Is it in any way possible for Dragonflight Unholy DK to have a dual-wield option? The last time such a spec was viable was in Cata if memory serves; but even then it paled in comparison to original Wrath talents with Blood-caked Blades.
I just liked the idea of a DK having an option for fast-hits that proced Shadow damage and doing large-group DoT damage.
After playing around with the Talent Trees and it’s possibilites, I think that Blood and Frost are mostly fine, but that Unholy Needs a major redesign.
All Trees have the issue that it’s possible to pick Talents which rely on other Talents, but it is possible to select them, without selecting their preqeuisite.
This should not be possible and has to be addressed in the comeing iterations.
It should be impossible to select, for example, Ebon Fever, without selecting a way to apply dieseases before.
On the same note, you can even fill out the whole Tree, without even selecting a way to apply virulent Plague. This seems utterly nonsensical to me, since we are FORCED to select a permanent pet.
I hope we have the ability to either chose our paths more freely, electing to decide against a permanent pet/ disease, or atleast get both ,baseline" , or rather are forced to select them, before proceeding deeper.
The Easiest fix would be to make Improved Festering Strike and Infectious Wound 2 Point Talents, forcing us to Pickup Outbreak and Sudden Doom, bevore proceeding deeper.
More generally: The Node positioning has to be improved, in my opinion.
There are some nodes that simply do not make sense where they are placed.
The Right path seems to be focused on Pet and Disease enhancements, but Reaping is placed along that Path. Reaping does not interact with Petdamage, or Diseases.
Either Add those place Reaping somewhere else.
Improved Death Coil is a great Talent, which i love the Idea of. It’s Placement and the palcement of synergyzing Nodes is confusing though.
If I want to buff my Death Coil further by picking Deadly Coild, I HAVE to select epidemic, which is in direct competition to my now multitarget Death Coil and seems like an utter waste in a build where i want to select Improved Death Coil.
And on an even more general Note: The Tree seems VERY HEAVILY scewed towards pet builds. Myself and many other People would LOVE to see more disease Heavy gameplay.
The current Tree, however, offers a total of 5 Nodes that involve diseases. Two of those simply apply a disease, so we are left with 3 Choices that enhance diseases. Only 2 of these have an actual impact on gameplay.
Let’s Compare that to Nodes involving Pets: I count a total of 12 Nodes for Pets.
There HAS to be more here that can be done to allow different builds.
Give us the ability to select additional diseases. Morbidity seems like a cool Talent, but it falls flat the moment you realise, that we can AT MOST apply two diseases, Virulent Plague and Unholy Blight.
Allow Death Coil, or maybe only Sudden Doom procs, to add a disease we can try to maintain on a target.
Allow us to select superstrain, or maybe chose between Frost Fever and Blood Plague to add as a second disease. Allow Eben Fever to interact with those if you do.
Give us Necrotic Plague, as many people have been asking for ages.
Allow Death and Decay or Defile to count as a disease to boost this synergy.
Be Creative to allow other buiilds than: Summon some pets that do your work.
Maybe allow a whole build that doesn’t have to select the permanent ghoul.
Maybe allow Unholy Blight to be played as an alternative to Dark Transformation, so we can choose between a Disease CD and a Pet CD, both of which can interact with the supporting Talents in Unholy Command and Frenzied Monstrosity. I believe those could easily be changed to work with Unholy Blight as an alternative.
And most importantly for me, give us a way to spread our disease once applied, an alternative to pressing outbreak AGAIN if we missed an enemy, or simply revert Outbreak to it’s BFA version.
Ideas would be:
Epidemic Spreads the disease to unaffected Targets it hits.
Bursting a Wound on a Target suffering from Virulent Plague spreads it to nearby targets.
You could change Outbreak to only apply to a single target, and rely on those mechanics to actually spread the disease, instead of simply applying it once. And haveing to do so again in case new enemies spawn or you missed one enemy.
Unholy should be able to spread existing diseases in some way, not be forced to manually apply whenever a new enemy enters ongoing combat, which both Blood and Frost are able to do as part of their rotation. Unholy cannot.
Some other things or adjustments I would like to see:
Give us some way to apply Wounds in AoE.
Allow Pestilence to have one guaranteed wound on the first Hit per enemy.
Maybe allow Festering Strike a chance to apply wounds in AoE
Or Allow one Wound to cleave in AoE if your current Target already has Wounds.
Add the Embrace Death Conduit in some form. I think it would be fun to allow a Build focused on strong Death Coils and give Sudden Doom more impact, since it is a very boring procc without and buffs.
Some other Notes, based on historcal and current Tuning:
Pestilence needs to be changed or buffed in some way, maybe the one guaranteed application on first hit, as suggested above.
Defile will never be picked if it competes with Unholy Pact. It needs a Buff along the lines of the Withering Ground conduit to compete.
Why does Unholy Pact even still give a strength bonus? Could be removed i think.
Harbringer of Doom is an utterly worthless pick without buffs, especially since it does not lead to anything else. Maybe swap it with pestilence? Would make more sense leading into Death Rot instead of leading nowhere.
Infectious Wound scaling up to the Wound cap seems extremely weird. Either make it 1 Wound with scaling Propability, or Change the Wound cap to go along with it. If it can apply wounds up to the cap, it seems like a recipe for horrible gameplay.
Reaping not applying to Diseases and Pets is weird, especially given its place in the Tree.
Allow Sudden Doom, Army of the Damned and Unholy Command to work with Epidemic. They do not according to current descriptions.
Revert Unholy Strike back to Unholy Frenzy, or increase the Haste buff to ~20s. If it Stays as is, it should be possible to Chain Unholy Strike into Apoc, with the Ghouls Receiving the Haste Buff for their full lifetime.
