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Unholy Death Knight State on the Shadowlands Beta
Shadowlands
Posted
2020/08/18 at 4:05 PM
by
Bicepspump
Feedback and opinions on the current state of Unholy Death Knight in Shadowlands, talking about spell and talent changes, the new Runeforges, Legendary Powers, GCD Issues and more!
State of Unholy in Shadowlands Beta
This article will display and discuss the changes that have hit the Unholy Death Knight so far in the Shadowlands beta. There's been a significant amount of individual changes, but the overall feel and gameplay remains similar to BFA Unholy. We've received some nice new utility in the forms of
Lichborne
and
Anti-Magic Zone
, a bit of added complexity to the normal rotation with
Summon Gargoyle
becoming baseline as well as a selection of new runeforges.
Shoutout to the Acherus community as always for their eagerness to have constructive discussions and their help in creating this article.
Spell Changes
Sudden Doom
now works with
Epidemic
A great overall addition. Consuming procs of
Sudden Doom
with
Death Coil
in AoE situations doesn't feel good in most scenarios (unless you can excplicitly benefit from the CD-reduction on
Dark Transformation
). It naturally translates the proc into a more versatile power-gain and increases the power of
Harbinger of Doom
in AoE scenarios (probably still won't be worth over other alternatives).
Summon Gargoyle
is now Baseline
Another good change to the spec. It adds flavour and complexity without sacrifising dps-utility (as the talent did in BFA). It does introduce another GCD in the opener which doesn't help the GCD-issues with Unholy (discussed later on). It's still a much less significant factor in the rotation compared to the Dark Arbiter of Legion but opens up for some optimisation.
Outbreak
has been reworked
Outbreak
now only spreads
Virulent Plague
on the instance of application (used to be every second for 6 seconds). Its duration has also been increased from 21 seconds to 27 seconds. Finally, it no longer has a chance to erupt (was 30% on every tick).
Lots of implications here. First of all, even if the base duration has been increased, the actual duration has in fact decreased. Because of the fact that
Virulent Plague
pandemics (up to 30% of the overall duration is added to the new DoT), in conjunction with the continuous application through the
Outbreak
debuff, the real BFA durations are 33.3 seconds (without
Ebon Fever
) and 19.65 seconds (with
Ebon Fever
). This means that in Shadowlands, the duration has been
decreased
by ~6.5 seconds.
The fact that
Virulent Plague
no longer erupts doesn't matter too much. By splitting the erupt damage, it only scaled linerally overall with added target (just like the DoT itself). From a PvE perspective, this is only a tuning nerf in a way.
Since
Outbreak
no longer applies
Virulent Plague
continuously (every 1 second) over 6 seconds, spreading your disease in AoE is no longer trivial.
Outbreak
is amongst the first GCDs in your AoE opener in BFA and thereafter only requires a reapplication further down the line. In Shadowlands, you have to be conscious about how you use
Outbreak
since it no longer automatically spreads to any target that is introduced to the pull. Often, one applies it on pull and then reapplies it when appropriate in order to cover all targets. You can also simply wait with the application until the tank has gathered everything in the pull, but will then trade a GCD for less DoT damage. A benefit of the change is that you now have more agency over your DoT. You can avoid scenarios where it spreads to unintended targets. Overall though, I don't think I like this change. It doesn't help with our already long list of GCDs to use and it makes spreading your DoT a nuisance.
Dark Transformation
now grants your ghoul 100% energy on use (Rank 2 benefit)
In BFA, some players utilise macros in order to pool the energy of our pet in AoE scenarios. This allows it to use more
Sweeping Claws
during
Dark Transformation
which in turn results in more damage and more
Festering Wound
s being generated. With this change a macro will no longer be required to minmax. However, one can now introduce minmax play where the pet energy is forcefully drained before using
Dark Transformation
, thus maximising the benefit of the energy gain. This is a thing since the pet only casts the claw ability when above 70 energy. I'd personally remove this energy threshold as it's no longer required for entering
Dark Transformation
with high energy.
There's an additional effect that needs to be taken into account here. The energy is granted
instantly
when you activate
Dark Transformation
but the transformation effect is a projectile that has a
travel time
. This means that, potentially, the pet gains the energy, uses up a chunk on a weak single target claw and then gets transformed. You then lose out on casts of the empowered attacks! To negate this, you need to stand as close to your pet as possible (or use a macro to delay the first cast of claw). A much better solution would be to make the energy gain occur on transformation instead.
