Class Wishlists for Midnight
Hunter Wishlist
For a brief breakdown of the changes coming to each specialization in Midnight, check out our Midnight Class Survival Guide.
Midnight Class Survival Guide
Death Knight Wishlists for Midnight
Our Death Knight Writers, Mandl (Blood), Khazak (Frost), and Taeznak (Unholy), discuss the most significant issues plaguing their specs as well as the must-have changes they'd like to see prior to Midnight's launch in just a few short months.
Blood Death Knight Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Better Defensive Toolkit Options
2.
Better Ability Tracking
3.
Unique Talent Choices + Visuals
4.
Bugfixes to Critical Abilities/Talents
5.
Hero Talent Balance
Defensive Toolkit
One of the initial builds of Midnight promised a trade-off: the wholesale removal of a large number of defensive choices and a relative neutering of Death Strike in exchange for a baseline armor and Bone Shield buff and "further changes". Out of these, only the baseline armor buff materialized. Bone Shield currently provides 126% of Strength as Armor on live, while on beta and the 12.0 PTR, it provides 125% - and this is before you include the outright removal of Reinforced Bones.
The "further changes" ended up being very little. The initial launch was promising, and the follow-up was non-existent, leading to a launch with essentially four fewer active cooldowns, two direct nerfs to the potency of Dancing Rune Weapon, two active nerfs to the potency of Death Strike, and very little to show for it.
Better Ability Tracking
Put it simply - the cooldown manager is a mess for Blood:
List of all improperly or not tracked at all abilities
Partially Tracked:
Blood Shield: existence and remaining duration trackable as a bar and a buff, value is mouseover only
Death and Decay: same issue as most weakauras on live, Cleaving Strikes extension is not factored in and leads to flickering/reapplication
Not tracked at all:
San'layn: Essence of the Blood Queen stacks
San'layn: Gift of the San'layn (important as it is impossible to differentiate between an Apex Dancing Rune Weapon and an actual hardcast - made worse by a bug)
Deathbringer: Exterminate stacks. Particularly problematic considering the existence of a hard cap of 2 and a new talent being bugged to provide two instead of one. This is tracked on Frost.
Deathbringer: Rune Carved Plates
This list is only the most glaring omissions. Most of these are of critical importance to proper play and were backfilled by weakauras until now, and combined with the problems the new Apex talents created specifically for San'layn, this only makes the omissions more glaring once you hit max level on Midnight.
Unique Talent Choices + Visuals
The changes between Midnight and The War Within yielded very little in terms of riveting, choice-inducing gameplay: almost every single new talent is a passive proc (and some of them have mismatched durations. Why is Blood Mist 8 seconds irrespective of whether you pick Everlasting Bond?) with the exception of Consumption, which still has barely any animation even when it became an empower spell - something you should visually see. Instead, you hold up your weapon and... a faint red slash appears in front of you.
Pruning unnecessary buttons was worth it, but replacing them with passive damage procs was probably a little too far on the other end of the scale. The result is yet another expansion with the same gameplay loop, with the hero talent trees providing the exact same flavor difference as in Dragonflight.
Bugfixes
Blood is currently in a majorly buggy state and two of the most problematic bugs directly impact Hero talent choices and resource economy. The list is very long, with the two most glaring problems being Heartbreaker not actually granting bonus Runic Power except when during a hard-casted Dancing Rune Weapon as San'layn, and hard-casting Dancing Rune Weapon while an Apex Dancing Rune Weapon proc is up does nothing (and vice versa - proccing Apex talents during a hard-casted Dancing Rune Weapon also has unintended effects).
It is worrisome to go into Midnight knowing that even the core of the spec is riddled with bugs that have persisted for a large part of the alpha and beta cycle, and even more disheartening when you consider that some bugs could almost be considered features of the game at this point.
Hero Talent Balance
A recent tuning pass brought the specialization aura buff back to 0% and re-distributed the offset (121% - a rather large number) to some, but not all abilities. In particular, Deathbringer went completely unscatched after a second set of hotfixes, while San'layn's only change was a 20% buff to Vampiric Strike - making a proc of Vampiric Strike worse in direct damage than a natural cast of Heart Strike before Infliction of Sorrow is considered.
Glaring differences like these, particularly without an information to the player that such a sweeping change to the numerical balance between hero talents from 11.2.7 to 12.0 happened, are very rough, and it serves to once again remove the choice of hero talents due to one of them being arbitrarily nerfed.
Blood DK
Frost Death Knight Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Stronger Single-target Talents
2.
Separate niches for Frostbane and Breath of Sindragosa
3.
Rework for Deathbringer Utility
4.
Trollbane Bugs Fixed
5.
Raid Buff
Talent Diversity
My top wish for Frost in Midnight is to see greater talent diversity. In 11.2, Frost played the same talent build everywhere. Although the tree is set up to create a different build to focus on single-target damage, the tuning on these talents missed the mark. The difference in throughput was negligible, and most players played the same build across all encounters. The Midnight Beta has some tuning changes that seem intended to add some variety, but at the moment, it appears that we will play one build everywhere. Frostbane will take over as the jack of all trades, even dominating in single-target, thanks to the new bonus damage to the primary target provided by Shattering Blade. Frostbane and Breath of Sindragosa now both occupy the same niche, focusing on a priority target with constant passive cleave. This will leave us playing the same build all patch, coming down to whichever one provides the most throughput in that niche.
