Hold on, don’t misunderstand what Maryz is saying. The point isn’t “BL is useless” the point is “having more than one BL class in a raid brings way less value than having multiple CR classes” which is correct.
You mean bringing a DK over another class? If so that’s a general debate which I believe shouldn’t exist in a raid, under ideal circumstances at least. A raid leader shouldn’t have to do these kind of choices.
I love the change to Frost currently on Beta. Shifting the damage from our Pillar windows to our base damage as well as taking away that terrible strength scaling have resulted in our rotation being less frustrating to pull off. The only question i have is, why Blizzard could you not replace Inexorable Assault with the Frost Strike effect Pillar of Frost had were you can spend more Runic Power during Pillar, right now we have cases were we over cap RP, if this effect had been located were Inexorable Assault is located then we can have a more interactive rotation, this also makes that talent path more viable.
Also we really need something more to work from Absolute Zero when we take this passive right now, it feels bad to take this passive when you go Rider of the Apocalypse, we could have had something that revolves around Howling Blast and Raise Dead in this location to give Frost DK something more to work with.
After additional testing in M+, I need to highlight again that while benefits offered by San’layn to the Blood DK are great, the Essence of the Blood Queen remains a major issue in how it is stacked and maintained.
Running through a +6 Necrotic Wake PUG run, with the gear scaled to sub-600 I was actually kept on my toes to maintain the rotation and RP generation to stay alive. During the whole of the dungeon run Vampiric Strike outside of Vampiric Blood procced less than 10 times, so I had to rely on VB to maintain the stacks, often wasting the defensive aspect of the cooldown as I was using it in situations that did not warrant a cooldown.
Note that even with WeakAuras to track Essence I had times I could not recover 7 stacks due to attempting to use abilities other than Vampiric Strike (BB to grab/maintain aggro on adds, DnD to maintain buff and ability to cleave, DS to prevent becoming a dead knight, etc).
Speaking of dropping the stacks. Generally through degenerate use of VB with a mandatory Red Thirst it is possible to maintain 100% uptime, but human error or unexpected circumstances may lead to losing these stacks. Getting these stacks back is painful - we’re talking about SEVEN stacks, so 7 GCDs within the VB window. That window itself is not very long, unless extended by a 2-point Imp. VB talent. Outside of the CD it’s impossible with the current proc rate of Vampiric Strike.
In short, the harder the content the more degenerate San’layn playstyle becomes.
In my understanding Essence of the Blood Queen is to be stacked and maintained throughout the boss fight/dungeon progress, however for Blood it is done so through a degenerate use of CDs and causing major rotational friction when trying to stack up the buff. If that is the case, please consider changing Essence of the Blood Queen related mechanics, for instance:
Essence of the Blood Queen (Keystone Buff) - reduce the baseline amount of stacks to 3, with 2% Haste per stack (6% Haste increase, down from 7.5%)
- Frenzied Bloodthirst increases the maximum stack count to 5 (10% Haste increase, down from 10.5%, so negligible loss)
- Optional: Make the Essence of the Blood Queen stacks have separate duration (acting like Festermight), so we do not worry about maintaining/refreshing the stacks.
Vampiric Strike (Keystone Ability) - greatly increase the proc chance (minimum 25%) so we can actually build up and maintain the buff outside of CDs.
- The approximate every fourth Death Strike would add a stack/refresh the buff, making it very manageable to maintain it throughout the fight, even between M+ trash pulls with the generous 20 sec duration.
- Increased proc chance should also help building up the (reduced amount of) stacks to full potential without using a defensive cooldown offensively.
Gift of the San’layn (Capstone Buff) - activating Vampiric Blood should grant at least 3 stacks of Essence of the Blood Queen
- If Essence of the Blood Queen is meant to be maintained, then refreshing lost stacks should not be such an arduous effort where after using the CD we need to then spend multiple GCDs to setup the buff while ignoring the regular rotation.
I also think the changes would benefit Unholy without adversely affecting their playstyle, especially in instances where we don’t want to use Dark Transformation immediately on cooldown and may want to hold it back for a priority target that is not yet available to be attacked (Raid Boss add spawns, tougher mob pack in M+, etc.)
