How are DKs in the new expansion

[Ellekene]

I stopped playin after legion and tel me i wanna know

[faithbane]

I stopped playin after legion and tel me i wanna know

come back and suffer well with the rest of us..

DKs are not a favored class by the devs who try their best to ruin the fun at every opportunity for a long time now.. on top of this DK players happen to be one of the least whiney playerbase in the game which makes it a lot less likely that we would get noticed and receive a buff.

If you have a look at general and class forums on the official site and compare how quickly some classes receive "Fixes" or gets buffed to top of the lists, it will directly correspond with the volume of cries..

[Raugnaut]

Blood is considered to be one of the better tanks for ALL content. Mostly because of Gorefiends.

Unholy/Frost were middle of the pack last I checked.

As for playstyle itself? Eh. Blood is a bit slow now without Artifact, and more squishy without all the bonuses the Artifact had. Talents are a bit of a mess.

[ro9ue]

Total garbage imo.

[Marrilaife]

If you wanna dps do yourself a favour and play demonhunter or rogue. That are the only favourite children of Blizzard in the melee camp in bfa.

If you wanna tank dk is okay but got nerfed in 8.1, used to be really strong in 8.0 but less so now.

[Shelly]

DK is doing alright as a tank.

DPS wise though it's very middle of the pack and probably will remain so until the next tier when they can actually gain significant percentages of secondary stats. Right now there's really no natural boost to one stat or another to push a DK towards a specific track and without that boost all secondary stat scaling is just bad. It seems to take a lot more stat just to reach a percentage point for a DK than it does for either my warrior or monk.

If you can turn the damage meter off though and just play the playstyle isn't that bad - at least for Blood and Unholy - for Unholy especially there are some specific talents you can take that make you pretty amazing for fights that have just a crap ton of adds. Shame though that if you have a DPS meter and there's a Havoc DH in the group that's not fondling their scrotum all they need are two GCDs to wreck shit that takes you twice as long for less damage.

[msdos]

Compared to Legion, basically we lost our ability to be top 3 raid DPS for the ability to not be a broken tank and have a very solid and fun PVP spec.

The blood talents and azerite traits are laughable. You could pick no talents but Bonestorm and not even see that much of a difference. The traits are just generic "deal some damage, get some haste".
Unholy's best traits are passive strength gains.
Frost I have no idea as I'm not trying Frost this expansion because Blizzfart has given up on it completely.

[ztm38841]

Play anything else but DK - we hit rock bottom. And when i interpret it right, we will receive even a nerf next patch.

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[seasy]

Blood is considered to be one of the better tanks for ALL content. Mostly because of Gorefiends.

Unholy/Frost were middle of the pack last I checked.

As for playstyle itself? Eh. Blood is a bit slow now without Artifact, and more squishy without all the bonuses the Artifact had. Talents are a bit of a mess.

Blood is kinda dogshit now compared to prot warr and prot pala and monks.
Blood just gets shit on high keys.

[Greengrim]

I find UH fairly fun. At least I have more than 3 buttons to press, unlike many other classes nowdays. I do play casually though, mainly PvP and sometimes M+ (mostly 10ish keys). UH can do quite decent in both fields, if you know what you're doing and have the right traits. The problem is they are not so preferred, so it's hard to find decent teams/groups to play with.

[Not A Cat]

Blood and UH don't feel too bad to play. Frost on the other hand feels pretty terrible. Breath of Sindragosa build is really the only viable one and it feels horrible to play since it's 20 seconds of burst and then a whole 2 minutes of waiting. It's a slower and less climactic fury warrior, and fury also performs better.

[Th3Scourge]

Blood and Unholy hold their own well. Frost pumps out some good burst AoE thanks to breath and frostwyrm but can't hold up to unholy's sustain. Blood is the king of M+ utility with two grips but lacks the DPS compared to Prot warriors. DPS specs lack the utility needed in high end keys when building a group composition and often loses out to other melee with similar or equal DPS but greater utility.

[Kendros]

Blood and Unholy hold their own well. Frost pumps out some good burst AoE thanks to breath and frostwyrm but can't hold up to unholy's sustain. Blood is the king of M+ utility with two grips but lacks the DPS compared to Prot warriors. DPS specs lack the utility needed in high end keys when building a group composition and often loses out to other melee with similar or equal DPS but greater utility.

