I know this has been brought up before but it’s worth nothing again. This is speaking as your average mythic+ dungeoneer where packs are usually 3-5 enemies a pull. ST it’s a little less ridiculous but it still applies.
I can get on a ret paladin, hit wake of ashes and spam blade of justice, judgement and divine storm and do ridiculous dps. Or go frost and hit pillar and DB and pretty much spam oblit and HB and do ridiculous dps. Or go fury… bla bla bla. Extremely simple rotations with crazy dps even without even using your bigger CD’s.
Then you have unholy… probably the most (or one of the most) complicated and longest set up classes of the game for mediocre dps. Outside of cooldowns it’s even worse.
In comparison - unholy has to pop abom limb, raise abomination, dark transformation, unholy assault, vile contagion, Apocalypse, defile, festering strike to build wounds, soul strike to burst or keep plaguebringer up, epidemic for runic power spending, all with full GCD’s and do it perfectly to even match what rets, frost dk’s, fury, rogues, etc… bring to the table.
Unholy is quickly becoming one of the least played classes and there is good reason for it. I’ve switched to DW frost, even though I love unholy and even with 4 ilevels of lower gear with crit, I still do just as much dps and push 5 less buttons.
Uhdk AoE is far from mediocre, but looking at it in lower keys playing with front-loaded dps specs (ret, havoc etc…) it may seem that way. Unh favors bigger pulls & trash that lives long enough (higher keys). There have been minor adjustments to cutting down the setup, but not enough; and additional CD off of the GCD would probably help.
Frost can suffer in the same respect (mildly alleviated when playing rider which removes DnD from the setup), but if trash is dying too quickly and the tank isn’t chain pulling, frost can quickly fall behind and desync pillar from subsequent pulls as FDK damage outside of CDs is still quite abysmal.
I agree, I just can’t play frost: It’s too dam boring, when compared to unholy. I love chasing the addiction of having the perfect setup and just sky rocketing to the top of the meters. If we could get empowered rune weapon back and DnD off GCD, the rotation would be a million times smoother.
Unholy is only good in keys were you are pulling 3-4 packs at a time. Their aoe dps is rivaled only by a good fire mage. If you pull anything less than that forget about unholy, everything else is better.
Any spec that needs setup suffers in lower keys or casual content because things die too fast. Frost is the same thing, you need to pop Abomb Limb > Rem Winter > Pillar > Reapers Mark > DnD and THEN you start the actual rotation.
You think a pack survives that long against a fury warrior burst in a +2? lmao
UH is fine afaik, you are just not doing the content it actually shines on.
This is what Unholy and Frost fundamentally, design wise, misses the point. “Doing the content it shines on” is the problem.
If encounter = Single Target and you’re specc’d into AOE talents, then you’re going to be not as effective.
If encounter = AOE and you’re specc’d ST talents, then you’re going to not be as effective.
Between those two points should be some nuance that comes with talent choices being interesting and rotations not being held back by weird synergies that are outdated with what’s being asked of player at the current content requirement, Class flavor etc.
Truth is Unholy requires too much setup just in general use to feel impactful in most encounters and has a bunch of GCD and Rune / RP dead zones. Frost suffers from a similar issue. Hero talents shouldn’t be the crutch patch that they are for specs that are just out of step with the current version of the game.
What would be nice is if DND worked passively / actively with disease placement. If 3 or more enemies have diseases on them, DnD becomes active on those enemies. You can make the effectiveness of that increase based on enemy density in range with diseases on and cap it at like 8 enemies. That way we’re not chasing tanks who scuttle around with pulled groups all the time. Make Defile baseline, make it a zone group / enemy buff debuff that can refresh diseases on enemies or flare up and cause aoe damage in a burst if DnD is on enemies.
Or drop Defile all together, bring back Desecration, make it the DK equivalent to consecration and all that entails, use class skill, creates desecrated ground. Targets in Desecrated ground move X amount slower, take y amount of damage from certain skills or diseases, again so we’re not chasing mobs around and trying to drop this skill on them. Make it synergize with all three specs as a class specific skill and add talents in the different trees to tweak how it plays with the different specs.
Though usually you want to be hyper effective at the content you are aiming at. If you are running into a fight that requires only ST there’s not much room for nuance there. Granted, now that M+ has both fort and tyranical on +10 it opens some room for more nuance in build expression, but at the end of the day something has to give in favour of another.
It baffles me that so far it hasn’t been made baseline after all this time.
Unholy having setup is a huge part of why I enjoy it. I’ve never enjoyed ret or havoc because of this.
If anything it speaks volumes to how under tuned lower end content is that people can blast through it so easily. It’s not fun playing setup specs or casters at the lower end.
It’s okay to enjoy complexity, but over engineered, or in this case, poorly designed specs that require a bunch of steps to get off the ground doesn’t mean they’re good. You can like doing something artificially difficult because you like the challenge of “beating your head against a wall” doesn’t mean it’s good design. And that’s kind of what the discussion has been about. The game has evolved as for what it asks of the player in major encounters with a host of mechanics that scale at difficulties. You can’t have continue to have class builds or mechanics that require as much attention during a fight as does the fight itself. So in M+ content this is less of an issue, there it’s more like, the performance of a class is so dependent on the way the class is designed and less the player, which is bad and needs to be addressed.
I don’t think there’s any big issues right now. Vile contagion helps tremendously, defile is on a 15 second CD and it stays on you for 4 seconds after you leave it, and rider can proc dnd.
In other content you can just play clawing and get out more direct damage. I think a lot of people just don’t like UH and would be happier with something else. I have no interest in being a ret paladin or I’d play ret.
Classes change over time and if you no longer enjoy it then that’s okay.
I mean that’s a fair take, of course. I just fundamentally disagree with Unholy and Frost being fine in their current iteration. I think they need to be more active, reactive and less setup intensive with a greater margin for error in the rotation.
I never liked this idea of having to fight my class mechanics along with raid encounter mechanics and that feeling goes all the way back to vanilla for me.
I think his point isn’t that it should mirror Ret 1 for 1, the reactive design ret has feels good, so if they can replicate that feeling for Unholy then it would be preferred, by him. That says nothing about removing any perceived uniqueness of a particular playstyle. The spec isn’t smooth, it’s janky as hell.
The majority of the community agrees about this. I can promise you, the strengths and weaknesses Unholy has are better mitigated and achieved by other classes. So why not fix the overall feel of the playstyle to make it more in line with reasonable player observations and feedback?
We should not do it because? Outside of the obvious engineering task it would take, there’s no good reason not to clean up the life cycle design missteps DK’s have in their kits, other than people shvitzing about keeping classes the same every expansion because they never desire change or improvement.