Current issues with Death Knights overall.

[Riven]

This thread has now been consolidated and reposted on the PTR feedback forum! Please add your support and further feedback to this thread!
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/9499490725
and here
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/9555305541

Warning this is a fair read, I decided to write this as I'm currently losing interest in playing my DK, my main since late Wrath, and potentially main changing.
A large deal of it is subjective, so feel free to post your thoughts as well.
I apologize in advance for terrible formatting as I originally wrote this up on my iPhone, and I'll fix it later.

This is going to be from a pure DPS perspective to start with.

NOTE: This thread isn't going to be lobbying for changes now, it's more of a discussion thread about the overall issues with the class and what we can look to fix/give feedback on for the next expansion/major patch after 5.4


1. Rotation.
All three DK specs are currently simming at the bottom of the meters, with DW frost even being behind Prot Paladins with no vengeance.

I know sims are to be taken with a grain of salt but is this because of bad scaling/tuning, or is it because the playstyles are quite simplistic and leave little room for tuning at the high end?
There doesn't seem to be a "combustion" about DK's. What I mean is, a mechanic that requires some skill and experience on the part of the DK to really push the class to its limits.

I would like to see something like this, as currently the class feels quite dull to play, and our damage is really bad outside of abusing Feather/Diseases as Unholy to pad meters, and you might as well bring any other melee on any fight where Gorefiends isn't mandatory.

Also I have the feeling our DPS without Feather is going to go down even further than it already is unless some big changes are made to the damage of our spells.


2. Stats.
Currently our Mastery seems very dull in comparison to other Masteries (Except for Blood), flat frost/shadow damage has always been boring and not a valuable stat unless you're playing DW frost. I would love to see something done where Crit, Haste and Mastery stacking is all viable for all specs, as they'v done with Warlocks.

Reworking mastery to interact with certain spells in an interesting way, and making crit increase damage of our main strikes are such ideas (although overused)


3. Flavor
(Note: this point is very subjective)

In my opinion the DK class is lacking a great deal of flavor.
We basically use the exact same animations for every single main ability except Howling Blast and Death Coil, both of which use the general Spell Cast animation.

A big point is out fancy Mists of Pandaria ability, Soul Reaper. This ability was actually a big letdown personally when I got it, compared to when I first heard about it.

I expected the animation for it to be your character thrusting their weapon through the chest of the enemy the way the Lich King attacks in ICC, or something like the Templar's Verdict animation at the least!
But nope, we got the same old attack animation with a reused spell effect and nothing when it actually procs.
So much for the incredibly exciting level 87 spell.

Even warriors have their Slam/Revenge animations, which are more interesting than swinging your weapon the exact same way 300 times a fight casting Scourge/Frost strike/Obit/Festering. Not to mention the Dual Wield animations are superior.

Blood boil still uses the old Hammer of the Righteousness animation, that spell has such potential to look cool but just doesn't.

Pillar of Frost could actually be a pillar or a frozen suit of armor etc instead of just a light blue cloud. That said, over the years it has grown on me.

Glyphs are okay now with the new ones being added in 5.4, but could be better in terms of flavor.

I was a strong advocate of this idea I saw in MoP beta:
Glyph of Unholy Auras: Outside of combat you gain an unholy aura that lingers about your character relating to your currently active Presence.
Think of the green aura hanging about the piles of bones in Acherus in the Unholy trainer quarter, something like that.


Runeforging is another hot topic. I don't believe this system needs a rework but it could have delivered a lot better on being ACTUAL runeforging and the animations of the enchants.

When I first rolled a DK and heard about runeforging, I immediately got the idea of actually seeing the runes forged into your weapons as a visual effect, perhaps with some customization interface where you choose a combination of runes that spell out an enchant, and then they're visible on your blade. An example of this is the Greatsword of the Ebon Blade's visuals.

Otherwise I feel some of the older enchants could use a buff/rework to make them actually useful, especially with Death Gate now returning you to where you left from, I wouldn't mind having to change my runeforge to suit a different fight as it changes my playstyle somewhat.