Why doesn’t Festering Wound work similarly to Tip of the Spear?
Why, as an Unholy, didn’t we receive something similar to what the rogue received, and at the same time something that is more identical to our class than to the rogue?
Why does the rogue deepen the fantasy of Unholy better than Unholy itself?
PS. Why are players’ opinions regarding hunter, and especially Survival hunter, monitored and listened to every week and turned into changes for this specialization, while player opinions for DK and Unholy are dismissed?
The truth is that you haven’t even done ONE THING for us that the DK community has asked for.
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:
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:
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:
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:
It doesn’t have to be complicated really. There must be a good solution for that!
Improve Raise Abomination’s mobility. It was probably nerfed for PVP purposes and it continues to this day…Abomination is too slow.
AND
Reduce CD for Abomination Limb to 1.5 min CD.
The current 2 minutes are a misunderstanding for every specialization.
This doesn’t suit anyone. Change it.
1.5 minutes is fair for each specialization for DK.
Other issue
Here someone posted some (in my opinion) good ideas for solving the problem with our runes (although there were already such suggestions in this thread) and a few ideas for redesigning the Soul Reaper - and these ideas are great.
I would like to add that it can be done as - dividing it into two talents (set this as a choice node) - active and passive, and giving players the choice of what style they want to play with Soul Reaper.
Active is a bit stronger - for PVP and Raids, passive is probably better for M+.
I have already written it many times - none of our problems have been fixed or minimized as much as possible. Literally nothing has changed.
PS. I am asking developers to never listen or read nonsense from Mr. Taeznak again.
Don’t do this again - please.
The Frost DK specialization needs a stronger, more distinct identity. After experimenting with the Omnifrost build (Breath of Sindragosa + Obliteration Capstones), it’s clear that Breath of Sindragosa should be moved to the Core Talent Placement in the spec tree rather than remaining a Capstone talent.
Moving Breath of Sindragosa to the core talent tree could significantly enhance the Frost DK’s gameplay and identity. This change would allow players to build around a central, powerful mechanic, providing a unique experience that sets Frost DK apart from other specializations.
A talent reshuffle is essential for Frost DK. With Breath of Sindragosa as the core talent, the spec could focus on a cohesive gameplay style. This would involve creating synergies with other talents, particularly Obliteration, to provide a more fluid and engaging playstyle.
To make Obliteration work seamlessly with Breath of Sindragosa, consider implementing an interaction mechanism, such as:
The envisioned Frost DK gameplay should revolve around two core cooldowns: Pillar of Frost and Breath of Sindragosa. Players should then have the option to path into Obliteration for a versatile playstyle.
These options should allow players to specialize without being forced into a full AoE or full ST build, offering more versatility and choice in their gameplay.
Implementing these changes would give Frost DK a distinct and powerful identity, with a more engaging and strategic gameplay style. Moving Breath of Sindragosa to the core talent tree and creating synergies with Obliteration will allow for a more fluid and dynamic playstyle. This vision, combined with addressing current bugs and unintended issues, could significantly improve the Frost DK experience.
It could look something like that from brainstorming a little bit
Thank you for reading.
I second this. I’ve always maintained that BoS needs to either be:
A: Completely removed in favour of something new.
or
B: Made baseline in order to create more interesting interaction and synergies within the spec. If turned into something core like that, they can then create new talents that adapt and modify it for different gameplay contexts.
Great, other classes received a full rework, while DK received only a few polishes - not even a complete rework of the talent tree was taken care of.
Unholy, for example, still has the same talent tree as in DF.
Frost has a barely visible change and Blood looks similar.
I feel like only Blood has changed a bit and is smoother and more enjoyable to play than before.
Runeforging
Runeforging could be such a good tuning knob for DKs to enchance different playstyles both in PvP and PvE but it’s been underwhelming for a decade now as Rune of The Fallen Crusade and Razorice are always the mandatory or best to pick.
My suggestion :
Remove the [Raise Dead] talent from the DK tree and make it baseline
In the place of [Raise Dead] put [Rune of the Fallen Crusader] with modified benefits. This would make this basically baseline so there should be atleast a minimum amount of nerf to it. Instead of healing 7% of your maximum health, make it 4%. Instead of increasing our Total Strenghts with 18% for 15 sec, make it 13% for 12 sec.
