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Frost Death Knight Changes in 8.2 - Feedback on the Spec So Far
RPT
Publié
11/06/2019 à 01:42
par
Bicepspump
This article will discuss the large number of changes made to the Frost Death Knight on the 8.2 Rise of Azshara PTR and will cover all the recent buffs to Frost Death Knight on the PTR and discuss how all of these changes impact the spec in the upcoming patch.
This article was written by
Bicepspump
, our
Frost Death Knight Guide writer
:
About the Author
This guide is written by Khazak, a Death Knight player since 5.4. Besides writing guides, I am a moderator in
Acherus, the Death Knight class Discord
and maintainer on SimC, contributing code and APL for Death Knights. I raid in Agency on Zul'jin US and sometimes stream raids on
Twitch
. I am always happy to take questions or comments about the guide through Discord.
Introduction
This article will discuss the changes made to the Frost Death Knight on the 8.2 PTR. I'll be looking at what's different from this build and the one covered in the
previous article
, as well as talking about the implications of each change. To start off, let's see what's different, I've highlighted any change that previously had a different value.
Class Tools
Blood
Talents
Frost
Talents
Unholy
Talents
Renforcement runique
has a 2.0% chance to proc per Runic Power spent (from 1.5% on Live)
Fièvre de givre
's
chance to generate Runic Power increased to 30% (from 20% on all targets on Live)
Chance now diminishes on targets beyond the first
Souffle de Sindragosa
:
now has a 0% increased chance to proc
Renforcement runique
(was previously 50% on the PTR).
costs 16 Runic Power/sec (was previously 18 on the PTR, currently is 15 on Live).
generates two Runes at start and end.
now deals 10% less damage.
Machine à tuer
RPPM now correctly 4.5 (was roughly 1.5 on Live).
Chape de glace
Pillar of Frost cooldown reduction now 3 seconds (currently 1 on Live).
Frappe de givre
now deals 15% more damage.
This might seem like a lot to digest, but I promise that I'll break it down nicely. However, before we dwell deeper into the implications of these changes, it's important that we understand the issues that Frost faces in the Live version of the game. I won't dwell too much on this since I extensively covered it in the
previous article
, so go have a look at that one if you want more in depth info!
On Live, builds using
Souffle de Sindragosa
have an obnoxious amount of downtime, reaching levels of 30%, or 85 seconds, in a 5 minute fight! It has been a major issue throughout BFA and I can't be happier that it's finally getting properly addressed. Another fact worth mentioning is the low power of the
Chape de glace
talent. Currently, on Live, this talent increases your damage by a total of 1% versus not having any talent equipped. This can be compared to a 13% increase when selecting
Souffle de Sindragosa
. You can boost this 1% number to 3.5% if you only pick azerite traits that synergise with the talent.
Impact of Changes
Souffle de Sindragosa
Resource Changes
I'll start by discussing the resource changes that have been made to
Souffle de Sindragosa
:
Souffle de Sindragosa
:
now has a 0% increased chance to proc
Renforcement runique
(was previously 50% on the PTR).
costs 16 Runic Power/sec (was previously 18 on the PTR, currently is 15 on Live).
generates two Runes at start and end.
I must say that I absolutely love these changes, they were right on the point when it came to solving the issues that previously existed with the
Souffle de Sindragosa
build. Let's start by looking at downtime. With these changes, in addition to the other resource gains, our downtime is cut in half compared to live!
Most notably, the downtime experienced when pooling has been significantly reduced. On Live, the pooling phase starts 20 seconds before we activate
Souffle de Sindragosa
, and it's not uncommon to not use any abilities for up to 7 seconds, simply because you want to pool Runes. Since
Souffle de Sindragosa
now gives us 2 Runes on activation, we can initiate the window with 1 or 0 Runes. This completely eliminates the need for pooling Runes for
Souffle de Sindragosa
, subsequently lowers our pooling window to 10 seconds. Furthermore, our opener is so much smoother. On Live, we use three
Anéantissement
s, weaving in
Rafale hurlante
when we get procs of
Frimas
. After this, we have to wait for several seconds before we can pop our cooldowns and use
Souffle de Sindragosa
. This means standing there, with all your procs and Bloodlust, simply auto attacking the boss: it's not very fun. On PTR however, there is no waiting at all! We can use our three
Anéantissement
s and then instantly move into the Breath window, it's so much nicer.
Within our Breath, we also experience less downtime. This is due to the increased cost of the ability. We need to use a higher frequency of
Anéantissement
to sustain the Runic Power drain. We also gain more Runes through the buff of
Renforcement runique
(in conjunction with the increased cost, every tick of
Souffle de Sindragosa
generates 42% more Runes on average). This essentially means higher GCD-utilisation throughout Breath. Due to this, we can consistently extend the
Tempête grandissante
buff with the higher Rune consumption. This will increase the strength of this already powerful talent.
