Can somebody who is beta testing please chime in regarding if this is a positive QoL change or a nerf. One would probably hold Unholy Strike until they have appropriate Str buffs and of course in melee range, correct?
So Unholy Strike is four festering wounds flat instead of the auto-attack wound generation of UF? I think it would be nice to give some sort of lower RNG festering wound generation in addition following the original four to round it out…or give us the 20% haste back
Seemingly, it would of been great if they simply added the strike to the current iteration of UF to compromise the gcd problems. Haha or remove some of the runic power/rune requirements of the SL talent…or let us use it from a medium/short range. I know I am probably asking a little too much, but hey I think it is one of the most enjoyable specs in the game imho. I truly hope it ends up feeling good in SL
Now I am liking the Soul Reaper change hope they keep it…
I mean it’s a change, if you like it or not comes down to personal preference. Between the SR changes and Unholy Strike, UH will have less of a static opener.
Unholy Strike instantly providing wounds will lead to an opener something like pre-Army>DT at 1s>Outbreak>Unholy Strike>Apoc>rotation, with both Unholy Strike and Apoc providing solid immediate damage. The opener has been cut down by 3 buttons by removing the double fester and soul reaper. One button that was passive now provides on demand damage. I’d call it a buff for Unholy’s damage profile and flow.
The damage profile looks good, the ability interactions seem better than they have been in 8.x, but in terms of exact numbers, we just don’t know how 9.0 will shake down.
We have a while until launch, and there’s gonna be at least 2 balance patches before Castle Nathria Mythic opens. One before opening week, and one on Mythic launch day.
depends on your point of view, overall i would say its a nerf, however for many players who have trouble getting their initial startup sequence down its a QoL change.
basically, nerf for master players, QoL change for noobs.
It’s on the PTR build, you can try it out for yourself. Honestly I don’t really like it. They should probably make it baseline and add something else to the talent slot. Also Soul Reaper should be baseline for all DK specs and something else added to that slot for Unholy as well.
Meh, not really. This accelerates burst damage w/ cooldowns quite a bit. The Haste duration is the same, unless I’m wrong, and that’s what you really cared about in the cooldown. Providing wounds instantly leads to a better damage profile, and a potentially higher burst output with the spell.
I don’t think the opener is too hard at all, and I don’t think its a big deal if it’s changed or stays the same, but this objectively makes the opener more reliable. You don’t have to worry about changing your rotation on pull if you proc 2 or 3 wounds. It also lets you float at high wound counts w/ frenzy active without overcapping, which can be a niche situation during cooldown use or trinket procs due to RNG, regardless of your skill level.
I think this opens up faster DnD windows as well. Unholy Strike>Dark Transformation>DnD is a fantastic fast damage opener in cleave situations now if you’re just looking to open up hard and fast. With Festermight being removed, I don’t really see the point in mass wound stacking before pops, because it’s not like we can triple our strength like we can right now. Fast damage openers will be a lot more viable in a lot more situations in SL, and I think UH Strike really plays into that in a big way.
Unholy and the game as a whole are changing a lot. If you compare Frenzy+Festermight to Unholy Strike, sure, I think Frenzy+Festermight is better, but we’re losing a lot of the things that make that sustained generation good. We’re not looking to minimize Festering Strike casts during power windows anymore, which is basically the only reason why Frenzy feels good right now.
The free wounds are not the same and that is what you really cared about (since it meant you could Scourge strike for more Festermight stacks in the Unholy Frenzy window without having to reapply wounds with Festering Strike and thus losing out on Festermight applications).
It is definately a nerf on that front, though Festermight is going away.
Not to mention it might not actually change the opener from double Festering Strike → Apoc, as you might want to save Unholy Strike for when the Gargoyle has reached 18 seconds duration so it has maximum damage stacks from Rank 2 when you gain the Haste.
So you’ll want to Apoc at probably 15 seconds in, and Unholy Strike at 17-18 seconds, so that your last 10-12 seconds of Gargoyle, when its doing its most DPS, is where you have stacked all your CDs, meaning you won’t even use Unholy Strike to get a quick Apoc in.
I think we’ll know better how to optimize the opener when the Sims are available and we can play around with the Action list.
