Okay so DKs are with no doubt terrible rn in Arena with Blood being by far the best option (top 5 DKs on EU are Blood).
Ive been 2.5k in the prepatch on frost DK 3v3 in a couple of days and 2.2k on like 3 other DKs (Unholy and frost) during the season, while only playing the LFG with randoms. Im not a R1 player and would obviously not even have the option to be one, since i don’t have have a team and am not pushing anything this season, however i’ve asked multiple r1 DKs about their opinions (for example Xeek,Mes, etc.) and they all have very similar opinions, so i do feel qualified to speak on this.
Let’s start with Frost. Frost, in my opinion, is better than unholy rn due to it actually having a decent kit and i dont think it needs a full rework, while most people wouldn’t be against it either. The main problem of Frost is that it just significantly lacks dmg rn compared to the prepatch for example where it was somewhere from A to S tier, this is simply because Blizzard decided to nerf Frost around 5-6 times in a row becaue of PvE and Unholy being pretty strong pre nerfs at the start of the expansion. The reason i say Frost is better than Unholy is because Frost has cheesy comps that could work to at least some extent like Dracocleave where you run all game while waiting on CDs or Frost + Enhance where you hope the healers dont press buttons, so you can oneshot them. Also Frost is insanely squishy to physical damage and is prone to getting completely oneshotted in a 3 second stun by literally just a warrior alone. My suggestion to Frost DK:
- buff their damage by around 10%-12% to make up for the questionable nerf spams
- make them take 5%+ less physical damage by increasing their armor or whatever else
Okay so Unholy needs way larger changes than Frost and probably a full rework, since it was (prior to the massive nerfs that completely killed the spec) much more oppresive than last season on lower rankings (anything below glad range, especially into casters) and basically does all its damage passively with dots and pets, so it was very easy to pilot and do well with when it was meta at start of season , which wasn’t the case last season. I don’t think the playstyle is fun either for the DK themselves because you have to manage so many mechanics at once, like Wounds, manually reapplying half duration Dots because of Ebonfever talent and Scourge striking for plaguebringer Dot damage increase , runes/runic power management / deathcoils and the most important mechanic out of all of them is cleaving with Death and Decay + CC to get people to stay in it, but only the dots, which are mostly passive and unfun to manually reapply so often and the passively summoned pets from riders were actually doing all your damage. So my suggestion for Unholy:
- remove the Ebonfever talent (Diseases deal 12% more dmg over half the duration), which is not even a last row talent and completely 100% defines your spec and the way you play the game, while making the gameplay less enjoyable due to manually reapplying dots so frequently and more automated NPC like, its also not viable to run a build without ebonfever, since even during the “S tier Unholy phase” your abilities and mechanics actually did almost 0 damage, while being heavily carried by Dots and passive riders Pets, so the non Ebonfever Unholy build would have most likely ended up in B tier or something
- heavily buff the core Unholy kit by very high numbers that would make up for the last 2 sets of nerfs + the removal of Ebonfever
- this would include Wounds damage, Deathcoil damage, potentially making Clawing Shadows impactful and if those become “too strong” then also replace the execute damage talent (Reaping) with something less synergistic
- Very importantly the Unholy DK San’Layn Hero talents need a massive rework to make it more fun and flavourful but also actually a viable option , since currently its basically doing absolutely nothing other than some theoretical niche situations of cleaving melees that wouldn’t practically even make it stronger than riders.
- For example make the Vampiric strike modifier scale properly with Clawing Shadows or even better, remove the Vampiric strike phase on Dark Transform and add a Vampiric Coil thingy additionally because Vampiric strike on unholy is insanely anti-synergistic with its core kit, since you dont want to ever spam your Wounds proccer ability while not having any Wounds, which makes it kinda situational in the first place, while having empowered coils would feel very good in the rotation and those being limited by runic power would make you want to press it but it also would make sense in your rotation.
- You could also make San’Layn Unholy blight go onto the DK again instead of the pet and give it a vampiric aura style visual and empowerment, since obviously the total Dot damage would be massively nerfed so it wouldnt be a problem and feel somewhat active
Blood DK plays mostly like a Dps spec rn so i don’t think its unhealthy for the game other than the Deathstrike modifiers being a bit too extreme and the other abilities being too low
These are very sensible changes that i think most people could agree on, since Frost DK is often placed as the worst melee dps spec and a meme basically, while every highrated Unholy DK I asked agreed on what is needed too (ofc San’Layn can be reworked in many different ways).