Core & Unholy talent revamp - Alpha

Classes Death Knight
1

Latest news from Alpha build.

So far all these seem like steps in the right direction. Of course we need to see what all the new talents will be like still.

Secondly, there are a few points which they’ve mentioned in previous communications, that don’t seem to have been acted upon.

This relates to Festermight, wound mechanics becoming and D&D mechanics.

And yes my frosty and bloody brethren, I’m hoping you’ll get some attention too.

But making absolutely fundamental things baseline and getting read of weak talents is definitely a thing that needed doing.

2

hell its about time

but the notion of getting the class wide rework we need seems slimmer and slimmer AGAIN.

WW monk has one half of abad expac and it’s fast track to the ooperation room to fix a bruised knee, while we have been standing with literal malignant growths from a LEGIOn based class with NO changes, and we will keep sitting in that waiting room while other VIP’s gets fast tracked to reworks.

YEEEAAAAH FEESL SO GOOD

3

There are many issues i have whit the new talent tree.

First row, we are still forced to spend 1 extra talent point to gain access to all the talent paths in the middle row, this being, Improved Festering Strike, Runic Mastery standing in our way for Apocalypse.

Second row is allot better, but there are still to many useless things gate keeping, or still exist as a passive that should be removed.

Ruptured Viscera, this talent passive is just bad, and it will be even worse whit Raise Abomination, next is Bursting Soars, why is it located there why are we forced to pick more wound focused passives, i would rather move it up to the end row and make it a choice nod whit Superstrain, and as for Pestilence, do we really need this passive? can’t we just have something more interesting than hey here you have a 10% chance to generate Wounds… Yawn very boring.

Last row still suffers from the problem of having way to many 2 point talent passives, do we really need Festermight, to have 2 talent point requirement, the same goes for Unholy Aura, it’s boring, it’s uninteresting, and makes me feel like i’m wasting my time.

I had also hoped that we would see more Diseases added in as options to our talent tree, that being Ebon Plague, Necrotic Plague.

Also Blizzard should have made a choice nod for Apocalypse, were you pick between Raising Ghouls, or applying Crypt Fever to boost Disease damage.

Another thing, but this is more so a me thing, i would have loved to see Raise Sludge Belcher added back, so we have the option to replace our base line Ghoul for Bob the Abom, i miss hem very much.

That also brings me to the Undead part, we only got Abom back but i feel we lack more unique Undead models to raise, whit War Within we should have gotten Nerubians, and Crypt Lord to Raise and fight for us, i feel like this makes allot of sense as we are practically going around killing them left and right.

4

I’ve been really hoping that the War Within changes will be enough for me to be able to use my Unholy DK as my main once again, I’ve found the cooldown heavyness of the Dragonflight version to be off putting and felt it had lost the “smootheness” of the Shadowlands variant. So that fact that Empower Rune Weapon has gone from the class tree is a relief.

The fact that it has been “replaced” by Raise Abomination opens up a whole new set of uncomfortableness for me with regards to the spec. That it replaces on of our existing cooldowns rather than being yet additional cooldown to press is good thing, the fact the cooldown it replaces is Army of the Dead… not so much.

The main issue comes back to class fantasy. To me Army of the Dead IS the class fantasy, a relentless stream of undead to overwhelm our enemies - the quintessential Unholy Death Knight is one who strides towards his enemies whilst waves of ghouls, geists and skeletons swarm past him to soften them up.

It’s almost as if the Demonology Warlock and Unholy Death Knight’s styles are the wrong way around. Unholy should be the “quantity over quality” pet class (replace wild imps with ghouls, dogs with geists, etc.)

3 Likes
5

absolutely correct, it’s really odd how it seems UH DK is a spec whit Army of Few minions, when our minions are supposed to be disposable, were as for Demo, they are ment to come in few but strong irreplaceable minions.

6

I only just realised that these talents are available for preview on the wowhead talent calculator…

The improvements are marginal… Yes a lot of nonsense went away, and yes there are currently 2 talents missing, but it seems real bloated all of a sudden… Doom… Haha get it? :dotted_line_face:

Swiftly moving on…

I like Menacing Magus, essentially our current tier set being turned into a talent is good.

Raise abomination being a pve talent again sounds like fun, though I’m wondering if there’s going to be too much of a risk of capping wounds on ST when paired with unholy assault

Ruptures Viscera is really bad. First of all, the talent itself is still the same real weak one as before. Secondly and perhaps even more importantly, its location is awful. if we want to do a pure ST raid build we have no choice but to pick it as it’s the fastest way to UA and FM. Should be ideally removed and replaced with something better, or at least swapped around with some other more useful talent.

Doomed Bidding seems like it could be an interesting alternative to Gargoyle. Both require you to spam DC as much as possible but with different result.

Seems like they want to make a more sudden doom/death coil spam build being a viable options, but this very much remains to be seen.

Commander of the dead currently doesn’t say if it empowers the Abomination, seems not to.

The core tree, not sure what to make of it. Again loads of bad talents gone, but a lot talent’s we’ll likely never pick are still there (seriously who plays with Death Pact and Sacrificial Pact? PvPers??). It somehow looks more bloated than before.

Finally it looks like we’re going to end with even more buttons than before! Sure ERW is gone, which in a way makes sense because the 2min cd makes no sense for us UH, but there is a build out there that plays Soul Reaper, Abom Limb, and Raise Abom…

Baaaaaaaaaah anyhow… I’m being very cautious here, they keep reshuffling too many things instead of creating new and exciting ideas.

For reference:

1 Like
7

Army of the Dead vs Raise Abomination should be a choice node. It feels really bad to spend a point on an ability, and then spend another point to change it into the new one.

