A concept for a "Lone Wolf" Unholy

Classes Death Knight
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I’ve been in love with the Death Knight class since it was released. It’s my go-to class and I’m looking forward to playing two-handed Frost again in Shadowlands. I also like disease-centric fantasy of the Unholy; However, I’m not a huge fan of playing with a pet. I know I’m probably in a minority here, but probably not the ONLY person who has ever wanted to go petless. So that got me thinking today… why not have a talent like Grimoire of Sacrifice or Lone Wolf passive for Marksman hunter?

How could the talent work? A few ideas… any/all of these could be tuned to do about 90-95% of an untransformed ghoul’s white damage - enough to be competitive with Unholy DKs with pets, but not outperform them.

  • Empower the DK’s existing diseases to deal additional damage
  • Add a new disease with a slightly different flavor – perhaps a low-damage pulsing AOE?
  • Increase the DK’s shadow damage by a flat rate
  • Increase the effect of Mastery: Dreadblade by a flat multiplier

Obviously, a couple of talent and ability changes would be needed:

Candidate talent(s) to replace:

  • Unholy Blight
  • Harbinger of Doom?

Ability Changes:

Dark Transformation gets replaced with Magus of the Dead. This would summon a Magus of the Dead like to the one from Azerite traits, but it would gain some cleave to mimic the buffs to Timmy. Duration and approximate damage output would be roughly equal to Dark Transformation.

Talent Changes:

All Will Serve – Magus of the Dead (Dark Transformation) summons an additional Magus. The combined relative power of the Magi would be tuned to roughly match the average output of a DK with the ghoul & skeleton.

Infected Claws – Increase maximum Festering Wound stacks to 7 or 8 (or just add a chance to apply Festering Wound on autoattack)

I’m sure there are other things I’m not taking in to account here. I’m just throwing out the idea, not a complete proof on concept. Thanks for reading.

1 Like
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No to unholy pet to get no pets. If you want a pet less spec it’s frost. At least frost is getting a two hander so there you go. It wouldn’t fit unholy for being pet less with a talent. Sure marksmanship get that and frost mages too but the pet does most of our damage.

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I wont lie, I always liked the idea of unholy without pets, just because i think pets should be for the 2 pet classes only. BUT. I think at this point pets have become more than iconic for the spec and it would be hard to divorce them from it. I especially like the way they doubled down on it and you now get to summon an entire army.

The only way I would want UH to go petless is if the pet is changed into essentially a permanent Unholy Blight, where instead of a ghoul we could have a talent to replace it with a swarm of insects that surrounds the DK and deal constant DoT damage to ennemies around him. You would essentially trade the pet’s range and stun for its damage to become AoE. Then Army of the Dead, could summon swarms of insects all bumrushing the target, would be epic :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

4 Likes
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I’m down for dropping pet. I’m in blood most of the time, but will second frost again if we get two hand frost back!!! Really don’t like unholy any more just like I don’t like affliction on my warlock

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I do not play unholy but i did play mm hunter and lone wolf hunter imo is not good. Yes you have dps but having a pet is what hunters are about.

Doing that to unholy would be just as bad.

1 Like
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Unholy has always been a master of two things: Diseases and raising an army out of them. Pet classes has always been not a cup of tea for some people and I don’t really blame you for it. If that’s the case, Unholy is not for you. We have blood and two version of Frost in the Shadowlands.

If you’re Unholy DK, you’re a Puppetmaster, a master of the dead, taking the pets out of it will make you look like a Necromancer who failed at raising the dead out of Scholomance, somehow graduated from there and keep failing to raise the dead which is exactly what a Necromancer is in the first place.

But alright, let’s just say Blizzard can accommodate for you for not playing an Affliction Warlock which does similar to the OP’s favorite disease-centric fantasy. The thing is… ironically enough, Affliction warlocks fit this fantasy better than Unholy Dks because Unholy Dks has become a minigame of how many pustules can you pop at a time and how often do you use Outbreak enough to spread your personal COVID. Spamming Epidemic to cause a ripple effect against targets who practice no social distancing.

