Unholy Death Knight in the War Within Reviewed – Guide Writer Feedback

Unholy DK GuidePatch 11.1 Undermine(d) PTR Development Notes

While the first 3 of these changes are focused on our survivability and have little to no impact on gameplay, they are still a genuinely good change that needed to happen, even if it was an all-around nerf. The other 2 though are both focused on Apocalypse and Raise Dead, which seem to be getting a new summon animation and spawn instantly! The summon animation is just something to look nice and has no impact on gameplay, but the change to their summon being instant is incredible.

To put it into perspective, the ghouls summoned by either of these abilities (and still likely Army of the Dead) had Risen Ghoul Self Stun applied to them when they were first summoned, stunning them for an incredibly long 4.5 seconds so their animation could play. For Apocalypse in particular, that meant they spent 22.5% of their entire duration stunned. So in general, this is a substantial buff to Apocalypse and gives us a bit more freedom to utilize utility spells such as Sacrificial Pact.

Though I do find it odd for Apocalypse and Raise Dead to get this treatment, but, not Army of the Dead which utilizes the same ghoul and summon animation as the other 2, though setup to summon one ghoul every 0.5s, unlike Apocalypse which are 4 ghouls instantly. This ends up stunning the ghouls from Army of the Dead for about 15% of their total duration.

The Core Design from a Bygone Era

Unholy is a specialization that very rarely gets changes to its core, so much so that the core of the specialization is well over 8 years old at this point. While that alone is enough to call for a look at the core of the specialization, this is amplified by that core being widely hated by the community. The core I’m speaking of is the Festering Wound system that Unholy was built around. Spend your runes generating, or consuming Festering Wound, if you can’t do that, press Death Coil. That’s it, that’s the core rotation. While it is an incredibly simple system, it causes a lot of friction with players.

Not only do you have to manage 3 resources, but one of those resources is target-specific, and to be optimal, you need to track the current count on every target you’re currently in combat with. While this alone isn’t a massive issue, the issues with Unholy’s core are the little things that add up. Do you need to switch to a new target? well, you have to spend 2-4x more Runes than you would if you were able to stick to the previous target just to get back to where you were before. Do you want to apply Festering Wound to many targets? Well, you either have to tab target a bunch and spend an absolute ton of Runes, or spend multiple talent points to fix the core issues, rather than them not being an issue in the first place.

There has been a lot of work over the 8 and a half years that we have had this core system to try to reduce its friction, try to iron out all the flaws it has. While I will say The War Within’s iteration of this system is the best it has ever been, that does not mean it is good, nor does it mean it doesn’t have issues that genuinely need to be sorted out, or the entire system ripped out and replaced with something less abrasive. I don’t believe talent points should be required to be spent to make a specialization work without being frustrating to players or making a specialization’s core loop operate.

As an example, if we were to take a typical single target build, and take out the passive sources of Festering Wound, the specialization starts to fall apart, requiring that we spend 2 Runes to generate more Festering Wounds almost twice as often. This cuts a massive hole into our already limited resource economy, introducing periods where the player has no resources, no buttons they can press and just have to sit there and stare at their enemies for sometimes seconds at a time. That’s just not an enjoyable experience for players. Should talent points be a fix for a lackluster experience? I don’t believe they should be, they should augment the core, and allow it to specialize into something greater. This brings us to the next major point I wanted to talk about, the rift in the talent tree.

A Talent Tree without an Identity

Unholy’s talent tree lacks an Identity, but what do I mean by that? In the most generalized sense, it has no core underlying theme, it’s a sprawled mess of ideas plastered over a web and called a tree. Does it work, and allow players to pick some genuinely interesting options? Yes, but, that core underlying theme is always lost. There is no way a player can approach the talent tree and solely focus on say, buffing our theme of “harbinger of plague”, it just doesn’t work because there are so many unrelated nodes standing in the way of that.

