Our low mobility makes me wanna reroll

[RuneDK]

The fact you need to spend 5-10k on a glyph to make WW usable is pretty shit design in and of itself. I however have rerolled to enhance shaman and have not been happier. If they address the mobility problem of DKs I'll consider going back however as Schizoide has mentioned I would not expect that until 8.0 at the earliest.

[Schizoide]

Well DKs were never granted mobility because

No. DKs have had 110-115% baseline runspeed since 2008. First Unholy Presence then Death's Advance, which every DK took. Combine that with a 8-10% runspeed enchant (which one again depending on expansion) and DKs have always run around at 121-124% total runspeed, without using a cooldown. Since 2008.

In this expansion, DKs run around at 100% speed. Huge, huge difference. And it ABSOLUTELY IS NEW.

[RuneDK]

Well DKs were never granted mobility because they have alot of ranged abilities for PvP and Blizzard always felt that giving them mobility would make them very strong. The same deal was with retribution last expansion. The spec that everyone played in PvP had only 1 melee ability and it was crusader strike.

But in PvP it was a problem. Cause a boss that has a large aggro radius requires you to walk to it on pull. When mages get their 3rd GCD of, DKs are just getting to the boss losing around 4 seconds on your prepot. I would fix this by keeping Wraith Walk and giving them an extra, long CD ability, witch is a gap closer. If you had something like charge but on a 45 second cooldown it would not be PvP breaking but would be just enaugh to press it and lose only 1 GCD on pull.
Im against making them super mobile cause they have ranged abilities and they are much like the paladin but that 1 charge would get them in melee range to use the most out of their prepot and have that much damage. Ofcourse you can always use wraith walk and a ret can use divine steed but its still 1 gcd worse than Charge.
I don't play DK anymore and when I did i played Blood but mobility was never a problem for blood cause the boss runs at you.

That would be fine if our ranged abilities didn't all hit like wet noodles now. Death Coil is weak as all hell and Howling Blast outside of rime is still a joke. However Frost still had DC and Unholy still had Icy Touch as well back when "they didn't have mobility". Truth is, as Schizoide pointed out, we've had 120-125% movement speed since we were brought into the game, to suddenly take it out completely, offer no enchants with run speed on them, and then give us the abomination that is wraith walk is more than a slap in the face. I do not understand on my shaman from a fantasy standpoint why I have an 8 second sprint on a minute cooldown on top of a charge(if talented, which it should be) on a thirty second cooldown with Ghost Wolf readily available at the cost of a GCD. Meanwhile, DK gets a 3 second incapacitating sprint that gets caught on everything, and you have to spend 5-10k just to get the ability to be usable. What's even more hilarious is they took the passive group movement speed away from unholy and gave it to monks.

[Deleted]

Play a WW. 2 rolls, teleport, snare removal/speed buff and if you get in trouble just fly across the map. I'm coming from mainly PVP but the same goes for PVE and they do very well in mythics too. Wish I hadn't blown my free 100 on a mage

Fost DK does more damage and is easier to play, the mobility does not come into effect much at all during mythic+. In really high mythic+ you can't run through 5 packs and gather them so you don't need mobility at all really. It is only bad if you need to run a long way on Arcway or when you skip one of the mini bosses in Vault of the Wardens.

I have a 884 Monk and 880 DK.

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They removed DKs and PLDs passive movement speed so they could make the legendary boots pretty much.

The boots suck, I am stuck wearing them and even at 25% haste you barely feel an effect from them.

Chrono Shard, Hunger of the Pack, Bear Tartar Food are the real problem solvers.

[Deleted]

Chrono Shard, Hunger of the Pack, Bear Tartar Food are the real problem solvers.

[Sonasol]

Well rerolling on this patch isnt that easy, u dont need only the gear, u need AP and that takes a long time to research

[Deleted]

Fost DK does more damage and is easier to play, the mobility does not come into effect much at all during mythic+. In really high mythic+ you can't run through 5 packs and gather them so you don't need mobility at all really. It is only bad if you need to run a long way on Arcway or when you skip one of the mini bosses in Vault of the Wardens.

