Is it just me? It feels really awkward to have to top damage abilities on single target to be:
1 - Melee (pet)
2 - Melee (army of the dead)
3/4 - Scourge Strike or Melee (me)
It makes the rest of the kit feel kind of pointless when it can’t even outdamage white swings from my pet. It just feels so awkward considering there’s no interacting with the pet in the spec aside from Dark Transformation. Only 1 talent has anything to do with your pets, and it makes the entire talent tree feel pointless.
You’re definitely not alone from what I’ve seen here, reddit and on the discord.
Too much pet damage in relation to player damage is one of the most common criticisms for Unholy right next to having too much downtime, having too many buttons, too much ramp up and a overly convoluted opener.
Talented Garg and Soul Reaper reverting into a garbage execute are up there as well.
This goes to show you, no matter the state of your class people will complain. There’s plenty of interaction to make your pets do more damage.
Enjoy it now before all the whiners get it nerfed and you guys are begging for any damage back.
It’s like you guys have never played this game before. If the class is fine shut up before it gets screwed up.
Also what is with dks picking kyrian and nightfae. Where is your dk pride.
I’m also in the camp of people unhappy about Unholy’s damage breakdown. I want my damage to come from abilities I’m actively pressing and engaging with, not from pets that are largely passive. I like the pet for its utility, and the complexity of managing it.
I do respect that there are people out there who like a pet centric class, but you have to appreciate that those of us who have been playing Unholy since the beginning had the entire gameplay focus of the spec flipped on us in Legion – and Blizzard has been doubling down on the changes made in Legion instead of mitigating them.
I disagree with this. Pets have even worse mobility than we do, none of the cc immunity/breaks, and are easily killed. Having our damage come from pets is a liability in PvP, not an advantage.
all of these come from a lack of understanding how to play or just simply what unholy is.
too much downtime?
we are low on haste, however, even at 9% im fine, i can dps for hours, in fact i did that to farm the egg in madraxxus yesterday, nonstop, 45m straight dps, very little downtime.
i tagged and pulled with outbreak used interweaving of deathcoil with festering strike to get some wounds as my dps, and when they were about 45-55% i would hit soul reaper and then try to kill them before the proc in order to intentionally proc runic corruption. between the SR procs and RP interweaving i really dont have downtime or resource issues, even at 9% haste.
feel slow sure, but thats from the low haste, at 1.4s a gcd feels slow compared to the .8s and .7s i was pulling with corruptions, but as long as i am able to fill every GCD with some sort of spell or output then 1.4 is fine.
true downtime is when you have an open GCD with nothing to fill it. we dont have all that much and its often because of a decided choice to overspend a resource in which case you knew what you were getting into, or you have missmanaged your resources somehow, either by not knowing how to interweave, or maybe just double tapping a spell by accident.
having too many buttons?
we can take passives to add or subtract a few spells, but this is a button heavy spec, and most unholy mains like it that way. we have a simple core rotation that is 3 buttons, from that you have a few short cds, a few medium cds, and a few others that increase from there up to army. which is generally designed as a once per fight CD similar to lust.
if you are looking for simple play, frost is there, and also other classes as well, but the fact is what makes unholy cool is the all the buttons.
too much ramp up and a overly convoluted opener?
again, are you asking unholy to be something it is not? its a setup spec, and its damage model is rot and high pressure, this isn’t a spec that does big chunky hits.
but, the complaint about too many gcds is a misunderstanding of the buttons.
and army ghoul does damage over time, it does it by hitting, but it does damage over time nonetheless.
you can look at gargoyle not as a pet, but as a dot. and this is easy, go to a dummy and press the spell, then see how much damage it did.
