Unholy has some serious problems

[Deleted]

in too many situation you can fuck up your frost/blood rune sync, so it screw your single target rotation, forcing us to do icy touch to convert the lone frost rune into death rune is fucking dumb.

So the Icy touch is used if you end up with frost runes like that?

[jellyfrog]

Although we are doing nice damage, I do agree that the class design is very poor. Runes are basically an extra mechanic in every fight because they require quite a bit of attention to ensure you don't fuck anything up (at least for me, someone who has played the class for 4 months).

Pre BB nerf I felt the class was really enjoyable to play, there was some complexity but it was quite intuitive how to manage your resources and playstyle. Since Necroblight I really don't enjoy it because every single fight requires a different approach. I'm sure some people enjoy that but personally I don't want to have to re-learn how to DPS effectively for each individual boss.

Plus with constant target switching on many BRF fights, and especially where the priority targets die quickly (Blast Furnace for example) I find it incredibly frustrating trying to maintain NP whilst making the best use of spare runes.

To me the class feels incredibly clunky and just not very fun at least the Necroblight style on BRF encounters. Unfortunately it seems far and away the most effective playstyle and I don't want to play something suboptimal so stuck with it for the time being.

[Deleted]

OMG since #2 KIRA this is best thread and I've missed so much of it.
I just wanted to highlight your warrior friend who presses whatever button is shining and being top #100 (guess that means he only looks on bars not on some custom auras - cause that's available for everyone) and also bursting as unholy. Almost sounds like we need soul reaper do to dmg? Oh guess we do.

Oh man I just love everything in the OP. It shows so much insight. And I agree with all of it. Buff unholy DK!

[Deleted]

Yeah being the best overall plate dps is not enough

We've had our time at the bottom, Siege of Orgrimmar says hi.

[Deleted]

feels like we have more to manage resource wise than other classes,runic power generators and spenders, 3 sets of two runes, all different types, certain abilitys cost different runes and give diffeerent amounts of rp etc while a warrior has what? rage, a ret paladin? holy power. and this is without specing into blood tap adding a whole new thing to manage

[Deleted]

feels like we have more to manage resource wise than other classes,runic power generators and spenders, 3 sets of two runes, all different types, certain abilitys cost different runes and give diffeerent amounts of rp etc while a warrior has what? rage, a ret paladin? holy power. and this is without specing into blood tap adding a whole new thing to manage

This is EXACTLY what I mean, sure, i might have been exaggerating in the OP, but yeah, what you said is so true.

We spend all fight worrying how to manage our resources best and how to not fuck up, people lose focus on other important tasks during the fight.

[Evilsbane]

I'm currently in a solid mythic guild 5/10M, working on more prog and honestly, i think UH dk has been pretty manageable even with the BB changes. I've had plenty of 95+ percentiles and it comes down to just micro management, having good WA's and trackers and just general knowledge around the class, if you mess up the rotation and you get thrown off with runes without having PL or ERW, then it's your own fault and should be punished for it, whether its 1k dps or 5k dps on aoe packs, i make mistakes too and i just move on, work around the left over runes, I've played since WotLK and raided since ToTC as a DK every xpac and can't get enough of it, the burst in HM was great, now in brf as more classes get more gear/better itemisation/bonuses they peak 150k burst while i peak 80-90k, im okay with that cause generally at the end of the fight, my red bar is still in the top 5-8. Those that i know play UH well love it, those that don't would rather keybind everything to HB and play frost so i don't think theres a loss there, UH doesn't need a buff, just needs to be managed better.

[Sut]

I think the problem with UH is less to do with damage output and more to do with the extra effort that has to be put in managing our resources compared to Warriors and Paladins. If a Warrior or Paladin makes a mistake and caps rage/holy power, it is a dps loss but it doesn't drastically affect the flow of their rotation. However, if a UH Dk gets rune desync it's a dps loss and really screws the rotation and usually requires something like ERW, PL or waiting to fix.

A friend spoke to me about the class simplification of WoD and said that most of the complexity from playing in a raid was moved from class mechanics to raid encounter mechanics and I'm inclined to agree with him. It seems the DK developer(s) didn't get the memo.

[Deleted]

Agree with Sut 100%

[Deleted]

We've had our time at the bottom, Siege of Orgrimmar says hi.

In what world was Unholy even remotely the worst plate DPS spec in SoO? You were miles ahead of Retribution, which is hardly surprising given that Retribution was literally the worst single-target spec in the game even post a slew of buffs in both ToT and SoO, and competitive on plenty of fights with warriors, rogues, etc.

You were strong for progression and then got buffed out the wazoo for farm - unlike a bunch of other specs that were playable for progression and then literally never got touched and were absolute horseshit during SoO farm.

[Schizoide]

It doesn't matter, nobody "deserves" to be at the top. Everybody deserves to be middle of the pack.

[Halym]

It doesn't matter, nobody "deserves" to be at the top. Everybody deserves to be middle of the pack.

If everybody's middle of the pack, then nobody is.

[Skullknight]

I think Unholy is far from having "serious problems". We are a very stable spec in my opinion. I float anywhere from #1-3 pretty consistently at 680 ilvl. Yes our Blood Boil AoE was nerfed to hell but at least we have the option of Necrotic Plague being viable now. With Army being crap the only thing I would ever like to see is a buff to our pet. They are no where near Warlocks or Hunters pet damage.

[Deleted]

You were miles ahead of Retribution

I hate to break it to you, but apart from pure single target, Ret was equal to or better than DK on pretty much every fight in SoO.