I have a 884 Monk and 880 DK.

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The boots suck, I am stuck wearing them and even at 25% haste you barely feel an effect from them.

Chrono Shard, Hunger of the Pack, Bear Tartar Food are the real problem solvers.

Hahaha, look at ret paladins, every rogue, and warrior for example. Much better self cds, better damage and much more mobility.. Are they any harder to play? Nope, RET is a fucking braindead class. Blizzard stated time and time again that balance has nothing to do with "complexity" since mop.

[setha]

Im just writting a comment here to show I really care of u

[Shadowman 747]

Frost DKs are currently average raid DPS. We need high uptime on a single target to deal competitive damage. These fights are currently best represented by Nythendra, Dragons, Ursoc and Xavius on Mythic difficulty, depending on your luck and general readiness to being a try-hard. We have to manage our lack of mobility to stay relevant (as opposed to dealing "very high damage"). We do fairly consistent damage and reach our baseline DPS quicker than Unholy or other burst-intense classes like Demon Hunters. Our RA/Obl. ST build is indeed a jack of all trades with the 3rd gold trait without hampering our ability to deal single-target damage much. Due to the way Icy Talons, Frozen Pulse, Runic Attenuation and Obliteration interact, we are not versatile damage dealers. We have a lot of survivability and staying power, which we need to for high target up-time. Our stat priorities are a mess and extremely hard to gear for correctly, with Mastery being our dead-last stat except in AoE scenarios like M+.

Frost is in a OK state, I am not complaining. It feels rewarding to play, but it is by far not the great damage dealer you make it out to be. Easier stat priorities and slightly more mobility would definitely be welcomed.

Luck really has no contribution to frost. You do damage or you don't, all of the abilities are there, there's no massive procs, there's no burst windows. The damage frost offers is incredibly stable and there really isnt any form of core rng element to its playstyle. I'm parsing high purples on most pulls and my obliterate is contributing 18% of my overall damage on most fights, in the current build, you're at 0-1 runes at all times, banking on KM procs isnt viable, as the wasted FP damage is far higher than the crit damage on an oblit. The only luck is if you get targeted by mechanics and that really isn't something to consider, as it's far more important than damage.

Frost is very much weaker in raw ST fights. I genuinely don't understand why you say it's strong. Frost excels at fights with multple phases that have varying add numbers. I say again, frost is a jack of all trades dps, we can do good st, good aoe, and good cleave with the same talent build. Many, many fights in EN are very favorable for Frost. M nyth has mc phase, ursoc has a second mob to cleave off of the entire fight, some dragons bring in new mobs to cleave onto, renferal has multiple add phases, eye doesnt favor anybody but we can do solid damage through standard build or frostscythe, cenarius has the guardian spirits you can cleave onto, and xavius has the fatass sha for the first phase and the tentacles we passivly cleave onto in the last phase.

What makes frost strong is our ability to go from STing a boss, to cleaving onto adds, to burst aoe as needed during the fight. Sounds vaguely like DH or monk? yeah sure, but all of their damage is burst, they cannot sustain. Where we loose out in burst behind our 5m cd, we make up for in sustained cleave by doing our core ST rotation, something that we do better than everyone else.

If you're using obliteration in EN, you're wrong. GA tends to be better on all fights, hands down. There are no raw single target fights where your goal is only damaging one boss. about 40% of my GA's in en hit more than one target, and it ends up pulling my dps higher than if i'd have used obliteration. The dps difference between the two in ST is very small, if i remember right it's about 15k, favoring obliteration. In any situation where you can land multiple multitarget GAs, you take GA. In this case, it means take it every time, seeing as every fight has windows to use it on 2+ targets. Odyn and Guarm are the only fights i'd take oblit on.

