I suppose I should start with the obvious: Death Knights.
Death Knights… well, they didn’t actually do so great this expansion. They completely dominated in season 5, due to being broken, and then various fixes and nerfs brought them to being the lowest represented class in every bracket and utterly worthless in two brackets outright.
To make a quick point, there’s a difference between something being broken and something being overpowered. In season 5, DKs were so fantastic because the majority of their damage came from Icy Touch, a ranged instant ability that they can come really close to spamming if they wanted to. Which they did, because it hit really hard.
This, to me, isn’t an example of something that’s overpowered. Overpowered would be a 50% damage reduction Icebound Fortitude every minute. Spamming Icy Touch for massive damage was not overpowered, that was outright broken. It was never meant to work that way, wasn’t designed to work that way, and thus was (eventually, Blizzard was way too slow in nerfing Icy Touch spam) fixed so it didn’t work that way.
To give another example, Bladestorm dealing too much damage would be considered overpowered. However, popping Sweeping Strikes then Bladestorm because it deals more damage to a single target isn’t overpowered, that is broken.
Yes, a class that has broken abilities can definitely be overpowered. A bladestorming warrior using sweeping strikes to beat the stuffing out of a single target is definitely overpowered. But that bladestorming warrior isn’t overpowered because of bladestorm, it is because the interaction between bladestorm and sweeping strikes is broken. A fine distinction to be sure, but it is nevertheless an important distinction.
So, with that out of the way, back to death knights.
To be blunt, DKs have been nerfed too hard and for too long. They have powerful defensive cooldowns (though death knight survivability is frequently overrated, especially against casters), extremely effective and efficient peels, snares and spell interrupts, and… well, that’s about it, really. Chains of Ice is the best peel ability in the game, there is no doubt of that.
The current DK is little more than an extra set of snare and interrupt buttons for their partner to push when they need it. A DK is only viable in the 3s bracket, partnered with a healer of some sort and then one of the following: affliction warlock, hunter, warrior. In every case, their only real job is to put interrupts on the enemy healer and cast chains of ice at anything that tries to attack their partners.
There are several problems that cause this. First, the nature of a DKs resource system. Essentially, their big snare ability shares a resource pool with (what is supposed to be) their big damage ability. Imagine if a warrior couldn’t use Mortal Strike or Overpower for eight-ish seconds after having used Hamstring. This means they have to make a choice, and unfortunately using the snare is usually the better option. This is because of reason number two.
A DKs damage is pitiful. Quite literally the worst of any PvP DPS spec. Every single caster and melee spec produces more effective damage than a DK. I use the term “effective” damage, as I’m referring to damage that actually leads to scoring kills. DKs usually position quite high on the damage charts due to disease damage, but that damage is negligible.
A DK can easily use pestilence to spread his diseases to, say, all three opponents and produce huge amounts of damage. However, that damage isn’t effective at doing anything but giving the enemy healer higher healing numbers. A priest, for example, can cast her frisbee, and that spell would take care of all of the disease damage by itself.
This is a nuanced problem, but suffice to say it boils down to two things: disease protection (lack thereof), and crappy direct damage attacks.
The lack of disease protection was a huge detriment to a death knight. DKs absolutely depend on having all of their diseases active in order to deal any sort of mildly threatening damage, and those diseases can be easily shut down by fire and forget abilities from several classes. To put it another way, any 5s team with a DK on their team can automatically become a better team by replacing that DK with literally any class/spec combination.
DKs are being given disease protection in the next patch, which will solve this particular little issue.
And yes, if you are seriously complaining that DKs are going to have 100% dispel resistance to their diseases next patch, you are an idiot. Giving DKs 100% disease dispel resistance won’t even broaden their viable comps, they’ll still be junk for 2s, possibly junk for 5s, and will become slightly better at their current comps in 3s with no new ones.
There’s also the slight issue that a DKs strikes, things like Scourge Strike, are crap. DKs don’t spec and play for things like Unholy Blight and deal primarily ranged damage in arenas because they like to, they do that because it is the only way they can actually deal damage that can’t be shrugged off easily. DKs didn’t toy with using Obliterate in an unholy spec for a few patches because they hated Scourge Strike, they used Obliterate because Scourge Strike was awful.
And it still is. Scourge Strike is an example of an ability I would call broken. It used to deal pure shadow damage, arguably too much shadow damage (but this has since been nerfed), and now deals physical damage with an extra shadow damage component based on how much physical damage it deals.
