Unholy: Spec Identity issues and possible solutions (Long)

Classes Death Knight
1

Unholy DK is in a weird place right now, our damage profile feels all wrong, with a big initial spike, and then pitiful sustain damage. Even though we are capable of good performance in raid encounters the damage breakdown between us and our pets still feels way off. Not to mention we are really struggling in PvP, especially in what has traditionally been our niche: sustain and drain.

I believe there are 3 primary issues:

  1. Low Personal damage/High Pet damage,
  2. Low sustain damage/High spike damage,
  3. Low self healing.

When combined these issues create an unholy death knight that plays in an unexpected and redundant style, leaving it’s previous rot melee niche unfilled in favor of competing (and poorly) over an already over populated spike damage based play style.

-1: Pets are Dom, you are Sub
Pets are and always have been an important part of unholy and our toolkit, I am not advocating for the removal of pets. However, many of our current problems are based around our pets and how much of our damage they are responsible for. With all of our cooldowns either summoning of buffing pets our class has devolved into stacking as many pets and pet buffs as possible and basically letting them do all the work for you. Because of the power of this initial spike pets are dealing around 50% of our damage on a raid boss. With this much of our damage baked into our pets, the consequences of losing a pet, or not correctly timing your pets can be devastating. I’ve lost as much as 2/3 (about 10k dps) of my total opener spike dps (about 15k) because of an accidental Timmy dismiss. The fight was progression yet I felt so horrible about that one button I just wanted the whole raid to wipe so I actually had a chance to good dps on the rest of the 5+ minute fight. Which brings me to my next point:

-2: Rotation feels worthless
Unholy has a (relatively) complex rotation, yet with so much of our damage attached to our pet spike opener you can’t actually tell the difference between doing your rotation well, and constantly fumbling (over-capping runes and/or runic power, not having festering wounds up ect). There is an element of cooldown recovery built into our abilities, but it’s usually redundant with either boss specific timings or waiting for other cooldowns (like unholy blight). The only rotational ability that seems to reflect my performance is soul reaper, giving me noticeably better dps when I execute it properly, and punishing my dps for poor execution and missed opportunities. chefs kiss.

-3: PvP where art thee?
In PvP the problem is worse. The unholy deathknight kit is designed with high sustain damage and high self healing in mind. Currently we have neither. The 5-7 GCD’s we need to initiate our spike damage is impractical, and getting all that damage countered by a single frost nova is a liability. Our cooldown game play is inherently second rate to that of a paladin or a warrior, even if our numbers were higher (which they are not) as direct in your face damage will always be superior to longer windup, slower delivery, and more easily mitigated/telegraphed pet based spike. Traditionally this wouldn’t be a problem, as traditionally unholy deathknights have been the strongest melee after all offensive cooldowns are inactive. Thus we more focus on disruption and defensive cooldowns to mitigate our opponents spike and then punish them in the proceeding sustain. However, even with our unique and niche defining necrotic strike mechanic we aren’t able to out pressure our opposition (significant gear advantage notwithstanding). It goes from bad to worse, as we aren’t able to heal through their pressure either. We have always operated on good self healing, be it Death Strike, Conversion, Death Siphon or something new entirely. The form it takes is irrelevant, what matters is we need to be able to heal through the damage of someone we are locked in a 1v1 with, especially if we are also using our vast array of disruption abilities to mitigate their damage. Death strike currently fails spectacularly at this task even when you execute it correctly.

To help resolve the above issues and get unholy back on track I recommend the follow changes:

TALENTS:
A: Remove Cooldown and Virulent plague application from Unholy Blight:

  • This would help Flattens dps graph by decrease delta between spike window and sustain window
  • Managing Debuffs is more thematic to unholy than managing cooldowns
  • Stacking mechanism rewards players who refresh before it falls off
  • Uncaps potential cooldown reduction of Apoc and Dark transformation, no longer requiring them to wait on unholy blight’s 45 second CD.

B: Remove Strength buff from Unholy Pact but decrease dark transformation CD slightly

  • 5% strength is Unnecessary buff to cooldown window period
  • Talent decreases dark transformation CD to compensate for strength loss during cd
  • Disconnects Dark Transformation from Apocalypse, so (legendary notwithstanding) we don’t have to always use them at the same time for max damage from each.