Right now, the tree is kinda split between single-target-focused abilities on the right, and AoE-focused abilities on the left, this ends up entirely shunting the themes, the identity players may want from the specialization. Gameplay-wise, for the high end though, the tree works and accomplishes what it sets out to do, but that’s not all that matters with a specs talent tree design. Enhancement Shaman’s Storm and Elementalist builds, and Frost Death Knights Breath of Sindragosa and Obliteration builds. Each have talent trees that allow for entirely themed builds, while also working well for the gameplay at the high end. So, why is Unholy left here without that? Festering Wounds once again come to the forefront of this discussion. Talents that focus on these abilities don’t learn into any of Unholy’s themes, take up space on the tree, and end up being something players just genuinely don’t care about, while creating this rift in themes that Unholy can represent so incredibly well. So, let us take a look at each node’s theme.

Looking at the above, it pretty visually demonstrates the rifts in Unholys tree, and its themes. A specialization meant to be a harbinger of plague sure lacks things related to its diseases. At the same time, there is not really a cohesive flow or theme to the tree. While the undead minion aspect is the most fleshed out, almost none of these talents are gameplay impacting, none of them let us genuinely have our minions do things for us, and they end up just being passive damage over time effects we have no real control over, skirting the master of the undead theme Unholy prides itself on.

So, what are we left with then? Honestly, just a specialization that doesn’t know what it wants to be, trying to be too many things, failing at all of them.

Power Disparity and Nodes without a purpose

Unholy’s talent tree is absolutely rife with talents that at a glance, seem incredibly cool, exciting, and like they would work well, but constantly get ignored by the player base because they just never get any attention from the developers in the tuning department. An example of this is a newly introduced talent in The War Within, Decomposition. On paper Decomposition sounds great, enhances some of our Disease damage, and extends our active pets, it all around jolly times, right? Well, no. The way this talent operates and its current tuning end up having it be an absolute best-case gain of less than 1% overall dps. Why make a node, put it in a penultimate talent spot, and leave it there with such abysmally bad tuning that it would legitimately need more than a 1000% buff to compete with Festermight which is just 2 spaces to the left. How does a brand-new talent end up in this position and get ignored?

Decomposition Isn’t the only example of this either, with All Will Serve, Ruptured Viscera, Unholy Pact, and Menacing Magus all receiving similar treatments by the player base. They are just way too weak, even in their target niche, and have been for an incredibly long time. Ruptured Viscera in particular has been wasted space on our talent tree for nearly 3 years now, it hasn’t received any attention even when no one plays it. So, why is it on our tree? The same applies to Summon Gargoyle, it is just entirely overshadowed by Doomed Bidding in the same exact node, not by a small amount either, usually upwards of 3-4% overall DPS worse. Summon Gargoyle would need at least a 100% buff to compete in that node in its niche. Isn’t the point of talents to give players genuine choices, make them excited about being creative, building different things? If so, then our talent tree needs a lot more attention than it has been getting.

Some readers may be confused about the Orange rating for Magus of the Dead, but in The War Within beta, this talent was nerfed so much that it is a barely competitive node, and in 11.1, the expected top performing single target build even drops it in favor of other options. Not only that, but it also drops Unholy Aura and Commander of the Dead in favor of Morbidity and Superstrain, entirely overshadowing our go-to single target pet-based setups. That setup can be seen Here, and Magus of the Dead ends up as a 1% overall dps loss vs Ghoulish Frenzy, an incredibly disappointing result for a talent that is meant to excel in single target scenarios.

While I will readily admit that this can never be perfect, there will always be a mathematically correct answer, but the answer can be blurred by giving the underperforming nodes more attention, or hell, even giving them their time in the spotlight for a while rather than leaving them ignored and wastes of space on the tree.

Hero talents – Player Favorite

Like most specializations, there is one clear winner for hero talents, Rider of the Apocalypse. This hero tree integrates well with the base specialization, albeit in a bit of an uninspired manner, it still just works, while also providing similar to slightly better damage than San’layn. This has led to San’layn seeing so little play that I’m confused as to why it hasn’t been given more attention. In Raids, the Mythic difficulty saw only 0.3% of all Unholy players logged playing San’layn. Heroic this does increase a bit to 1.3%, and Normal increases it further to 2.9%. For something that’s presented as a choice for players, it currently doesn’t present a compelling option compared to Rider of the Apocalypse. While I’m sure Blizzard has this data on their own and can see exactly what the distribution is in all content types, what I can see doesn’t paint a very good picture of the desire to play San’layn.

