Unholy button bloat reduction and other ideas

Here’s the changes I’d like to see to reduce button bloat, up our quality of life and make unholy dk great(er) again:

Unholy blight is now a passive talent. Using dark transformation, army of the dead or abomination now gives you and your pets the unholy blight aura.

Sacrificial pact is now a ghoul pet ability that can be used as a passive death save. This ability sacrifices your ghoul and heals you to 25% health when taking damage that would otherwise kill you. The auto-cast can be disabled and the ability can also be used manually as a heal or to deal damage if wanted.
This is for Unholy only. Frost and Blood still got the regular sacrificial pact.

Clawing shadows is no longer only a 100% magic damage ranged spell but is now also considered one! This means that you can use it while disarmed, it can’t get parried and it goes through BoP etc.
The spell animation is changed to a smaller and darker slappy hand that slaps your target. The cast animation is now the same as epidemic or death coil, not sure which fits better.

Necrosis (previously Necrotic strike) is now a passive PVP talent that adds the heal absorption effect to your scourge strike or clawing shadows.

Reanimation is now a passive PVP talent that causes your Outbreak to also summon a zombie. The zombies will now blow up as soon as they touch any enemy player and not just your target.

Unholy assault is now a passive that causes your Apocalypse to always summon 4 ghouls, deal increased damage and give you 12 runic power and 20% haste for 12 seconds.
Also buffs the damage and duration of crypt fever if used together with the necromancer’s bargain PVP talent.
Not sure on this one since people might wanna use the festering wounds for something other than apocalypse

And lastly, something for all the specs:

Your experiences in the shadowlands have increased your knowledge of runes. You can now runeforge in rest areas, at the start of an arena match and for a few seconds after joining a dungeon finder or raid finder group.

Unstoppable death (previously Wraith walk) is now a passive talent that buffs your Death’s advance. Death’s advance gains 2 charges and breaks all roots on use. The movement speed gain is increased to 70% the first 4 seconds. While active, you are completely immune to slows.
The visual effect is removed and instead comes in the form of a glyph called glyph of wraith walk.

That’s it for now!
I think most of these changes are quite realistic and nothing insanely OP.
The biggest buff imo is the death’s advance one which would give us some much needed mobility.
The Unholy Assault one would give us a lot of pressure in PVP if paired together with Necromancers bargain so that’s kinda strong as well.

Do you have any ideas or changes that you’d like to see? Maybe a completely new ability? Please share if you do but also please refrain from things like “I want a button that let’s me instantly kill everything in a 50 yard area around me”.

Let’s see if we can come up with some cool things! If we do, maybe Blizzard senpai will notice :grin:

10 Likes

Most of them really sound reasonable and would take things considered mandatory from the skilltree to make room for new stuff.

Thumbs up from me.

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Great ideas, I’d love to see that.

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nice ideas but the death advence sound broken as hell

Yeah, one charge would be more realistic, but in that case I would like cd to be shorter and to give immunity to slows and roots (4-5 sec) if we choose that talent. Btw Soul Reaper should be baseline.

3 Likes

So… after having fought for unpruning to happend, it’s now the time for the pruning demands? 3 buttons specs are not very fun, most of the time.

Some cool entries!

Really like the unholy assault and sacrificial pact idea. The latter I have actually never even used it outside of that silly Torghast power, so it being a passive upon death sounds like a fun addition, which might have an interesting impact on pvp especially!

Personally I’d like to see all these absolutely dead talents replaced with something more interesting. We’ve got too many “mandatory” ones. I don’t think we should nerf them, instead we should look into improving ones like Pestilence, Defile, Harbinger Of Doom, Summon Gargoyle, Ebon Fever and even Clawing Shadows (what you recommended on this one seems cool for a pvp oriented scenario though).

I think the rune forging system should be entirely revamped. It’s been a passive enchant for as long as I can remember. What you mentioned seems like a fun quality of life upgrade, albeit a bit lore breaking, but doesn’t solve the main problem of Rune of the Fallen Crusader simply being the best for all specs in all scenarios. I’d love to see a system that is a little more involved and actually plays around with different dk abilities and specs as opposed to giving passive buffs. Maybe we could have a rune that makes Festering Strike always guarantees 3 Festering Wounds on primary target and a X% chance to cleave, so I’d use this for dungeons.

Maybe there could be one that essentially turns festering wounds into a stacking dot, thus making us think a little more strategically about when we’d want to build them up and when to blow them up! You get my drift, the possibilities are endless, just something more interesting and interactive!

