World of Warcraft

I was practicing frost dps a bit today in pvp, when i stumbled upon a few things that cannot be right or should be changed

*First thing is something that has been since the dawn of death knights:

Killing Machine
Your melee attacks have a chance to make your next Obliterate or Frost Strike a guaranteed critical strike.

Sounds neat doesnt it? Guaranteed crit?
But it isnt a guaranteed hit.. Why?
Because we as death knights dont have the luxury of stacking expertise, we are forced to stack spell penetration.
Now personally i'd like Spell Penetration removed from DKs, but that prolly wont happen
We see warriors running around beating up people like mad men, not having to try and run behind targets - cause they're allowed to go for experise, without it being a problem for them.

Solution:

Killing Machine
Your melee attacks have a chance to make your next succesfull Obliterate or Frost Strike a guaranteed critical strike.

Impact on PvE: none cause you should already be expertise capped
Impact on PvP: Makes frost more viable as you wont see your killing machine proc fade away with a dodge/parry


*Second up is our belowed Mind Freeze, the ability to interrupt a player
Now, blizzard said they wanted to remove hardcounters from the game, but i must admit that i find a shaman a hardcounter for a DK - because:

Mind Freeze is considered a frost spell, but only useable in melee range.
Strangulate considered a spell effect aswell
----
Then how do we interrupt that shaman through his grounding totem?
Death Grip? - That's also a spell

As it is now

Mind Freeze
20 Runic Power Melee Range
10 sec cooldown
Smash the target's mind with cold, interrupting spellcasting and preventing any spell in that school from being cast for 4 sec.
Considered: Frost spell

Soluation
Mind Freeze
20 Runic Power Melee Range
10 sec cooldown
Smash the target's mind with cold, interrupting spellcasting and preventing any spell in that school from being cast for 4 sec.
Considered: Melee

Impact on PvE: None
Impact on PvP: Allows us to actually have a interrupt useable through grounding totem, counterspell, Avengers Shield.
Also seems weird to be the only melee class without a silence not categorised as a spell.


Haste on frost DKS:
Now generally i like the idea of frost having high haste because we cant rely on runic Corruption.
But having 50+ smt haste isnt much use if it doesnt benefit your runes in some sort of way.
My runes are being affected by 2.smt % as i gotta stack mastery for frost pvp and having to rely on a clunky mechanic called Runic Empowerment.

I understand that it is hard to balance frost and unholy towards a more equal ground, but this was my 2 cents.
I was asked by a GM to post my ideas here and so i did.

Sorry for english grammer. Not my native language

In conjunction to my other post, i have come up with new ideas to make frost dps more competetive:

Implement a kind of Runic Corruption for Frost Death Knights aswell.

Witht the change to how frost mechanics works, it's gonna be something like 3*OB + frost strike, then reapply diseases whent hey fall of.. OB + FS..

This is also one of the contributions to why frost dps is weaker in PvP - got less runes to mess with + less selfhealing as UH can get more runes back

Solution:

Remove the passive called runic empowerment and add to pillar of frost an ability like Runic Corruption.

Impact on PvE: Would give frost the chance to be more competetive
Impact on PvP: Giving the opportunity to be more competetive to UH PvP, we dont have a pet to run around that can do a good amount of damage, even if we are rooted, so we need the self healing more than UH does.

Frost DKs are like warriors in a way. We just dont get any charge, but a DG with almost double the cooldown
Would also help a bit on DK gap closing for all specs

Solution

The Cooldown of Death Grip has been changed to 25 seconds. By using talent "Unholy Command" the cooldown will be 15 seconds - that is the same as a warrior without glyph in it.

Seems fair, as it does the same thing, just we pull towards us - they rush towards.

I was under the impression SP was removed from DKs. Thats why our cloak enchant should be the 50+ crit(or other alternative) as opposed to the old SP chant back in WOTLK.

DKs still need spell penetration for pvp

For PvE, you dont need it though

Probably why i do so bad in pvp then XD

04/03/2011 11:10 AMPosted by Góre

Probably why i do so bad in pvp then XD

Unholy is better in arenas, Frost in bg's/rbg's.

Few simple changes would make them competetive though
But guess you didnt read the whole thing?

Few simple changes would make them competetive though
But guess you didnt read the whole thing?

Yes I did.

04/03/2011 11:12 AMPosted by Gagerx

Probably why i do so bad in pvp then XD

Unholy is better in arenas, Frost in bg's/rbg's.

Lies. A hunter will have a field day with a frost dk. Kite galore. Been there, done that. Frost, inspite of its name, has very little cc or anti-cc.

Unholy is the best pvp build. Frost is for facerolling while not raiding. Sure it's nice and viable but you're just gimping yourself against smart opponents.

Hmm. When DK's can control their ghoul?

When the heck did this become a thread to ask questions about DKs, talking about best spec and when you learn some ability? :D

Please keep the thread to what it's about

Im gonna have to do a little bump here
Would like to know how the rest of the community feels (would probably foremost be frost DKs i'm looking for)

Anybody?

