Unholy Rework is Getting Convoluted

Classes Death Knight
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Abilities Lack Identity

In 12.0, every Unholy reworked ability does a bit of everything, skills have no defining identity, diluting the clarity of each skill. Festering Strike interacts with Plagues, Scourge Strike also interacts with Plagues. Scourge Strike also summon Ghouls, Sudden Doom also summon Ghouls. Both Plagues are so similar, they might as well be merged.

Huge Ramp-Up

The recent patch adding Combo Skill and Soul Reaper created a rats-nest of moving parts worse than that of 11.0 Unholy.

The gameplay mechanics had a good concept when the Alpha first started; but the new update cause the startup sequence to be 8+ GCDs long. And after 8 GCDs, Scourge Strike still can’t even chain yet.

Outbreak > Army/Abom > Dark Transform > Festering Strike > Festering Scythe > Putrefy > Soul Reaper > Death Coil/Epidemic > Scourge Strike (1 target) > Scourge Strike (2 targets) > Scourge Strike (3 targets)

Frost rework was so much cleaner, it is snappy, being able to just start doing damage in ST and AoE without a big ramp. Unholy needs to replicate similar on-demand damage.

Improvement Ideas

Festering Scythe - Identity: Festers Plagues, directs Dread Plague:

  • Festering Scythe replaces Outbreak and Festering Strike baseline
  • Festering Scythe is an empowered ability - charging takes it from melee range to X yards frontal
  • Inflicts Plagues on enemies hit, or refreshes duration on targets already inflicted with Plagues
  • At Rank I, melee single-target
  • At Rank II+, allows Scourge Strike to chain to 5 targets for Ys + X yards frontal
  • At Rank III, summons a second scythe that inflicts your target within 30 yards with Dread Plague
  • (Remove Plaguebringer - so that players won’t try to delay the free FS proc by Putrefy (see below))
  • (Remove combo skill)

Scourge Strike - Identity: Summon Ghouls:

  • XX% chance to Summon Ghoul baseline
  • Every X seconds, the next Scourge Strike is guaranteed to summon a Ghoul (to ensure there is always something to Putrefy)
  • Change Forbidden Knowledge
  • (No longer cause Plagues to erupt, to focus on the summoning identity)
  • (No longer needs 4 GCDs to ramp in AoE, auto 5 targets after Rank II+ Festering Scythe)

Putrefy:

  • Two charges
  • Damage needs to take into account ghouls remaining duration
  • Chance for the next Festering Scythe to cost no runes
  • Bring back Blightburst as the free Festering Scythe will now refresh the Plague duration
  • (No longer resets the CD on Soul Reaper)

Sudden Doom

  • Reduces Putrefy CD
  • (No longer summon Ghouls)
  • Number of procs needs to scale with Haste, otherwise Unholy’s will always get outscaled due to static tick rate of Dread Plague

Move all Soul Reaper damage back into baseline skills so there is not a 8+ GCD ramp.

Remove Soul Reaper again or merge it with an existing skill and make it a Capstone, such as:

Soul Reaper:

  • During Dark Transform, or when the target is below 35% health, your Death Strike becomes Soul Reaper.
  • A strike that siphons a Soul Fragment of the target to deal X Shadow damage and heals you for XX% of the damage dealt + 20% of all damage taken in the last 5 sec
  • (Shadowmourne) When you have acquired X Soul Fragments you will unleash Shadow Bane, dealing X Shadow damage.
  • Consuming Sudden Doom with Soul Reaper grants you 2 Soul Fragments

With the above changes, the ramp sequence would be more in-line with other classes. ST ramp would be much cleaner:

Festering Scythe (Rank III) > Army/Gargoyle > Dark Transform > Putrefy > Festering Scythe (Rank I) > Scourge Strike > .. Death Strike/Soul Reaper

AoE ramp would also be much cleaner:

Festering Scythe (Rank III) > Army/Abom > Dark Transform > Putrefy > Festering Scythe (Rank II) > Scourge Strike > .. Epidemic

Miscellaneous

Minions attacks have a X% chance to cause Plagues to erupt.