For Frost remove the [Killing Machine] passive from the Talent Tree and make it baseline
Replace [Killing Machine] talent with [Rune of Razorice] with modified benefits.
Instead of 773% Extra weapon damage as frost, make it 725%. Instead of giving 3% frost damage debuff that stacks 5 times, make it 2% debuff
After this, you can go crazy and create/balance new Runeforges and there will be a lot more diversity and a lot more place to enchance certain playstyles with different type of runeforges. It has such a huge potential of altering DKs playstyle or enchancing certain playstyles that would make DK feel more unique and better it’s incredible. Don’t neglect this, finally let this DK specific “ability” shine.
Now that Shamans have gotten their raid buff we are the only class missing a raid buff to bring.
What we should bring to raid is a haste buff, i think this is a golden opertunity for Blizzard to remove Unholy Aura in UH DK’s talent tree and turn it to a raid buff.
[Unholy Aura] Allies are filled with Unholy Might radiated from the Death Knight increasing the haste and critical strike damage by 3%.
Also Horn of Winter should be turned in to a heroism/Blood Lust effect.
[Horn of Winter] The Death Knight blows his Horn of Winter empowering his allies and filling the enemy with dread, Horn of Winter increase the raids haste by 30%. The name of this buff it self should be called The Icy Winds of Northrend.
If Unholy Aura could be changed we could have Festering Dead added instead, I really think we can use a passive that synergizes with our Pet related talents in the UH DK talent tree.
Gonna copy my suggestion here, i also added some more details in to it.
[Festering Dead] for every time Scourge Strike/Sudden Doom Death Coil Bursting 1 Festering Wound, Raise up 1 Skeleton Warrior for 8 seconds. The Skeleton Warrior Charges in at the enemy striking them with Plague Strike which applies a stacking debuff on the enemy target, this debuff ramps up [5-10] stacks causing the enemy to take increased damage from the Death Knight/Minions, the Skeleton Warrior also Cleaves the target with it’s melee attacks.
This in of it self is far more unique than just a flat 20% minion damage buff with a 8 yard range to it, and Festering Dead would have more synergy with the spec. One of the major problems with Ruptured Viscera is the fact we are not Raising Undeads all the time to attack the enemies face. That’s why i think if we could have this passive, we could create a feedback loop on our Wound generating effect with Festering Dead/Ruptured Viscera, you burst 1 wound the Skeleton Warrior does his thing, then he explodes for some small damage, and a 10-25% chance to generate a Festering Wound in return, this also helps to make Commander of the Dead a much more interesting cap stone talent as well now that it’s a buff on the Death Knight that gets applied to all Minions that get Raised during it’s duration, this also have a better synergy with Decomposition, but this passive really need to further increase the duration extension when you put your second talent point in to Decomposition.
As for Gargoyle like i have mention a couple of times now, this should be baked in with Unholy Assault, it would be way better if our Gargoyle gave us Unholy Frenzy with a duration that’s based on how long we can keep up our Gargoyle, not only does it solve our awkward opener because of Unholy Assault being a melee GCD/CD that applies just a 20 second Unholy Frenzy on us, but it also creates a synergy with Decomposition because of it’s ability to extend the duration of our Minions.
This in my opinion are some of the changes i see Unholy Death Knight really needs to have added/fixed in so we don’t end up with mostly a good talent tree but stuck with some bad passives. Also Blizzard, you need to address Pestilence, this passive is really bad and has no business being a talent in UH DK’s talent tree, just put Bursting Soars there and add Festering Scythe were Soars is currently located, then you can just add in a new passive were Festering Scythe is located currently on beta.
If we don’t get a raid buff, we should get it:
OR
OR
Although it would be more interesting to do it with a bit of class fantasy:
I forgot to mention tuning DK’s damage to make it an important choice, even necessary, to find its place in the raid.
Scourge strike and festering wound cant work without each other so we didnt get nerfed 15% its a 30% nerf
When you nerfing both scourge strike and wounds its a 30% nerf and thats too much
While other already overpowered classes like mage and war getting 30%buff to everything 3weeks in row.
