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Change Pimples (“Pestilent Pustules”) to something more similar to how Holy Power or Combo Points work, so that we can effectively target switch without having to ramp up pimples again.
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Change Outbreak to either costing charges (instead of a Rune), or if it’s going to cost a Rune, allow us to occasionally proc a passive re-application or free cast (similar to how Howling Blast works).
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Merge and make baseline the Dark Transformation + Unholy Frenzy CD, so that when you activate the buff, both you and your ghoul go into a frenzied/empowered state. Adjust the damage or CD timer appropriately so that it’s not over powered.
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Change the Epidemic talent so that it empowers your existing Death Coil. The new talent could probably act as a Death Coil, but upon striking it’s initial target for the regular damage, it shoot’s out additional death coils or explodes on impact, hitting all surrounding targets (in an 8 yard range) for 30% of the damage of the initial death coil.
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Army of the Dead should have a lower CD (maybe 5 mins). Lower the damage if need be, but a 8 mins CD timer feels too long.
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In addition to what it currently does, have Apocalypse refresh 2 runes (effectively merging the Soul Reaper effect into Apocalypse). Revert Soul Reaper to a pseudo-execute like it was back in WoD.
- go play a paladin.
- costing a rune means you generate RP, this is critical to our resource flow.
- no, these are often used separately.
- or we could leave it alone and just make deathcoil cleave in DND like CS/SS but that wouldn’t be a good idea either because sometimes you really just want ST only damage.
- ffs read the tooltip.
- while SR should be an execute, it should be an execute phase modifier to boost the rest of your spells, not a single button you hit for big numbers. tying SR rune proc to apoc is also bad because sometimes you use SR to hit FS again to stack 4 wounds to hit apoc. additionally its less efficient, Apoc has a 90 sec cd while SR has a 45 sec cd.
you should really learn the class more.
“go play a paladin.”
I prefer the dark side.
“costing a rune means you generate RP, this is critical to our resource flow.”
Fine, fine, but less down-time from being rune starved simply feels better to me.
“ffs read the tooltip.”
My bad, fixed. 8 mins still feels like too long a CD.
“tying SR rune proc to apoc is also bad because sometimes you use SR to hit FS again to stack 4 wounds to hit apoc.”
Excellent point.
“you should really learn the class more.”
I spend virtually all my game time tanking as Blood, so fair point. However, the times that I’ve tried UH it just feels clunky, or it seems to lack a certain smoothness that can be found in other specs.
Do you think UH is in a perfect spot from a mechanical standpoint (as opposed to dps numbers), or are there areas where you feel the spec can be improved (outside of the SR change that you noted)?
Well for 1, having Wounds on the target is part of our class fantasy as the guys who give children polio. Plus reapplying your dots is what most dot classes do already. And if you’re switching targets because the one you’re on in about to die, SR is an option to pop any remaining wounds and get the haste buff. Also Outbreak is naturally a 20+ second dot so reapplying it shouldn’t be an issue. It’s also a good way to build rp at range.
I do like the idea of having DT buff both us and our ghoul, but there’s no need to take away abilities. And don’t hurt epidemic anymore, having 2 very distinct dps RP spenders is a nice thing to have. It’s better than the legion version at least. Also having an execute option would be cool, but instead of turning Apocalypse into a resource generator+dps cd, which would feel awkward, since you’re likely out of wounds to pop, just make a baseline resource builder.
Lastly, sure the cd on Army is long and I’d like to see it be closer to 6-7 minutes. But it also feels great when you see a horde and hit that 8 minute cd so they know you want to kill them.
that’s the difference in our perspectives, i’ve been playing pretty much only unholy since mop and only my dk since wod, to me the spec isn’t clunky, and a lot of the issues players have with it feeling clunky are related to not getting a proper feel for resource flow and how this feeds into future spell selection.
in particular the biggest mistake i see players make is trying to use old wrath style rotations with the new rune/wound system. that will get you a clunky resource stall out real quick.
i don’t think its in a perfect spot, there’s simple changes that can make the current model great. however i also think building out distinct playstyles is a better way to overhaul unholy.
thats what i think should be done in 8.2, it would give us a massive boost in ST dps, raid/M+ utility, and pvp.
shadowmourne’s proc style is more consistent, allowing skilled players to play into the windows of max strength. It should build up 1% str per stack, at 10 stacks it does the AoE burst for your total attack power in damage, and then gives you 15%(10%pvp) str for the main buff. this would compete with FC because you have more control over your STR proc. if the rune was tied to having shadowmourne it would also give dk mains a reason to go back and get their genuine leggo if they haven’t already.
you could argue we don’t need a boost in pvp and that’s partially true, we’re in a good spot in pvp, however the fact that necrotic strike is mandatory for all pvp means that we really only have 2 pvp talent choices. the devs original intention behind the mop talent tree change was to give us these mandatory talents baseline so we can actually have a meaningful choice. moving NS baseline is in line with that paradigm.
For 9.0 the spec should be overhauled to include a WoD like dot based playstyle from a talent which replaces festering wounds with stacks of necrotic plague. it could also have some interaction with your other dots and spells: targets infected with necrotic plague take 5% more damage from your dots and CS/DC, stacks up 20 times. additionally virulent eruption adds 1-10 seconds to the duration of your unholy blight. the idea here is that you use FS to build up stacks of necrotic plague to increase your damage, then have VE proc enough to keep unholy blight up most of the time. with CS and DC being the filler, and each stack of necrotic plague decaying off on it’s own timer, so you need to keep adding stacks to keep it capped.
