Coming off Frost in legion, Unholy feels really good at the moment. Feels much less clunky, flows better. Frost/Blood were always my go-to, but now Unholy is really tickling my bits.Happy for the shake-up! Keen to see how it carries into BfA with new content and gear.
I really do hope they make the pestilence changes you recommended. Using DnD ST does feel sort of clunky and can't be done without overspending runes in your opener. Soul reaper could help this, but I'm not sure if that's the talent to run if we don't have to, especially once we get into raid gear.Looking great overall and I will main this!
the longer duration/number of casts reduces the randomness in maximum dmg from gargoyle (compared to arbiter) as it reduced Standard Error.
Yeah UH feels really good right now! 28% haste with Sphuz's Secret + Unholy Frenzy i am still RUNE STARVED! It is so much fun to see auto attacking my DK while in front of the monitor i only can pray for runes! So~so~ much fun!In Legion i never had this problem...
I can still get behind UH, but really missing the old Abomb following me around. Otherwise, still lord of the undead, as it should be... Also, non-baseline wraith walk feels bad.
I just wish they would give Unholy a glyph for a less disgusting looking pet. Ghouls and skeletons are fine, a valkyr to replace DA would be awesome. I just can't stand looking at the flesh golem things, it ruins the spec for me.
Dude you play a freaking UH DK, what do you expect it to look like?
"but we unfortunately no longer have Unholy Endurance, which will be greatly missed." No mention of the loss of Corpse Shield? Paired with the abom's protective bile it was the UH bubble. For raiding ST, unholy was always my favorite DK spec in Legion. I miss some things but the spec is really solid in 8.0.1, pulling #1 and #2 DPS spots in raid and almost dead last in damage taken. Far more solid for M+ now too, which I would go Frost for when I wasn't tanking. Frostscythe and Obliteration (still prefer it over BoS) along with Cold Heart is still damn good for M+ because of UH's DnD CD time, mobs moving around too much, and Defile being on the same row as Epidemic =/. UH definitely still my go-to raiding DPS but I wouldn't feel bad using it in M+ either. I've noticed the Garg being decent as well. Despite the huge nerf in damage ramp up, the Double Doom from Legion meant so many freebies that the GCD took the rotation far out of sync and slowed the ramp-up on DA. Now it's easy to drop 3 full bars of RP.Overall some pretty good changes. Lack of haste is hurting a lot of classes for a while. There is a drink you can click in Stormsong that will give you a big haste buff for a few minutes, it really shows where the specs should be later on in the xpack. They feel really nice (Frost too, but not much was changed there).
Oh yea, just completely skip over the fact that Unholy is slower than molasses in winter in terms of gameplay. We lost FOUR artifact traits which helped the spec avoid downtime, and got NOTHING in return. Apocalypse giving 2 runes, more RP gen/cap, scourge strike rune refund chance, and double doom as a passive rather than a talent.Often times, even with a rather sizeable amount of haste(~20% to ~25%), you will find yourself twiddling your thumbs for 5-6 seconds doing nothing even though you did everything in your rotational priority correctly. From a numbers perspective, VP, the minion, and autoattacks compensate for this, but gameplay-wise it is incredibly dry. Unholy is, once again, a feast-or-famine spec because all of its rune regen is tied to whether or not you get lucky with RC procs. Aside from Soul Reaper, there is no way to escape RNG rune return, in addition to the fact that the RNG of RC procs is without anything else to compliment it and act as a "supplementary" support to rune regeneration.Stacking haste is not an option, either, because DK DPS specs have their tuning low-balled due to RFC's 50% uptime. This leads to poor scaling with primary stats(which has always been an issue), thus necessitating the stacking of mastery or, in some cases, crit in order to see any sort of real power increase with ilvl. There's a good reason why "if it doesn't scale with mastery, it's probably trash" is bit of a rule with unholy. Unholy cannot stack haste out the wazoo unless it wants to hit like a wet noodle as the price to pay for a smooth rotation. This is not to mention the lower overall budget of secondary stats on all BfA gear so far; the percentages we had in EN during Legion will be greater than that of Uldir in BfA.I'm not a fan of spending so much time just auto-attacking. It's not playing the game, it's watching the game play for you. Fortunately, it'd be an easy problem to fix by simply adjusting the base rune CD. No talent changes, no rotational changes, no percentage tweaks or tuning, just a simple alteration to passive part of the spec's resource auto-regen. As far as utility goes, I also heavily disagree with this article. The only thing a DPS DK brings that other classes do not is a single (overrated, and mostly useless in raids)grip on a 25 second CD, and a spammable ST snare at the cost of doing any damage. A mass AoE snare with a decay effect is easily out-classed by mass roots any day of the week, and a single target stun is something almost class can provide. Aside from raw DPS, there's nothing that would make a group leader want to seek out a DPS DK in particular, save for maybe frost with its AoE root. There's nothing for the DPS DK to fall back on if they happen to receive the short end of the tuning stick for the tier, or aren't suited very well in the damage-department for the encounter in question. The utility DPS DK's were intended to have was, of course, given to demon hunters along with copious amounts of other utility since Blizzard realized not as many people are playing the class as they wished, and try to rectify it by giving them so many useful tools that they have to be brought.Edit: oh yeah, they have a Brez, but Blizzard decided to put an arbitrary 30 runic power cost on it, meaning it's 2nd class brez compared to, say, druids. Really gonna feel helpful being unable to rez my allies in combat because my slow rotation means I'm sitting there for several seconds until I can get the runes needed to get enough RP to rez someone. Thanks, Blizz.So, here we are in BfA. No AMZ, no Dsim, no mass grip(unless you like tanking), no NecroStrike casting slow, no second grip from abom, and yet our utility is said to be in a "really good spot?" Sure, maybe compared to level 1 kobold, but compared to other melee DPS? Don't make me laugh by licking Blizzard's boots. Unholy, as far as what it could do with the new talents it has is really well-done, I must say, but it's walled off from doing so because of its feast-or-famine resource issues. Both DK DPS specs also suffer from an atrocious lack of things to provide to the group outside of raw throughput, and that alone is not something to rely on since the upper half of DPS specs often changes drastically from one patch to the next.My outlook for unholy in BfA? Not so good. I will be leveling a paladin as soon as I cap my DK in case I need a back-up for feeling like I made the wrong choice in playing the same main I've had for nearly 7 years now, because at least ret is feeling great even with cruddy gear now that they got rid of that awful "judgment smash" mastery.
First of all, if you are experiencing a lot of downtime with current Unholy, it is very likely it is due to rotational issues. You no longer play exactly like Legion Unholy did, and now play at lower Festering Wounds on the target, causing you to use Festering Strike way less often and use Scourge Strike/Clawing Shadows more frequently. Your math on Sudden Doom is also pretty far off. it has a proc rate of 2.875 * Haste, not "barely 2 proc / minute." Going back to the rotational issue, you want to spend runic power efficiently, when you're at lower runes and need to regenerate them. That is also where something like Soul Reaper can come in and is very effective. An on demand, instant 2 runes is very powerful and makes the rotation extremely smooth As far as resources overall, why would you need more than 3 runes at a time in order to efficiently go through your rotation? There are very little times when you cannot reach 40 runic power with 3 runes (spending 3 runes is either going to generate 30 (Outbreak and Festering), 33 (Festering into Scourge/Clawing) or 39 (3x Scourge/Clawing). As to address the last point, Cold Heart should be nowhere near your top damaging ability in any fight lasting over a minute or two. That again goes back to not using abilities effectively. Unholy is a pretty fluid spec overall in BfA, once you grasp the rotation/priority system with it you will see what I mean.