Frost gets Chains of Ice, Blood gets Death Strike, and Unholy gets Raise Dead without having to spend a point. So getting all three requires spending 2 points.
2 Likes
Its a decent start with some cool ideas, but boy do I hope way more creativity will go into the trees.
Also, I cannot for the life of me understand why gargoyle won’t be going baseline for unholy or at the very least separated from army of the damned
5 Likes
You will have 31 available class points to spend and the tree requires 49 points to fill out, so you’ll get around 3/5ths of the class tree.
The spec tree has 30 specialization points out of a spendable 45, so you’ll get around 2/3rds of it.
So no lol, you wont get all of the non choice node options. You will be choosing between many abilities you currently have.
I hope (or cope) they will make empower rune weapon viable for UH so that this isn’t just more of the same and consider making cooldown reduction from Unholy command and army of the damned baseline to spice up the other options a bit.
1 Like
Might of the Frozen Wastes: Wielding a two-handed weapon increases Obliterate damage by 30%, and causes your auto attack critical strikes to grant Killing Machine.
This should not be a talent. There is no reason we should have to opt into wanting to play 2H and lose a talent point for doing it.
You might as well make a talent that makes DW be able to hit Frost Strike and Obliterate with both weapons if that’s so.
Might of the Frozen Wastes: Needs to be baseline, and an option if you want to use it over DW. Not a talent. If its going to be a talent, it should be an improvement not a Horizontal Movement.
TLDR: It would be like adding a talent to use Dual Wield as Frost. Do not keep this on the tree.
Adding something like Chill of the Grave in its place would be nice.
(Chill of the Grave Increases the range of your Frost Strike by 8 yds.)
From the Legion Artifact Weapons.
12 Likes
I like that we can get chill streak now as frost but I’m pretty disappointed with dk trees overall. It feels like we’re gonna have to spend so many talents just to get back what we have now. Instead of making the most immobile class in the game waste a talent on chains of ice, why not add back some old favorites like dark simulacrum or mass grip?
I have loathed unholy’s wound system since Legion, with these new talent trees they had a chance to bring back older playstyles by making sides of the trees correspond to different playstles. For instance I would’ve loved to have one side of the tree delve into a minion build with stuff like gargoyle/army/new pets and have the other focused on diseases.
You could bring back the disease micromanagement with stuff like necrotic plague or adding multiple diseases and having your abilities scale off them. Bring back that melee affliction warlock as an option.
90% of the new talent tree is filled with abilities we either already have baseline or talents/conduits/legendaries we have in shadowlands. Not having an interrupt or slow baseline is not fun, and it’s not a compelling choice. This honestly just feels like another excuse to prune. Was it fun having to pick between the legendaries/artifact abilities from legion when you threw them into the talent tree in BFA?
3 Likes
With the return of the Icecap supporting talents we are once again hit with issues that need to be looked into at least to some degree. This will be all about Frost’s talents.
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Whelps being back is an amazing synergy that was sorely missed for Icecap to be viable but in my opinion the 40 yard range on whelps was a huge turn off. Hitting your dps cooldown as a melee dps and having to think about pulling something well out of agro radius every time is unpleasant. For open world and dungeon running this added a layer of annoyance especially with pillar having such a short cooldown. The same issue comes from Frostwyrm’s Fury but with a longer cooldown it is easier to stomach. The Ancient Drake torghast power that made a Frostwyrm Fury aoe circle around you could be a welcome change for whelps and frostwyrm’s.
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Icecap and Enduring Strength for 2 handed frost. These simply do not allow you to play 2 hander and do anywhere near what dual wield does with them. Both benefit from offhand critical strikes so outside of Killing Machine procs dual wield essentially double dips with such a build. Allowing players to choose 2 hander frost as a talent but not having these other 2 talents function well with it feels like a terrible design choice. The solution is very clunky but outside of Killing Machine procs 2 hander should take 6 seconds off Icecap and either a 50% increase in the strength gained from Enduring Strength or a 50% duration increase. How this would be worded to show that Killing Machine is the exception to the rule will probably be a confusing mess but without this change 2 hander is doomed to Obliteration in every circumstance with the choice of Icecap being bait.
