Trying Dk for the first time and went unholy. I like the concept of the pets and even dots, but festering wounds feels like an extra layer that makes the class feel tedious? Maybe it is just me, but I enjoy the class until I had to manage wounds. Having to set up plater, and keep track of it. Is there like a talent that I missed that can let me get around it?
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The dev team really seems to like the idea of the festermight DK dream where you vile contagion a group of mobs and cleave them all down and get like 70+ festermight stacks and become a god.
In reality mob packs never work out that way so unholy gets power budgeted into a build that isn’t functionally useful so it serves more as an “eh” maintenance mini-game that props up our cooldown rotation.
So to answer your question, no there’s no getting around wounds. There are probably weakauras that make it more obvious when your current target does not have wounds, and I know for sure there are weakauras for tracking festermight (although they aren’t as useful now that it stacks with seperate duration).
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Oh that sucks, I’m managing wounds, Cooldowns, Runes, dots, and resources. I can see this becoming a chore once the new excited feel wears off.
Thanks for info, I am kinda shocked they don’t have a spec that you can get out of it.
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Some people like it while others want to go back to diseases and Timmy play style
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With San’layn you press Festering Strike 50% less than Rider, which already doesn’t press it a ton.
Basically, at least for ST, while you can’t spec out of wounds you can spec to generally ignore them outside of Apocalypse, and the talent build that does this is currently the best simming/highest DPS option.
Wounds exist but outside of Apocalypse for extra burst damage they’re largely irrelevant at this point for ST.
Festering wounds is a mechanic similar to the old Rogue combo points. Latter Blizzard reworked CP for Rogues cause was an outdated design.
But ofc, they forgot about us.
Welcome, suffer well.
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I like the concept.
I don’t like how hard it is ti see without modding.
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Yeah, I retired from unholy because I don’t enjoy keeping 75 plates spinning … not my idea of fun or engaging gameplay especially when I actually have fight mechanics to keep track of on top of that.
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This 100%, lol even some of the Dks in max’s chat about DK mentioned how they hate wounds.
Sadly, despite feedback over the years, Blizz seems to really want to keep wounds even though it would be entirely easier to rebuild UH without them than it is to make them feel fun.
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Managing fester wounds is much easier than managing rune types back in patch 3.0 when there was 3 types of runes: Blood, Frost and Unholy and each spell used required different runes in order to use them.
It’s just to ensure that we are not a 2 button spec and making sure that you have to weave in a festering strike here and there.
I’d like to see wounds reworked as just an additive in our toolkit rather than a core function of the class (and rework pvp/spec talents around their removal as such), and return as some said above the disease/strike/pet focus that was early DK until pre-legion.
Specifically, I’d like to see the return of necrotic plague and necroblight but to each their own.
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I hate it. Reminds me of combo points when they were locked to the target you generated them on.
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Echoing what others have said. I hate the woons! I wish Blizzard would get rid of them all together. They are vestiges of playstyles that have long since been outdated.
Now having said that. Current iteration of UH feels good to play right now. Better than it has in a long time. The spinning plates are much less painful to manage. So if you’re just getting into DK now is probably the best the spec has been since the early early days.
I am loving my DK rather than just enjoying it… or enduring it as it has been in the past. And I am genuinely excited to try out both Hero Talents.
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Well, they could do like Rogue combo points are and kinda put the Festering Wounds “points” on us instead of a enemy. So Festering Strike would buff our next X Scourge Strike, for instance.
Oh, Imagine if those Scourge Strikes buffed by Festering Strike cleave without needing DnD?
Just a thought.
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Where is the moment to moment complexity in a world without Wounds? After the recent mechanical prune, do you honestly believe that Wounds are giving Unholy a severe mental load?
I’m personally finding post-prepatch Unholy very, very easy to play relative to the spec in the past. The simplification of Festermight, Apocalypse always giving max ghouls], and merging Dark Transformation and Unholy Blight has made the spec really, really easy to handle IMO. The moment to moment play feels pretty easy, and it does feel kinda hard to butcher the basic Maintain Plague>Sudden Doom proc>Soul Reaper at 37% or less>pop wounds>build wounds>spend excess RP. We don’t even need to align resources for our 45 or 1:30 anymore. Relative to either Frost or other classes, Unholy feels really, really simple to play right now. The raid build kinda feels a bit brain dead, and while FM stacking alters the AoE rotation a bit in M+, the spec still feels really manageable.