Allow Control Undead to be used by Unholy DKs, without sacrificing their Ghoul, or Allow the controlled undead to benefit from Dark Transformation and other buffs in some way.
Change Improved Festering Strike. Maybe allow it to do Shadow damage. Otherwise it’s 3 Points for not even a 1% damage gain.
I think thats it, thank you for reading if you did, I hope there were some useful Ideas in here atleast. Have a nice day 
My requested changes are simple
Any choice mode we should be allowed to drop a 2nd point into to gain both options.
A gateway that connects left and right side so you don’t have to cross mid. Either they are spread at the middle point at point breaks.
My issue with the way it currently looks is that having a base 4-5 abilities that are for the spec makes more sense with the tree yes adding other options to add but also make the 4-5 abilities you get better in some way. For example grip having the option of 2 or instead of being pulled to you it’s you pulled to them. Flexibility in what the abilities does or makes it stronger in some way. That would make more sense. I don’t expect every ability but give us a handful of them by default for the spec that are duh choices of need to have any effect.
this. this is all i came here to speak about.
i am hoping blizz lets dk’s choose between 2h and dual-wield for ANY of the specs and have it be viable. heck, at this point, i’d prolly be ok with non-viable, as long as i can do it. it’s not like i play hardcore world first.
i literally couldn’t care about anything else except the OPTION to dual wield as any spec.
A lot of abilities that should and used to be baseline are now a talent. Not sure why anyone would be excited about this. The tree looks nice, but the abilities that were baseline and now competing for “selection” does not feel great.
I have had IBF, Brain-freeze (kick), and Garg basically baseline in previous xpacs. Why do I need to select abilities for certain situations, why cant these be baseline? I think these tree’s need to be fleshed out more or better yet re-designed to have new ideas/abilities, buffs, interactions to be selected.
Please let me know if I am wrong in my understanding.
definitely agree on frost being mostly fine. it only needs a couple of changes tbh. mostly nerfs imo to remorseless stacking stuff.
No one is. Its that people are the opposite making a big stink out of it and this if you arent disappointed then you must be excited which is such a bad way of thinking. If you arent for gaining 2h back in the way I do then you must be against it. If you dont hate this thing like I do then you must be fore it. Its bad reasoning.
IBF and Mind-Freeze are basically baseline. There is 0 reason why you wouldnt take these. Again you have to pick these up to get to the point where you can complete the rune system.
Garg can be picked up along with something else as well. It depends on the balance of the talents if it would be chosen over something else or something else being chosen over it.
Skull Bash for druids was in the initial preview of this system. An interrupt, and its in the 5th tier and you dont even have to pick it up like death knights do.
None of this should be anything new at this point. It was all shown when DF was announced.
The definitely went overboard with turning baseline abilities into talents.
Mind Freeze
Death’s Advance
Runic Empowerment/Runic Corruption
Death Strike
Those 5 abilities 100% should be baseline. You could argue a lot more stuff shouldnt be talents. But those 5 have absolutely no business being talents.
The first 2 rows are all baseline kit, that you will certainly pick up with any build you make, so we aren’t losing them. Just imagine the first 10 or so levels where you unlock abilities each level, kinda like you do currently. But with them as talents you can get them in the order you like, which I think is an improvement. Currently people don’t get interrupt or decurse quite late.
So the only abilities being ripped from our core kit are the ones further down the list, like deaths advance. I don’t like where this is placed, because it’s such a powerful mobility ability on a slow class that you will always want to get it so it’s not really a choice. You are forced to go down the middle to get it. I think talents shine the best when there are actual choices, multiple options to the same place. I also don’t like being forced to give up loads of dps for utility, or having to waste talent points in a talent row that isn’t useful to your build just to get to the node after it. I don’t mind spending talents to work my way down a tree too get to the juicy talent at the end, but I want to feel good about the talents I’m picking up on the way. Horn of winter into Rune mastery feels bad to me. Would love to see icy talons and rune mastery swap.
As for runic empowerment/corruption, I disagree with you on that one. I think that’s exactly the kind of thing we should have in the talent tree. 2 choices (that need a bit of balancing to be even) that enhance your rotation, and work well with all builds.
Players may not pick Runic Empowerment/Runic Corruption. That would be a fairly large mistake for a DK player. So no, Runic Empowerment and Runic Corruption should not be talents.
Also because players will just take whichever one is the strongest. That “choice” node isnt a choice.
something that occurs to me is why not follow in the footsteps of pvp talents and conduits, and put all of our talents in a pool that we can socket into the tree in any order we want. keep our baseline abilities baseline, then just unlock more abilities to add to the pool as you level.
Or just make it like the very top layer so there is no opportunity cost. Having the option of either, especially for blood, is fairly interesting.
Yesssssssssss
If the choice between the 2 was significantly higher on the tree, that would work fine. But needing to spend that many points into Frost to get them really limits Unholy and Blood builds.
Its kind of silly that they are hiding the core gameplay (passive) talent for how the resources interact with each other deep down the frost branch.
That would be like all rogue spells just costing energy, but they have to spend 13 talent points in the subtlety branch to make it so the spells also generate a combo point.
Thats the real problem. Rune regeneration talents are integral to DKs. They need to move Rune regeneration way up on the Frost side or offer Runic Empowerment/Runic Corruption on tier 6 on all 3 trees (Blood/Frost/Unholy).
People are just highlighting on why they gradually took choice away. You had choice up into WotLK and was starting to be taken away in cata when they made it to where you had put points into one tree before any other and then completely removing choice and putting everything on rails.
Let people fail. They will learn real fast how important something is.
While I agree, there need to be some safeguards. Rune regeneration needs to be a safeguard.
Where do the safeguards end then? Runic Empowerment and Runic Corruption were choices in the talent system before so im not really seeing the problem here.