TWW Beta Feedback - Core Thread

Classes Death Knight
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Let’s use one main thread to give feedback on various DK issues. Please comment if you’ve actually got access to TWW Beta and not just theory crafting ideas. Of course feel free to ask questions, and send builds, I’ll happily try them out.

Here are my first thoughts and reactions from playing beta so far. Do keep the following in mind: loads of lag and general bugs, pre-made characters have terrible gear so I’m sitting with 19% haste, no real addons and other optimisations. These all focus on how things feel, not on numbers and total damage.

Let’s Go:

The new Sudden Doom
That actually feels better, it procs more often and makes you prioritise it without feeling like you’re missing on wounds as they now pop wounds too. Talent Harbinger Of Doom actually feels relevant now and nice to play.

Doomed Bidding
Actually a fun alternative to Gargoyle, quite nice to always having a little skelly mage dude firing projectiles, looks a decent addition for dungeons.

Festermight
The new stacking mechanism is much more consistent and way easier to maintain, to the point where there’s no need to track it anymore.

That’s about it in terms of straight up positives. Now for the not so fun stuff…

Festering Scythe
I really hope the animation is a first pass placeholder. It’s yet another completely disappointing swoosh that barely does anything in terms of VFX & SFX. This is meant to be a big fun button to press, right now it’s feels like fizzling fart.

Vile Contagion
It does feel better at 45 sec CD, sure. But it still lacks some kind of synergistic gameplay, and very much pushes us further in this 45 sec windows even on AoE.

What I’d like to see is some more interplay between Vile Contagion, Festering Scythe and the general wound system. Maybe we can have a talent that has a small chance to reset the CD of Vile Contagion, speeding up the 20 stack process for FS, an making the whole spec feel more dynamic. Right now it just feels like we’re being further pushed into hyper specialised high target count aoe. And since it looks like this play isn’t going anywhere (to my dismay), consider buff the talent Pestilence. Right now at 10% this talent is going to spend another expansion on the ignore list.

The Haste conundrum
19% haste… Feels so horrible again… Can somebody please have a look at how haste scale with this class please? Surely there must be a technical way to make our baseline haste that control our GCD and rune regeneration a lot faster, but then make subsequent haste scale slower. This way we still get our dopamine boost when BL is on but we don’t feel like rerolling until we’ve reached the right haste cap.

Apocalypse Contention
Although I mentioned that the new Sudden Doom does indeed feels good, it does create a strange dynamic with Apocalypse. Let’s say apoc is about to get off CD, it’s got about 4 seconds left, you got 4 wounds on your target and you think “right time to dump some RP until it’s ready”. Now if sudden doom procs until then, which is highly likely, you’ll end up popping the wounds that you were reserving for apoc, and that kind of feels clunky. Not sure if this a full negative as it might just be a habit we need to change then it will be fine, but until then it’s just odd.

Any other Beta testers please share your thoughts, and everyone else ask questions, share builds. Let’s see if they’re really “listening”.

PS: Defile still looks awful.

Edit: spelling

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Useless

Useless

Useless

Nothing new doomburst talent is in the game for years

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Yeah but it was a pvp talent that didn’t see much play, and you know, if you don’t pvp you don’t even know it exists.

Sudden Doom feels more impactful now, the fact it guarantees a crit, and more importantly applies wound bursting on Epidemic, that’s completely new and feels good to press.

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Well thats for sure i agree
And i must say doomburst 2wounds pop is my favorite talent of all of them.

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I have Beta tested UH/Frost atm.

What i can say is from a game play perspective both are playing much smoother than on live, and our Hero talents brings a lot of fun interaction with our talent tree.

For UH’s part, i find it that my worries with UH talent tree ended up being correct, we are still stuck with bad passives which hinder our talent tree options for a fully organic Disease/Pet-Minioin/Striking build, and we still have to pay the talent point tax in Blood/Frost/Unholy in the first part of the talent row to be able to unlock all the talent path’s to gain Access to our Middle talent row.

Ruptured Viscera/Pestilence/Vile Contagion in the middle talent row suffers from not adding in any thing to our spec while playing our rotation.

My suggestion is to locate some of our talents like making Bursting Soars be located were Pestilence is and then move Festering Scythe to were Bursting Soars is located.

As for were Ruptured Viscera is located this would be a prime spot to add a passive that could have changed our passive All Will Serve in to a stronger passive to create a better talent out of it, instead of it being yet again a dead passive.

Vile Contagion feels like it needs a complete change to it’s functionality i would rather this be something that buffs our Disease damage against our enemy target’s to make it so the Disease build has a leg to stand on VS the Pet build.

overall the Middle row is alot better than on live.

Now for the last talent row for UH.

We still suffers from the 2 talent point problem we have to spend way more than we get for our talent picks.

Decomposition suffers from the same thing Improved Death Coil does as well were you only get the full benefit from the first talent point spent in to the passive, this needs to either be solved by it getting an increase to the pet duration extension or it being set to 1 talent point.

