Frost consistently the weakest spec in the game?

[Fenrkyr]

Of those classes that have multiple DPS specs, one is usually better than the other, particularly for the pure DPS classes. But the top spec for pure DPS classes rotates all the time, and rarely is one of their specs the worst in both PVE and PVP for more than 1 tier/season in a row. Even hybrids with multiple DPS specs usually have periods where one is better than another, and they flip flop all the time. For warriors, arms is generally second tier to fury in PVE with the occasional exception for AOE, but arms is almost always a top spec in PVP.

However, DK's seem to break from this trend. Frost is always outclassed by unholy in both aspects of the game. I can't think of a single tier going back to 4.0 where frost was a superior PVE spec. More often than not it is bad enough that guilds don't even want it in the raid. This might be tolerable if it was significantly better than unholy in PVE, but this has never happened either (the current PVP season is the only one in memory where frost wasn't totally outclassed by unholy) and right now frost is probably in the weakest position I can remember, even worse than ToT. My question is why? Why is this spec consistently shafted by Blizzard? Certainly other specs like enhancement have had tiers where they weren't great, but I don't think any other spec has been at the bottom of both PVE and PVP performance as consistently as has frost.

[nephzor]

Because frost is a poorly designed spec, and the way it scales makes it a good spec for progression but always get outshined by unholy when you start getting some gear.

SoO frost was better until you had really good gear then unholy was taking the lead, it will stay like that until blizzard stops buffing/nerfing the spec and make mechanical changes to it

[Enfilade]

One of the myriad of reasons why I have unsubbed, and doubt I will ever play again.

inb4 "cna i haev ur gold"

[Deleted]

From what I've heard on the current PTR 2H frost outshines unholy on ST

[Bmfstunner]

Wouldn't just make sense to balance it around being a Dual Wield spec? I'm not a completely knowledgeable about why Frost struggles but I thought one reason is they can't balance the 2H to DW aspect

[Deleted]

From what I've heard on the current PTR 2H frost outshines unholy on ST

A thorough shame then that you can't gear effectively for both Frost and Unholy and 2H Frost can't cleave for shit. I'll eat my hat if Unholy doesn't end up still being the progression spec on almost every boss. 2H Frost is just far too mechanically limited in terms of what it can do and DW Frost can't compete with Unholy.

[Taninsam]

5.4 was pretty good for DW Frost, and right now on 6.2 PTR 2H Frost is pretty solid on ST too. Thing is, they need to rework the mechanics of the spec. Hopefully they will next xpac.

you can't gear effectively for both Frost and Unholy

Not really. Both want MS, so as long as you have a few haste offpieces around for your Frost spec, you'll be fine.

[Deleted]

you know a specs shit when it needs a 15-25% buff to its 3 main abilities every patch just to keep up, even then its still mediocre

[bals]

frost was good for a lot of mop. unholy was really only better in tot due to a trinket and a specific gameplay style. even then it wasn't massive, i think you might be misremembering https://www.warcraftlogs.com/ranking...ss=DeathKnight. I guess most of those logs are long after soo came out though.
frost was good some of cata as well

[Deleted]

frost was good for a lot of mop. unholy was really only better in tot due to a trinket and a specific gameplay style. even then it wasn't massive, i think you might be misremembering https://www.warcraftlogs.com/ranking...ss=DeathKnight. I guess most of those logs are long after soo came out though.
frost was good some of cata as well

Festerblight with Fabled Feather was infinitely better than Frost in ToT. It wasn't even remotely close on single-target, never mind on cleave where Unholy could spread EbolAIDS and Frost did... nothing.

[bals]

well it still doesn't change frost being better in the other 2 raid tiers for mop.
I was mostly just pointing out op's exaggeration is wrong.

[Deleted]

well it still doesn't change frost being better in the other 2 raid tiers for mop.
I was mostly just pointing out op's exaggeration is wrong.

But Frost wasn't better for the two other tiers of MoP. That's the point. DW Frost was competitive with Unholy right at the start of SoO progression, and even then many top DKs like Infeh chose to play Unholy instead - and this was pre-buffs to Unholy that came a month or two into SoO.

Even when Frost has done best, it hasn't been the unquestionable go-to.

[Maxweii]

From what I've heard on the current PTR 2H frost outshines unholy on ST

Thats not factoring in gear, fights, trinkets, ect

[theyanger]

Frost was better in Dragon Soul and Firelands (Unholy higher ST in Dragon Soul but that didn't matter since it wasn't better at spine or madness, the only two hard fights). Frost was better in 5.4. Frost is better next patch from the looks of things. Some tiers I'm not even remembering since I tanked them mostly.

You're simply wrong.

[Kaliblaze]

They fixed Ele shaman problems really easily. Crit sucked at the start then it got a new interaction with LvB where LvB has a chance equal to your crit chance to fire off multistrike LvBs or something. Don't see why something like that can't be done for Obliterate/Frost strike (just tone it down or make it not work in pvp)

[roarfacelol]

Frost was better in Dragon Soul and Firelands (Unholy higher ST in Dragon Soul but that didn't matter since it wasn't better at spine or madness, the only two hard fights). Frost was better in 5.4. Frost is better next patch from the looks of things. Some tiers I'm not even remembering since I tanked them mostly.

You're simply wrong.