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I’d personally prefer 3 distinct builds for unholy. One for PVP, one for M+ and one for raiding.


We’d have the AoE/M+ blight spreader build focusing on death and decay, plagues, diseases and epidemics to bring down multiple enemies at once. This build would have stacking diseases with enemies infecting each other. The dots would stack faster the more enemies there are. Kinda like how epidemic deals more damage the more enemies there are.
Perfect for those big pulls in m+.


The ranged necromancer build for PVP, with focus on sending zombies, ghouls, abominations and gargoyles while attacking from range with death coils and clawing shadows. The big CDs would be abomination (with a hook!), air strike gargoyle and sith lord force choke.
Perfect build for getting around the death knights lack of mobility.


The juggernaut build for raiding with a more hands-on approach that focuses on different and bursty strike combos and executes. It could have damage that ramps up over time with the death knight eventually ending up in an unholy frenzy for the “execute phase”.
Perfect for long boss fights with different phases that require bursty damage instead of consistent damage.


Cons:
The M+ blight build would be bad at PVP since it’d require many enemies bunched up for maximum damage. It might see some use in raids depending on the boss fight.

The PVP necro build would be bad at M+ since it’s mostly single target damage but might still see some use in m+ and raiding due to being able to attack from range.

The raiding juggernaut build would be bad at PVP since it’d require a decent uptime to pull off those bursty strike combos. Same goes for M+, the fights would be too short for the juggernaut to reach a frenzy or pull off strike combos properly.
It might still see some use in 3v3 with a comp that would help setup those combos or in M+ for certain affixes, like tyrannical.


Talents:
Each talent tree row would basically have a M+ talent, a PVP talent and a raiding talent. You’d be able to focus on one thing or mix things up for a jack of all trades, master of none build which might be better for solo play in Torghast etc.

I know these changes would never happen since this means unholy would require a complete rework and we’d more or less have 3 specs within a spec but… One can always dream, right? :pensive:

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It’s not about how many buttons, it’s about the quality of those buttons.

It’s something that people apparently do not understand.

You could have a rotation with 10 buttons but each of them feel meaningless, that is not a good rotation.

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I don’t like the idea of Death Pact becoming a ‘‘Cheat Death’’ Mechanic, seems very noobish and limiting. Same goes for Unholy Blight being a passive.

I don’t know how many times I’ve used Unholy Blight to take a rogue using Meme in the dark Leggo, out of stealth, when I spot the debuff.
If you make I passive I can’t do that anymore.

I do like all the other ideas tho, my only other suggestion would be to remove Outbreak, or at least make it so your Death Coils/Epidemic or Scourge strike extend the duration of Virulent plague (which needs a dmg buff in PvP by the way)

That should be the ideal for all class/specs combinations right? :wink: At least the way the game is build right now with the 3 talents per row system.

Thing is, Unholy has pretty much 3 themes all competing with each other:

The Necromancer, minion summoning one
The disease spreader / debuffer
The “anti-paladin” dark knight

A bit like you mentioned would be great to see these be more defined in terms of their use. Maybe if they focused on making all talents more thematic they might come up with more meaningful buttons to press.

An other approach I can think of splits two ways:

Talents that empower the death knights themselves.
Talents that empower all the minions we summon.

The benefit of this approach is that it might give more agency as to how people want to play, particularly in pvp. Ourselves being much stronger and not relying on pets sounds appealing to me in terms of pvp. On the other hand, maybe some would find overwhelming the opponents with an army of minions more fun.

That’s pretty bang on for the entire game. I find that with unholy’s single target build all buttons are pretty impactful, oddly enough with the exception of Scourge Strike. For me it’s the “yeah whatever, I guess I have to press this one because there’s nothing else to press atm”. Same goes for Death Coil outside of the DT extending bursts.

I’m all with you on that, but removing all control and management from a spec isn’t exactly a qualitative change. If i use the Unholy Blight proposition of the OP as an example:

  • Makes it a passive proccing on Dark transformation, Army of the dead and abomination.
  • Makes it procs on each minions, making the damage multiplied by the active number of minions the dk has.
  • Remove the cost in rune and RP, removing the management, which is supposed to be the main design focus of all DK specs.

Sure all those changes makes it feel nicier to burst, which is actually not even a problem, since it’s the funiest part of the spec. The main theme of his propositions is turned around the fact the spec needs to cost less and less RP and runes for his rotation, and removes the possible failing factor by making everything passive. Il feels like he dont like having any downtime in his burst focused build.

On the counterpart of your argument, Ilyon, we have blizzard that likes to let one or two useless spell per spec, and make it shine with a legendary, a set bonus or a thing like Thorgast powers.

