Please check out our new Hero Talents preview and let us know what you think in this thread.
5 Likes
So you mentioned having plans to “alleviate” DND cleave in the dev note, but given that you keep introducing new talents based around it I think it’s pretty safe to say you aren’t going to straight up remove it. I imagine you’re probably gonna do something like a longer duration or having it follow the PC like Mograine’s version apparently does.
I would just like to say that it’s okay to recognize when an idea is bad and go back to the drawing board. You don’t need to keep doubling down on this hated mechanic for ten years like you did Rune of Power. You can remove it. We’ll all be happier. It’s less work for you in the long run than having to keep making half-assed attempts at compromises that end up not solving the issue. You don’t need to try and salvage it. Just get rid of it.
39 Likes
minor issue - with the on a Pale Horse passive, can you guys add:
- An updated, higher rez version of the acherus deathcharger
- A glyph to allow the legacy version be available
Pretty please with a cherry on top?
45 Likes
Death Charge
Paladins be seething all over the world.
21 Likes
Alright, hell yeah riding a horsey. Whoohoo. However!
Let’s go over some issues of the tree in the terms of Frost DK:
Forced to take certain talents:
Frost Wyrms Fury and Horn of winter, I do not particularly enjoy having to be forced to take some of these talents, horn of winter especially with an obliteration build, there are even some instances where I do not take Frost Wyrms fury, and this completely negates the capstone talent for frost. These talents should either be built into the class baseline orr idk. Same with Unholy’s talents in this tree.
Seemingly Randomness of the Horsemen:
Will we have any control over what horseman gets summoned? Or is it completely random or summoned by certain order? Like oh man im doing AOE too bad trollbane got summoned and not Mograine?
Also what Wulm said, the acherus death charger is looking a little old and crunchy.
22 Likes
If all the specs were as awesome as this one, I would be genuinely pumped for these new talents. This tree is way, way better than the other two, and it’s not even close. This spec actually does what it says on the tin, while San’layn feels really underwhelming in the vampire fantasy department (maybe have it swap Death’s Advance for a version of Venthyr teleport with a root dispel, as a start?), and Deathbringer seems like a low graphics effects spec with a mathy short offensive CD and little else aside from some ramping magic and physical damage reduction. Yawn.
If I could take this spec for Blood, too - and from how it is implemented, there is no reason it couldn’t be made to fit extremely easily - I totally would.
9 Likes
From the Unholy side of the equation, I don’t always want to take Unholy Blight either, but at least that talent also reduces the Death and Decay cooldown.
I agree though that getting railroaded into Frost Wyrm’s Fury is more of an issue.
I reckon we won’t have control over the horsemen that spawn, and the tree will live and die by whether the proc rate is sufficient, but they should be able to get that sorted. I’m okay with this sort of randomness though: it’s kind of like a super-sized version of a strong random proc trinket. Not necessarily exciting in and of itself, but then we don’t need to worry about playing around it all that much, either, which can also be a strong selling point.
100% agree on uprezzing the death charger, AND maybe even providing us with more death charger options!
7 Likes
Apocalypse should call upon all 4 Horsemen, why is it behind a 8min CD?? or is army gonna get reduced to 45s ~ 1min? am I missing something?
Death charger is a 10s CD or something? or why is replacing Death’s advance?
Pact of the Apocalypse needs to be buffed to 15% per horseman
4 Likes
This looks fun and busted in the best way. 30 second cooldown on divine steed PLUS death’s advance? That alone has me sold. This right here is the what the other hero specs should be like. A crazy fun gimmick that everyone wishes they had.
7 Likes
Yeah I never really enjoyed horn of winter myself and it feels bad to miss out on like half a talent node.
But yeah, being railroaded into a capstone talent is kinda huge cringe for me i like it but I don’t want to always have to take it. I suppose with our tier set with chillstreak going away we will have the extra points to go into it being able to move those to fwf - but again… Shoehorned into a capstone lol. I feel like army is such a huge selling point of Unholy. I would however just like to see them baked in - but I’m greedy lol.
My biggest worry is the horseman Ai being a bit wonky and either keeping you in combat or pulling random stuff. Esp if they have aoes like dnd 
5 Likes
Horse should be permanent in combat as well, but with a lower movement speed bonus like 30%.
6 Likes
This if it works as it sounds is probably going to be my favourite Hero talent tree for all of TWW.
- Improves a core beef I have when I play frost
- Fun interaction with a useful capstone anyway (wyrm stun comes in clutch).
- thematically it is very cool.
6 Likes
Thematically, absolute banger of a tree.
That said, this tree has some serious issues regarding forcing you into talent choices like Frostwyrm’s Fury and Horn of Winter as Frost or Unholy Blight as Unholy. Depending on how the Horsemen are tuned, this design could force Frost into taking Absolute Zero which is a talent with a hefty opportunity cost from a build perspective. I’m really not a fan of when Hero Talents explicitly force specific talents to be taken for them to work properly. Unholy Blight has an even bigger issue because it is an incredibly hard talent to take on any sort of single-target centric build. If Unholy Blight was made much easier to take, this wouldn’t be a real problem, but right now you have to take Epidemic to take Unholy Blight and that essentially amounts to you flushing an entire talent point down the toilet in ST situations. Unholy doesn’t even always take Epidemic on bosses with intermittent AoE like Igira, Gnarlroot, and even Fyrakk.
Also, anything involving standing in one’s own ground-targeted effect is objectively annoying. It sucks with Consecration a lot, and it sucks with Death and Decay. I’m not sure what you’re going to do to alleviate a mechanic that’s plagued this class for over a decade by this point, since you specifically mentioned that something will be changing in the future, but it needs to be very substantial since Mograine alone isn’t going to fix this issue.