In regards to our stat priority, you're somewhat wrong. There's a 23-25% haste breakpoint (depending on latency), and your crit needs to hover between 22 and 26%, but after that, you dump in either verse or mastery, Mastery is far more efficient to dump in i've found, due to frost damage contributing 75% of my damage and that you need so much less mastery for a point than you do for a point in verse, although the priority between the two swings a lot. Your taking obliteration and not GA might swing it in favor of verse easily. Personally, the only hardship i have with my stats is keeping my crit down, there's so much crit/haste gear that i'm at 22-29% (eye of command stacks). It isnt that it's hard to gear, it's that once we hit crit and haste breakpoints, we just loose all value out of the stats.

[Nemesquish]

Luck really has no contribution to frost. You do damage or you don't, all of the abilities are there, there's no massive procs, there's no burst windows. The damage frost offers is incredibly stable and there really isnt any form of core rng element to its playstyle. I'm parsing high purples on most pulls and my obliterate is contributing 18% of my overall damage on most fights, in the current build, you're at 0-1 runes at all times, banking on KM procs isnt viable, as the wasted FP damage is far higher than the crit damage on an oblit. The only luck is if you get targeted by mechanics and that really isn't something to consider, as it's far more important than damage.

Frost is very much weaker in raw ST fights. I genuinely don't understand why you say it's strong. Frost excels at fights with multple phases that have varying add numbers. I say again, frost is a jack of all trades dps, we can do good st, good aoe, and good cleave with the same talent build. Many, many fights in EN are very favorable for Frost. M nyth has mc phase, ursoc has a second mob to cleave off of the entire fight, some dragons bring in new mobs to cleave onto, renferal has multiple add phases, eye doesnt favor anybody but we can do solid damage through standard build or frostscythe, cenarius has the guardian spirits you can cleave onto, and xavius has the fatass sha for the first phase and the tentacles we passivly cleave onto in the last phase.

What makes frost strong is our ability to go from STing a boss, to cleaving onto adds, to burst aoe as needed during the fight. Sounds vaguely like DH or monk? yeah sure, but all of their damage is burst, they cannot sustain. Where we loose out in burst behind our 5m cd, we make up for in sustained cleave by doing our core ST rotation, something that we do better than everyone else.

If you're using obliteration in EN, you're wrong. GA tends to be better on all fights, hands down. There are no raw single target fights where your goal is only damaging one boss. about 40% of my GA's in en hit more than one target, and it ends up pulling my dps higher than if i'd have used obliteration. The dps difference between the two in ST is very small, if i remember right it's about 15k, favoring obliteration. In any situation where you can land multiple multitarget GAs, you take GA. In this case, it means take it every time, seeing as every fight has windows to use it on 2+ targets. Odyn and Guarm are the only fights i'd take oblit on.

In regards to our stat priority, you're somewhat wrong. There's a 23-25% haste breakpoint (depending on latency), and your crit needs to hover between 22 and 26%, but after that, you dump in either verse or mastery, Mastery is far more efficient to dump in i've found, due to frost damage contributing 75% of my damage and that you need so much less mastery for a point than you do for a point in verse, although the priority between the two swings a lot. Your taking obliteration and not GA might swing it in favor of verse easily. Personally, the only hardship i have with my stats is keeping my crit down, there's so much crit/haste gear that i'm at 22-29% (eye of command stacks). It isnt that it's hard to gear, it's that once we hit crit and haste breakpoints, we just loose all value out of the stats.

Ive been one of the people telling people to go for far more Crit than listed here, but other than that, I completely agree with everything listed here. GA Vs Oblit is honestly such a small dps difference, its use whatever you want to.

Mastery> Vers after listed break points here (Althought I like to run 30-35% crit)

So my personal stat weights are Crit (35%)>Haste(20%)>Mastery>Vers

[Lucifuger]

DK to me feels like playing the melee version of a warlock in terms of mobility. Its hilarious doing a mythic+ and everyone else speeds off ahead. Its like one of those cartoons where the characters are having a race, the guy shoots his gun and there's this big dust cloud..and everyone else is gone, except for you.

