Unholy DK Alpha Testers, Please Read! (Unholy Legion Discussion)

[OzUnOo]

I've played a couple levels of unholy so far in the alpha and didn't enjoy it as much. You put a dot up and forget about it, you stack another dot and pop it before the stacks cap. Filler with death coil. That about sums up the spec.

I do like that you can choose talents that empower your pets more or you more, that could be fun. Unfortunately, for pve, right now you only take the abomination talent because the other two aren't great

I still owe it a few more chances because I really wanted to like it but right now it just doesn't do it for me.

If they fix the most glaring issues, Unholy PvP will look very promising. Specially excited for the Reanimation PvP talent, nothing screams unholy like willingly bringing a corpse back to life and exploding it in your opponents face. Hoping it doesnt require a nearby corpse and that it can be triggered at will with corpse explosion.

[jashmaster]

*start mini rant* I personally don't like how they changed the whole spec around for unholy or for any other spec on the alpha RNG wise. I often find myself RP capped almost all the time on the alpha due to RP generated by FW and having only one RP spender being DC and therefore being stuck between overcapping on runes spamming DC or overcapping RP by spending runes. I haven't had time to unlock the artifact empowerment for DC increasing SS by 50% so i haven't been able to try swapping between DC and SS, but when checking my logs for fights im usually right above the tank for damage done :/ idk guys, whole thing just feels lackluster like they took skill out of the game and made it too easy for casuals *end mini rant*

[OzUnOo]

*start mini rant* I personally don't like how they changed the whole spec around for unholy or for any other spec on the alpha RNG wise. I often find myself RP capped almost all the time on the alpha due to RP generated by FW and having only one RP spender being DC and therefore being stuck between overcapping on runes spamming DC or overcapping RP by spending runes. I haven't had time to unlock the artifact empowerment for DC increasing SS by 50% so i haven't been able to try swapping between DC and SS, but when checking my logs for fights im usually right above the tank for damage done :/ idk guys, whole thing just feels lackluster like they took skill out of the game and made it too easy for casuals *end mini rant*

Dont bother with damage now, beta is still a long way down the road when the number tuning actually starts. I have no doubt the new rune system will work great once you hit the haste optimal cap, but yeah, its the most boring its ever been. Hope they give us new areas where skill and experience matters, positioning seems to be more important now that our pet can have grip, for example.

[jashmaster]

Dont bother with damage now, beta is still a long way down the road when the number tuning actually starts. I have no doubt the new rune system will work great once you hit the haste optimal cap, but yeah, its the most boring its ever been. Hope they give us new areas where skill and experience matters, positioning seems to be more important now that our pet can have grip, for example.

i hear ya. curse you alpha and your completely untuned and unfinished product! i hope they either tone down the RP gain or give us a better RP waster. Imagine breath on unholy in alpha <3 it procs your FW AND does the normal damage it does on live. its uptime would probably match Blood on live now LOL
Haste stack till breakpoint then probably mastery stacking or crit for the one talent that doubles FW procs off SS crits for stat weights. then again who knows cus its always up in the air till either beta/live!

[OzUnOo]

So everyones artifact proc is basically removed now.. Hard to guess what the reason was, maybe too complicated to balance? That makes 2 of our traits completely useless for pvp, since we no longer summon army ghouls often. Wraith Walk and Epidemic were buffed at least though. Wanted to know how the spec feels now for testers.

[Ariyana]

So everyones artifact proc is basically removed now.. Hard to guess what the reason was, maybe too complicated to balance? That makes 2 of our traits completely useless for pvp, since we no longer summon army ghouls often. Wraith Walk and Epidemic were buffed at least though. Wanted to know how the class feels now for testers.

Don't be so quick to say the ghoul summoning is gone. There's an artifact trait right after Apocalypse that is currently a placeholder (it's shared between a ton of artifact talent trees) which is probably where that perk is going to appear. I'd be shocked if they had talents affecting the ghouls for army and then make it so you almost never get to benefit from them...that, and I don't know what they'd put in its place. It seems they're moving from having a proc on the weapon itself to putting it in the talents as a trait, and the artifact itself grants an active ability of some kind.