4. Talents
Honestly I like the DK talents for the most part, there are a few exceptions though.

Plague Leech is just a horrible clunky way to play, this talent does not need buffs, it needs to be removed and replaced with something better. How it even made it through beta with the dozens of threads complaining about how terrible it was I honestly have no idea.

The level 75 tier should be shifted to level 55, having no rune regen talents on a fresh DK until level 75 is literally the worst experience of any low level class, and I've played them all.

I think the 75 tier talents should be also somewhat changed to avoid the ridiculous bad luck streaks you can get with them, eg. runic corruption always gives at least 1s of 100% regen per coil/FS. The amount of times I've had emptied full runic power bars into Empowerment/Corruption and not had a single proc is just the most depressing thing.

Death's Advance should be baseline, or if not, sprint increased to 50% and breaks Roots/Slow effects, but doesn't make you slowable less than 100%. The passive 70% should still be there.
DK's are currently the least mobile melee outside of Death's Advance and the argument that they have ranged attacks is quite outdated.

Desecrated Ground should be reworked or replaced, it's stupid in PvP and useless in PvE outside of very very situational circumstances, usually soloing mobs that do some ridiculous CC chain on you.

Remorseless Winter is too easy to avoid in PvP as an alternative, nearly everything has a dozen ways out of it. It's basically the Cataclysm spell warlocks almost got, except even easier to stop by simply dispelling the stacks. Meanwhile leg sweep..

I believe Remorseless should have been a baseline dps cooldown for frost, Defile as the equivalent for Unholy, and have Gorefiends as baseline and all 3 level 90 talents redone, probably as interesting passives to avoid button bloat.

Also, Death and Decay slow glyph should be reworked to just be Desecration back on Necrotic/Scourge Strikes/Obliterate. I miss Desecration.

Cheers for reading if you made it this far!

[DarkStarUndead]

In my opinion the DK class is lacking a great deal of flavor.
We basically use the exact same animations for every single main ability except Howling Blast and Death Coil, both of which use the general Spell Cast animation.

A big point is out fancy Mists of Pandaria ability, Soul Reaper. This ability was actually a big letdown personally when I got it, compared to when I first heard about it.

I expected the animation for it to be your character thrusting their weapon through the chest of the enemy the way the Lich King attacks in ICC, or something like the Templar's Verdict animation at the least!
But nope, we got the same old attack animation with a reused spell effect and nothing when it actually procs.
So much for the incredibly exciting level 87 spell.

Even warriors have their Slam/Revenge animations, which are more interesting than swinging your weapon the exact same way 300 times a fight casting Scourge/Frost strike/Obit/Festering. Not to mention the Dual Wield animations are superior.

Blood boil still uses the old Hammer of the Righteousness animation, that spell has such potential to look cool but just doesn't.

Pillar of Frost could actually be a pillar or a frozen suit of armor etc instead of just a light blue cloud. That said, over the years it has grown on me.

Seeing some of the other abilities animations really showed how behind the DK animations are.

For soul reaper, I though something like Svala Sorrowgrave's Ritual of the Sword from Utgarde Pinnacle but more shadowy looking would have been awesome. Giant sword slowly spinning down onto the target.

I thought Blood Boil should look like AMZ, but red and do a quick popping animation. At least that would look blood-related, rather than just a /roar.

And with the introduction of shaman's Ascendance, it would be cool if Blizzard reworked Pillar to show an ice-clad DK, rather than the cloud.


I saw a post the other day on fixing the scaling issues for DKs, I thought it was great to see someone putting forth a ton of thought and effort to our class. I only hope Blizzard does change DKs to be more competitive. Here's the list that was posted (I'm sorry I sent it to a friend and didn't keep the posters name, if you recognize it, please give credit):