Come 4.1, we'll have the highest burst in the game. These threads always make me laugh. Whining for the sake of it. There is literally nothing wrong with Frost DKs at the moment-you can't be an unkitable,unkillable, 0-downtime juggernaught.
UH has control,average dps,!**# burst. Frost has nearly no control,good dps and great burst.
To the other guy complaining about hunters-If he's kiting,death strike the pet, if he keeps it next to him,and has space to run,tough !**#,you can't win. Why this is a problem is beyond me-expeting to counter every single class in the game is laughably naive.
Also,you seem to forget that once we close that gap, if you havent been on the target for more than five or six seconds,youll be able to death strike,and then ds again,unlike all other melee,who cant heal half their health pool just because they are finally able to hit something. That is why DKs will never get low-cd gap closers, and it would be foolish to expect them.
Suma summarum, the only spec in dire need of help is the balance druid,who gets !@%!d by all dps,and cant kill any healers. Everyone else has a fighting chance, with frost dks close to the top of the pyramid, and when 4.1 hits, taking the no.1 spot from frost mages.

drunk post was here :p

To be fair;
Frost DKs are bugged on the PTR so i dont think you can say frost DKs will be the new frost mages.
By a long shot it wont, can tell you that.
We'll have a burst, that might hit for 3*10-13k, then rely on frost strikes for 10 seconds.
It's gonna be a very machine gun kind of effect.

I dont want my class to be completely OP, but i dont see the reason that our KM proc can be dodged because we dont have the luxury of going expertise. We're forced to go spell penetration, while warriors for instance go for more expertise and hurt us like a evil doomsday train, chu-chu-chu-chu Wuu-uuuuu! ALL ABOARD! Paintrainhasnobreaks!

Also:
It cant be real that all out interrupts are classified as spells.
It seems stupid and wrong that a grounding totem can interrupt our interrupts.

The fixes in my OP is totally legit and dont change anything for the PvE aspect of the game.

The DG reduction + Runic Corruption is more basicly ideas to make frost more viable in PvP.

First of all,you are almost guaranteed a KM when trying to chain Obliterates. Secondly, 3*12-15 as you put it is amazing burst without any crits. Its like an MM hunter being able to do 3 Chimera Shots in a row. Everyone would be up in arms about it. There is simply no way that we could get more. You would end up with double frost+healer as the top 10 teams in 3v3 arena,and facerolling everyone in bgs.
I believe the refreshing of runes should stay as it is,but once 4.1 comes,make it a guaranteed death rune. That way frost is differentiated in some way from UH, but not annoyingly in the way that it is now.
Warriors arent the best example-sure once they get to someone,they hurt them more than we do. But can a warrior howling blast 6 times in a row for 40k or more?No,once he's snared that's it. Coupled with the fact that they have the worst slow in the game, and the shared cd with Intercept/Charge,they have become the class requiring the least finesse/skill in pvp. This coming from a HWL in vanilla,2500 exp in arenas in wotlk,as well as numerous gladiator friends/AJ posters.
You hit something for more than 10 secs,it'll die. But no decent player will allow himself to be attacked for more than half a second once he trinkets/stun wears off.
It sounds a bit like you want to be an arms warrior with a perma snare in the form of CoI,interrupting in melee and at range. The tradeoff for having to use expertise and spell pen at the same time,is that we have much better snares,self healing,and ranged aoe dps that slows everyone it hits. I think its fair.
And if you cant see the grounding,and attempt to Strang,well then turn off those mods and start looking at what the opponent is doing.

You fail to see the point;
I can see the grounding totem, but when HB isnt considered a spell (Grounding totem doesnt take it), it's basicly a guaranteed heal everytime a grounding totem is put in to battle.

I'll say it again; It's not something big i suggest - i suggest Mind Freeze being a Melee type of attack, instead of a spell.
And KM should hit on the next SUCCESFULL attack.
There has to be a trade off from sacrificing expertise.

It's not big changes and it wont make frost OP.
It's small "upgrades" to spells/talents without much gain.

It wont have any impact on PvE, but will make things more fair in terms of PvP.

Also; Same as hunter getting of 3 chimera shots in a row? That can add up to what? 3*30-40k hits on full resilience targets? Our attacks hit for around 21k on a crit. Not saying it's not fair and would be amazing if chimera shot could be used for infinity and would crit 3 times in a row, but i wouldnt compare ranged and melee.

also; wont be able to use 6*howling blast, would also be a bad idea as you're sacrificing all your damage.

You have yet to say anything about why you think it's okay that we're the only melee class in the game with no type of melee classfied interrupt? Casters wont suffer the same as a DK against a grounding totem, believe it or not. If i see a grounding totem up on my mage, i use a fire blast and i go on with my counterspell. If i see one on my DK, i'll have to find it.. Might be on the other side of the pillar. Run over to it, hit it - then run back to the healer already at full health again.

I wouldnt want to see frost DKs be the new FoTM.
But i fail to see how these changes would make Frost DKs OP?

I find it weird, that me posting my ideas - in a polite manner, telling what i think is wrong - is a kind of QQ for my class having less CC/CC breakers or something. CC/CC breakers hasnt even been mentioned in the post.

It's small changes, with no loss to the one your attacking, but a good benefit for the DK

I get what you mean about grounding totem. There's no death coil to throw into it to get it down first, but like someone said above me - just use chains of ice. Grounding totem is on a 15 second cooldown, you just have to engage your brain a little before you use it. Hardcounters shouldn't exist but there are plenty out there, and this one spec having a problem with grounding totem isn't such a big deal.

And slightly off-topic, but frost DK is more than likely going to be insane next patch after the buffs (in PvP). The on-demand burst damage, CC and control coupled in a setup with already high damage (hi2u TSG) will be too much. Expect nerfs :P