Enjoy the pain, dks! Upcoming Death Knight set changes in 9.2

Happy Friday, Death Knights! Sorry to reply so late, but your feedback here – and from all the different channels we read and viewed – is invaluable. Let's talk about the various changes we're considering next and the issues you should see in future releases that need to be addressed. Thank you to some of you for reporting these issues!

austerity

Bug fixes:

Glacier bursts should be released when the killing machine is consumed by the Frost Sickle.

Reports of glacier bursts sometimes covering the killing machine BUFF in flight are being studied.

Overall, Frost seems to be doing a good job from a performance level standpoint, and the impact of these two rewards is a bit better than it seems. However, what we'll explore in future updates (because, most likely not in the next releases) is the repackaging of the 2-piece set, which, while keeping it at the same performance level while incorporating more content into the kit – may be biased towards generating or planning applications for killing machines, which in turn could make the 4-piece set feel smoother.

Blood

The heart strike of the 4-piece set does not trigger the many inconsistencies of the 2-piece set or interaction with talent.

The power of the Endless Rune Waltz and the extension of the Rune Blade Dance should only be triggered when a heart blow is cast, not based on the number of targets hit.

Our goal was to clean up the interplay between heart strikes and other tiered sets – the intention here was to make the 4-piece set of heart strikes that basically trigger all the normal effects. This should make it more powerful under normal circumstances while fixing the error of single-brushing the entire high-level key (oops, lol). In addition, we'll add an internal cooldown for the 4-piece parry trigger to better control its output and inform future adjustments. In future updates, the repeated feedback so far is that there is a considerable sense of separation between the value and excitement of this set of equipment between the Great Secret Realm and the Regiment. While the design of this set is essentially biased toward one of them, it's still worth exploring how to maintain that "infinite" value in a multi-objective scenario while providing better help to our team members. There are some ideas on how to achieve this (like adding more to the 2-piece set of effects), but you won't see this right away.

evil

In some cases, evil pets don't actually get 20% attack speed buff as seen.

Overlapping use of Soul Reaper (from the 2-piece set and spells) will cause later uses to detonate slower than normal.

One big problem: when a unit with Soul Reaper dies, the four-piece ghoul isn't spawned – this is for the features offered in The Dual Target/Grand Secret Realm, but doesn't fully enter the PTR.

The balance of evil is tricky because it's based on the beheading period, but some of the bugs mentioned above make it much worse than it was intended to be outside of the beheading period. We'll make all of the above modifications and take a look at how the 4-piece set of summons should work. There are many people who have reported that since it is a ghoul in an army of the dead, its duration should be increased to 30 seconds, but it is also hoped that it will produce the undead magic mentor through talent. For now, it seems most likely to change the duration to 30 seconds and not produce the Undead Magister, but it will take a moment to decide which approach to adopt. It's worth noting that even if the 4-piece set is enhanced, it's likely to be limited back (or test an alternative) due to adjustment considerations, so your ongoing feedback, testing, and theoretical research is invaluable. That's all!

- All listed bugs are expected to be fixed, as well as some minor feature changes, and future versions will be primarily updates to the Evil 4-Piece Set, Blood 2-Piece Set, and Frost 2-Piece Set (approximately in that order of priority). Enjoy the pain, DKs.