Feedback: Death Knights

In Development Midnight Beta Test
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This thread is dedicated to leaving feedback on Death Knights in Midnight. Look in this thread and in the Midnight Alpha Development Notes for adjustments and bugfixes made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

Apex Talents

Many Apex Talents are available for playtesting and may be selected using specialization tree points in the final specialization tree node. The current User interface (UI) is temporary for playtesting purposes and will be replaced with a final UI later in development. As with any test cycle, we will be adding more Apex Talents to the test over time and not all will be available with the start of the alpha test.

To help us refine Apex Talents, please consider the following questions as you playtest:

  • How gameplay-impacting, exciting, and fantasy forward is your Apex Talent to you?
  • Are your Apex Talents and new Hero Talents meeting the approachability goals laid out in our Combat for Everyone in Midnight article?
  • Are there cases you would consider not selecting your Apex talent?
  • Does the Apex talent disproportionally favor a particular talent build or Hero Talent tree?

For feedback regarding the changes on making the combat system more approachable for players of all skill levels, leave your feedback in the Combat Approachability feedback thread.

Thank You

We greatly appreciate all your feedback and are very excited for you to test out all the changes in Midnight!

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Blood

Going into Midnight we had a few pain points with Blood Death Knights that we are looking to address. On initial pull, Blood has an incredibly long ramp up time to both get their defensives rolling but also their offensive power. The main culprit is due to how we turned Boneshield into a damage throughput resource because of the existence of Shattering Bone and Insatiable Blade. Going into Midnight we have removed Shattering Bone and re-distributed its power into Blood’s baseline damage abilities for a more consistent throughput that doesn’t require all the hoops to jump through to start dealing damage. On the topic of Boneshield, we’ve also reduced the number of abilities that deduct from it such as Tombstone and Bonestorm. As a tank you have a lot of things to consider in your role and adding what was essentially a third resource to spend felt like it was slightly too much. Not to say we can’t explore this design in the future, but we will need to be much more cautious and deliberate with these ability designs to ensure its not encroaching on the already existing resource system of Death Knights.

The other notable change for Blood is focused on making them more reliable in high end Mythic+ keys. Blood historically (outside of the very strong Sepulcher of the First Ones tier set) has been great at low to mid-level keys but started to fall off at higher end keys where their Death Strike healing can’t overcome the damage they start to take. To alleviate some of this we’ve made a pass on Death Strike and all its modifiers to reduce its overall healing but at the same time we’ve re-distributed that power into their baseline defensives, talents, and Boneshield. The goal being to make their damage intake a little more predictable at higher keys and prevent them from “falling over” before they can start to get their other defensives rolling. We love that Blood has carved a niche for itself as the self-sufficient tank and we don’t want that to change. We look forward to hearing your feedback to the above changes as well as the other changes not mentioned as we continue into Alpha and beyond.

Frost

In Midnight, we are looking to iterate on the Ghosts of K’aresh Frost Death Knight rework by implementing better tuning knobs that allow for the two prominent builds, Frostbane and Breath of Sindragosa, to be able to compete in single target situations.

We’re also updating Obliterate to be partially dealing Frost damage, so that we can fine tune the throughput difference between casting it with Killing Machine or without where we believe is needed.

Unholy

In Midnight, our primary goal for Unholy Death Knight is to deliver fantasy and gameplay that truly embody what it means to be a master of disease and raising the dead. We found Festering Wound to be mechanically overbearing and decided to move away from it. We’re overhauling the core abilities of the spec to create a new rotation that interacts more deeply with your diseases and summoning powers.

To deliver this vision, we’ve introduced a new type of summon called the Lesser Ghoul, placing it at the heart of Unholy’s baseline rotation. Festering Strike now grants a buff that empowers your next couple of Scourge Strikes to summon a Lesser Ghoul—instead of applying a debuff to a single enemy that needs to be spread and tracked throughout an encounter. We’re also updating Army of the Dead to summon these new Lesser Ghouls, and restoring it as Unholy’s primary cooldown by reducing its cooldown to 1.5 minutes.

