As an icy harbinger of doom, the Frost Death Knight is meant to be the embodiment of the icy chill of Northrend, the frigid cold of death.
If you ask me, (and this is my post so if you're reading that's kind of the equivalent of asking me,) the image of the Death Knight evokes the idea of an executioner or the Grim Reaper. Swinging a massive weapon just feels right for the class. Ghouls and zombies are there to savagely attack the Scourge's foes, clawing and scratching, but the Death Knight comes in to end things. The most iconic weapon associated with the Death Knight is Frostmourne, a two-handed sword. Executioners' axes are two-handed, the Grim Reaper's scythe is two-handed.
It just feels right.
Now, way back ten years ago when the Death Knight was first introduced, they decided that it would be the only plate tanking class that wouldn't use shields. Instead, they'd have other ways to reduce damage to compensate. Instead, a Death Knight's equipment would be either a two-handed weapon or dual-wielded swords.
For whatever reason, Frost always seemed to be the spec that allowed for dual-wielding, but from Wrath through Warlords, they always allowed Frost DKs to make a choice between using a two-handed weapon or dual-wielding.
Personally, I loved the style of two-handed frost, with its massive and very satisfying Obliterate crits. The class and spec fantasy - of being that implacable doom marching toward your foes and then executing them with cold, unfeeling efficiency (see "Killing Machine" as one of Frost's major procs) - really fit with that playstyle.
But in Legion, with a single weapon type available for the spec, they decided to go with dual-wielding. It makes sense, to be honest. As the only spec that ever really allowed for dual-wielding, they'd either need to make Frost use two weapons or just get rid of the idea that Death Knights would ever dual-wield. You'll notice that no class got all weapons of the same type. Warlocks and Priests got two specs with staves and one with a dagger and off-hand each, and so forth.
And I'll certainly acknowledge that there is a place for the idea of dual-wielding fitting a certain type of fantasy for Frost - where you sort of emulate the bitter, frozen winds by striking relentlessly.
But let's talk about whether they can walk that back.
Now first, you could ask the question of whether they should. Frost has a very simple and easy way to identify itself amongst the DK specs - it's the dual-wield one. By going back to two-handed weapons, the distinction between Frost and Unholy becomes a little (only a little) more subtle. Still, as an old fan of the look and feel of 2H, I'd like to think about whether it's possible.
I think the biggest challenge is pretty obviously how to balance between two weapon loadouts. Unless you got rid of dual-wielding entirely (which would mean losing a ton of transmog options, for one thing) you'd have to ensure that both styles were viable. Blizzard has come a long way since the days of "there's one right spec to play" back in vanilla. So there would have to be reasonable parity between these two sub-specs.
One piece of good news for this prospect is an under-the-hood mechanical change that actually de-emphasizes the importance of a weapon's damage. Ability damage in BFA will be based entirely on Attack Power, and not on weapon damage. The only thing that weapon damage will be used for is your autoattacks. So unless I'm mistaken, this might actually mean that your Demon Hunter can use their proficiency in daggers without paying a price in damage.
And what that also means is that, assuming that having the same item level weapons for DW and 2H gives you the same value of strength and secondary stats, the damage of Obliterate and Frost Strike shouldn't change at all with your choice of weapon(s.)
Easy enough, then, right? So that fixes it?
Well, the problem is a little rune called Razorice (also any talent that activates on auto attacks.) Two-handed Frost never gets this buff to Frost Damage that you get with dual-wielding. This was sort of off-set by the massive Obliterate crits, making 2H a more physical-damage based spec and making DW more Frost-damage-based, which of course also changed the value of Mastery and... yeah, it got complicated.
With two weapons, you get the benefits of both Fallen Crusader and Razorice, while 2H generally just went with Fallen Crusader - the big strength buff was kind of hard to pass up.
Allowing two weapon runes with dual-wielding inherently unbalances the system. Even if all other things are equal, you need some way to counterbalance this or Dual-wield will always come out better.
Beyond just giving you Razorice automatically if you are wielding a two-handed weapon (and even then you have the problem of the frost damage it does on application - something that happens more frequently while dual-wielding) you'd have to play some really tricky games with the Runeforges to make this balanced.
I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but I think it's not the fire-and-forget kind of design Blizzard would look for. Restricting the spec to only DW has, I'm sure, made it far easier to balance.
But if we're talking class and spec fantasy, I do really feel like we lost something when 2H frost was taken away.
We've been told that Frost is getting some significant changes in BFA, but those changes are not yet in the latest build. I'm certainly looking forward with interest to see to what degree things are changing - so far, Frost has been more or less identical to its Legion incarnation on the Beta.
At the risk of going down the rabbit hole, I do think Frost needs some rethinking to the base rotation.
Killing Machine, as a proc, was once really important to the spec, largely because it got consumed by multiple abilities. KM used to be consumed by both Frost Strike and Obliterate, and depending on your weapon set-up, you wanted to use it on one or the other. This meant that the game with Killing Machine was avoiding wasting it on the wrong ability. For example, in Mists and Warlords, if you were using a two-handed weapon, you'd want to make sure you had some runes open to spend on Obliterate, and not wind up blowing KM on Frost Strikes while you're hoping for Runic Empowerment to proc.
Nowadays, however, there's not a lot of interactivity with the proc. You basically just try to use it when it goes off, but if you don't get it, you still want to use Obliterate to generate runic power. And there's no fear of losing it for using it on the wrong ability.
It does help set the rhythm of the spec's rotation, but it's not as crucial as it once was. I wonder if Blizzard is satisfied with it as a kind of pacing proc, or if they want to go farther than they did with Unholy (which to be fair, changed a lot more in Legion - significantly for the better if you ask me) and really look at the core rotation.
Maybe there's room in a big redesign for 2H frost to return.
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