Unholy Festering Wound Replacement

Classes Death Knight
1

TLDR: Replace festering wounds with a resource on the DK instead of the target, remove the need to stand in DnD, and slightly ease the cooldown issues.

Issue #1: Readability
Festering wounds have been controversial since their inception. Though they have a few differences with RNG and AOE they essentially break down to being a worse version of death runes, as they have basically the same purpose (more scourge strike damage), while making target swapping, chain pulling, and windup all the more awkward. The resource displays are also very unfriendly to players, you are expected to track the number of wounds on top of a target frame by reading that tiny number while it moves around your screen and compare it against your static ui elements of runes and runic power. There is a reason people say this spec is “unplayable” on stock ui.

Suggestion #1:

  • Remove Festering Wounds, Festering strike grants 2-3 “Necrotic Power”(Name can be anything) which are a resource that lives on the Death Knight of which you can have 0 to 6. When you Scourge Strike it consumes one Necrotic Power to deal additional shadow damage to the target. Necrotic power could be displayed as simply changing the appearance of your runes, you could reuse the old death rune art so all the death knight resources are displayed in the same place preventing eye strain.

Issue #2: AOE
I will admit one advantage of the festering wounds design is the AOE scaling, it’s roll is somewhat redundant with epidemic, as they are both AOE attacks that trigger AOE attacks, but it does give us something to spend runes on in AOE. It however requires the Death Knight to remain stationary within Death and Decay, which proved to be very unpopular though powerful enough that we do it anyway. Think of it like a more forgiving rune of power on a less mobile class. So the question becomes can we maintain a decent AOE rotation without AOE spread debuffs, and can you reduce the requirements to stand within your own death and decay? I think yes.

Suggestion #2:

  • When Scourge Strike consumes a Necrotic Power any target currently within your death and decay takes bonus shadow damage. You do not need to be standing in your death and decay to trigger this effect, this effect replaces the current “Cleaving Strikes” effect. This would be another massive quality of life improvement. While we would still need to keep the enemies in our death and decay to deal damage, we are free to run around, dodge aoe, and better compensate for our limited mobility. The backend spell effect can be separated from the shadow damage on the primary target, so the two can be balanced separately and our single target does not need to suffer if our AOE becomes too strong.
  • Infected Claws could be changed to “Your ghoul’s claw attack has a 30% chance to gain a Necrotic Power, increased by 15% for each addition target hit with sweeping claw.” and Pestilence could be likewise 10% per target hit max 1 per tick. Unholy Ground could give 5% haste if at least one enemy is within your death and decay. Vile Contagion and Festering Scythe would need a complete redesigns.

Issue #3: Cooldowns
The last part of Festering wounds is Apocalypse. If you were to consider our Festering Wounds to be combo points, this ability is our only finishing move! but also has a cooldown? this skews our resources too hard in one direction, as it’s the only situation that can burst multiple wounds on a single target (outside Doomburst in PvP) it messes up our opening and creates a hard to balance feast or famine resource situation. The solution thus far has been the Unholy Assault Cooldown, as it can give us the 4 wounds we need at the start of a fight, and every second Apocalypse after that. However we already have a cooldown stacking problem, and this cooldown is an incredibly powerful flat 20% damage. Unholy Assault is also the least flashy of all our cooldowns if we need to shave a cooldown players would miss this one the least.

Suggestion 3:

  • Remove the resource requirement from Apocalypse so it stops skewing the rest of our rotation and remove the Unholy Assault cooldown from the talent tree, possibly replace it with a passive that just increases the damage of scourge strike, festering strike, death coil, and soul reaper to compensate for the cooldown damage lost while buffing sustained damage. This would diversify the final tier talents to: “disease/direct damage/pets” instead of “disease/cooldowns/pets(also cooldowns)”.

These suggestions are ranked according to what I perceive to be most important, with 1 being the most important and 3 being the least important.