These are the 2 glaring issues though I will admit I could be in the minority as far as hating the range on whelps and drakes and seeing them as a painful mechanic. It would be nice to see 2 handed frost able to play any other talent build it wants instead of having a clear correct choice.
1 Like
I guess I should make some UH feedback as there’s little/none here.
I get that it’s difficult to provide good feedback and that 90% or more of feedback is about people asking for buffs and giving Blizzard numbers it already has. So I just want to make a post discussing playstyle changes I enjoy and would like to see added for quality of life and fun value as opposed to directly asking for buffs to this or that.
Empower rune weapon: Given that both soul reaper and Abom limb do shadow damage which makes them work extremely well with UH mastery it’s difficult to imagine this being a choice for unholy. It’s cool, and would be the only new active ability for Unholy coming from SL. I hope it’s also viable.
Unholy command and army of the damned Given UH is already extremely dependant on cooldowns it feels like a shame that we will once again be spending talent points for cooldown reduction. I’d really hoped that it CDR would be more baseline in Dragonflight since it feels mandatory for much of raiding and m+ content.
Sudden doom change with death rot: Great idea and I like the concept of taking an existing ability and adding more value to it. It’s cool to have proc gameplay burst wounds and will take some skill to use it. More like this would be great.
Unholy aura: I liked the name necrotic aura better.
Fundamentally the talents that add to the aesthetic and feel of Unholy being a plague and minion master are here albeit not off cooldown. I will be very happy to see the end of the current tier 4pc and have an aura instead. I still feel like UH is far too cooldown dependant and some stuff like Death Rot and Unholy aura might change that a little, but stuff like CDR is a huge QOL improvement so long as we remain so cooldown dependant I wish that if we can’t have any baseline that there are more options for it. Also a way to summon minions without needing cooldowns like in BFA would be nice.
2 Likes
except adaptive swarm is 20% dot damage and not 40%-60% and convoke is convoke without the legendary so 2 minutes and less likely to do bites\starsurges.
Legendaries and conduits make a huge difference to those spells.
Is this correct? There seems to be a contradiction.
One other set of questions is around what abilities are still awarded automatically outside of the tree. There are few broad categories:
- Abilities learned before 10, the most basic elements of what starts to make you into your class (Moonfire, Death Strike).
How can it be given free for Blood if it is stated that it will be awarded automatically?
priest is the most immobile class.
It seems like it’s possible to make a build that doesn’t have Apocalypse or Army of the Dead, but does have Army of the Damned.
Also, there is no world where Soul Reaper can compete with Abom’s Limb for PvP and putting them on the same tier is lunacy. Unless Soul Reaper is buffed to do something like 10x the damage it does now in PvP, or Abom’s does 0 damage. Please consider the damage profiles of all forms of content and not just raiding when putting talents to compete with each other.
1 Like
Personally I’d rather see something like this:
It seems that the Unholy tree has 3 focuses: Wounds, Pets, and Diseases. I reorganized some talents to better focus on this.
Death Knight Class Talent changes
Soul Reaper moved to Row 1 (Replace Raise Dead)
Raise Dead moved to Row 2 (Replace Improved Death and Decay)
Improved Death and Decay baked into Death and Decay baseline
Strangulate added to Row 6 (Replace Control Undead)
Control Undead made baseline
Army of the Dead moved to Row 10 Base DK from Unholy (Replaces Soul Reaper)
- Army of the Dead used to be an ability for all DKs, and makes more sense to compete with Abom’s Limb and Empowered Rune weapon than Soul Reaper.
- Perhaps make a PvP specific version where it has a 3 min CD and only summons 3 ghouls.
