Unholy is actually getting left behind, and it will only get worse

[Protean]

All 3 specs are viable, they just aren't competitive. There's a difference.

Viable at what exactly?

Because I see them as completely nonviable at every competitive level. Or I guess only your level matters.

[Galathir]

Skullflower works in QA not design. He provides feedback and the devs chose not to act on it. Don't blame him, it's not his fault.

Magdalena does not work for Blizzard, and he actually quit the game over the lack of communication in beta and ensuing state of DKs in 7.x.

Okay, then I remembered this incorrectly. Thanks for the clarification.

[Freedom]

Just a bit of fire to add.
Have you guys seen the latest sims for 865 Ilvl on simcraft?
Yeah sims are not reliable, but still, good to know we are in a good shape!

Frost finally reached unholy! Yay!

P.s. Here they are http://www.simulationcraft.org/reports/Raid_T19H.html

Every time our one lock teases me for being Frost I'll link him this. It's not even the talents excuse anymore - Frost only has 1 very subpar talent in SimC now(HoW vs FP). Assuming FP is worth 10% of your damage, napkin math says Frost is right below Shadow non S2M at 337k DPS.

[hellhamster]

Every time our one lock teases me for being Frost I'll link him this. It's not even the talents excuse anymore - Frost only has 1 very subpar talent in SimC now(HoW vs FP). Assuming FP is worth 10% of your damage, napkin math says Frost is right below Shadow non S2M at 337k DPS.

Actually horn of winter is like 1-2% ahead of FP right now for Obliterate builds. It's a different story for Frostscythe. People should still pick FP though for obvious reasons.

[Grimdeeds]

I don't trust the sims at all for DK's.

Having said that, I do take more stock in the statistics page over on warcraftlogs. I also put stock in my own personal experience if it starts to match up with what I see on the statistics page, and the community as a whole. And right now every item level bracket my team moves up, the further my DPS gets left behind. Our AoE/cleave is okay, but not stellar, for mythic dungeons until about +6 and above. And anyway in really fast-moving, competitive groups we are a liability because of how slow we are and our pet's erratic behavior which can pull mobs unintentionally. The groups wanting extra chests (most of them) will frown on a DK that brings medium aoe damage, low single target, and NO mobility.

For mythic raiding, I may get benched soon for our Ursoc attempts. We just don't have enough single target to be viable unless we have bracers or our team can comfortably carry us. I start off great with single target burst, usually very competitive, but of course the damage fall off outside our army and other cd's is so terrible, I mean so ridiculously bad, that after 5 minutes, I've been surpassed by most of the raid. We've been built with a natural damage falloff outside our burst which is far greater than our non-DK peers', and of course any movement at all swings that door even further wide open.

This low to medium damage combined with no mobility and complete damage falloff outside of burst on single target is infuriating, quite honestly. Truly frustrating when all you want is to keep up somewhat with your friends and teammates. I can't keep up with them literally in movement nor figuratively in damage.

Death coil, for me, is the number one area I look to for change. The ability is so dissatisfying to use. Multiple sudden doom procs and the need to occasionally overcap some runic power because of runes in danger of sitting is super frustrating. If blizzard could buff death coil damage, it would do a few things for us: Make death coil feel rewarding to push, make movement slightly less punishing us since we can pool and dump RP during movement, AND honestly most importantly bring our SUSTAINED single target damage up where it needs to be, so we don't despair as fights drag on and our damage is falling off with every minute that goes by.

[Schizoide]

It is absolutely semantics, in that using words properly is important to convey the point you want to make.

Viable means it can be used to complete content. You could absolutely complete content with only frost DK DPS. It would be much more difficult, require better gear, and take longer, but it's possible. Viable is a very low bar, such that it's effectively meaningless. You could probably compete content with all Balance-specced druids in cat form, eventually.

Competitive means just that; the spec has comparable power to the other choices. When it comes to competing, Unholy is weak and Frost downright terrible.

[Deleted]

Viable means it can be used to complete content. You could absolutely complete content with only frost DK DPS. It would be much more difficult, require better gear, and take longer, but it's possible. Viable is a very low bar, such that it's effectively meaningless. You could probably compete content with all Balance-specced druids in cat form, eventually.

Actually, someone might need to run the maths on that. There's a very good chance that 14 Frost DKs wouldn't be able to do the required damage necessary to kill Mythic Ursoc, even with optimal play, and assuming only gear from EN pre-Mythic Ursoc is available. I'm grasping at straws here, but you get the point, Frost is actually really shit.

Being viable, to me, isn't just about being "able to do it" albeit with more or less difficulty. It has more to do with how effective something is in the scenario set. Just ask the multitude of DKs that in this very thread said they were benched on Mythic progression for low damage. To their guild, it's not about being competitive, they're simply not viable because they're delaying guild progress due to subpar damage.

[0verdose]

Frost is also getting that huge frozen pulse buff in 7.1 while unholy current isn't seeing any changes. So blizz logic is have the two dk dps specs switch roles for a few months then switch back again later on the the expac? Do they serious want to piss off the people who only invested Ap into the unholy artifact? With those changes frost will be significantly better for sustained aoe and could possibly catch up to unholy for ST. I do not feel like building up the frost artifact nor do I want to main frost. Looks like I'm gonna be reitirjng my unholy until buffs come up and going to start lvling a new spec. I hate how blizz can't make BOTH dps specs decent. It either has to be one or the other. Judging in how quickly blizzard does something about dks issues will show how much they actually care about the dk community haha.