You mean blood hold their own well, frost and UH are both close with UH pushing slightly ahead but both are bottom and subpar on dps than most specs.

[Raiz]

You mean blood hold their own well, frost and UH are both close with UH pushing slightly ahead but both are bottom and subpar on dps than most specs.

If we deleted the dps meters, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be here complaining.

[terminaltrip421]

I used to thoroughly enjoy frost, granted it might have been OP. now it feels like I'm swinging two nerf bats. this is why I chose to level every class though, it's been happening since TBC; just play the ones that are still fun. though it feels like a majority of the dps specs I play are under-powered. I'd swear that there was better balance in WoD (I quit legion after only leveling a DH to 120 so I can't speak to end-game play on anything else for legion.) like death knight demon hunter may remain GM for a few expansions and then get forgotten in favor of the next hero class.

[ashblond]

I played all 3 specs. And as people mentioned already, Blood is effective m+ and raid tank, unholy is Ok.

But across all the 3 specs, the rotations are boring, and the playstyle is really slow...

[Th3Scourge]

You mean blood hold their own well, frost and UH are both close with UH pushing slightly ahead but both are bottom and subpar on dps than most specs.

I'm mainly referring to M+, in raids we are making up the numbers

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/21

[Raelyn]

I really enjoy frost, but it does rely on decent gear and azerite traits. It offers excellent AoE damage (although on a 2min cd) and I find it much more enjoyable than unholy. Got battle res of course which can just about get you a spot for a group that doesn't have a druid or lock already.

[Moonsorrow]

I only play Blood in Raid or M+ and I'd consider it a very solid choice. Prior to 8.1 Blood was ridiculously overpowered, especially in M+.
Warrior seems to bring higher dps and therefore gets picked for very high keys. Compared to Brewmaster DK brings more utility for M+ and is needs to rely less on the healer as the self heal is still very strong.

In Raids DK is ok, but our strenghts' matter less then those of the other tanks, especially monks.

Our dps in raids is definitely bottom of the melees especially compared to rogues and DH.

[Tojara]

Blood takes too much damage and has virtually no Azerite system.

I wouldn't call blood ridiculously overpowered even prior to 8.1, it was a major symptom of community perception from Legion carrying over. The best tank in that era? Absolutely. Even if blood got zero nerfs in 8.1 and retained everything from 8.1, you would still see more warriors in high M+keys, just not to such a margin.

People are so heavily focused on mass grip as utility that it boggles my mind. I play both my warrior and DK in 18-20 keys, and outside of a few fringe cases, I vastly prefer warrior utility and rarely actually miss mass grip or single grip at all. It just makes you play LoS a bit more, which groups should be doing anyway. In most cases, it's a glorified 90 second disruption tool, much like leg sweep, intimidating shout, shock wave and ring of peace are used for.

Having to rely on a healer less is really a toss up, and currently I don't think that's the case at all. Sure blood has vastly superior HPS to every other tank, but that's at the cost of inferior defensive CDs generally, way less armor and no secondary source of defense. My warrior has close to 3k more passive armor than my DK, does 6k HPS (could be more if I actually found leech gear) with block and critical block eating up giant chunks of damage. This model allows efficient heals such as hots to work, allowing a healer to actually do damage in a run. Blood DKs currently heal a lot, but take way too much damage.

If our Azerite traits were half worthwhile these problems might vanish, but they currently are fucking putrid. It's absolutely retarded that they've flown under the radar or been ignored for this long. Blood is still fun to play, but fairly frustrating to play in M+ at the moment. It completely evolves around getting as much threat as possible in a short window, and proceeding to kite like crazy, which isn't that fun. Blood actually needs to heal more, or actually take less passive damage. My warrior on the other hand just face tanks shit, with kiting rarely needed at all (you still have to kite, or have disruption, but you can go nearly a minute with shield block being up before needing a short respite).

Guess we have to wait to see what the new neck system looks like in 8.2 and pray that we get something good to make up for a system that virtually every other class gets to use (Azerite traits). Right now blood is average in raids, and occupies the rung below warriors in M+ (which blood shares with monks and paladins).