Please notice Frost DK's blizzard

[Greengrim]

Regardless of the situation, in WotLK, DW was always better than 2H, even if 2H had shadowmourne.

2H had burst but after that you had 0 killing machine procs and the talents lined up better for DW...

The discussion was concerning DKs during Cataclysm, not WotLK.

[Heartlessnobody]

what if frost had an execute back via soul reaper

frost needs it traits from the artifact back or obit n co need massive buffs so it feels like we are doing dps

[Trunganh1131]

I think people waste a lot for Frost boring. Just leave the fingertips wasting the most time. Most people complain about the wound mechanism, although the repair is completely fine

[tru]

Good luck is all I can say. I parked mine with legion after 6 years. Just hope 9.0 does something for the class as a whole and don't worry about it now. Your not going to get some mid expac rework like a warlock. And any and all band-aid fixes they have done for dks have proven to last what a couple weeks. They are vastly out scaled. I've had sick a hard time picking a main since legion launch. BfA only further shows they don't care about the class.

[Ange]

BfA only further shows they don't care about the class.

There is zero chance for a warlock/rogue treatment like we got the last 4+ years, with allways overtuned specs and on top of that with broken and allways positive mechanics to exploit even further without any fixes.

It is clear what classes the DEV's play and what classes are just a row in a spreadsheet. The old "DEV's playing problematics classes to understand issues" is long gone, at least since WoD and nothing even points to any changes in the near future.

We can hope for unintended buffs for the Death Knight class in form of untested powers/raidencounters/aurabuffs but to hope for anything else is just unrealistic.

Just remember what LEGION, the whole expansion had for this class - staring with 3 undertuned specs, broken-useless legendarys followed by the extinction of the whole class before the last raid tier even started and lead to a massive overbuffing for frost for the last few months - to late, even with forced grip-utility into the last raidtier, there was just nobody left playing the class anymore. Progression guilds had to bring ALT's to do the DK gimmick encounters, since the class was basicly dead midLEGION.

[cordrann]

There is zero chance for a warlock/rogue treatment like we got the last 4+ years, with allways overtuned specs and on top of that with broken and allways positive mechanics to exploit even further without any fixes.

It is clear what classes the DEV's play and what classes are just a row in a spreadsheet. The old "DEV's playing problematics classes to understand issues" is long gone, at least since WoD and nothing even points to any changes in the near future.

We can hope for unintended buffs for the Death Knight class in form of untested powers/raidencounters/aurabuffs but to hope for anything else is just unrealistic.

Just remember what LEGION, the whole expansion had for this class - staring with 3 undertuned specs, broken-useless legendarys followed by the extinction of the whole class before the last raid tier even started and lead to a massive overbuffing for frost for the last few months - to late, even with forced grip-utility into the last raidtier, there was just nobody left playing the class anymore. Progression guilds had to bring ALT's to do the DK gimmick encounters, since the class was basicly dead midLEGION.

This is just objectively false. Frost was very strong in nightwell. Blood was also quite good in tomb and antorus.

[Flykz]

We can hope for unintended buffs for the Death Knight class in form of untested powers/raidencounters/aurabuffs but to hope for anything else is just unrealistic.

This is exactly what is happening, but I fear there will be a hard nerf on the new neck traits.

This is just objectively false. Frost was very strong in nightwell. Blood was also quite good in tomb and antorus.

Blood was very well overall in legion (exept first tier), but there aren't many tank specs in the game, and they all somewhat worked during legion.

As for frost and unholy, if you pick a class like rogue/warlock and compare the number of times when it is shit/low/middle/good/god tier, it's just ridiculous. And on top of that rogues have cloaks, warlocks have portals.

[shise]

At this point, I think it is obvious that certain forgotten specs are not going to have a chance til next expansion. Probably in the last patch of this expansion, the pre"name of next expansion here" patch.

8.2 looks like one of the best patches in the last 8/9 years. The last patch of this expansion, so chances are that they are already, or will soon start tuning classes and specs towards the next expansion. I really don´t see them working them out before that. Not just DK but all.