Let’s take a look at your suggestions OP:

  • Empowering the DK existing diseases to deal additional damage: do you mean Erupting Plague or Festering Pustules?
  • Erupting Plague already does this. If it is a Necrotic Plague, we’re talking!
  • Boring. The 10% Lone Wolf buff was kinda boring too tbh. I played a MM in BfA and I feel overshadowed by BM a lot. :frowning: Maybe it was me and not the spec honestly.
  • Again, boring. Mastery: Dreadblade used to increase shadow damage on tenties in Cataclysm though so THAT was fun. In SL, Mastery also increases pet damage. Doing it petless would totally make Mastery meh.

Looking at your talent and ability changes…

Ability Changes:
Dark Transformation replaced by Magus of the Dead.
No, ABSOLUTELY NOT. What you’re proposing here is removing the parsing between good and great unholy Death Knights. Dark Transformation is used to enhance different situations such as AoE Festercleaving (Which you also propose to change), empowered stun (extra second yay lol) and a ranged kick from your pet.
The Magus is cool but it is not important enough to replace such an important ability… and didn’t you want to make Unholy more petless anyway? Why do you want Magus of the Dead?

I’ve read the Talent Changes for All Will Serve and IC and I’m not gonna explain myself to say why those two are terrible changes. If you read me out of Dark Transformation, you should understand why.

At this point though, Unholy Blight and Harbinger of Doom are quite trash honestly. UB has fallen from grace from WoD as it was used to ramp up Necrotic Plague (It was a very powerful talent). Harbinger of Doom, considering how often Sudden Doom procs, using two of your GCDs to cast Death Coil is overshadowed by Soul Reaper.

And I’m surprised you haven’t said anything about Apocalypse.

My conclusion? No, to unholy getting no pets. These changes are honestly terrible and I know if you play Unholy much more often and understand the spec, I strongly believe you can be more creative with it.

1 Like
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a lot of people’s requests to overhaul unholy have to do with the fact that the raid dps spec and rotation are not where the spec shines, yet that is where they use it. its like using a corvette to move and complaining about the small cargo space.

instead of overhauling unholy into something its not, I would rather see them make frost compelling enough to be the primary PVE DPS spec, which would allow unholy to be a primary PVP spec allowing for changes like no GCD dark trans, PVErs are the reason we can’t have that, and act as a ball and chain on the spec design and fluidity.

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The only change I want for Unholy is for Blizzard to remove wounds. Not a fan of combo points, especially ones that don’t follow from target to target.

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they aren’t combo points, they dont act like combo points and dont have the drawbacks of combo points.

if you switch targets, your wounds on the previous target aren’t lost, and you can burst them both at the same time. also, if you stack wounds on a target and that target dies, you still get the benefits of those wounds bursting, you still get runic power and stacks of festermight.

the only way to lose from swapping targets is to swap from A to B and then just never come back to A.

1 Like
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I can’t agree to unholy being the “pvp spec” simply because that is the current situation now, and it does not feel good. Being locked to one spec and only one spec for each aspect of the game isn’t healthy gameplay and removes flexibility.
Let alone it makes the class more tolerant of being nerfed when players can shift from one spec to the other.

I honestly believe unholy would play better if they took some abilities off the gcd such as dark transformation and unholy frenzy.

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Absolute yes to petless unholy. I hate being a support class for an NPC. Pets are boring and passive damage does not promote skill based play. Unholy would be my go to regardless of how poor it performs in some areas without the pet. Seems like every pet class has the option to get rid of theirs but us. Cant understand why you would ever argue against more options.

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I really don’t like the doubling down on the minion master stuff

I wish it was a build option but I’d like to go back to having my dots and SS hitting like a truck

2 Likes