You’re probably wondering why I referred to Frost DK as a budget enhance shaman, right? Yeah, I thought so. Well, they both use their resources to power the more “powerful” attacks, and use their spammables to generate resources. They’re both brawlers that also rely on procs for burst, and while not awfully bad, they are on the bottom of the food chain generally. Very similar play style in a way, but enhance feels a lot more fluid. Why? Because you never run out of maelstrom. Outside of Empower Rune Weapon, Frost DK during long fights is essentially sucking on fumes trying to squeeze that obliterate out, and then you play the waiting game for them to regenerate.
You’re removing maelstrom for Shamans, and that’s great, but I feel like you need to look at Frost DKs resource, because it feels horrible. I want badly to enjoy this spec, but eventually I always rage quit because I wasn’t happy how the last fight went with my resources and log my Arms or Enhance, just to feel that fluid gameplay again.
Now this whole managing multiple resource thing might be okay if the spec wasn’t semi garbage, with their lackluster damage and GCDs. You’ve got this huge potential, but I feel like it’s missing the mark.
Someone posted the idea of making Frostwhelp’s Indignation baseline for pillar of frost, and I think that’s a great idea. It doesn’t feel good to press a button, using a GCD, and get nothing but a buff. At least with the Frostwhelp trait it actually makes it feel good. There’s a pause after Pillar, there’s a pause after empower rune weapon, there’s a tiny pause after RW. Once you’ve finally got them all up and running you’ve lost half your health, then you’re ready to start doing some “Obliterates” that couldn’t cut through melted butter.
Frost DK is an example of a cool idea with poor execution. Please fix this spec.
TL;DR; Fix Frost DK. It feels bad. Awful resource management + GCDs + lackluster damage = sad face.
Weird and long way to saying that frost is bad. Enhancement is a really bad spec in retail with no resource management whatsoever. In Shadowlands, the devs just tossed everything they had at their disposal, there is no rotation and way yoo many abilities that don’t play with each other. So I’m pretty convinced that whatever the situation frost is in, it’s in a better place than enhancement.
For the fact that FROST feels good or bad, I’ll take your word for it.
I wasn’t saying enhance was good by any means, just that it feels better to play because you’re never in that position where you have to auto attack because there’s literally nothing to press while you wait for your runes to regenerate, and you’ve got no rune power left because you had to death strike 100 times to recover a large chunk of health.
Honestly I don’t like “rotations” anyway. I don’t want to be told that pressing X, Y, Z, X, X, Z is the most efficient path. I just want to hit stuff and watch it fall. I totally agree on the too many abilities that don’t play with each other thing. Frost definitely has the win there. For the most part it feels like a well designed spec. It’s really just the resource management that I find off-putting.
Yeah, I had considered flipping enhancement in SL. But heck no, all that stuff they are throwing back in got pruned for a reason! Shamans already have too many buttons.
Frost DK requires ridiculous Haste stacking to feel good, and by “good” I mean that the lulls in the rotation are almost too short to notice, but they’re still there.
Sadly the problem is that Frost DK has been stuck in Cataclysm for 10 years, the class in general got no QoL or Mobility options outside of Death’s Advance (Wraith Walk’s been irrelevant since WoD ended, and it has never been good to begin with) and its rotation stayed unchanged despite all of the tools and options being taken away from it.
Runic Empowerment is terrible game design.
You have a class with 2 resources to manage, but the relationship back and forth between these resources is a bunch of coinflips.
Over time the bandaid fix to this has been “Make Frost Strike cost less so it covers more GCDs which gives enough time for runes to regen” which has never worked.
It’s been 10 years that this spec has been getting progressively worse, cannibalized by other more successful and fun to play specs like Havoc DH and Retribution Paladin and just left in a corner to rot.
Want proof that not 1 person at Blizzard wants to take a look at FDK? Glacial Advance.
This talent has been there since Legion’s launch and it has never been picked, never been relevant, never had a visual facelift despite looking the way it does in Legion (where the hidden artifact for HPally gave their Bubble a different effect btw) .
It is so busted that despite what the tooltip says it does not apply Razorice if you don’t have it on your weapon already.
According to Wowhead the bug where it would get stuck on anything in the terrain has been fixed, but I’ve tested it recently and it still gets stuck on the flat terrain of the Acherus, where the dummies are.
And from what we can tell so far in SL, it’s just staying there exactly as it is right now.
The damage weighs on its abilities are messed up, Frost Fever will most likely account for 15-20% of your damage , or more depending on Mastery, which is absolutely ridiculous.
The fantasy of DK in general was the use of Death Magic to aid the Knight part.
Frost Fever used to be a debuff that makes your enemies weaker, and your Obliterates stronger, not a Warlock DoT, but all of its debuffing capabilities have been stripped, it doesn’t interact with any of your spells either, it just does some damage, it’s completely pointless.
Imagine if just half of that damage was moved onto Obliterate or Frost Strike instead, how much better the spec would feel, to hit a button and see something happen instead of waiting for things to happen.
It’s fundamentally broken, RNG reliant and unsatisfying even when all the stars align, even when you’ve gotten all of your borrowed power.
If Blizzard has nobody who earnestly cares about it, I don’t know what can be done except just rerolling, as many have done already.
I personally level it up every expansion, see how bad it feels to play and eventually abandon it for specs that are more cohesive and fun to play.