1.) Unholy needs more emphasis on weapon damage. We're still a melee class. Festerblight is nice but I think it'd be more beneficial to emphasise applying diseases on high-AP/crit procs and then have to re-apply them at some point rather than focus on keeping the same dots rolling throughout the fight, AKA up the damage of scourge strike and lower the damage of festering strike.
2.) Haste is far too valuable for 2H. While it's also valuable (to a point) for DW and Unholy I believe it might be an idea to lessen the impact haste has on rune regen, possibly compensating by making it work alongside diseases to make them tick faster or reducing the cooldown of Soul Reaper (or another spec-specific cooldown) depending on how much haste you have (for example). Haste would still be needed but, as it interacts with crit and mastery anyway it would also make other secondary stats as attractive.
3.) I think the obliterate "bonus damage" from diseased targets should be frost damage along the lines of the shadow portion of scourge strike to make mastery more important.
4.) I still think Icy Touch should do more single target damage than howling blast, making it the go-to single target Rime proc (or ST rune attack for DW if they stick with the masterfrost model) then have howling blast's cleave and main target damage be the same (albeit a bit higher than it is now).
5.) If "strong dots" (festerblight-ish) unholy continues to outperform 2H then Soul Reaper could be made shadowfrost to compensate.
6.) Killing machine needs a serious look. With more haste comes more killing machines which devalues crit. Killing machine attacks could also do more % damage based on how much crit you have.
7.) While in Dark Transformation mode Timmy could have a short-range ticking shadow-damage aura.

If we don't get an AOE runic power dump next expansion I'll be really surprised.

My real gripe is with DK tanking though, considering I MS blood for raid. It seems that when people cried about DKs doing too much damage and healing in BGs as blood, Blizz nerfed our damage output. Isn't that what PvP Power was made for? They didn't adjust threat generation when they dropped our damage output, making it harder to hold a boss, or even add packs, against the other tank, or bursting dps classes. I always thought the point of DK tanks was that we did a lot of damage and converted that damage to self heals due to our lack of block.
That's just the way I see it and could be wrong.

[Deleted]

I agree with some things here, but not all of them.

The huge lack of flavor is indeed quite annoying, even though I can live without being as pretty as a paladin. We have some spells that have the potential to look very cool, like Soul Reaper or Blood Boil. I mean, even Heart Strike sounds very powerul and deadly but it looks kinda weak. Some of our moves are also completely invisible. While some of them being like that is fine (wouldn't want to be a living firework festival), I feel sad about Rune Strike, Scourge Strike and Death Strike not being different than a regular auto-attack, except for that boring special attack animation.

Now, to the part where I don't agree.


- 1) Talent tree.

I personnally think our talent tree is poorly designed.



Our tiers are some kind of hazardous mix of very different abilities that shouldn't compete with each other. We almost ALWAYS have to make drastic choices about what we want. Say you need to able to kite and move fast at the same time; you can't, because DA competes with Chillblains. Not that our mobility is lackluster anyway, eh?

Let's look at some other melee/tank classes talent trees.





See how their trees is actually asking HOW they want things rather than WHAT things they want ? No drastic choices here, this is what I call smart and well organised. Mobility is flexible, meaning that you can chose what you need depending on the situation/encounter, so is CC, and you can have both at the same time.

Let's also note that their raid utility (banners/shouts/devotion aura/hands, etc...) aren't talents either. They are baseline.


- 2) Glyphs.

Most of them are completely useless, and most importantly, none of them directly impact dps, survival or our ability to bring utility. While warriors can get extra rage or stun things while charging and paladins can choose to heal while dealing damage, we don't really have anything that matters.
Now, you're going to say that glyphs aren't supposed to change much, that's how things are meant to be. Still, paladins have a glyph that gives more damage to their SotR or heals them while popping some cooldown, warriors get mobility through enrages via a glyph and can even raise their rage cap from 100 to 120. Isn't that nice?

A few of them are smart, like the Icebound Fortitude one, but other than that, it's pretty lackluster. The new glyphs are also pretty dumb if you ask me. Who would want to glyph Horn of Winter to last for an hour when you spam the ability anyway for the extra RP? Same thing for the glyph of Festering Blood. You'll want diseases on your targets, so why bother picking that?

Even our cosmetic glyphs aren't fun either, even though there were so many cool ideas.


- 3) What's left.

I won't spend much time on this because most of our issues were underligned by a lot of people before me. We suffer from severe mechanical related issues. Frost and Unholy have their obvious scaling related problems, so does Blood whose active mitigation contradicts itself by not being based on vengeance but instead on damage taken and it's disease management (read physical debuff management) system that is unnecessarily complicated for what it does.

