PTR Build 24026 Unholy Changes

[Deleted]

I hope unholy dk is competitive...... sick of seeing frost being the top spec all the time !!

[Sulika]

Our scaling has been fine we've just been undertuned slightly. Tuning and scaling are different.

I don't think it is just a matter of scaling. There are issues with Unholy that go a bit beyond that.

The first of these is that the spec really has no burst. There is Gargoyle and Apocalypse but these both suffer from the problem of first of all not being very bursty, they both do their damage over pretty long periods of time. Fights with burst windows are generally quite short in the game, generally 10 seconds or less so as Unholy it generally isn't going to add anything significant if you save Apocalypse or Gargoyle (or Dark Transformation) for these times. Even if you wanted to the cost of doing so is probably going to outweigh any benefit. So Unholy is always going to suffer on fights that have burst windows.

The second of these is AoE, while on paper Unholy has some of the best AoE in the game the reality is that for Unholy AoE to shine you need two things. A relatively long time between AoE windows of 30 seconds or more for Death and Decay to come up as well as a very static and predictable positioning in which to do that AoE. Given that boss fights in general are unlikely to get simpler it seems unlikely that being able to stand still and AoE is going to become common. I think it is interesting that there isn't a single fight in Nighthold where Unholy's AoE really works well. Skorpyron the spawn timings are too rapid so you can't death and decay every spawn and even if you could often the adds are dead by the time they are positioned, Chronomatic Anomoly adds are the only ones that really work for Unholy since they spawn in and die in one spot but they die a bit fast for Unholy to really do a lot of damage to them. Trilliax is ok but its just a single add, spellblade is ok but some of the adds are forced to be very spread out (to be fair that mechanic is designed to prevent just AoEing all the adds down so that affects everyone), Tichnodrious adds run all over the place, Gul'dan adds have to be moved quite often or move themselves etc. Long slow statically positioned AoE just isn't really a niche in the game and seems unlikely to become one, the game has moved on from that.

So you have a spec that while a lot of fun to play can't really do on demand burst and can't really AoE effectively in a raid boss fight scenario (on static pulls like trash the AoE is fantastic). As frost you have a lot of macro decisions to make on fights, it is often worth holding a cooldown to sync with a vulnerability window or add spawns, it the fight needs you to peak for a burst window you can do so, if the fight needs you to blow up a set of adds fast you can do so regardless of the fight mechanics. Unholy doesn't really have great tools for either of those situations and it's hard to envision too many fights coming up where being able to do one or the other well isn't a big advantage.

And for the tools Unholy has often using them isn't intuitive. Take a simple example of Skorpyron with his exoskeletal vulnerability. Should you hold Apocalypse and / or Gargoyle for that moment? Is it better to pop Apocalypse while its active (and lose ghoul damage as you wait for them to appear and start attacking) or to pop it before the phase activates and lose some of the burst damage but gain some extra ghoul hits and ghoul debuff uptime during the phase? Or say a fight like Spellblade, what is the ideal number of runes to have avaiable at the moment the adds spawn? It's really hard to know for sure (nevermind the difficulty of actually ensuring you have a certain amount of runes up at a particular moment or trying to sync it with soul reaper uptime and its 2-4 GCD and 2-4 runes cost to get it up and active). For frost those answers are quite easy to know. Should you save remorseless winter for adds spawning? Well since its damage scales linearly with the number of adds the answer is always yes. Should you save runes for howling blast spam when adds are spawning, same answer, always yes. Should you as Unholy? Well if you think they will spawn and be gathered up fast enough that you can put down death and decay and be in position to hit all the adds with cleave while they stand in it then yes, but you can almost never know that so as often as not if you do you'll just end up wasting good runes that you could have used to single target the boss and gain no benefit.

It's a pity because I love playing Unholy, it plays really well but its gameplay is all in the moment to moment of managing your rotation. It just doesn't play well with fight mechanics and while in theory of course they could just bump the numbers so that Unholy DKs could go on just doing their rotation and paying little attention to burst windows and accepting that their ability to AoE successfully was pretty much totally out of their control it feels like that is something they won't do.