Dread Plague and Virulent Plague: Either combine them into one, or give each one its own flavor.

Wish

Control Undead functions similarly to Tame Beast.

Center Capstone - Raise Dead additionally summons the Undead you have under your control. (Marrowgar, Frost Wyrm, Skeletal Healer, etc)

Necrotic Wounds needs to have a vast increase in uptime and absorb percentage. Right now, it has a 25-35% uptime at 16% damage absorption.

1 Like
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I agree that this direction just isnt it. I didnt like wounds, but this is worse. Just give wounds back at this point and up their damage so they are meaningful.

3 Likes
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All very good ideas that make improvements over the current direction. :+1:

2 Likes
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this just looks like a normal spec?? not everything needs to be a brainless 2 button rotation

4 Likes
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I do think they’ve got the right idea with a lot of the core mechanics, but I agree it feels like things are starting to blend together, in terms of functionality. There’s also not really distinct disease and minion builds / gameplay styles. The core elements that I think they have right, and would want to keep are:

  • Lesser Ghouls - thematically great, target swappable, lots of interesting gameplay that could exist with them
  • Dread Plague - good for priority and single target damage, and having Sudden Doom proc off it lets them balance it properly
  • Putrefy - I worry this could get too similar to Implosion, but in principle I think it’s a fine direction

Now for some suggestions:

  • Have Festering Strike summon one Lesser Ghoul directly and reduce the rune cost one - this doesn’t need to be a two step process involving Scourge Strike. Alternatively, keep it two runes and two Lesser Ghouls, but give it a cooldown
  • Adapt the now-defunct imp energy system from Demonology and use it for Lesser Ghouls. Each Lesser Ghoul spawns with X number of attack charges and a very long passive duration. The Lesser Ghoul despawns when all charges are consumed, the timer is up, or it is consumed by Putrefy
  • Putrefy already has two damage components baseline - single target and AOE. Make the single target component a function of the number of charges it has remaining. This way it doesn’t matter if you pop Putrefy with full charges or only one charge remaining - the total single target damage will be the same or similar either way
  • Have Festering Scythe replace Festering Strike completely during Dark Transformation. In addition to the AOE damage, have it summon 2-3 Lesser Ghouls at once, to mirror the Reanimation talent. Give it a cooldown so you can only press it a maximum of twice during Dark Transformation. Remove the DoT hasting component from Festering Scythe
  • Completely remove the ramping aspect of Clawing Shadows. Just let Scourge Strike chain as if you had 4 stacks right away. The ramping just feels bad in too many content types, where mobs die fast
  • Grant Blightburst (Putrefy) the DoT hasting component of Festering Scythe. This will discourage players from hitting Putrefy twice in a row, to maximize uptime on your DoT hasting, except in cases where mobs will die soon
  • Remove the disease extension component of Blightburst (Putrefy) and move it back to Epidemic, Death Coil, or Death Strike. Our Runic Power spenders don’t have enough interactions right now, while other spells have too many
3 Likes
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I like my boring three button rotation, thank you.

1 Like
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I don’t necessarily agree that it’s convoluted, but I see where you’re coming from and they can (and probably will) make improvements.

I think most of the skill effects fit though:
FS being a setup button makes sense.
I like that SS erupts plagues; it feels pretty on brand.
I like the CDR from Sudden Doom.
On the fence still regarding the overall design of Putrefy & Soul Reaper, but I also don’t think they’re done with them yet.

I agree that SS and SD both summoning ghouls results in a bit of mixed messaging. On live, summoning a magus with Doomed Bidding feels good and I think they should’ve stuck with that. That would also make the Forbidden Knowledge window more interesting.

I’d be happy with just these changes to FS.

I don’t think this is that bad…
Outbreak is applied as you’re running in anyway.
DT is off the GCD now.
So it boils down to apply diseases from range, push out all CDs in one GCD, and double fester before going into the main rotation.

As I said, they can certainly make improvements to the design of FS/Fsc & Putrefy/SR, but we’ve had worse openers in the past.

