DK Wish List for Expansion

[Wrien]

I can't help but notice that many of your posts show a strong bias towards frost. I'm wondering what you hope to accomplish by proposing changes to essentially nerf Unholy. Remove Unholy Frenzy? Are you kidding me? If you are actually serious about that consider removing Pillar of Frost too, because a % strength increase is definitely strong. Proposing Roiling Blood is a Blood passive only? Again, chopping down on Unholy, now you want to cripple AOE? What is your basis for the removal of Outbreak?

Do you even raid? If current mechanics are a pre-cursor for what to expect in WoD raids, Asphyxiate will definitely be a necessity. I get that you want everyone to feel like a special snowflake in their own class, but the way raid mechanics and encounter designs work today that philosophy just doesn't work.

I don't really understand what you hope to accomplish by proposing all sorts of nerfs to Unholy while buffing Frost.

If you look at the talent grid you see why. Unholy Frenzy and Hysteria would be too overpowered together. Rolling Blood made it too easy to spread diseases. Maybe give unholy the current Unholy Blight? Outbreak is pretty useless and not very good.

I don't play much unholy, but it's better than frost in pvp. I want to balance them more...

I think that the Necrotic Strike change i suggested isn't very good after thinking some. Change the skill somehow, but don't give it a CD.
Asphyxiate isn't needed. Hungering Cold should eb the only CC DK's should have access too. Just ebcause polymorph, sap etc. are very powerful doesn't mean that all classes needs them.....

[TehCyberJunkie]

I'd prefer frost be strictly 2h, removing DW from the spec and giving it to unholy which is converted to dw only. Making SS hit phys with MH and shadow with OH. With these spec flavors set, i'd like these changes:

Remove rune regen tier, make runic corruption baseline for all specs
Empower rune weapon- doubles the effect of current runeforge, activates it for 20secs, 2min cd
Remove frost fever from unholy and blood specs
Remove blood plague from frost spec
Remove rune of razorice

Rune of Shadows- increase target's susceptibility to the death knight's shadow dmg by 2% per stack (stacks up to 5 times). Converts all auto-attacks to shadow dmg.

Frost
Killing Machine- every autoattack hit doubles rp gain from rune generating hits. Stacks until rp reaches 100% and then resets
Rime proc- grants rp equal to twice that of a normal HB in addition to current mechanic.
Pillar of frost- does not consume frost rune to activate.
Frost strike- applies frostbite, stacking up to 3 times
Frostbite- causes the death knight's obliterate to ignore 7% armor per stack.
Obliterate- always crits. Crit chance increases crit dmg of oblit.
Mastery- frostburn: increases frostbite's effect by .5% per point

Unholy
Fallen summoner- the death knight has a chance on autoattack to summon a temporary pet for 20secs. Max of 5 at a time.
Deadly plague- haste increases tick rate of diseases.
Unholy blight- an aoe pulse (5yd) created by blood plague ticks that empowers your pets dmg by 1%, stacking up to 10 times. Does not affect gargoyle.
Death coil- causes target to pulse Unholy blight if affected by blood plague
Scourge strike- deals offhand dmg as shadow
Unholy contagion- applied each time target is damaged by the death knight's shadow dmg, stacks up to 10 times, causes target to sprout a tentacle that lashes out at the target and cleave enemies within 10yds dealing dmg based on player's weapon dmg and mastery for 5 secs. Duration increased by death coil by 1 sec.
Mastery- monster mash: increases dmg bonus of unholy blight by .5% per point.

[Raikh]

I'd prefer frost be strictly 2h, removing DW from the spec and giving it to unholy which is converted to dw only. Making SS hit phys with MH and shadow with OH. With these spec flavors set, i'd like these changes:

Remove rune regen tier, make runic corruption baseline for all specs
Empower rune weapon- doubles the effect of current runeforge, activates it for 20secs, 2min cd
Remove frost fever from unholy and blood specs
Remove blood plague from frost spec
Remove rune of razorice

Rune of Shadows- increase target's susceptibility to the death knight's shadow dmg by 2% per stack (stacks up to 5 times). Converts all auto-attacks to shadow dmg.

