What do you guys think about Unholy being split into two sub specs in its talent tree? This way people could chose if they want to play a necromancer like class or a plague spreading dark knight.
My perception is that two of the partial causes for Unholy being in that weird spot since Legion are…
first - the ever since heavy damage distribution on our unproportionally strong cooldowns.
Army, Gargoyle, Apocalypse and Dark Transformation.
second - the introduction of Festering wounds in Legion.
Therefore I would remove the Wounds mechanic which acts like pseudo combo points and make it a simple DoT.
It could be like Warlocks Agony that starts with low periodic damage but overtime increases. (Would suit a rot spec much more)
To make it work in AoE I would simply make Festering Strike also cleave in DnD. This would make it severely less clunky than its current iteration.
To make it perfectly streamlined I would rework DnD all along and instead of a ground effect making it an aura that follows us around like Frosts Remorseless Winter.
This would probably fix the Defile visual problem overlapping with other ground effects too.
For the second problem the solution could be to revert our Mastery back to only scale our shadow damage and remove the pet component but instead giving us a talent that replaces the shadow damage scaling with pet damage scaling.
This would be the build defining talent.
The Disease build would shift actual damage back into our abilities while the Pet build is revolving around summoning and empowering undead minions.
They could bring back Vision of Perfection as a talent that summons magi of the dead when hitting a target with Scourge Strike f.e.
Honestly everything about unholy feels strange to me.
It has a direct dmg shadow type of playstyle potentially with Wound bursting, Shadow Claw, Death Coil talents.
But it also has the affliction dot spec playstyle, except dk dots don’t scale with haste, and somehow haste is still really strong for them which is weird to me.
But also a demo warlock playstyle with temp and perma pets.
But also only 4 dps buttons to press and like 10 DPS cool downs to dump together.
I want to like unholy but man it’s just so strange and all over the place. It never feels like I can just make my preferred playstyle or build either.
Id prefer if there was less long CD steroid/dmg abilities and if I could go all in on a playstyle, like summoner playstyle vs dot vs direct dmg. You just end up with a weird hybrid of all 3.
Oh and death coil always feels so bad to press. Idk if that’s just me.
If it was me I’d just have pet build vs dot/direct build. Personal dmg vs pet damage. Maybe even going as far as having a choice node for the permanent pet vs self dmg boost like Frost Mages.
Have the pet build let our abilities reduce CDs on pet skills and buff the pets in different ways. Let apocalypse be the main spender for pet build with a lower CD. Have some cross pollinating talents still for the potential of hybridizing like the ghouls applying wounds on death talent, etc. Army of the dead would become a capstone for that side of the tree.
Then the other builds can combine disease and death coil/shadow claw all together for a petless build and be a true Shadow Knight type of class.
I neither play Frost nor am I interested in doing so. But I am certain the problem with Frost is not being given two sub specs but more being neglected since forever by class designers. If it was done properly and given the necissary attention there could be a way to fix it.
Back to topic. Unholy is a gruesome blend of all kinds of class mechanics and needs more distinction
Its a variety of talents that changes the damage profile, it still plays the same, the suggestion is a complete different playstyle inside the same spec.
There is not really a sub spec. In AoE you talent into Superstrain and Plaguebringer to benefit from fast DoT ticking in mass pulls and Epidemic exponential scaling.
Wounds in AoE are quite minor damage. They hover usually around 11th place in my details breakdown.
In Single Target you are pigeonholed into Gargoyle and Army, both 3 min cooldowns that made you the PI target in the first raid tier due to obscene haste scaling of these cooldowns. In Single Target wounds are even less contributing to your overall damage (approx. 4% for me).
Disease is designated to grand AoE scenarios.
Wounds are just weird and have no really significance other than building RP.
Pet deals always the most damage in Single Target.
On a dummy parse my highest damage is Army + Apoc auto attacks and ghoul auto attacks.
Then followed by Death Coil and Clawing Shadows followed by Dark Arbiter and Magus of the Dead. In a raid setup with PI and Bloodlust the pets are roughly 50% of my overall damage.
No, it did not. The skills and the talents are all the same since launch despite some % tuning on some skills. An overhaul is that what Ret and shadow priest have received.
So do me a favor. If you have nothing constructive to say piss off and annoy someone else you snob.