Propose changes to Fdk. spec is DEAD

Classes Death Knight
43

and that’s what bothers me. you started playing again a few days ago and instead of rediscovering the class, learning all the abilities and play to it’s full potential, you go the forum stating this:

how the hell can you know after ‘a few days of playing’? Just like the vast majority here you’re not even close to knowing how the class works properly and instead you just go to the forums adding to the already hefty pile of FDK salt.
And why is that pile hefty? Because FDK is a typical specc that’s easy to learn, but hard to master. And if gamer’s nowadays don’t get what they want in a blink of an eye, they start spewing poison.

If you do the slightest bit of research, you know there are tons of players that can really make the class shine. It’s right there in the logs, NOT the sims, the logs. The actual history of a PLAYER’s perfomance. So yeah, that right there is bold fact that it’s the player that’s bad, not the class.

44

OMEGALUL stopped reading after that.

45

You can just about master it over 1 night… it is not difficult to master in the slightest.

The only deciding factors to a frost death knights performance are their gear level and not choosing an outright bad set of talents, this is because the frost dk spec in particular has effectively nothing to actually utilise any level of skill with. However, skill requirement should never be a balancing factor for the obvious reason in that it would amount to basing balance on speculation and not actual balance.

The simple fact is, this expansion as a whole has been horrible for character building because of the combination of azerite gear, talents and now necklace traits… if you are unlucky then you literally can’t even build your character in the first place.

What i am saying is that it is a crippling design flaw as a whole and not just limited to death knight, frost just got the short end of the stick with it all, like really, really short end.

This is why it is critical that the overall building of a character needs to revolve around 1 or 2 systems that are easy to use or obtain and not require lengthy chores or severe RNG. This is where set bonuses and the old loot system came in, however, if they bring back set bonuses, they need to ensure that they are not things which favor specific builds as that would invalidate the point in character building in th first place, they would need to be limited to mostly passive un-connected additons like on-hit effects.

46 
  I honestly loved Frost DK during Antorus when the breath build was over finally. I never liked the breath build, it never made sense to me. I am a main death knight, but every time I found myself going to other classes just because this frost death knight in bfa is so lame to play. I don't have a problem with numbers, I have a MAJOR problem with this breath spec which is awful to play. 
  I really hope for big changes in next expansion for death knights, I believe blizzard sees or understands that this build is not enjoyable to play for MANY people and will stop making it the best build at least for a while, although it would make me the happiest if I never see that spell again. 
  Did I mention how horrible the spell is? Ok.
2 Likes
47

It’s not exactly difficult for them to fix breath build through these simple steps:

  1. runic empowerment will no longer work during breath
  2. Runes regenerate faster during.
  3. Obviously reduce runic power consumed compared to current.
  4. a maximum duration added in.
    This ensures that the breath lasts for plenty of time but is not outright oppressivly powerful when the stars align and sets a proper balancing factor for the ability.

For example:

Breath of sindragosa
5 runic power per second

Continuously deal X Frost damage every 1 sec to enemies in a cone in front of you, for up to 20 seconds. Deals reduced damage to secondary targets. Runic Empowerment will not function while breathing but runes will generate significantly faster.

48

Yeah, it’s not great right now. I’ve been playing a DK since WotLK launched and I really don’t like it right now. I hate how gimmicky Breath of Sindragosa has become to the Frost spec. I also hated how they removed 2h.

49

Looking at your mythic+ and raid experienec and virtually non existant WCL entries, I cannot take this comment serious in the slightest

and based on this

and this

I get the impression that you just want an auto piloted class with fixed performance of X with barely any human factor involved. And thus proving my earlier point of this:

there’s 2 types of players. Those that invest in their gameplay and perform well and those that demand to be on par with them without even trying. I consider you the latter

1 Like
50

The obvious:

Firstly gcd should be removed on cds, like in legion, this applies to all classes though.

Second point also applies to many classes, new animations on attacks, take for example stormstrike, it has 3 animations in total, obliterate is just one, same for frost strike, it can become quite let’s say monotonous.

Third, this one also applies to pretty much all classes, bring back some skills from the past and make them baseline, or as new talent rows, archimonde trinkets, legendaries, artifacts etc…

I am fine with 2h frost.

Other than that they could change the mastery into something a bit more interesting, maybe instead of just frost damage, it could do something else along with it, like enhancement shaman mastery, maybe increase the proc chance on rime, and runic empowerment, so there is less downtime.

Maybe they could half the rime proc, but make it also proc from frost strike, they could change killing machine so it does more than just guarantee a crit on obliterate, maybe change the damage to frost, and guarantee a crit, lots of things possible that could be good, but not many come to mind at the moment, maybe it;s because unlike legion i am not using alts at the moment.

51

The spec is not fine! I played frost until Mythic Ashvane, and honestly I can’t stress over how bad BoS is and how much of a pain it is to deal with in raids. I actually had to respec to unholy and learn the spec from scratch because I just could not handle the BS of a spec frost is atm. First off I played the spec long enough to optimally keep my BoS up; which is ~30sec. <THIS is the main problem with frost dks and this is why:

  • 30 seconds is a LONG TIME
  • Our entire performance and resource capability depends on a single 2min cooldown.
  • The major downtime of 1.5 min when BoS is on CD.
  • BoS is the only viable build.