[OzUnOo]

Don't be so quick to say the ghoul summoning is gone. There's an artifact trait right after Apocalypse that is currently a placeholder (it's shared between a ton of artifact talent trees) which is probably where that perk is going to appear. I'd be shocked if they had talents affecting the ghouls for army and then make it so you almost never get to benefit from them...that, and I don't know what they'd put in its place. It seems they're moving from having a proc on the weapon itself to putting it in the talents as a trait, and the artifact itself grants an active ability of some kind.

I see, really hope thats the case. Do you know what the Armies of the Damned added effects are exactly? Heard it was 10% dmg reduction, but since it says effectS it must mean theres more.

[Ariyana]

Yep!

1) Death - +10% Damage taken
2) Famine: -10% Damage dealt
3) War: -10% Healing dealt
4) Pestilence: Places a DoT on the target (still have yet to sit down and figure out how much it does and how it scales)

From testing some of us have done, these debuffs appear to impact other people where appropriate, so it's pretty nice raid utility when available. Multiple instances of them could be up, but I don't believe the effects (other than Pestilence) stack with each other, although it may be one per DK. Otherwise, the main benefit to more than one is higher uptime on those debuffs.

[OzUnOo]

Post has been updated. All new stuff has (*) at the beginning, please share your thoughts!

[OzUnOo]

Bump for update

[rhoark]

This is 01 of the best posts I've read today.

[OzUnOo]

This is 01 of the best posts I've read today.

Not sure if trolling or not, but thanks!

New build released today had one of my complaints answered (FS min. stack is now 02), hope more of it gets through.

Still no major changes to rune regen besides Soul Reaper getting buffed, and Virulent Plague remains boring (though stronger).

[Ariyana]

Virulent Plague is not stronger. It is simply a tooltip change to show the total damage done over the course of the debuff duration instead of the damage per tick.

[OzUnOo]

Oh right, stopped reading at the seven multiplier to do backflips lol. Valkyr not replacing gargoyle seems to be a tooltip error, so no huge gameplay changes for unholy in this build, rly.

[Deleted]

OzUnOo If u can post something on alpha forum: we need dark simulacrum to be baseline again

btw our animations are completed? it looks so bad compared to Enh/Warriors

[OzUnOo]

OzUnOo If u can post something on alpha forum: we need dark simulacrum to be baseline again

btw our animations are completed? it looks so bad compared to Enh/Warriors

Im posting here exactly cuz i aint got alpha access lol. I can only expect somebody with alpha access to like some of my ideas and post them there for me.

I actually agree with Dark Simulacrum being a PvP talent, cuz it was barely useful in PvE and must have been a pain balancing PvE with it in mind. I disagree with it being a 1 min cd though, they should make it a 30 sec cd like its live gliphed version.

I dunno about the other animations, but Wraith Walk animation is confirmed to be just placeholder for now. Hopefully some of the other animations will be changed too.

[Coldvibes]

No way, Dark Sim is a perfectly good PvE talent, its just that Blizzard can't get their heads on fucking straight about how to balance abilities you can steal from bosses/adds so they either don't bother with putting stuff you can DS on things or they don't let you steal them, even if it actually does cost "mana".

[OzUnOo]

No way, Dark Sim is a perfectly good PvE talent, its just that Blizzard can't get their heads on fucking straight about how to balance abilities you can steal from bosses/adds so they either don't bother with putting stuff you can DS on things or they don't let you steal them, even if it actually does cost "mana".

DS simply was not created with PvE in mind. Stealing a NPC ability will always feel either too strong or too weak, never just decent, cuz its much easier to steal the ability you want in PvE where the enemys patterns are set in stone.

[Coldvibes]

DS simply was not created with PvE in mind. Stealing a NPC ability will always feel either too strong or too weak, never just decent, cuz its much easier to steal the ability you want in PvE where the enemys patterns are set in stone.

I full-on disagree with that mostly because the 2 (3?) abilities you can actually steal on bosses worth stealing in HFC were powerful but not encounter-breaking, which was awesome.

[OzUnOo]

I full-on disagree with that mostly because the 2 (3?) abilities you can actually steal on bosses worth stealing in HFC were powerful but not encounter-breaking, which was awesome.

How powerful? No point stealing dmg speals cuz they are based off the DK spell power, so unless it deals shadow/frost dmg it wont be relevant. Was it a form of CC? Offensive cd?

The point is, its better to get DS out of PvE cuz it will give the devs more room to invent boss mechanics, DS restricted their design too much w/o giving much in return, thats how i see it at least.