We basicaly got only horse from hero talents and zero dmg.
Right now in live i think unholy is stronger than in ptr.
Last time in s3 when we got nerf 10% to scourge strike and wound unholy dk became worst melee thats how important is to not nerf both scourge strike and wound because its combined 20% nerf.
Later they reverted nerf but it was to late people already swiched to dh.
For sanlayn i have no words everything is useless right now cant be nerfed more thers no numbers you can go only in negative numbers
Unfortunately EU accounts still can’t post in the US forums so this will most likely not be seen much anyway…
I’m trying to give a “short” feedback on the raidbuffsituation, as it kinda got even worse now, but lets take a look back at a statement from approx. 2 weeks ago.
Ultimately our goal is broad spec representation and class representation across the different roles. I think we’re hesitant to add still more raid buffs that might risk feeling redundant and yet another thing to manage or that might too heavily force less choice in composition forming. Ideally though, if you’re a PUG leader, if you’re putting a raid or Mythic raid group, you should want one of every class and then once you have that covered, you should look at who’s available and how you want to fill out the rest of your roster based on your people and the content that you’re facing.
We need to look at diversity and want to make sure that classes like Shaman and Death Knight are bringing tools to the raid that make them valued members of a raid group or valued in dungeon groups. That’s not to completely close the door on a new raid buff ever coming to them, but our hope continues to be to use the other knobs that the team has at its disposal to get them to a place where they feel equally valuable without just needing a raid buff.
I don’t want to go to much in depth in commenting on what was said in the interview and how this is not really reflected in the game.
So now we are here and got introduced with a “new” Raidbuff for Shaman in Skyfury:
Throughout Dragonflight and The War Within’s development, the topic of raid buffs has been actively discussed and we’ve come to the decision to add a new raid buff to the Shaman class. Our goal with this buff is for it to fully replace the Windfury Totem buff previously brought by Enhancement Shamans and grant Elemental and Restoration access to a raid buff to encourage their value in raids.
Skyfury incorporates the previous effect Windfury Totem had of activating additional auto-attack swings with a small Mastery buff. Players may also note that this is lifting the party-wide restriction previously in place on Windfury Totem’s effect and turning it into a guaranteed raid-wide effect.
This leaves Deathknights as the last Class without a proper unique raidBUFF. Blizzard stated multiple times Grips being the reason DKs are brought to raid therefore representing their “unique” but actually not so unique “Buff”.
Grip as Raidbuff and differences in DK Speccs
Let’s just assume for a moment Grips (or displacement Effects) would be a “mandatory” raidbuff (which should be unique to DK which isn’t the case), then we need to take a look at the discrepancy in the DK speccs themselfes:
| Blood | Frost / Unholy |
|---|---|
| Death Grip 15 sek CD | Death Grip 25 sek CD |
| Gorefiends Grasp | - |
| Abom Limb | Abom Limb |
| AMZ | AMZ (approx 30% weaker than Blood) |
So why would you ever bring a DPS DK if Blood can do everything better and even can do more (looking at you Gorefiends).
Situation seems familiar? Exactly, this was fixed just now for Enhance being the only reason to bring a Shaman to raid by giving Ele and Resto acces to their Raidbuff as well.
So in a world where grips are seen by the community, not only the devs, as unique DK raidbuff these tools need to be adjusted to be provided by all DK speccs on the same level.
Is Grip really a Raidbuff or just good Utility if needed?
So lets take a look at Grips, their uniqueness and when they were “mandatory” this Expansion.
Vault of the Incarnates
No proper grip fight. If we really tryhard to identify a gripfight we could point to Dathea and the small Adds on the outer Platforms, but these could be easily grouped by a simple kick or the multitude of displacement Abilities provided by non DKs.
Abberus
Zskarn. Grips were definetly usefull here.
Amirdrassil
Fyrakk. A pretty special case of gripfight, as this was more of a Gorefiends Grasp fight than a gripfight. So Blooddk mandatory, dps DK was subbed out for a 2 expansion old engineering enchant because it was not worth to bring a dps DK bc of bad tuning.
