Seen some confusion going around about the mounted combat aspect of this; hoping for a clarification. If you take On a Pale(r) Horse, will you actually get to remain mounted whilst you fight stuff?
I love the flavor of this tree so far. Here are my points of feedback:|
Things I love:
- I loved summoning the Horsemen in Torghast, and having them in general gameplay is so, so cool from a thematic standpoint.
- Death Charge/On a Pale Horse are each very powerful in different ways, and really sell the âRider of the Apocalypseâ fantasy in a unique way.
- Whitemane: DKs have been clamoring for some form of Necrotic Plague to come back, and Whitemaneâs ability is perfect for this fantasy. Giving us a way to interact with it (via Whitemaneâs Famine) is peak DK class fantasy.
- Fury of the Horsemen: exactly the kind of talent I wanted to see out of this tree. Again, just fantastic flavor.
Points of criticism:
Apocalypse Now: Army of the Dead and Frostwyrmâs Fury each have their own pain points when it comes to using them to summon all 4 horsemen.
Army:
- Usually used 1 or 2 GCDs before the pull, worries about uptime loss on pre-pull army usage
- Is around 3 minutes CD in continuous combat with no interruptions, but CD goes up drastically with downtime (see, e.g., Tindral). Is Army of the Damned being looked at/the CD of army generally?
- Army has 2X the cooldown of Frostwyrmâs Fury (with talents), so unholy would have half the uptime on all four horsemen compared to frost.
FWF:
- Correct me if Iâm wrong, but I donât think Frost wants to use FWF on pull, while the talent design makes you want to use this ASAP
- Making the best use of Rider talents requires you to invest in FWF + its capstone, which is not always easy to access in the current Frost DK talent tree design.
Other concerns:
- Nazgrim/Nazgrimâs Conquest: Along with Festermight, this gives DK another source of stacking strength thatâs strictly limited to a finite debuff. Given that rune spending and wound popping occur continuously, this has led to a lot of âfeel-badâ moments where your festermight/nazgrimâs conquest stacks reset, but you have to do a mechanic or are otherwise unable to take advantage of the stack, losing out on damage while still playing the rotation optimally. IMO both Festermight and Nazgrim should function similar to Ironfur, with their values rolling dynamically. They may need to be adjusted accordingly, but limited time stacking debuffs (including Necrotic Wounds) are difficult to play around and contribute more anxiety to the rotation than they do good feelings of mastery at high stacks.
Nazgrim/Trollbane/Morgraine:
- Compared to Whitemane, their effects seem dramatically less exciting. As noted above, if Nazgrim was more of an Ironfur-style buff Iâd be more excited about it, but Trollbane (mostly) being a brief 5% damage increase followed by a one-time shadowfrost explosion and Morgraine just giving Death and Decay donât seem as impactful. I feel like I should be excited for any of the four Horsemen to show up to aid me, and regardless of numbers tuning, from an emotional standpoint I am not super excited to see anyone but Whitemane based on the tooltip alone.
Horsemenâs Aid: As an avid PvP/rated arena player, I think original Spellwarden taught us that random magic damage shields feel awful to play as and play against - another example of passive healing that can either do nothing or feel very unfair to play against (especially as AMS also makes players immune to magical effects like fear and polymorph).
I would recommend that Horsemenâs Aid instead empower the Death Knightâs defensive abilities - AMS, IBF, Sacrificial Pact, Death Pact, Death Strike, either making them stronger, applying a portion of their effect to allies, reducing their CD, or otherwise rewarding active decision-making.
(While Iâm at it, I would greatly advocate for removing the healing from Necrotic Wounds, making the stacks simpler to apply, maybe baking the effect into Wounds baseline, removing the PvP talent, and buffing Death Strike or other active effects to compensate.)
As weâve seen this expansion, passive healing is incredibly frustrating to play against, and leaves the Death Knight feeling like their player skill contributed less to their survivability. Changing Horsemenâs Aid to empower specific abilities would also distinguish it more from the other choice node, which is a strict passive damage reduction.