[jellyfrog]

I think the problem with UH is less to do with damage output and more to do with the extra effort that has to be put in managing our resources compared to Warriors and Paladins. If a Warrior or Paladin makes a mistake and caps rage/holy power, it is a dps loss but it doesn't drastically affect the flow of their rotation. However, if a UH Dk gets rune desync it's a dps loss and really screws the rotation and usually requires something like ERW, PL or waiting to fix.

A friend spoke to me about the class simplification of WoD and said that most of the complexity from playing in a raid was moved from class mechanics to raid encounter mechanics and I'm inclined to agree with him. It seems the DK developer(s) didn't get the memo.

Pretty much exactly what I was trying to say, but more succinct.

[Deleted]

So can we all agree on that DK's are the most complicated class? Or close to it atleast?
With Rune and Runic Power management, knowing what spell causes what rune to be spent, and how much RP you gain from all the different abilities. And all the dark transformation timing, pooling up RP so you don't have downtime.
Plague Leech being used perfectly or you only end up with 1 death rune.
You're either using RC or BT, i'm using BT, which is ANOTHER thing to manage, so all in all, it definetely seems that DKS playstyle requires more attention etc than other classes.

[Terridon]

So can we all agree on that DK's are the most complicated class? Or close to it atleast?
With Rune and Runic Power management, knowing what spell causes what rune to be spent, and how much RP you gain from all the different abilities. And all the dark transformation timing, pooling up RP so you don't have downtime.
Plague Leech being used perfectly or you only end up with 1 death rune.
You're either using RC or BT, i'm using BT, which is ANOTHER thing to manage, so all in all, it definetely seems that DKS playstyle requires more attention etc than other classes.

No, but we can agree that it's too complicated for OP. Op should roll warrior for crits.
Unholy is in a fun and good place, currently, in my eyes.
In all fairness most classes can be complicated to play when you go in depth with them. Most just do that with 1-2 classes and then claim all the others are easier, because they don't understand them well enough.

[Raikh]

Unholy didn't change much in tersm fo game play since cata. MoP brought up some changes like blood tap and inverse scaling RC but from a game play perspective not much changed, we got some QoL changes in MoP, like free garg and PS applying both diseases.
In late T14 the concept of festerblight popped up, ending up brutally effective with feather from ToT, got weakened in SoO but was still the way to go as EEoG and TTT synced naturally basically giving us a 2 min festerblight cycle.

Now for WoD. AoE got vastly simplified, BB actually generating death runes, pestilence backed into BB, BB being a 15 yard AoE spreading diseases is extremely practical and strong by itself. Unholy actually got the chance to use PL which was not the case in MoP due to festerblight being very effective. The BB nerf gave festerblight the chance of a comeback, being realized with the buff of 6.1 of NP.

That rune desyncing isn't exactly fun is a bit older than this expansion, so its interesting that it is exactly popping up right now as we are currently ina pretty good place, always something t complain, I guess? (no offense, nor saying that it is completely unjustified)

Personally speaking I think that this desyncing and BT management matter is exaggerated over the top. Its an absolute minmax story, its not fundamental for your dps. It feels a bit interrupting but its nowhere as heavy a dmg loss as it feels and the workarounds are also easy to play out, especially for necroticblight, have a death and frost rune? Use FeS as you need more FeS than you would normally get anyway, there is also always the option of simply using IT once and so on, waiting is also not much of a problem, a single orphaned rune is not blocking runereg and the blood rune for that will come back anyway in time, its an empty gcd for the moment but its not like that we are fully gcd capped either.
Blood Tap is also not fundamental. It has a quite powerful extra for AoE, but no current boss provides sustained AoE to the degree it would be a must have and especially for ST and light cleave the difference between RC and BT is extremely small, there are several top rankings using RC and RC is avodiing most of desyncing from the very beginning.

The rune system is complex but most of that complexity isn't relevant for dmg or your gameplay, its the very edge of optimal dmg that uses that complexity to squeeze a little bit more out.
Its basically normal for every spec to start with basics and work your way up from there. If you jump onto a class and try to instantly master the minmax playstyles its ofcourse going to backfire. The way our resource system is designed you can gain and lose from it. If you mess up whats relevant for the last 5% dmg and lose 10% instead ofcourse the class feels hard and its ofcourse to question if that is good from a design perspective but you also have to differentiate the magnitude of that minmaxing for you as it is not truly important for playing the class itself. In the end it boils down to practice and for encounter specifc game play to put a bit of thought into it, making a plan when to use what and not randomly hoping for NP not to drop off or shooting a BoS into nothing and so on.

I enjoy how the dk works right now, I can play pretty stable easily and if a boss is very attention demanding can play at good pace without bothering too much about minmaxing my resource management and once you got into the boss you can optimize your management and tailor some things to the boss to get the rets fo the dmg, of course the last part isn't easy but I welcome the challenge knowing that it isn't something direly needed but rather something I want to do. Its also relatively simple to recover messing up a few times, its just that messing up often kills your output at which point you should chnage things up a bit. This is something many specs still have at some point to some degree, it might be just the case that it feels a bit more punishing than it truly is as it takes some momentum out of your game play when it happens.

[Deleted]

No, but we can agree that it's too complicated for OP. Op should roll warrior for crits.
Unholy is in a fun and good place, currently, in my eyes.
In all fairness most classes can be complicated to play when you go in depth with them. Most just do that with 1-2 classes and then claim all the others are easier, because they don't understand them well enough.

So, please enlighten me, what other classes has equally much to pay attention to, huh?

You can't agree that if Dk's slip up it completely ruins our burst, or rotation, whilst other classes arent equally affected?
You know there's a reason why we never top DPS anymore, right?

[Sinzaram]

Now for WoD. AoE got vastly simplified, BB actually generating death runes,

This change happened in the ToT patch. Kinda amazes me how people only notice now. :P