I hate hypocrites.

3.2 patch notes have been out for some time, and the PTR has been up for two days now with people confirming and finding new changes. Of course, Death Knights received a load of nerfs; a few of which are deserved, but most are just knee-jerked reactions caused by WoW's fucked up Arena system.

I'm not even going to touch the tank stuff. Not my main spec. However, my DPS spec is being destroyed, and that fucking pisses me off.

Comparing Death Knights, the pecking order for single-target damage is Blood --> Unholy --> Frost, with Dual Wield being practically worthless to play. Obviously there are some gimmick fights that alter those rankings, but they hold true in most cases.

The problem comes from the Arenas. Frost DKs have insane amounts of burst damage through their main attack, Frost Strike. With proper setup, a Frost DK can drop 4 attacks in 4 seconds, each with the ability to crit for roughly 10K damage, or more. That's obviusly a problem.

So what does Blizzard do? Nerf the fuck out of it, which of course has serious ramifications for PvE.

What I love most is the hypocrisy surounding the nerf though. I quote, from a post from Ghostcrawler:
We're already trying to have Blood, Frost and Unholy tanks and Blood, Frost and Unholy PvP builds. Also having Blood, Frost and Unholy dual-wield builds just creates an impossible matrix. You have to support Blood 2H PvP, and Unholy DW tanking, and Frost 2H PvE. It just gets crazy.

Frost might still do okay with 2H. We didn't specifically nerf their 2H abilities. We just gave them a talent to make DW more viable. I don't honestly know how 2H Frost dps stacks up in 3.2 at the moment.

Okay, so they say "We didn't really nerf 2H Frost", yet, let's take a look at the evidence, shall we? Remember that Frost Strike accounts for close to 50% of my overall damage.

1) Frost Strike now causes 55% weapon damage (down from 60%) plus 110.55 (down from 120.6) at max rank.
2) Frost Strike can now be dodged/blocked/parried.
3) Blood of the North increases Blood Strike and Frost Strike damage by 3/6/10%. (Down from a maximum of 15%)
4) Sigil of the Vengeful Heart increases damage of Frost Strike by 115. (Down from 380).

Now, I recognize that this is still all on the PTR and subject to tweaking, but for the time being, I call fucking bullshit. All four of those combined is an extremely significant and unfair nerf to PvE Frost DPS. Note that we recieved only one very minor buff to a strike we barely use to compensate, and we're already the lowest of the three trees on base damage.

I'm being forced to either Dual Wield in Frost (which may or may not be okay, time will still tell on that), or respec to Blood or Unholy and redo my gear.