13 Likes
2

So… Soul Shards? You want Unholy to have Soul Shards? I mean runes are technically soul shards but… this one seems like RUNES for RUNES if that makes sense. :joy:

Like I kind of get that Festering Wounds are something to interact with resource wise (and it aged badly), but they’re also a debuff that does something. Combo points that is Apocalypse essentially requires to use which I can understand this sentiment.

And I can already see some problems with your suggestions:

Suggestion 1: By tying Festering Wounds relative to the DK instead of enemies, you are essentially removing one of the most fun yet niche ways to pop all the wounds at once: Dead enemies.

Dead enemies will pop all the wounds at once. Giving you RP each stack AND will add a domino effect if other enemies have high stacks of Festering Wounds if you use Bursting Sores.

Dead enemies are the only way to pop wuunds without spending Globals on it. One which I personally think Vile Contagion is powerful in M+. I just wish that I don’t have to give up a point for it…

Suggestion 2: YES to more mobile cleaving strikes! Maybe this could work with the Necrotic Power but still… I don’t really know if this should replace the wuunds in general. It really does sound nice on paper.

Personally, I would like to gain Cleaving Strikes through different means other than just dropping a global on Death and Decay, moving as an aura. Maybe it’s time for Dks to have Sweeping Strikes/Blade Flurry? Make it a Corrupted Runed Weapon or whatever.

Suggestion 3: You know what? I take what I said back. This one is fine. There is just… a lot of Cooldowns from Unholy that should be just merged into Apocalypse at this point. It also doesn’t make sense that some of the cooldowns costs global as well. You can’t tell me that DT should have a GCD so we could all make a macro for it that aligns with Apocalypse.’

It’s important to keep in mind though, again!, is that the Wounds are NOT combo points! It is a debuff. For Apocalypse being a “Finishing Move” and I can understand why people have this sentiment, see my first suggestion. I do agree Apocalypse shouldn’t be a “Finishing Move” in this context though.

Conclusion: There really should be fine line between the two between people who want to keep wounds and people who don’t. Unholy seems like it’s having an identity crisis. Be it Festering WUUND management. Be it Disease management. Be it a Necromancer that raise minions and GARY IS STILL CRYING IN A CORNER.

Good post though. Take my like.

1 Like
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I will fully admit that Festering Wounds (with Bursting Sores) can create some fun chain reactions, especially when you are farming content you are over-geared for, yes there would some loss in that interaction.

However I also see this as a chance to let Virulent Plague shine within the niche of chain killing mobs through death explosions. Virulent Plague’s explosion now only occurs when an enemy dies, and this explosion is the unique effect of the disease, like Blood Plague’s healing or Frost Fever’s runic power gains. I think we could just increase the damage of Virulent Plague’s death explosion to compensate for the loss of Festering Wounds death explosion and maintain most of the same gameplay experience.

I also think I should clarify, Apocalypse isn’t really our “finishing move”, it just behaves very much like a finishing move, while the rest of the Festering Wounds system behaves the opposite. Our builder (Festering strike) produces multiple resources, while our spender (Scourge Strike) consumes a single resource. The issue that in attempting to marry this multi-builder single spender with apocalypse, a multi spender, creates an awkward situation where your resources are either going to empty because of the Apocalypse tax, or they are going to be overflowing and trivial because they are tuned around Apoc’s over consumption. Blizzard has gotten around this by making Apocalypse either grant two runes to replace one of the festering strikes, or by adding a cooldown that gives us all the resources for half our Apocalypses. I think it’s time to just accept that Apocalypse doesn’t fit into the multi-builder/single-spender resource model and let it be a solo act instead of constantly trying to make new ways for a square peg to fit in a round hole.

Thank you for the feedback! Take my like as well.