[Trumpcat]

It is extremely hard for me to agree with your second part, while you certaintly are entilted to your opinion, it doesn't change the fact that some people play the game strictly for the sake of performing better than others. Yes the game is meant to be fun, but that feeling of being better at your class than others is a different reward in itself. There are times where I relentlessly grinded to hit Gladiator and I'd get really frustrated at losing to a mirror comp where the other DK is performing better than me... Some of us play only for PvP to satisfy that competitive drive in us. When I was permanently removed from sports due to severe injuries, I needed to compete elsewhere, WoW pvp was the perfect environment for me and while there are times it wasn't fun, the rewards and lessons I learned from constantly working harder and understanding the class better through better players was the best part. By no means am I Gladiator or rank 1 caliber player, but knowing that I face them frequently in matches because I'm playing at that level feels a lot better than facing Challenger level players while only playing for fun. Bottom line is, there's more than one way of having fun in this game, and some people have fun by striving to be better than others at their class.

Compliments for this well put opinion. The competitive aspect of WoW is made better by players who strive to be better and who respect and learn from others who are above their level.

And sorry to read about the injuries. As someone in similar position, although hoping it won't be permanent, I can very much sympathize with that.

[Ambrosios]

If you play the class well its not a boring or bad class. Cold Heart and Breath of Sindragosa require resource/CD management, I even have a Turnip Punching Bag to place on someone once rooted for Chill Streak which ends up doing 24-30% total health damage. I enjoy the aspect of slows and roots except when you play against a class that has unlimited cc breaks, although we get to root people for eternity as long as we have runes so its a balanced trade off I guess. Damage one on one might not be great but if you play smart you can manage to do a lot. Frost dks are great for letting nobody escape which is important when it comes to teamfights in PVP, a warrior might not be able to catch up with their enemies on his own but with a frost dk he most certainly will. Nothing beats pulling an enemy healer into your team, immediately rooting it and having your entire team nuke them. It might be a little far fetched what I'm about to say, but I'm convinced that anyone who complains about frost DK playstyle aren't playing their characters correctly or don't understand the balance a class needs. The only thing I would change about the class would be some extra haste for less downtime. maybe give Soul Reaper to all specs and have the haste gain depend on runes/RP spend during Soul Reaper duration instead of exp/honor gain from kill.

[Coughee]

Compliments for this well put opinion. The competitive aspect of WoW is made better by players who strive to be better and who respect and learn from others who are above their level.

And sorry to read about the injuries. As someone in similar position, although hoping it won't be permanent, I can very much sympathize with that.

I genuinely appreciate it and thank you for your kind words Unfortunately, my ankle injury is only saveable through surgery which I do not plan to do, as basketball is no longer a legitimate dream to pursue.

- - - Updated - - -

If you play the class well its not a boring or bad class. Cold Heart and Breath of Sindragosa require resource/CD management, I even have a Turnip Punching Bag to place on someone once rooted for Chill Streak which ends up doing 24-30% total health damage. I enjoy the aspect of slows and roots except when you play against a class that has unlimited cc breaks, although we get to root people for eternity as long as we have runes so its a balanced trade off I guess. Damage one on one might not be great but if you play smart you can manage to do a lot. Frost dks are great for letting nobody escape which is important when it comes to teamfights in PVP, a warrior might not be able to catch up with their enemies on his own but with a frost dk he most certainly will. Nothing beats pulling an enemy healer into your team, immediately rooting it and having your entire team nuke them. It might be a little far fetched what I'm about to say, but I'm convinced that anyone who complains about frost DK playstyle aren't playing their characters correctly or don't understand the balance a class needs. The only thing I would change about the class would be some extra haste for less downtime. maybe give Soul Reaper to all specs and have the haste gain depend on runes/RP spend during Soul Reaper duration instead of exp/honor gain from kill.

It isn't so much that the class is bad, that isn't a concern of mine at all. It is more of the fact that the predictability of the class even before GCD is what makes it easy to deal with. Grinding rating is not an issue, I comfortably play within duelist range, but that is only doable as Unholy. Warriors have a lot more to offer for their team than DKs, it is too easy to trade cooldowns with DKs and in terms of resource management with breath... Yeah... That doesn't really go far in high rated arena honestly, it is ridiculously easy to completely lock you out through those big cooldowns. Unless you're willing to trade IBF and AMS as well to ensure your full damage potential to come out, but it isn't worth the trade as you'll surely die afterwards if you didn't get the kill.. I'm just rambling at this point, but the issue stands that the class's main source of damage is dots only, and that doesn't go far in high rated arena for me at least. Overall, the playstyle is just way too slow with limited to no flexibility of trying different things, it is very demoralizing being locked in to one set of talents that every frost dk has to run in hopes of achieving mediocrity in PvP.

