I don’t even care if Unholy is good, if the call is to play Blightfall. The spell sucks, it isn’t fun to play. The spec is alrady clunky af on account of the tier set messing with Soul Reaper usage, and now SR is getting even more conditionals tacked on, on top of there being even harsher penalties for the game’s buggy tab-target and occasional failure to accurately transfer Dread Plague between targets. Unholy needed ST/Cleave buffs for raid, but making Blightfall meta pushes our M+ through the roof when it was unnecessary (which will probably prompt AoE nerfs, but not in the form of dialing back BF…), and makes the playstyle for raid absolutely atrocious.
I had a huge sigh of relief when it turned out BF wasn’t actually better than minion builds earlier in the season.
This season is sketchy and kinda bad on the content side, but if my class and spec aren’t in a fun place, I might call it quits until it’s fun again. My interest has already been waning on account of the poor dungeon pool, raid, and story, but this might be the final nail in the coffin. I’m basically on a lockout-over-lockout state of debating to call it quits on the season to re-allocate my time towards work, single player games, and Forever. Struggling to even find the motivation to cap crests at this point, and now the worst playstlye that Unholy has to offer gets pushed up to the top, killing the existing equilibrium between Rider and Sanlayn.
I’m aware the post sounds reactionary, but it’s entirely possible that this week’s changes are the straw that breaks the camel’s back for me this season. Next week’s lockout will probably decide if I stick with the game or hang it up for now.
A big reason why I just quit. They verbatim said at the beginning of the expansion when UHDK got another rework that they wanted the spec “less CD reliant.” So their solution was to make UHDK completely reliant on Blightfall?
I don’t know why they choose to evolve the game this way. I feel like i need to take adderall to maintain enough focus in M+ now.
Appreciate the fix. Don’t get the hate, nothing really changes between 3 builds. Going from Rider to SL the only thing you need to do is to take a look at stacks before forced downtime, but it really just plays itself. Going to BF you add 1 button, this is nothing. It’s a bit unfortunate only BF is good right now, but we’re likely to get another tuning pass soon, so beefy coil dream is still alive. If pressing right buttons at the right time is deemed clunky, I don’t know what to say.
It affects Soul Reaper usage, and optimizing your damage now harshly penalizes dropped or refreshed Dread Plague, when there are already bugs with transfering your dot from target to target, and various fights in the raid don’t even allow you to DoT transfer to begin with, IE Ulatek intermission 1, or downstairs group for Soilcoiler M.
It isn’t just ‘adding one button’, when there’s this much cascade impact for the spell. You have to have SR up on your DP target to fire BFfor full value, and optimal SR usage is already tied to your lich summon, which can desync with the start of DT.
Throwing stones on skill while posting from an alt is also rich. I’m no esports gamer, but I’m pretty happy with how I’ve played this tier, and overall I think my logs reflect that. You’re free to look me up if you’d like.
There are things to love and hate about the rework.
What I love:
Festering wound was converted to a buff on the player rather than a debuff on the target.
That’s it.
What I hate:
Having to upkeep a bunch of maintenance buffs such as San’Layn blood queen, Festering Strike, Dread Plague, Soul Reaper, Clawing Shadows stacks (I guess can be coupled with San’Layn blood queen)
Using Putrefy only during CD windows
Death Coil if less than 3 targets, BUT if you’re in Forbidden Knowledge window then use it for less than 5-6? targets.
Being a pet class where I feel like I don’t have much control or feedback over what my pets do. I’m just doing my rotation that does tiny damage from my player but then eventually a ton of damage from some minions that spawn. I just feel like Demo Warlock and BM Hunter have better feedback from their minions in terms of feeling like each button press is impactful.
I agree that Dread Plague’s jump issues need to be fixed, the rest of what you’re describing is just part of being a ramp spec. We can’t expect to be good at everything and target switching has been a weakness for UH for a long time.
If you want to be strong in some areas, then you have to accept being bad at other things. I’m fine with the ramp as long as we’re designed/tuned to have a proper payoff. Right now Blightfall is strong and so the payoff feels pretty good.
Sure there’s a chance you’ll do less dps on Ulatek’s second heart, but 1 & 3 are going to be strong. As for M Soulcoiler, there are better specs for the downstairs phase so that’s kind of on your RL for sending you down.
I’d much rather have Necrotic Plague for a capstone, but BF is what we got for a disease build and it’s not that bad.
Rider isn’t a ramp spec. Minion Sanlayn isn’t one either, it’s an execute spec. The spec itself isn’t defined by a ramp style, and hasn’t been one for almost a decade. Pre-nerf Festermight was the last time there was a meaningful element of ramp to the spec, and half the time FM was around, you were capped on stacks with uptime. Hard disagree that the spec is a ramp spec, outside of specifically Sanlayn Blightfall.