Unholy Talent changes
Apocalypse moved to Row 7 (Replace Army of the Dead)
Army of the Damned moved to Row 8 (Replace Apocalypse)
- Change to only affect Apocalypse.
- Change to reduce CD by 1sec for each Death Coil cast and Wound Burst (from Convocation of the Dead Conduit)
Morbidity and Unholy Aura Swapped
- Right side of the tree is disease focused, and the middle is pet focused.
Gargoyle moved to middle (Replace Army of the Damned)
Necrotic plague added (Replaces Gargoyle)
Other Notes
Unholy Row 8 is still scuffed to me. I think the Wounds side of the tree would like better access to bursting sores and infected claws. But maybe making all that aoe wound synergy easily accessible is a bad idea. I just don’t think there are enough disease focused talents which makes sense to replace them with.
7 Likes
There’s improved convoke just below convoke on the tree that gives it the exceptional spell increase portion from the leggo.
Also, the strength of convoke was Niya Mastery, not the conduit or leggo. It was still a strong ability without them. This is also not accounting for anything in dragonflight with tier sets etc, or tuning passes.
1 Like
ill make it easy for you its shadowladns 2.0 systems its covenant abilities,conduits and leggos with talents its nothing new.the only things new are the percent increases.
on that note frost dk is looking lit af for dragonflight and mite be my main depending on what they do to enhancement shamans and hunters.
2 Likes
You love them taking away our baseline abilities and making us use them as talents so were even more pruned?
5 Likes
I already posted another response saying that i understood the concerns and need for improvements in that department. My reaction was admittedly based on the QoL changes put into the individual abilities that were requested for a long while now.
As the talent trees are now, at level 70, I cannot recreate my baseline lvl 60 blood dk (with shadowlands talents selected), no borrowed power added. I’m even 1 talent point short of Bonestorm. This is really bad, especially because there ARE some new and returning cool talents that I would want to try out.
My immediate suggestions are (for all talent trees of all classes):
REMOVE ranks from all talents and just give the final rank. It doesn’t feel good to sink multiple points into one talent just to make sure your heart strike does the proper amount of damage or you have the mandatory increased stamina/dmg reduction. It especially feels bad when you need multiple ranks to reach the next ability which is what you wanted all along.
Avoid just boosting the damage of an ability. For instance, Improved Heart Strike is super boring but feels mandatory for damage output. It would feel much better if it was married with Heartbreaker, boosting damage AND runic power gains, while also cleaning up the tree of trivial must picks.
Create more links between talents to provide more choice on how you work your way down. Nothing sucks more when there’s a talent you want, but you are forced to take 2 talents that you didn’t want because they are the only path to the desired talent.
Lastly and MOST importantly:
Put all fundamental spec abilities off to the side of the tree and just unlock them automatically as you put points into that tree. Check out the game Rift’s talent tree “roots” where you passively unlock stuff as you spend points in a tree. It shouldn’t be a “choice” to gain access to our key spells and abilities and it feels really bad trying to “reassemble” the baseline class we have in shadowlands.
3 Likes
You might not need multiple ranks to get to the next row based on the old talent tree. Though its blizzard so… who knows?
I have been playing around with a calculator…and the only major gripe from me is that you have to spec a talent point into 2h frost. Either 2h frost talent also comes with a dps boost to compensate the point spend, or 2h frost is just a baseline ability.
also there needs to be something that ajusts the balance of playing icecap/BoS as 2h is you spend a talent point on it. More CDR for icecap per crit would be good.
2 Likes
This whole talent tree is garbage. To take baseline abilities and put them in a tree and call it choice is terrible. There needs to be standard abilities and the tree allows you to customize your build. For example the first 5 abilities in the frost tree are of course baseline frost so everyone will grab those because otherwise how are you really doing any damage. Why dilute the tree with a required choice. It’s not really a choice. It’s a waste of points used. From what I can tell it’s hey we through everything in a talent tree and added a couple things but half of your points are going to be used on stuff that typically is baseline frost.
4 Likes