The Fundamental Problem With Death Knights

[Rhaxus]

I think Death Knight would be cool if he was "melee caster". My idea is that he would have to "channel" his strikes for a short time before hitting strong attack. Of course, it would be castable while moving.

interesting way to create the "slow but hard hitting" feel but i'd prefer this to be a ranged variation instead. swinging/channeling the sword on the move to blast enemies from range with diseases/ spells

[matrix123mko]

interesting way to create the "slow but hard hitting" feel but i'd prefer this to be a ranged variation instead. swinging/channeling the sword on the move to blast enemies from range with diseases/ spells

Sounds weird for a knight but I like it.

[Rhaxus]

Death Knights' identity was being "the anti-Mage". For some reason, though, they've veered away from that... and I'm really not quite sure why.

probably to ensure the niche was empty for DH :|

[Casterbridge]

it's not about the actual mechanics, but the fantasy behind it: lots of fast, small cuts are a more logical means of applying diseases and sores than giant 2h Sword Swings and vice-versa having a spec with "obliterate" and "nothing but the boots" in its flavour would make a lot more sense with a massive 2h-weapon instead of swinging two swords around

The fantasy of UH is directly tied to Arthas and his visuals, all the way from WCIII, more than either Frost or Blood so I'm not sure why people keep trying to play this game of it making more sense to be the dual wield spec. I can understand if someone would like the visual for dual wield for UH, but stop acting like it makes more sense, it doesn't, it's simply an opinion. Personally, I like the visual of being a powerful warrior wielding a 2 handed sword, casting dark magic, and summoning the dead.

Grant it mechanically they need to work the spec mechanics. As mentioned elsewhere damage is far too passive at the moment. There should be better interaction with our pets and diseases, plus more work done on our actual melee strikes.

I also agree with the comment they really need to make dual wield a visual option, and maybe even vice versa, I kind of find the idea of playing a combat rogue, with a two-hander intriguing, or a survival hunter dual-wielding axes etc.

[Claymore]

The fantasy of UH is directly tied to Arthas and his visuals, all the way from WCIII, more than either Frost or Blood so I'm not sure why people keep trying to play this game of it making more sense to be the dual wield spec. I can understand if someone would like the visual for dual wield for UH, but stop acting like it makes more sense, it doesn't, it's simply an opinion. Personally, I like the visual of being a powerful warrior wielding a 2 handed sword, casting dark magic, and summoning the dead.

Grant it mechanically they need to work the spec mechanics. As mentioned elsewhere damage is far too passive at the moment. There should be better interaction with our pets and diseases, plus more work done on our actual melee strikes.

I also agree with the comment they really need to make dual wield a visual option, and maybe even vice versa, I kind of find the idea of playing a combat rogue, with a two-hander intriguing, or a survival hunter dual-wielding axes etc.

I dunno; Arthas has always been a bit of an amalgamation of all three specs (less Blood than the other two). WC3 Death Knights definitely draw more inspiration from Unholy, but Arthas has always been associated with ice and frost -- hence, many people see him as the fundamental "Frost" DK, especially when he was presented as more of a "warrior in the forefront of combat", which has never really been Unholy's style.

Ultimately, much like most NPC's for whom classes are based on, Arthas is kind of the "omni-spec DK". But I think, by and large, most people would associate him most with Frost. He generally fought one-on-one, used big, powerful hits, spent his days sitting upon the Frozen Throne, in a region called Icecrown, on the continent of Northrend, wielding a sword named Frostmourne.

[Thraenduil]

List of problems:

• Dw vs 2hander
• movement
• utility
• overall image

Now let's try to tackle some of them.

Regarding weapons, they could leave it to players to choose what weapon to use, giving option to dw or use 2- handers. If white damage is not important, what matters is on-hit- effects and your own preference.
If you are not fast enough, you get hit by raid mechanics. This depends on encounter and your role in it. This problem is not constant if you know your way around. Then being little slower is no big deal.
I admit that all specs getting Gorefiend is a good first step. Next could be Raise Dead, making all Dks have their own off-tank pet with different purposes. If Blood were to switch aggro back and forth with their pet, it could be interesting.
Original Dks in lore were created as a counter for mages, like Teron Gorefiend. Arthas wasn't created like this, he was corrupted by Lich King through Frostmourne. All his abilities come from it. There is no info about the abilities of original Dks, so we have pretty open canvas to picture on how the current dks should be. No one is wrong or right about this for now.