C: Decrease power of All will serve.

  • Completely passive and has no interaction
  • Clawing shadows requires you to preform your rotation while doing mechanics to maximize it’s damage, should be optimal choice for single target

D: Change Necrotic strike to a baseline ability instead of a PvP talent

  • Iconic ability, there is a certain expectation to have it
  • Doesn’t have to be “competitively” balanced with other throughput PvP talents (eg auras), can be as weak or strong as it needs to be to compete with scourge strike/clawing shadows instead.
  • Many PvE encounters feature healing mechanics where clever unholy dks can take advantage of the throughput gain from necro over scourge.
  • Change to Flat absorb amount, scaling with attack power for more transparency and therefore easier balancing

NUMBERS:
Decrease damage pets by about 50%, Increase all other damage by about 50%

  • Instead of being 50%:50% it’s more 75%:25% with you dealing the 75%
  • More Agency in the hands of the player
  • More of overall damage in runs based on rotational up time
  • Punishes over capping resources directly
  • Room to recover from a bad opener

Remove dated 50% Deathstrike PvP nerf

  • Return primary defensive mechanism to functionality
  • Help most where DKs are struggling (solo play and 2v2, especially as double dps)
  • Return Focus to sustain damage and rot comps as it’s still a player expectation that unholy is THE rot melee.

Increase all Damage by X% (5%? 10%?)

  • I suspect that reducing the synergy between pet cooldowns will lower overall dps, even with unholy blight’s cooldown removed, so increase dps here to bring spec back up to raid viable.
3 Likes
2

problem is the team would have to buff this every patch if 5% from DT was removed. I had 700 some odd strength at the start of the expac, now over 1400. Next tier I expect a similar jump. Meaning if the team implemented your change it would be a direct nerf now, scaling up as time goes on and more strength is acquired on gear.

Base values on scourge strike,festering and coil need to come up. Epidemic and death strike need to be added to the very short list of abilities that reduce the CD on DT (as valuable in pvp as it is in pve)

5% str on DT isn’t an issue, my rogue and Palladian trees are loaded with far stronger multipliers. Everything else you nailed.

2 Likes
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I think you’ve got a fair point here, as a raw damage buff and a strength buff do scale slightly differently, it would probably be best to keep the str buff, or possibly make it just an always on passive instead of tying it to dark transformation.

I just want to encourage more situations where you can dark transformation or apocalypse while the other is still on cooldown and not feel like you are wasting damage potential by desyncing them, if the unholy blight change alone does this then I’m happy.

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Ok, except Emni allows for them to be used together pretty fluidly. I’d say given the weakness of APOC make them both baseline same cd time, being 1 min.

Not sure that de sync is as bad as people claim on paper with the cd resetting mechanics of both. Holding seems more a loss depending on the situation than using on cd. It’s hard to get an accurate read on that though because of the rate of decay for Unholy dps outside of cd’s being so extreme. I go from 20k on open with all cd’s to 3.5 with no cd’s, and I’ve hit for over 30 in aoe with all cds vs 5-6k no cd’s just epi spam. Need a lot of adds for that too.

Our extra long global needs to go. The dev team needs to stop catering the class to people that can’t manage runes which is the entire reason that 1.5 exists; to help slow down the rotation to make it harder to get dead spots in it. Instead of just scaling rune regen to work better with haste. This works to gate our damage and keep both specs somewhat idiot proof which is a fundamental mistake.

Also, ease of execution isn’t a reason for low damage, you never said this but it’s a common trope from people that have never played Ret or WW or Sub/Assassination before. Those specs are so easy a drunk 3 year old could parse on them, or be a nightmare in pvp with little to no real setup to speak of. Not to mention the overly toxic playstyle associated with rogues atm. Literally idiot proof stealth, and not only do they not suffer the class gets buffs. Sub only gets adjusted when it’s able to one shot a whole 3’s team, if it can one shot 1-2 it’s fine.