We recognize that simply having cool ways to summon armies of the dead doesn’t necessarily create meaningful gameplay. That led us to design a new Rune-spending ability called Putrefy—the third rotational partner alongside Festering Strike and Scourge Strike. With Putrefy, you’ll sacrifice your oldest summoned Lesser Ghoul to explode and deal Shadow damage to nearby enemies. We’ve intentionally placed Putrefy early in the specialization tree to enable further fun and meaningful interactions you can opt into. And for those wondering about targeting—don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Just press the button and enjoy the show as your Lesser Ghoul explodes spectacularly.

Now that we’ve covered summoning, let’s talk diseases. In Midnight, we’re introducing a new single-target disease called Dread Plague, which will work alongside your AoE disease Virulent Plague. As with summoning, simply applying cool diseases isn’t enough—so we’re redefining some core abilities and bringing Runic Power spenders like Death Coil and Epidemic into the mix. Scourge Strike will now cause your diseases to inflict an additional tick of their periodic damage at a percentage of their effectiveness, while your Runic Power spenders will extend their durations. Extending disease duration becomes important because we’re also introducing a powerful disease consumption mechanic via a talent called Blightburst. When talented into Blightburst, the explosion effect of Putrefy will consume a significant portion of your diseases’ remaining duration and deal that amount of damage instantly.

By leveraging the concepts of Lesser Ghoul and Putrefy, we aimed to unify the summoner and master-of-disease fantasies. We hope you’ll find all the other talents we introduced fun and engaging—especially the new Apex Talent, which we believe will fully immerse you in this redefinition of Unholy Death Knight.

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With the rework to Unholy Death Knight, we can finally play out as a master of undead and diseases, but, i can see that we still have some bad passives in the talent tree, i think this needs to be changed, and some talents needs to be relocated.

  1. Menacing Magus. This passive is still in the talent tree, this should just be baked in to our Reanimation, it feels bad taking a passive that strictly is AOE and does not provide any dps upgrade on single target, i would rather see the return of Raise Sludge Belcher in this location.

Raise Sludge Belcher had some skills that improved things for UH, here is how it would impact us now with the talent rework.

(1) Spell attacks always cleaves, and AOE while Dark Transformation is active.
(2) Defensive CD no longer stops the pet from attacking, while in Dark Transformation, it reduces damage taken by 60%.
(3) Pet stun now last for 2 seconds, up from 1 second, while in Dark Transformation it stuns for 3 seconds.
(4) You gain a Physical Death Grip from the pet, which if target is immune, it will grapple itself to the enemy instead.
(5) With the new infected Claw applying a Disease to the enemy, this will then help us keep adding this Disease in cleave and AOE scenarios.
(6) We have Rune of the Apocalypse, why not also make it so the Sludge Belcher applies 2 individual stacks to the enemy to increase the consistency of this rune weapon enchant. Also again, if it cleaves, it will apply it to multiple targets, once again a win win if added to the talent tree.
(7) Plus, if it also gains a bit more damage, and health, it also helps it set it apart from our Pet Ghoul.

This are some really good things it offered which we have lost, i think this would be an great addition to our talent option in the talent tree. Some things they can add to it as well to make it a little more interesting is, each time you consume a Sudden Doom proc, it will generate a charge which lets you raise a Lesser Ghoul. When you press Soul Reaper, it will also get commanded to deal it’s pet attack, but now it raises a Lesser Ghoul instead.

With all the undead we raise on Alpha, i think it would be cool to bring back Ruptured Viscera. This used to detonate our Ghouls when their duration expired, it had a chance to generate Festering Wounds, they could just tweak this passive a bit and make it more interactive.

  1. Ruptured Viscera cost 2 talent points, and it should be located after you have talented in to Raise Sludge Belcher, which you can after you have talented in to Ruptured Viscera, you can then talent in to Army of the Dead.

(1) Each time a Lesser Ghoul explode, they have a chance to make your next Scourge Strike to raise an additional Lesser Ghoul alongside Festering Strikes effect. So 2 Lesser Ghouls, instead of 1.
(2) When 1 Lesser Ghoul gets Putrefy, Ruptured Viscera’s Corpse Explosion effect has a chance to chain of to another Lesser Ghoul, causing it to enter a state of Unholy Frenzy increasing it’s attack speed and duration for the same amount, from the effect of Putrefy. This can only chain of once per Lesser Ghoul.
(3) Each time a Leser Ghoul’s duration expires and it detonate, reduce the CD of Putrefy by 1-2 seconds.

