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Upcoming 7.3 Changes to Frost Death Knight

posted 2017/07/14 at 7:31 PM by Squishei

Blizzard

The next PTR build should have a round of changes aimed at addressing various concerns with Frost. The major issues we're focused on are:

The spec is too dominated by Breath of Sindragosa (which has knock-on effects on talent choice throughout the tree).
Breath of Sindragosa, when you do use it, can be maintained for far too long. In addition to causing the talent/legendary lock-in around it, it means the demand for continuous time on target is very strict for extended periods of time.
The spec has many talents/legendaries that (individually or taken together) flood it with resources. Breath contributes to this by encouraging you to take all of them, but it's also a problem on its own.
Talent balance generally has to be reviewed, especially after addressing all of the time.
We're trying to limit the scope of the changes in the patch, to address the above without opening up the core rotation for changes.

All damage abilities increased by 27%
Hungering Rune Weapon (L58) and Glacial Advance (L100) swapped positions
Breath of Sindragosa damage increased by 10%

We want to preserve the identity of Breath of Sindragosa, including the steady resource drain being the main limiting factor, and the expression of skill in optimizing around that. So in trying to avoid less natural solutions like capping the duration or redesigning how it works, we're trying to limit the talent/legendary synergies that cause huge variance in how long Breath can be maintained. And breaking the Breath of Sindragosa/Hungering Rune Weapon interaction, on its own, goes a very long way toward making Breath's duration more reasonable again. DPS adjustment for the change is being put mostly into the baseline spec rather than into the power of Breath, because it's currently so far ahead of other setups.

Murderous Efficiency (L56->L57), Frozen Pulse (L57->L90), and Runic Attenuation (L90->L56) swapped positions
Hungering Rune Weapon duration 12s (from 15s) and additionally grants 20% haste
Bugfix: Hungering Rune Weapon correctly generates a Rune every 1.5s instead of every 1s
Murderous Efficiency chance 50% (from 65%)
Horn of Winter cooldown 45s (from 30s)
Koltira's Newfound Will generates 1 Rune (from 2) and now causes Obliterate to deal 10% extra damage

Using even a small subset of all of the above effects causes the rotation to be quite flooded. They are all being either weakened in power (with compensation to the baseline spec), or given non-resource-granting effects for part of their value. In addition, the two most egregious offenders (Murderous Efficiency and Horn of Winter) can no longer be taken together.

Overall, there should now be a much broader set of talent combinations that produce a good-feeling rotation in which there are resources to do something on most GCDs, but you're still able to spend them down. Including, for example, during Hungering Rune Weapon, which is overly hectic or frustrating right now when you can't spend all of its resources.

In addition, the talent rearrangement puts Frozen Pulse on a row with two predominantly AoE talents, which is a better home for it. The Frozen Pulse/Icy Talons ("machinegun") synergy is preserved, but can no longer be taken alongside Runic Attenuation as well.

NB: The Hungering Rune Weapon bug may be fixed on live shortly as well, after we test the fix and analyze the impact.

Icy Talons bonus 15% (from 10%)
Shattering Strikes bonus 60% (from 40%)
Freezing Fog effect 20% (from 30%)
Obliteration duration 10s (from 8s)
Frozen Pulse damage reduced by 39%

Minor talent rebalancing to match the above rearrangements and talent changes; numbers are likely to be updated as the rest of the changes settle into place.

Breath can retain its role as a talent that encourages building around it to some degree (and its synergies with things like Runic Attenuation, Koltira's Newfound Will, and Seal of Necrofantasia are preserved). But without the overpowering Hungering Rune Weapon interaction, there is a lot more room for other builds to compete, and we've buffed the spec's baseline damage a great deal to shift the landscape towards all talents being closer together in DPS. As always, we'll continue to examine all of these changes based after people can start to test them on PTR.
EDIT: Added Frozen Pulse change which was missed when I copied changes into the post earlier. As with the other changes, this is meant to make Frozen Pulse balanced within its new row, and meant to be accounted for in the overall DPS increase above.

Comments

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Comment by enrickes The DMG of dks was fine. They should think a bit about the class mobility. Because it really sucks... Comment by Rellyne Breath spec ATM is only hectic if you don't know wtf you're doing. Otherwise, it's the most fun frost spec since Wrath, it requires you to know the fights beforehand, plan a bit ahead and time your abilities well. If you can do that, you have crazy DPS potential, if not, your DPS is $%^&.