Oh joy, the problems with this design. I could be wrong, but it feels like this change was made so that unholy DKs could actually use all the armor penetration that insisted on showing up on their gear. DKs deal primarily spell damage in both raiding and PvP, so armor penetration was largely useless in both places. Making Scourge Strike part physical made armor penetration, not necessarily attractive, but at least not useless to raiding DKs.
And royally screwed over PvP DKs.
PvP DKs cannot get armor penetration, at least not in the same amount, say, a warrior can get. So they land scourge strikes with whatever armor their target has, and that is that. This results in a scourge strike that can barely tickle anyone wearing plate or a shield, and yet hits exceptionally hard against anyone wearing cloth. This gulf in damage is very large, as in critting for 2k on plate and 6k on cloth large.
I see this as a design problem. It cripples DK damage against anyone with high armor, and leaves “train the clothie to death” as the best, by a huge margin, strategy for a DK to employ whenever a clothie is available to hurt.
You’ll notice that this has been almost entirely about unholy DKs. This is because both the frost tree and blood tree are extremely bad at PvP. You’d be better off with a fury warrior. I wish I was kidding.
Also worth noting is that by allowing Unholy Blight to give disease protection, Blizzard has given only unholy DKs the ability to protect their disease. Isn’t it nice to have the developers recognize that you only have one viable PvP spec and to go along with it?
My suggestions?
The DK resource system is fine. Making a choice between big damage and uber snares is a solid design idea. Only thing is, that isn’t the choice DKs have right now. They get to choose between uber snares and pointless damage.
All specs need disease protection; just unholy is fine for now, but I thought we had moved past the “only one viable spec” thing. DKs need to get to a place where they can actually cause threatening single target damage again.
Scourge Strike needs to be reverted back to pure shadow damage. Scourge Strike does not need to be buffed back to its original overpowered damage it had many patches ago, but it does need to go back to pure shadow damage. It needs to be stronger against plate and weaker against cloth. Pure shadow damage would accomplish that.
Or, remove armor penetration from the game and balance from that. (hint: cataclysm will fix it)
Ghoul stun moved back to 30 second cooldown.
Things like Mind Freeze costing no RP and Lichborne need to be made baseline, or all DKs will always spec into the frost tree for PvP, no matter what. If that is the intent, then fine.
Stop saying ignorant crap like
Class abilities are different. Envenom is not Scourge Strike. Rogues still do a lot of physical damage. Frost Strike still hits for 100% magic damage, but it’s a more controlled ability. The DK in PvP hitting for huge Scourge Strikes over and over again is not something we’re going to go back to.
I’m not even entirely sure what to make of this statement.
The whole argument around Envenom is Blizzard saying “you can’t have attacks that ignore armor”, the players saying “but… uhh, that’s exactly what everyone else does”, and the best they can come back with is “rogues are different”. Mentioning Frost Strike is pointless, as frost DPS isn’t good for anything, in raiding or PvP. Mentioning a return to “huge Scourge Strikes” is dumb because nobody wants that and nobody asked for that. Scourge Strike is currently referred to as “wiffle strike”, without even a hint of irony. Is it really so bad to want to change that?
Critical QQ 
Nice post, nice analysis
You’re making a mistake in your assumption on the statement GC made. He’s not saying “You can’t have attacks that ignore armor”. He’s saying “Your class is a plate DPS hybrid, so you’re always going to be behind the other melee, deal with it.”
I play a DK and a warrior: I wouldn’t PvP with either. I don’t want to be an Arms debuff bot with a 1.25 minute cooldown damage window, and I don’t want to be snare boy. That said, I don’t understand why DK’s can’t get as much ArP as a warrior, aside from battle stance. There’s so much ArP plate in the gear out now that the only reason NOT to get a ton of it is resilience.
As Gx1080 said, the hybrid tax is a fundamentally dumb idea in a game like WoW where specializations are polarized as much as they are.
Even from a PvP standpoint, where everyone can be reasonably expected to tank/survive/DPS regardless of their talent points, it simply makes no sense because everyone, technically, is a hybrid.
DKs can get armor penetration if they really wanted to, though it simply isn’t a good idea trying to stack a stat that will affect, at most, a quarter of their damage output.
