Unholy genuinely feels so good right now. I know not all problems are solved, like we hate DnD cleaving, but I’ve taken unholy for a spin and my love for my favourite spec is renewed.
The spec feels so fun right now, loving the magus procs, abomination is awesome, feels like such a good step as a necromantic DK.
So, cheers DK Dev - add in volatile zombies / fix the defile graphic and its a gg honestly
Yeah, I am seriously digging the feel right now over previous iterations.
Glad to hear it. Frost is feeling pretty nice as well. Love that I can do good damage outside pillar now. The new capstones and related talents give nice variety to the rotation. DnD cleave is odd but it works better.
Only thing I’d like to see for frost is a couple new animations. Glacial advance could be a bit cooler and shattering blade needs an animation. But overall I’m very pleased with frost.
Frost is on my agenda for tonight, for sure but my wife is happy with her Frost DK.
I have been playing DK, mostly Unholy, since Wrath and had a love/hate with the spec since it got the woons mechanic. Imo this is the best it has felt since then. I would still rather not have the woons, but at least they feel much less chunky than in the past. Raise Abom and Apocalypse rework with Foul Menagerie glyph makes me really happy.
Are you still required to track wounds or are they applied easier now? I haven’t tried unholy yet so I’m a bit clueless.
Apocalypse now always summons all possible ghouls instead of needing to have 4 wounds on the target. Its fixed a lot of RNG clunk. You still have to track them a bit in AOE and every 45 seconds if you play vile contagion.
I super agree with the OP about UH being great now but man do I wish wounds worked like new combo points and not the old version.
They are much easier to apply and spread, it’s taken alot of the micro-management out. The Apoc change to one wound always spawning 4 ghouls is great!
I agree that if they worked like current rogue combo points it would be even better, but right now is the best it has been.
Having magus, abom, apoc ghouls, and your pet ghoul up at the same time really feels awesome
Frost DK feels much more smoothed out and Icy Death Torrent really fits in that missing damage profile. I thought I wouldn’t like The Long Winter as much but it’s quite fun.
DnD feels a lot smoother with the new grace period added but it still really sucks for big pulls like AA with the massive plant pull. I just can’t maximise AoE while 3x Seed Detonation keep popping off on +15.
One more thing is, remove and/or change some dead talents:
Frost needs a few more basic passive talents like Crit Strike %, Soul Reaper needs to play into the spec more and Frostscythe needs more damage - it’s such a fun button.
100% on the animation update. Was on my SPriest and appreciating the new Void Torrent.
After playing unholy a bit more today im def going to have it in my warband. I wasnt up to date on unholy since i never reallt follow dk stuff but man is it fun. The ramp up is pretty much gone and spreading diseases and plagues is so.quick and satisfying.
With the added mobility of riders its a contender for a main. Which sucks cause i was already torn between mage, warlock and monk. Necromancing is a pretty big asethic i like so well see!
Only thing i didnt like was DnD not being a aura or placed on attack like pallys concentrate and death coils animation. Should be updated to look like a necrolord ability tbh.
Unholy indeed feels great, though it would be better without the wounds stuff entirely and more disease talents… other then that I’m loving it
This ^^, they should prune all the Remorseless Winter talents.
I cannot Frostscythe without sacrificing other talents with the Shattering Blade build and taking Absolute Zero.
I was hoping soul reaper and frostscythe would get more time to shine this time around, but both aren’t doing enough damage over their competing talents to take them. I also wish frostscythe was a 360° AOE ability rather than a cone.
Icecap needs to return to it’s dynamic iteration, or at least be 30 sec cdr, 45 is NOT good.
The idea to reduce rune generation by nerfing efficiency resulted in situations where you cannot spend killing machine procs inside your damage window, and that overcapping rp would still be a thing unless they completely annihilated resource generation which would have simply killed the gameplay of the spec. AS EXPECTED, AS I ALWAYS SAID IT WOULD HAPPEN.
It also turns out that the “bandaid” solution of increasing rp consumption dynamically actually worked better than reducing resource generation, it also made you waste even less killing machine procs inside your obliteration window due to runic empowerment, and that all they needed to do was simply to take this idea and expend it to glacial advance, and make it a baseline thing. Who would have known, it’s almost like i actually think stuff through, unlike some people. Slap an extra 50 runic power on top and you would have been fine, would that have completely eliminated ovecapping? No. Neither did your solution, unless you take it to the extreme and just kill the spec rotation and gameplay, at a certain point you have to maybe realize that, overcapping really isn’t that much of an issue, and there are more important things to focus on. And that by trying to completely solve this problem you would just kill the spec.