A necromancer build to include a talent similar to reanimation where you summon a ghoul with 1 rune to attack the boss for around the same damage you would do with a CS+wound. essentially you are replacing CS/SS with PVE reanimation, instead of a zombie that dies all the time it would summon an army ghoul, he pops up, does 8k damage over say 10 seconds, then dies. teh goal here is maintaining a certain number of ghouls summoned and playing with summing cds like arbiter/abomb.
3rd playstyle would be a melee based strike build that retains festering wound. but i would make CS our baseline wound/single rune spender and make scourge strike a talent but with increased damage and popping 2 wounds instead of one. that way it would have few options for how many wounds to spend beyond 1 and 4. IMO this build would also need an additional strike to cleave wounds on to other targets, say build up 6-8 on a target, hit this strike, then those wounds are spread around all targets in melee range, essentially a proper wound pestilence. build up, spread, drop defile, spam CS to AoE (SS would no longer cleave in AoE, allowing its damage to be increased for ST)
the first talent row would be deciding between those 3 talents, the rest would be ways to add to each style, so for the placeable AoE row you would have 3 different AoE replacements for DnD, a blight cloud for the dot build that applies VP/UB/1 stack per 2-3 seconds of NP to all targets, defile back with a mastery buff, and desecration to originate from the player with plague strike, rooting enemies caught in it and doing damage. (plague strike replacing chains). similarly for the passive AoE row you could include a talent that increases the chance of virulent eruption for the dot build, bursting sores for the strike build, and last surprise for the necromancer build.
- Soul Reaper grant haste upon use during execute phase.
- AMZ baseline
- Tune Deathcoil, Festering Strike dmg.
With these 3 things I’m happy enough.
all they really need to do here is change it to proc the haste, 2 runes, and reduce its CD to 8 seconds when damaging a target below 35 or 45% health. we’d be swimming in runes so GCDs become the resource in this phase, but essentially it just turbocharges your normal runeplay and adds a dot instead of being a simple execute knockoff.
An execute style ability would increase our ST damage… I’m just afraid Blizz thinks this type of ability should be exclusively for Warriors…
I know devs like to do strange things, but I remember when they decided to get rid of all ‘execute’ type abilities outside of warriors, and I remember thinking how silly it was.
It’s not like the old Soul Reaper in anyway functioned like Execute, just a silly change with unnecessary consequences.
MoP soul reaper worked like execute, when targets hit 35-45% HP soul reaper did additional large damage on par with execute:
Strikes an enemy target for 100% weapon damage and afflicts the target with Soul Reaper. After 5 sec, if the target is below 35% health, this effect will deal 46,114 to 53,590 additional Shadow damage. If the enemy dies before this effect triggers, the Death Knight gains 50% haste for 10 seconds.
it was later buffed to do more damage before it was gutted.
my thought is that a simple hits big spell would be a knock off of execute, so using it for the haste buff and runes as a playstyle modifier would go around that. combined with the dot the idea is you increase your overall ST output with your regular abilities in P3.
Wow I had completely forgotten how it worked, I must have been thinking of some other spell.
Ah well must be getting old lol.
Make the legendary ring a talent, not sure why it never was made into one, probably because no one at Blizzard ever played Unholy before.
But yeah, after doing timewalking Ulduar with the ring I understand that our rune regeneration is too slow.
More often than not I have to choose between death and decay, refreshing the dot and then running out of wounds afterwards.
Our single target damage is so low AND our runes regenerate too slow… Wtf… Waiting for another deathcoil buff. Maybe make it 100% buff this time? Dunno.
You seem upset.
Not saying this isn’t the case, but what do you mean exactly by this? I’m curious.
the old wrath style had you spend all your runes, then dump all your RP, the reason was the static time for rune regen would have your first runes spent coming back up about when your RP was spent.
the modern rune system is dependent on runic corruption, you want to interweave RP spenders and rune spenders in order to try and maximize runic corruption proc effectiveness. essentially you want to spread out its procs over time so that you get runes back as continuously as possible. if you follow the old model, you get bursts of rune regen, then deserts of nothing where you have no runes and no runic power to proc runic corruption.
you will still have these gaps if played right, but they will be shorter, fewer, and farther in between making your resource system feel smoother to play. you use the remaining gap moments for non-class related things like throwing a grenade or using your racial(BE’s in particular are good for dks due to the RP generation)
Do you switch to rune spending once you have a Rune Corruption proc? Assuming you’re not close to max RP and have the runes to spend, that is.
I’m a Wrath veteran so I still follow the old style, but your logic makes sense, and it’s the first time I read about it.
generally yeah, you proc it, and if it gives you a rune you need, spend the rune, then try to proc it again once the proc has ended.
the RNG aspect really makes it hard to have a solid “always do this rule” like it was in wrath, and that is intended by the devs, they didn’t like the wrath model where we were GCD locked.
what really helps is to get a good rune tracker or build your own with weakauras.
What about AOE (with Epidemic specifically)? Do you still spam Epidemic inside Death and Decay 'til you get a proc, and keep going back and forth? My intuition tells me I shouldn’t, specially if I pick Bursting Sores and have a few targets with wounds ready to pop.
Thanks for the info, btw.
that would probably be better answered by the guys on the acherus discord, i dont run enough dungeons to really have a good answer for you on that. but you can use epi to proc runic corruption on ST if you have 30-34 RP and no way to generate more.
Every second of every day, lol