1 Like
5

All of these issues are my personal gripes against the pet damage they added for mastery and nerfs for it. Overall reducing our own Shadow Damage. :C

But my personal problem with Unholy stems from


Necrotic Strike still does not apply Death’s Due.
Necrotic Strike still does not work with Convocation of the Dead.
Convocation of the Dead does not work on mobs dying with proportionate amount of wounds.
Why is Pestilence a talent competing against Defile?
WHY IS GARY NOT BASELINE YET!?

And yea, I get it. Pets do most of our damage profile. Yadaa yadaa yadaa. In fact, I think our pet damage build is solid. It’s our other personal damage areas need to be buffed. Ebon Fever needs to be replaced with something more interesting and bring back
 hmm
 there are two words that I can think of that can also synergize with current iteration of Unholy Blight like back in WoD times



 wait for it


BRING BACK NECROTIC PLAGUE!!!!!

Honorable mention for DS buff too for pvp. >:/

5 Likes
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I agree, it really feels like Unholy has lost a lot of the spec identity that I used to love about it.

Personally, I’d like to see an even more major rework and remove Festering Wounds. I’ve hated that mechanic ever since it was implemented. A very similar playstyle could be created by making Festering Strike apply a high damage, 6-second bleed and SS/CS then causing Virulant Plague to erupt on those targets. The VP erupt damage would need to be made single target and deal the same amount of damage that wounds do. If done right we’d have nearly the same rotation/priority system as is current, but it would allow FS to do more damage than SS/CS and we’d no longer have to manage wound stacks. It’s always felt off to me that our 2-rune attack does less damage than our 1-rune one. All the wounds related talents would have to be changed to work with the new system, but that wouldn’t be hard to design.

Also, doesn’t AMS currently have a -50% modifier in PvP just like DS? I haven’t tested it personally but it says it in the addon I have. With casters being able to do 30k+ damage in a couple of globals I don’t see why AMS should have a PvP nerf modifier if that’s the case.

2 Likes
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I agree, but would like to see it implemented baseline. Unholy’s always been the dot/rot/pet spec, but the first two are sorely lacking. I’ve gotten good damage out of stacking the VP conduit with EF in M+ (over 1.5 mill on plague alone) but it’s so so boring. I’d play it if it were far and away the best build for my stat budget but it isn’t thank god.

The question is, how to implement it baseline? I’d like to see it attached to Scourge/Necrotic Strike or Festering Strike or maybe Epidemic/Death coil would be better. Perhaps having it on Outbreak with Runic power or spender usage adding a stack.

One issue with it though, it’s power was locked behind the max stack and holding onto that for as long as you could with proper Festering Strike management. We don’t have the ‘extend dot time’ portion on Festering anymore. Getting the time extension on the max stack would be really important for making the spell viable, sort of the same deal as Agony for Warlocks.

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Not trying to be cynical whatsoever, but I honestly think Blizzard would be more likely to rework DKs if everyone just stopped playing them.

There’s no point mucking about with Unholy because Affliction exists, like anything you want for Unholy, just go Affliction.
You wanna controls pets? There’s something better.
You want consistent rot damage? There’s something better.
Do you not want to be balanced around a 10 minute cooldown? There’s something better.
Wanna be able to raid and do arena on the same spec? There’s something better.
Wanna be able to just pvp? There’s something better.

You either play what you want and get arbitrarily restricted or you don’t play what you want and skip over the restrictions. It’s not just bad balance, it’s bad design.

6 Likes
9

Now that there are going to be massive catch up for legendary items
time to go to my rogue in 9.1. Or maybe my Spriest.

Always nice to have a WOW Royalty class (rogue warrior druid mage hpal or priest) in the back for when things like this happen.

I agree with what you said about not playing it, that’s how we got the S2 BFA changes.

That being said we shouldn’t cease productive posts like Tsaleras.

10

Thumbs up for the post.

Personally, I dislike pets. Wish for an option to not have a pet and then get a %bonus if you don’t have it, like the mm hunter. I get it, would have to redo the entire spec, doesn’t mean I like my retarded pet.