It is of course nice to see some numbers tweaking but the spec right now has no niche, it has solid single target damage and AoE that as often as not will wiff as work and cooldowns that use so many resources to proc successfully that its pretty much impossible to do any meaningful burst. Its a huge amount of fun to play (my favourite spec in the game by far) but having a spec that only weakly interacts with fight mechanics be a strong spec would be so problematic in general that its hard to see it being buffed to the point of being a top damage contender.

I'm sure anyone here could come up with a bunch of suggestions for changing things (I could do so myself) and some suggestions for how to play those boss fights but the point is its unintuitive. Lets take a simple exercise. Sit down and knowing what you do of Frost plan out how the perfect Skorpyron fight would go. When you use cooldowns, when you save them, what you do phase by phase. It's not that hard to do and you can come up with decent improvements in DPS just by planning the fight and playing accordingly. Now do the same for Unholy. It's a lot harder. There are plenty of general principles you could apply but coming up with a plan that you know is solid, workable and practical is almost impossible, you're generally best off to just blow everything during heroism and wing it from there. You have a fight with 20 second add spawns and unpredictable burst windows to somehow optimise around a 3 minute cooldown, a 90 second cooldown with setup requirements, a 60 second cooldown a 30 second AoE and whatever other tools you get from talents. It's pretty much impossible and that in a way is the problem with Unholy. There's a lot of buttons to use, a lot of cooldowns, a lot of skills that interact in interesting and fun ways but for the most part the best you can do is muddle along and use whatever you have available at the moment as best you can in the moment.

Last up in this wall of text. A simple question for Unholy DKs. In all of Nighthold what is the Unholy DKs moment to shine. The fight or moment in a fight where you think "this is it, this is when Unholy shows what it can do". My own thought is that there isn't one. I'm not even sure what a situation like that would look like.

[Maxweii]

I am not going to bother to fully respond to that as you even said yourself it's a wall of text.

Unholy's burst is actually... very good. Right now the problem is the longer the fight the worse Unholy does as it moves away from time when we used Army.

Unholy's aoe is excessively simple to do, using Clawing Shadows. The mobs don't need to be in it, you do. So if some mobs aren't in DnD, you can still cleave them as long as they are close enough to your target (hint here would be make sure you're targetting whatever is in the center of the mobs).


Really just reading all that, to summarize it very simply, sounds like just a bucket of salt was poured on you because you find Frost easier, and as such don't try on Unholy as much. Knowing how many runes to go into the add phase with Spellblade is not a hard thing to figure out, neither is weighing ghoul explosion damage vs apoc+wound burst damage. Simple questions that you are over portraying as big issues.
Unholy fits wonderfully well into NH fights, by the way.

[Deleted]

That depends on talents and RNG, I know you're a fan of DA Weii, but that talent, which can provide excellent burst, comes at an opportunity cost and sacrifices your rotation for runic dumping.

Secondly, the classic SR talent setup does not provide guaranteed good burst for the length of its CD (this includes army, DT and Garg). Not against other classes. I need to find the logs where I pugged a Mythic EN, against DHs, Frost DKs, warlocks, Mages and rogues in that group, I was no where near the top 5. Even our own DH consistently bursts for over 2 million where a decently geared frost DK (910+) can hover near 2 million. Our average burst window nets around 1.5 million.

Lastly the aoe issue pointed out by the previous poster is correct. There are talents, such as bursting sores, which with bracers and black claws, that provide good passive aoe without sacrificing too much in terms of ST damage, but this should have been baked into our toolset.

[Maxweii]

Like I said I wasn't responding to the whole thing so clarification on some things wasn't there.

Our burst is fine for target swapping, our burst on pull is also very good (hint we're just undertuned compared to top specs). Wasn't even speaking of DA in these places either.

Overgeared content is never a basis for good comparative logs, EN is entirely easily overgeared even in mythic now.