[Schizoide]

Warlocks can talent into a 50% sprint with no cooldown. Also they're a ranged spec, so running around at 100% speed (while still not actually fun) isn't such a huge drag.

[GaryWinthorpe]

The lack of mobility was causing me issues, getting out of shit quick in higher m+ and heroic ToV was becoming an issue.

However since getting the boots... things are great again. I really wish they would make that movement speed increase to be baseline. We shouldnt need a legendary to make the class be able to get out of melee range of certain attacks.

[Flextt]

First things first, thanks for making such an insightful, elaborate post. I wont argue against some of the nitpicks you do, since I feel we mostly mean a lot of the same through different lenses. Your take on GA vs. Oblit is definitely insightful and I will try it out.

But how do you best avoid dropping FP when you dont wait for KM? Do you use constantly rune-starve yourself with non-KM oblit in the worst case and shit on KM procs?

[...]

[bingildak]

I really enjoyed unholy at the beginning. Felt so different somehow, like melee necro - I was so confident that I wanted to play that.

Day by day, getting my 2nd utility legendary (and no dps legendaries) unholy started falling behind then came the frost buffs.

After the buffs, frost dps was off the roof even without the key legendaries. I was happy for a while until I realized frost was literally a mind-numbing spec to play. No planning, no resource control - nothing challenging to offer a 12 years of player.

But, nevertheless, I kept my mouth shut and hoped for 7.1.5 - they would make some talent changes and the flow would be different.

Then while waiting for 7.1.5, I felt the irritation about movement boiling deep down day by day. I was getting frustrated. Not because lack of movement lowered my dps but it was feeling so shitty! Walking to point X to Y, then Y to X then X to Z was horrible experience. Just horrible. At the end, even with slowpoke movement, I did decent dps but it did not feel satisfying.

I decided to level my old rogue on my off time. Even though the numbers are not so great atm (with the shitty gear) not being afraid to move feels good overall.

so when you say you want to reroll because of movement, I totally get you;
#feelsbadman

[Ascius]

I really enjoyed unholy at the beginning. Felt so different somehow, like melee necro - I was so confident that I wanted to play that.

Day by day, getting my 2nd utility legendary (and no dps legendaries) unholy started falling behind then came the frost buffs.

After the buffs, frost dps was off the roof even without the key legendaries. I was happy for a while until I realized frost was literally a mind-numbing spec to play. No planning, no resource control - nothing challenging to offer a 12 years of player.

But, nevertheless, I kept my mouth shut and hoped for 7.1.5 - they would make some talent changes and the flow would be different.

Then while waiting for 7.1.5, I felt the irritation about movement boiling deep down day by day. I was getting frustrated. Not because lack of movement lowered my dps but it was feeling so shitty! Walking to point X to Y, then Y to X then X to Z was horrible experience. Just horrible. At the end, even with slowpoke movement, I did decent dps but it did not feel satisfying.

I decided to level my old rogue on my off time. Even though the numbers are not so great atm (with the shitty gear) not being afraid to move feels good overall.

so when you say you want to reroll because of movement, I totally get you;
#feelsbadman

I was pretty much the same except I can't force myself to play frost, for many reasons, stupid ones too. I could deal with no mobility... but it's painful to see the spec (UH) being so low on dps, so while I still raid with it, I'm gearing up my paladin, which works better than my dk and isn't tied to stupid rng. Their mobility isn't much better, but at least the pony doesn't break on abilities. I was waiting for 7.1.5 changes, but from the first patch notes it seemed we're gonna get nothing at all, I'll wait till they announce the release date for 7.1.5 and if there are no changes to unholy outside of % buff to some ability that will not matter due to our scaling then I'll drop my DK and play RET or reroll something, I'm done hoping after that.

[Shadowman 747]

First things first, thanks for making such an insightful, elaborate post. I wont argue against some of the nitpicks you do, since I feel we mostly mean a lot of the same through different lenses. Your take on GA vs. Oblit is definitely insightful and I will try it out.

