Petless Unholy, How I'd do it

Classes Death Knight
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And no, I’m quite fine having my geist buddy at my side.
But some people do not want little Timmy trailing behind them gnawing on ankles.

And I figured I’d toss some ideas out here into the nether about how I’d do a ‘Petless’ version of Unholy.

First of all, How would I acquire this? Well, I would make it so that you go to your class trainer. And there’d be a dialogue option to turn on the Petless mode. Or if it’s already on, to turn it off.
Why not just make it an ability so we switch between them? Well that for starters limits what it can do as being able to switch between Pet and petless would just make BOTH modes become part of the meta optimal way to play. Which is what both sides I would assume DO NOT WANT. And then it also changes how much being petless could change gameplay and the class.

But now WHAT does it do?
Well we have to look at pet based abilities we have now don’t we?
Namely: Raise Dead, Sacrificial Pact, and Dark Transformation.

Raise Dead: I’d turn this into like… Unholy Fervor, Increases attack speed by a little. Adds Shadow damage to auto attack, and gives your attacks a chance to place a festering wound on the target and a chance to refresh your diseases on the target. Basically like Raise Dead you press it and forget it. And it buffs your damage to make up for the no ghoul. And to give you your ghouls kinda effects.

Dark Transformation: Stays kinda the same? But it applies the effects to you instead of your ghoul. Explode for damage, gain Runic power, and your attacks deal more damage and cleave for the duration. Yeah imagine that. Auto-attack cleave. But better yet. Festering strike cleaving. Festercleaving!
Visually though instead of becoming an oozing pus monster I’d say we grow MASSIVE BONE WINGS and wreathed in lichflame. Or like a San’Layn Blood King/Queen look… Maybe a Lich with a glyph.

Sacrificial Pact: This one was tough as well, it sacrifices our ghoul’s health to heal us and deal damage. But with no ghoul… we can’t really sacrifice ourself? And just maknig it damage and heal becomes… OP? Like Oh no I just used up my self-buff to heal and do damage waaaah I’ll just reapply that buff now. There isn’t a ‘drawback’ to it.
So like what do we do with it? Make it cost health and do damage? Or make it consume Unholy Fervor for a quick heal but not do damage? Wait no I got it!
It consumes Unholy Fervor, Costs a bit of health, Does damage but gives Leech for a few seconds so you can heal back up and maybe a little more so the heal component is there. Become vulnerable a few seconds to get gains… Yeah that could work. Prob gonna heal for peanuts in PvP tho because that’d get nerfed… Yet paladins get a 50% Spam heal, a 100% CD heal, AND a bubble. But that complaint is for another thread I suppose.

Then there’s talents.
Infected claws. Just applies to self with auto-attack, swing my sword, occasionally a free wound.
All will serve. Dead talent. WHY ARE YOU TAKING THIS FOR PETLESS? What do you want instead? The same useless passive that frost got on their artifact weapon but instead of ice spikes it’s bone spikes? Yeah no, let’s not change this and just don’t pick it. Or maybe it just makes our auto-attack have like 10yd range. That’d be so miniscule you wouldn’t pick it anyway. Clawing shadows would be so much better…
Unholy pact, no pet for chains… Just… radiate shadow damage instead?

Now why didn’t I touch Apocalypse and Army? Well while the idea was to make a self buffing unholy warrior… we’re still a Death Knight and turning the tides by summoning a short lived mosh band is very much still core to what we do.
And the more we change… the more needs to be re-balanced and uh… let’s not put all that work on this. Simple solutions to simple problems. The problem being the pet, so only things affecting the pet should be altered.

So this makes unholy have options as it is three things it tries to be…
An unholy fighter that uses runes and magics to hasten and empower itself…
A necromancer battlemage that uses unholy minions as aids.
Plague spreader of unholy diseases.

Well we’d have the Necromancer covered by Pet.
Unholy warrior that buffs self covered by Petless
And then talent to shape the above into the Plague spreader if desired…

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So basically you want Unholy to be a worse version of an Arms Warrior

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Not even close. What part of any of this is like Colossus Smash?

It’s just moving what we apply to our ghoul onto us.
So if you think this makes us Arms warrior… then uh we’d already be arms warrior…

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That’s basically arms warrior, they have self buffs too…same as paladins, druids…any other melee really…

There is no benefit to being petless is my point. Unholy would have be to be re-built entirely without pet mechanics, and revamps don’t always result in better designs. Take shaman for instance. How many times have they been re-designed now and STILL have issues.