As for Commander of the Dead, this passive is still bad and forces us to play in this piano way were one wrong click messes up our entire burst damage opening, my take on this is that this passive needs a complete change or just be removed, my suggestion is to either move Gargoyle here, or add something that spices up our Magus by adding in our tier piece which made the Magus cast Amplify Magic to buff our damage as a whole.

Another way we could do with a cap stone passive would be that we can have a random chance to Raise a Lich instead of the regular Magus we spawn all the time to spice up the visual.

Last thing that needs to be addressed in the last row is Raise Abomination, this should be it’s own individual CD [IF] this is going to stay as a talent you can only pick after Army of the Dead, and quite frankly i think that should be the case, losing army feels like a step backward in terms of UH DK’s theme of raising an Army of the Undead, i think we would feel visually alot stronger if we had both Army and Abom.

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BwPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAgkASSElIRSiQikIRCAAAAAAAAASiERkEAIkQaJSSSIJCIQiQ0aAaBIASA
This is probably best choice of talents and if unholy stay this way we gona have fun expansion.
Doesnt even mather if tier set bonus synergise with this build it will make ton of dmg.

Also i think Sanlayn would be better option for arena also.

Frost will benefite more from rework of left talent tree it will be more tankier.
Frost Right talent tree: i dont see anything new thats helpfull.

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Annoyingly it gives me an error message saying that it’s from an older version of the game. Maybe use the wowhead talent calculator to link more reliably.

Today managed to copy to main over (this dude I’m posting with) and WA are working generally feeling more stable and less laggy. Back to 37% and got to say things generally feel a lot better.

Gave me some new insight on Festering Scythe. This ability needs to have it’s rune cost removed. Firstly it will add to the “fun special button” feel it suppose to have, currently lacking. Secondly and the most important reason why it should be free (or cost only one rune):

If this ability is available but you haven’t pressed it straight away, and let’s say you’ve just popped loads of wounds with Epidemic, these wounds won’t count towards your next scythe which is really lame. So let’s say you’re on your cleaving window, you popped 20 wounds, but all your runes are on CD. You got loads of RP so you’re like whatever you keep going with Epidemic. But with the new sudden doom you’re now popping wounds, but these wounds won’t count for the next festering scythe, but you can’t press your current one because of rune CD. This feels really BAD and has to change

The official Beta forum is up, I can’t seem to be able to post or reply over there, anyone else experiencing this?

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As long we have to pop 20wounds to activate its not good .
Should be insta aoe apply wounds on like 30sec cd.
Would be perfect

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Currently, the damage from the Festering Scythe and Festering Wounds is so low, and so frustrating to stake and then burst, that making the Festring Scythe (strike) passively hit like a warrior’s Cleav on all targets in front of us will not change our position in the table in any way.
In a single target situation, this percentage for the improved Festering Strike is worthless. It just absorbs our attention unnecessarily.

Creating the strongest build for festering wound will not improve its situation compared to the alternative disease build. In every scenario, diseases are better, stronger and more pleasant to use.
What’s the point of choosing a game for festering wound?
Is the developer able to answer this question?
For it to be better than Diseases and Epidemic it would first have to do more damage than Diseases and Epidemic for me to actually want to click it, and then be more pleasant to use in many scenarios.

I also don’t understand why I have difficulty accessing the build with diseases and I am forced to choose Vile Contagion, Pestilence or Infected Claw to get lower to Superstrain.

We currently have a lot of garbage skills, and these are:

- Improved Festering Strike (should be baseline)
even with this talent, Festering Strike and Festering Wound do not fundamentally change our game or table layout in M+ or in raids. It does negligible dmg.

- Runic Mastery
very weak. Maybe if it increased our Masters like a set bonus and cost 1 talent point, it would be of some use in the new expansion.

- Festering Scythe
this should be the baseline for Festering Strike so that there are no problems with applying wounds to multiple targets when we really need it and not at random moments, e.g. outside of combat.

- Vile Contagion
another talent that will likely never be selected until it is actually removed from the talent tree.
Only a strong buff beyond the balance of our festering wounds can give hope for this talent.
However, in law it will be very weak in every scenario - as it has been so far. Another garbage talent on your skill bar.

- Death Rot
this makes absolutely no sense and makes even more sense to use Epidemic instead of Death Coil for even 2-3 targets during a fight just to save stacks on those targets.
Any mistake or interruption in combat causes your game to start over again and you are penalized -10% of shadow damage.

- Ruptured Viscera
maybe if it ran as fast as The Blood is Lifie (blood beast) in the San’layn tree, MAYBE then it could make sense. However, it currently deals very little damage and often misses targets, which is why it has been a junk talent since it was introduced.

- Improved Death Coil
something that seems to be a sure thing to work as a baseline (it hits 3 targets in total), and in the improved version, after selecting this talent, your Death Coil attacks 2 additional targets and when there are no enemies nearby, it is not split, but hits 3 times one target.
This, in turn, would improve the throughput and appeal of talent like Coil of Devastation and Rotten Touch

- Unholy Aura
this should act as a passive buff with no range requirement and cost only one talent point - because it is a very boring talent.

