Point in playing Unholy?

[Astro9866]

Currently working on Paragons, soon to be Garrosh. What is the point in playing Unholy? Pros and Cons that I could come up with. just got a HWF weapon from Thok, and only have H weapons from Norushen.

Pro:
-AoE is simple
-More burst(?)
-More execute damage
-less reliant on the player

Con:
-not as passive cleave as frost
-More management of buffs/pets
-Haven't played in an entire tier(for me atleast)

Would like more pros/cons from other people, hopefully people that have done the fight.

[Nangz]

Well, if you have a good 2h weapon, sounds like you would/could do higher single target.

[Astro9866]

I'll have to sim it, Unholy still tries to get the all of their stats near the same weight, while maintaining secondary stats > str right? It's been a while

[bals]

Really depends on fight.
Wdps isn't as major of a factor for unholy as it is for say 2hand frost.
also unholy stat weights are pretty close so it's pretty much get enough haste to where you're gcd capped and get which ever other one you want, or keep them even *crit is higher at max gear level though

[Astro9866]

Cool, thanks! More pros/cons would be nice from everyone! Multiple opinions > one opinion

[Maxweii]

Unholy's really nice now, gotten a lot of qol improvements.

Pro:
Not as dependant on weapons for dps, though I would say the trinkets then take weight and matter more
Stronger execute
Stronger aoe for non burst adds
Strong dots in general

Cons:
Pet, not everyone likes them
A lot of the damage is from your CD's, which is bland to others



stats yeah crit at BIS is best, and what I do is pretty much what bals said. Get to a point you are comphy with your regen/gcd capped and then it's into crit/mastery

[Deleted]

Unholy's fine but it's less dependant on your weapon than the other two frost specs (and more on gear). Seeing as you're on HC Paragons I'm sure gear isn't an issue.

Pros:

Can have a fairly low amount of haste (generally all 3 stats are fairly decent), reforging into crit/mastery and therefore have a slower, more controlled playstyle that suits some people. Frost (especially 1h) is pretty spammy and, at GCD cap can leave little room for error.

Nice burst at the start of the fight. (or any time gargoyle's up tbh)

Decent execute damage.

You're not locked in to using Thok's trinket if you've been unlucky with getting it. Can also use Skeer's to re-apply diseases at max stacks (it's godly when the RNG gods give you a proc during AOE) alongside Galakras'

Gear's not as much of an issue as DW frost's reliance on "all mastery, all the time".

Cons:

Sad truth is you'll likely do more damage as 2H frost with a HWF weapon than Unholy. 2H frost thrives on fights with small amounts of downtime due to the insane "add-killing" capability of a few obliterates in a row. Unholy still has ramp up time and, outside of cooldowns not much burst.

Unholy's pretty dependant on the strength of your applied diseases which can be pretty RNG on fights with multiple waves of adds. Generally frost will play out "as simmed" whereas your DPS results on encounters can vary wildly with Unholy.

Unholy requires a bit more timing when it comes to AOE, making sure you can transform/keep timmy up during these phases.

Slacking with soul reapers is not an option with Unholy.

[Astro9866]

I have both a heroic CD and Amp trinket, along with about 21k mastery (all the frost damage!) So I'll probably end up going Haste > Mastery > Crit. All depends on if the guild needs boss or add damage on Garrosh.

[Raikh]

I just "tested" Unholy for me last raid (normally frost dw and sometimes 2h this tier) and i thought of it worse initially. Although i would say that i messed up quite a bit especially on the first encounters because of not being used to it anymore, the results were quite nice and were absolutely competitive to frost. Although a bit "harder" to achieve in times of resource management and so on.

Speakign for Unholy with garrosh heroic in mind:

Pros:
- Higher burst (garg + frenzy of course and also stronger army)
- Dmg control (you can sacrifice a bit of overall dmg for keeping up fully powered dots the entire fight and burst threw with normal prio + super dots on an important burn phase)
- High selfehal/flexibility (death siphon heals for grotesk amounts and with high levels of mastery deathsiphon and SS are at a small difference making it a good range attack and so having 2 ranged attacks + pet + dots for being out of melee range)
- higher movement speed than frost (even if only a bit)
- cusomization without payments ( 4 set vs offset wf are a small difference, you can basically stack any stat still doing comparable dps allowing you to choose a stat set which fits best for the encounter)
- strong execute (which garrosh has plenty of, healing up from 10% to 100% in first transition, from 10% to 30% in second and from 0% to 60% for p4, so really much SR uptime)

Cons:
- Weaker AoE (even for long term AoE UH will lose, you can't keep up super dots on many targets and as they drop the AoE drops significant, burst also worse than for frost as we mainly AoE through dots.)
- Pets are commonly known as stupid and sometimes buggy
- Longer ramp up than frost, so not that good on instant switching on low hp adds that have to die asap
- less forgiving, srewing dots, SR, ghoul transform or wasting resources and getting starved is way easier and hurts more than frost atleats for the most part
- Setboni: rnd 2set - can be rawr ultimate power can be non existent and 4 set is pretty much non existent.

On a side note: What i found somewhat strong and isn't incoporated by the sim is (only works for having gala + thok trinket) extending dots from thok to thok procc. Only with some bad luck you'll get the trinkets desynched and so you can basically play with perma super dots while not having them to be extended for like 10 minutes, lucky 2 piece procs can get in handy there,too.
Strong mastery settings are also about as equal as crit settings (maximum 1% difference, for my current gear even less) with higher AoE power and very hard SRs, Garg, totally insane death siphons (500k+ heals inc) with trinket procs and really strong BP.