Overall, itâs such a cool concept, and as an Unholy DK main, Iâm very excited about both Rider and Sanâlayn.
7 Likes
2 Likes
For On a Paler Horse, will you remain mounted while using abilities? Or is this simply a way to get on a mount while still in combat (which can still have uses, just significantly fewer)?
For Whitemane, the way it reads when sheâs out is that it would be the most damage to get Undeath on one target, then swap to another target so she follows your target and can spread even more Undeaths than what she can do through Whitemaneâs Famine alone. Or does she stay locked on whatever target she gets summoned on?
With Mawsworn Menace, can Unholy have a ten second cooldown on Defile?
3 Likes
The tree looks pretty good, significantly better then Sanâlayn and Deathbringer, but thereâs still some issues here.
First off, the horseman themselves seem really underwhelming except for Whitemane, most of them you wonât even notice, the only way you know theyâll be up is by the visual of the horseman being there. There also needs to be more clarification on the summon order of the horsemen, is it random or does it cycle through each one similar to warlock diabolist? Also, how big are the horsemen? Are they going to be mounted and to scale or will theyâre size be reduced at all? I can see them becoming extremely annoying once the novelty of this Hero tree wears off if they are taking up a lot of space on your screen. Some clarification would nice in those regards.
Secondly, thereâs a couple nodes here that are tied to abilities that both unholy and frost only take with certain builds or in certain situations. Unholy Blight is only really taken in AoE and doesnât really provide any benefit in Single target, plus with where itâs located on the tree, you will have to sacrifice quite a bit of power to get to it and take another talent that will be useless in ST (Epidemic) to get to Blight. Horn of Winter is only taken by Breath builds, playing horn on obliteration is a waste as you donât need it, so having to take that as Obliteration is not gonna be fun either, especially since frost will have to take Frostwyrmâs Fury and Frostwyrmâs Capstone for the CDR on it. Both Unholy and Frost already have very limited talent points to play around with, so this is very concerning that weâre being forced into certain abilities that arenât always taken, especially since we will have no left over points to move around the tree as we want to when using this hero tree.
Third and probably the most problematic, the capstone being tied to Frostwyrmâs Fury and Army of the Dead are going to be extremely problematic and annoying. For frost, Frostwyrmâs Fury is only really useful in AoE, it doesnât do enough ST to be worth taking for ST and the line AoE it does is extremely annoying in M+ due it ninja pulling mobs if you donât aim it right or donât see a pack that is in its path till youâve already sent it. We already got a glimpse of that with the Aberrus Tier set for Frost. And for unholy, which definitely got the worst part out of this capstone. Having it tied to Army of the Dead is going to be extremely punishing to Unholy, even more so then it already is since army is a 8min CD that relies on CDR from a talent to get down to even a 3min CD to line up with the rest of your 3mins, unholy is going to be punished beyond belief for any type of down time in boss encounters and M+ since they canât generate runic power to use Death Coils to CDR Army. Frost will have significantly more uptime on the horsemen then unholy, even if unholy has full uptime on a boss due to the abilities the capstones are tied too. Another issue is that if you cast Army before Gargoyle, the 20sec duration on the horsemen will cause you to lose their benefits shortly before Gary ends, which is going to feel horrible since Gary is the strongest on his last cast. This cause unholy to want to save army till Gary is at 20secs left on his duration which is going to make burst windows for unholy significantly more clunky then they already are. Even if the capstone isnât changed for frost, IT HAS to change for unholy with how unholy currently plays or else this is going to make unholy extremely frustrating and clunky to play.
Fourth, I think the abilities the capstone, as well as nodes like Mawsworn Menace need to be rethought out for which abilities they are tied too. The horsemen do not seem powerful or interesting enough to tie them to such long CDs (before talents) as of right now. I know tuning can change this, but Iâm not even necessarily looking at tuning right now, each ability the horsemen uses seems very underwhelming. I hope blizzard takes a look at this tree, as well as the other DK hero trees again, and does some adjustments. As I said earlier, Rider is definitely the best one here, but it still needs some help. I also hope that rework is being planned for DK as a whole with its Current class tree and all 3 spec trees, DK is in desperate need of a complete overhaul.