2 Likes
4

It is not mechanically important but for the playerbase what they change wounds into would really make or break the vibe. I’d like them to go down the necromancer path a bit more and make them souls or soul fragments. If they’re on the player (as you suggest) you could then give them visual representation as swirls or little white balls (or little floating skulls) around the player. Attacks spending souls could fling them at enemies. This would help with reliance on UI to communicate playstyle

2 Likes
5

Arapaw, the more I read this suggestion the more I love it!

I’m brought back to Shadowmourne in Wotlk and how the purple souls would swirl around in different levels of intensity as we build up our strength and then it exploded outward when dealing the bonus shadow damage, something along a similar vein would be amazing. I always appreciate when you can tell that state a player (or yourself) through visual hints and spell effects so you aren’t completely dependent upon the UI.

6

I just want to say that I’ve played for 20 years (off and on), I currently play 8 classes, I have almost always used the default UI, and I hate mods… but playing unholy forced me to get weakauras, and make my own damn tracker for festering wounds, so I could actually see it, and not have to use an entirely new UI that somebody made.

4 Likes
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i love my wound tracking system in weakauras, i guess if you are doing boss/dummy dps they are a little monotonous, but overall i think most player’s problem with wounds is they don’t have them setup right on their UI, as soon as you build a weakaura that treats them like a resource you just build and spend with your runes and RP, then they are very manageable and fun to play.

8

You spelt combo points wrong.

9

You should check out my Unholy redesign thread. I massively simplified the Festering Strike issue while bringing much-needed flavor and fun to the spec at large.

1 Like
10

I’ve long believed that if the devs were to move wounds from a per-target resource to a personal resource the best way to do it would be to replace wounds with lesser minions.

E.g. Festering Strike now summons 2-3 zombies and Scourge Strike commands a zombie to charge at the target and explode. Mechanically it’s the same—the numbers would be a little different since the minions attack until sacrificed, but it’d be a cool way to unify the necromancy facet of the spec with its builder/spender rotation.

3 Likes
11

You don’t know how much I’ve wanted to break into blizzard HQ and just start pushing DK updates to the PTR like there is no tomorrow and radically redesign Death Knight, but I’m ranting again.

I think external zombies or ghouls or something as a resource is a really cool idea, and is something I would be willing to try in a more radical redesign. I’m really liking the design of pathfinder 2e’s new necromancer playtest and it runs on a similar concept, there are however a couple of important points I think need to be made if we were to try this idea in wow, and I would like to try it.

  • If the minions have hp they will die to AoE, especially in pvp
  • If the minions walk to the target they will have pathing issues
  • If the minions don’t seek their target they will miss anything moving

Simplest solutions to these issues, make them untargetable and invulnerable, and make consuming them launch them at the target exactly like any other spell or projectile.

More complex solution is to work hp and dying into their value, make their hp significantly large or at least make it large enough that an average rotation will have a chance of spending it before it dies. Likewise their pathing could be resolved by borrowing from the diablo 3 necromancer and having a button that just leaps them all onto your current target. I still believe that consuming them should essentially (or maybe literally) turn them into a projectile like deathcoil or shadowbolt, except more flying cadaver-y so we don’t have to worry about it missing anytime we are fighting a moving target.

I like the idea, I refrained from something similar in the suggestions because I worry it’s a bit too radical in it’s approach and it would be much harder to stick the landing with as it has lots of moving parts from an implementation PoV. That said I’m glad you brought it up and started the conversation :slight_smile:

12

So Demo lock with a single imp sacrifice instead of sending them all in at once?

13

Essentially yes.
Though I must add the caveat that we won’t know if it’s actually fun or not until it’s tested, which would mean blizzard would need to commit resources to something that might not work, which is why I say it’s a more radical suggestion.

14

Just remove wounds. We dont need to replace it. Nothing Blizz has done since wrath has been an improvement.

4 Likes
15

wounds should just be replaced by necrotic plague

and just make core buttons do damage again

7 Likes
16

I assume this would include returning festering strike to it’s MoP/WoD iteration of increasing the duration of diseases and chains of ice by 6s?

