2.1.
Midnight Season 1 Release Changes
Midnight Season 1 has released, and with it came a lot of new content.
It brought with it three new Raids, alongside heralding the start of Season
1 for both Mythic+ and PvP. With all the new things available, we've provided
some dedicated hubs covering everything available!
2.2.
Patch 12.0.5 Changes
The Frost Death Knight received some minor changes to improve the gameplay loop in
12.0.5. The recall of
Frostwyrm's Fury that we get from our
Chosen of Frostbrood
is now off the GCD, making it less disruptive to cast. Furthermore,
Echoing Fury
now grants one stack of
Exterminate (down from two) and
Exterminate
again reduces the cost of your next
Obliterate/
Frostscythe by 1 Rune.
Overall, we get more resources in our burst window with
Deathbringer and
more flexibility with our GCDs. This will improve our gameplay and help us consume both
Killing Machines and
Exterminate procs more effectively.
In addition to this, a variety of open world content releases worth checking out!
The Voidforge Unlocks!
The Voidforge is Midnight's take on Bonus Rolls and Turbo Boost, allowing you to
target specific big ticket items through a new bonus roll system. You can also
further empower trinkets and weapons, and we have recommendations on our
Gear page.
Void Assaults are Unleashed
Eversong Woods and Zul'Aman are under siege from the forces of the Void. Thwarting
their attacks provide a new way to acquire gear all the way up to Hero level, and
you can check out more on our Void Assault hub.
Disrupt Ritual Sites
Sharing a similar reward structure to Void Assaults, Ritual Sites are instanced
content similar to Delves. You can find out all about them on our Ritual Sites page.
Click for Previous Season 1 Hotfixes
Frost Death Knight has received a total of three buffs in Midnight so far. 4%
on March 20th, 4% on March 31st and an additional 4-5% on April 7th. Frost started
out as a relatively weak spec but is doing better now after all the buffs.
When it comes to tuning adjustments, our next planned pass is expected to arrive
with the Midnight Season 1 launch on March 17. Our next pass will follow immediately
afterwards utilizing data gathered during the week Heroic difficulties are available;
these changes will go live with the launch of Mythic raid difficulty and Mythic+ on
March 24.
Beyond these dates, we will look to perform more tuning passes based on data gathered
during the starting weeks of Mythic difficulty for Season 1 and the March on Quel’Danas
available the week of March 31.For these two passes we err on the side of caution with
the amount of tuning we do until their respective Mythic end-bosses die to avoid being
overly disruptive to progression. After these key dates we will have several check-in passes
planned roughly a month apart. Once players obtain higher item level and better optimized gear
sets, the throughput of several specs will shift up or down relative to others and we feel
it’s important to be diligent in looking at the current state of class balance as time goes on.
2.3.
Midnight for Frost Death Knight
Frost Death Knight has not received a significant number of changes
in Midnight. Frost Death Knights received a rework in the middle of
The War Within and it seems the developers are happy with this new iteration.
We saw some minor changes within the talents,
buffing
Shattering Blade and
Frostbane, adding a frost-damage component to baseline
Obliterate and making
Empower Rune Weapon have no travel time.
2.4.
New Apex Talents
We have received three new talents in our spec tree that we can talent into as we
level from 80 to 90. These are generally really powerful, buffing
Frostwyrm's Fury
specifically. We get a huge raw damage increase to the ability, a Haste buff whenever we use it,
a
Pillar of Frost extension as well the option to recast the wyrm within 45 seconds
of using it initially.
2.5.
Hero Talent Changes
Both
Rider of the Apocalypse and
Deathbringer have received three new talents.
Rider gets
Ride or Die!,
Let Terror Reign and
Unholy Armaments. Deathbringer receives
Frigid Resolve,
Deathly Blows and
Echoing Fury.
The impact to us is not that
significant from these talents, mainly presenting some nice damage increases in interesting ways.
Echoing Fury granting two stacks of
Exterminate is probably the most impactful as it
generates a significant amount free procs of
Killing Machine.
2.6.
Tuning and Quality-of-life
Obliterate now deals a portion of its damage as Frost Damage by default. This
provides a nice tuning knob for Blizzard to help bridge the huge gap between raw Obliterates
and
Killing Machine Obliterates.
Frostbane now also deals 300% additional damage to the main target when it consumes
stacks of
Razorice. This is a significant single-target buff to the ability that previously
struggled in that scenario. This significantly buffs dual-wield builds and make them more viable
in all content.
Empower Rune Weapon is now instant and no longer has a projectile. This is a very useful
change to an otherwise great ability. Currently, the projectile aspect of Empower Rune Weapon
causes issues on certain bosses where we see up to 0.5 seconds delay before we actually get
our Runic Power and
Killing Machine proc. This makes the rotation feel a bit more laggy
and disrupts your otherwise practiced flow. We can now always reliably expect the Killing Machine
to come at a specific time.
2.7.
Class Tree Changes
The Death Knight class tree has also seen some minor changes.
Blood Bond,
Death Defiance,
and
Death Notes have all been added. Some nice defensives and a hook to talent into
Death Pact
(which is very much needed, we never pick this talent otherwise). Death Notes would have been a nice addition
back in the day, when
Breath of Sindragosa drained Runic Power. It is still nice to get but not as impactful
anymore.
Soul Reaper is gone as it has been moved to the Unholy talent
tree and
Sacrificial Pact has been simply removed. For Frost this really
does not matter since we did not pick either talent anyway.
We have also had some movement of nodes around the tree.
Death's Reach is in a much better spot as a choice node
with
Asphyxiate.
Wraith Walk has moved further up the tree and is now a choice with
March of Darkness.
Unholy Momentum is now a 2-point talent as well. Overall we get a bit more access to certain talents and some more options
in the tree.
Death Strike and
Unholy Endurance were nerfed a bit so we also lost some defensive power, but not that
much in the grand scheme of things.