If someone is simply wrong saying that UH is stronger than Frost, then you need to show evidence why. "from the look of things", Unholy is actually stronger than Frost simply because it's a much more versatile DPS spec. As someone who's done mythic PTR testing, there's just too many fights where you have cleave/AoE swapping. UH can easily swap between ST and AoE, while Frost (more specifically 2H) has to actually gear change to make their damage effective for either ST or AoE, which you obviously can't do mid fight. The archimonde trinkets doesn't make it any better. Frost trinket is essentially bottlenecking the spec to deal more ST, while UH's provide a massive AoE buff and potentially make NP our ST talent. As we get more gear, UH will become stronger and stronger as the spec benefits more from ilvl than Frost. It'll probably end up being like the time Blizz nerfed BB by 33% during HM and everyone went on a Frost hype, but we all still ended up played UH cause Frost is just that bad.

- - - Updated - - -

They fixed Ele shaman problems really easily. Crit sucked at the start then it got a new interaction with LvB where LvB has a chance equal to your crit chance to fire off multistrike LvBs or something. Don't see why something like that can't be done for Obliterate/Frost strike (just tone it down or make it not work in pvp)

Previously, people speculated that Obliterate was never overbuffed for PvP reasons. We've recently seen that Blizzard is 100% capable of making adjustments to Oblit so that it doesn't ruin PvP. Blizzard simply has made no effort to fix Frost mechanics for over 2 expansions; Blizz just keeps buffing frost for very early progression and quickly falls off to UH.

[Tojara]

People are certainly remembering things wrong, at least from Cataclysm to the end of MoP. Frost hasn't consistently been terrible, to be quite honest it's flip flopped with unholy quite a few times. Frost is usually it's strongest when howling blast does a lot damage. I certainly remember frost being the best in the first two tiers of Cataclysm, and stating otherwise is simple wrong. Howling blast did such a retarded amount of damage that you would be stupid not to play frost. Unholy did fine single target damage, but when the majority of the encounters were designed around having DKs kite things, or giant groups of small adds that needed to die quickly, well, that didn't fit unholy really well. Diseases, at least in Cataclysm weren't a great source of damage, nor was that type of damage great for the type of encounters we were facing.

Realistically, speaking Cataclysm anyways, Unholy really didn't become super viable until you got the sword from Deathwing. Even then Frost was still quite good in DS, and was at least a competitive alternative. I distinctly remember playing Frost on the encounters I didn't tank throughout that entire expansion. Frost just did better damage, PoF was far more flexible with encounter designs and well, howling blast. I could sit here and name a dozen encounters in Cataclysm that you would solely go Frost for howling blast alone.

MoP started with Frost and by the end you could realistically do whatever you want. Unholy wasn't even viable until you got the Feather from Ji'kun and that's a fact. Even then you didn't just play Unholy on every single encounter, there were still encounters where Frost was preferred. Again, encounters that required a lot of burst damage (Howling Blast) still gave Frost a niche to exploit, and that extended to the end of MoP.

That doesn't take away from the fact that Frost has, and always has been poorly designed. To an extent, I would say that UH is poorly designed at times too. Frost has been strong when howling blast is strong, which at least in this expansion it isn't, at least when you compare it to previous expansions. Part of this is because UH with necrotic plague actually does a decent amount of damage fast, which in previous expansions normally isn't the case. UH has always had strong prolonged AoE, just this expansion they have good upfront AoE and prolonged AoE, which takes away from what Frost typically did.

TLDR; There have been multiple tiers where you were Frost for the entire tier, or at least half of it. I can assure you people didn't do bosses like Heroic Ragnaros as Unholy.

[Deleted]

you know a specs shit when it needs a 15-25% buff to its 3 main abilities every patch just to keep up, even then its still mediocre

and when you see that you know that yes they "don't ask us to do maths", but they never do maths for themselves either... MMO Champions won't ask them naughty questions. Ask them if they do maths if so how come they need to buff some specs something by 30% 2 patches after release. They do wrong maths then, which is pretty much the same.

rarely is one of their specs the worst in both PVE and PVP for more than 1 tier/season in a row

Like subtlety hasn't been shit since Pandas. It's the worst spec.

[Helwinter]

If encounter design continues the route it has in BRF - piles of adds, cleave, and whatnot - then Frost is going to get left *way* behind without giant buffs. 2h will never compete because of mechanics on cleave fights, and DW needs HB to hit like a succession of freight trains to be worth using for cleave. I despise Unholy, but I suspect I'll be playing it in HFC unless Frost gets buffed through the roof because it is vastly superior on cleave / AoE, and competitive on Single Target

[Schizoide]

Frost was better in Dragon Soul and Firelands (Unholy higher ST in Dragon Soul but that didn't matter since it wasn't better at spine or madness, the only two hard fights). Frost was better in 5.4. Frost is better next patch from the looks of things. Some tiers I'm not even remembering since I tanked them mostly.

People have really short memories. Frost has been terrible this expansion. The top spec has changed many times over the past expansions.

Unholy was much better in 5.4, though. For some reason nobody played Unholy anyway.

Unholy actually has substantial mechanical disadvantages compared to Frost, but pruning and numbers tuning made those disadvantages completely ignorable over the years. DW frost can spam full AE on single-targets, it should have great cleave. But Howling Blast is tuned too low for that to matter. It also does damage at range, but Death Coil was pruned so Frost can't sustain it. Unholy has very long ramp-up, particularly at lower gear levels, but the pet does so little damage now that it no longer matters. I could go on-- but the point is that DW Frost is mechanically far superior to Unholy. It's just substantially undertuned.