Thought it would be a good time to start a thread on this subject as 10.1 should include a major revamp of PvP talents.
The idea is to throw as many ideas out there and possibly feed the machine at Blizzard since they seem to be taking feedback lately.
I’ll start:
Death Reaper: Soul Reaper delayed damage is now instant and summons an army of the dead ghoul for 12 seconds. Cooldown increased to 12 seconds.
Note: Soul Reaper is unusable in PvP. It is simply to hard to coordinate. Even when you manage to pull it off in a timely manner, the effort/result ratio is insanely low.
Icebound Clasp: Icebound Fortitude also grants immunity to disarm effects. The first Death Strike cast during IBF can not be dodged or parried.
Note: In most matches where there are 2 available disarms in the opposing team, it’s very difficult for Death Knights to maintain defensive throughput and they quickly fall behind. This would at least give some breathing room during IBF where most teams already completely ignore this defensive ability.
Rot and Wither: (Redesigned) Death and Decay is now applied as an aura around the death knight. Cooldown increased to 45 seconds.
Note: Death and Decay is the core of Unholy DK’s AoE damage builder. In PvP, there is so much movement that this ability’s potential is completely negated.
Unbound Monstrosity: During Dark Transformation, casting Leap frees your Ghoul from all movement impairing effects.
Note: Currently there is so much micro movement impairing effects in the game that the use of Leap to interrupt your target/focus is incredibly frustrating and unreliable. Dark Transformation is one of UH biggest offensive abilities. To see it completely shut-down by random micro CC just feels terrible.
I’d love to see soul reaper in pvp, but honestly I think it just needs a huge damage amp against players rather than replacing it’s whole identity, if its gonna be a execute with ridiculous amounts of counterplay, then make it properly threaten death like mop/wod.
Cool but weak, honestly I could see this making death strike unblock/parry/dodgeable for the whole duration. Otherwise, I like the idea of a niche defensive option!
I’ve been asking for a D&D aura around the dk for ages now, this would be sick.
Again, a bit weak to take a whole pvp talent slot, could maybe give you a second charge of Leap as well (so we can pet kick again without too much losing damage uptime). Another idea I had similar to this floating around was Death Coiling your pet removed CC from it.
As for my own ideas, bringing back Necrotic Strike would be an obvious win in my books, and an even bigger win if it merges with Necrotic Wounds. Unholy is really missing its niche and is suffering because of it.
Back in legion we had 3 auras to choose from Necrotic, Heartstop, and Decomposing. In BFA you were able to choose all of them at once and that had to be nuked from orbit. I’d love to see some toggleable version of these come back, where only one can be used at once and you can adaptively change depending on the situation. They don’t even have to be the same exact same effects, just some variant of Damage vs Defense vs Utility. Could honestly work similar to presences historically.
This ones more of a change, but reworking necromancer’s bargain to be more focused on the dot would be amazing. Relying on ccable pets that take 5 seconds to get up to do a large portion of your damage sucks. Honestly you could incorporate necrotic plague into this with some hopefully very fun results.
I like that you noticed that my propositions are rather weak. I purposely did that just so it didn’t terrify anyone who’d think I’m asking for unwarranted buffs. We’ve all seen what happens when a class is redesigned and released without thought (looking at you, Ret Paladin).
My idea was to set up the stage and put them on track towards shortcomings I’ve personally been experiencing as UH and I think need attention.
Double Leap would be extremely strong if it also broke every form of movement impairing effect on the ghoul. I’d like the idea of refreshing the CD on Leap if you’d land an interrupt though. Or maybe increasing the duration left on Dark Transformation.
I definitely think we need some form of way for it to break from roots as it’s way to easy to play around Dark Transformation right now. Most of the time people shut-down the ghoul without even noticing just with passive micro CC.
There is a lot more I’d like to see for UH in terms of pet management. As a pet class (and this may be true for other pet classes), we should have more situational customization options for our minions to play with. We currently have none.
Roar of Sacrifice is a good example of a powerful pet situational ability baked into a PvP talent.
I get you, they do have to be worth taking over what we have now though. That being said, I’m not sure we’re not due for a buff.
Oh that’s a sick idea I’m a fan.
And yea, pet management and utility was the whole reason i got into Unholy back in the day, would love to see more skill expression via increased pet utility.
Spellwarden has been redesigned – Reduces the cooldown of Anti-Magic Shell by 10 seconds but reduces its duration by 50%. Anti-Magic Shell is now usable on allies.
New PvP Talent: Bloodforged Armor – Death Strike reduces Physical damage taken by 20% for 3 seconds.
Unholy
Reanimation has been redesigned – Reanimates a nearby corpse, summoning a zombie for 20 seconds that slowly moves towards your target. If your zombie reaches its target, it explodes after 3 seconds. The explosion stuns all enemies within 8 yards for 3 seconds and deals 20% of their health in Shadow damage.
The zombie summoned by Reanimation is no longer targetable or killable.
Reanimation now costs 30 Runic Power (was 1 Rune) and now has a 12 second cooldown with 2 charges.
Ok now what to do with raise abomb and necrotic wounds being stuck in place…hopefully that 20% will do a good enough job at keeping up our hp with death strike. either way glad they did something for our paper armor and the new reanimation looks interesting
Yeah it’s been brought up in quite a few threads now that Raise Abomination needs to be a choice nod with Army (or make army usable in arena at reduced effectiveness)