[EskwyreX]

Would like to see Unholy become a spec that's built around building up a big disease (read: necrotic plague) and then unleash it upon your targets through a big ST dot or a smaller AoE dot placed on your ghoul and yourself (akin to Epidemic/fire nova for Enh back in MoP/WoD). Now, how you build that disease? I'm not really a game designer but I guess i'd do it through applying and then siphoning a dot or wounds off the target maybe like this.

Festering Strike to apply wounds/dot
Scourge Strike to pop and siphon off the wounds into your disease
Death coil to spend RP and add additional damage to your disease
Stack Necrotic plague up to a fictional number being 100 stacks? Use necrotic plague on the target to apply a huge dot or to apply an aoe pulsing dot around you and your ghoul both doing damage to the same target.

CDs could be Unholy Frenzy which still gives haste but powers up wounds to apply additional damage to your disease. Army doesn't change.

[FrostyK]

what are you saying, there literally was a dk in the world first kill of the last boss.

frost dk represent!

[Androsobi]

FROST
I think it's safe to say at this point that most dislike Dual Wielding for Death Knights because it simply just doesn't fulfill the fantasy and the overwhelming requests to bring 2H back that continue to be ignored is saddening.

Frost has also continued to suffer from scaling issues and the always ends up needed constant band-aid touch ups as the expansion progresses as we've seen. It really needs to be re-designed from the ground up. Only one viable talent build for 2 expansion in a row is also pretty bland and testament to the specializations lack of depth.
(

I completely agree! 2H Frost would be great!

[Kaver]

FROST
I think it's safe to say at this point that most dislike Dual Wielding for Death Knights because it simply just doesn't fulfill the fantasy and the overwhelming requests to bring 2H back that continue to be ignored is saddening.

Frost has also continued to suffer from scaling issues and the always ends up needed constant band-aid touch ups as the expansion progresses as we've seen. It really needs to be re-designed from the ground up. Only one viable talent build for 2 expansion in a row is also pretty bland and testament to the specializations lack of depth.

I want frost to be 2h. I would probably go back to my DK as my main if frost became 2h.

However, I can't help looking back at WOD. As I remember it, most Frost DKs were playing dual wielding in WOD because it had the best performance. So in the end, it still seems like people are valuing performance higher than class fantasy anyway. I could remember wrong though.

[faithbane]

I dunno; Arthas has always been a bit of an amalgamation of all three specs (less Blood than the other two). WC3 Death Knights definitely draw more inspiration from Unholy, but Arthas has always been associated with ice and frost -- hence, many people see him as the fundamental "Frost" DK, especially when he was presented as more of a "warrior in the forefront of combat", which has never really been Unholy's style.

Ultimately, much like most NPC's for whom classes are based on, Arthas is kind of the "omni-spec DK". But I think, by and large, most people would associate him most with Frost. He generally fought one-on-one, used big, powerful hits, spent his days sitting upon the Frozen Throne, in a region called Icecrown, on the continent of Northrend, wielding a sword named Frostmourne.

If you actually played Arthas in WC3, you would know pretty well why people associated Arthas more with unholy. His appearance + unholy desecrated ground/building animations reeked of diseases. 3 of his abilties were unholy based - death coil, unholy aura, raise dead + 1 "Blood" based I guess and nothing in terms of frost.

People that you associate more as "wrath-babies" will associate Arthas/LK with frost because of how it played out in that expansions and his many on snow appearance and frost based spells in combat. Before wrath, it wasn't even cannon that death knights can wield frost based powers, a weapon having frost in its name to having frost powers is an extreme stretch Play wc3 from beginning to the end and Arthas won't use a single frost spell the entire game.

The scourge hero who had frost spells in WC3 was the lich.

[Alaenore]

WotLK ended with DW.
Cataclysm had DW better than 2H.
MoP was the same.
Again, same with WoD.

Most frost DK spent more time playing dual wield than 2h, even in LK, and just a vocal minority asks for 2h (me included).

As for "only 1 spec is viable", maybe don't blindly follow guides and experiment things outside of BoS? Plenty of other specs are more than competitive (~0.5% dps variance) with no "fuck I got a mechanic during BoS" downside.
Reminds me of Nighthold when people "realized" Obliteration wasn't actually trash even before BoS was nerfed.

[Papzer]

I don't know which expansion was it, but I really liked doing pvp with 2h frost (that was when we had necrotic strike, and desecration too, so probably cataclysm?), but for pve I always preferred dual wielding. So I prefer having both.
DW is just a core part of death knights, or the death knight fantasy, whichever you like, so thanks, but removing it would be just dumb.