I wasn't even talking about our toolset. I spoke of the Spellblade option on in the context of saying, knowing how many runes to take into a situation is part of learning a fight, not your toolkit. So I spoke of how our aoe isn't "Long slow statically positioned AoE " as was stated by them.

[Ange]

(hint we're just undertuned compared to top specs)

I play Frost-49 with ilvl 910 gear and Unholy-48 with ilvl 910 gear, both with BiS Legos. The DPS difference between both specs for me is 12-15% on 5+ min fights and it is more on shorter fights (mythic+).

Unholy demands lots of attention all the time with all the random overcaping of 3 different ressources and there is the long army cooldown, which is very punishing in mythic+ dungeons, which is a big part of this expansion and class balance. With Frost, there is pretty much only the BoS-Phase to track for 30-60 seconds and you are back to tracking only HB procs to not get wasted and compared to other classes Frost is still not the easy/boring/not demanding whatever one to play currently.

Just keep in mind how BoS-Frost still needs the right talents, the right Legendarys, the right BoS uptime just to compete with the ONE button press of any Warrior DPS spec with Draught of Souls to get similar BoS-DamageDone to Draught of Souls-DamageDone.

Do you think Unholy should be slightly overtuned above Frost or even top specs to counter this disadvantages?

[Deleted]

Any short fight is a good measure of burst, which is why old raid data is so useful.

Any top UH DK who's done old raids with their top performing guildies would probably tell you of the high expectations we have of our burst window (30-60 seconds) where we should be top given the amount of CDs we manage in the first 7 seconds of a pull. Which in itself is hindered by a number of GCD bound CD's and the initial over cap of resources we have. On top of this we have a CD which is a liability to pre-pulls in raids and results which are lack lustre compared to top specs. This notion that we should accept anything less is ludicrous.

Instead we have a situation where our initial burst against a number of specs is poor in comparison and our tail off is significant when the fight goes on. In a 4 minute fight a frost DK (not a top spec - more upper middle) can not only outburst a similar UH DK with shorter CDs but has the opportunity to create another burst window 2 minutes later. A Demon Hunter, at the top of their game can burst for over 3.5 million and can sustain around 1.7 million beyond the 30 second window. Now that's good burst. We can't even scratch a fraction of that. The initial assessment of the previous poster was very accurate. It's ok, but nothing special and pretty weak given the number of resources and CDs we use.

[Sulika]

I am not going to bother to fully respond to that as you even said yourself it's a wall of text.

Unholy's burst is actually... very good. Right now the problem is the longer the fight the worse Unholy does as it moves away from time when we used Army.

Unholy's aoe is excessively simple to do, using Clawing Shadows. The mobs don't need to be in it, you do. So if some mobs aren't in DnD, you can still cleave them as long as they are close enough to your target (hint here would be make sure you're targetting whatever is in the center of the mobs).


Really just reading all that, to summarize it very simply, sounds like just a bucket of salt was poured on you because you find Frost easier, and as such don't try on Unholy as much. Knowing how many runes to go into the add phase with Spellblade is not a hard thing to figure out, neither is weighing ghoul explosion damage vs apoc+wound burst damage. Simple questions that you are over portraying as big issues.
Unholy fits wonderfully well into NH fights, by the way.

I think you're missing the point a bit. The point was unholy has no on demand burst, popping all you cooldowns at the start of the fight while heroism is up is not on demand burst, every class can do that. If there is a single target burst window you can do something but unless it is either at the start or at (some multiple of) 3 minutes in its probably going to be an overall dps loss to do so. If a boss spawns 5 sets of adds and the 3rd set needs to be burst down it probably makes no difference as unholy, you just do your (pretty good) aoe cleave down on those adds the same as you do on the other spawns. If those adds last 5 seconds, you probably dont do too much, if they last 30 seconds you probably don't do too much either beyond the first 10 seconds.

Even single target using Gargoyle and Apocalypse isn't really burst, the increased damage is spread over about 40 seconds which is hardly what you could call a burst window. Unholy can't really interact with these sort of mechanics very well. You can to some point of course but for the most part the benefits you gain are far lower than most other dps specs will gain from playing well around the specific mechanics of the fight.