So out of the 26 Raidfights this Expansion. We had one proper gripfight and one massgripfight. 2/26 or approx 8% of the fights where we needed grips, 1 time the role could be fulfilled by DPS DK. On the other hand Chaos Brand/ Battle Shout/ Arcane Intellect and the other “proper” Raidbuffs were most likely seen as “mandatory” for all the fights.
Conclusion
With the solution provided for Elemental and Restoration Shaman to give them access to a/their class specific raidbuff the bare minimum that needs to happen is to get Blood and DPS DKs in line with each other:
If Grip is enough (especially pugs) to treat DK as a mandatory inclusion for their
group is definetly a big NO. Grip is very strong when it is needed, this is true. But so are for example immunities, freedom effects etc. But these are all Utility not Buffs. Unfortunately lots of speccs (or engineering) provide a close enough solution to the problems that should be solved by grips.
Overall i am definetly supporter of the removal of raidbuffs than simply adding more, but we are one step away from every class providing a unique Buff so please swallow your pride as you did with shamans. Allign the DK Speccs and give us a simple Raidbuff.
i’m starting to get worried we are not going to see our issues with Unholy being addressed.
if we are stuck with Pestilence/Unholy Aura/Vile Contagion/2 talent points in the first row/the current Gargoyle/Decomposition not further increasing the pet duration after the second talent point is spent, then we are inn for yet another expansion were we feel half finished in our talent tree, this can’t go live. Blizzard, you need to address this issues or we are going to have to pester you for the entire duration of War Within.
I hope on your part Blizzard you will give us some insight on why you haven’t fixed this issues Unholy Death Knight have.
Now i do sound a bit doom and gloom with how i pointed things out, but if any thing i do like the direction you are driving Frost Death Knight Blizzard, this current change really hammer down why 2 handed Frost Death knight will be fun to play in War Within, but if there is any chance, can you guys consider adding something to work from after you have talented Absolute Zero, right now when you are going Rider it kinda feels bad you have nothing to work from that talent location, it would be really nice if we could have something that revolves around maybe our Rime procs/Raise Dead maybe even something to replace Death and Decay for something stronger and more synergistic for Frost Death Knight.
They have not currently fixed they issues that they’ve identified with Unholy with the current Talents. Namely
Unholy also suffers from the amount of things it needs to track to really function optimally and it is less than ideal and we are looking to reduce the amount of “plates that need to be spinned”.
Whilst they have removed Empower Rune Weapon from the class tree (and made if Frost only) and from our current single target DF rotation that would reduce the number of cooldown windows we need to keep an eye on (from 45s 1.5m, 2m and 3m to 45s 1.5m and 3m) the fact that Abomination Limb is now the only “throughput” capstone talent we have it feels more of less mandatory for all builds now meaning the 2m cooldown window remains.
Unholy Blight becoming passive doesn’t change anything as it’s one of several 45s cooldowns. So we still need to track the 45s cooldown window.
I’ve tried Unholy (with Rider of the Apocalypse) on the Beta and with the default UI my eyes were bouncing around everywhere trying to keep an eye on everything! And it’s still way too many “plates” to spin.
Which is a shame, as I really want to come back to maining Unholy in TWW.
Focusing on the 2 dps specs, there’s overall a lot of good changes, class tree is a lot better and there’s nice additions to make frost function better with BoS in particular, while unholy has a few interesting new talents to make it revolve less around 3 minute cooldowns.
I’ve written up the biggest issues I noticed through beta in both raid and m+ testing (and just hitting dummies too) below:
Unholy
Abomination is the kind of thing that I think should be a choice node with army, rather than essentially costing us 2 talent points to get a cooldown. The fact it seems a lot stronger than army even with a bug reducing its damage by a lot, means it would be a pretty easy choice as it stands (and also because of the horsemen interaction, which I’ll get to later), but the problem is that army of the dead is just a pointless filler node - it exists just to drain a talent point so you can get to abom. In fact, it’s not even a filler node, it’s just a straight up lost talent point. Also, his slow move speed is horrible in pve and his ai is terrible.