We only see a small decrease in downtime outside the two situations described above. However, it's important to acknowledge the fact that our pooling window is smaller, meaning that the total amount of time in the "Otherwise" category has increased. Importantly, it feels great when you exit your Breath window. Previously, you would be almost completely starved as your
Souffle de Sindragosa
ended, having to wait several seconds to gain the Runes necessary to continue your rotation. With these new changes on the PTR, this no longer happens. You are instantly thrown into your normal rotation with the resources necessary to do so. Everything feels much smoother and plays so much better. Furthermore, we can expect more downtime reduction if we pick the
Souvenir des rêves lucides
essence. It's currently unclear if this will be our best choice so we'll just have to wait and see!
Another important aspect that has changed is the
Anéantissement
use during
Souffle de Sindragosa
compared to the previous PTR build. 18 Runic Power/ second with a 3% chance of proccing
Renforcement runique
meant that you were locked into spamming
Anéantissement
for almost every single GCD. Using
Frimas
,
Faux de givre
,
Fureur du wyrm de givre
,
Cœur froid
and
Hiver impitoyable
was difficult without ending your Breath. With 16 Runic Power/ second and a 2% chance to proc
Renforcement runique
, our breath window is much healthier, leaving enough room to use these 1 or 0 Rune-cost abilities!
Damage Tuning
Souffle de Sindragosa
now deals 10% less damage.
Frappe de givre
now deals 15% more damage.
With the resources changes made on the PTR,
Souffle de Sindragosa
saw an unproportionate damage increase compared to builds with other talents. This was mainly due to how
Souffle de Sindragosa
benefits more strongly with more resources, as well as the additional 4 Runes added to the cooldown. This meant that Breath saw an 8% overall increase, whereas
Oblitération
only saw a 4% buff. Buffing
Frappe de givre
and nerfing
Souffle de Sindragosa
stabilises this unbalanced gain. Builds with
Souffle de Sindragosa
have a smaller proportion of the overall damage coming from
Frappe de givre
, since a fraction of your Runic Power is spent on
Souffle de Sindragosa
instead of
Frappe de givre
. Buffing
Frappe de givre
therefore buffs alternative talents more.
With these new damage values, builds with
Souffle de Sindragosa
lose an overall 0.5% and alternative builds gain 2.5%. This means that the unproportionate gain from the previous changes has been largely cancelled out. This all considers Single Target, something that we usually look at when judging the power of changes. This is both because Single Target is a simple environment where we can accurately compare talents, as well as being an important metric in both Raiding and Mythic + scenarios.
Chape de glace
Chape de glace
: Pillar of Frost cooldown reduction now 3 seconds (currently 1 on Live).
As I previously mentioned,
Chape de glace
is a severely undertuned talent on live. Without the boost it gains from Azerite, it's a mere 1% upgrade on Single Target compared to picking no talent at all. Both
Citadelle glacée
and
Indignation de dragonnet de givre
synergise with this talent, increasing the number to roughly 3.5%. This is what justified the insane buff to the effect of the talent, increasing it with a factor of 3.
Let's consider the impact of this change on Single Target. A larger cooldown reduction leads to a shorter cooldown of
Pilier de givre
, thus increasing overall uptime. This allows us, with enough haste and crit, to overlap our
Pilier de givre
with the previous
Citadelle glacée
buff, enabling windows of high strength to further increase the power of
Fureur du wyrm de givre
and
Cœur froid
.
On Single Target, these changes amount to a huge buff to
Chape de glace
as a talent. With 2 stacks of
Citadelle glacée
, it now increases our damage by 6% compared to not selecting a talent. You can boost this number by quite a bit. If you for some reason decide to run triple
Citadelle glacée
and triple
Indignation de dragonnet de givre
(which is actually possible from current azerite with
Spallières dynarouage
,
Grand heaume du sentier putride
and
Cuirasse de purification divine
), you can boost this number to an insane 11.5%. However, since
Indignation de dragonnet de givre
isn't very strong on Single Target, this combination would actually be worse in overall dps compared to the setup using 2 stacks of
Citadelle glacée
.
Single Target isn't where this change sees the largest impact though. The uptime we can achieve is significantly larger in AoE. This is due to the interaction between the Cooldown reduction of
Chape de glace
and the
Faux de givre
talent. When using
Faux de givre
, only a single crit is required to reduce the Cooldown of
Pilier de givre
. Hits from
Faux de givre
crit independently, meaning that we get multiple tries on every use to generate a crit. We cannot, however, reduce the cooldown multiple times with a single use of
Faux de givre
due the internal cooldown of
Chape de glace
. Below is a graph showing the % chance to crit versus multiple targets using
Faux de givre
with a 20% crit chance.
As you can see, we get a really high proc chance at high target counts. For instance, at 5 targets, we have nearly a 70% chance to proc the cooldown reduction every time we use
Faux de givre
. Since we're generally spamming this ability in AoE, we'll be seeing a lot more uptime of
Pilier de givre
. At high crit and haste, we can even reduce the cooldown of
Pilier de givre
to introduce permanent uptime of the buff! Unfortunately, the power increase from Runes we use in the cooldown doesn't transfer when we refresh it (unlike
Tempête grandissante
which does indeed keep its stacks). This looks promising when it comes to alternative builds in Mythic +. Icecap might bring a higher overall AoE throughput, creating meaningful choice between the talents in the final talent row.
