My proposed changes for unholy dk talent tree
prefacing this that I am more biased towards plague and disease spreading aspect of unholy while the necromancer isn’t as enticing (but that’s mostly due to how poorly explored the necromancer aspect is), so we have 3 possible solutions for this dilemma:
- make unholy purely about spreading diseases
- make unholy purely about necromancy
- keep it as it is but then the two aspects needs to interact with each other
I can elaborate for each of the solutions but considering that this post took me about 2000 words I highly doubt someone will be sitting through all 3 proposed rework ideas so let’s start with this one and maybe I could post the other two in the near future. And since I am biased towards the disease aspect of unholy I’ll start off with this one first. Also if I write any numbers I’m using them more as an example rather than hard rule if something should be exactly that number - that is for balancing team that has actual stats on how those should be.
Disease Spreading
Firstly I would like to address the pimple in the room - popping festering wounds isn’t fun because of the friction within the system. You have to keep track of those, and while sure the “reward” for popping them is runic power it just doesn’t feel fun to constantly be setting those up and god forbid you have to switch targets and have to start all over again. If you want to keep this effect it needs to be easier to either keep track of or reduction of the friction of application of said wounds (the current talents that act as bandaid for that system aren’t it and the fact they take several different talent points to essentially do QoL for the wound is horrible). I can’t tell you how many times I switch target to put the pimples on the enemy just for them to get nuked down and then having to re-apply them on a new target. One suggestion I could give for those pimples is that on death the target should spread them on nearby enemies (either with one less or spreading randomly across nearby enemies) so it doesn’t feel like you wasted your runes putting up festering wounds on a target that just died before you had the time to pop them (being restricted by runes for popping on top of also GCD it doesn’t leave a lot of time to you to engage this system properly, and reapplying costing 2 runes is also not that healthy for the gameplay). Next thing you would need to do about pimple popping is that it should interact better with diseases, it should be something akin to making the disease occur more often (speeding up tick rate) or making targets more vulnerable to your diseases’ crit damage (these are just some barebones ideas for the festering wounds to be more interactive with the rest of the kit). I addressed my issues with those pimples and how to potentially improve them (also those QoL talents that currently exist should just be 1 talent that focuses on spreading the pimples instead of being 3-4 different talents just spread around the tree).
For mastery talent I’d remove pet damage completely and instead add frost damage to it - more on this later.
Since I dislike festering wounds altogether I propose we completely remove this system. In its place I propose a new type of disease that would work differently to our dot disease playstyle, it would be a disease that stores % of the damage dealt by either our diseases or overall % damage dealt by death knight up to a cap and once its capped it allows the death knight to release an AoE unholy nova of a fast acting disease where the tick rate is determined by how healthy the enemy is - higher % hp means the ticks occur more often. This idea is about allowing dk to do their regular dps and store moments where you don’t need to be setting up resources for every pull but instead storing damage between pulls and with this it allows them to have a quicker burst to healthier units (akin to how devastation evokers have that mastery talent).
Since I proposed festering wounds as a whole that would make festering strike kind of pointless as it’s primary use is to apply said wounds and so I’d move Plaguebringer effect onto festering strike and making that be the buff applicator instead of scourge strike (and maybe make the buff lasts longer but that’s gonna be down to balancing numbers)
Epidemic I think it should be put back into the talent tree in place of permanent ghoul and should also become a choice node with another talent I propose. This talent would make Death Coil have bigger cleave where it could hit up to 8 targets when cast. The idea for this type of cleave is that often times when approaching groups unholy has to count alive enemies to know if its better to spend runic power of death coils or on epidemic and doing that all the time for every pull it gets quite frustrating - this choice node would allow people who don’t want to count to be able to still spend runic power and not make it feel like you made the wrong choice for spending runic power while also allowing others who still prefer to run epidemic to stick with it (yes I know that epidemic does insane damage in very large pulls but it shouldn’t have so much power budget on this spell to begin with and rather spend that power budget on the rest of the kit). And when you add up how many things unholy needs to keep the track of in the current state removing some of those things makes it easier to pilot this spec (tracking wounds, tracking how many targets are alive to know which runic power spender to use, tracking disease timers, tracking runes which is just another form of cooldown on top of GCD and regular cooldown)
Death and decay (and by extension defile) should be a talent choice node where you’re allowed to have it as it is but the duration is increased to 15 seconds or keep it at 10 seconds but the spell follows the death knight around like an aura. We already have this kind of thing on one of the horseman and if the death knight should be the one commanding them then they should not have the worse version of that spell.