I’m fairly sure the Darbiter passive was removed. I was messing around on the PTR and it wasn’t on the spell anymore. Perhaps it was a tooltip error, but I distinctly remember going in thinking Garg would have it, and it wasn’t there.
the problem is that is only a benefit for PVE ST combat.
i can’t use unholy strike to speed up reanimation summoning at a distance, which is a huge nerf to my gameplay in hybrid pvepvp.
and im still on the fence on if the 4 wounds vs wound per weapon swing is better for necrostrike kill windows in arena.(irony being that once again, we have to pick between two talents that we used to have both at the same time, magus and ufrenzy)
those two aspects make it a nerf IMO with the benefit here being that it makes army of the damned attractive because of magus.
i think its great that he devs are listening to feedback, DK often gets special treatment in this area, but they need to think from a multifaceted level first. ST boss DPS is our most borning playstyle, but its also the surface level you master before you get deep into the spec, catering to complaints about that may keep players from feeling forced to go deeper.
the UF to Ustrike change is one that is kinda fuzzy atm in my book because it seems to violate that depth of mastery model.
its also hard to say if any of this holds true, i’ve only been able toplay with it on the PTR against dummies, not in actual pvp.
You’ll keep gaining stacks after the 18 seconds mark, meaning those extra death coil stacks will occur whether you Unholy Strike at 1 second or 18 seconds. But the gargoyle will tick faster at higher stacks for longer if you do it at 18 seconds.
We had this mechanic in Legion and the math said to use Haste effects as late as possible, not as early as possible. So while we won’t know until we can sim it out and mess with APLs in a SL Simcraft build, we can go by what we know from Legion’s mechanic.
I think the crucial bit here has to do with how death coils add damage to gargoyle. The value of any given death coil is determined by the number of gargoyle hits after that death coil. The death coil you use early are worth a lot more than the final few.
Using haste-stuff early gives more of these high-value death coils. Using it late can give more gargoyle strikes which buffs all coils. I think that if the number of strikes that gargoyle uses is unchanged by a given haste buff, you’re better off using it early. Otherwise, using it late is probably better.
This is why I think Army of the Damned should reduce cooldown of Gary too. Unholy Strike is basically a nerf to your Festering Wound generation in the longrun. You only use it for Haste buff even after the Haste value nerfed along with secondary stat DR has been applied. Not to mention it’s another GCD used to set up as Unholy. Y’know, the fundamental problem Unholy has compared to Frost?
I guess the Army of the Damned having Magus is nice that scales with Mastery but come on, why exclude Gary from this? Clearly AotD matches minion style gameplay where UF or Ustrike in this case revolves around Festerweaving which got sledgehammered and overshadowed in Shadowlands.
It’s technically a reduction of 3 GCDs into 1. Since you get the somewhat sameish effect as 2 Festering Strikes + Unholy Frenzy into a single button for a single GCD.
I’ve been steering clear of the Unholy “GCD” debate as I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with a class having to do more setup. The pay off is a bigger burst of damage, and many of the GCDs in the opener are dedicated to direct attacks, meaning it’s not just hitting empty do-nothing buttons, not to mention a good part of it occurs during the countdown phase, meaning pre-combat.
If you prefer to “have at it”, then go Frost and don’t look back, triple obliterate into Breath and go.
See, that’s fine. That’s the remedy of the RNG problem of Festering Strike. It’s actually 2-3 GCDs into 1 since Festering Strike applies 2-4 depending on how lucky you are. The haste buff is just icing on a cake.
This is not to point out the GCD issues of both Frost and Unholy has, rather than to buff Army of the Damned to compete with a raw haste value that UStrike gives or an 8% multiplicative strength value that UP gives. People prefer haste because Haste affects RPPMs and GCDs. A very well rounded stat for Unholy.
There isn’t, if anything, that’s a fundamental of Festerweaving/Festercleaving. If anything, actually, both Frost and Unholy have their own issues of GCD. At least Unholy has a greater payoff right now since Festermight is currently a thing and Bursting Sores is a solid talent. Come Shadowlands with AoE Cap, Unholy Blight will be a choice because of 20% more minion deeps.
I prefer Icecap or anything that helps my Dk to gain strength as much as possible. If any of the multiplicative strength gain is present throughout the expansion, I will take it so. Even though Icecap is probably gonna be garbage in early days of Shadowlands or later on the expansion because of Secondary Stat DR.