Mobility, raid utility, scaling, etc, these things were said a bazillion times before.

Anyway, I don't think we're in "danger" of anything, but things could be way better, and I really wish they were.

[scabobos]

If DKs aren't completely overhauled in next xpac I will be shocked.

[Deleted]

Blizzard have already said that they think our mobility is fine because we have some ranged attacks...bs if you ask me.

[Deleted]

Blizzard have already said that they think our mobility is fine because we have some ranged attacks...bs if you ask me.

Yeah. I'm totally gripping and icy touching that boss from afar as a tank. -_-

Nothing sexual here.

[rhoark]

The rune regeneration tier is the dullest tier of any class. They should just increase the base rune regeneration rate to match the average benefit of the any of the three and free up the tier for some actively-used abilities. Something with three choices that play very differently, have flashy graphics, and good headroom on the skill cap. The priest level 90 tier is a good role model.

[shells]

Blizzard have already said that they think our mobility is fine because we have some ranged attacks...bs if you ask me.

This.

It'd be different if death's advance was longer and granted more speed. Also others have brought up before about having a glyph where deathgrip is a reversed (basically charge).

I wish they'd fix the level 75 talents. Frost gets runic empowerment, blood/unholy gets runic corruption, and all specs get blood tap. THEN add in some new talent choices.

[scabobos]

the rune regeneration choice as a talent is one of the dumbest things they've done. They literally must have had no ideas

[fangless]

I wouldn't be surprised if nothing really changes this tier. 6.0 is where anything major will happen.

Current issues? I am starting to really hate the rune system. It's a neat idea, but most of our headaches regarding DPS optimization come from rune gcd capping, or something of that nature.

[Beefkow]

Kinda lost interest in playing a dk, i think i would consider death knights a "dull" class, not a "hero" class.

So far... absolutely no INTERESTING changes AT ALL in this incoming GIGANTIC PATCH OF THE EXPANSION, so i am really disappointed so far, (lol, lets buff fail siphon or the talent to never be picked, plague leech).

And the dull attack animation, well scourge strike deserves that because its a "wimpy" strike so don't get me wrong but it doesn't deserve a "heroic" animation.

- - - Updated - - -

Also, Death and Decay slow glyph should be reworked to just be Desecration back on Necrotic/Scourge Strikes/Obliterate. I miss Desecration.

I actually want desecration to go back as well, that would be SICK!!(that was actually one of my main reasons i loved being a DK)

But i wish they can bring back spec "uniqueness" where frost gets something cool (bring back chillblains to frost?) then put desecration on unholy.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

I dunno, different tastes I suppose for Death Knights.

[scabobos]

We have 2 "cool" looking moves in DnD and AMS (which really doesn't look cool at all, but some people like it i guess)

[Nangz]

My response:

1. Rotation

Comparing different classes based on sims is very inaccurate. As for scaling? I find this post is fairly informative and a must read: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...2347?page=3#55

On the rotation itself I think we are fine. Comparing us to rogues, we both have similarities as our resource systems are fairly similar. (One resource recharges over time and is used to build a secondary resource). The differences in their specs is mostly related to their energy consumers and finishers which is similar to our rune consumers and finishers. The similarities are diseases/poisons and cooldowns ( erw/army is similar to vanish/shadow blades). I think in this regard we are very logical and well designed. You certainly notice a similar difference changing from combat to assassination as you do from frost to unholy. (Excluding weapon changes).

My biggest complaint regarding rotations is that blood's rune usage seems strange. They focus on frost and unholy runes for survival, yet their death rune conversion doesn't help to increase that.

2. Stats

I'm fairly ok with our masteries. For one, I love the blood mastery and it shouldn't change. The frost mastery is decent too as it creates a difference between dw and 2h frost's gearing priorities. I dislike unholy's but the majority of that is because it isn't a great stat.

3. Flavor ( cosmetics)

I do think that our melee strikes are lacking in interesting animations, however I also think that 99% of melee animations are lacking for all classes.