[Biomega]

that doesn't go far in high rated arena for me at least.

I understand your predicament - but isn't it a lit Utopian to be asking that every spec of every class be competitive in high-rated arena? It's the same with high-end PvE, asking that every spec of every class should be competitive at mythic raiding is not a reasonable demand.

It sucks for the people playing those specs/classes to be sure, but I don't see a realistic way of changing it without sweeping homogenization or fundamental changes to how PvP works at the basic level. The latter of which would tbh be nice and likely to solve a lot of problems, but is counter to Blizz's main concern: keeping the mediocre majority happy, and able to just jump into PvP any time and any which way they want to. The high end of the rating spectrum is much less important, because metas gonna meta anyway and the people genuinely upset about the balance problems (like you) are unfortunately a minority that Blizzard has a long history of ignoring

In short, it's just not worth the investment for Blizzard to bring PvP balance to where people like you would be happy with it; and so it's unlikely to happen. What's more likely is that balances will shift in the future due to various things like class/spec changes, and you may incidentally find yourself back in a better place. Or not. Who knows, really. That's a very unfortunate situation, but like the people who enjoyed, say, Subtlety Rogue in PvE and just can't play it to any appreciable level now in mythic you have to live with it. There's simply too many specs and too many classes to make everything reliably balanced.

[loanel]

We can beat this dead horse over and over again, blizzard is just braindead when it comes to frost dk.

Every. Single. Expansion. We are fucked because of how our mastery and obliterate works. Every time we scale like dogshit because obliterate, the attack that APPARENTLY is supposed to be our rune damage dealer, doesn't benefit from mastery at all. That's why every single fucking expansion something like a breath build comes up and overtakes anything else the spec can do. Then Blizz always does some rebalance that SOMEHOW increases the base damage of obliterate, or they add some stupid passive that lets obliterate scale from mastery just a little bit, while nerfing the breath/other build. Then the class works again, we are happy, next expansion hits, and we are fucked again because they remove the passive that was fixing us in the middle of the last expansion.

They'll never fucking fix it. They have a boner to make frost the RUNIC POWER dps spec while unholy is based on runes. Problem is they have no fucking clue how to properly do it.

[Th3Scourge]

We can beat this dead horse over and over again, blizzard is just braindead when it comes to frost dk.

Every. Single. Expansion. We are fucked because of how our mastery and obliterate works. Every time we scale like dogshit because obliterate, the attack that APPARENTLY is supposed to be our rune damage dealer, doesn't benefit from mastery at all. That's why every single fucking expansion something like a breath build comes up and overtakes anything else the spec can do. Then Blizz always does some rebalance that SOMEHOW increases the base damage of obliterate, or they add some stupid passive that lets obliterate scale from mastery just a little bit, while nerfing the breath/other build. Then the class works again, we are happy, next expansion hits, and we are fucked again because they remove the passive that was fixing us in the middle of the last expansion. They'll never fucking fix it.

I don't know about you but Frost was boss in Antorus. It was actually incredibly fun to play as well, not like what we have now

[loanel]

I don't know about you but Frost was boss in Antorus. It was actually incredibly fun to play as well, not like what we have now

Yea, but remember what they did before antorus came out? They made a giant fucking rework of damage values, in nighthold EVERYONE was playing breath, then coming into either ToS or Antorus, don't remember now, they rebalanced values of every single FDK ability (i think it was a blanket 30% buff on everything except breath, and they reworked how hungering rune weapon worked) AND they added the passive impale with crystaline swords when obliterating (named thronebreaker i believe), which effectively gave obliterate frost damage. Then expansion rolls in and whoop-de-fucking-do, they removed everything.

The usual cycle before they removed the option to two hand was something like this:
patch1) you don't have a lot of stats, so two hand edges out dual wield
patch2) you start getting more stats from items, both options even out
patch3) you have a ton of stats, dual wield outscales two handers hard, blizz either buffs something with two handers or leaves everything be

In legion they made frost dual wield only, but guess what? They remade the dual wield into the fucking two hander playstyle (7.0.3 killing machine only works on obliterate). So now the Killing Machine mechanic revolves around Obliterate only, which was good only when you had a two hander. Now the obliterate is dogshit and you scale like with a two hander in earlier expansions, so blizz has to change us in every patch to make the spec work properly. Amazing design.

