Why the nerf on DKs?

[Greengrim]

No idea what discord you are following....
The nerfs are live today in beta. 2 hand obliteration is as of this stage dead. It will be playable for people that dont care about performance and want to look cool.. yay! They reverted the nerf of the best legendary, but reducing the uptime of obliteration by 40% an reducing the damage of obliterate by 25% burried the build. That build was A tier for single target fights yes. But As soon as you add second target or cleave situations breath of sindragosa become top again. It was fun to have 2 equal in power builds for different situations. It feels like blizzard just looked at pvp and the bursts dks could do with 15+k obliterates, or the damage metter where obliterate was 40-45% of our overall damage... aaand just "balanced that sh*t out".. Obliterate was the flavour of our spec.. now with all the legendaries/conduits and stuff. its just slightly stronger than frost strike. (on prepatch is weaker than frost strike...) There was nothing wrong to make a build around one ability (look at frost mage and their icelance!!) . Pillar of frost nerf needs to be reverted. 1 min cd unsync-ed our cooldowns. If obliterate damage nerf stays.. other abilities need to get buffed so the consistant damage gameplay is still valuable. Most of the dk players dont like breath of syndragosa gameplay. We want obliteration build that is competitive.

Nerfing the core of the build only because it will rely on borrowed power later is just wrong. Its wrong because its immposible to balance 3 borrowed power systems at once.. ..good luck with that.
From what ive observed from alpha till now, playing and testing.. blizzard burried them self in such a hole and now trying to get out but its too late.
All the dk changes they made feel like 1 step forward 2 steps back.
Just look at unholy dk.... still broken gameplay.. They started fixing stuff and ended up breaking it even more than what it was in bfa. And the main reason i feel is like... they just dont want to listen to the community and trying to think of something new and original. People wanted 2 simple spells off gcd to fix our long opener. Their solution was to add an useless aoe effect to one of them.. and delete the other from the game.... Nice.
They added 4 wounds to unholy frenzy that noone wanted only because in their head its a smooth gameplay options to apply 4 wounds and burst them str8 after with apocalypse. You can witness with that change that blizzard dont play the classes. You need to delay unholy frenzy by 1-2 seconds after you press apocalypse, because the ghouls take 2-3 seconds to raise up from the ground and start hitting target. So u delay UA so they can benefit fully from the haste. All we wanted is the original unholy frenzy off the gcd .. same with recklessness and pillar and bunch of other short duration buffs in the game.. but no.
So yeah.. the sky is falling for a lot of us.. if we are forced to play broken cl till the end of the expansion.

Awesome reply, thanks!

[Unholyground]

They are still very much in a good place. The only thing they need to do now is create 2h versions of all the runeforge effects that need it.

[Rhonen]

For whomever said it, I don't think it's so much that Breath isn't cool, it's just that it shouldn't be the only viable choice for performance. It's a big cd, and not everyone enjoys that play style.

[Draken4o1]

I assume all the nerfs, tuning changes are for level 60 endgame so for those with Beta access, those dks who are level 60 who have unlocked the 2nd rank of obliteration, the rank that allows Obliterate to do frost damage, how are Frost dks at 60? Are the oblit build, icecap and breath build closer to another? Do frost dks still feel underwhelming at level 60 (because they sure do in pre-patch)?

Talking about pve...
icecap is dead talent. What made it playable in 8.3 was the corruption, frostwhelps and icy citadel. WIthout those its not playble. And now even more so with pillar nerf.
Breath is fine. Currently best spec. (again....)
Obliteration was like 2-5% ahead of breath of sidragosa in pure single target pre nerf. As soon as you add any cleave to the fight Breath was still better.
If the recent nerfs stay, we expect to see buff of all other abilities so the obliteration playstile remain viable.

[Razorice]

Just play Unholy

[Bisque]

Aye without the frost whelps and icy citadel you would figure that icecap would once again go dead. But from what you are saying it seems like frost dks are okay-ish at level 60. It feels really bad/underwhelming to play frost dk now but if everything works out, gets better at level 60 then we can endure.

[Reignfire]

That feeling when people quote Frost DK being listed as A tier in rankings, and not understanding why classes get ranked in their perspective decision. They rank way outside of just DPS, and Frost get a big utility boost, same as Demon Hunters:

"Their damage itself is competitive, but their main usefulness comes from Death Grip Icon Death Grip and Anti-Magic Zone Icon Anti-Magic Zone. There are three bosses this tier where Death Grip will be extremely important, but Anti-Magic Zone is one of the strongest defensive abilities that raids will have. It is really hard to understate just how effective AMZ can be if used correctly, especially for Sire Denathrius."

Damage being BoS cleave. So no not really great, just reliant again on keeping BoS running as long as humanly possible. I'm not being negative just trying to point out the flaws with quoting Icy's DPS rankings.

[me4again]

i dont consider us nerfed, maybe relatively in pvp. but from a blood DK player i definitely feel very strong in pve.