-Pestilence
Absolutely unnecessary and unnecessary talent tree filler.
Maybe if it always applied wounds to all targets it would make sense.
Paradoxically, if it had a 100% multi-target wound application rate, it would go some way to solving the multi-target wound application problem, making the Festering Scythe talent even more useless.
However, it is still a thankless and annoying way to play the game because it forces us to play in a place where everyone else won’t because we are all forced by the game to be constantly mobile during combat due to damage and area effects that negatively affect us . This almost always happens in M+ (dungeons) and PVP.

-Cleaving Strikes
It just doesn’t work in dungeons and PVP. Even an extended buff does not solve the problem.
Scoruge Strike should always hit up to 8 targets near 12y, and Festering Strike should hit everything we see in front of us.
We don’t need anything else for this - for playing with festering wound. You’re forcing it on us, so do it at least to make it tasty and pleasant, like pizza.

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I tested this one just to test my bias and I really don’t understand their intent here. It’s absolutely useless on ST. Then testing on the group dummy in zul dazar, sending army to it, does insignificant damage, and it gave 2 wounds max per target. They would need to really buff the damage and guarantee loads of wounds for this be worth it. Finally, they should consider the range of this ability so it might actually be useful for the Magus as well. Looks so silly seeing them explode in range where they touch nothing.

The bottom left of the UH tree is just awkward to talent to. In ST builds we have to take infected claws just to get to Death Rot, then Decomposition is on the middle towards the right near minion related talents.

The odd thing is with RoA talent that removes 5 seconds from Defile’s CD, and combined with this talent, we can basically have permanent cleave, but where it became awkward is that I found that we don’t generate wounds fast enough in order to fully take advantage of being able to cleave that much. It’s almost paradoxical, and shows just how clunky the whole wound system is. Since we’re stuck in this silly system, so many problems would have been solved if we could just cleave ourselves, like Festering Strike turns automatically into Festering Scythe whilst we’re standing on defile.

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i made a post on the beta forum.

i highly recommend every one to take a read and chime in if there is something you agree with or not.

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I tried to do some dungeons and as play Unholy DK. Playing without addons with the amount of buffs / stacks that are necessary to track, to use abilities properly + on top of it there is a lot of movement and “not standing in fire” mechanics, makes unholy not fun to play at all. I think Unholy could use some visual clarity update (Defile) and either remove, merge or simply streamline some abilities that require different stacking mechanics and reduce button bloat.

Festering scythe - is really cool idea, but implementation of how it works in current rotation is clunky. I think its really neat that both frost (Frostscythe) and unholy have this new “scythe” abilities. But the way Frostscythe works is much better. You use it as soon as possible for big damage then you reduce CD by consuming Killing Machine procs. Festering Scythe you go through rotation of possibly 10+ buttons to get just more Festering Wounds? I think this ability would work much better as AOE opener. 30 sec CD, like Frostscythe, that just applies wounds and streamlines AOE rotation makes the spec a lot more fun. Consuming Sudden death reduces CD by 1 sec? Probably too stronk :smiley:

Army of the Dead / Raise Abomination - I am sure I am not the first one to mention this - this should absolutely be a choice node. In tier 2 talents, there is 21 talent choices, 2 of them are 2 pointers. In order to unlock all 3 wings (left, center and right) in this tier, you are FORCED to spend 9 talent points in tier 1. We already have to spent extra points to unlock stuff before tier 3, so spending 1 talent to unlock Army and then another to replace it with Abomination feels bad. Left and Right wings are simple, spend 4 points and get 3 modifiers. Even if you pick Abom to get Unholy Assault spending 1 less talent point, you cant unlock all 3 capstones in Spec tree, so I dont see the need for this.

Improved Death Coil - I dont think anyone has ever spend both talent points in this for extra 15% death coil damage. Remove damage boost, make Death Coil cleave and make it 1 pointer.

Apocalypse / Ruptured Viscera - I am not sure if its intended, but Ghouls summoned by Apocalypse start acting, moving and attacking maybe 3-4 seconds after casting. Making spell description, which states it summons them for 20 seconds kinda false. Personally I was never fan of exploding zombies after expiration. Currently weak and dead talent, without any cool visual.

Vile Contagion / Unholy Blight - I dont really have problem with any of these abilities. Let me cook on this one :smiley: For the argument of reducing button and talent bloat (In tier 2 talents, there is 21 talent choices, 2 of them are 2 pointers), could these 2 be merged? 6 second aura, that applies virulent plague and extra disease that stacks up 4 times and with each stack of disease also applies 1 festering wound?

Rider of the Apocalypse - visually nice, low impact on the gameplay - overall really what i hoped for.

Sanlayn - in order to maximize, it breaks your rotation. Another negative - more buffs to track :smiley: My cook - nerf the haste buff of Essence of the Blood queen and make it flat %, make Vampiric Strike a simple damage buff, or make it guarantee sudden death

TLDR - Generally Unholy DK is borderline unplayable without use of addons, buff and stacks tracking is crazy. Visual update required for Defile.

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The official DK thread over at the Beta forum is accessible now. If anyone can’t seem to be permitted to post in it even though they have beta access, just log out and in again on the website and it should fix it. I suggest we copy our comments over there as they’ll likely be observing those threads more.

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wupsie, ty for correction :slight_smile:

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