Banter is a terrible DK who retired because he was so bad. He did what all power hungry people do in his position, became a Discord moderator. His DM’s are always open on either Discord (Banter#7648) or on
Twitter. However, most people just ping @Banter in #general of the Acherus Discord, which works just as well!
Frost
Normally ridiculed in the Frost vs. Unholy debate for its simplicity, Frost actually plays pretty well on Alpha, in comparison to it’s accompanying DPS spec. Even without any changes to it whatsoever (outside of damage tuning), Frost is still an okay spec due to to its robustness coming from Talents, and not the Artifact.
However, Frost is notably very slow on the Alpha, and the loss of the magical floating toothpicks (
Crystalline Swords) is definitely a loss I’m still reeling from.
Does this mean we get 2h Frost back now?We lost the Artifact, along with the fabulous perks and abilities contained within it. However, I’m not going to list the list of useless fluff abilities we’ve lost, whose effect could have gone unnoticed if they were nerfed during Legion (and from a TC perspective, me and my spreadsheets are glad they’re gone). Instead, I’m going to focus on the most devastating loss of all,
Blast Radius.
Blast Radius is a very simple, yet effective artifact perk, where it quite literally increases the damage of your
Howling Blast by a whopping 24% (at level 4), with a maximum possible increase of an astonishing 42%. This loss will surely be missed by “Howling Blargh” enthusiasts everywhere, especially those who had acquired the fine taste of the sacred “Machine gun Frost” playstyle. We can only hope that this this travesty will be resolved, by simply increasing the damage of
Howling Blast in BfA to compensate.
Other notable abilities missing include
Crystalline Swords and Thronebreaker, which were absolutely game changing perks. Hopefully these can be made baseline, or possibly even into talent(s).
The talents are still pretty goodI would love to spend time poking fun at the “massive” changes that have happened to talents, but I’m not allowed to turn this into a 72 page essay. So I’ll make this brief.
Literally nothing has changed from Live to Alpha (at the time of writing) in terms of talents, other than some talents moving left/right in some rows. The only thing worth mentioning about is how I had to retrain my muscle memory when picking talents on Alpha.
The
Breath of Sindragosa AoE change is probably worth talking about though.
The death of Breath (of Sindragosa)Jokes aside, there actually has been one interesting change in Alpha so far, which has gone mostly unnoticed/undocumented since it didn’t appear in spell datamining (shoutout to Melekus for finding this). Before I get into the meat of it, first, some history.
Breath of Sindragosa has been a very refreshing spell since its introduction in WoD, and has brought DK’s the most entertaining play styles in the game (Such as “Chains of Sindragosa”), due to it inherently flipping the Death Knights resource system on its head. During WoD, we had hilarious scenarios where Blood DK’s would do absolutely monstrous amounts of damage in an Operator Thogar encounter, thanks to ridiculous amounts of adds appearing every few minutes and the possibility of keeping
Breath of Sindragosa up for long amounts of time. For many Blood DK’s, this was the most rewarding tanking had ever been, with the best players being able to almost permanently sustain
Breath of Sindragosa, while properly filling their tanking duties!
In more recent memories, Nighthold was a breath of fresh air for many;
Breath of Sindragosa, in conjunction with
Convergence of Fates and the
tier 19 bonus, gave Frost DK’s a fantastic high risk/high reward playstyle that heavily rewarded players that were able to balance their resource depletion and the timing of their resource generation abilities. For those that were able to pull off the difficult gameplay at that skill level, that tier was arguably the best Frost had ever been from a gameplay perspective. Contradictory to the strange Alpha changes though, Breath’s large AoE damage was never a problem in Legion.
So, what happened to
Breath of Sindragosa in Alpha? Breath has an cleave component, with its cleave damage value(s) being hidden from tooltips. On live, secondary targets take (100/n)% damage where n is the number of targets, e.g. 100|50 damage between 2 targets, or 100|25|25 between 3.
In alpha, the formula has been changed to be (60/n)%, leading us to get 100|30, or 100|20|20.
In a nutshell,
Breath of Sindragosa’s AoE has been stealth nerfed. It’s AoE is still very powerful, but it seems that if Breath is to be taken in future, it will not be due to its massive AoE damage. Which sucks.
Cool, but how does Frost play in BfA?Frost in Alpha feels very “clunky” (slow, clumsy, obtrusive, sluggish, unwieldy), largely because of the asinine GCD change which I’m sure others have already mentioned in this article. If Legion Frost DK was “The Fast and the Furious”, BfA Alpha Frost DK would be “The Slow and the Useless”.
SummaryIn short, literally nothing has changed in the Alpha besides the fact that we aren’t using the Artifact anymore. We lost a button, and frost is now very slow. If I missed anything, its probably because it’s not even worth mentioning (except maybe
Mirror Ball). Hopefully we can get some more changes soon.
