This was written in response to a post in general, but I figured it would get more class-specific attention here:
With raise dead being given to all DK specs, I’m very worried that unholy is basically going to become useless. It’s already a suboptimal DPS spec, with poor performance in anything but the longest boss fights due to ramp up time, and it’s a very boring spec to play because so much of your damage output is passive.
I would not at all be opposed to unholy becoming more necromancer-like, or even ranged to some degree (though they should stick with the 2h weapons and not be turned into staff wielding clothies…)
There’s a few major points of issue I have with Unholy at the moment:
Army of the dead’s cooldown is far too long for what it does. 8 minutes is absolutely ridiculous especially when you consider that nearly all other offensive abilities in the game have had cooldowns dropped to the 1.5-2 minute range. The longest, aside from army of the dead, is bloodlust/primal rage/etc. which is a 5 minute cooldown with a 10 minute debuff, but that’s also a party wide 30% haste boost, far more useful than having a few extra ghouls around for 30 seconds.
Dark Transformation is boring and visually unappealing. Why does my ghoul/geist/skeleton suddenly turn into a tentacle monster more resembling the old gods’ minions than something undead? Further, why is my ghoul’s performance (and mine by extension) being completely limited by a 1 minute cooldown when the extra performance could just be made a passive part of the ghoul’s damage output?
Apocalypse, similar to those above abilities, puts something iconic to our spec on a long cooldown for no reason other than to limit our consistency in combat. Apocalypse is a HUGE part of our damage output, but they’ve basically turned a DoT spec into a burst spec by putting that on a cooldown.
The festering wounds mechanic just overcomplicates and ruins something that should be straightforward. There’s no reason the extra damage from festering wounds couldnt be added into the base damage for scourge strike.
For a DoT based spec akin to balance druids or affliction warlocks, we have too few DoT abilities at our disposal. We’re essentially limited to virulent plague as our one main DoT, and death and decay as an AoE dot with low uptime.
These issues all combine to make unholy a boring spec to play, when it should be what everyone has been asking for: a necromancer. We should be summoning droves of disposable undead minions to overwhelm our enemies, and afflicting everything with diseases and blight. Instead we’re sitting there autoattacking 90% of the time while our shapeshifting ghoul does the work on his own.
So here’s my suggestions:
Reduce the cooldown on Army of the Dead to 2-3 minutes.
Remove dark transformation. Work the extra DPS from dark transformation into our ghoul’s base damage, or improve it’s abilities for unholy spec only (not blood or frost) to make up the difference.
Make apocalypse a passive ability that summons a ghoul for 15 seconds each time we spend a rune, with a maximum of 6 ghouls active at a time.
Remove festering strike / festering wounds, and incorporate that damage into scourge strike.
Add unholy blight as a baseline ability, with a 15 second duration and 30 second cooldown or something to that effect, granting us another frequently usable DoT ability and greater AoE potential.
Return Corpse Explosion as an active ability that uses runic power to destroy either an enemy corpse or one of your active ghouls (from army of the dead or apocalypse, but not your raised pet ghoul) to deal burst AoE damage.
As far as making the unholy DK a ranged spec, that can be accomplished with the above as well as utilizing the clawing shadows talent, which makes scourge strike a ranged attack. Everything else we have is relatively ranged with the above changes.
Wasn’t this to be more focused on un-pruning? I’ll give a more PvP orientated explanation to my thoughts on this.
Reduce CD for AoD: Yes, I agree in some ways to this. Although I find majority of the time that the CD is fine how it is since we have our main burst rotation already working well I can understand wanting it (although abom is way better (PvP stand point).
Remove Dark Transformation: I actually find it quite simple. Yes you could effectively remove it then account for the damage decrease by having a static increase to our ghouls basic damage but this just gets rid of more of our abilities and currently in a burst rotation it works quite fluidly. For DK Dark Transformation is amazing help when bursting a target versus slower damage that does the same.
Make apocalypse passive that summons ghouls: As before, apocalypse is a massive DPS increase probably one of our best. So far, a lot of these just makes DK an all passive AFK in PvE kinda class also massively hurting our viability in PvP. For example, you could just make it so shamans Feral Spirit summons a wolf every minute and you’d get similar DPS readings but making us so passive and have less control over our own spells and abilities makes it harder to control our DPS rotation.
Remove Festering Strike and give the damage to scourge strike: Understandable, however in our current meta this is extremely required as it is a fundamental part of unholy DK. It take a little while to get use to but as before is a rather fun mechanic that keeps DKs paying attention and managing what they’re doing. It doesn’t really have many disadvantages and as before from a PvP standpoint this complicates the fact that we typically only use Necrotic Strike and not scourge strike at all. They’d have to re-balance all of that area just because players no longer wanna manage their own damage and DoTs.
Add Unholy Blight: No real gripes on this Unholy Blight is cool and another DoT I suppose that’s fair.