Unholy Aura no longer grants us haste from Putrefy. Now this is a really bad change. Now Unholy Aura is just a Mastery scaling tool from our Magus of the Dead, this is boring, and has made this 2 point talent feel extremely bad. Of course it had to be changed a bit from it’s current function, but, i think Blizzard should made it a 1%-2% haste for each Lesser Ghoul you have active.

  1. Ancient Runes got renamed to Ancient Power, still the same, but you gain stacks from Runic Power spending abilities, instead of runes. Like common Blizzard, we don’t need this unnecessary multi strength scaling passive, it really cannibalizes our dps for just existing as a passive with the way it scales our strength up. i’d just remove it, and then move Unholy Aura to it’s location, then move Reanimation to Unholy Auras location, and then make it to a 2 talent point nod where you also gain Menacing Magus as an effect, if you put the second talent point in to Reanimation, and with it also giving you a 50%-100% chance to raise a Magus. As for what to add in Reanimation’s location.

I still stand on that Gargoyle should be changed from a por mans Breath of Sindragosa, the Runic Power draining one. Not the new Breath of Sindragosa we have right now. Gargoyle should be relocated to Reanimation’s location.

  1. Summon Gargoyle . Summon 3 Gargoyles, to attack the enemy target, if they did it this way, they could add in an effect that for each attack they do, they will increase both Critical Strike , and Critical damage by 0,3% to Disease, and undead minions, for each attack they do to the enemy target, and stacking as high as all the attacks they can do in a span of 30 seconds. This is a buff on the Death Knight , and not a debuff on the enemy. In additon, Summon Gargoyle also has a chance to raise Lesser Ghouls.

Ghoulish Frenzy is an incredibly boring passive, which is a discount Unholy Devotion/Transfusion buff. My suggestion is to relocate All Will Serve in this spot, and add a new follow up passive where the Skulker is located.

  1. Where the All Will Serve was located, i would love to see a passive that makes Dark Transformation work with the Skulker as well. Here are what i think it should do. Dark Transformation now has a 1,5 minute CD, and last for 20 seconds up from 12 seconds. The All Will Serve Skulker will be transformed to a Bone Lord. The Bone Lord has several skills it uses during Dark Transformation.

(1) When Dark Transformation is cast, it uses Bone Storm , charging in to the focused enemy target to deal damage, Bone Storm last for 4 seconds and can be extended by Death Coil.
(2) When Bone Storms duration expires, the Bone Lord will use Bone Cleave , to cleave the enemy target.
(3) For each time the Bone Lord deals damage, it has a chance to raise a Lesser Ghoul , when Sudden Doom is used to trigger Bone Cleave/Bone Storm , it will also have a chance to raise a Lesser Ghoul but at the half of it’s chance, something like, if it had 30%, then it would be a 15% chance when it’s at it’s reduced effectiveness.

  1. Our Apex talent needs to be made more interesting, the Death Coil part of it is really boring, and i would rather have a Lich attached to it instead. Just make the Death Coil effect to a new talent passive we can talent in to the talent tree, it is cool as a talent, but not as a [APEX TALENT]. In my opinion, locating it after you have talented in to Reaping as a new talent gate between Unholy Aura and Reanimation, that would be a smart move, just make it a 2 talent point nod just like those 2 passives.

What they can do with Necrotic Bolt and Graveyard should be something along the lines of.

(1) each time Necrotic Bolt is cast, you have a chance to cause Dread Plague/Necrotic Plague to cause Dread/Necrotic Eruption, causing your Disease to flare up, and to deal splash damage around the enemy target.
(2) Same case for Graveyard, but in this case this will work with Virulent Plague, making this Disease to cause Virulent Eruption instead, this will deal higher amount of damage for each enemy hit.

Now, as for the Lich, i think having a powerfull Lich minion which does a lot of things to our spec and rotation is a great thing, this would also feel exhilarating when you have a powerfull minion doing unique things to set it apart from things such as Abomination, and Summon Gargoyle.

  1. here are some examples i think a Lich could do to shape our Unholy’s Apex Talent over what we currently have on Beta.