Fièvre de givre
Resource Change
Fièvre de givre
's
chance to generate Runic Power increased to 30% (from 20% on all targets on Live)
Chance now diminishes on targets beyond the first
I only briefly touched on this change in the previous article. I've now done extensive testing and understand the PTR version of the ability much better (shoutout to Dagraine for helping to provide data). I'd like to start by saying that it's quite difficult to consistently test high target counts in WoW. Training dummies exist as a maximum of 4 stacked targets, making it tricky to reach higher numbers. Luckily, you can create as many characters as you want on the PTR, each with its own cooldown on
Sac de frappe de navets
, allowing you to spawn multiple Turnips by sequentially logging in on your many characters. You can here see me testing 12 targets (you have to place the primary turnip just to the right of the bone on the ground).
These tests reveal some interesting aspects of the new DoT. First of all, the ICD (Internal CoolDown) has been removed. This previously meant that
Fièvre de givre
could only proc at a maximum rate of once every second. Even if you were to hit 20 targets with the DoT, you'd only ever get 5 Runic Power every 3 seconds when the DoT ticked. This actually led to some shenanigans where you'd desynchronise your DoTs on different targets to overall increase your Runic Power gain. You can read more about this in
this article
over at the
Advanced Concepts
section in the Frost guide.
With the removal of the ICD, there is no longer a limit to how many times your
Fièvre de givre
can proc the Runic Power gain. Theoretically, you could get 10 procs in a single large tick on 10 targets, filling up your runic power bar to half (this will be extremely unlikely). We can observe this behaviour when testing:
There are some weird points on this graph, like at 6 targets where the observed proc chance suddenly dipped. I'm confused by this number since it's statistically very unlikely to occur. Assuming a true proc chance of 75%, even lower than what a linear fit would predict, this low of a number is at almost 5 standard deviations. In other words, there's a 1 in 10 million chance of getting a number this low. It's probably just a mistake I've done when testing, or it could be an underlying mechanic that we've yet to understand.
Most importantly, one can observe more procs on the PTR, compared to Live, at almost every target count. Furthermore, the procs continue scaling past 1, potentially scaling linearly to infinity. I personally thought this change would limit the scaling of
Fièvre de givre
resource gain in AoE. However, it seems to amplify it, further increasing the power of
Souffle de Sindragosa
in AoE scenarios (only by a small amount).
Machine à tuer
RPPM Fix
Machine à tuer
RPPM now correctly 4.5 (was roughly 1.5 on Live).
Since the start of BFA,
Machine à tuer
has been severely bugged. Instead of proccing roughly 4.5 times a minute, it was only proccing 1.5 times a minute. This meant that the power of
Efficacité meurtrière
was significantly reduced and overall meant that the spec did ~450 dps less (this bug hasn't been implemented in simulations so they've always been overestimating the power of Frost DKs). Luckily, the proc chance has now been fixed on the PTR and you can expect the correct amount of procs, as long as you have enough crit.
Due to the fact that
Machine à tuer
only procs on critical auto attacks, you actually need a specific amount of crit to even reach the RPPM. Simply put, if you have too low crit, you won't critically strike 5 times a minute and can therefore never reach the RPPM. What this does is that it makes your critical strike scale more at low levels of crit. The RPPM of the ability already scales with crit, but at low crit numbers, all you care about is meeting the required quota of critical strikes per minute.
Conclusions
We've seen a lot of interesting changes on the PTR and I'm excited for the patch to hit. There's still much uncertainty when it comes to essences and how they'll impact us. The resource changes to
Souffle de Sindragosa
are on point, reducing downtime drastically and vastly increases the enjoyability of the spec. The damage tuning effectively counteract the unproportional gain in DPS that Breath received from the initial changes, making sure that the gap doesn't widen even more to the other talents. The buff to
Chape de glace
is a significant upgrade to the talent, making it 11% better than no talent in certain situations. It also shows promising applications in sustained AoE and may become an alternative and viable choice in Mythic +. The change to
Fièvre de givre
shows indications of being an overall buff to resource generation at all target counts. Furthermore, it now scales better at high target counts, having average proc rates at above 1 when reaching 10+ targets. Finally, the
Machine à tuer
bug fix is a welcomed change that will bring
Efficacité meurtrière
up to par with the other talents in the same row. It will also increase our dps by roughly 450.
Looking forwards, I'd personally like to see
Oblitération
become a more viable choice in the final talent row. In the current state, you can't make meaningful choices depending on situation. If
Oblitération
was better on Pure Single target, it could become the pick for pure patchwerk when you cannot cleave off anything. This could then instigate talent switches between bosses and dungeons, something that I think is healthy for the game. Furthermore, the increase in resources is currently detrimental to
Oblitération
. Since you already gain resources through the CD itself, you sometimes overcap on Runes and Runic Power. This is especially noticeable in AoE situations where the low cost of
Faux de givre
leaves you at 5+ Runes, on average, during your
Pilier de givre
. I don't think the 30% Rune gain is necessary anymore.
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