Alpha for a new expansion is the right time for substantial changes to talents and hero talents - but I haven’t seen a ton of discussion about Rider of Apocalypse yet. From a fantasy perspective this tree is S tier - but from a gameplay perspective, it’s extremely lacking. This post is written from an Unholy DK perspective, but everything here could be adapted for Frost pretty easily.
Good hero trees change up your gameplay loop in interesting ways. Okay hero trees are entirely passive. A bad hero talent tree is one that changes your gameplay loop in degenerative or uninteresting ways. I’ve seen a lot of people argue that San’layn is bad because of how much it prioritizes spamming Vampiric Strike - but less discussion of the fact that Rider of the Apocalypse encourages spamming Scourge Strike.
Rider revolves around four horsemen, who work in the following way:
- Trollbane: Puts Chains of Ice on a target, which you have to ‘pop’ with Scourge Strike to do AOE damage
- Whitemane: Puts Undeath, a stacking DoT, on a target - which you have to stack and spread with Scourge Strike
- Mograine: Passive bonuses for standing in his death and decay
- Nagrim: Passive stacking strength buff
In Midnight, Whitemane has additional functionality inherited from our current tier set. Dark Transformation summons her for six seconds, and she casts Death Coil and Epidemic when we do.
The only way we can interact with our hero talents (besides summoning the horsemen in the first place with Army of the Dead) is to spam Scourge Strike to trigger Trollbane and Whitemane’s abilities, and now to increase the value of our Runic Power spenders, but only when Whitemane is active. Sidenote: With the removal of Weakuaras, keeping track of which horsemen are active will become harder.
Personally, I find this gameplay loop kind of boring. I hate feeling like I have to spam Scourge Strike to pop Chains of Ice and spread Undeath. It creates a very predictable back and forth of Scourge Strike → RP spender → Scourge Strike. I’d rather see some more interesting interaction with the horsemen, and one that doesn’t rely on having to be aware of which horseman happens to be active at any given moment.
Make the horsemen an all or nothing situation. Increase the frequency with which you can summon all four - then remove the random summons.
- Dark Transformation and Army of the Dead now both summon all four horsemen, for a duration of 15 seconds. That will give up up-time on your horsemen of 50% (2x Dark Transformation + 1x Army of the Dead every 1.5 minutes) - Frost would likely work with Empower Rune Weapon and Frostwyrm’s Fury
- Spending runes no longer has a chance to summon a horsemen
Remove all activated horsemen abilities and make them passive instead:
- Trollbane now directly casts Frostscythe instead
- Whitemane now pulses Undeath on all nearby enemies every second. Whitemane no longer duplicates your Death Coil and Epidemic abilities
- Mograine’s Death and Decay no longer buffs you, but its AOE damage is increased
- Nazgrim unchanged
Add new talents to the tree that enhance your rotation regardless of the horsemen being active:
- Whitemane’s Famine: Targets affected by your Virulent Plague (or Frost Fever) are occasionally disoriented by debilitating hunger, stunning them for two seconds
- Unholy Armaments: Scourge Strike now has a chance to make your next Festering Strike cost no runes
- Let Terror Reign: Putrefy now empowers your horsemen, increasing all damage they deal by 50% for six seconds
- Trollbane’s Icy Fury: All targets affected by your Virulent Plague now also suffer from Frost Plague (choice node)
- Hungering Thirst: All targets affected by your Virulent Plague now also suffer from Blood Plague (choice node)
A final point on Death Charge / On a Paler Horse: these do not need to be a choice node. It gets very agitating having to swap between the two of them depending on whether or not I am currently outdoors. Just grant us both abilities at the same time. If On a Paler Horse is active, then Death Charge doesn’t increase speed, it just gives you the movement immunities.
Also: fix the flag for ‘outdoors’ for On a Paler Horse. This is currently based on whether or not flying is available, but there are lots of zones you can mount up but not fly. In Undermine at launch, we couldn’t use On a Paler Horse - a special Undermine only flag was added sometime later. We still couldn’t use it while Phase Diving last time I checked. This will keep happening (and the ability will continue not working in legacy zones like Azuremyst) without a system level change.