Unholy
The obviously superior DK DPS spec, for its slightly harder difficulty, necessity to track abilities/debuffs and dealing with multiple pet AI; Unholy is unfortunately plagued with some of the same problems that Frost has: It’s the same spec, but slightly worse and far slower.
So slow that it's still 10/11MHave you tried doing dungeons before receiving your artifact on Live? Imagine that but slower (thanks to the GCD change), and you basically have BfA Unholy! In its current form (at the time of writing), it is horrendously slow; while Frost could be called “The slow and the useless”, Unholy would be “It doesn’t work”.
To the contrary, Unholy is actually doing pretty well right now in BfA dungeons, thanks to our obscene pet damage and running
Defile (alongside
Blighted Rune Weapon, etc). However, those large pet numbers are definitely not going to be left un-nerfed, and this playstyle will definitely not be final.
Unholy’s rotational sluggishness is mostly due to missing two main issues, our low Haste% and some key abilities from our artifacts.
Apocalypse Soon TMUnholy is incredibly reliant on the artifact in Legion, and with literally zero changes to Unholy in Alpha (besides a missing artifact), Unholy is definitely feeling quite ill without it. The loss of
Apocalypse(ability),
Black Claws and
Double Doom will definitely bug players.
Much could be said about the loss of
Apocalypse(ability) and
Black Claws, since they really did fix a lot of the awkward pauses with the rotation, and were essential to properly managing Festering Wounds. The lack of general resources do not help this cause either, with general rune/RP generation being worse than it had ever been in Legion.
With the Festering Wound mechanic/system currently obstructing the flow of the spec, thanks to the constant delaying of casting builders and spenders (
Festering Strike &
Scourge Strike respectively), we can only hope that there will be changes to the system, possibly even receiving the aforementioned perks as talents.
Is Risen Skulker good yet?I would love to spend time poking fun at the “massive” changes that have happened to talents, but I’m not allowed to turn this into a 72 page document. So I’ll make this brief.
Literally nothing has changed from Live to Alpha (at the time of writing) in terms of talents, other than some talents moving left/right in some rows. The only thing worth mentioning about is how I had to retrain my muscle memory when picking talents on Alpha.
However, some things are still uncertain with talents. Will Unholy (with the fantasy of “Scourgelord, master of all diseases”) get more than 1 disease as a talent, like Necrotic Plague (Festering Wound does not count, that's an affliction), and will
Dark Arbiter last another expansion?
The D stands for deadThe infamous
Dark Arbiter truly has been the problem child of this spec, and has been a plague on theorycrafters with its inconsistent uptimes, and I honestly don’t think we will see her around for another expansion.
In the current BfA build,
Dark Arbiter is looking pretty run down. The resource changes alone have already rendered her borderline useless; the glacial pace of resource generation, alongside the GCD change and our low Haste, causes
Dark Arbiter’s Shadow Empowerment to simply never stack high enough to be useful.
One could argue that the content available doesn’t give us a chance to utilize her to her full potential (ie not raids), which is a very fair point. However, along with the problems already outlined, there is another more elusive issue which is causing her to hit like a wet noodle (in comparison to Legion), which was actually a blessing when given to us at the time.
...and make it doubleOne issue I overlooked, that was pointed out to me by Bicepspump (thanks fam), was that the former change to
Death Coil’s RP cost (a buff at the time) is now working against players in BfA.
Throughout Legion, thanks to our high haste and resource generation from the artifact, players were struggling to effectively manage their RP, having durations were they had too little RP, and periods were they had too much (they did not have enough GCD’s to cast
Death Coil). Blizzard actually had a genius solution for this problem, by simply raising the RP cost of
Death Coil, which happened mid-Legion.
This fix was fantastic. It fixed the RP issues many players were facing, and it stealth buffed
Double Doom &
Sudden Doom, both of which indirectly benefited
Dark Arbiter (the free
Death Coil’s further increased the potential ceiling of DA’s Shadow Empowerment).
However, now that we are back to a scenario where we are always struggling for resources, this change is one of the key things slowing our rotation down, and also a cause for
Dark Arbiter’s current predicament.
SummaryIn short, literally nothing has changed in the Alpha besides the fact that we aren’t using the artifact anymore. The loss of the artifact sucks, but is exacerbated by our generally low haste and slow resource generation. That, alongside the still present mid-Legion
Death Coil change, has caused a domino effect within the spec and general rotation, which is definitely not for the better.
Some people have claimed that Unholy is “literally unplayable” in its current form. While that is a silly statement, the kernel of truth within that sentiment is that the spec is currently just not fun to play. Hopefully, there will be some future changes which can cure the problems plaguing Unholy.