Speaking of losing talent points, a lot of the late choices in the unholy tree feel pretty bad as 2 points. Festermight is a mandatory 2 points, so is aotd/abomb as said above, and you are realistically always taking unholy assault, so there isn’t much choice left, you pick your cooldowns and festermight and then you go into superstrain or commander of the dead, with the last point for death rot or doomed bidding. Morbidity and unholy aura stand out as especially boring filler nodes, with one basically just being a damage increase and the other turning you into some sort of totem. Decomposition is absurdly weak in all scenarios and costs 2 points too, so it either needs to be buffed a lot or moved earlier in the talent tree, probably a mix of both.
Frost
Icecap being 15 seconds cdr is very awkward. for BoS, it means you would probably delay breath 15 seconds every time because it is now short enough duration that you really need to align it with pillar, and for obliteration, although it’s a much smaller issue, the same thing applies to empower rune weapon cooldown.
Shattered frost consuming razorice feels quite bad. razorice is a debuff you apply to deal more frost damage, so every time you consume it all, you’re reducing your frost damage until you stack it back up - and then you consume it again. I don’t know if it matters much numerically, but it terms of gameplay it feels a bit bad to me, and also probably costs you a runeforge, since other builds can apply razorice through other means.
2 points are essentially lost by being stuck with frostworm’s fury and absolute zero even in ST because of riders, which hurts builds a lot, but again I’ll get to that with horsemen.
Death and decay still just feels bad for frost. For unholy and blood it doesn’t feel too bad honestly, but for frost it just feels so dependent on it for aoe.
Rider of the apocalypse
By far the biggest issue is the final node, where all four horsemen are summoned for a specific talent. Worse for frost, because you might not even take FWF at all for ST, but both specs are effectively locked into 2 talents points late in the tree because the talents that reduce the cooldown of these abilities by 90 seconds still spawn all four horsemen. I think this node needs to be tied to something else to spawn it, or nerfed by half when using raise abomination or absolute zero, because it contributes to some already strained talent trees.
Other than that the tree is quite passive, both Trollbane and Whitemane’s abilities interact with the player through scourge strike, which you’re probably pressing anyway, and Nazgrim’s is realistically not going to change anything you do - if things die while he’s up, that’s good, but you were trying to kill them anyway, not just to increase his buff. Mograine’s is the annoying one. The death and decay in itself is not overly useful, since he’s likely to spawn when you have it anyway most of the time, and as unholy you would want to press defile regardless for the damage, but he gives you 5% damage if you stand in his. That would be great if he just stood next to you, but he doesn’t, he runs to stand where pets always do, and having to chase him around on bosses with big hitboxes or where positioning matters means you can’t really make use of it, and it’s frustrating. I think Mograine should just get a different ability, and the other three are probably fine when bugs are fixed. It may be quite a passive tree, but I don’t think that’s an issue - hero talents don’t need to dramatically alter gameplay.
San’layn
After a few revisions we at least got away from the vampiric strike super spam, but there’s still some issues like the rng on extending essence of the blood queen between cooldown windows, the rng on blood beast spawn, who can spawn long after you’ve done most of your shadow damage and also just blow up after a pack dies or when a boss jumps away. I think blood beast should just spawn one at a time when you activate gift of the san’layn, and essence of the blood queen either needs to have a reliable extend mechanism, no extend mechanism at all, or just be active during gift of the san’layn.
Infliction of sorrow is also a pain point because it’s something that’s just always going to be either problematic or borderline useless. In the last iteration it was so strong that we just wanted to press vampiric strike at all costs, now it looks so weak that it hardly seems worth the amount of effort it warrants. It would probably be more fun to just rework this.
Deathbringer
The glaring issue with this one is the rng of reapplying the mark. If that procs, you get the full effect of mark and exterminate again right away, and a chance to proc it again after that. It’s like a slot machine, it’s so rng it hurts and I hope I don’t have to play it ever if it stays this way. It really does ruin the tree entirely by itself.
Aside from that, the main things I’ve noticed are that the rune cost is tough to fit in, especially now with the dramatic reduction in resource generation for frost, and it’s hard to line up with icecap specifically, which makes it feel all around awkward for the spec.