Apocalypse, All Will Serve (skeleton boy), Army of the Dead, Raise Abomination, Dark Transformation and Gargoyle I would completely remove (and other talents that only exist as QoL for those mentioned) - I know some of these abilities are iconic for unholy but due to how they work at the moment they are better to be removed or to be focused completely on (more on this in the next option).
Dark Transformation I’d simply replace the ghoul with it so the unholy death knight would summon just a more powerful version of ghoul for limited amount of time instead of summoning ghoul for a limited amount of time.
Unholy Blight should be brought back into the kit and it should be surrounding the death knight but increase the range of how far the spell affects.
Maximum runic power talent first of all isn’t worth 2 talent points but more importantly it should just go and instead put in place a talent that helps with rune generation - while I’m not sure the exact correct approach to it but possibly crit chance scaling making the runes regenerate faster or added to mastery since pet damage would be gone from mastery. There are probably other more elegant solutions but this is what comes to mind.
Superstrain talent just is so boring on paper, instead of just casting the other two plagues (frost fever and blood plague) they should just combine into our virulent plague where frost fever would make our virulent plague deal shadowfrost damage and slow targets for whatever % frost fever has and blood plague should give virulent plague “and heals death knight for % of the damage dealt by virulent plague” (this doesn’t have to be % of damage dealt if that’s too strong but then it should say something like and steals health from target to heal death knight and then have it be its separate number for balancing purposes).
in place of unholy assault which lets be honest its quite a boring spell to just be “you will do % more damage for duration” lets add a new type of disease that steals stats from your enemies where it could be stealing primary stat, crit, mastery, haste, versatility for its duration and allow it slightly debuff enemies (for example steals 2-4% of the stats but stolen stats would stack on the death knight up to cap so lets say he could steal up to 10% or something like that from different enemies) exact numbers as always I’m not sure of cause I’m in the stage of conceptualizing this rework
Instead of Gargoyle and its capstone I would add one thing that might seem controversial but allow me to explain. I would add Pillar of Frost (or rather Shadow) but instead of it being a boring spell that just gives % strength it would make it into a damaging spell where once cast it erects an actual pillar that has runes on it and it creates a rather large zone around it (30-40 yard radius is my suggestion but these numbers could be overblown but balancing could sort this) to compensate for such a large radius I suggest that the damage done by this pillar which would effectively do DoT around it as some kind of shadow and frost blizzard that scales with distance so closer to the pillar more damage it does (for example 100% within 10 yards, 85% within 20 yards, 70% within 30 yards - you get the picture) and then the further talents below gargoyle would be related to what pillar could so like applying a debuff of those damaged by the pillar to your shadowfrost damage.
Because I think that unholy should share some similarities with frost in thematic I think that our virulent plague dealing shadowfrost damage as well as being able to summon the pillar like frost (and I would also give frost the same type of spell as the change I propose and also give it to blood dk which is on serious life support due to having effectively no choice in their blood dk talent tree but I could talk about frost and blood reworks another time) they would feel more similar in this regard.
One thing that boggles me is that death knight should be like anti-paladin and one aspect I think this is missing is auras. Auras are so iconic for paladins that surely death knights should have a similar idea, for this very reason I’d add auras that either debuff enemies or dive a durability buff to allies. For example if it would be debuff it could be movement speed slow and also making it distance based where closer you are the larger the slow, or something like healing and shielding reduction aura, OR if we go the route of buffing allies then something like a leech aura or possibly avoidance aura. I would also bake this aura into the pillar effectively allowing the death knight cover larger area with this aura as well as doubling the effect of that aura during the time pillar is active.
There is a lot more I could about general dk talent tree that honestly needs a lot of changes still, even though the rework they got at the start of TWW was step in the right direction when you actually look at the talents you realise that you don’t really have actual choice between these talents with maybe 3 actual options you can pick from and even those are minimal choices. (also sorry if there was any typos that I missed)