I get the frustration with UI though, and I think the fact that Wounds can be knocked off of the Blizzard nameplates is the biggest joke immaginable, but Blizzard’s UI hasn’t ever been up to snuff for basic gameplay, and trackers have always been a requirement for optimized play. DK specifically has a plethora of junk buffs and debuffs that make stock UI almost impossible to effectively use, but I don’t think that’s a fault of Wounds.
Nah, old combo points aren’t an apt comparison at all. It’s much easier to interact with Wounds on almost all levels of play. Target side combo points would drop if you tabbed off a target, and Rogue/Feral typically don’t have any options to actually measure their combo point expendature, it’s always an all or nothing spend. UH has a plethora of ways to affect the wound economy, and with cooldowns reliably build and spend them on AoE without any of the pain points that old Rogue had.
It’s incredibly hyperbolic to suggest Wounds are on the same level of feelsbad as tab drop combo points.
And as I suggested above, where is the spec’s complexity if we remove wounds? Like actually where is it? Because right now, if wounds get dropped, you’re literally just maintaining your plague, spamming Scourge Strike and Death Coil mindlessly, and popping fire and forget minion cooldowns. Where is the core rotational flow with Wounds gone? Where is the hypothetical replacement? Are people complaining about wounds actually just straight up content with having a core rotation with no internal flow?
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I will say as a longtime Unholy player its not a spec youre going to get overnight like frost. You have 3 different resources to manage, and you dont want to cap or be empy of either.
Runes
Runic Power
Wounds
When you finally click with Unholy though its an oddly satisfying dance of your class spec while doing the mechanics of the encounter in question.
Its still very clunky in parts and frankly we reall could use alot of QoL changes with regards to our Festermight and DnD cleave.
However its worth it, very much so.
Suffer Well
What about DnD cleave in Unholy needs a QoL update? To me, anti-DnD rhetoric really only started when it was given to Frost as a baseline in Dragonflight. Prior to DF, people were even begging to have Night Fae’s DnD cleave baselined into the class, because it gave Obliteration such good support.
Not a peep was said about Unholy DnD cleave in Legion, BFA, or Shadowlands. People generally seemed to love it when Bursting Sores+Festermight was meta in BFA.
I’m finding it very interesting that all of a sudden, now that Frost has DnD cleave, after it was explicitly asked to be baselined by the Frost community, there’s so much pushback against DnD cleave, that said pushback is being retroactively applied to a spec that’s used DnD cleave for longer. DnD cleave wasn’t considered problematic for Unholy over the course of the 6 years following its rework, even during the era before we had 2x DnD charges, and the cleave was tied to the physical dimensions of DnD rather than a player buff. From what I can tell, having watched DK discourse unfold over many years, the prompt for anti-DnD sentiment in UH seems to have come from discussions about Frost.
If DnD was fine when it was locked to physical dimensions and 1 charge, why is it problematic now, when the buff is flexible and we have 2 charges? It’s genuinely only gotten easier to use from when the community deemed it a healthy part of the kit. I’m not seeing the reasons why it’s a problem now, when it’s been in a much, much worse place.
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Because people just want X spec to be designed like 10.0.7 Ret instead of just saving people the trouble and rerolling. That’s it.
Just like how 10.0.7 Ret has 0 skill complexity and decision making, people want that to be applied to DKs. And you’re right, the worst part of all this anti-DND nonsense is that’s it’s objectively not a problem if you’re not terrible at the class.
My only issue, and has been, is the fact that my cleave is based on the Tanks opinion of whether or not to keep a pack inside the Giant Red/Grey AOE.
With the Riders talent making it a PBAoE on Darion its very obvious that they are listening and hearing this feedback regarding DnD.
No need to get in a huff. I dislike the fact that my cleave window is dependent on whether or not another player wants to be an A-hole. Its my cleave window give me that control plain and simple.
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