Frost
Killing Machine- every autoattack hit doubles rp gain from rune generating hits. Stacks until rp reaches 100% and then resets
Rime proc- grants rp equal to twice that of a normal HB in addition to current mechanic.
Pillar of frost- does not consume frost rune to activate.
Frost strike- applies frostbite, stacking up to 3 times
Frostbite- causes the death knight's obliterate to ignore 7% armor per stack.
Obliterate- always crits. Crit chance increases crit dmg of oblit.
Mastery- frostburn: increases frostbite's effect by .5% per point

Unholy
Fallen summoner- the death knight has a chance on autoattack to summon a temporary pet for 20secs. Max of 5 at a time.
Deadly plague- haste increases tick rate of diseases.
Unholy blight- an aoe pulse (5yd) created by blood plague ticks that empowers your pets dmg by 1%, stacking up to 10 times. Does not affect gargoyle.
Death coil- causes target to pulse Unholy blight if affected by blood plague
Scourge strike- deals offhand dmg as shadow
Unholy contagion- applied each time target is damaged by the death knight's shadow dmg, stacks up to 10 times, causes target to sprout a tentacle that lashes out at the target and cleave enemies within 10yds dealing dmg based on player's weapon dmg and mastery for 5 secs. Duration increased by death coil by 1 sec.
Mastery- monster mash: increases dmg bonus of unholy blight by .5% per point.

While thats kinda creative, i don't see the ideas working very well in practice, especially since a lot of information are missing, like costs of respective abilities.

For Frost:
KM - would create absurd of runic power of which we could not use at all at current FS costs
Rime: again rp, how are we gonna use that 2 bazillion extra rp?
PoF - no costs on this is overdue since cata
FS - usage buffing oblit dmg is not bad, but not good either as it creates an artifical ramp up
Frostbite - just artifical ramp up, both abilities are used either way, hb oblit snyergy would make more sense.
Obliterate - 100% crit is nice to have, but not really necessary, would be just flavor here.
Mastery - so in fact the mastery is just Arp, ArP got removed for a psecific reason, it gets stronger the more you have instead of inflating like all other stats. Which means it would be rather bad with low stat budget and gets stronger with higher budgets. Won't happen at any chance.

So as frost we create much more rp than we could possibly need, or FS cost is going up, which would render frost presence useless compared to Uh presence, so what happens with frost presence/FS to make this work?
The other new mechnaic means just, that downtime sucks more than already, if it is a debuff then target switching sucks or we have some kind of unplausible ramp up and ArP was removed for a good reason.

Unholy:
Fallen summoner - i kinda dislike uncontrollable pets as a dmg resource, but seems ok for me.
Deadly plague - Might work well, might not, it contradicts itself a bit with the classical haste usage, take as much as you feel comfortable with/ aka are gcd locked to a certain extend as you might go for breakpoints over that necessary amount of haste, which can lead to feeling overwhelmed by resources.
Unholy blight: Yay again ramp up, sucks on swithcing targets, bosses like megaera depending on buff duration on pets and looking how current hitboxes work it won't hit your pets on bigger bosses at all, like you can abrely spread via pestilence from horrdion on adds.
Death coil - if UB would work i would like extra ticks thorugh death coil
UH Contagion - So those little tentacles are considered pets if i read that right, scales totally insane with increasing targets, but again ramp up, so if adds need to be AoEd down quickly this is extraordinary useless, remembers me of fire nova and that AoE was critisized alot for that downside.
What are those 10 stacks doing exactly? 10 stacks causing a tentacle? every stack a tentacle? increasing dmg of that tentacle per stack?
The deathcoil is either useless or op or i dunno, does it affect the tentacle of the hit target, all tentacles, also creates heavily situational AoE priorities.
Mastery - extremely heavy stat inflation, the dmg bonus increases per stack from 1 to 1,5% from just 1 point mastery, thats 50% increase. Would start very strong and fall into nothingnes. If you meant .5% of that 1% it would be really useless form the very beginning.

Here again a whole lot of ramp up for some flavor which isn't really of any use or establishes cool playstyles, QoL or creates an interesting synergy as all spells are used independently either way.
Also FeS would scale with haste here, makign it double dip on it, increasing its DpE the more haste you have, which gives it the possibility to overtake SS use until BP lasts for the remainor of the fight, thus making Festerblight mandatory - atleast if BP deals considerable dmg.


Maybe you can add information about already existing spells and also costs of new old/spells, presence changes etc. because the infos given feel kinda unthought as most things consist of additional ramp up for no gain as nothing really changes from what you use. Scaling would maybe get better but that only partwise and some things are just flavor, which is of very subjective use. (especially changing uh to dw, which is really just taste and has no reason, not even by looking at the original dk design, i mean yeah thats ok, but i wouldnt support this at all)

[TehCyberJunkie]

Frost rotation/explanation/reasoning:

Currently, no changes to rp costs/generation (12 rp per rune used)

Stacking frostburn would cost 60rp to max it, hence why the increased rune gen would be needed.
Rp gen per rune is 12 with no KM stacks, 24 with 1 stack, 36 with 2, and 48 with 3.
KM resets to 0 once you reach 100 rp.
Frostburn stacks are consumed with each oblit.

