I wanted to make this post bouncing off a post made on the NA forums where I cannot post. I’ll copy the contents of that post here for context:
Hello, I’m Discord. I’m a minion from Acherus, which is the Death Knight Discord. I do some TC work, and I review logs to help and coach community members wanting to improve their gameplay. I assist mostly new players learning their rotation, and older players trying to figure out less obvious issues. They both usually have a problem stemming from the same source.
Reaper’s Mark.
It’s often the first thing a newer DK will ask about, “Why is X’s reaper’s mark doing so much more than me”, and it’s usually something more experienced DK’s will complain about “my class feels like trash when reaper’s mark doesn’t proc.”
This is especially bad for new players, who might be playing WoW for the first time, choose a DK, and not understand why sometimes mobs will absolutely disappear, while other times they take forever to die.
**The Problem**
Reaper’s Mark Resets are bad for the spec. It is an infrequently rolled RNG proc which has significant rotational and damage impact, which both result in not proccing feeling terrible. This is juxtaposed against actually procing being borderline unnoticeable in the moment, since the initial application is identical to an Exterminate that does not proc.
This is compounded by the debuff itself often being covered up by Frost Death Knight’s cluttered debuff profile, as there are a great number of non-interactive debuffs that without extensive UI modification can be difficult for any player to understand.
Because of this, two people pressing the exact same buttons and playing equally as well as each other will get wildly different results and feeling out of their class.
**An Example**
Anecdotally I tried to help a pretty young player who wanted to solo delves. He could manage it well enough until he got to the boss, where he would either kill it extremely quickly, through reaper’s mark procs, or he would be unable to kill it and die.
Due to how difficult it can be to feel Reaper’s Mark resets without the knowledge of what it is, he could not figure out why this would happen. This was genuinely upsetting for him as he did not understand the source of these wild RNG swings.
Before, he had sent multiple messages asking for help or information, but after this situation, he completely stopped talking in the community, which I suspect meant he gave up on the class or the game,
**The Result**
The inconsistency in both feeling and damage has and will continue to result in people abandoning the spec, or even the class all together.
As a regular of Acherus myself, I can only support the opinion that the current state of Reaper’s Mark resets isn’t a good place for the spec to be in. Adding to the issues presented by Discord in his post, a few bugs also further complicate the matter.
First is a bug regarding Exterminate itself. There have been many reports by people in Acherus that Exterminate simply will not trigger. They have Exterminate ready and are getting the discounted Obliteration casts, but the buff will simply stay without triggering the scythe part of the effect. This causes potential delays on Reaper’s Mark resets during critical times, while at the same continuing to discount Obliteration casts which randomly changes the resource economy of the spec.
Additionally we believe that the first Reaper’s Mark cast of a raid encounter has a disproportionately low chance to reapply Reaper’s Mark through Exterminate. While it balances out across the encounter, the decreased chance during the opening of a fight can obviously negatively impact our dps on some encounters, where early resets would be very valuable.
This not only causes frustration, but also a great deal of confusion to a lot of players, both on the low and high end; experienced or not. We often get questions regarding how Reaper’s Mark works, because players frankly have no way of understanding what is happening during their gameplay with both bugs and random chance factoring into it.
This is why I believe it would be beneficial to revisit how Reaper’s Mark’s reapplication works. The reapplication could be guaranteed at the cost of some of the power Reaper’s Mark currently has, or this reset mechanic could be removed entirely. Maybe we could even have this be a choice node, so each player can have agency over which way they prefer to play? I’m sure the dev team is much better than I am at figuring out the specifics on how best to adjust this, but I think the current design of Reaper’s Mark leaves much to be desired.