(1) When Army of the Dead is cast, you will raise a Lich to fight alongside you for 15 seconds.
(2) While the Lich is active, it morphs Dread Plague in to Necrotic Plague.
(3) Necrotic Plague will gain stacks, increasing the damage, for each time you raise or Putrefy a Lesser Ghoul.
(4) Army of the Dead’s Lesser Ghouls are empowered while the Lich is active. The Army of the Dead Lesser Ghoul’s melee attacks, and movement speed, is increased by 50%.
(5) The Lich buffs the Death Knight with Deathfrost Armor. Deathfrost Armor reduces the damage the Death Knight takes by 5%, while also increasing the damage done as well.
(6) Lich cast Deathchill Bolt at the enemy target, Deathchill Bolt slows the target for 60% movement speed, and Deathchill Bolt increases the damage the enemy take by 1%, stacking up for a certain amount of stacks on the target. In addition, when Reanimation is talented in to it’s second talent point, the Lich will also cleave with it’s Deathchill Bolt.
(7) The Lich will drop a Shadow Fissure underneath the enemy target, after 1 second, it will explode for high amount of damage. In addition, if the target is infected with Necrotic Plague, it will build 5 stacks on the enemy target, it has a 8 second CD.

I did copy this post from my Unholy Beta Feedback thread. I hope your team at Blizzard might take this suggestions in to consideration. I do think with this changes, it could shape Unholy to have a strong identity in both it’s necromancy, and master of plagues theme.

5 Likes
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Festering Strike - another expansion, and another year of feeling awful clicking this skill.

  1. Do I really have to click this twice in a row to use the Festering Scythe talent? Couldn’t this talent completely replace Festering Strike?
  2. If I don’t choose the Festering Scythe talent, this skill is the worst to use; no damage, no animation, and no real point.
  3. Still RNG skill (2-3 Scoruge Strike…)

Scoruge Strike in an AoE scenario - I have absolutely no feeling or awareness when this talent is hitting an AoE; I simply can’t see it, it doesn’t even have any animation, so I have to keep track of the next buff in the game instead of focusing on the game.

Putrefy - I don’t feel it either; this mechanic is tiring. It forces me to use it as soon as possible because if I miss it, I’ll lose a huge amount of damage.

  1. Half the talent tree is dedicated to this skill, which doesn’t look or function particularly well, and certainly does not provide any fun or satisfaction.
  2. This should be optional and potentially expand the pet build, not be a significant part of the disease build…

Death and Decay - are you really forcing me to put this on my skill bar when I choose just one, literally one talent (Desecrate) in the San’layn skill tree? Isn’t that idiotic? What other character in the game is forced to such absurdities?

Putting charges into Scoruge Strike is flawed. Change it. Just make Scoruge Strike summon one lesser ghoul and that’s it. Why are you making it so complicated? You have no idea how to expand Festering Strike, and that’s why you’re forcing me (since the Legion expansion) to put charges into another skill? Meh…

Pestilence - great that I have it, too bad I can’t use it on a target without diseases…

Reanimation - supposedly a passive talent, but it depends on the skill that has a cooldown - 30 seconds and one charge (without additional talents), so theoretically, Reanimation does something every 30 seconds and only for 8 seconds. / CAPSTONE TALENT - probably the worst in the game.

All penultimate talents in the Unholy tree have 2 points to put in.. Out of curiosity, I checked Frost DK’s talent tree - and there, you only need to allocate 1 talent.
Btw, of course, Frost DK has 4 capstone talents, Unholy only 3, and realistically, in practice, 0.

Unholy, with its talents and talent tree structure, their placement, and design, is two expansions behind, and soon there will be three.

You started off well with the changes, but you’re ending as usual – as for DK Unholy, of course, very poorly. This specialization will once again be strange, unplayable, unsatisfying, and more frustrating than fun.

By the way, you ruined San’layn by castrating that tree from Infliction of Sorrow and from The Blood is Life (low dmg).

Army of the Dead, Raise Abomination, Summon Gargoyle, Dark Transformation – so all our CDs are in the wrong place.

RAID BUFF ? WHERE? WHEN? 10 years later?

2 Likes
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After testing Festering Scythe, it feels incredible bad having to first press Festering Strike, then Scythe, just to get our rotation ready. Festering Scythe should just replace Festering Strike and count as if you had pressed both of them, way simpler, and way better than it’s current function on Beta.