Fifth, I want to touch on the changes to DnD that were announced with the tree. Thank you acknowledging the issues with DnD and for looking at doing some changes, but please, just remove DnD. Not a single DK I have ever talked to has never once said anything positive about DnD, especially since there are so many passives from the Class tree being tied to it. Its extremely frustrating and annoying to use, and will still be problematic even without Cleaving being tied to it, assuming Cleaving Strikes is moved to another ability, it will help a lot, especially for frost, but will not solve all the problems. The only change I can see that will make it good is it being converted into an aura around the DK instead of a ground effect, but I donât see that happening, so please, I beg you blizzard, just remove the ability.
Finally, The movement choice node is absolutely perfect, please do not change it at all. On a Paler Horse is going to be insanely fun in open world content and when doing certain dungeons, and Death Charge is movement that DK has desperately needed, the only thing I would change about Death Charge is make accessible to Blood as well.
4 Likes
Forcing us into one specific mount skin is a terrible decision.
I didnât kill arthas over one hundred times to not use Invincible.
10 Likes
DK has been one of the main specs I played since WoTLK. I havenât really played the spec during Dragon Flight because I feel Frost needs a rework, so now I just occasionally play Unholy when I am bored. I donât want to invest too much time, because there has been no mention of a Frost rework and Blizz staff hyped on RoTA.
That being said, the lore behind RoTA and how its matches up in the tree is really good - way better than whoever designed the warlock one, for example.
Obviously the big take here is On a Pale Horse. Itâs really good that this is on a choice node, so nicely done there for when we play in-doors. This will be both really thematic and great for PvP. It is literally a massive win - probably one of the biggest wins in hero talents. If every spec had something like this then we would be golden.
The On a Pale Horse and Death Charge node is so good that it allows the rest of the tree to just be a bit âmehâ, which turns into âgoodâ with Apocalypse Now.
Not every talent needs to re-work the wheel, and I think the mechanism with the Riderâs Champion works really well to just add âsomethingâ additional to the summoning of pets.
The only complaint I have about the design is that the mechanisms feel very unholy based, but you may get some people playing Frost pick up RoTA to just grab the movement buff node for content.
Other than that⊠âApocalypse Nowâ, really? 
Does it need to be apocalypse based? Why canât it be something like âRelentless Onslaughtâ, âUnbridled Furyâ, or âJustice of The Graveâ.
The tree is a really good design, looking forward to it playing as Unholy. Maybe my joint fave design along with Dark Ranger.
2 Likes
Only in outside combat which will probably mean out in the world, not in instances or raids, basically anything people care about you wont be able to mount.
So really its Death Charge or nothing.
The tree is really just eye candy for a few people but as a hero spec its pretty bad and is just going to annoy people in melee. Lets have 3 DK that summon 4 horses each with the rest of the melee, and if unholy add their pets too it.
5 Likes
Aight so I still stand by this; this tree is awesome.
I am however not too warm to the 1% stacking strength from Nazgrim, would prefer to see something else there than a maintenance-adjacent buff
1 Like
This tree is awesome
the mounted combat, and mounting in combat is extremely awesome, very thematic, much appreciated
It has very good implications for PvE and PvP
Any problem i have with this tree is going to be related to all the other nodes however that mainly just provide boring flat % increases, Something a bit more tasteful would go a long way and maybe a bit more practical and direct
And please, No more death and decay gameplay. Leave the ability purely for PvP so we can stop drinks but dont tie any gameplay around it outside of that
Especially in the same talent tree that features the mounted combat, which implies we will be more on the move than ever before
+1 on updating the regular acherus horse model for the expansion, and updating DK ghouls in general similar to warlock
3 Likes
It would be cool if Archerus Deathcharger got a visual update, or at least we could have Glyphs to use other undead mounts like Invincible, Rivendereâs Charger, Mummy Raptor, Tauralus, etc.
Prefer undead wolves/dinos for my Horde characters 
1 Like
Where is this mounted combat people are seeing in the spec that isnt there? You can mount your charger outdoors while in combat and thats it.