Blood boil is an abomination of a graphic from what it was at the beginning of cataclysm. ( Changed for performance related issues). It never got modified and it is quite a shame.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27snWKDARtM
( A video of the old graphic that I loved so much)


4. Runeforging

With 5.4 allowing death knight's fast travel between acherus and our previous location, runeforge swapping should be easier than ever. I would love to see SOME reason to change my runeforge. Be it; aoe, burst damage, sustained damage, crowd control, it doesn't really matter. Just give me a reason to change!

5. Glyphs
Currently, there are a few that stick out as being "unusable".

Chains of ice: The damage is really quite bad. Even if it did amazing damage, it wouldn't for long as it would overshadow everything else. I've yet to test, but a wowhead comment indicates that in mop, this deals less than 25% of icy touch's damage. Completely pointless. Remove this!

Death Coil: Such a low heal that doesn't stack makes this glyph hard to use effectivly. At most, it seems to give a small absorb that costs a ton of our resource for. You can't even use it on yourself! Remove, rework, something.

Mind Freeze: If interrupting was so critical to either pvp or pve maybe this glyph would be worth it. With the number of instant casts around these days in pvp, this glyph isn't necessary or compelling. I think I would consider it however if it only reduced the cooldown. Its too taxing otherwise.

Enduring Infection: Horrible, horrible glyph. Dispelling diseases nowadays isn't as bad as it was in wotlk. Cleansing totem and dispels without cooldowns made diseases frustrating to keep up. Nowadays, people don't dispel diseases intentionally; it only happens if they are attempting to dispel something other than the diseases. If people dispel your diseases, its 8 seconds of dispel they don't have for your cc. No intelligent healer makes this decision.


6. Talent Trees

I agree entirely with the idea that our talents are lacking a thematic element to them. First tier is "diseases" but really each option provides something different but not in a truely compelling way. Plague Leech really stands out as poor design. I understand that it goes back to the old frost mechanic of obliterate consuming diseases but they changed this for a reason: It was frustrating to play!

Second tier is survival, but you either get raid utility, or personal survival. A really badly designed trade off. AMZ needs to be baseline and we need another talent. The other two are really good though.

Third tier seems to be "pvp...control?" I would be happy if it was excluvily pvp related so that I could ignore it for pve. The mage tier in pve can be ignored in almost all but a few niche encounters. ( Similar to dks i suppose with chillblains for kiting) Yet we are forced into Death's Advance. I would like to see a root removal aspect to death's advance and give death's advance to everyone baseline so that the tier truely is pvp only.

Fourth tier is healing, which is fine, but note that only one of these options are "dps free". Compare this to warriors, 2/3 of theirs are dps free and they have a passive, an active, and an active with a significant cd. We have 2 actives and an active with a significant cd. Would love some type of option that is truly passive. Maybe something like the old blood presence that was flat healing based off damage done?

Fifth tier creates the cycle of RP to Runes that complete our resource feedback. It is quite strange that this is such a high level tier and it really should be lower than it currently is. Our feedback is two parts, Runes regenerate RP, and RP regenerates Runes. Imagine if we didn't get our first part of this system until level 75. ( RP consumers). That would feel SO wrong. Why hasn't this been changed? I'm still fairly butthurt that Blood Tap was removed from its pre MOP incarnation. I enjoyed that aspect of rotation saving usage.

Sixth Tier is....ignore-able for anyone doing pve. Sure, some situations can be made "slightly" better by having these talents. But they certainly aren't amazing. I don't like how in pvp, the options are gorefeind's grasp for RBGs, and Desecrated Ground for anything else. Aoe Deathgrip is so "meh" with our tier bonus already allowing for multi person death grips. Remoreseless winter either needs a snare increase, or a larger radius. Its too hard to use effectively on multiple targets.

7. Mobility

I think our mobility is ok ish. I would love to see death grip modified so that it acts like a charge in pve. A good solution could be that it be a talent. We have less than warriors, monks,and rogues, less on demand sprint/ghost wolf than shamans but similar to paladins. Think of a talent tier like this:

Death's Advance- Unchanged from live: passive movespeed with small sprint
<Needs Name>- Your death grip now pulls you to the target instead of them to you. ( would still have to glyph for taunt removal)
<needs name> Something else. Maybe a pure sprint option with no passive movespeed.

