Patch 7.3 Frost Death Knight Changes, Blizzard App Update, Tweets, StarCrafts

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Upcoming Patch 7.3 Frost Death Knight Changes
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
The next PTR build should have a round of changes aimed at addressing various concerns with Frost. The major issues we're focused on are:

  • The spec is too dominated by Breath of Sindragosa (which has knock-on effects on talent choice throughout the tree).
  • Breath of Sindragosa, when you do use it, can be maintained for far too long. In addition to causing the talent/legendary lock-in around it, it means the demand for continuous time on target is very strict for extended periods of time.
  • The spec has many talents/legendaries that (individually or taken together) flood it with resources. Breath contributes to this by encouraging you to take all of them, but it's also a problem on its own.
  • Talent balance generally has to be reviewed, especially after addressing all of the time.
  • We're trying to limit the scope of the changes in the patch, to address the above without opening up the core rotation for changes.


We want to preserve the identity of Breath of Sindragosa, including the steady resource drain being the main limiting factor, and the expression of skill in optimizing around that. So in trying to avoid less natural solutions like capping the duration or redesigning how it works, we're trying to limit the talent/legendary synergies that cause huge variance in how long Breath can be maintained. And breaking the Breath of Sindragosa/Hungering Rune Weapon interaction, on its own, goes a very long way toward making Breath's duration more reasonable again. DPS adjustment for the change is being put mostly into the baseline spec rather than into the power of Breath, because it's currently so far ahead of other setups.

  • Murderous Efficiency (L56->L57), Frozen Pulse (L57->L90), and Runic Attenuation (L90->L56) swapped positions
  • Hungering Rune Weapon duration 12s (from 15s) and additionally grants 20% haste
  • Bugfix: Hungering Rune Weapon correctly generates a Rune every 1.5s instead of every 1s
  • Murderous Efficiency chance 50% (from 65%)
  • Horn of Winter cooldown 45s (from 30s)
  • Koltira’s Newfound Will generates 1 Rune (from 2) and now causes Obliterate to deal 10% extra damage

Using even a small subset of all of the above effects causes the rotation to be quite flooded. They are all being either weakened in power (with compensation to the baseline spec), or given non-resource-granting effects for part of their value. In addition, the two most egregious offenders (Murderous Efficiency and Horn of Winter) can no longer be taken together.

Overall, there should now be a much broader set of talent combinations that produce a good-feeling rotation in which there are resources to do something on most GCDs, but you're still able to spend them down. Including, for example, during Hungering Rune Weapon, which is overly hectic or frustrating right now when you can't spend all of its resources.

In addition, the talent rearrangement puts Frozen Pulse on a row with two predominantly AoE talents, which is a better home for it. The Frozen Pulse/Icy Talons ("machinegun") synergy is preserved, but can no longer be taken alongside Runic Attenuation as well.

NB: The Hungering Rune Weapon bug may be fixed on live shortly as well, after we test the fix and analyze the impact.


Minor talent rebalancing to match the above rearrangements and talent changes; numbers are likely to be updated as the rest of the changes settle into place.

EDIT: Added Frozen Pulse change which was missed when I copied changes into the post earlier. As with the other changes, this is meant to make Frozen Pulse balanced within its new row, and meant to be accounted for in the overall DPS increase above.

Breath can retain its role as a talent that encourages building around it to some degree (and its synergies with things like Runic Attenuation, Koltira's Newfound Will, and Seal of Necrofantasia are preserved). But without the overpowering Hungering Rune Weapon interaction, there is a lot more room for other builds to compete, and we've buffed the spec's baseline damage a great deal to shift the landscape towards all talents being closer together in DPS. As always, we'll continue to examine all of these changes based after people can start to test them on PTR.

Blizzard App Beta Update
The Blizzard App has been updated to add a collapsible sidebar with smaller game icons.



Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
ToS mechanic scaling for 10 man groups still doesnt feel right. Been a problem in ToV and NH too. Please re-evaluate this.
Hello! We do analyze results and watch for things like this. Can you point to any specific encounters or situations where it feels notable? (WarcraftDevs)

Ghostcrawler Tweets
Ghostcrawler still occasionally talks about WoW. Remember that he no longer works for or speaks for Blizzard.
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
Can you explain what the anti-combo anti-pattern is?
It’s when something the game is asking you to do interferes with another thing the game is asking you to do in a way that is really frustrating. Games are always asking you to make trade-offs (do you want more offense or more defense?), and those can be hard decisions, but that’s not really what the anti-combo issue is.