The point being that even if they buff Unholy to where it could sim as equal to other specs the spec will still lose out on any fight with a burn phase simply because the tools available don't really lend themselves to exploiting it. The specific adds burn example it slightly different in that on the overall damage meters doing good AoE on all five will probably look much the same as doing lesser AoE on four and fantastic AoE on the important one but the latter is more useful in general.

As for the salt, come off it. We could all say anyone who tried to point out any issues with our favourite spec was just being salty but I don't think it would get us anywhere. I made certain lots of times to say how much I love playing Unholy, it's still my favourite spec to play, I still raid as Unholy when I can (lately I end up having to tank a lot) and I could write a post just as long as the last outlining all the stuff I love about the spec. The point was that I don't see how a spec that interacts weakly with fight mechanics should ever be a top tier spec, for that to be the case the spec would by definition have to be stronger overall when there were no mechanics to exploit. And I deliberately use the word should there (as opposed to could), obviously they could give Unholy a flat 10% boost in the morning and make it one of the strongest specs in the game but I don't think that would be a very rich experience, I think most people would agree that the guy who does the most damage on the fight should be the guy who best played around the fight mechanics, to do that you need tools that Unholy right now just doesn't have, it plays fantastically in the moment to moment game of balancing your resources, certainly as rich a moment to moment gameplay as any other spec can offer but there is very little by way of macro gameplay, you don't really benefit from trying to optimise cooldowns for the encounter and that's a limiting factor.

[Deleted]

I am not going to bother to fully respond to that as you even said yourself it's a wall of text.

Unholy's burst is actually... very good. Right now the problem is the longer the fight the worse Unholy does as it moves away from time when we used Army.

Unholy's aoe is excessively simple to do, using Clawing Shadows. The mobs don't need to be in it, you do. So if some mobs aren't in DnD, you can still cleave them as long as they are close enough to your target (hint here would be make sure you're targetting whatever is in the center of the mobs).


Really just reading all that, to summarize it very simply, sounds like just a bucket of salt was poured on you because you find Frost easier, and as such don't try on Unholy as much. Knowing how many runes to go into the add phase with Spellblade is not a hard thing to figure out, neither is weighing ghoul explosion damage vs apoc+wound burst damage. Simple questions that you are over portraying as big issues.
Unholy fits wonderfully well into NH fights, by the way.

I'm interested to learn how you actually define "burst" per se? What are you actually comparing and in what scenario? Every CD with lust on ST? On demand burst on priority targets?

As an example, these are logs from mythic Krosus the first 40 seconds (lust time frame), comparing top logs within respective spec and chosen the one that seems most average;

UH DK: Top parses seems to be around 1.5M dps. (https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...0991&by=target)

Frost DK: Seems pretty similar at 1.5M dps (https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...5661&by=target)

Havoc DH: Found some very high, but this one seems most common at 2.7k dps (https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...8007&by=target)

Assass Rogue: 1.6M dps. (https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...5667&by=target)

Affli lock: Same, 1.6M dps. (https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...2760&by=target)

BM hunter: 1.6M dps. (https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...2972&by=target)

After looking at many other classes, they are pretty even at 1.4 - 1.6 M DPS during the bloodlust window at pull. All these are toplogs comparison.

Would you still say UH burst is "very strong"? I would put it as average or actually weak since AotD is a 10min CD and should yield a lot higher burst because of that.

[Kendros]

Our burst with AotD should at least be equal if not higher than DH with their fucking 4 min cd for Meta while we have a 10 min cd that doesnt even deal damage for its full duration plus the time to stack debuffs.

[Glorious Leader]

Our burst with AotD should at least be equal if not higher than DH with their fucking 4 min cd for Meta while we have a 10 min cd that doesnt even deal damage for its full duration plus the time to stack debuffs.

Yea i never understood why its a 10 minute cd? The new 4 piece is nice but it still kinda begs the question

[Deleted]

Uhh the new PTR notes for the set bonuses. I like. Especially paired with the slight frost nerf.

