Making this since there’s not a DK feedback thread (even though there were sweeping changes, and really should be a feedback thread… if y’all even want our feedback…?)
Let’s start with the elephant in the room.
I’m going to be blunt here: the justification for the removal of Abomination Limb is incredibly flimsy. Suppose Abomination Limb, as a displacement effect, was so powerful that encounter designers just couldn’t allow mobs to be able to be displaced on raid encounters. Why are all the displacement effects that have been utilized to replace Death Grip for years still present?
If the plan is to make Death Grip feel like a true raid buff, then the ONLY way to accomplish that is to remove every other displacement effect in the game. Seeing the patch notes, and no mention of removing other displacement effects leads me to strongly believe that you truly do not understand the issue at hand here. Death grip is NOT unique in what it can do, nor was Abomination Limb. Sure, this tier, it’s a hot topic, the encounter team will absolutely design fights with death grip in mind. But, what about 2 years from now? Are you really going to force your encounter designers to design fights specifically around death grip for now, until the end of eternity? That’s, in essence, basically a “just trust me bro, it’ll be good” when, as has been demonstrated in the last 3 tiers of content, that is NOT something we as players can trust.
When it comes down to it, this set of changes did the exact opposite of making us desirable in a raiding environment. Abomination Limb being gone means we have less utility. I do not know how this was decided, nor do I really care, but what I can say is, go back to the drawing board; this is not okay. This is not what players want; this is not what player feedback has been asking for.
Ion Hazzikostas recently said during a talk at the Nordic Games Developer Conference that Blizzard would be focusing on the player perspective, incorporating their feedback, but you’ve utterly failed to do that here. Don’t make Ion a liar.
Now, to get to my feedback on the Unholy changes
These two talents seem intended to help with Unholys critical strike scaling issues its experiencing right now, but they somewhat fail to do so. Since these are talents, it would require the player to already have a significant amount of Critical Strike rating for them to be desirable as talents, making both of these an odd choice, for crit to be good, a player must have a lot of crit, but, to want a lot of crit, crit has to be good. its a bit of a paradoxical scenario. Think Plague Mastery should probably just be baseline instead so that crit has value to the baseline of the spec. I like the theory, I like not just being a bare % crit damage done mod to all things, its a good choice, just needs a few adjustments to accomplish its goal.
Im torn on Desecrate due to where its at in the tree. Its in a choice node with Defile, making this a choice between raw damage, or mobility essentially. Desecrate lets you move if your tank decides to run out of your DnD basically, the damage it does is… pitiful to say the least (at most, doing 54% of attack power in damage, compared to Defiles 224%) And the AoE wound generation just… doesn’t do a lot for us, we already often have more wounds than we can pop, even before this talent was introduced. Which brings me to
Im not sure what the intention is here honestly, we were flooded on wounds in AoE before, with Festering Scythe alone providing enough wounds to keep any competent unholy DK fed on wounds entirely on its own, totally ignoring the benefits of Infected Claws, and Pestilence. When you consider those two, we often had more wounds than we could even pop during a pack, if it wasn’t for on death wound pops, we would be wasting just colossal amounts of damage.
When it comes to wound popping in AoE as mentioned here, nothing in the notes accomplishes that…? not sure if that’s incomplete, or what, but, be incredibly careful with that, as bursting sores quadratic scaling can easily cause unholy to scale to uncontrollable levels.
All in all, Im just confused by this developer note, it doesn’t address any real issues the specialization has been having.
Ignoring the bugs present with this talent at the moment, its a good concept as an alternative to Raise Abomination in AoE scenarios, where often players would flat out skip Army, and Abomination, both of which are pretty iconic unholy abilities, and part of its core identity. My only major concern with this is its just going to absolutely flood us on festering wounds if we also take Festering Scythe during its duration, with no hope at all of popping all of them. If we skip festering scythe, the cooldown on this ability is far too long to keep us fed on festering wounds. It’s just… awkward at best. I like the concept, but, needs more work.
My only confusion with this is the intent of the Epidemic portion of it, in-game it’s 5 targets, but the patch notes listed 2. If it’s 5, amazing, it might actually have some uses in cleave/aoe. If it’s 2, it’s a dead node past 1 target.