Zileas called it “anti-combo” because it feels like you are being asked to take steps which actively move you away from your desired result. Imagine a fighting game combo, ABC, where A adds 10% damage, and C adds 20% damage, but B removes 10% damage. Sad trombone sound.

An example we talk about all the time is the vanilla WoW rage model for tanks. You need to take damage to earn rage to do stuff. One of your core rotational buttons was Revenge, which stuns the target. A stunned target isn’t attacking and so isn’t giving you rage. Likewise, warrior tanks stacked dodge and parry, which meant you weren’t taking hits and generating rage. The better you got as a tank by improving your avoidance, the worse you became as a tank by decreasing your rage. (Source)



StarCrafts - Season 5 Ep22: The Duel
Another episode of StarCrafts has been released!

This article was originally published in forum thread: Patch 7.3 Frost Death Knight Changes, Blizzard App Update, Tweets, StarCrafts started by chaud View original post
Published on 2017-07-16 03:05 AM
40 Comments
Comments 40 Comments
  1. mmoc32ac407789's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Elfcap View Post
    I get it GC has insights, but he doesn't work with Blizz anymore, and because with your reasoning, we could show any mmo developer tweets and answers. He is working with a moba now, doesn't know anything about Blizz stuff or the future in any projects regarding this matter.
    And for the disclosure I like GC, but I also get the "haters" or simply say, critics' viewpoint.
    its mmo-champion, not blizzard-central (i dont think shitty twitter answers should be posted as anything "usefull") but i agree i don't see why others developers dont do something similar
  1. Fabled's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Kaleredar View Post
    I always feel like people are trying to bait some sort of "gotcha" answer out of him to validate their own opinions as to why they think the game sucks now.
    Perhaps, but I always found it to be a neat inside look at how things are done at Blizzard or elsewhere.
  1. mmoc7e12af7143's Avatar
    I really hope with these changes to Frost DK, Ret is getting some treatmeant soon.
    I know Crusade is hard to Balance and Blizzard somewhat likes the Retribution Passive (which I and many other Rets despise). However, even with those problems Ret is a fairly simple spec and SHOULD be easy to balance.
  1. Spryte's Avatar
    RIP Frost, can I get some more Unholy legendaries now?
  1. Kazlehoff's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Nevcairiel View Post
    You can just enable it in the settings of the app.
    Where? just looked through all the settings. no mention of beta. provide screenshot.
  1. Typhoria's Avatar
    "An example we talk about all the time is the vanilla WoW rage model for tanks. You need to take damage to earn rage to do stuff. One of your core rotational buttons was Revenge, which stuns the target. A stunned target isn’t attacking and so isn’t giving you rage. Likewise, warrior tanks stacked dodge and parry, which meant you weren’t taking hits and generating rage."
    Lol... GC and whomever he talks to never played vanilla. Revenge stun was not baseline. Infact it was a talent that didn't even grant 100% stun, that no one who cared about min-maxing invested points into.
  1. ColbaneX's Avatar
    Not okay with the frost changes one bit. I LIKE the Breath of Sindragosa playstyle, and have the perfect legendaries for it. Might just switch back to Unholy.
  1. VanishO2's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Quincey View Post
    terrible changes for frost =/

    putting hrw and bos on the same talent line just nulls both of those choices. It is in fact taking choices away from us.

    I don't understand their reasoning for reducing the time we can keep breath up, seems to me balancing cooldowns / knowing the boss fights and when to use bos was a pretty okay "skill" check and the reward was semi-ok burst dps. It felt rewarding and fun.

    The buffs they have laid out above don't even get close to covering completely destroying breath. They are axing our potential in half to raise up the lower end slightly.