2 Likes
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Putrefy is a bad ability even design wise it’s literally the kind of thing they claim they want to remove from the game.

I actually feel like S3 TWW is much better than what they’ve done on Midnight alpha. It feels like they somehow made it more complicated after it was much simpler in S3

4 Likes
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Don’t forget all the death coils you need to cast for your gargoyle/to avoid overcapping rp.

Nuclear launch detected.

1 Like
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I think they should move Soul Reaper into the garbage

4 Likes
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I can see why Blizzard wants to stick with Putrefy. After playing with Felspike on Legion Remix, the explosion is probably the most impactful skill I’ve pressed in a while. As long as they can solve all the problems with Putrefy as we discussed, Putrefy can be quite interesting. Give Felspike a try on Legion Remix, it might change your mind on Putrefy.

2 Likes
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Felspike has a 30 yard range and, for me at least, currently hits for >200m damage. Somehow I don’t think Putrefy’s gonna do that.

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Putrefy can literally just be a shadow detonation on your main target if it has a disease. The issue I have with it is the ghouls, why do they even exist to just clutter the screen when you dont actually need them for putrefy.

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I can get behind plague explosion. That would solve all the problems of the current Putrefy. Plague explosion empowering Scourge Strike to summon ghouls wouldn’t be bad. But having a ghoul explode into bits adds more flavor.

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Selfishly speaking, I enjoy more complicated interactions and think there should still be room for some specs to be more complicated than others (and Frost is already Frost), so this isn’t the worst for me and I enjoy the focus on visual identity the rework gives.

I just would like one of the classes I enjoy to remain on the more challenging-to-optimize side. Gives me something to work on.

4 Likes
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The problem with this type of complexity is that the ramp is 7+ GCDs long. This is a major issue with some content.

By the time Unholy pushes the fourth GCD, there is barely 500 AP of damage, Frost already got out close to 1000 AP of damage.

1 Like
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If people want flavor with the ghouls exploding then why even bother with putrefy at all? Just have the lesser ghouls leap and explode on the target automatically. If their attacks are going to be crap damage like it sounds like… why bother with it?

Just seems like unnecessary design to prolong you getting up and going.

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It’s quite the opposite really, Putrefy gives you an incentive to summon your minions, without it they are just passive damage that could be swapped out for a real dot with no gameplay interactions changing. Interactions with your pets is the only thing that makes them real instead of just background noise.

The problem with TWW is the class is covered in complexity that you completely ignore, it creates a steep climb for new players while presenting something closer to an auto-battler to those who have copy and pasted their build from a guide. It’s complexity for complexity’s sake, not to fulfill any sort of gameplay interaction.

While I do think the new soul reaper is a serious issue, and tying it’s CD to putrefy just creates more issues, I understand that isn’t an issue with putrefy, it’s an issue with soul reaper.

More and more I get the impression that a certain number of players want to just press one button and have the class preform for them, without actually taking the dps loss from using the blizzard included one button rotation. No one is entitled to perfect play.

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And unintuitive complexity that is poorly communicated. And is designed in such a way that to properly execute you need a weak aura tracking all the disparate parts to tell you the best usage timing, which Ion explicitly said they don’t want to do. Maybe someone should run a memo down to the Unholy team.

I think they have a good idea and foundation. But they don’t know how to fine tune it and are just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.

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Aside from soul reaper (which I think should be deleted or reworked), the only reason one might want a weak aura is to maximize the number of lesser ghoul swings you get. Something which might not be a real issue when the damage numbers come in, but could still be resolved with extra tuning. Blizzard has shown us with other talents they can add to the duration of existing pets, so hypothetically they could just add the extra ghoul life onto your most recent ghoul and you wouldn’t suffer a DPS loss even with horrible timing.

I agree that it’s a good idea and foundation, but I would argue that Alpha is actually the correct time to throw things at the wall and see what sticks. Alpha generally means the product is testable but not “feature complete” while Beta is “feature complete” but not debugged or balanced. Normally fine tuning will happen during Beta, especially in the last few weeks of Beta.

1 Like