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Arms warrior doesn’t have anything like Army or Apoc tho.

And if you’re gonna say Melee just feels like any other Melee…
Well that’s Blizz being uninspired and I can’t fix that.

Maybe there is no benefit. But it’s still what some people want.
And being able to festercleave with DT would be a neat difference. And something to play around. Like for Bursting Sores to smash mob packs with.

Like the point for it is that Petless is no better than Pet. They’re both meant to be the same, balanced. But people have the choice to choose which flavour they want.
Because some people do not like the pet flavour.

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Unholy has numerous ranged attacks it would be nothing like a warrior. I actually think it’s lame how our burst used to be calling a NPC to spank someone for us.

I would love to play unholy without a pet and be usefull. They did that to MM hunters.

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the petless dps dk spec is frost.

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Petless Unholy is like asking for a Petless Demo or a Petless BM.

You’re not forced to use a pet on some specs but Unholy specializes in minions and plagues.

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So play frost

/thread

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The best option is just buff 2H frost and/or delete breath of sindragosa (which legitimately hasn’t been fun since Nighthold)

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frost needs a complete overhaul, unholy is over here RPing all 4 horsemen of the apocolypse while frost is just a warrior frost mage combo. we argue constantly about buffing 2h frost or if DW or 2H can even be balanced. why not both at the same time? we have the weapon slots to equip 3 weapons. unholy chooses between strikes and spells, frost could choose between big 2h attacks and dw quick attacks.

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I suppose but the spec fantasy for frost isn’t quick attacks from some speedy agile warrior.

It’s literally what you described a cold rune warrior

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I find it funny how frost strike is something stupid. I mean, what’s the point of freezing your weapon before hitting someone? It makes no sense to be some kind of techinque to become stronger, haha.

At least death coil is a cool flying mango um throw at someone

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No.

I don’t see it making sense. To add on to that we’d have to get huge passive buffs to make up for not having minions up.

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If they’re going to keep it as a pet spec, which is fine, I think it would be cool to have more fire-and-forget pet summons on short CDs, undead themed of course. Similar to some BM and destro abilities that summon a pet to do immediate or dot damage.

Take the Shambler, for example. Imagine if that was an aoe ability on a short or medium cool down, adjusted so that the damage was immediate or at least not so heavily delayed. I mean, the possibilities are endless. Instead we get boring pimple popping.

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Next up, prot warrior with no shield…

Not to mention that sac pact could be do aoe damage and heal yourself. You arent losing your ghoul for 2 minutes, you lose it for the time the summoning animation lasts. I dont even play unholy and I knew this. Raise dead has a 30 sec cd so people must not actually know that much about the spec yet still suggesting on how to change it for people that dont like it in the first place. Change for the sake of change is bad. At least argue that pet AI is crap and less damage should be coming from pets or something.

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This is the same thing as asking for Frost DK damage to be converted to shadow damage. There would be no point in having both Unholy/Frost spec if they play pretty much the same. That is what the OP is asking for.

Frost is a good spec, but it has it’s own problems just like Unholy does. Problems become exacerbated when homogenization of class specs occur. It’s precisely why class fantasy became a thing. To differentiate and give each and every class spec a purpose.

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Don’t go putting words in my mouth.

And I see so many miss the point.

Some people want less of the former and more the latter.

That IS NOT the point.

Yes and that’s what would replace Raise Dead. Did you not read?

Frost is it’s own issue. 2H and DW should be equal.

This is NOT ABOUT TAKING AWAY
It is about GIVING OPTIONS

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No… you’re literally taking away.

The spec is plagues and minions. Just like how beastmaster is pets and zoo’s and demonology being summoning enslaved demons and empowering them.

As Neth said, just play frost. We get it, but unholy was never anything that you are suggesting to provide.

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Facepalm

But I am not REMOVING the pet.
I am ENABLING an option to play without.
Pet Unholy would LITERALLY STILL BE THERE.

And as I said first off. I do not mind playing with my geist.
But there are people that have wanted the OPTION to play without.
They want to play UNHOLY NOT FROST.
So telling them “Just play frost” is NOT a solution.

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