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Quick rotation and gameplay FIX - My rework after your (Dev) rework.

(I lost hope for better changes and wanted to give up, but I decided to make further suggestions - maybe at least a few things would be changed).

Putrefy - removed
Apocalypse (replace Putrefy) - Summons 4 lesser ghouls that fight for 15s. 30 sec CD.

Corpse Exploder (replace Apocalypse ) - Throws corpses at an enemy, dealing damage to all enemies within 10 yards. 2 charges. 15s CD.

NOTE:
You don’t need ghouls or corpses, DK simply throws the corpse at the enemy immediately. No logic adaptation needed here. Thanks to this change, we feel the power and agency of this skill (old Putrefy), and we can use the normal animation of the skill. This change also preserves the perception of DK Unholy as a necromancer - who has the choice of summoning minions by resurrecting them from their bodies or immediately proceeding to throwing those bodies at the enemy. This preserves the class’s fantasy.

Scourge Strike - Hits up to 8 enemies in front of you and summon 1 lesser ghoul for 10 sec and for each active disease effect on the target, deals 5% more damage

Wandering Plague - Scourge Strike has a 10% chance to infects one target with Wandering Plague.
Wandering Plague (replace Pestilence) instant deals 50% damage with your all diseases on around with 8 yards.

Festering Strike - Infects the target with Festering Corruption, which increases your minions damage by 15% for 15s and deals damage over 10s for the amount Festering Strike hits.

Festering Scythe (replace Festering Strike) - Hits all enemies in front of you within 20 yards

Festermight – Increases the damage of Festering Strike by 20% and and causes your Sudden Doom to also activate Festering Scythe for free (without having talent).

Infected Claws - Your Lesser Ghouls hit all enemies in front of them with Infected Claw and also that gives your minions attacks a 50% chance to apply one of the following debuffs to the target, Death: Healing Reduction, War: Increases damage taken from the Death Knight, Famine: Reduces damage dealt to the Death Knight, Pestilence: Slows the target and deals damage over time.

Superstrain - Your diseases additionally consume X% of your Runic Power every 3 seconds when you are above X% Runic Power and deal X% more damage immediately.

Clawing Shadow - as in live + Hits up to 3 targets nearby + it has a chance to cause a shadow earthquake / shadow trap under the attacked enemy.

NOTE: Or it can works like Overpower for the warrior’s Arms and create a shockwave.

Soul Reaper - 15 sec CD. Soul Reaper - as in beta + Drains life/souls from nearby enemies within 10 yards and deals damage equal to the damage dealt by your Deacl Coil and Epidemic for the next 8 seconds.

Death and Decay - Follows DK around and deals damage over 10 seconds. The damage dealt has a 35% chance to infect the enemy with a Dark Bomb that explodes after 3 seconds on the target, hitting up to 8 enemies within 5 yards.

NOTE:

If DnD is to retain some form of Unholy Dk, it should be one that follows the Dk’s lead, like Darion Mograine. There are plenty of possible uses – it can cause Lesser Ghouls to explode after a certain duration, it can deal massive, rapid damage, it can affect diseases in some way, it can cause a random explosion, it can apply all diseases and debuffs, it can randomly summon ghouls (and resemble a graveyard).

Other suggestions for the Lich/pets are above – add him to the game.

Warlock has a ton of different demons – Unholy stopped with his pets in the Legion expansion. Why?

BTW according to the story, a Val’kyr is not a Gargoyle, and vice versa – this should also be separated and implemented into the game. A Val’kyr is a Val’kyr, and a Gargoyle is a Gargoyle.

BIG TIP for PUTREFY- to improve this ability’s performance even faster in the BETA version.

Putrefy should work like Blood Boil for Blood DK: it has two charges, no rune cost, and no need for a living ghoul (from Scourge Strike etc).

Simply put, when I have a charge, I can cast it, and DK will immediately throw a ghoul or corpse at the target. In other words, use Corpse Exploder / spell=127344.
It has an attack animation, a sound (if I remember correctly), and it works instantly.

Double-clicking Festering Strike is a disaster, and generating charges for Scoruge Strike is also a disaster.
Changing Outbreak to Pestilence and removing disease is also a disaster.
The current functionality and usage conditions for Putrefy are also a disaster.
This is simply wrong.

