not as mandatory (you’re not punished that much if you have to run out because of mechanics) and will also reduce the uptime requirement in keys, making you not rely on your tank as much.
Another big part is how BoS interacts with our Hero trees:
Deathbringer seems to me as the mandatory pick for BoS builds. At least to my testing, the 30sec Reaper’s Mark with the effect on Exterminate to reduce Obliterate rune cost helped me with Breath uptime a lot. The difference in Breath uptime between Deathbringer and Riders of the Apocalypse was pretty significant (10s and more) in my testing (though me being a rather mediocre player, take that with a grain of salt. I’m not sure if it may be just a skill issue). I don’t have exact numbers for that damage wise but I just want to point that out.
“Omnifrost”: As was pointed out by others, there’s a possibility to spec both into Obliterate and BoS which in the community is refered to as the Omnifrost build. Do you want this build to be a thing?
Depending on your own answer to that, it may be a good decision to change the tree such as making Breath and Obliterate a choice node or not. It may also be a numbers tuning issue in the end, but it would be very bad if that build runs miles ahead of everything else. Since this may very well be a tuning nightmare, maybe you should completely remove this possibility out of the equation and make it a choice node somewhere in the middle of the tree. It sure is fun to play for some time, but if it limits the freedom in what to talent into as a FDK, I’d rather not have it.
Chill Streak: This talent is a hit or miss talent. Either it’s numerically strong enough that you’d take it in most situations or you don’t take it at all. Some of that comes of course from the position in the tree, making it a completely optional talent to take which isn’t required to path through. The other issue is ofc that it doesn’t interact with the rest of the FDK kit. Maybe you should think about adding an additonal effect to it that changes this. Example:
- (add the following): Every time Chill Streak bounces, there’s a chance to refund a rune.
With the nerfed Murderous Efficiency, this could be an interesting talent to take to get more runes. With Icecap talented, it would have the same cd as Pillar. So you’d cast Chill Streak before your Pillar window to help with rune generation. Ofc Breath loves runes as well to get more Obliterates for higher Breath uptime.
Cleaving Strikes: So getting to the huge elephant in the room. Cleaving Strikes making Death and Decay mandatory in any multitarget rotation is pretty horrible. I didn’t like it a bit in Shadowlands, avoiding Night Fae at all cost. And it stopped me from maining Dk in Dragonflight. If it was only an enabler like Whirlwind for Fury Warrior, it may be even fine. However, the additional requirement with that static ground effect is just so bad. It makes playing dps Dk in M+ so much harder and more importantly unsatisfactory that I don’t know why this objectively bad design (given how many people don’t like it) is still a thing.
You still need to change that! The 4sec dropoff increase is nothing more than a pitiful bandaid and doesn’t solve anything. It’s better but I don’t think anyone is content with that…
You want that ground effect to stay? Give us an option to cast it passively like Retribution Paladin does. At least for one spec of Dk. I just want one Dk spec that doesn’t need to have his M+ tank playing around him. Just one spec that goes in a M+ pug group and can do his thing independently of what your tank is doing. I think FDK would be the perfect spec for that with his short cd pillar burst windows (not taking BoS into account since this ability always needed your tank to play around you). Not sure where you could attach Death and Decay to apply passively. Maybe Glacial Advance? Something like:
- Glacial Advance has a chance to leave behind an area of Death and Decay. Pillar of Frost causes your next Glacial Advance to leave behind a Death and Decay.
It doesn’t have to be complicated really. There must be a good solution for that!