Rotation and reasoning:

Open with howling blast to apply FF, then one oblit, gen 36 rp, frost strike and oblit again, consuming frostburn stack. You now have enough rp to frost strike three times, and then oblit.

Essentially, you should prioritize maximizing frostburn stacks between oblits, and the killing machine change is the only way that would be possible. Sindy's breath would also be benefitted greatly by KM's change.

Unholy changes reasoning/rotation/explanation:

Festerblight is useless next patch with snapshotting being removed. It should basically only be used to convert runes.

Unholy contagion: at 10stacks, it would spawn a tentacle and reset. With rune of shadows being used on offhand, all autoattacks deal shadow dmg, meaning tentacle uptime on your primary target would be close to 100% with high haste.

Monster mash: likely too high stacks on blight, probably drop to 5 stacks and have empowered dmg last 15 secs (to combat excessive ramp-up).

Blood plague dmg would be around 1.25x that of frost fever for frost spec with no haste. Overall dmg would be balanced half between the dk and his pets at single target.

Tentacles: aoe lash likely excessive, keep it single target.

[Statix]

I always felt that Frost made more sense as a tank spec. Same way Blood works better as DPS for me. I just want to be able to choose Blood as DPS and Frost as tank again.

[ZenX]

Some real speedboost would be nice+some utility to raid. Call it a vampiric move or whatever. Just give me something that doesn't make me the slowest to get from a to b on long distance, AND the slowest on short distances.
Even on something as slow on a paladin i feel like a god damn speedy gonzales compared to DK
Raid utility. We have none except the lousy AMZ(and CR). Gorefeinds/winters doesn't really count outside of very limitied situations. Some 3 mins cd that helps the raid would be awesome.
After i began playing paladin, i'm finding me to be extremely frustrated with the lack of ways to help other people if they struggle.

DKs are known for their formation of hug-circles right and love for tea-parties amirite. /facepalm

I want a summon Val'kyr ability with the Unholy feeling more like the 2nd War type of Death Knight.

[Wrien]

New updated ideas

All
- Hungering Cold brought back, Remorseless Winter removed
- Asphyxiate removed, Magic Supression replaces it:
Magic Supression:
45 sec CD
Aoe silence, replaces Strangulate. Silencing all enemies within the arena targeted by the Death Knight for 5 sec.

- Death Siphon is no longer a talent, but is now a Frost and Unholy skill available for both specs at lvl x
- Vandetta replaces Death Siphon in the talent tree (similar to the old blood talent):
Vandetta
increases all healing done by 20% for unholy and frost, and 10% for blood. Heals you for 10% of you health when you kill something that grants you xp or honor. Heals you for 7% of all damage done.

- Outbreak removed. This skill is a joke. Freeing up space for other new skills.
- Chillblains is now a frost passive skill, old Desecration takes it's place in the talent-grid.

Frost
- Obliterate damage increased from 250% to 320%
- Frost Strike damage increased from 115% to 170%
- ToT and MotFW no longer increases Frost Strike or Obliterate damage. MotFW increases melee damage by 15% and ToT makes all melee skills hit with both weapons. No other bonuses from them.
- New passive skill:
Frozen Runeweapon
Obliterate now freezes your rune-weapon, increases all frost damage done by 25% for 8 sec.

- Rune of Cinderglacier removed because of Frozen Runeweapon.
- Killing Machine now once again affects Howling Blast and Icy Touch instead of Obliterate
- Blood of the North now also removes the rune-cost of Blood Strike, and increases it's damage done by 50%. Blood Strike is now once again available for frost, but now acts like a filler-skill for potential downtime.
- Anhilation brought back. Now passively increases Obliterate and Blood Strike crit-chance by 15%
- New skill: Remorseless Storm:
Remorseless Storm
1 frost
45 sec CD
Think of the Lich King skill where he strikes his weapon in the ground (ice) and creates a huge frozen wave.
Deals x frost damage to all enemies within 15 yards of you

[Deleted]

- Outbreak removed. This skill is a joke. Freeing up space for other new skills.

Yeah, that's still a "nope" from me.

As long as the physical debuff is tied to blood plague, I don't see myself playing blood without outbreak.

[Schizoide]

Killing Machine is a major problem that needs to be addressed in 6.0. Currently we are best served just ignoring it. That's obviously not OK.

Back when we thought we couldn't ignore KM, it was even worse. The ability procs randomly from autoattacks, so you often spend it on the wrong ability, feeling like we failed a test. That's negative gameplay.