Hybrid tax, stupid or not, isn’t going away. (I don’t have a single ‘pure’ past level 20, so I’d love it if it did.) It’s the artificial means to preserve playing in classes that aren’t designed for flexibility of role. (And it’s not working, at least if Armory Data Mining can be believed.)
ArP for DK’s and paladins seems to be like Haste for warriors: you’ll take it if you have to, and it does increase DPS, but not as much as other stats would. It’s a shame they never could balance it to be useful for all plate melee DPS.
I do 3’s with a DK on my warrior. Our DK was complaining about the complete and utter lack of damage output especially with the boost to Resilience this season… so I suggested he go frost. The result? We started winning a lot more. Don’t underestimate frost this season. Using hungering cold to pull off a switch in an otherwise cc less comp is awesome. The combination of howling blast aoe slow (chillibans + howling blast glyph) and bladestorm is a crazy combination.
Also the somewhat disease protection is there due to pretty much every ability applying frostfever. Mind freeze cost no runic power and your main damage ability is generated from runic power meaning you can build up for a burst kill.
The only thing he really complains about anymore is the lack of a pet to annoy healers with. Plus… with his build I get 20% more haste 😀
I remain skeptical. No desecration, no ghoul stun, and frost strike can be parried/dodged unlike the death coils unholy has access to (which is comparable damage and ranged to boot). And such a comp would fall apart against a team with solid disease dispelling. Shadow priest/elemental shaman/holy paladin would tear you apart.
All PvP DKs get a free mind freeze, nobody skips that talent, really.
It can work, definitely, but you’re essentially running a gimmick comp. It’s the same as running blood DK/warrior/healer. Yes, you can catch somebody in a bad position, slam Hysteria onto the warrior and then watch him absolutely destroy somebody’s health bar faster than a hunter pet got blicked before resilience applied to pets.
But when it comes to pure PvP viability, you just don’t have all the tools there.
Dunno. I’ve seen some love to Frost spec in PvP, is a spec basically based on using Hungering Cold to do switches and burst someone.
Besides, OB is the hard hitter in Frost, not Frost Strike. Even as physical damage, it hits hard, unlike Scourge Stike and can be glyphed for more damage.
To be honest though… what comp these days isn’t a gimic?
Last season we ran a 2 healer team with the DK as unholy. The comp worked great because we could just run the other team down… now though he just doesn’t have the damage out put as unholy. As a result he went frost and I’m on my warrior.
Hungering cold really is an amazing ability especially when you can get the team to group up. Most people don’t expect frost in arena’s so aren’t prepared to counter their entire team being frozen in a block of ice followed my an aoe fear from the priest or I.
You’ve just enumerated, much better than I have, the many reasons I have stopped playing my DK in PvP for almost three months now. He was my main for all of Wrath until very recently and I wondered what all the problems were. I was doing good damage, 4-5k scourge strikes and nice DC hits, but it always felt like I couldn’t quite get the kill. I have since switched to mage full time and the reason is pretty damned clear when I crit a priest for 11k one GCD into the match.
@above poster: Your DK will also get 20% more haste next patch with the Icy Talons change.
It’s worth pointing out that the DK I play with feels the exact same way. Definitely good damage, but he can never “close the deal” when it comes to scoring a kill. Playing hunter/DK/priest, it’s laughable how huge of a difference the simple addition of a mortal strike makes.
Not that I’m saying DKs need mortal strike.
First, hybrid tax is retarded, full stop. The damage difference (really large damage difference in this case) isn’t because DKs can be tanks, is because people with less armor will QQ A LOT on the forums if people with more armor can do equal or more DPS.
That’s why they are going to equalize armor in Cata, despite being a LOLWUT-terribad-doesn’t-make-sense idea.
One thing: The reaction of the PvE community to the PvP Scourge Strike nerf was basically: “Suck it bitch, we are killing Arthas”.
I think that Blizzard just made the DKs underpowered for pleasing all the people that got reamed in the rear at the start of Wrath by DKs. They need to have their revenge or they wouldn’t stop QQing.
A hybrid tax is a bad idea and has been a bad idea for a long time, as I said above.
I do find it funny that raiders complain constantly that PvP is ruining PvE, and yet never acknowledge that their raiding game hurts PvP just as much, if not more so.
I think the problem here is that we’re comparing a Dk’s damage to a Ret Paladin’s (mostly because they use 2 handers and they were known for their burst damage through strikes in their first season of arena).