[Riven]

Beautiful posts gentlemen, as soon as I find a computer I'll respond, I forgot a point about ERW and Army specifically as well.

[Riven]

Responding to Asheriah/Nangz

Glyphs&Talents

Glyphs
I agree here, a lot of them are lackluster in comparison with other class's glyphs, especially melee DPS. There is one next patch which might prove to be interesting which is the Glyph of Regenerative Magic, reducing the cooldown of AMS if it is not fully absorbed. I feel this is a very strong glyph but there definitely could be more competition. As said later on, the Glyphs of Chains of Ice, Mind Freeze, Death Coil and Enduring Infection are all for the most part completely useless and could be easily reworked or removed in favor of more compelling glyph choices. I also like the idea of Glyph of Shifting Presences and Glyph of Dark Simulacrum being made baseline, as quality of life changes.


Talents
Exactly agreed with Nangz, when Plague Leech was put into that tree to replace Corpse Explosion in beta it was a really confusing choice, mainly as that tier had seemed to revolve around disease spreading or management, and here was a talent which... removed them? What? And even after multiple threads saying how clunky/awkward it was to use, it wasn't changed at all and went live in it's current state, similar to the previously terrible Conversion. They seemed to have rushed the DK talent tree without much thought about thematic tiers or viability like they did for pretty much every other class.

The Healing tier is kind of awkward at that. Sure Death Pact is nice in oh shit moments eg. Purgatory, except it has a 2 minute cooldown for a 50% heal and leaves our ghoul vulnerable in PvP (Not to mention it barely heals for 90k with Battle Fatigue/MS, but that's another issue) compared to say, Sacrificial Pact for a Warlock with a 1 minute cooldown, 25% sacrifice for a much larger absorb shield than we could do with even two death pacts.

Conversion has been somewhat fixed, I personally would have preferred it eat all available runic power at once for a Recuperate type effect so that it is at least somewhat useful for PvE in situations like Ra-Den second phase.

Death Siphon has always been terrible even since beta, i'm not entirely sure why they keep trying to make it work when it obviously won't under any conditions as Death Runes are just too valuable, especially in PvP for Necrotic Strike. I think this could be easily reworked into something better, perhaps with no cost and a cooldown, does no damage but applies a debuff of some sort and heals for an amount scaled on attack power.

The Rune Regen tree does need a looking at as well. As said, it's position in the tree seems to have been just thrown in there without any thought, as it is way too high for the class to be any fun at all until it is available, it's comparable to rogues not getting combo points until level 75.
The actual talents though still have too much RNG about them (unless you're looking at Blood Tap of course). Not getting procs of Empowerment/Corruption is the biggest problem that leads to downtime and lack of fun more than anything else. Corruption is any easy fix, as stated in my original post.

I feel the level 90 talents have been explained enough already since beta that they need changing. Gorefiends is too good not to have in PvE, the same with Desecrated Ground in PvP and Remorseless is basically useless and would have been better as a Frost DPS cooldown with an equivalent for Unholy. I do not feel DK's need Desecrated Ground at all, and having so many ways out of CC is just as bad as the amount of instant CC in the game.


Cooldowns
This is more specific to Army of the Dead and Empower Rune Weapon.

Army of the Dead currently is a fun spell to use, although lacking in terms of damage especially as a 10 minute cooldown. Stampede next patch will do almost double the damage of army on half the cooldown, and has the same taunting utility if glyphed. Don't even get me started on Guardian of Ancient Kings or Fire Elemental totem.

Empower Rune Weapon is useful yes. Although it could be so much more considering it's cooldown is so long and does so little to justify that cooldown, not to mention the animation for the spell barely lasts a second.
I would love to see this reworked a little to make sense for the longer cooldown.
For example.

Empower Rune Weapon
Empower your rune weapon, immediately activating all of your Runes as Death Runes for 15s and Generating 25 Runic Power.
This way the graphic doesn't go to waste and is actually useful for longer than 3 globals for a huge cooldown.


