Its a big part of Unholy DK lore so I figure this is a decent way tomake it good again.
Make it operate like Warlocks Demonic Tyrant. The problem with it is that on a 3 minute cooldown it absolutely has no benefit in todays game. You have to build up the damage by spamming coil and by the time the damage is respectable its already expire. So maybe on a 1.5m cd you make it where it does respectable damage on its own plus some benefit to your mastery or haste.
And for the pvpers there can be a utility honor talent that if u spec into Gargoyle you can use said talent to summon a garg to carry yourself or teammate away from/to somewhere on the map
Gary brings 2 of his friends that each mimic your Death Coil and Epidemic at 50% effectiveness that also increases their damage when you use Runic Power.
You summon a Lich that raises Magus of the Dead everytime it casts Deathchill Bolt… along with your Magus defaults to Deathchill Bolts. Also increases their damage when you use Runic Power.
i would like to see it detatched from doomed bidding and moved onto its own node. gargoyle is cool but if its a choice between gargoyle and summoning a free mage every time i deathcoil? im taking the mage, both for rule of cool reasons and build reasons.
personally? i wouldnt mind if it replaced unholy assault. unholy assault is a graphicless, gameplay-less cooldown that essentially serves as a math fixer and little berserk window that feels totally out of step with everything unholy is trying to do. it doesnt apply some new disease, summon a minion, blast the enemy with torrents of dark power, nah, it just helps with pustule resources and gives you a vanilla flavorless damage steroid. its a boring ability. powerful? sure, but boring as unbuttered toast.
delete unholy assault, replace it with gargoyle, and give gargoyle something interesting to do (like you said, maybe make it a demonic tyrant style commander). also, we got a TON of high rez gargoyle models in shadowlands, maybe its time to replace the gargoyle model the spell summons and update it a bit? its still using like a vanilla wow model with a vanilla wow spell effect. he looks R O U G H
I wish Garg was better as well. I think they should have 2 routes to go with it. Either make it a pet that replaces your ghoul permanently with its own new abilities. Or have it come out whenever you summon army/abomb and have the RP spending part changed.
Hypothetical gargoyle capstone talent could be to change it to a Val’kyr, just like the old talents had (ignore the customization option for it that exists right now). Increase damage of it’s spells and its shadow bolts can either do splash damage for cleave or it can fire a volley like the magus. Hell I’d even bake in the Commander buff to the Val’kyr and change Commander to something entirely different, Commander itself is boring as sin.
Or, since the Forsaken’s Val’kyr in the past were the ones who actually raised new Forsaken, maybe they can also have an interaction with Army ghouls. Every 100 runic power spent while the Val’kyr is active, it raises an additional ghoul, with every 5th ghoul being a magus. Really lean into the “army” part of Army of the Dead.
cant you still get the valkyr aesthetic by talking to one of the trainers in acherus?
in either case, valkyr is cool, but i like the thematics of the gargoyle with the whole gothic necromancer vibe of unholy deathknight, it just needs an update, and i dont think they have to look far to find one with models like the stoneborn or gravewings especially, or even an unarmored and smaller sized version of the undercity plaguebat. just gussy up one of those bad boys and give it a modern spell effect and you’ve solved your visuals while keeping the spirit of the spell.
the gameplay could have any number of solutions. i dont hate the raising ghouls idea, but that also gets to the point where…i mean when im playing my unholy deathknight, between doomed bidding, apocalypse, my abomination, the horsemen, and my basic ghoul companion, plus maybe that skeleton archer no one takes, you’ve already got like 10-12 undead at any given time. add onto that a gargoyle and another potential 5 or 6 ghouls? thats a lot of undead. what might work is if the ghouls it summons explode after a few seconds like the old shambling zombies that walked forward and then popped from a few x-pacs back. it would still summon new ghouls, but they wouldnt jam up the screen for the full 20 seconds, and we havent used that exploding ghoul spell effect in a while if i remember right