Outdoors is usually in the open world so its not going to be used in instances.
3 Likes
Yea this will be very odd as it will vary depending on raids, as some raids have allowed mounts and others have not. I like the thematics but the âoutdoorsâ part concerns me haha.
2 Likes
I think the Rider of the Apocalypse tree is maybe the best so far in terms of capturing an iconic fantasy. Gonna feel just like a WC3 death knight, and I love it.
I do have two suggestions to further enhance that fantasy:
- Consider allowing RotA death knights to use any undead steed mount for mounted combat (i.e. Rivendareâs Deathcharger, undead racial horses, Midnight, etc.) in addition to the Acherus Deathcharger. The Acherus Deathcharger is a beautiful mount, but especially compared to the HD skeletal steeds that the four horsemen ride, itâs a bit low-res and some variety in useable mount visuals could be nice.
- With the current preview, mounted combat will only work outdoors. I would love being able to keep the visual of mounted combat indoors, even without the speed boost benefits, just to keep up the âdark riderâ aesthetic. Perhaps going indoors wouldnât dismount us, it would just take away the speed boost and going back outdoors would give us a couple second delay to regain the speed boost (as if we had needed to summon the mount again, just without ever losing the visual?) I just want to be able to get on my deathcharger and never get off of it, ha.
7 Likes
I, like everyone else, would love an updated Deathcharger model for this. Still being stuck with DnD is lame but I am still hopeful for a DK revamp.
2 Likes
This is how Diabolist is functioning. One then the other then the other then restart. Safe assumption for this to follow suit.
2 Likes
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I think Rider shows the most fun thematically to me for the DK hero trees.
Summoning horsemen is a fun concept that was historically fun for me in Torghast. Replacing Deathâs Advance is also going to be fun as well. Giving DKs more mobility is huge value for PvE and Iâm sure huge value in PvP. With (as currently designed) Wraith Walk being extremely hard to take, this talent is going to feel really good overall. I think DKs need a slight more options for mobility at a baseline, rather than through hero talents, but I am hyped for Death Charge.
Horsemanâs Aid v. Pact of the Apocalypse
The defensive choice nodes in this tree seems a bit insane. Free AMS procs could be absolutely insane in some fights, but the talent could also be useless in many cases. I donât think I would take the node for most scenarios. For the second node, I like the idea that the horsemen take damage from you (point of clarification needed though) Does it mean that youâll have 20% DR if youâll have all 4 horsemen? 10% with only 2? Or does it mean that youâll take 5% less damage which splits amongst the horsemen, no matter how many you have?
The former seems extremely strong, but even a (high uptime) 5% DR is something great either way and I think something DK needs for things like higher keys, but the problem is itâs not reliable. Those bosses that deal 1 shot mechanics only mitigated by DR means you cannot rely on this to save your life.
On a Pale Horse v. Death Charge
I donât see a world where I take On a Pale Horse for 99% of the content where itâs useful. I really like the idea though. However, even in those moments I that I am playing in outdoor/world content, dynamic flying will still be a preference here unless we cannot use dynamic flying at all in certain areas.
Deathâs Charge will have a similar value for my world content, and Deathâs Advance doesnât have an extremely long CD, so this will be useful in world content. I think On a Pale Horse needs a little more something to make it more of an interesting choice.
Capstone: Apocalypse Now
As others have said - making this tie into Army is not good (as currently designed). Army not only has a heavy reliance on CDR from actively fighting, but itâs still twice the CD as Frostwyrmâs Fury (assuming youâre taking the CDR talent). Furthermore - you sometimes needs to hold Army to line up with other things. Like Bloodlust or damage windows, meaning that Unholy will likely get even less value from this and as mentioned, if you have fights where Unholy is not actively pushing buttons, itâs even less value.
This is all assuming Army is not being changed for War Within.
The rest of the tree lines up I think with most of the other trees where it buffs/works with the keystone talent. I think this tree is a great look into the future of DK and Iâm excited to play this.
3 Likes
I think it has to do with being inside an instance or outside an instance.