This makes me really angry. Literally almost unsub angry. Not only as an unholy main, but a master of every class in the game, I will say that Unholy is the most complicated and intricate spec in the entire game to play and peak performance, and they want to make it even more difficult. Not even more difficult, but just more burdensome and frustrating by adding extra pointless globals… WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
The Outbreak mechanics were not an issue at all. Why change something that isnt broken? Terrible pointless change, makes me wonder, if they have time to waste on this than how bad will Shadowlands class design be…
Makes me not even want to think about playing unholy in shadowlands just because they want to make us press extra skilless pointless buttons in order to dps
plz tell me other DK’s feel the same way so we can stand and protest this change before it’s final.
I do think its gonna make an already clunky spec (gcd hamstrung), feel even clunkier. That being said, I think Virulent Plague being applied and passively spreading with one button is a very dumb and simplistic way of doing things. All dk specs used to apply their diseases one way, and spread them another. This is the way it should be. Blood fever or whatever is applied, and then you spread it with Blood Boil. This is much better class design than a passively spreading AoE pulse mechanic such as Outbreak.
Epidemic needs to be baseline and do what it does now, and there needs to be a talent to make it spread VP. That, or Pestilence or something needs to come back to help us apply it in an AoE scenario.
Apply and forget abilities and dots are unhealthy for the game, they always have been, and they will continue to be so.
Okay so I cant find this in the Alpha Forums, MMO Champ, DK Class Forums…I mean if you’re gonna be that upset over something, if you’re gonna try to inform the masses, could you at least take the time to link the info??
There’s already a whole other thread on this, and I’m fairly positive that the change has been noted at least on MMO-Champ, plus Alpha testers have verified, etc. This isn’t an unknown thing at this point.
I believe its part of their effort to extremely limit classes ability to AoE large packs of enemies.
They’ve been target capping alot of AoE Spells to vastly smaller target counts.
Another area where Unholy was hit was the baseline change to virulent plague. it no longer has a chance to “Flare up” dealing damage to enemies around the target. Effectively just making it a dot with an explosion (if the target dies while it is up). Outbreak/Virulent plague has had its damage potential vastly reigned in.
I can’t say I am happy about it but can understand their design intent. If anything i’d say that if they plan to keep the change in place they should change the area of initial impact to 10-12 yards and maybe make bursting a wound on a target with VP on it spread the VP to all targets around the target?
I’m sure nothings going to really feel good with the change regardless.
Here’s the change:
Deals (10% of Attack power) Shadow damage to the target and infects all nearby enemies with Virulent Plague.
Virulent Plague:
A disease that deals [7 * (12.5% of Attack power)] Shadow damage over 21 sec. It erupts when the infected target dies, dealing (24% of Attack power) Shadow damage to nearby enemies.
Alpha Release - Build 33978:
Removed AoE duration
Changed from 10%/20%
Removed “divided among nearby enemies, and has a 30% chance to erupt each time it deals damage.”
I’m not sure exactly what point you are trying to make. Are you indicating that even though the flare up damage has been removed that the ability is buffed (outside of them increasing the %AP contribution to both the dot tick and final explosion)?
For someone who thinks they are a master of every class in the game, they should see it’s not a big deal at all. The only thing this changes is when you apply it. If gathering of mobs is still going on you hold off from applying it so you get the maximum damage out of it.
That’s really the only thing this change does. Don’t be wasteful with your runes, use them wisely, and everything will be fine.
They are also probably trying to reign in the damage the ability does for aoe Which is really the only place this change will have any impact on.
This wouldn’t be a problem if Blizzard would stop being a brick wall when it came to taking things off the GCD. There are a litany of abilities that Unholy has that deserve to be off of it.
But mechanics like Virulent Plague spreading passively are bad for the game.
The real problem I see here is the amount of runes we will have to spend just to keep the dot up on single target encounters if you talents into VP.
Blizzard made a comment about the difference between AOE damage and cleave damage. I feel like VP is AOE damage and dropping dnd and scourge striking is cleave and they made the right decisions capping it along with other classes. Spreading VP via epidemic or refreshing it via epidemic might be a good trade off.
I know hitting epidemic against a single target is not ideal when death coil is available but if blizz won’t revert the change this may be a possible medium.
I agree. I have played every class except druid and warlock at a reasonably high lvl this xpac.
Unholy is by far the most complex to play well, in dungeons at least. There’s just a lot more to manage, we have a lot of setup and it changes drastically depending on how long the pack lives and how many mobs.
The absolute last thing we need is to waste more globals during our setups. Especially taking into account that our rune generation will go into the dumpster with all the haste loss at the start of shadowlands.
The spec already suffers the worst in the entire game from the “give me a minute i’m just going to use about 7 GCD’s before I actually start dps’ing”. So what is blizz solution to this? Give us another CD on the GCD (gargoyle) and make these changes to outbreak which will result in more wasted globals and runes.
I just don’t know what they’re thinking a lot of the time. Be nice to have a post explaining their logic behind all of this and why they go and make a core issue worse.
it was only one global back then as well. Your diseases would already be on the target so you just had to spread them with pest or blood boil depending on the expansion.