WW monks have a far better mechanic in Combo Breaker. It only procs when the player uses an ability. Imagine something like:

Killing Machine (2H)
Frost Strike hits have a [X%] chance to cause your next Obliterate to attack twice or make your next two Howling Blasts free. Lasts 15 sec. Two charges.

Killing Machine (DW)
Obliterate hits have a [Y%] chance to grant a 100% critical strike bonus and 100% critical damage bonus to your next Frost Strike or make your next Howling Blast attack twice. Lasts 15 sec. Two charges.

[valliant13]

I'd prefer frost be strictly 2h, removing DW from the spec and giving it to unholy which is converted to dw only. Making SS hit phys with MH and shadow with OH. With these spec flavors set, i'd like these changes:

Remove rune regen tier, make runic corruption baseline for all specs
Empower rune weapon- doubles the effect of current runeforge, activates it for 20secs, 2min cd
Remove frost fever from unholy and blood specs
Remove blood plague from frost spec
Remove rune of razorice

Rune of Shadows- increase target's susceptibility to the death knight's shadow dmg by 2% per stack (stacks up to 5 times). Converts all auto-attacks to shadow dmg.

Frost
Killing Machine- every autoattack hit doubles rp gain from rune generating hits. Stacks until rp reaches 100% and then resets
Rime proc- grants rp equal to twice that of a normal HB in addition to current mechanic.
Pillar of frost- does not consume frost rune to activate.
Frost strike- applies frostbite, stacking up to 3 times
Frostbite- causes the death knight's obliterate to ignore 7% armor per stack.
Obliterate- always crits. Crit chance increases crit dmg of oblit.
Mastery- frostburn: increases frostbite's effect by .5% per point

Unholy
Fallen summoner- the death knight has a chance on autoattack to summon a temporary pet for 20secs. Max of 5 at a time.
Deadly plague- haste increases tick rate of diseases.
Unholy blight- an aoe pulse (5yd) created by blood plague ticks that empowers your pets dmg by 1%, stacking up to 10 times. Does not affect gargoyle.
Death coil- causes target to pulse Unholy blight if affected by blood plague
Scourge strike- deals offhand dmg as shadow
Unholy contagion- applied each time target is damaged by the death knight's shadow dmg, stacks up to 10 times, causes target to sprout a tentacle that lashes out at the target and cleave enemies within 10yds dealing dmg based on player's weapon dmg and mastery for 5 secs. Duration increased by death coil by 1 sec.
Mastery- monster mash: increases dmg bonus of unholy blight by .5% per point.

Personally not a fan of taking away diseases from specs. It's one of the core things I would feel weird just changing like that since we've basically had bp/ff since our release in wotlk.

you want to get rid of razorice, then make one that is the same thing just shadow damage? unholy bias much on the reforge aspect? I mean I love the idea of that forge and I personally prefer unholys play style but you can't take of RI and then give unholy the same thing but actually better. Either can the idea of that runeforge completely or give unholy a version of it. Personally I think CG/RI should be tied into the same runeforge and make RI increase shadowfrost damage as well as giving a chance to proc the CG runeforge.

I do like some of your frost changes, it would make both subspecs pretty equal as long as you had a fix to ToT/MotFW. It would definitely make the gameplay more compelling for frost.

your changes to unholy while they sound amazing, feel a little too good. especially unholy blight and unholy contagion. Depending on balance it would definitely make unholy an exceptionally fun spec to play. However the devs have done a poor job balancing dk's as is and I feel most of the unholy ideas would make it even harder to do so.

[Wrien]

Killing Machine is a major problem that needs to be addressed in 6.0. Currently we are best served just ignoring it. That's obviously not OK.

Back when we thought we couldn't ignore KM, it was even worse. The ability procs randomly from autoattacks, so you often spend it on the wrong ability, feeling like we failed a test. That's negative gameplay.

WW monks have a far better mechanic in Combo Breaker. It only procs when the player uses an ability. Imagine something like:

Killing Machine (2H)
Frost Strike hits have a [X%] chance to cause your next Obliterate to attack twice or make your next two Howling Blasts free. Lasts 15 sec. Two charges.

Killing Machine (DW)
Obliterate hits have a [Y%] chance to grant a 100% critical strike bonus and 100% critical damage bonus to your next Frost Strike or make your next Howling Blast attack twice. Lasts 15 sec. Two charges.

Or just revert Killing Machine to what it used to be, when it affected Howling Blast, Icy Touch and Frost Strike instead of Obliterate and Frost Strike.

