Introduction
So a brief introduction ! hi my name is emma i’ve been playing wow since the start of shadowlands and pretty much being a frost dk one trick since I started playing. I don’t want to sound arrogant or anything like that but I’ve been quite high on the log rankings in a number of seasons and I’ve been one of the only high level frost dks to continue attempting breath in keys even when it wasn’t in the meta. I also won the eve ascension season 2 tournament playing off meta frost dk and playing breath ! I had the intentions of writing something like this a while ago to try and express my ideas with frost dk and what I’d like to see be changed. Just recently wowhead released their article recapping frost dk over the tier and while I think it does a great job addressing many issues I still wanted to post my thoughts on the spec and give some solutions to its major gameplay issues. Just to be transparent I’m a breath advocate and I have much more to say on breath however I also play obliterate and think I have a good understanding of what both playstyles want thanks for reading !
Breath in season one and the changes from shadowlands
Towards the end of shadowlands breath was the dominant build and you would expect to get about 1min 45ish on breath windows sometimes higher with good rng and sometimes lower if you got a mechanic but because of this the damage was scaled around not getting an infinite breath super often which meant that when you did get a long breath window it felt really great because it would be an uncommon thing and then if your breath ended after onemin because of a mechanic etc then it’s not the end of the world you’ve not lost out on everything so you can still try again on the next breath. however, in dragonflight this playstyle changed as with the new talents we were given lots more resources to generate runic power, such as AMZ now giving rp shorter AMS cooldown two charges of empowered rune weapon and having access to all three rp talents at once murderous efficiency, horn of winter and runic alteration. having access to all of this meant that achieving infinite breath was easy and so all of season one it was expected that you would have infinite breath and rarely need to recast it at any point. So, the issue with this is that we lost the fun skill expressive part of trying to get the longest breath and instead it is expected that you get an infinite breath, so it didn’t really feel that amazing when you did. And at the same time as losing the excitement around getting infinite breath if you were to lose breath at any point for whatever reason in a fight it would feel awful as you were expected to keep it at a high uptime. However, this wasn’t so bad in season one before the breath changes. towards the end of season one they made changes to breath increasing breath’s damage but also increased the cost per tick. this change had the right idea as hopefully it would have created the shorter breath windows but make the spec much more bursty however in practice infinite breath was still possible and reasonably manageable. This meant that the same issues of being expected to keep up infinite breath was still there but now it just became more difficult and more frustrating if you were to get a mechanic early on in a fight.
Season two
In season two was where we really got to experience the breath changes while season two did add an amazing 4set to the game which felt really great to play in keys and in raid some of the boss fights in Aberrus were less friendly one that specifically sticks out in my mind is playing breath on echo of neltharion where you would need to move out if you were ever targeted with a volcanic heart and during the echoing fissure you would need to move all the way out and this lack of uptime made playing breath extremely stressful on such a fight. Another problem that was felt during season two was that even on a patchwork fight on occasion you could at any moment just lose breath through no fault of your own simply because with the increased cost to breath it meant that we relied much more on hysteria procs anyone who was playing frost dk at this time knows the desperation of needing a hysteria proc to keep breath going. This made the gameplay at times feel really frustrating and frost dk shouldn’t be expected to rely on the will of an rng proc to decide if our cd lives or dies.
Season three
In season three this problem hasn’t been as bad as we gained a huge jump in stats meaning maintaining infinite breath has been easier as well as this our 4 set provides us with more runic weapon uptime which also has helped with smoothing out our rotation. despite this our season three tier set has felt awful to play. While it does give a lot of damage, being forced to talent at least one point into chillstreak if not two never feels nice especially with frost dks limited talent options. As well as this chill streak can be a frustrating cooldown to play with for example in keys chillstreak can sometimes jump to a mob that has dashed away, just died or is even a critter which would just instantly end your chillstreak with no cdr for the next one and a single stack of the damage buff. While there are options to play around this holding your cd for a pack that isn’t going to instantly die and drop chillstreak isn’t a fun way to use the set, though I will say in higher keys it becomes less of a worry. And even when chill streak is working as intended it still has a lot of rng factors involved which can cause it to get misaligned with pillar. So overall chillstreak while it may look cool it has a lot of issues that make it frustrating to play with. One more point about season three I would add is a more of a general frost dk issue but its highlighted especially on the fyrakk where he does his flying mechanic between intermissions. Even with increased stats and rune weapon charges if you want to keep breath between p1 to intermission or intermission to p2 for example it can be incredibly resource heavy and has made it so in a lot of cases you are dropping breath no matter what. This issue was also experienced in season two on a fight like assault or experiments on difficulties below mythic. While these little roleplay downtimes are cool for roleplay it makes frost dk much less viable compared to classes whose damage isn’t contingent on keeping perma uptime. I address this issue at the end in my suggestions section.