THIS NEEDS TO BE CHANGED/FIXED.

2 Likes
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After more testing with talenting in to the talent tree. It feels like there are to few options to pick from both in the middle talent row, and the last row as well. Right now we spend way to many talent points on the same passive in the last row, while in the Middle row we lack a couple of passives on both side to fill out some of the empty gaps the talent tree has.

The right side has Menacing Magus still in it, this one is a real pain as it has no use in single target, leaving us avoiding it. I can’t stress it enough that we should see the return of Raise Sludge Belcher talent here. As i have stated earlier post i made, it would solve some of the issues we have with Infected Claw really only being good during Dark Transformation.

The left side’s Superstrain talent is just so incredebly bad to take, on live we get both Frost Fever and Blood Plague, but now we just get 4 Runic Power. This passive should A. Be returned to what it does on live, or B. be changed to something else, maybe by bringing back Unholy Blight or something.

The last row has only 3 cap stone talents while most others have 4+ this seems so wrong to a spec like UH which should have so many ways to corrupt and kill it’s target. That’s why things like Gargoyle and Abomination should just be separated, then be located other places in the talent tree for us to take. Gargoyle really struggles to feel like a good CD, it’s play style is fight the Runic Power bar, this feels incredebly bad with the new rework. After more testing in San’layn, you can’t really ever talent in to Gargoyle as it’s design contradict the Hero talent design, that’s why it should be changed to what i suggested in one of my earlier post here.

Ancient Power is incredibly boring. This passive has no business to exist with the new UH design, this one needs to be removed and changed to something more interesting, more preferably a Disease related one.

3 Likes
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Blood mist should be separate button, not tied to DRW. We already spending 3 talent points to make DRW work (it shouldn’t be). Now when we lost so many button it wouldn’t be harm to add extra button. Also would be nice if you remove Plague Infusion talent, its boring and unnecessary. It is just filler talent to gatekeep from bloodmist

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Raid buff: We had grip being a required piece of utility on Dimensius last tier, maybe we have it again on one of the bosses in first tier of Midnight. Do we really want to restrict developer freedom this much, just so we can die on the hill that Death Grip is a raid buff? What happens if developers just forget about it, and design the end boss where it isnt required, like what happened in Liberation of Undermine. Let utility be utility.
Please give DK a throughput buff, something that is useful on every fight, without requiring specific design. Hunters got their buff fixed, it is fine to have it be the “lazy” 2% dmg increase 1 hour buff.

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Can’t agree more. Specially when now we have 1boss raid and two boss raid. Which i think wouldnt require grips. Also when people are forming m+ groups they are looking for raid buffs and blood is only one tank who doesn’t have it. Plus warriors got MASS grip in class tree??? Blizzard you took it away from us saying you wanna make grips more impactful. First you shouldn’t because its much more for fun to grip a lot of mobs in one spot then manually trying to catch them. Second grips are utility not raid buff lets admit you were too stubborn and give us raid buff

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Frostbane:

Even with buffing single target damage, this is still way random to use in single target.

I rather have Frost Strike damage to buffed, when consuming Razorice stacks and have Frostbane talent to transform Glacial Advance to Frostbane instead and use it as AoE Razorice consuming ability.

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Regarding cooldown manager stuff

Frost:
Please do something about Bonegrinder. Both the stacking and the dmg amp part have the same icon, it is hard to tell them apart, this is something I used a weakaura for in TWW.
An option is to separate them into 2 different buffs in the buff tracker, and let us change the icon of the buff manually, you could use the macro creating UI for this.
Different option would be that you just change the icon of one of them.

Bonegrinder is part of frosts core gameplay, one of the skill expression in the spec that I personally enjoyed playing around, so if you leave it in then please bridge the gap that was created with no weakauras for bufftracking.

Unholy:
Please add Lesser Ghoul to the buff tracker, I would prefer watching it as a buff with stacks instead of funny number on my scourge strike

And in general please give us the option to for additional buff tracking rows/bars, I would like to track my reactive procs like Rime, Killing Machine or Sudden Doom separately from my other buffs like Pillar, Dark Transformation. I would like to track my defensives separately again, for a clear overview. The bufftracking in general is fine, just give us the option to create additional buff trackers.