Another thing I noticed is a lot of emphasis on making abilities do shadowfrost damage, but outside of helping stack reaper’s mark a bit, dealing shadowfrost damage has no advantage in almost all situations? There’s no bonuses in or outside of the tree that benefit frost for doing shadow damage or blood for doing frost damage, the only thing it does at all is help stack reapers mark, which feels very underwhelming.
Quick side note I forgot to mention: Abomination limb feels like an extremely weird ability right now. It’s a 2 min cd which doesn’t line up at all for unholy, and while it does line up for frost, all this ability does now is some minor damage, but it has no competition in the talent tree in terms of dps so you always take it. I would have been happy to see this ability go after Shadowlands, but if we have to keep it, then you might as well just remove the damage and make it a utility talent for if we need to grip a lot of things. The visual is annoying and it’s boring to press.
The DK developer has been on vacation for a few weeks, or is he maybe working on bigger changes for us in the coming weeks?
It’s cruel when other classes such as Hunter receive changes every week based on player feedback, to which the developer also refers with his notes, while in our case there are a few lines of changes and without any comment from the developer.
In fact, we’ve been getting pennies of change over the past few weeks until today, when we received a significant nerf. In this situation, I see absolutely no reason to use the wound mechanics that are included in the Unholy rotation.
It was bad before, now it’s even worse and extremely frustrating.
How are you going to encourage me to press Festering Strike, apply wounds and burst them with Scourge Strike since it’s:
Why does the Developer responsible for the DK project not speak at all and does not talk to the community?
Why might a Hunter developer do this? Why was the developer for Paladin, Rogue, and DH allowed to talk to the community during changes to these classes in DF?
What is wrong with DK that he is treated the worst of all classes?
What project are you creating for us? Who are you listening to?
Why haven’t you done a single thing for us, why haven’t you improved literally anything? Why don’t you want to help us?
Do it your way if you want (if you can’t use our ideas) but do it for God’s sake - without cheating us.
Currently, all our advantages have been destroyed: base damage, San’layn damage and survivability.
So tell me, what’s the point of San’layn now?
There is absolutely no difference whether I am San’layn or Rider, although thematically San’layn should guarantee me much greater survival - in fact, the greatest survival in the game.
The changes that DK received are changes that make me wonder whether I want to play the next expansion.
I will probably stop playing because literally nothing has been done to improve the game and make it more FUN and enjoyable.
This is damage balancing for us, so it means we won’t get any more changes. This is the end of the changes.
For the next ones we will have to wait until a bigger patch or another expansion… no thanks.
Cancels his subscription. They ruined our game.
There’s couple of suggestion as Frost DK about our talents:
Rider of the Apocalypse Hero talents
A Feast of Souls
Apocalypse Now
Frost talents
Icecap
Improved Rime
Shattered Frost
Getting a nerf! Got to love the class team.
For the love of Arthas, can one of you actually start playing DK? Just humour us, main DK for a patch, do some raids, m+ and pvp… Then go ahead and return to your original main and feel the difference. This class is literally stuck in a different decade.
I’ll play devil’s advocate for a second. I did do some dungeons in beta with my guildies and yeah, my ST damage was really high even with a build that was aoe focused. Ok sure, maybe a minor nerf there. But why on earth are you nerfing Epidemic for? What happened to “we understand you don’t want to be solely relying on D&D for cleave damage”? First Epidemic doesn’t burst wounds, now it gets nerfed, guess what DKs?
YOU’L STAY ON YOUR DISGUSTING FLOOR COVERING GOOP AND YOU’L LEARN TO LOVE IT.
Cheers class devs, what can I say.
Also, seriously, a Festering Strike nerf? That ability already doesn’t do damage and is the worst button in our rotation, why nerf it? You know why? Because you don’t play DK so your dev just went “eeeeerm what are the main abilities all uh dks have, not sure so I guess nerf all of them?”
Play the class or just delete it, so at least I can reroll in peace. Arthas is dead, Bolvar has been reduced to sad parents issues, the helm of domination is broken, shadowlands ruined dk lore anyhow.
Well that was a cathartic winge. 
Just at the bare minimum, fix defile’s animation… If you’re forcing us in this gameplay at least make it so we don’t increase our risk of dying by 99% when using it.
My guildies say we should go ahead and spam the Mage forums instead hah.