Hero Talent Pain Points
Each of Frost's Hero Talents still has a significant pain point. For Deathbringer, it is the choice node containing Death's Messenger/Expelling Shield. Now that Lichborne has no damage reduction, only providing a small, temporary leech buff, neither talent in this choice is remotely useful. I would like to see both of these talents replaced with new options that offer some small utility. Rider of the Apocalypse suffers from a couple of major bugs around Trollbane. The first affects Let Terror Reign, causing Trollbane's Obliterate to only deal Frost damage and scale with the player's Mastery when the player uses a Two-Hand weapon. The second stems from the same talent. Trollbane's Frostscythe casts will inconsistently benefit from the player's Killing Machine, leading to large swings in damage done. Both of these bugs add extra, non-obvious considerations in picking which Hero Talent to play.
Raid Buff
At this point, the Death Knight raid buff bit is a well-known meme, but it still warrants a mention at every chance. The strength of this argument hinges on the presence of encounter designs that cater specifically to Death Grip. If we see another tier lacking grip opportunities like Liberation of Undermine, then our desirability hinges entirely on our tuning. If we see another end boss with a hard requirement to bring a Death Knight for the sake of Death Grip like Dimensius, then we are inherently desirable regardless of tuning. Every other class brings some passive aura that makes them inherently desirable in a group; it is time for Death Knights to get the same treatment.
Frost Death Knight Guide
Unholy Death Knight Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
AoE Gameplay Changes
2.
Talents that affect Decision Making
3.
Better Tier Set
4.
Balanced Resources
5.
More Undead Variety
Gameplay Variability
The first two aspects of my wishlist kinda boil down to the same thing in the end. Right now, there are just no talents in the Unholy talent tree that can affect gameplay decision-making at all. It's all passive effects that you get the full benefit from just by playing the rotation properly, even our capstones. While most of the talents are fairly interesting thematically, they entirely lack the gameplay hooks to make them fun, and feel more like an active player choice, rather than Unholy just being the same all the time.
This is easily my biggest gripe with Midnight Unholy at the moment, and I genuinely wish there were more things that could affect our moment-to-moment decision-making. Not talking about random procs, or RNG added to the rotation, but instead talents that change how you approach an ability, how it's utilized, and most of all, doing so based on the number of targets available to hit. As it is at the moment, it's bound to get bland, boring, and samey very quickly. I'd love to see something akin to Breath of Sindragosa vs Obliteration for Unholy, with gameplay options focused on diseases, or pets based on capstones, but right now it's lacking even the most basic gameplay variance.
Tier Set Woes & Resource Balance
Similar to the first two points, the next 2 are also in a similar vein. Currently, our tier set is a bit lackluster.
Unholy
Death Knight Unholy 12.0 Class Set 2pc -
Death Knight Unholy 12.0 Class Set 4pc -
Contrary to what Blizzard's stated goals for the tier sets are to be mechanically interesting while being simple. Increasing the damage of Putrefy and our Diseases is fine for simplicity, but the mechanical aspect falls flat on its face. Putrefy making our next Scourge Strike free does nothing interesting for us; instead, it simply leads to resource overflow, wasted resources we can't use. As we don't have anything that hits incredibly hard that we are vying for resources to be able to use. Instead, our resources serve a strict rotational purpose, spend Runes to be able to generate Lesser Ghouls, and spend Runic Power to regenerate those Runes.
At a baseline, our resources just aren't balanced properly at the moment, requiring Festering Scythe to reduce the Rune pressure we face to generate Lesser Ghouls, while we also just don't generate enough Runic Power to be able to press Death Coil, or Epidemic enough to trigger Runic Corruption enough to generate those Runes we need for Lesser Ghouls. Its a bit of a complex problem, and the tier set serves to help with none of it. Even if it did, it would feel terrible to require this specific tier set for the spec to feel/flow correctly resource-wise. So, the baseline resource situation needs rebalanced, and the tier set really needs to be changed... again.
Undead Variety
The final point is the only one not really gameplay-related, but still very important to me and my wishlist. As it stands right now, Unholy hasn't seen any new undead variety in its summons since Battle for Azeroth, when Magus of the Dead was introduced. 7 years of the same 5 undead; Ghouls, Gargoyles, Abominations, Magus', and Skulkers. Being a very summon-focused specialization, it really feels like a missed opportunity to not frequently add new Undead to our arsenal, to our Army of the Dead. While other pet specializations get new pets every expansion, Unholy is left out of the fun.
The Apex talents themselves are probably the biggest missed opportunity in this regard, with a major focus on Liches in their theming, and yet mechanically, they have nothing to do with Liches at all. Instead, a weak justification to steal an old Rogue animation for Necrotic Coil, and repurpose Abomination Limb's animation for Graveyard. What do these two things have to do with Liches, and frankly, why doesn't it let us summon a Lich?! Alongside this, Putrefy also seems like a missed opportunity to reintroduce the Reanimated Shambler pet we have had a few times in the past, with this already summoning something to explode, is there any reason to not replace it with the Shambler?
Unholy Death Knight Guide