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I would like to add that our Lesser Ghouls should have an energy bar instead of a duration. This would solve some issues our minions will have in high movement encounters where their timer might be a liability duo to that. I recommend making this change, it should also effect the Gargoyle and Abom as well. Movement is something that will plague our undead build.

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I got my manager set up to track lesser ghouls with a icon, so this is already in the current build. The icon tracks with a buff number

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I have done some more testing. Currently Reanimation seems to be bugged, atm it does only raise one Magus of the Dead, when the tool tip clearly states that you Putrefy up to 2 Lesser Ghouls which in turn should raise 2 Maguses.

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I meant the stacks from Festering Strikes, that makes Scourge Strike summon ghouls. The one you can track is the currently active ghouls. Both are called Lesser Ghoul

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Unholy DK

  1. Putriefy feels so awkward to play around. I’d prefer if we got Unholy Frenzy back to buff the active ghoul. It’s mandatory to pick Putriefy including the other talents, especially with Blightburst, Pestilence in play. This makes it even more awkward to be forced something jsut for DPS even if its feels awkward to play with.
    1. it feels like the whole Festering Wounds mechanic has been rebranded into “Ghoul Detonation”
  2. I’m not a fan of the “master of Undead” fantasy, or in other words the “LICH”-Theme. We are DKs. Having a ghoul is fine but priotizing LICH-style mechanics over disease gameplay bothers me the most. I would like to see more depth in Disease-Mechanics to actually make feel like an Unholy DK. The current lich fanstasy feels forced and more mandatory than I’d prefer.
    1. Desecrate should be core unholy talent and not something locked behind a Hero Talent tree
    2. Bring Back Unholy Blight as a disease.
    3. Add Superstrain back to the talent tree. (TWW)
    4. Add a Talent, which deals damage when a disease crits. This would finally give some synergy with Plague Mastery
    5. The way diseases are currently played is not satisfying. They feel way to passive and disconnected.
    6. Make Pestilence to reINFLICT the diseases…
    7. Add an Option-Talent to Buff DnD more for players who love to play more Unholy then a Lich-Theme DK
1 Like
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Im gonna write more from Blood DK perspective and what i think is bad in our class, spec, hero talent trees:

March of Darkness and wraith walk in same node. DK already are joke object and called wheelchair class. And reducing our spells from choosing from anyone of thouse two are not helping
Asphyxiate and Death’s reach in same nod. Also limits our toolkit
Unholy endurance - after lichborne lost DR does it still need to be in class tree? Or you could rework lichborne to make it like stoneform, Dispeling all curse,poison,bleed, curse effects. It would fit DK fantasy and spell had its meaning.
Subduing grasp - should be removed
Death Pact and Death defiance not impactful for Blood DK

Spec Tree:
Still need invest 3 talent point to Dancing rune Weapon to make it work.
Blood mist should be separate button and not tied to DRW.
Plague infusion - filler talent and very unnecessary
Abonimation limb - 2 min cd and no dmg lost it purpose. Very underwhelming talent. No competition to Gorefiend’s gasp which has lower CD and silence.
Leeching strikes, blood feast - after all this purging how those talent still there ?
Deathbringer talent tree - no synergy with alpha talents at all.
Echoing furry tied with DRW again ? why it cant be tied to Reaper’s mark ?
Frigid resolve - permafrost ? 100% effectivnes of 0 is still 0.

Still no Raid buff for DK. Just give 1h raid buff for DK. BDK is only one tank that doesn’t have raid buff and grips doesn’t compensate it.

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This isn’t very in-depth, just some early feedback before we get the proper end-game content.

Pestilence feels like it’s missing something, like there should be some other step in between consuming your diseases and using Putrefy to get them applied again. Speaking of diseases, their management is almost non-existent. It all feels very automatic: SS spreads VP, Rapid Variant automatically reapplies your DP if it’s target dies, Putrefy with Blghtburst reapplies or extends both of them and Infliction of Sorrow also extends them. These are things that you will do normally as part of your rotation, not something that you have to necessarily think about. Hopefully I’m not misremembering things, but, for example, in MoP and WoD, you were casting Festering Strike to convert your blood and frost runes into death runes to use Scourge Strike with them, but sometimes you wanted cast more FSs than needed so your diseases wouldn’t run out. Neither snapshotting, nor Necrotic Plague are around anymore and I’m not saying that this was some in-depth disease manager, but it was something.