I personally wouldn’t like if removing wounds turns us into a two button class (just scourge strike and death coil), so I would prefer a world where festering strike still has a purpose.

17

I like wounds. To me unholy is a fundamentally near perfect spec (besides some gripes I have with global cooldowns) and I would rather them not make any major adjustments to its core.

I would rather they just fix frost and stop making it a one trick pony for both PvE and PvP, then I think death knights who dislike festering wounds can enjoy the other spec.

1 Like
18

I respect your appreciation for festering wounds, I disagree, but I respect it. The comments on frost however rub me the wrong way.

I want to play Unholy, I don’t want to play Frost. I want my permanent pet, I want a dot based playstyle, I want my damage to be more sustain focused, I want the complexity of dealing with multiple resources, I don’t want to play a rushdown spec.

The issues I have with festering wounds are not from a place of a Frost DK who wants to play Unholy but doesn’t like the wounds mechanic, and are actually from the place of a longtime Unholy DK, who loved death runes and have found festering wounds to be a clunky and unwelcome replacement.

I don’t mind the complexity of festering wounds what I dislike is how it limits your ability to react to changes on the battlefield, instead encouraging mindless tunnelling. If you see a target who just became vulnerable and you want to switch to them you must festering strike the target a couple of times, which eats away at the runes and momentum, by the time you get your resources flowing there is a good chance the target has already recovered from their vulnerable state and now you have wasted festering wounds as they are on two targets and you only have the time to spend them on one target. Compare this to death runes where you can build on one target and then react to the battlefield and immediately spend them on another target and there is no comparison. You also don’t have to deal with the frustration of a rogue removing all your wounds with a cloak of shadows and forcing you to restart your windup in the middle of trying to focus them down.

When Blizzard makes it unfun to play Unholy in PvP I don’t reroll Frost, I quit playing the game. Of the 5 expansions that have had festering wounds I quit for 3 of them.

2 Likes
19

You know what’s really odd about Unholy is that the specialization is all over the place to the point where some core mechanics like Festering WUUNDZ have a lot of must take nodes that you might as well not have any sort of agencies.

Like are you trying to tell me that a spec that has:

  • A debuff that it takes two globals to interact with them? Heck, you got Bursting Sores and Festermight to the point you might as well merge into them in ONE node for those who do like the WUUNDZ gameplay.
  • Where is NECROTIC PLAGUE BLIZZ??? WHERE IS IT??? Make it a choice node between it and Superstrain.
  • Unholy being dedicated to have minions (not to the extent to Demonology or BM) should also have a choice.
  • FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS UNHOLY BUFF GARY. In fact, make it so that Summon Gargoyle summons 2 more of his friends that echoes your Death Coil. OR Summon a Lich that raises a Magus of the Dead for every Deathchill Bolt it casts.

And Apocalyse is just… :nauseated_face: at this point. The Runeforge for it is BAD. There really should be a choice between a player not WANTING to have a Ghoul for a minion (Looking at you, Verod) or a player that DOES want to have a Ghoul for a minion.

Everything above players should have some sort of agency. But what did Blizzard do instead? Slap a Minion Damage on Unholy Mastery and then nerf its overall effectiveness putting Shadow Damage having a short end of the stick.

-Sigh-

2 Likes
20

I think festering wounds having a AOE when busted should have been a thing from the start. Because they are a wound with pus, swelling, and tissue necrosis. So a pinata full of gross. Bursting one doing splash damage to the mob’s close to the one you are bursting wounds on makes sense

Also them having have a build up mechanic in the splash damage would help. Like if a mob gets hit with the splash damage 2 or 3 times, they get a festering wound. The splash damage itself could be looked it as a bit of bonus damage with getting wounds on the other mobs being the main focus.

It could also be worked into death and decay by increasing the radius of the splash damage of every wound you pop on a map that is in it.