The following can be implemented by mostly Copy and Pasting existing code. It would take all of 30 minutes to implement.
Remove Clunky, Uninteresting Skills
Remove Festering Strike (unimpactful, boring) and replaced with Festering Scythe
Remove Festering Wounds (clunky, Unholy’s long setup time is made even longer to pay off with Wounds)
Necrotic Plague
Virulent Plague replaced with Necrotic Plague
Necrotic Plague - Disease that deals X Shadowfrost damage per stack every 2s for Ys. Each time it deals damage, it gains 1 stack and infects a nearby enemy
Merge Plaguebringer with Festering Scythe for interaction with Necrotic Plague
Festering Scythe - Sweep through all enemies within 14 yds in front of you. Festering Scythe causes your disease damage to occur 100% more quickly for Xs (ie. Necrotic Plague gains stacks 2x faster)
Sudden Doom summons Minions
Sudden Doom - No longer triggers from auto-attacks. It is now triggered by Scourge Strike / Clawing Shadows
If Scourge Strike / Clawing Shadows hits a target affected by Necrotic Plague, there is an X% chance to gain Sudden Doom
Consuming Sudden Doom summons a Ghoul
Note: Necrotic Plague basically acts as an infinite Festering Wounds debuff that Scourge Strike “pops” to summon Ghouls, which makes the Unholy rotation essentially the same as it is now, but feels infinitely better.
Minion Interaction with Diseases and Scythe
Talent: Minion attacks have X% chance cause your diseases to flare up, causing AoE damage
Talent: Minion attacks have X% chance to make your next Festering Scythe cost no runes
Other Possible Talents
Talent: Festering Scythe drops D&D
Talent: Consuming Sudden Doom has a X% chance to summon a Magus
Talent: Necrotic Plague have X% chance to causes your Death Strike to turn to Death Siphon, dealing X Shadow damage and healing the Death Knight for 150% of damage dealt
Cleanups
Remove bursting Wounds from Apocalypse so Dark Transform can be used at any time
Remove Army of the Dead since it is now just a redundant version of Apocalypse
Replace Plaguebringer with something else
PvP
Necrotic Wounds - Each stack of Necrotic Plague absorbs healing by 0.X%
Imo wounds feel fine in single target when the player has agency over it. I hate when my pet applies them. Wounds would also be good as a funnel build as well.
This is an extremely naive thing to say and isn’t helpful. Software systems like an MMORPG are extremely complex and nothing is as simple as it may intuitively seem. Even an experienced software engineer would not make such a statement about a system they aren’t intimately familiar with, and I wouldn’t trust any that do.
I am a COO of a tech company. I deal with this stuff day and night. It is another one of those times where you think you know more about something than another person, but you really don’t.
Like I’ve said before, stop thinking everything you think is right.
If it takes that long to make a few changes, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the code. Just based on how skills work and the changes they’ve made in the past, I can already determined that it would not take long to make the changes I proposed.
To say a Senior Engineer would not make such statement is false. All my programmers can make a good estimate even if they have never seen the code for a system that they have using for a year just based on the way the system works.
There are good programmers and bad programmers. It would take a bad programmer 5 days to do 1 hour of work from a good programmer. There are lots of bad programmers out there, but I have faith that Blizzard hires somewhat competent people. Send me your Linkedin profile in game. I will message you back on Linkedin.
You are claiming that the 17 tasks you have listed can be completed under 30 minutes. That means each task must be completed under two minutes. Some of them require building completely new spells which would also require investment from the art team. Repurposing a spell that existed in the past is likely tied to a creature somewhere out in the world and refitting that spell ID would break that creature. You would also have to overhaul the respective talent tree/s as well and evaluate the DK mechanical damage profile for spell interaction. On top of that, how would that be affected by tier set bonuses or trinkets and cantrip items? Further, you’d then need several iterations of testing for tuning purposes to see if it’s even practical or smooth or takes away from some particular aspect of gameplay.
With all due respect, you don’t come off as a COO that I’d want to work under so I will not be sharing my LinkedIn with you.
Delete Festering Strike. Delete Festering Wounds. Necrotic Plague is a DK skill that can be copy and pasted from a previous patch. Merge Plaguebringer with Festering Scythe. Add Necrotic Plague to diseases affected by PLguebringer. Modify Scourge Strike to proc Sudden Doom. Sudden Doom already have code to summon Magus. 30 minutes for a senior programmer at Blizzard. 5 hours for a junior programmer.
As I pointed out, this isn’t all about programming and you can’t always just pull something from the past and have it inherently work. Additionally, I never acknowledged that I’m even looking for a job. The point of me not sharing a connection with you is more to your benefit - a Chief of Operations should know how exactly a company operates and this “Senior Programmer” mentality tells me all I need to know. It’s better to keep that title to yourself because not understanding even the majority of a process needed for a final product, even if it’s for a different business, leads me to believe that your typical directive is, “Hey director/manager of whatever department, I don’t know the process and I don’t know the hoops you need to jump through but here is what I want and here is the deadline so make it happen” and that’s not good for a well-oiled machine. If you are actually a COO of a tech company, you’ll be significantly more attractive to even larger companies (companies that will offer you significantly more money) if you take a few days to get a better grasp of what the people under you actually do each day for that final product.
I have already considered all the “majority of a process needed for a final product” within the first milli-second when I made the estimate.
What you are missing is the following:
I have never said the 30 minutes to implement the proposed changes will be production-ready. The entire idea of my post is to illustrate that the skeleton of what is required to fix Unholy can be done easily.
You are so set on arguing, trying to prove me wrong, that you completely miss the point of the post.
Knowing, Kelliste, he will be replying shortly to argue about semantics and things that are not explicitly stated.
Highly doubt it or you would know this isnt a 30 minute thing.
Am I saying I know about coding? Or just recognizing that there is someone that is too full of himself?
Its not a 30 minute job.
Because you know the code right? And nothing ever happens when coding is involved right?
And programmers that have a big head.
You really dont know what was going on with Classic do you? You cant just copy and paste code from over a decade ago and expect it to work, especially since Blizzard had a hell of a time getting the old coding and the new to work together.
No its not.
And you want to talk about me, hilarious. Psst, your ego is showing.
No, I don’t have as much time as you. Message me in game, let’s talk on Teams to discuss in more detail why you think code changes take so long. I don’t want to further derail the thread.
I’m not set on arguing with you to prove you wrong - you decided to open the argument box when you replied to my statement of you being out of touch with reality of having a 30 minute deadline. “I have never said the 30 minutes to implement the proposed changes will be production-ready”. OK, Mr. “Unholy DK - 30 Minutes of Programming to Fix”.
Based on your conversation with others, typing back and forth with you usually gets nowhere. Just message me sometime in game and we will talk, maybe I will get a better sense of your thought process.
If I said, “Unholy DK - 12 Hours of Programming to Fix and be Production Ready” would it be as impactful? No.