DID YOU SAY NECROTIC PLAGUE?
oh wait, you just said plague, nevermind 
Necrotic Plague, Frost Fever, Virulent Plague, Blood Plague, whatever
Also… add new plagues.
You know naming names is against forum ToU right?
And same for asking someone to name names.
Not that I even remember specific names anyway but I have seen a few threads whining about pet AI and that unholy would be better “if they just get rid of the pet”
Is this a very very niche thing? Yeah. But maybe I like overthinking niche things sometimes.
Like seriously this thread was just gonna be a bit of fun.
I am not asking for blizz to make these kinda changes.
That said, Bliiz DO need to make changes and fix up DKs but that’s really not what this thread was for.
Disclaimer: I get that Unholy is the “pet” spec. I get that the current design of it is meant to utilize pets. Please, if you have a response to this, let it have a little more thought to it than “You just want a gimp Arms spec”, “Play Frost/Arms”, or “/thread”. This post is meant to assume that all of what I have just mentioned is known and understood.
Claim: Unholy is the pet spec.
Response: Ok, but why is it a pet spec? Thematically the term Unholy could mean a lot of different things. In this case I suppose it means “necromantic”, so I fully understand why they made it a pet spec. However, it could just as easily mean “dark, virulent magic” and instead focus on diseases, plagues, corrupting forces, etc. Lots of debuffs, lots of dots, lots of small sources of damage that add up to terrible consequences for the victims. It need not mean lots of undead beings running around. However, I do concede that part of the DK class is undead minions, and I don’t really find the other specs to be better at representing those minions. If you removed the permanent pet from gameplay, that pet could quite simply become a cooldown you can press and have skeletal hands from the ground tearing at the enemies flesh. It could be a passive effect that X% of the time an enemy that yields xp is killed by the DK it rises for 60 seconds to carry out the will of the DK serving as a temporary pet - with “raise dead” becoming a talent that works opposite of Lonely Winter/Lone Wolf. You take the talent to have a permanent pet instead. In fact, for a bit of really interesting changes, each row of talents could have a Raise Dead talent, and for each one you take, you get an permanent follower. Lvl 15 could offer a ghoul, 30 could offer a skeletal archer, 45 a skeletal mage, lvl 50 could offer an abomination. There’s a LOT of ways to continue to have Unholy be the pet spec, but also require a pet at all.
Warlocks have Grimoire of Sacrifice and utilizing this spell, they essentially sacrifice their pet and gain an ability based on what pet they sacrifice. There is no reason why there couldn’t be an Unholy Sacrifice talent that allows you to murder your pet with your rune weapon and take its unholy energy into your weapon, making it so every melee attack has a chance to apply a stacking blight upon the target. The DK could also expel the energy in the weapon every 60 seconds and cause an AoE eruption.
There’s a lot that can be done.
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Interesting ideas in all!
And I do quite agree. From all the old Flavour text, Unholy meant three different ways to play to me.
First was the anti-paladin, the disease focused, debuffing power stripping dark knight that would rot down his foes with crippling plagues and unholy curses.
Second was the Plate Necromancer, the melee summoner that fought with an army of undead allies by his side.
And third, which was the focus for this thread, the unholy warrior that used dark magic to empower himself to supernatural levels to unleash a dark frenzy of devastating blows on his opponents.
With blizzard’s current design philosophies it feels like DK really needs another spec or two to really fulfill it’s breadth and depth of class fantasy.
No.
Demonology is the pet spec of warlocks and it has grimoire of felgaurd. The other two non pet specs has sacrifice. You can’t compare the non pets specs and justify this with a purely pet based spec.
We all understand what is being said here, but Blizzard and their designs for pet based specs does not offer anything to eliminate the pet since the pets/minions are their primary source of damage.
Beast master, Demonology and unholy all have their damage and utility primarily coming from minions/pets. The other specs of hunter and warlocks have talents and spells that eliminate the need for pets/minions because that’s not where their primary source of damage comes from. Just having the pets and minions does not add much to them. Frost and blood has like one spell to raise one, and another to enslave one, but the primary use there is for a big heal or a temporary cc in pve.
People disagree here because no other pet based damage spec in the game has anything like your suggestion where they can function without their primary source of damage being available to them.
That can only work if Blizzard just completely redesigned all of these specs where the primary source of damage does not come from the pet or minions. That would involve buffing, redesigning and even replacing multiple abilities and talents (excluding whatever system they’ll come up with next 
). It’s just not possible without doing this. Unholy would need more than just one talent or spell to be able to function without a minion. To make up for not having the main ghouls damage in and outside of dark transformation and its cc as well as army and apocalypse. You’re basically advocating for a huge nerf to the spec.
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I think Unholy needs more Pets, i want it to be a Necromancer spec, Abom back in PVE would be nice…
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Would be cool too. Something like Diablo’s Necromancer that keeps a constant army of undead pets up. Not like perma pets but just constant influx of temp pets.
But we have Demo lock doing that with imps and kinda failing. So I doubt Blizz will do it.
The current iteration of Demonology is far from failing.
Although it does need some a bit more oomph to compete with meta classes.
It still feels like a Miss to me.
Better than the first iteration in Legion but… still a Miss.
Tyrant doesn’t really do it and it lacks that OOMPH feeling.