Return Corpse Explosion as an active ability: I mean maybe? But the ability is really situational. It could be useful in PvP but even in PvE you can’t control your ghouls easily they kinda just attack whatever they can get at (usually your focus) but it still would be harder to manage that than anything else since you can’t actively move them. This could be quite frustrating in the long run.
Ranged Unholy would be an awesome thing and was what I played during Legion’s WoD pre-patch. But I don’t know if this is the best way of accomplishing it.
TL;DR I don’t think all these abilities and such should be removed. They’re mainly looking to un-prune our specs and not rework the entire spec all over again right now it functions fairly well and is the best spec we have PvE and PvP. Most of these would just make us extremely idle and lose a lot of the control we have over when we need to do damage and how we do damage. Our current rotation is fairly nice and the mechanics of festering wounds are also quite nice. They take a little bit of getting used to but are a massive part of what UDK is right now.
They didn’t say it was the full pet Unholy version of Raise Dead, did they? Since they’re talking depruning, I’d think they meant the old temporary minion versions that Blood and Frost used to have.
We are the masters of undeath and the plague carriers. I would like to see more disease DoTs and if I could have a retinue of skeletons and ghouls surrounding me at all times I would love that. I’m all about the spec/class fantasy.
For dark transformation I like that ability. However there should be a passive that back in wolk that you could take a talent that each time you death coil it gave your ghoul a buff that stacks up to 5. Which increase damage by 10% per stack and on the 5th it would’ve been a big damage spree for to turn into dark transformation.
Granted our dark transformation should have a newer model. But I hope they can let us go out in the world like a hunter can tame beasts to their stable, why not us unholy able to do that? Would add flavor to our spec for going out to grab other undead a with unique abilities that does different things. Idk just an idea for minions.
we know about the issue with army, too much damage is dumped into it leaving us rather weak when it isn’t available, however there is something to be said for optimal use of a large scale damage CD. if army was available all the time, it would diminish the skill of properly utilizing large scale damage cds in a fight.
dark transformation isn’t boring, take your pet off of auto and start manually controlling it. also its CD is reduced by deathcoil.
unholy is a multifaceted spec, not just a dot spec, proper use of burst cds is part of the deal. as far as dots are concerned we were never really anything special. for most of dk history our dot complexity consisted of two dots that did static damage with no real interaction. wod changed things up a bit, however all it did was give us a big dot that needed some ramp up, once ramped up you could just play your melee rotation and ignore it.
per 3, festering wounds provide something to do, and they don’t really change up our button presses from wod, it creates a builder/spender mechanic that can also be used for quadratic AoE. you know those moments in MDI where unholy pulls like a million dps? thats festering wounds.
we are a not akin to anything, you can take unholy blight if you want, as well as defile and soul reaper. additionally there is a azerite trait you can take for an extra stacking dot from deathcoil. our dots were changed because 1 dot that ticks for 100 is the same as two dots that tick for 50 each. and since we had no real complexity or maintenance to our dots in the past, just apply them then melee, it was made more efficient.
my suggestion would be that you actually learn the spec from more than a surface level before you suggest changes.
Festering Wounds is the best mechanic Unholy has ever had. I agree with a lot of your other points, but Festering Wounds is amazing.
As far as Army, given our talents, the cooldown is actually more like 3-3.5 minutes. That being said, I’d much rather have a larger portion of our damage come from our own gameplay, and not a passive stack of pets that we can’t control. If you think about it though, that’s basically how DK’s were so dangerous. It wasn’t the 10 DK’s killing everyone, it was the 10,000 scourge being led by them.
you pretty much just described my ebg build, you can look at my armory if you want. but i have abomb, valk, tons of zombies, and depending on the bg i will take AWS for the skeleton archer. i also have unholy blight, defile, soul reaper, and 3x harroying decay for some dot action.
TBH while unholy does need some improvements, the biggest problem is people are asking for stuff that it already does, and does well. i think this is because most people read icy viens, take the pve spec, never change it, and never try anything else to really explore the spec.
that depends entirely on what you are doing, as i said that is my build for epic battlegrounds, the main content i participate in, and they all have their specific uses which is why i take them.
if you are looking at things like ST dps, there will always be a best talent to take, not every talent is designed for optimal ST damage. some are designed for short term burst, some are designed for sustained gameplay. utilizing these effectively in the correct situation is really needed to understand their strengths (and why you can’t always rely on sims)
one of the biggest issues with unholy is that a lot of our really cool talents and abilities that really show the necromancer side are locked away as pvp talents, meaning that the majority of players who are pve only never really see or learn them. if you have seen me in bgs, then you would know im surrounded by tons of undead minions, and have no problem simply overwhelming opponents with undead adds, dots, stuns, slows, and heal absorbs.
just make sure you have conflict and strife primary, and rune of stoneskin gargoyle. reanimation is a %HP attack, so when attacking pve targets like Vann your HP sets the cap on reanimation damage, the more HP you have the more damage you do. provided they connect its the best damage per rune you can get, so use abomb for wound stacking to hit apoc and don’t really bother with VP or UB on pve targets, they are mainly for AoE damage to help with team fights and distracting healers.