so now, let look at our opener:
i press a spell for 250k damage(army combined damage) i press a spell 40k damage(gargoyle damage) (if you have gargoyle)
as i walk in, i press a spell to apply two dots that do damage and enhance the previous two spells and my next spell.(unholy blight)
I press a spell to build a setup while doing 1500 damage(festering strike)
I press a spell to build a setup while doing 1500 damage(festering strike)
I press a spell to do 75k damage(apoc+apoc gouls)
I press a spell to do 800 damage and increase my damage with the spell claw(dark transformation) I press a spell to apply setup and do 1800 damage and enhance my overall damage(unholy assault) (if you have UA)
now, my biggest dots and pressure are going, i have wounds on my target, and i can go right into scourge strike deathcoil interweaving to build my resource flow and keep them from stalling out.
and how long was that? 6 gcds, with my current GCD speed (1.37)that is 8.22 seconds of opening setup, each step did damage on its own. just because it isn’t a strike or isn’t a rune or runic power spender does not mean we aren’t doing anything or getting anything from our keypresses. it just isn’t a big flashy in your face explosion like a TV crit.
our pets being top damage isn’t us fiddle our thumbs, we are hitting the boss with our pet. if you really want, right click your pets claw, and manually control it, i do this, i have claw macro’d into some of my abilities, that way i can hit some stuff to pool his resources, and hit other stuff to activate claw. works well in pvp as i will combine DTClaw with necrotic strike to enhance the hit, particularly if im timing it.
i think what a lot of players are looking for is a melee feel that just has pets around it for style points. unholy has pets to use them as weapons, not decorations. play unholy like a melee/caster/hunter hybrid, not a pure melee.
That’s a fine thing to say to a new player, but after hundreds of days played on DK as Unholy I think I get to justifiably be upset when the playstyle of the spec drastically changes.
It’s also worth noting, if you go Festering Wound/Bursting Spores build, a large portion of your damage is coming from the DK itself as long as your rotation is clean.
Besides, while Unholy isn’t the most complex spec of all time, it does have a bit more to it than most specs. Without the passive pet damage, the spec would really suffer during encounters with a lot of moving.
If all of our damage was baked into wounds/popping them, switching targets would also come at a cost to our performance. Where as with the pets carrying part of that load, you aren’t punished as much.
I can see where people are coming from with the flavor aspect of it - you want to feel like you’re chunking with each button press. But I DO feel like that. Unholy is putting out crazy damage right now and I feel very involved in making that happen.
The only talents in the entire talent tree that interact with your pet’s damage are Army of the Damned, Unholy Blight, and All Will Serve. The rest are all about diseases/festering wounds, which make up a minuscule part of our damage.
soulbinds and leggos are on the way for that, i already have an amp to VP in my soulbind tree, and im waiting on superstrain to go have some dot spreading fun.
if VP was buffed to be our top damage, then the complaint would be that its boring, it does damage, but all you do is refresh it every 15 seconds.
unholy uses strikes and necromancy and diseases to destroy their foes, all three. you can play around and lean on one area more than the others, but you do have to use the whole toolkit if you want to do well.
All will serve, unholy blight, unholy pact, army of the damned, gargoyle, unholy assault. Your haste increases your pet attacks unless they changed it in shadowlands. It’s pretty balanced in talents from attacks and pets.
If your army did nothing you would complain you have pets that hit like a wet noodle.
We’ve been down this road before. Everyone cries about something and they nerf without giving anything real somewhere else.
Changes will be like:
Rune cost for army back to 3 runes. Army skeles don’t scale with haste or mastery and does 50% less damage. Scourge strike and festering damage up 8%
Wait until the raid comes out so you have logs for analysis.
hmm, expanding on that, what if dark transformation is what did it, and added the AoE outbreak function to the ghoul in an identical fashion to the pvp abomb, lasting for the duration of dark transformation.
additionally, it would be cool if when you hit sacrificial pact, anyone hit by the explosion also has VP explode for all its remaining damage. in an AoE splash of course.
so, pull everything into a DnD, DT, then SS/Epi spam, then SacPact once DT wears off, summon new ghoul. outbreak remains for regular dot spreading, but a dot spread with DT would free up a global in GCD spell stacking, and it would be strategic for pvp.