Plenty of other specs are more than competitive (~0.5% dps variance).

That's just simply not true.

[Alaenore]

I don't know which expansion was it, but I really liked doing pvp with 2h frost (that was when we had necrotic strike, and desecration too, so probably cataclysm?), but for pve I always preferred dual wielding. So I prefer having both.
DW is just a core part of death knights, or the death knight fantasy, whichever you like, so thanks, but removing it would be just dumb.



That's just simply not true.

I liked the 2h "Obliteration almost one shotted that warlock" DK and I think that was Cataclysm yes?

As for DPS and sims, i'll send you a message (which I cannot because I don't have ten posts, it'll have to wait D: ).

Edit :
Got the BoS gear from one of the top Sivara parse. Matched the amount of gems and switched a few azerite, upgraded ilevels of a few pieces and reduced those of others to roughly match the ilevel), then gave the real gearset the best stuff to compare it against others.
As I can't post links yet, just add raidbots domain before.

- BoS : /simbot/report/mxEw8hTaf7EvTQxmR9QDos (100% dps)
- Obliteration : /simbot/report/2fwPXnhqvzrb4G3m9ahWuE (99.27% dps)
- Icecap (gear ~equivalent to the BoS one) : /simbot/report/jdM3emxHVpwk3hJcW2NUvQ (100.09% dps, actually a dps increase)
- BoS (profile from before, 445 chest + Za'qul weapon) : /simbot/report/nyrnd2kCt684aeib8DsCPN (102.05% dps)
- Obliteration (445 Za'qul chest) : /simbot/report/k6i2SWvVwbGvfwhGDCVvKC (97.98% dps)
- Icecap (445 chest) : /simbot/report/pToXtY51TjJYS7eYmoMABb (101.27% dps)

As you can see in current essence levels and against the gear of one of the best DPS on Sivara, both Obliteration and Icecap can be competitive, and could probably even be a dps increase depending on your available gear. The DPS variance is < 1% for Icecap, ~2% for obliteration in roughly bis gear.

Which, again, makes them more than competitive, with different gameplays, stats scaling similar to other classes (~6.1 for crit in Icecap for instance), and does not have BoS drawback, aka "I can't do mechanics or i'll lose all my dps !§"

Another icecap : /simbot/report/siDkVtZX4pUg1bbkpJydb6 (102.37% dps, the highest so far.)

[NihilBE]

Hello,

My concerns with the DPS's specs of the DK are:

- Weakness of the DPS outside the burst windows granted by the major DPS cooldowns (I would suggest to reduce the dps of the major cd and to increase the dps of other abilities).
- Directly linked to the first point: the weakness of the damage abilities like OB, FS,...Dots and melee hits are too high imho and in particular when playing a DW class with almost no haste.
- Mobility: should be trade for higher dps but it's not the case, see point 1.
- Class design/gameplay: no major updates for ages now.
- Recurrent issues to see this class scale with iLevel compared with other classes (is that difficult to add some frost damages to Obliterate? or something similar)
- Utility in MM+: but I think that it's probably some other classes/specs that have too strong utilities (why not a BL debuff on shroud?).

That being said, I've recently switch to a fury warrior. The DPS is not the major element of my decision, it's a matter of having fun. When I play my DK (main since LK), I'm bored by the slow gameplay with that one "hour" GCD, in open world I feel so slow to kill mobs in both spec's, so weak compared to the fury (how can a fury warrior be so resistant, produce such self heal?). And also, can someone explain me why when I hit something with a 2H, I hear a "whooosh" like I strike the wind?

If I had the opportunity to give my opinion on how to address these issues, I would probably suggest to look back at the talent trees/gameplay of WotLK (but I must admit I would be happy to trade the Frost DPS spec with the Blood one).

[Gastromancer]

Sadly I agree with Javelin. Maining Blood DK since MoP, and recently moving over towards Prot Pally, its miles of difference. Even being 400 as opposed to 425, the speed and DPS are miles apart.

[mvpness]

i agree there

[Lex Icon]

give dk's a shadowstep like ability. i'd even be willing to trade death grip for it.

[Papzer]

give dk's a shadowstep like ability. i'd even be willing to trade death grip for it.

Nah. The game needs less (fewer?) movement skills, not more.
DK movement is fine as it is, the problem is that blizz went overboard with the other classes.

[Lex Icon]

Nah. The game needs less (fewer?) movement skills, not more.
DK movement is fine as it is, the problem is that blizz went overboard with the other classes.

yeah and i doubt they would remove such things from other specs so maybe it's just time for dk's to get with the times.