[Deleted]

To every death knight who can post here : http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/t...675560?page=21
Ask your questions all of u write death knight probelms to this forum post. We must get their attention, and this is the best place of doing it.

[Deleted]

Do people even understand what 75/95 PERCENTILE means?

I don't, but I would like to know

[zaino]

I don't, but I would like to know

pretty simple

when comparing the logs of your fight compared to every other frost / unholy dk who also had fights logged, you fall in somewhere

percentile is how well you stack up vs those other dks

when talking about 75th percentile, it means logs from dks in the top 25%, or dks who did better than 75% of other dks

95th percentile is the top 5% of parses, or the straight g ballers who managed to get a bis legendary (bastards)


harder question to answer is: why is this important? a lot of classes are balanced around max level potential, or the skill ceiling. The reason we saw shadow priest changes recently which were half reverted were because of how dominant shadow priest players are in the bleeding edge raiding guilds.

[Deleted]

same, already leveling my fire.My mythic guild needs more range than melee anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My guild's already said they'd take me back into the Mythic team as a DK but I just can't find raiding enjoyable on a DK atm.

[Nero Stormchester]

Please child , nythendra is NOT a patchwork style fight - there is way too manny adds there to boost DPS through AoE

[Casterbridge]

I'm not in a bleeding edge guild, not even close really so some of the things that bother you guys don't actually bother me as much.

As an example the Festering wound mechanic, I know there is a lot of complaint about the RNG of wounds, and I get that, however I'm afraid if they move to a more steady system of wound generation and popping, the priority of UH will become much more stale.

I'd rather they add in some little cool down that allows you to put on say 4 wounds (or more) at once, so that when needed we can quickly put up a reliable amount of wounds and not have to worry about the RNG.

I don't know, what I'm basically trying to say is I don't want to sacrifice all of the interactivity of the spec and end up in a situation where we have a very bland straight forward rotation. I know you guys aren't advocating that I just feel that is the kind of knee jerk reaction the devs are likely to come up with.

[Galathir]

Please child , nythendra is NOT a patchwork style fight - there is way too manny adds there to boost DPS through AoE

Plus there's a lot of RNG involved with running. When and how often does someone get Rot? Can they stand near the boss in P2 or do they have to be all over the room the avoid the bugs?

[Dahti]

So do those meters show that frost scales slightly better?

Also for frost there is ~36 cast of howling blast and 77 oblit, I think it's using HB too often..

Napkin math tells me that's about 14 minutes worth of frost fever in a 240-360 second fight (4-6 minutes). I'm also not seeing a condition that HB is cast outside icytalons/rime and 'howling_blast,if=talent.frozen_pulse.enabled' is in the APL though horn of winter is the selected talent.

Looking over that rune waste part it looks like rime must be proccing 10 times per-minute (one every 6 seconds) which probably makes sense but I wonder if all these HB procs are using GCDs that could be better spent elsewhere namely frost strike (given it has the highest DPET). I think this is also highlighted in that the average runes left at the end of combat is ~1 while the average RP is >40. I also am not sure if rime procs are generating RP properly in the sim, it's only showing <14 RP gained from howling blast where it should be around 360-370. That's about 14 frost strikes that aren't being accounted for.

Or I could be off, haven't had coffee yet.

[Schizoide]

Frost is also getting that huge frozen pulse buff in 7.1

The buff is primarily to Obliterate priorities, which don't have single-rune abilities to maximize FP uptime. It will bring Obliterate and MG closer together. The damage of each FP tick is being nerfed in 7.1. Overall it's a QoL improvement for everybody, and a welcome one, but not really a buff.

[RuneDK]

Frost is also getting that huge frozen pulse buff in 7.1 while unholy current isn't seeing any changes. So blizz logic is have the two dk dps specs switch roles for a few months then switch back again later on the the expac? Do they serious want to piss off the people who only invested Ap into the unholy artifact? With those changes frost will be significantly better for sustained aoe and could possibly catch up to unholy for ST. I do not feel like building up the frost artifact nor do I want to main frost. Looks like I'm gonna be reitirjng my unholy until buffs come up and going to start lvling a new spec. I hate how blizz can't make BOTH dps specs decent. It either has to be one or the other. Judging in how quickly blizzard does something about dks issues will show how much they actually care about the dk community haha.

I mean...I only get a few hours per night(often it's about 2) and I have 17 points into Apocolypse, 13 into Maw and 23 into the Blades...if you didn't invest into your other artifact weapons at all you're really the only one to blame.

[0verdose]

I mean...I only get a few hours per night(often it's about 2) and I have 17 points into Apocolypse, 13 into Maw and 23 into the Blades...if you didn't invest into your other artifact weapons at all you're really the only one to blame.

I don't play frost or blood. So what's the point in putting ap into artifacts I won't use? I don't play nearly as much as I'd like because of college and work anyways. No time to focus on three separate specs. eh it doesn't matter if unholy doesn't get any love till 7.2, I'll just gear my mage, dh, hunter or rogue until then.

[Schizoide]

If you keep up on your artifact research, leveling your other class/spec artifact weapons will go extremely fast in a couple weeks. It's not a big deal.