If you want an example of that, you have Slam on the warrior that has pretty much no use in any of the 3 specs, but a legendary were using it before a rework, Thorgast powers uses it and BFA azerite armor were using it. Most of the time, we can get it out of our spell bars, but it feel good to have it when it’s usefull. Sometime, a little more is better than less.

On DH side, they felt short in the design process of this expansion rotation, making one of the few button in the rotation useless to use. On paper, the DH is fun and engaging, even with 4-5 rotation buttons, but with the removal of Blade dance from an optimal single target rotation, the spec feel incomplete and boring. Better lost 12% of your rotation than 25% when Blizzard miss their mark on spell.

In a dream world, those issues wouldn’t even exist, but design flaws are a real thing.

I really feel that unholy needs a redesign the current design of the spec feels extremely unfun and chore to play.

I don’t mind lot of buttons but unholy has way too many crap in it that doesn’t feel interesting or fun to push.

Personally what i like is this, in general:

  1. a few core rotational abilities, for dh for example it;s eye beams, chaos strike and demon bite.

  2. a lot of interactions between those abilities, for example, demonic, demonic appetite.

  3. a cd that feels meaningful without making your rotation overly reliant on it, a bad example of this is fire mage because the cd is good, it feels nice to press that button as it makes your rotation very cool, problem is that too much damage is dealt in those 10 seconds. Remove the mastery scaling, increase the duration, and when you press combustion your fire blasts are reset back to full, this way you don’t have to hold off damage.

  4. a few intermittent short burst cds, like what artifacts weapon used to do mostly. God knows why they removed them… Things like doomwinds, wake of ashes etc.

  5. some rng to spice things up, but not too much where it feels unreliable, good examples of this are, stormbringer, divine purpose, empyrean power, demonic appetite, bad example, roll the bones. The problem with no rng at all in specs is that it usually makes the rotation feel very bland, it’s always the same, ret pally without purpose or empyrean is just, use blade of justice off the gcd, use crusader, when you have holy power use verdict or storm, rinse and repeat, at least with those 2 talents that should be made baseline, you can get some back to back procs that feel very nice to press. Without feeling that you are not in control at all.

This is what i generally look forward in a spec.

Haha so true, you managed to really well capture everything I don’t like about blizzard’s approach to class design. I always bang on about how the baseline of every class/spec combination should feel good to play without any addition to it, no borrowed power, class sets, legendries, not even talents.

Talents come to optimize the baseline for a particular environment (pvp, dungeons, raids etc). Then anything else is just a nice to have thing on top, that gives you a bit of an edge and/or spice things up a bit for an expansion. Not this whole “well this class is useless unless you have this % mastery, this and that special ability from the bUiLD ARoUnD FeAtURe”

I like current iteration of unholy and the management it requires through its numerous abilities. I don’t feel like changing this is a worthy battle.
There is a large margin in performance comparing some talents of the same row and there are some talents that provide barely noticeable changes to the spec. This has to be the focus for improvement and evolution.

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They should make Death and Decay an aura instead, that way a lot of the abilities used in PvE (Such as being able to Cleave with Scourge Strike while inside your DnD) (And the Pheromones legendary 15% haste buff) could be used in PvP aswell.

So, similar to Remorless Winter for FDK.

Also make it so, if you choose Unholy Blight talent, it becomes a passive automatically triggered whenever you use DnD, to ease up on the GCD bloat.

For sure! Git to fix those permanently dead talents first, Harbinger Of Doom, Pestilence, Defile, Ebon Fever…

  • Makes it a passive proccing on Dark transformation, Army of the dead and abomination.
  • Makes it procs on each minions, making the damage multiplied by the active number of minions the dk has.
  • Remove the cost in rune and RP, removing the management, which is supposed to be the main design focus of all DK specs.

The damage and cost would be balanced accordingly ofc.
The main goal here is imo to either reduce the amount of buttons that needs to be pressed and make the remaining ones feel more impactful OR reduce the amount of GCD’s so you can macro the buttons together, which would be the EZ but boring solution.

Necrosis (previously Necrotic strike ) is now a passive PVP talent that adds the heal absorption effect to your scourge strike or clawing shadows.

Unstoppable death (previously Wraith walk ) is now a passive talent that buffs your Death’s advance. Death’s advance gains 2 charges and breaks all roots on use.

We didn’t get these exact changes but what we got is more or less the same or better!! I guess Blizz actually do check the forums every now and then ^^

A very welcome change and a good start! At least for PVP :smiley:

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