The fights in the EP are very erratic and a lot could happen within 30 sec. Sivarra could use barrage or soak circle forcing you off her, fish could transition or require you to switch to puffers, Ashvane could mark you with a bubble or an azerite beam, Orgozoa requires you to wait for adds, tanks could switch QC mid breath, Za’qul could fear you. All of these events will require you to stop using breath and deal with boss mechanics during which you dps will suffer. The only 2 fights in which you are in control are azshara and radiance.

The breath build is the only viable build for frost atm (face it, icecap is subpar) and until blizzard decide to remove BoS, the spec will never see the light of day.

Moreover, Frost? Hard to master? Don’t make me laugh.

52

this is the essence of raiding. You need to time your abilities in accordance with boss mechanics.
Of all the examples you listed, they are all on fixed timers. Only ashvane arcing azerite I also find sometimes troublesome because it overlaps with our burnphase (only first one, second one we don’t cut)

by all means, laugh. If that’s how you express difference in opinion then go ahead and be that kind of person. It certainly does not add to your credability

1 Like
53

That doesn’t change the fact that you have to wait for that said mechanic to blow over. As I said 30 seconds is a long time and if a mechanic is gonna force you off the boss in 20 seconds then you have to hold off your cooldowns until the mechanic is done and dealt with. And because you are now sitting for 20 seconds waiting for a mechanic to happen your dps will suffer and it will be hard for you to compete with the other specs. Unholy on the other hand, only has 1 cd that doesnt need to be alligned with your other abilities and it only lasts 12 sec.

54

don’t you mean the spec is…Undead
shows myself out for stupid pun

2 Likes
55

Mastery shoumd work for DW and 2H style. And from earlier in thread i think best change would be: oblitirate KM’s (for 2h) does % of its dmg as frost dmg equal to mast % which then is further increased by mastery.

Would be way better for scaling whiwh was always issue for 2h frost

56

a useless change, obliterate already scales with mastery as it is the only effect that activates rime and thus allows you to use howling blast which benefits fully from mastery.

apparantly i have had that little relevant activity lately that my armory timed out completely… that is my level of interest in dk in this expansion…

originally i was doing 7 and 8 keys all the time around uldir time since i don’t do mythic raids so there would be little reason to do anything more and then I just stopped doing heroic raids aswell since every fight was exactly the same with the zek adds suddenly being immune to grip resulting in basically every fight being the equivilent of a training dummy with all that passive shielding and healing in the game.

57

no not useless,it would still make oblitirate scale lot better over expansion,and if can get enough mastery the crits could do near or full frost dmg + bonus frost dmg.
Howling blast benefits from it fully,but obltirate has never itself used mastery. and we had howlingblast in past aswell,and in legion with dual weild. it dint do anything to solve problem of scaling for frost.

My idea wouldnt totally fix it either as i dont have the numbers for what % obltirate and other skills are,or for evryclass. and how exactly gear is going to scale to whatever ilvl(cerainly next expansion where amount gained per ilvl up could change again heavly)

58

Why does dk have problems with scaling though?

Or in a more general sense, why do some classes have problems with scaling, for example, ww monk last expansion scaled pretty badly from secondary stats compared to other classes, but better from agility, i noticed the same thing for dk.

59

I dont know exactly,but secondaries generly scale faster(and by end of expac alot) then main stats.
and magic dmg generly scales better with more gear then physical,since physical gets reduced by around 30 ish% on bosses
But aslo has to do with ability modifiers,

like 115% of attack power + full of mastery for example will outscale something that just has say 140% attack power as from where it damage comes.
I dont know exacts of it,but thats more or less why (as far i understand but im no theory crafted or rotation designer/tester to get the data simcraft and such use.)

60

Secondary stats scale far better because they are a % value i’m almost certain, while primary stats are flat values, so as your damage increases, secondary stats matter far more.

I find it better this way, secondary stats actually make most specs play better, primary stats are just a damage increase, aside from versa, versa can just go f off for all i care, maybe replace it with something a bit more interesting.

This is one of the things i did not like in bfa, the sec stat nerf was just bad in many ways, and the “problem” is still here, so literally solved nothing at all, and they actually made things worse.

The thing i do not understand is why some classes like legion monk scale worse with secondary stats, compared to other specs, like enhancement, which at some point my haste value in legion was like almost 50.

For dk, primary stat, scale better because of pillar of frost, in legion unholy also scaled better because of the artifact trait unholy crusade i think it was called, which was bis.

Man, i want my artifacts back.

1 Like
61

Regardless, it is the developers job to provide more interesting ways to use the class as opposed to everything just doing more flat damage.

I mean when you think we could be doing anything from providing on-hit frost slow/damage to people to granting them icy armors… they really haven’t dug very deep into what the frost dk could be doing.

62

Mastery is either the worst or the best, it’s the one with the highest potential to be fun, but also can just be ac boring as versatility in the case of too many classes.

Haste increases the speed of your rotation which is nice, crit doubles your damage on hit, which is boring, unless, you have some synergy with it, like in the case of assassination rogue or past havoc dh, which chaos strike refunded fury based on crit, it doesn’t do this anymore, mastery can be pretty much whatever you want.

It can be a flat damage increase like in frost dk, unholy or ret pally, really bad, uninspired mastery, or it can actually do something for your rotation like for enhancement shaman, which resets stormstrike and provides more damage with fire frost and nature., a much better mastery since it actually impacts your rotation.