Would solve a lot

[Schizoide]

Or just revert Killing Machine to what it used to be, when it affected Howling Blast, Icy Touch and Frost Strike instead of Obliterate and Frost Strike.

Would solve a lot

If KM worked on those three abilities, players would continue to largely ignore it. That's not gameplay, it's just abilities randomly critting.

I was trying to work within the devs' design parameters. They wanted 2H and DW frost to play differently, and tried (and failed) to use Killing Machine to make that happen.

[Sinzaram]

If KM worked on those three abilities, players would continue to largely ignore it. That's not gameplay, it's just abilities randomly critting.

I was trying to work within the devs' design parameters. They wanted 2H and DW frost to play differently, and tried (and failed) to use Killing Machine to make that happen.

It used to work great with those 3 abilities in wrath. But it also Howling Blast had a 6 second cooldown, so you did have to time for KM crit Howling Blast, holding back from Frost Strike. It wasn't quote as faceroll has you mention.

[Shiira]

Runes worked differently in wrath.

The old killing machine wouldn't do anything interesting for our gameplay right now.

[Schizoide]

Yeah, you had a lot more runes and roughly half the runic power back then.

[valliant13]

It used to work great with those 3 abilities in wrath. But it also Howling Blast had a 6 second cooldown, so you did have to time for KM crit Howling Blast, holding back from Frost Strike. It wasn't quote as faceroll has you mention.

Howling Blast also cost two runes then not one, so you wouldnt prioritize KM HB unless you had a rime proc. It always went to FS, all the old rune system did was keeping us from having any downtime unlike now. I prefer to be the way we were in wotlk in terms of gcd locked because we had to basically have twitch reflexes to hit the right stuff at the right time. If you screwed up it was actually a rather big dps loss compared to what is frost now, you just push anything that lights up and you're good to go.

[Shiira]

We aren't any less gcd locked now than we were in wrath.

I agree though, frost is not a spec that takes a lot of effort to play right now.

[TehCyberJunkie]

Personally not a fan of taking away diseases from specs. It's one of the core things I would feel weird just changing like that since we've basically had bp/ff since our release in wotlk.

you want to get rid of razorice, then make one that is the same thing just shadow damage? unholy bias much on the reforge aspect? I mean I love the idea of that forge and I personally prefer unholys play style but you can't take of RI and then give unholy the same thing but actually better. Either can the idea of that runeforge completely or give unholy a version of it. Personally I think CG/RI should be tied into the same runeforge and make RI increase shadowfrost damage as well as giving a chance to proc the CG runeforge.

I do like some of your frost changes, it would make both subspecs pretty equal as long as you had a fix to ToT/MotFW. It would definitely make the gameplay more compelling for frost.

your changes to unholy while they sound amazing, feel a little too good. especially unholy blight and unholy contagion. Depending on balance it would definitely make unholy an exceptionally fun spec to play. However the devs have done a poor job balancing dk's as is and I feel most of the unholy ideas would make it even harder to do so.

At the top of the post, i actually removed frost DW, and made unholy DW only.

[valliant13]

depends on which sub spec shiira and we are only that way due to ams soaking. Not that we didn't ams soak then, but it wasn't absolutely required like it is now. The spec was slowed down way too much and I have said it since the rune change, but the spec is a wotlk spec that is forced into the cata rules. It hasn't felt right since the rune change. If you take ams soaking out the way we do it now...like standing in completely avoidable crap and use it the same way it was used in wotlk or even make it so frost gets no RP from it like in cata then the spec would have a ridiculous amount of downtime to the point that haste would be our most valued stat again.

- - - Updated - - -

At the top of the post, i actually removed frost DW, and made unholy DW only.

Ah I missed that part, personally I like the idea behind it however I don't like unholy as the dw spec from a personal standpoint. I really think they need to make a blood dps spec, make frost the dw spec, and unholy can stay as is with some tweaks. They wanted 2H frost to fill that void from taking blood dps out with the big number crits however I truly think giving dk's back blood dps could fix some of the issues of balancing frost. The subspec idea has been absolutely terrible, especially this expansion.

[Schizoide]

depends on which sub spec shiira and we are only that way due to ams soaking.

That's not really true. It's very easy to sim this. For a best case scenario, here's T16N 2H frost. T16H would have more haste, and DW has less free GCDs than 2H.

T16N 2H Frost w/ AMS soaking: 0.50% wait time
T16N 2H Frost w/o AMS soaking: 2.41% wait time

Note that anything under 10% wait time is effectively GCD-locked, as it means you have less than 1s free every 10s. AMS soaking is worth 2% total DPS but it doesn't change free GCDs in any meaningful way.