In short frost dk could have been really good gameplay, but they stumbled right at the end. And royally screwed it up. Right now it’s a pretty good spec for gameplay, when it could have been great.
As for unholy, i don’t have much to say about it, it plays relatively well. But the talents improved festering strike and runic mastery simply should NOT be 2 talent nodes.
You know what’s worse than a 2 talent node? A bad 2 talent node that’s clearly there just as a barrier for entry to other cooler talents.
Same for runic command for frost and improved frost strike, which should also be 1 talent nodes, or just straight up removed and integrated baseline. Especially the extra runic power.
Overall, frost is a 7/10
Unholy is an 8/10.
They are just op af right now, as soon as that wears off people will be a little bit more objective about these ratings. As always.
I mean it’s not like 7 and 8 is bad, but it’s not excellent.
To recap: The idea to reduce rune generation didn’t solve anything, you still overcap, you could literally completely remove murderous efficiency and you would still overcap, the only thing you would accomplish is damage the flow of the rotation. Instead of overcapping on runic power you would just waste a lot of killing machine procs. Congrats. Genius idea.
Removing the one thing that could have lessened the overcap because “bandaid fix” was also a stupid idea. Guess what, that “bandaid fix” Worked better than whatever you did after. Bandaid fix+higher resource pool would have significantly lessened overcap without affecting the rotation negatively, in fact it would have positively affected the rotation.
Icecap flat cdr means a less interesting rotation, less feedback for your rotation, doesn’t matter much for breath, but for obliteration it’s a big deal. In short, i was right all along, these suggestions didn’t solve anything, they just damaged the gameplay of frost. Oh but at least you can now “plan” around your cds, as if that mattered when pillar was like a 30 sec cooldown.
Play stupid games win stupid prices, next time think for more than a few seconds before blurting out some half baked ideas.
I really do wish they left the additional RP consumption on Frost Strike during pillar in the game to handle that burst window RP glut.
Otherwise yeah all three specs are hugely improved.
The idea was certainly better than reducing rune generation by reducing ME proc rate, which did NOTHING to solve the problem, while having a negative effect on the rotation.
They just needed to take that idea, apply it baseline, and add glacial advance to the mix. While also increasing runic power cap to 150, maybe even 200, and making it consume up to double instead of 50%, like ferocious bite does. The extra 20% from runic empowerment would simply work like ruthlessness does for outlaw. Since with 60 RP spent you would have 120% chance to proc it.
Then make a choice node for icecap, for people who don’t like dynamic cdr, put in the strength stacking again, but also works with runic power as well as runes. This may be too strong with breath, would have to be tuned properly, they might have to straight up remove the runic power scaling if you select breath, but it wouldn’t an impossible hurdle. Now you could choose between more pillar windows, or a REALLY strong window every 1 min.
If they simply did this, and nothing else, frost dk would now feel better to play, the extra rune procs would mean that you virtually never run out of runes to spend killing machine during pillar of frost windows, right now there are more situations than compared to before where you are in the middle of a obliteration window, with 2 km procs and not enough runes to actually use them. Which DEFINITELY feel a lot worse than just overcapping runic power.
Perform just as well, and they would have ACTUALLY lessened the RP overcapping problem. Instead of pretending to solve an issue.
And while we’re at it, ill make another suggestion.
Replace shattered frost with a talent focusing on razorice.
When you have razorice enchanted on your weapon, the power is increased, and it can stack up to 8, you can use all stacks at once, but shattering blade still starts from 5 but goes up to 8, and the damage % obviously scales in power based on how many stacks you have.
This would make razorice more appealing as an enchant, since you get a more powerful effect when you actually have it. If you selected this talent without razorice enchanted you would still be able to get up to 8 stacks and consume 8 at once, but you wouldn’t get the extra effect from razorice.
This talent would work better for aoe and st, than shattered frost, tab targeting is also not exactly my idea of fun, and they can just make shattering blade work with glacial advance. But only the casted version, not the proc from glacial.