An interesting change that makes Soul Reaper a tad more useful in some scenarios, but still far too weak even with this to be used during Gift of the San’layn, something needs to be done to give Soul Reaper value if a player is San’layn.
Yall tried this in Shadowlands beta, and the community rioted. You tried it again now, the community is rioting. DO NOT DO THIS. How did you not learn your lesson last time?
Apocalypse and Dark Transformation have different uses, different scenarios where they are strong. They are not always used together, making this just a blatant downgrade. Yes, its 1 less button to press, but you can accomplish that in other ways, my recommendation would be taking Unholy Assault and Dark Transformation off the global cooldown so that players can use them more freely, or macro them into other abilities rather than trying to combine two things that do not need to be combined, and causes players to have worse experiences with the game because of it.
Still needs another 900% or so to compete with Festermight in terms of value per point… but at least you tried… good attempt.
Great change to give players more versatility in when they decide to use Scythe. Solid change.
Bit questionable since builds that liked one of these often didn’t care for the other but… this is an okay change, I guess? still wont make Clawing Shadows more than a 0% dps gain for San’layn though since it doesn’t increase the damage of Vampiric Strike if you take Clawing Shadows.
All solid changes here, Im a bit sad about Vile Contagion going, it had a lot of potential, but, never really got a chance to shine due to design decisions around the ability. Otherwise, awesome.
Whats still missing
Well, an actually universally useful raid buff for one… but I digress.
In this bit, I want to talk about all the feedback that’s been given on unholy over the last several years that’s been blatantly ignored, never acted upon.
First things first, Wounds. This minor change to the talent tree isn’t what we have been asking for. Nor is it even what was promised when the 11.2 preview said “New Gameplay for Unholy Death Knights”… there’s no new gameplay here. Just a few talent nodes shuffled around, a few new talents to replace old ones. Nothing changes about the gameplay at all. Unholy needs better than this, I understand you don’t know what to do with the spec, I entirely get that Unholy’s design is built on such an unstable foundation that its insanely hard to design stuff for. I get it, I really do, but, the players deserve better than this, and you know it. We are only going to get louder about these issues until they are resolved.
Unholy at its core is a lost cause; admit it already and do something about it. It needs a ground-up rework to everything about its core. The wound concept has been refined again, and again over the last close to 9 years, and we still hate it. Give it up.
Second up, Raid Utility. Look, I know it’s hard to admit we have been right for 4 years telling you Death Grip isn’t a raid buff, but give up already, we aren’t going to change our minds. Give us a raid buff, stop messing around with us, it’s insulting that a niche ability is being touted as a raid buff when there’s a plethora of alternative displacement options.
Finally, the core abilities
When it comes to Unholy Death Knights core abilities, there’s a distinct lack of flavor, a distinct lack of fun. More so when it comes to the major pain points of Festering Strike and Outbreak. What about these buttons brings player satisfaction? What about these buttons is fun? Right now, the answer to that is basically nothing, and that’s a major issue. A core rotation in a game shouldn’t try to force a player to press buttons they don’t want to press because the design requires it to, if that’s the case, the design should be changed.
Being an MMO like World of Warcraft is, the core rotation of a specialization is basically what makes the game fun for people, if its not engaging, not something that’s satisfying, its going to fall flat on its face and the players will perceive the game as unfun, a chore.
You have to remember, the combat system of a players specialization is the lens in which they view the game through. We have been complaining about Unholy for years, and the reluctance to act on any of our feedback about it is a shame, because I absolutely LOVE the themes of Death Knight, and Unholy especially. I want players to have so much fun playing it, being able to enjoy their experience. But, instead I spend most of my time answering questions about why X is so weird, or why the specialization as a whole is so unintuitive, lacking in flow. The 11.2 preview gave me hope that there would finally be work done to work on this, but, I was left sorely disappointed, unholys the same old turd with a new coat of paint.
Add all of this to a severe lack of any communication on what the intentions of the specialization are, and as a community, we are genuinely reaching a boiling point.
Do better Blizzard, I know you can, you’ve captured the hearts and minds of so many players over so many years, me included. You’re so much better than this.