But how do you best avoid dropping FP when you dont wait for KM? Do you use constantly rune-starve yourself with non-KM oblit in the worst case and shit on KM procs?

Here's my current priority:
Frost strike if above 70 runic power
Frost strike with <2 seconds on icy talons
Obliterate if >=2 runes
Glacial Advance at 1 rune
Remorseless Winter at 1 rune
Frost Strike above 20 RP

I completely rune starve, but in the spec's current state, even if I have low runes, it's very rare if i'm not gcd capped. I have the ring of necrofantasia, so if I ever run dry on resources, I can pop ERW, but that rarely happens, probably once or twice a fight. Obliterate doesnt contribute much at all to my damage, for as much as I cast it. Maintaining frozen pulse matters a lot more than KM crits, imho. Your obliterates have a chance to crit regardless of KM, and FP is huge with as fast as we auto attack with icy talons. A trick to maintaining FP and IT during a resource is to burn runes and hold RP.

In it's current iteration, frost is all about proper spell order to maximize FP uptime. Knowing how to manage RP, runes, and knowing when to cast Obliterate and when to cast GA or RW is what separates the bad frost players from good ones.

I'm not gonna lie, I don't really listen to the mainstream theorycrafting for frost, I mostly run my own numbers and then adapt the information i'm given into a strategy for a fight. I have no clue if what I'm doing is the right thing, but I never drop below 60th percentile on any boss, heroic or mythic, I average hovering in the 80s. I like to think that speaks for something.

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I was pretty much the same except I can't force myself to play frost, for many reasons, stupid ones too. I could deal with no mobility... but it's painful to see the spec (UH) being so low on dps, so while I still raid with it, I'm gearing up my paladin, which works better than my dk and isn't tied to stupid rng. Their mobility isn't much better, but at least the pony doesn't break on abilities. I was waiting for 7.1.5 changes, but from the first patch notes it seemed we're gonna get nothing at all, I'll wait till they announce the release date for 7.1.5 and if there are no changes to unholy outside of % buff to some ability that will not matter due to our scaling then I'll drop my DK and play RET or reroll something, I'm done hoping after that.

Honestly, all uh needs is numbers tuning and a shift from physical to shadow, to allow mastery scaling, on a few abilities. I think shifting SS to pure shadow, FS to split shadow/phys, and the base on apoc to shadow would give the spec enough scaling. The spec plays fine, but the reward isnt there, even for good rng.

I really want UH to be good, it's a fun spec that's getting shafted by poor ability implementation. The core 'build wounds, pop wounds, use DC to dump rp and get more runes' is really fun, i also don't inherently think that castigator feels bad, I just straight up think the spec needs more damage for it to be rewarding. As it stands, it only scales to crit and haste to their respective breakpoints, and then the damage just doesn't go up, because mastery doesn't cover enough, and vers isn't efficient to stack due to how much you need to gain damage from it.

[Glorious Leader]

I think mobility is good grounds for rerolling. Once you go mobile you don't go back.

Word the fuck up. I rerolled resto druid. Never looked back.

[Dreddnacht]

Ya think you got it bad. I came from one of the most mobile toons in game. I've been maining a feral druid who's mobility is out of this world. But I just got tired of being a one hit wonder.

Sure feral rocks at single target damage, but no one really wants you in M+ if you have practically zero AoE.

Missing out on M+ left me to rely mostly on Raiding drops only for gear upgrades. Which is a pretty slow way to gear up if you've got several leather wearers. That and the fact that rings and cloaks are pretty much shared by all now.

Being so slow to gear up without the M+'s was leaving me in an unhappy place on the DPS charts, so I decided to change mains. Only had 4 100's to choose from with DK being my favorite of those.

Didn't really notice too much of a problem while leveling, but once I started raiding and doing M+ the difference in mobility between feral and DK is enough to drive you insane.

[Nayami]

Hunters and monks make me happy when they give me free passive movement speed <3