See title. I am not exaggerating when I say that if you're playing any class except DK in PvP, you are going to have a miserable time. DK ability tooltips, ESPECIALLY Molten Whip, are so overbuffed that they do triple the damage of ultimates (I have 35k spell resists and minor protection and getting hit for 13k molten in noCP BGs) of many ultimates including leap itself, while having to put 0 effort into sustain because of CoF and morphs and having ridiculous survivability healing. All damage tooltips are like 1.5-2.5x what they should be and DK seems to have absolutely no flaws whatsoever, not even a weakness to Frost damage. They have all the damage, all the survivability, crazy ult gen, unlimited sustain from BR and abilities so can invest even more into damage without the usual tradeoffs, it's just stupid. And their leap CC is even more obnoxious than RoA.

The end result is that literally playing anything other than pureclass DK is setting yourself up to fail, and because of this Cyrodiil is almost universally DKs now and death recaps are literally just permutations of molten whip, leap and dragonfire. Everyone in BGs is DK spamming the same skills over and over with everyone running the same sets and builds (so much for subclassing giving more diversity lol). If the idea of encouraging pure class over subclass was to make one class so brazenly above and beyond any of the other 18 class lines to the point of any nonmeta build being equivalent to feeding then I have to say ZOS is doing an incredible job. Otherwise, some serious adjustments need to be made at least in PvP (perhaps a class-specific Battle Spirit?) and a fundamentally different approach to making pureclass viable must be adopted, or else we just get a repeat of this with every class refresh. I understand that a lot of PvErs are having a great time with the class which is fine given Arcanist's dominance but this has become insane. At the moment it's just a crutch for terrible, overconfident play because you can do pretty much anything short of step into the middle of a zerg and get away with it, unless of course there's another DK with the same overpowered crutch build.

There have been many periods pre-subclassing where classes have been dominant but since 2017 I don't think I've seen a single instance of any specific class or combo being OP anywhere near as close to this one. It is not an overstatement to say this is the absolute rock bottom (so far) of PvP balance in the game.

Some solutions I would propose to fix this:

- Like earlier, implement a temporary class-specific Battle Spirit that reduces damage, healing and all other tooltips of DK lines by X% for some appropriately chosen X, I would recommend X=25 as a good starting point. This would have no effect on PvE where arcanist still dominates. However, this would only be a temporary bandaid fix to try and keep class diversity on life support.

- Extend the limitations of more, (preferably all) DK abilities so that they perform the basic actions, then only have special effects if both a DK core and/or pureclassing - but this wouldn't fix the fact that pureclass DK is busted right now. However, assuming the other class refreshes are made similarly powerful, then it would at least revitalise playing pureclass again and the power imbalance would shift as more classes are refreshed. We already see this with certain DK abilities but at the moment it's not sufficient; imagine a subclassed DK + the future refreshed warden with no pureclass restrictions, somehow even more busted than DK already is. This would prevent that.

- Add more (PvP-centric) drawbacks proportional to how many DK skills/lines are used; for example higher damage taken from frost damage, interruptible cast times (<= 1 second/gcd so not noticeable for PvE players) for the most damaging abilities like whip, or reduced movement speed from activating these abilities to give enemies chance to recover and at least run from the ridiculously overpowered tooltips that DK currently has. Personally this is my least favourite suggestion and I prefer option 2, but these drawbacks wouldn't affect PvE (much) while giving real drawbacks and counterplay to just having broken tooltips (which we don't want to nerf lest it ruin pve experience).

But as it stands, this is the most unbalanced, unfun and broken state that PvP has ever been in if you're not playing dragonknight. A change needs to be made and soon, or else any enjoyment left from playing other classes, especially other pure classes, will just vanish completely.



^ My damage taken in BGs from combat metrics, and I'm a PvP healer with 3k crit resists, constant HoTs, and 34k spell.