[LCDArcade]

I've played frost as my main spec every expansion...well with the exception of this one simply because I didn't play BFA...like at all lol and it has ALWAYS been the hardest to balance and hardest to maintain from a design standpoint. Unholy was the best at the end of Wrath, cata, MoP, and WOD. For some reason they refuse to actually redesign the spec and continue to just let its core flaws exist and just band-aid it every patch.

Also FUCK DW...I have no idea why they thought restricting it was a good idea. Unholy should of been the DW spec lol.

[Kaver]

Seriously man, why are you still playing DK or even reading this forum ? You've been complaining about Frost dk ever since Legion came out (?) It gets tiresome you know...
And most importantly about that bolded part, why do you care so much about a distinction between good and great frost DKs ? You're doing it wrong. You're not playing WoW to have fun. You just want to play the game just for the sake of doing better than everyone. You're not doing WoW a service by stomping on every other DKs. In a sense, if you continue to have to mindset, then blizzard did the right thing by making this game more simple than before.

It's no wonder why the DK's community is toxic right now.

No! Just No! YOU (and your type of people) are the problem. Not RuneDK. Wanting to do well and better than other people is not toxic behavior. It’ a good thing to have a competitive mindset. It helps you to become better. It’s completely okay if you settle for mediocrity by being a bland average person that gets lost in the crowd, but don’t call other people toxic just because they have higher ambitions than you.

A lot of people think competition is fun. Have your heard about sports? Of course trying to be better than other people is important. And IT IS FUN. Competition is fun. Playing a game where you can’t improve by effort and get better than others is pointless. I think the REAL TOXIC BEHAVIOR comes from people with weak mindsets that wants everybody to be the same!

[Gib Lover]

Love to quote 4 month old posts asking if they've heard about sports

[RuneDK]

No! Just No! YOU (and your type of people) are the problem. Not RuneDK. Wanting to do well and better than other people is not toxic behavior. It’ a good thing to have a competitive mindset. It helps you to become better. It’s completely okay if you settle for mediocrity by being a bland average person that gets lost in the crowd, but don’t call other people toxic just because they have higher ambitions than you.

A lot of people think competition is fun. Have your heard about sports? Of course trying to be better than other people is important. And IT IS FUN. Competition is fun. Playing a game where you can’t improve by effort and get better than others is pointless. I think the REAL TOXIC BEHAVIOR comes from people with weak mindsets that wants everybody to be the same!

uh thanks...haha..

[Raiz]

No! Just No! YOU (and your type of people) are the problem. Not RuneDK. Wanting to do well and better than other people is not toxic behavior. It’ a good thing to have a competitive mindset. It helps you to become better. It’s completely okay if you settle for mediocrity by being a bland average person that gets lost in the crowd, but don’t call other people toxic just because they have higher ambitions than you.

A lot of people think competition is fun. Have your heard about sports? Of course trying to be better than other people is important. And IT IS FUN. Competition is fun. Playing a game where you can’t improve by effort and get better than others is pointless. I think the REAL TOXIC BEHAVIOR comes from people with weak mindsets that wants everybody to be the same!

Nothing wrong with being competitive. I'm very competitive myself (Used to play starcraft 1 and 2 semi professionaly, and playing Tennis goodly enough to be able to coach next year). Thing is, there are a lot of people who associate it with being a jerk towards the others players (like "lol how can you play so bad, you're doing way less DPS than my alt and i'm even less geared than you, get a life bruh").

Maybe I'm not being objective, but EVERYTIME I've been playing with a DK, they were either a jerk or complete noob. Nothing inbetween. And when I was playing my own BDK, there was this one time I could remember as if that was yesterday, where this idiot said that his son did better DPS than me when he had absolutely no clues about how leveling works (it was when BFA just came out). He kept telling me how bad I was at surviving dungeons when I was like lvl 118 or 119 compared to his son's lvl 112 or 113.

Again, I like the competitiveness, but not the constant gloomy's attitude he's been putting everytime he's playing his DK. It's depressing when you're reading his posts .