As I mentioned, these two hero talent trees, more so after the 11.0.7 changes, provide very similar power, often within 0.5% of one another, so the tuning is on point. Then what gives? why don’t players want to play San’layn? If I were to hazard a guess, I would chalk it up to its themes, and gameplay interaction not being anywhere near as fleshed out as Rider of the Apocalypse, it ends up adding more frustrations to the rotation just to do the same damage as if you were to play the way you’re already comfortable with. As has been shouted by the community time and time again, I do want to echo the sentiment, San’layn should be looked at again. Possibly even scrapped and made into something more in line with Death Knights in general, we aren’t vampiric mages that the San’layn are in lore, so this tree doesn’t fit into Death Knights themes, outside of slight alignment of it with Blood Death Knight’s theme of blood and bones.

Secondary Stat Imbalance

Prior to 11.0, Unholy was a specialization that generally liked all stats, some a bit more than others, but, never to the extent of ignoring a stat. With 11.0, and the Sudden Doom changes (and some help from Foul Infections), that’s shifted though, and not just a little bit. The favor of Mastery and Haste has increased dramatically, while Critical Strike as a stat is often less valuable than Versatility, often the least impactful stat. This absolutely decimated our scaling factors which will often determine how well a specialization scales as it gears up, instead putting an incredibly heavy reliance on not just getting higher item-level gear, but, also gear with the right stats.

With all that said, Unholy needs something to increase the value of Critical Strike again, while I’d like this scaling issue to be fixed with some sort of Critical Strike interaction, the simplest solution is just a baseline Critical Strike damage modifier to bring its value back up to something more reasonable. I fear if this isn’t noticed and taken care of early in this expansion’s cycle, we will end up in a scenario where we will end up needing substantial buffs every tier, as most specializations just flat out-scale us. An example of this effect can be seen Here. Do note, that stat scaling sims aren’t the end-all-be-all, and should only be utilized as a single data point for secondary stat balance. That sim isn’t running excessive amounts of Critical Strike to deflate its value either, here is the stat distribution utilized in that simulation.

To get a baseline perspective of our secondary stat scaling let’s look at data from this base level 80 Unholy Death Knight, without any secondary stats, trinkets, etc. Using the season 2 San’layn build and Tier Set.

THIS IS A CHART DEMONSTRATING THE SCALING OF THAT SINGULAR STAT ALONE AND DOES NOT HIGHLIGHT INTERACTIONS BETWEEN STATS WHERE INCREASING ONE STAT CHANGES THE VALUE OF ALL THE OTHERS
*Haste is… special, you can mostly ignore how spiky it is, and gauge its average values, often slightly higher than Mastery.
**The dips in value at specific points are the Diminishing Returns in action! it’s interesting when visualized.

As demonstrated in both the simulation above and the chart, critical strike’s value is just abysmal. No stat should ever be worse than the passive % damage increase that is versatility. That kind of gap in secondary stat values ends up really unhealthy and makes specific gear just way better than alternatives at the same item level. Comparing a Crit/Vers item, to a Mastery/Haste item for Unholy at the same item level, the Crit/Vers one is often worse than lower item-level pieces.

Conclusions

At the time of writing, in 11.1, Unholy has a lot of issues to contend with which limits its potential in so many ways. From player expression being near impossible in the talent tree for those who like one aspect of Unholy’s themes, but not others. To gameplay, where the abrasive systems just aren’t fun to so many players, many of whom have been extremely vocal about this for many years without any real resolution to the issues, just more patches to a broken system. There’s been progress to fix these issues, but it hasn’t been enough, and often when there are changes it is one sweeping set then silence for another 2 years. While I may seem overly negative here, I love the specialization and wish it wasn’t so ignored.