1 Like
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To be fair, the way the Affliction is designed right now. DoTs are absolutely useless. Agony, Corruption, Unstable Affliction, even SOUL ROT are used as not for DoT Damage but a fuel to a flame that’s an abomination of an ability called Malefic Rapture.


 and they’re going to nerf its damage by a significant amount and half the bonus of its conduit. To compensate for this, they increase the damage done with agony by 20%
 while Destruction is going to be destroying things with Chaos Bolt. :joy:

The most appropriate class for us to compare to in terms of rot would be Shadow Priests. Not Affliction Warlocks. Spriests do more DoT damage than any of the rot themed classes thanks to Devouring Plague’s return.

1 Like
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Why it’s my bfa boost and on deck for 9.1 as well. The damage and utility kit are insane.

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I would love to see a change like this. I can also think of a version where it’s still festering wounds, but just every 3 seconds 1 wound automatically bursts instead of expiring and having them all just fall off. Both of these types of game play remind me of something though


Ahh yes, that’s what it was!

That’s Plan B! this post is Plan A! But yes I 100% feel you.
(although to be fair I’ve already stopped playing my deathknight in PvP entirely, I only log on to raid dps and then log out when raid is over)

1 Like
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Good post. Necrotic strike and raise abomb should both be baseline abilities and army of the dead needs to go for our rotation to actually do damage.

Raise abomb is thematically better in pve anyways for people that care about that. You can actually see it. Sweeten the pot and let it respond to pet attack and movepetto commands and tada you have a more fun spec in pve and pvp

2 Likes
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Actually, Army of the Dead is one of my biggest damage profiles for M+. AotD, Apoc, DT, UB, IQD, Pot allows me to nuke a mob in a dungeon for over 15k+ dps. AotD is a very powerful cooldown that I personally should use more of.

It does feel bad that you can’t even use AotD in arenas though and you have Buttons taking up your PvP Talent slot to remedy that. I am not sure if Buttons would be able to outdamage 8 ghouls and a mage.

1 Like
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the thing though is that our regualar spells are balanced around the damage we do with army. so if you can do 15K currently with army, then you should still be able to do 15k without army, but since our main spells would be buffed, we would be able to do damage all the time, instead of just when we have army. so your main spells could so like 12k, and abomb could do 3k, bringing you back to 15k, but now you aren’t worthless without your cds since your main spells still do 12k.

1 Like
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Think you misunderstood. Our rotation without army is weak because of the power tied to army.

Army goes away our buttons get stronger

1 Like
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In what way, though?

I’m all for having the abomination with a significantly shorter cd, but how would they buff us to compensate? Faster attack speed? Just harder hits overall? Or maybe just buff everything else like dots scaling with haste again and scourge strike not relying on wounds to do good damage on its own?

Again, I’m all for what you’re saying, but I kind of worry about what Blizzard would do with that. It could be a huge benefit to the pvp to have our own damage outside of the minions being better even when the minions are being ccd when a cd is used.

1 Like
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From fair statements like these, it kinda leave me a bit more confused.

AotD to me is as powerful as Lay on Hands for Paladins. I recall that the ability was bonkers enough that it’s frowned upon when you use it during duels. But now that the ability is streamlined, received many damage nerfs and now buffed thanks to Mastery, AotD is in a very solid state in terms of PvE content.

Adding Buttons to baseline would add yet another GCD into Unholy’s toolkit which is the last thing Unholy needs right now.

Plus I don’t think Unholy is black and white in terms of damage dealing on cooldown like Fire Mage’s Combustion or Frost Dk’s Pillar of Frost. I think that’s how every DPS cooldowns work.

I’m assuming Inemia, you wish to reduce the damage effectiveness of AotD for more personal damage?
I’m assuming Amatox, you wish to bring Buttons baseline, cutting AotD AND more personal damage?
Like Xeno, I’m on board for them too and I also do share his concerns. It’s the problem Demo Locks are suffering in PvP since Tyrant is a bulk of their damage countered by freezing it in terms of minion damage that it is right now anyways. xD

1 Like
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it just replaces army, and it frees up a GCD. abomb applies VP. so you can drop it as you run in to both summon your DPS cd and apply VP.