Mobility
Honestly our mobility is terrible.
Death grip could be related to Shadowstep on the terms of similar cooldowns, except it has no sprint, useless on bosses and so it has half the usefulness as a gap closer and can't be taken seriously as a mobility spell.

The argument that "Death Knights have ranged attacks, they don't need more mobility" is outdated and unpractical. Who honestly spams Howling Blast as 2H Frost while running to a target when they can save their runes for a much harder hitting Obliterate, the same for using Icy Touch as Unholy, it just doesn't work and is a huge loss of DPS to even think about doing that.

The way that tier is set up is horrible, we either take Chillblains for kiting/Asphyx for PvP and then we have the slowest movement speed in the game and without any sprint effects at all to catch up to people/mobs, compared to say a Warrior who can talent/glyph Charge in 4 different ways on top of Heroic Leap/Banner intervene and still have a ranged 50% slow through Piercing Howl.

A great example is on Lei Shen, without any Stampeding Roar in the melee, and with Death's Advance popped and even leaving early, i'm still the last to get to the boss when it is being dragged from platform to platform to charge conduits. The sprint effect needs a direct buff, I don't care if the Cannot be slowed less than 100% gets removed, I just don't want to be the last person there every time.


Runeforging
Will cover this again really quick. As said, the older enchants need a rework or something due to the Death Gate change, there is absolutely no reason why we can't have a rune that improves AoE damage for AoE heavy fights (Rune of Wandering Plague anyone?), or a rune that improves Crowd Control/slow effects etc.
Would also love to see the Runeforging interface be redone to be more interesting/thematic to improve the flavor of the class.

Flavor/Cosmetics
I'm not asking for every ability to be incredibly impressive, but the fact that nearly every single melee ability uses the exact same animation with absolutely no variation apart from the default spell cast animation is just the most boring thing. There isn't any "Wow that looks awesome" about DKs anymore. Sure you can argue Death and Decay, but that's what.. one spell out of 20 that all look the same?

Especially Soul Reaper, no new animation, no spell effects, no cool sound clip (despite probably not being able to hear it anyway in actual raid combat) no effect when it procs on a target under 35%, nothing to distinguish it from any other spell. It's disappointing in comparison to the other 87 talents that were introduced with MoP.
The only decent looking spell added this expansion for the class was Remorseless Winter, which even then has very very limited use.

[Deleted]

Empower Rune Weapon is useful yes. Although it could be so much more considering it's cooldown is so long and does so little to justify that cooldown, not to mention the animation for the spell barely lasts a second.

It would be nice if ERW did the same thing as Holy Avenger for paladins. They wield Ashbringer for the duration, we could be wielding Frostmourne.

Anyway, reading through all this makes me feel a bit depressed. It's sad to see how things could have been so much better.

[Riven]

It would be nice if ERW did the same thing as Holy Avenger for paladins. They wield Ashbringer for the duration, we could be wielding Frostmourne.

Anyway, reading through all this makes me feel a bit depressed. It's sad to see how things could have been so much better.

Nah, I like the ERW animation, it looks cool. The only problem is nobody ever sees it or even knows what it looks like.

Yeah, I agree. The saddest part is that most of these issues were risen during MoP BETA, in so many feedback threads, but it all just got ignored and pushed to live.
Not wanting the same thing to happen to the class for next expansion.

[Deleted]

Believe me, it kinda loses all it's coolness when you play as blood and where Blood tap and Rune tap have almost the same red glowy animation thingy. :/

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The saddest part is that most of these issues were risen during MoP BETA, in so many feedback threads, but it all just got ignored and pushed to live.

A thousand times this. I can't believe the DK Talents went live the way they are. They are all over the place with no real direction, no damage increasing abilities (They said in early MoP that they didn't want to give damage talents to anyone, then they gave one to everyone but DKs), our final talent is for PvP/Trash GET HYPED and the Rune Regeneneration tier is so fucking dumb that it's hard to put into words.

I rerolled Monk when I started MoP (Not entirely because of how horrid the DK Talents are, but it didn't help) but I'd really like to go back to my DK next expansion. Here's hoping Blizzard overhaul our tree entirely.