Now, all that aside, this tree otherwise works very well for Unholy but I have some obvious concerns regarding Unholy’s damage possibly being too frontloaded again. This doubles down on Unholy being a 3-minute damage profile spec (which isn’t entirely bad because there are VERY few 3-minute specs nowadays), so depending on how strong the Horsemen and their buffs are there’s a non-zero chance of the spec becoming a big old external battery that does gamebreakingly high burst damage for 30 seconds every 3 minutes and then an absolute pittance for the rest of that time spent between cooldowns. But that’s more speculative than anything else. The big problem here is the Epidemic situation.
2 Likes
Army currently is back up after about three minutes due to cooldown reduction from a talent tied to runic power consumption.
8 Likes
The design for Riders of the Apocalypse is so catastrophically toxic I don’t even know what to say. Unbelievable amounts of rng that will only lead to frustration – especially in PvP for people playing against the DK.
The theme is cool, but that’s about it.
First of all, in response to the Developer’s Note: Shouldn’t this be designed and announced before the hero talents were? Why are hero talents that affect, and are affected by, DnD being released if DnD is being redesigned? Like, what? How can anyone give decent feedback if we don’t know what is being changed with DnD?
Questionable talent designs:
There are too many random minor pet nameplates in the game. The nameplate filtering options just aren’t good enough, or exhaustive enough. Why are we adding random proc pets? How are they going to be controlled? Probably the same way as army pets… I’d hope. But sometimes pet AI is quizzically stupid and never gets fixed. This makes me nervous.
Really, there’s too many player pets in the game – across many classes.
Also, having our entire hero talent kit dependent on these random pets is potentially very problematic for PvP. Is every class that auto cleaves pets just going to dunk on them and completely invalidate our hero talents? This was a huge problem at the beginning of Dragonflight when Unholy relied on pet damage to get kills, but many classes (like feral) would just cleave down our pets completely ruining our damage. Is the same thing going to happen? Why wasn’t this considered?
A random proc pet that has a DnD attached to it. So let me get this straight, if we want to benefit from the DnD we have to position around a pet? That’s worse than needing to position around a DnD that we drop. There is no way this is a good idea – unless the DnD has no interaction with us, but then … why have it? Terrible. And if this interacts with Grip of the Dead; I just can’t even. It could be so toxic in PvP.
A Chains of Ice proc? Dudes, why? This is going to be so annoying.
What? You want DKs to have a random proc AMS? This only leads to frustration for the DK’s opponents, and for the DK. Having your survivability be tied to various RNG effects is not good and feels really bad. Crits in PvP are reduced for a reason and random procs heavily affecting defense is so awful. Spellwarden was bad enough and it didn’t make us immune to CC. I thought this lesson was learned.
I cannot imagine how awful it’s going to be for a warlock, mage, whatever, the first time they try to CC a DK only for AMS to randomly proc. Or for a DK vs DK 2s match and for the DK that gets more AMS procs end up being the winner. What is the thought process here? There is no way this talent is a good idea.
Ok… But this is just more RNG survivability. Like, I can’t depend on it, so I can’t play around it (unless the proc rate on the riders is super high). Guaranteed to feel bad.
DKs (in PvP) are in this position where our primary defensive tools have been nerfed to the ground, but we have all these noodley unreliable, or heavily caveated, tools that just make living feel unreliable and bad. I don’t want to be dependent on random tools to live.
Get rid of all these stupid procs, rng effects, and uselessly short buffs (Bloodforged armor) and make our primary tools actually good. Please.
Actually kind of cool, but why is this a choice node? So whenever I’m out in the world I want On a Paler Horse, but when I’m in an instance I’ll want Death Charge. Sounds like I’m going to have Death Charge selected all the time or be swapping constantly. Pretty annoying gameplay for something that has been a long time fantasy for many DKs (mounted combat).
These are just like a disrespectfully bad version Necrotic Plague, which Unholy DKs have been desperately wanting to make a return. Come on.
Pretty much every other talent that I didn’t mention is boring. Minor damage buffs/procs that will have little gameplay interaction.
10 Likes
Not understanding what the problem is with a random proc AMS for the DK. It’s not as though it puts actual AMS on cooldown.
2 Likes
So, you guys are going to update the Acherus Deathcharger’s model since this tree uses it, right?
…Right?? 
18 Likes
Having a random proc provide 5s+ of magic immunity is a problem in PvP. Not for the DK, but for everyone else, which will invariably mean balance changes that likely won’t work out in DK’s favor.
4 Likes
This. Tree. Slaps.
This is awesome, desire to DK intensifies
2 Likes
First and foremost I want to back another commenter’s play here and request a updated Death Charger before we get locked into a rapidly aging model for a modern wow spec. OR let us choose what we ride. We got some really good undead mounts we could use now that would be sick.
To add to the above, I’d like more clarification on how On a Paler Horse functions. Is it mounted combat or we can just mount up in combat and run away? Because the former is WAAAAAAAY cooler then the latter and if thats the case, I would like a reduced speed version of that for raids and dungeons otherwise it’s a dead flavor talent. This can either be really cool or really awful depending on how this plays out. But getting us on a mount is a good theme choice.
Second point, I am not sure I like us summoning NAMED npcs so that we have a army of Whitemanes and Mograines running around in a fight. I was kind of hoping more for US to be the Horseman here and theme ourselves around War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death. However, it is more undead summoning which I love, just not in the way I would have picked.
One last note, I do really like some of what I am seeing here and it certainly will be fun I think. I’ll have more to say when I actually get my hands on it, so most of my thoughts and feedback is purely on the themes.
7 Likes