Not happy with the Unholy Buffs

In Development Undermine(d) PTR Discussion
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While I should be happy with getting buffs, the buffs to Unholy Death Knight didn’t fix any of the tuning issues I have with the specialization and even made some of them worse.

Issue #1: Rider of the Apocalypse is now 5.3% behind San’layn in Single Target performance.
Prior to this tuning pass, it was 4.9%. The Death Coil buff increased the disparity between Rider and San’layn, San’layn has a MASSIVE multiplier to Death Coil with Frenzied Bloodthirst, you can’t be buffing Coil more and expect to fix this disparity.

Issue #2: Critical Strike is BY FAR the worst stat for Unholy Death Knights. Combine this with Versatility being a generally bad stat as well, and Unholy ends up in a position where Crit/Vers gear is substantially worse than even lower item level Haste/Mastery gear. Unholy NEEDS a buff to its Critical Strike scaling value. Buffing Coil even more increases this disparity further.

Issue #3: Talents meant to be good in Single Target are not even good Single Target choices. Magus of the Dead received a buff in this update, but, once again, so did Death Coil, making Ghoulish Frenzy 1.2% better than Magus off the Dead in single target… because Ghoulish Frenzy buffs Death Coil more, and more multipliers better when Death Coil is currently accounting for NEARLY 37% OF OUR TOTAL SINGLE TARGET DAMAGE NOW.

Commander of the Dead, Unholy Aura, Summon Gargoyle, Army of the Dead and Raise Abomination also suffer from this effect, all of which are talents that are meant to be our Single Target cooldown bread and butter. They aren’t with the builds we are looking to be utilizing in 11.1. Raise Abomination is a 2 talent point cost node, due to having to path through Army, and accounting for less than 3% of our total single target output. This makes Raise Abomination and Army of the Dead the first points we drop if we want to trade some Single Target for AoE. Genuinely, what the heck is going on with that? Saying nothing of Summon Gargoyle currently being ~4% overall DPS worse than Doomed Bidding.

Commander of the Dead not being a go-to pick in Single Target as well is insanely confusing, as this talent is meant to buff our minions, which only do single-target damage really. What is the point of a node like Commander of the Dead existing if, in its target niche, it does worse than the more general-purpose option of Superstrain?

Issue #4: We still have an absolute ton of Talent nodes on our tree that NEVER see use, and haven’t received tuning in ages. These buffs do nothing to remedy that either.

Oh, and Soul Reaper is still not worth pressing during Gift of the San’layn… sooo, yeah. useless buff there.

So yeah, I’m not happy with these buffs. Anyone else feel this way??

44 Likes
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I don’t really have anything to add other than saying I agree with all of the above.
I think most would prefer Rider to be competitive, if not THE main hero talent choice.

5 Likes
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Unholy is the thematically coolest spec in the entire game, but all of the themes that make the idea work at its core have been consistently pushed to the wayside to further funnel us into being Death Coil bots. These buffs are just out of touch with what the player base wants out of the spec and force us into playing a really shoddily designed hero talent tree that once again reinforces our place as this weird 2 filler button spec and not the disease and pet class I was initially sold on. Really great post, hope things change.

4 Likes
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Taez is pretty much everything you could ask for in a community member. If he is calling the alarm on something, it is important to notice. Having such a binary play system with death coil is not ideal for the majority of the playerbase. Any buffs are nice, yes, but the primary issues with the spec are not really addressed.

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I agree, having Rider of the Apocalypse be so bad it is unplayable cannot go live.
The tier set most likely needs to change to fix this, as well as buffing the pets and their talents as Taez mentioned.

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As always Taez provides a detailed write up on the issues plaguing unholy. While I won’t reiterate all the specifics, it does seem extremely clunky to not press SR inside execute due to Gift. In addition, in a ST scenario to be going full disease build not b/c it’s a fun or engaging build to play around but b/c the traditional ST build around pets is underperforming is not fun.

I do hope Blizzard has time to address these issues, with a full rework ideally soon, but for now with bandaids.

3 Likes
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I feel like Unholy being a Death Coil bot cannot be the intended design. Please Blizzard Dudes and Dots should be the majority of our damage.

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I’m definitely not looking forward to the playstyle that seems to be evolving for Season 2 on Unholy DK.

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San’layn is cool but they really need to add more buttons to those interactions, this divide between vamp strike and other abilities is extremely annoying, and it just results into a hero tree that could be really cool, but instead things just fight each other for priority .

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Until blizz actually takes the time to give DK the proper rework it needs, all they will do are band aid fixes. (like this one, which doesn’t actually fix fundamental issues)

2 Likes
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As always, well thought out and backed with evidence, thanks Taez.

Nothing important to add aside from frost getting a similar treatment and massively missing the mark. Both spec’s need serious overhauls to better define talent choices and overall play styles contrary to the muddy spec trees we now have.

1 Like
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If we’ve redesigned Sudden Doom into a hole like this, can we just give Death Coil the chaos bolt treatment and give DC critical hit damage scaled by crit chance only when empowered by SD?

Edit: It doesn’t fix the issue of us being Death Coil bots but at least we’d have crit scaling back in some way, shape and form.

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Another design issue that I’ve seen from Taeznak’s charts on the discord is that in Sanlayn we do not use epidemic until 7 stacked targets if we have Improved Death Coil. That seems like egregiously bad damage tuning. Epidemic should be our primary RP spender in AoE but if it’s going to require that level of target count to be used then its tuning seems way off.

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Here is a question, how many Death Coils happen under the effect of Sudden Doom guaranteed Crit? and could making Sudden Doom Guarante’d Crit scale the crit-chance as Crit damage similar to how Shadowburn behaves under Conflagration of Chaos alleviate such an issue?

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on a 5:23 fight, 122 death coils were casted and 63 of them were under sudden doom