    Not amused.
    Because you can't know boss RNG, because when they design the boss fights, they get locked into always having to think about the guys that can't move away from boss thanks to breath to do the encounter mechanics, because you need a longer duration on breath to it even be viable... all that crap that makes BoS one of the worst specs in the game for team play. You become just that guy that the entire raid has to play around because you're locked on boss (and have crap mobility already! lol). Most of the people that really like BoS is because of how it simplifies the boss fights for them. "SORRY! CAN'T STACK I'M BoSing HERE!".

    Now at least you'll be free to actually be a raid member and be able help the raid instead, to move away from the boss when needed, etc.

    There is a reason most players always leave BoS as soon as they can (or other builds become viable, or unholy become viable again). Blizzard mistake is making one talent, the spec. Then next patch, they decide that people should play the other way and we keep going on and on.
  1. Unholyground's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by meumaxu View Post
    Blizz sucks so bad, they shoudnt change how FRost works to please casuals, instead they should only buff the spec by 30% at least do it can be competitive with other dps specs. This nerf to BoS will only make the class simple to casuals to play.
    It was already simple to play lol, frost has never been difficult.
  1. VanishO2's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by meumaxu View Post
    Blizz sucks so bad, they shoudnt change how FRost works to please casuals, instead they should only buff the spec by 30% at least do it can be competitive with other dps specs. This nerf to BoS will only make the class simple to casuals to play.
    The Legion BoS is already for casuals. One mistake before Legion and it was GG your BoS and dmg. In Legion you can have mistakes, no problem, it's just a spam the most you can fest anyway.
  1. mmoc1c10d6a90a's Avatar
    The fucks the point of buffing HRW and then putting it in the same tier as BoS? Youre NEVER going to be able to dump all those resources.

    Stupid changes all around. BoS was the only way of making frost at least a little exciting, the previous "machinegun" (that name is still fucking retarded btw) spec was absolutely braindead 3 button spec that had nothing interesting about it.

    Thank fuck unholy is viable/better again, the playstyle is 100 times more engaging.
  1. Eon Drache's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Orisai View Post
    5 years and they still post GC tweets
    Hasn't even been 4 years yet. Come on. In other news can you guys look at Crusade for retribution Paladins?
  1. VanishO2's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Netukka View Post
    The fucks the point of buffing HRW and then putting it in the same tier as BoS? Youre NEVER going to be able to dump all those resources.

    Stupid changes all around. BoS was the only way of making frost at least a little exciting, the previous "machinegun" (that name is still fucking retarded btw) spec was absolutely braindead 3 button spec that had nothing interesting about it.

    Thank fuck unholy is viable/better again, the playstyle is 100 times more engaging.
    So spamming obliterate/rime procs locked on target, wait, do it again, is not braindead? LOL.

    Exciting spec... one of the most boring talents of the entire game.
  1. mmocc7bb15d74f's Avatar
    Download URL for the new beta app ? =)
  1. Cazmosis's Avatar
    BoS build is a bad idea, unfun to play, and is mostly why I put my Frost DK down.

    ...but you know...stuff like Shadow Priest Clarity of Power build...yeah that fun as hell rotation needed TO GO!!!
  1. caervek's Avatar
    The next PTR build should have a round of changes aimed at addressing various concerns with Frost.
    My only concern is that I can't spec 2H frost again until 8.0, let me know when that's being sorted and I'll care...
  1. Deonora's Avatar
    I love the play style of Breath. Making sure your cds line up popping it and being rewarded with good dps. I hate that people complain about it. Yes there are other things they could have done to improve damage make breath work different but this change is just crap. But I guess we will see once it is live. Just sucks the amount of time I invested into getting all the required gear and legendries for this spec just to then have to go unholy since in this patch with no Unholy legendaries and still being horrible with the rotation I do way more damage without trying.
  1. mmoc3514689de5's Avatar
    Took them quite a few months to notice the Sindragosa in the room.
    Also, 27% overall buff to all damage speaks volumes.
  1. Gilgallad's Avatar
    How does one get the Blizzard app beta update?
  1. emilpor's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by munkeyinorbit View Post
    because sims are important right? You do a sim, import it into WoW and just watch the boss die.
    Don't be r*****ed, sims are important and if we're bottom tier after the changes, I'm gonna warm the bench since Legion didn't really make it easy on us to have alts and I don't have all day to play, some ppl gotta work.
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