I guess this takes too much thinking for the casual community, so Blizz goes ahead and crushes it, so the optimal playstyle will once more be boring, one button spamming machine gun, that does the same DPS no matter the encounter or the player's skill, without any potential moments of awesomeness...

RIP, I hope my UH legendary shoulders drop before 7.3. hits...Comment by iceman994 The DMG of dks was fine. They should think a bit about the class mobility. Because it really sucks...Comment by niccab Guess the jig is up for BoS DKs. Oh well, back to Machine Gun then. Comment by Avenfold Youre wrong. Blizzard looked at frost and dealt with issues more than any other spec. Look at other classes and then talk about "what bliizard hates". And every experienced frost DK will be happy with these changes Comment by warbridge Youre wrong. Blizzard looked at frost and dealt with issues more than any other spec. Look at other classes and then talk about "what bliizard hates". And every experienced frost DK will be happy with these changesComment by durf24 I have absolutely no problem with them giving frost DKs more options but putting hungering rune weapon on the same talent tier as BoS kind of makes the ability worthless since you really need HrW to pull off a good BoS. If they reduced the runic power drain to compensate for the loss then I could understand it better but as it stands it really doesn't seem to be worth using but they may change it before they put it live, who knows? Comment by tigerfighter Give us an active artifact ability. Passive swords that sometimes appear but can't be seen because of combat mess is excessively underwhelming.Comment by enrickes That dragon is the worst artifact ability. Comment by Jwall1019 I feel like this is a bad change to BoS, considering that it works well, and all the effort it took to make it usable in previous patches. They talent choice should be weakened a bit rather than making the main 2 talents of the build not possible to take together. Weakening the legendaries a bit would be a fine choice, but the passive increase in power paired with the weakening of the talents would make for more options. What's going to happen is now one is going to use BoS anymore, and then we have to repeat for the same problem when Machinegun becomes dominant. Comment by Jwall1019 I have absolutely no problem with them giving frost DKs more options but putting hungering rune weapon on the same talent tier as BoS kind of makes the ability worthless since you really need HrW to pull off a good BoS. If they reduced the runic power drain to compensate for the loss then I could understand it better but as it stands it really doesn't seem to be worth using but they may change it before they put it live, who knows?Comment by WidowMaker12 Is it just me, or does it seem that a lot of people here and on the WoW forums are complaining that you cant keep Breath up as long anymore and are complaining that this automatically makes it worse, forget that it is getting a 37% damage increase for the duration it is up?

To me they seem to pushing towards making Breath shorter but more powerful so that people arent as punished by movement heavy fights Comment by SexRaptor Bring back 2h weapons to frost. They're dks, just match the the dmgComment by rinkworks I guess this takes too much thinking for the casual community...I'm sick of blizz changing toons abilities to suit the part time player...Comment by Bisso Bring back 2h weapons to frost. They're dks, just match the the dmgFrost Giant's CleaverComment by mageranger13 I think this is another example of Blizzard looking at H/M raiders and going...yep need to change that. I seriously doubt they have internal metrics on what active players do H/M and Id be willing to bet that its only about 20% or less of the game's player base. Im not talking the random pugged H/M either I mean regular runs of raid teams. Outside the raid environment nothing stays alive long enough for this to be a serious concern; so we are once again seeing a change that affects the minority of playerbase and ends up being a gross over-reaction of Blizz resulting in their objective being met but creating the same situation with another build. Look, Blizz will NEVER have anything be 100% perfect balanced, yet they spend countless hours trying to which is amazing. However, I think in this situation they shot themselves in the left foot to distract the body from feeling the pain in the right foot...the pain is still there just hidden. By that same token the issue of imbalance is there, they just keep overshooting the mark instead of hitting the bulls eye, maybe they should work on Hunters a bit and see if they improve their marks. Comment by Shaitan051 Here's an idea: How about making the other two 100 talents viable? Remember when you removed the old trees because there wasn't enough choice in builds? Comment by barbudinho Cool, they're trying to bring back the *!@#ing awful build of machine gun that is literally throwing runes into the &*!@ing trash without regards to anything. I guess I'll just switch to Blood and keep loot spec on Frost then go grind old content since they're murdering my spec one more time.

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Upcoming 7.3 Changes to Frost Death Knight

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