Obliteration in dragonflight
Obliteration over dragonflight for the most part has seen improvements but is not without flaws. Going from shadowlands to dragonflight frost dk unlocked the ability to play icecap and obliteration at once which has been enjoyable to play with and lets you get off your damage much more often. This is especially great in keys where you can press CDs pack to pack it overall has just felt a lot better to play then in shadowlands. In season one obliteration started off okay it really took its stride when they increased the number of targets you would cleave while in death and decay from two to three which offered oblite a lot more damage. In season two frost got a set that would was extremely strong for both build but especially obliterate as during your burst windows a majority of your damage would be critical hits as is so it definitely felt it’s best during season two. In season three however the inclusion of the legendary axe has been mixed but the set has really felt mediocre for obliteration. Going from having your crit damage buffed for every pillar guaranteed we instead get chillstreak and chilling rage which, while obliterate has more talent points to spare, still feels extremely clunky. Obliteration doesn’t mind getting the cdr on rune weapon, but it isn’t as significant for it as it is for breath. As well as this breath getting misaligned chill steak and pillar cds isn’t great breaths damage profile at least makes it more bearable. Whereas obliteration really wants chill steak back before pillar. This can just make the gameplay feel clunky overall and much like breath chillsteak being inconsistent in keys also plays a problem for oblite.
Issues with the general class tree
I think that all three DK specs can agree that DK probably has the worst class tree of all. We have limited flexibility in our talents and we offer limited utility to the group. Some of the issues concerning our class tree include death strike requiring two points to obtain what we already had in Shadowlands, in an era of raid buffs DK doesn’t really bring anything to the group outside of grips and a mediocre amz. Our cap stones are boring and uninteresting and don’t really offer much flexibility for utility or fun. And talents that we are often forced into for example blood draw don’t offer anything on a second point. Overall the DK class tree feels like we’ve not gained any new utility like other classing going into dragonflight but instead we’ve been pushed into taking our old utility but split between various points. There are some good quality of life talents that we’ve gained since Shadowlands including shorter ams for all specs having two charges of deaths advance has felt amazing. However they’ve made it really difficult to change talents.
What I’d like to see (wishlist):
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I have a lot of ideas about frost dk some more crazy some more reasonable. But one thing I think they need to make a priority on is deciding if we are going to be obliteration or breath. Because splitting the tree with two distinct builds makes it difficult to create an interesting and customizable tree.
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For obliteration starting off one of the biggest problems playing with obliteration right now is when your tank moves away from your death and decay or alternatively you need to move out of it for a mechanic. Oblite already has such a short burst window and being made to miss out of three target cleave is awful. We need to be given the same treatment as monk has for faeline stomp and give us the cleave buff persisting even after we walk out of it.
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For breath one of the worst experiences is either having a boss such as fyrakk who flies away and makes you unable to keep breath up or getting a mechanic that forces you to move out. The same thing can also be said for being forced to struggle to keep breath up between pulls in keys without chaining. One way I would try to rectify this would be to make it so that breath consumed 60-80% less runic power when it doesn’t hit a target I feel like this wouldn’t create a big shift in balance as the best frost dk damage is when we can keep up full breath uptime but just as well it would be a huge quality of life change.
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Another thing for breath I talked about how it’s felt less skill expressive due to the issues surround runic power and us being overcapped on resources I would like to see blizzard try and get breath back to that 1min 30 sweet spot. Some of the ways I think they could go about doing this without just taking away all the new ways we have to generate resources would be to include a ramping effect of some kind so that for every 200 lets say runic power spent your breath damage is increased and the cost is increased, this way you would have a breath that would ramp up in damage the longer you kept it up which could be really fun and exciting whilst alot limiting the ability to easily get an infinite breath. And to do away with hysteria and instead give us reliable ways to generate more runic power similar to deaths due in Shadowlands with the unity power. That way we could plan how we use our cds instead of just praying for hysteria procs.
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For obliteration I think that one thing that feels counterproductive when itemising stats is that while you want crit because you are criting with spells that aren’t obliterate during your burst it feels counterproductive that during your burst all your crit on oblite is somewhat not required. So it would be really cool to see oblite get something like crit strike is converted into crit damage for obliteration during pillar. Something along those lines similar to firemage could make the spec feel even more bursty and fun to play.
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For the general dk class tree it would be nice if we could get a raid buff I’m not really sure what that would like we need an entire tree redesign I believe but ideas I’ve had include a basic antimagic aura similar to PvP. Or more a more interesting suggestion could be to make icy talons effect the whole group this way we could give back to our enhancement shamans !
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A personal request for me I would really love to see deaths due brought back into the game or into the skill tree somewhere. It has a really cool visual and it feels like it would be a waste not to use it. Plus I think that having it in the class tree could find use on blood DK who used to enjoy it in Shadowlands. I think it’s a great effect I think the legendary power for it was awesome I’d just love to see it included or brought back in some capacity (I’d even take a glyph)
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One last outlandish idea that I don’t think would be included but if we could have something where when you enter breath your spells get transformed similar to ascendance for shamans where perhaps your obliterate is replaced with like dragon claw with extra range. I just think making breath become a bursty super cd where you are fighting to keep up this powerful form with ramping damage could be an epic play style.
Conclusion
If you made it this far first of all thank you so much for reading I really do appreciate it I know it comes off a bit rambly and negative but I really do love frost dk I cannot see myself maining any other spec. Overall I think frost dk has had a good expansion, while oblite has gameplay issues still people who enjoy that build have gotten alot of great changes added to it since shadowlands. And as for breath while I prefer how it played in shadowlands the ability to take icecap and frostwhelps has been realy enjoyable and I know going into season four frost is gonna feel really fun with the season two set choosen ! 