DKs – especially Unholy – are better compared to affliction locks. They’re about control and steady DPS output through DOTS, not bursty strikes. DKs can go for the kill through Gargoyle, chain silence/interrupts, and perhaps and Empowered Rune Weapon. If you’re looking for big burst through SS, perhaps you’re playing the wrong class.
A rogue can’t use Envenom quite as often as a DK can SS. The rogue has to use some of those CPs for their Kidney Shots as well. Also, a mutilate rogue still benefits from arpen – I’d say about as much as a Unholy DK does now. Which is to say – not nearly as much as combat but the stat isn’t entirely wasted like it was when SS was all Shadow.
I would definitely like to see some PVP buffs for DKs – they have been poopy’d on for too long. But I don’t think SS damage is where its going to come from.
What Blizzard should have done is simply provided plate DPS gear that didn’t have armor penetration in equal quantities to plate DPS gear that did.
There are only three plate DPS classes, and two of them (DKs and ret paladins) for the large part would be much happier if they could outright avoid armor penetration on every piece of gear. Blood DKs being the exception, of course.
Why is armor penetration so prevalent when warriors and the extremely small population of Blood DKs are the only ones that actually want the stat?
I’m not talking about raw damage output here, either. I’m talking about effective, threatening damage, something the DK currently lacks as compared to, say, everyone else.
Basically, DKs can’t burst in the Burst-o-Rama that is Wrath PvP.
That’s bad, you know.
Steroidz from my server (Bonechewer) from my guild (No Girls Allowed) has very little problems tripling the damage of others.
He does insane damage, lives for stupid amounts of time through insane amounts of damage, and never seems to not have a single cooldown unavailable that reduces or negates magic damage significantly.
I have heard complaints about dispelling desieses, but even still, he hits like a truck. And death grip is a very good peel, especially since you can follow it with an instant slow.
http://www.arenajunkies.com/rankings/2v2/Death%20Knight/
One thing that bothers me with a lot of SS magic damage arguments is the comparisons to Envenom and Frost strike. These are not comparable to SS. They are comperable to death coil because they both rely on a mechanic that involves building up to these bursty abilities by using other abilities (combo points, RP).
That right there is why (unholy) DKs will never gem ArP in pvp. Their damage is affected by it, but their dangerous damage (death coil) isn’t.
It would be lovely to have an all-magic SS again, but it won’t happen for pve reasons.
Ultimately, what I see here is a too-many-trees-can’t-see-the-forest issue. The gaps in player armor are way too great. From like 3k for a mage without ice armor all the way up to 25k+ for holy paladins or frost presence DKs. It’s a problem for balance in the whole game. Back before envenom was this good, remember eviscerate? It hit like a truck on clothies and rogues couldn’t do decent damage to plate wearers. Now rogues just do loads of damage to everybody, so there’s not as much of a gap. I also imagine having less drastic variation in player armor values would make people whine less about warriors.
The good news is they’re fixing it in cataclysm! Of course, that leaves DKs, among others, high and dry for the remainder of this xpac, but it’s not like it’s the only issue facing pvp. Excessively high burst damage, too much pve gear, a format that encourages me to bladestorm in the first 10 seconds of every match…
Reading the cataclysm stuff, I get the feeling that blizz really does understand all these issues. I also get the feeling that they see a lot more of the potential downstream affects of fixing them, and they’re trying to redesign the entire system to fix current issues without making new ones.
[…] I could probably write a 10 page essay on why DK’s suck at PVP, but fortunately Euripedes has done just that. […]
i can post the other brackets to show you the 200 other teams above 2200
@yup: You can also show that out of the top 100 2v2 teams, currently there are 4 DK’s. In 3v3, they have the lowest percentage participation (14 of 300 participants), and 5v5 is lower still (10 of 500 participants). If you arena at all, which seems doubtful given the great evidence you have analyzed thus far, you will find that most of the DK’s currently on successful teams have been on those teams quite a while.
those numbers are inaccurate, you need to do research
You’re completely missing the point. DKs are currently a support class. In TSG, they keep a healer stunned/interrupted/silenced long enough for a warrior’s pain train to actually do the damage. This is basically the role a DK plays in every comp. The argument is that this is not very much fun, and giving them some real burst might make their prospects in 2s and 5s a little bit better, as well as open up some new comps because they could actually do appreciable damage.