Im glad that some of the issues of the spec are being addressed in the War Within Alpha but some are still flying under the radar in my opinion:
Unholy Aura:
Move Unholy Aura from the Player to the ghoul pet. This talent being taken mostly for Single Target at the same time as Clawing Shadows feels convoluted since for one you need to be 8 yards from the target to have 20% minion damage but the other gives you the chance to keep damaging enemies from 30 yards. Moving it to the pet would solve that issue while making pet control which is part of the spec’s fantasy to be more important.
Death rot:
Death rot takes too long to fully apply which makes it super punitive if it falls off which happens a lot with bosses flying away or new waves of adds spawning. This reminds me of how Dread Touch used to work for Affliction Warlocks. You had to do 3 malefic raptures to get the bonus 30% dot damage but now its only one GCD for the same effect and it last 8 seconds. While using Death Rot UDKs have to spend between 10 to 5 spenders to reach a similar goal. Plenty of fix options with this one but I think halving the maximum amount of stacks changed to 5 with each being 2% shadow damage would help greatly. It could also function exactly like dread touch with it being just on spender for 10% but reduce the duration to 8 seconds.
Defile:
To perfectly play defile you have to track the mastery buff with a addon since the buff persists after the visual fades and to perfectly refresh the spell to not waste any charges you have to cast it while there is 0.5 second left on your buff which is just crazy and not new player friendly at all and near impossibly to pull off. I would visualize this buff to not require a weak aura and make the window of success to refresh it perfectly at least to 3 seconds. Also this spell overall blends too much with lots of swirlies making it hard to see harmful abilities.
Honestly Defile needs to just go away. The fact they need to tack an arbitrary mastery buff onto it for it to be actually worth taking is a seething indictment of the spell itself.
Self Affix: Can’t See the Floor just cements it.
how much of that is a damage issue though? they wouldn’t need to entice us with buffs if the spell did monster damage. which considering its a non mobile 30 second cooldown dot it really should be a nuke.
my current defile does 21,719 damage over 10 seconds, that’s 2,172 per tick against targets with 1-3M HP, its less than a hot tick. they need to add 2 zeros to it: 2,171,900 over 10 seconds is a lot more attractive of a spell.
The damage advantage of Defile comes from the 8% mastery buff not the damage of the spell itself. It is that buff which is too hard to keep at full uptime in my opinion.
It’s stupid that an ability with such a striking and large dangerous-looking visual would be predominantly for an individual buff to a stat. We weren’t afraid of the LK when he cast Defile because it would empower his strikes against the tank; we were afraid because it would hurt us and get bigger.
clawing shadows should be a talent but SS needs to be full shadow damage and CS makes it ranged or does something else or makes it ranged and gives timmy a extra button to pres
What I would like to see, which probably wont happen, is Unholy being moved away from being a pet class… To me it doesn’t make any sense to have an undead zombie pet following me around… It’s weird. I want to raise undead minions from the ground to help me fight but having one as a pet…? I don’t know… maybe it’s just not my thing
And obviously they need to completely get rid of cleaving strikes or do something with DnD/Defile.
But this is a losing battle… It’s apparent that Blizzard doesn’t read the DK forums at all