I was disappointed to see that out apex talents is just another buff that is triggered by a cooldown and replaces a spell (or two in this case) with a more powerful version that you keep extending with some other spell, much like Gift of the San’layn. Not to mention that, if we count Dark Transformation, this is the third type of cooldown buff that we can extend with our rotational abilities.

I’m not sure if this is necessarily a problem, but Scourge Strike feels like it’s starting to do too many things at once: baseline shadow damage, flaring up diseases, spreading VP, popping ghouls, stacking Clawing Shadows and AoE damage.

Soul Reaper’s cooldown being almost twice as long than the debuff it provides is pretty awkward, if anything it should be the other way around.

Sudden Doom only reducing the DC cost by 10 irks me. I now this is a pretty controversial subject involving our resource generation, but having a visual that modifies an ability pop up in the middle of your screen and it not making much of a difference in terms of how it feels to press said ability is frustrating.

Menacing Magus should probably just be baked in the Magus of the Dead talent already.

Superstrain is weird. It just gives the Frost Fever runic power passive to the one target plague and… that’s it? Why not just make it baseline, then?

Putrefy, besides being kind of boring spell gameplay wise, also has lacking audiovisual feedback. I understand that it can’t have some grand visual, since it would just add to the melee clutter, so I think adding a more booming, meaty explosion sound could help in this regard. Vampiric Strike, for example, isn’t some impressive ability, but it sure does have a satisfying sound effect.

Over time and now some iconic abilities have been eliminated in order to streamline a somewhat bloated spec: MoP-DF Unholy Blight, Unholy Frenzy/Assault, Apocalypse, DnD and Defile. The last two especially feel like a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, especially now that we don’t have to pop wounds or rely on cleaving strikes. Even with San’layn, the new Desecrate tries to just turn DnD into a maintenance buff (albeit with a low proc chance).

I would like more undead types. I take a look at Demonology warlock and all the types of demons they can summon after their latest rework and then I look back at Unholy and I get sad when I see that our summons are 80% ghouls. There are still a bunch of cool undead that aren’t used by any spec, like Nerubians, Liches, Geists, Varguls, Bone Wraiths and Golems, Banshees and Shades.

Lastly I have a pretty niche suggestion, but I would love a glyph that adds back the old model for the Skeletal Magus, despite it bein an outdated classic era model. In fact, something simmilar would be nice for the other Shadowlands models (Rider of the Apocalypse horses and Risen Skulker) and spell effects (the Maldraxxus green in Putrefy and Forbidden Knowledge). Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some “Hur, dur, Shadowlands bad”, I quite like a lot of its models. It’s more that the Shadowlands undead feel out of place with the rest of our spec, despite clearly being based on the Azerothian ones. The visual language of the Maldraxxi and Mawsworn is different form that of the Scourge. Plus, if we are to talk about the aforementioned magus, the original had a very distinct casting animation and silhouette, as opposed to the current one which looks like a forsaken with forgettable kul tiran animations.

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I dont get it why they haven’t added FF and BP back to it. I actually liked the talent in TWW, it gave that core Unholy DK feeling of “I infect enemies with diseases”.

Instead they leaned to much into a Lich-Theme then actually Unholy-DK.

Sure, summoning ghouls is awesome, kinda like a Death-themed Demology Warlock, but thats shouldn never be the only plastyle. it should be more like: “You want diseases? We’ll give you flexible, disease-centric options”

F.e, why not add a talent in the same slot as Purify (pick one) thats lets cast Unholy Blight? it could deal x% disease damage based on the number of active diseases for 15 seconds, stacking each time a disease crits. Then you add baseline disease extender to the talent-tree.

Also, add a flexible follow-up talent: every time unholy Blight deals damage, your active ghoul (primary) start smelling rot and enter an Unholy Frenzy for 15 sec. increasing attackspeed and damage of the ghould (stacking).

Then you add at the bottom a flexible talent: If Unholy Blight reaches 8 stacks, the ghould enters cannibalistic mode, causing its attacks to deal additional shadow damage up to the stacks of Unholy Blight.

This would at least give diseases a much more important role in defining your active ghoul playstyle.

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