The Imps don’t feel like a menace in and of themselves. they’re more like…
Fuel or fodder for my Insta Demonbolts.
And Imp-losion looks and feels like no matter how many imps it barely tickles it’s target.
Not at all like it should because I’M TURNING MY IMPS INTO MERRY SUICIDE BOMBERS on an enemy.
It all feels pretty lackluster, a huge missed opportunity which kinda feels like a failing to me.
Demo has been doing really well, in both pve and in pvp. Tyrant build for pve though you can use the demon bolt build, or the demon bolt build in pvp though there is a dogs build as well.
Demon Bolts can crit around 30k without power siphon. And the Tyrant build the Tyrant does around 40% of the warlocks damage.
Both of those builds require pets though.
Unholy damage isnt just the ghoul because another 20% of unholy damage is army of the dead ghouls. So around 40% of unholy is pet damage. 40% of demo is tyrant damage and I dont know about beast master.
You’re underestimating Tyrant big time. As well as the way that it is built right now. The problem with Demo right now, while it scales well, I don’t think it can compete against BM Hunters or Fire Mages in terms of raw damage numbers.
That could be because my Demo Lock is NL instead of NF that stacks Haste/Vers instead of any other secondary stats.
Demo in BfA and SL iteration was (still is) WAY better than Legion iteration. Problem with Legion was Demonic Powerment all of it itself.
Imps are kinda weird. They scale with haste but they also scale inversely with haste. They’re the only form of minions that do this. Implosion, proper usage of it, separates from good and bad demo locks in M+ setting.
You’re also forgetting doggoes which are also HUGE contributor to your damage profile, especially to your Tyrant since FTS now also buffs Demonfire’s damage.
How the heck do you get that much of a damage from DB? Where did you get that number? You’re not using SS, are you?
because it uses permanent and cool down based summons to do a large portion of its damage. At inception all dks could summon a temp ghoul, unholy had a permanent summon with gargoyle built in.
The dk starting area used to give people a really clear idea of what each spec focused on then, blood was a vampire warrior/Palladian, frost was more so a tank that used frost magic to bolster defensive abilities, unholy was focused on diseases and summons.
Ive seen either 23 or a 28k demon bolt. There is a lot of things that stack up that gets you there and I wasnt using Power Siphon.
I have to actually get on my lock to list all the buffs going on and you even get one more in pvp though you have to leave your felguard at the door and take the succubus.
So everything that gives Demonbolt damage.
-Balespider legendary 60% increase
-Sacrificed Souls 4% per demon, when you are getting at the very least 11 imps, 2 dogs, tyrant, felguard thats another 60%
- From the Shadows is another 20%
-Decimating Bolt is at least 100% increased damage and if you use it on low health targets it gets increased even more and ive seen like 170% increased damage.
-Power Siphon would be another 30% but I dont use it for pve.
-Pleasure through Pain (pvp only) increases shadow damage by 15% which also increases demon bolt damage since its shadowflame damage.
This happens every 45 seconds and your damage output is more steady than having spikes every 1.5m with the tyrant though the tyrant build is still the best. But the demonbolt build is sooooo much more fun, at least to me.
Might have sounded like the tyrant build can crit for that high with demonbolt, but its a separate build.
Ah, you used Balespider. I wonder if it can compete against Shard of Annihilation.
Being it guaranteed crit and gives crit damage in all when you use Deci Bolt in all. I really would like to try Balespider but I also wonder if I really wanna put up with its buff maintainance. Kind of a same problem I have with legendaries such as Malefic Wrath.
In PvE, Wilfred is probably still better than the Shard but oh boy the shenanigans I may pull off with that.
… and if you don’t include Power Siphon, oh man.
Its not really that much of a maintenance buff. Your always shadow bolting for shards so it should be at 4 stacks all the time unless you have a window of downtime of 20 seconds where you dont shadow bolt at all.
In pvp though it might be completely different now with shard as to what is best in terms of killing power. You would be working to decimating bolt +2 demon bolts anyways with power siphon. The forced crit in pvp would be strong.
If only torghast didnt feel worse now than it did prior to 9.1. Its like there are spots in maps that are blocked off but things still spawn there. More testing it looks like.
That is true with SB and Balespider esp with PTP.
Oh btw, you get more Soul Ash now and you can transfer them to your other characters once Bonesmith Heirmir sells stuff in Korthia.
I’m actually excited about the Decimation Bolt Leggo.
I might be.
But my necrolord warlock, Demonbolt seems to be my big blaster spell.
Tyrant is the big ol’ burst cd but it feels bland.
Like all up the damage definitely puts out fine just the feel of it all doesn’t really… connect. Once the rhythm and flow is down, that’s it. Imps come in regularly, doggos go out. It doesn’t feel MIGHTY, it feels like just another routine day.
Like back in t’day, you popped demo meta and you FELT MIGHTY. Tyrant doesn’t feel the same.
Well, later on if you try out Shard of Annihilation, you might feel a bit different.
Demonbolts WILL DESTROY.
Definitely gonna play around with what looks fun now soul ash is uncapped.
But I mean Demo is not exactly what I’d pick in terms of doing the whole Big smashy spell.
Like Big demonbolting gonna be fun especially with the talent. But that was always more Chaos Bolt’s function to me.