Also, there are still a lot of 2-point nodes which also just feel kinda bad and weird especially since you need both points to path through them.

And finally, it feels kind of weird that the Unholy Assault path is locked behind either Unholy Blight or Ruptured Viscera, and Bursting Sores is hard locked behind Unholy Blight.

8

as people mentioned in this thread, aswell as my own opinion, Demonology warlocks is just better in all areas, they have strong demons, weak demons, swarmy demons, strong defenses, non convoluted plate spinning to get their show running.
they press a button, a felguard spawns in at your side charging towards your target before the full model can even render, no need to “bore demonic wounds into the target” that you can then interact with to summon a minion that takes 3 to five seconds to complete it’s spawning animation, then WALK to your target to do a BASIC ATTACK…for 3 DAMAGE.

the devs have no idea, no clue, and no care what to really do about Unholy, and Dk as a whole compared to their passion in other classes. im beating a dead a horse but the lightning fast response at the WW rework first thing announced in TWW major information got me questionably mad for a simple video game.

it’s a humiliation ritual at this point, and they know they can get away with treating us like second class customers.

9

The tooltip doesn’t suggest it replaces army currently. I know the pvp talent used to, as far as I know, if it replaces an ability it’s on the tooltip (look at clawing shadows for example).

And yeah that’s what I observed above as well, it’s just very weird placement of the talents

10

Blizzard should remove Ruptured Viscera, and replace it for something pet related sins Ghoulish Frenzy, and Magus are located before it.

In my opinion this could be a good location for Raise Sludge Belcher to be added, maybe it can have a extra effect were it makes Rune of Apocalypse get 2 individual stacks, when it uses it’s spell attack.

11

It says it in the dev notes: https://www.wowhead.com/blue-tracker/topic/eu/the-war-within-alpha-development-notes-508013

If you Ctrl+F for Raise Abomination it says that it replaces Army of the Dead, so it definitely should be a choice node.

12

i think they should be both separate CD we can use, it kinda dosent make sense for us to lose the ability to raise an army of the undead just to trade it for one chunky abom.

13

I disagree, Unholy has a lot of buttons already and I don’t really see a need to add more. If anything I think it could do with removing some, though idk which.

14

well if Blizzard had been smart then they would have taken Dark Transformation/Unholy Blight off the GCD, they also should have swapped Unholy Assault back to Unholy Frenzy whit it also being off the GCD, then we would only have to open up whit army and abom for our CD’s.

15

Ah didn’t stumble upon those… Odd the tooltip is different, I recall the pvp version of the talent specifically mentioning that too. A choice nod would definitely make more sense then.

Would be curious to see how the 2 perform differently number wise. if abom going to be flat better than army on all contexts, then it straight up feels wrong having those 2 talents back to back like that. Having to spec into army just to immediately replace with with abom kind of thing.

Now I’d imagine they’re likely going to be a bit more situational. I can see abom being more useful in dungeons vs army being the standard for raids. Who knows until we see the numbers. Anyhow that should be a choice nod.

Yeah but they never going to do that, they wouldn’t want us to macro so many things together. We’re losing ERW which is off gcd, gargoyle is off gcd which is great. If either apoc or DT come off gcd then everyone will macro them together and treat them as one ability, which is the right thing to do, but they seem very adverse to that.

2 Likes
16

yeah it’s really sad but true what you say, it is an unfortunate thing honestly.

1 Like
17

Or…you know…do away with the vanilla designed combo point system on the enemy (wounds) that was removed from the game for a reason, but for us to have it is fine, because the devs hate DK, and thus design an entire spec around a deeply flawed game mechanic they scrapped 10+ years ago.

Look at Demo warlock
look at BM hunter
they press a button, a beast/demon appears from NOTHING, charges forward while their animations have not even loaded in, and deals big damage immideatly.
or they merely cast their builder abilities, and stack up stacks on themselves, anc once they reach a certain stacks, something happens, a summon, or a minion boost, or abilities that just SUMMONS forth your minions alongside the use of an ability, free of charge.

compared to UH DK, that has to use an RNG amount of festering strikes to set up an apoc use, all the while having to spin triple the amount of plates compared to BM Hunt and Demo lock, i can go on but you all know how UH plays like.

18

yeah i don’t like Festering Wounds ether, but after hearing that the DK class designer being a creep who only lurks, and read posts on DK forum instead of communicating whit us, it makes allot of sense why we are talking to a brick wall about DK changes.

19

a bitter truth that i learned a few years ago, is that there is no assigned class designers.
No DK dev
no Monk Dev
no warlock dev

BUT…the dev(s) that do the class design, one or two, is technically class designers for their favorites, get what i mean? Unoffically they might be rogue or warrior class devs, because thats their babies taht needs the most attention in their Biased eyes.

And if there are favorites, there are hated ones. and boy, do we know that.

i wanted to deny this, denounce it even, but everything makes sense if you really think about it. there are clues on how…clueless…the decisions in our abilities are, the entire focus on rider of the apocalypse horsemen summons riding MAW STEEDS…and not deathsteeds that we tamed ourselves as death knights ever since the dawn of wrath.

THEY DONT HAVE ANY CLUE ABOUT OUR FANTASY OR FEEL. It’s just another job, stick what fits and call it a day, the other classes need their fifth fun redesign since legion, while we ARE effectoively a legion designed class WITHOUT an artifact weapon to prop it up.

2 Likes
20

I wonder if it’s worth using twitter to get some messages across sometimes. Not that I would go ahead and make an account over there just for that, but if anyone does use the platform, might be worth tagging the dev team. Supposedly a lot of them are quite active on twitter.

2 Likes