I’m not even opposed to ramping if it’s done right. I’m very, very opposed to locking Soul Reap down behind multiple conditional effects, and good BF usage being gated behind so many conditionals. BF becoming meta basically locks the DT window down into a GCD locked pre-set pattern, which is the exact launch sequence problem that people complain about with Unholy.
Doing 0 dam outside of Lust+Pot+CD stack, or in San’s case execute, is enough of a weakness for the spec as a whole. The sustained damage was never truly buffed along with the nerfs to our burst windows. S1 Rider lacked weaknesses, but Rider now is a far cry from what it was.
The way that DT windows play out with BF and tier set is trash. It was already bad with the tier set while playing sanlayn, Lich summons could be desynced from DT based on CDR globals/luck on V strike procs, and now it’s absolutely dogwater to play.
This is straight up the type of damage-on-a-tuesday garbage that prompted a gamewide rework for D4.
lesser ghoul debuffs: war, famine, infected claws, etc.
outnumber buff for main ghoul
gargoyle damage amp (if we ever play it again)
dropping DnDs in AoE
And this is just off the top of my head…
Our entire opener is a ramp sequence designed to maximize all of the above.
You don’t have to press specific buttons for all of this, but you sure need all of it online if you want to maximize damage. We’re definitely not zugzug like warriors/paladins that just send cooldowns and go.
There is a reason that UH’s damage gets better as you move up key levels: UH needs time to get all of its sources of damage going. So yes UH is a ramp spec. That ramp may be shorter or longer based on hero spec, but it’s always there.
I wouldn’t mind more sustained damage either but this is not a problem that’s unique to UH. Most specs in modern WoW do the bulk of their damage via CDs.
It’s not my ideal version of a plague build either, I’d much rather have Necrotic Plague back and have a build focused on empowering and maintaining plagues.
But in the absence of that, I wouldn’t call the current version trash. While it’s not perfect a lot of DKs like building up their plagues and setting off BF nukes, which certainly works well with damage amps. Having some actual power associated with DT again is pretty nice too.
Over analysis there is kinda insane, considering less than a quarter of your list plays any impact at all in affecting the global-to-global rotation and active playstyle. It’s an active cognitive penalty to even consider the majority of your list during moment to moment play, or in theorycrafting. Taking a bunch of micro-passives that don’t influence your priority list, and calling them playstyle defining is asinine to the extreme.
I stand by my call on BfA being the last time the spec actually ramped on playstyle level. It was the only time that the rotation actually shifted at a breakpoint to reflect the ‘ramp’ you’re talking about.
Necrotic Plague was removed 10 years ago. If it was added today, it wouldn’t fit the spec at all. DoT maintenance works on oldschool Patchwerk fights, but this isn’t WoD anymore, that era is closer to Classic than Midnight these days. This type of design absolutely sucks in any way when it comes to interfacing with modern fight design.
This current version of the spec is the most unintuitive trash version of Unholy I’ve seen in a long, long time. I swear that autism is a prerequisite for the way that the new Blightfall spec plays.
These sorts of design and balance issues will continue until Blizzard allocates different employees to work on unholy class design. Current people don’t seem to know what they’re doing and express an inability to improve the quality of their work.
Blightfall is probably the least fun version of unholy I’ve ever played. Hopefully this is just a blip and not the design choice going forward.
I feel like every version/change they have made to unholy since midnight launch has just made the spec less fun to play apart from festering scythe being a buff on the player now.
feels like the tier sets this season run the gamut of either only being noticeable on damage meters or just twists the playstyle into garbage. i hate ret’s 4pc, i hate sv’s 4pc, and i’ve yet to try dk but i suspect my feelings will be much the same.
What are you talking about?
I was talking about ramp, not cognitive load, which I listed many examples of.
You can stand by whatever you want, it doesn’t make you any less wrong. UH is a ramp spec. Feel free to go ask in Discord so you can have that confirmed for you even more.
Duh?
Of course they’d have to update a 10 year old spell to make it fit with the current spec. That doesn’t make it any less of a good idea.
You can even tell from the alpha spell data that the devs were trying to bring back Necrotic Plague before they changed it into the inferior Dread Plague, for whatever reason. And the main theory crafter for UH has said, on multiple occasions, that Necrotic Plague should come back as our disease capstone.
If I were to bring Necrotic Plague back I’d have it gain a stack any time an enemy or one of your own minions dies and then consume itself at max stacks. (gains a stack immediately when you trigger an Order during Army, if we’re still doing that)
Comedy option: it gains a bunch of stacks if an allied player dies.
I think a ret paladin or some other builder-spender spec would be more your speed. Unholy’s always had plagues, soul reaper, and festering strikes. I like San’layn thematically, and it adds something to the gameplay whereas rider is just completely forgettable.