[Sulika]

Uhh the new PTR notes for the set bonuses. I like. Especially paired with the slight frost nerf.

So unholy you use about 40 runes per minute (based of some quick estimates from looking at a few parses). That would be every minute the AotD cooldown is reduced by about 5 minutes giving an effective cooldown for AotD of a approximately 2 minutes with the 4 piece bonus as it currently stands.

I actually really like the two set bonuses as it turns army of the dead into something you use for on demand burst instead of something you precast before the pull then forget about. I have no idea how strong it would be but assuming the numbers are decent enough to make it worth using it would be fantastic from a gameplay perspective.

[Deleted]

Uhh the new PTR notes for the set bonuses. I like. Especially paired with the slight frost nerf.

You have a thing for frost eh;

[Protean]

Any short fight is a good measure of burst, which is why old raid data is so useful.

Any top UH DK who's done old raids with their top performing guildies would probably tell you of the high expectations we have of our burst window (30-60 seconds) where we should be top given the amount of CDs we manage in the first 7 seconds of a pull. Which in itself is hindered by a number of GCD bound CD's and the initial over cap of resources we have. On top of this we have a CD which is a liability to pre-pulls in raids and results which are lack lustre compared to top specs. This notion that we should accept anything less is ludicrous.

Instead we have a situation where our initial burst against a number of specs is poor in comparison and our tail off is significant when the fight goes on. In a 4 minute fight a frost DK (not a top spec - more upper middle) can not only outburst a similar UH DK with shorter CDs but has the opportunity to create another burst window 2 minutes later. A Demon Hunter, at the top of their game can burst for over 3.5 million and can sustain around 1.7 million beyond the 30 second window. Now that's good burst. We can't even scratch a fraction of that. The initial assessment of the previous poster was very accurate. It's ok, but nothing special and pretty weak given the number of resources and CDs we use.

In your DT macro add the line

/petautocastoff [nocombat] !cleaver


In your apocalypse(or SS/CS) macro add

/petautocaston !cleaver



Now you can play like the old days, don't see why you would want to though. Decoupling SR and apoc gives greater results since you don't waste half the duration on ghouls still spawning. You want their attacks sped up and casting BRW->DT->SR gives you a lot more hasted globals for yourself too. Especially if you add /use !cleaver on your CS macro.

- - - Updated - - -

So unholy you use about 40 runes per minute (based of some quick estimates from looking at a few parses). That would be every minute the AotD cooldown is reduced by about 5 minutes giving an effective cooldown for AotD of a approximately 2 minutes with the 4 piece bonus as it currently stands.

I actually really like the two set bonuses as it turns army of the dead into something you use for on demand burst instead of something you precast before the pull then forget about. I have no idea how strong it would be but assuming the numbers are decent enough to make it worth using it would be fantastic from a gameplay perspective.

I personally plan to run shoulders+trinket until I get bracer+ring combo. And Shadow Infusion talent.

[Deleted]

You have a thing for frost eh;

Nah I have a thing for unholy.

[Spamor]

Bracers nerfed again from 1-3 to 1-2. :/

[Deleted]

In your DT macro add the line

/petautocastoff [nocombat] !cleaver


In your apocalypse(or SS/CS) macro add

/petautocaston !cleaver



Now you can play like the old days, don't see why you would want to though. Decoupling SR and apoc gives greater results since you don't waste half the duration on ghouls still spawning. You want their attacks sped up and casting BRW->DT->SR gives you a lot more hasted globals for yourself too. Especially if you add /use !cleaver on your CS macro.

Thanks for the tip, but that's not what I was talking about, sentence you underscored was to do with AoTD.

Also you don't waste half your SR buff when coupling SR with apoc, you gain globals to continue your necrosis rotation, which is the talent I've taken. You also spend a global casting DT with your suggestion, with no guarantees that your ghoul or say bracers will pop more than one wound.

[nicola87]

Bracers nerfed again from 1-3 to 1-2. :/

lul yeah they are too op!

[Adlian]

Just remove the RNG part from bracers and make them proc 2 wounds always.