Army of the Damned
now provides the benefit of the
Magus of the Dead
Azerite trait
This is a nice and thematic change to an otherwise arguably boring talent. The Magus spawned is slightly different from the BFA version where it uses more frostbolts than shadowbolts. This doesn't have a significant impact but is still interesting.
Apocalypse
cooldown reduced to 75 seconds
This makes the cooldown align perfectly with
Unholy Assault
which is nice. However, it unfortunately doesn't align it with our other cooldowns.
Dark Transformation
,
and
Unholy Blight
all have effective cooldowns of ~45 seconds, desyncing them from
Apocalypse
and
Unholy Assault
. Furthermore,
Summon Gargoyle
doesn't sync either. I think it'd be better to actually increase the cooldown of
Unholy Assault
to 90 seconds to make everything align nicely.
Mastery: Dreadblade
now affects pets
This is a huge change for Unholy. In BFA mastery simply doesn't translate well into single target since such a small fraction of our overall damage is shadow damage. By adding pets to our mastery, it will now scale much better into single target scenarios. Furthermore, the spec itself will generally scale better with secondary stats, good news, everyone! Currently, any pet that also deals shadow damage "double-dips" into mastery, meaning that it gets the benefit twice. It's unclear if this is unintended but it makes things like Gargoyle's
Shadow Bolt
deal significantly more damage.
Certain abilities are now capped in AoE
Scourge Strike
and
Clawing Shadows
now only hits up to a total of 5 targets when you're standing in your
Death and Decay
/
Defile
/
Death's Due
(total damage was previosuly capped at 20 targets).
Bursting Sores
now only hits up to 8 targets with the splash damage (total damage was previously capped at 20 targets).
This change is in line with multiple other caps that Blizzard has introduced to specs across the board. The big question now is how much it will affect our damage output in AoE. The big change will be in relation to the "wound build" in AoE, where we utilise the combination of
Infected Claws
and
Bursting Sores
. Other builds simply see a simple scaling change to their
Death and Decay
window (
Scourge Strike
and
Clawing Shadows
damage caps at 5 targets). There's a small effect related to the decreased Runic Power gain from popping less wounds in AoE, it's tiny though.
First of all, let's consider the change to
Bursting Sores
. By capping it at 8 targets, Unholy now scales quadratically up to 9 targets, and then linearly from that point. Previously this was quadratically up to 21 targets, and linear beyond that point. The damage certainly scales less drastically, but still scales well. Important to note here is that it never stops scaling. This is a clear advantage compared to pretty much every single spec out there.
The change to
Scourge Strike
and
Clawing Shadows
is more difficult to digest. Our ability to generate
Festering Wound
s in AoE hasn't been impacted (only increased through the addition of legendary effects). The change only affects our ability to burst these wounds we generate. Let's consider a scenario where we use 6
Scourge Strike
s in a single
Death and Decay
(quite realistic). That has the potential of bursting 30
Festering Wound
s; a significant amount. The damage is no longer as front-loaded as in BFA (you could burst 30+ wounds in 2 gcds), but the overall damage output isn't necessarily limited. Currently,
Scourge Strike
and
Clawing Shadows
aren't "smart" when used in your
Death and Decay
, meaning they won't prioritise targets that have
Festering Wound
s on them. I really hope this will be changed since it makes our burst into a bit of a lottery. A large pull also tends to contain targets of variable health pools. The initial damage of your burst will help to kill targets will low hp, thus triggering the wounds they hold automatically. Finally, we will generally require more uses of
Scourge Strike
and
Clawing Shadows
to pop all the
Festering Wound
s in our
Death and Decay
. This indirectly leaves less room for using other abilities (
Epidemic
is the main one here) if we want to ensure that all
Festering Wound
s are burst. Our damage is therefore in a way less efficient when you consider the damage output per GCD and there's a larger risk of overcapping Runic Power.
The change will certainly decrease our ability to burst wounds, but it's not necessarily always the case. We still hold the tools required to enable our insane scaling and can potentially realise the damage in the majority of scenarios. If I were to address our scaling, I'd limit the target cap of our pet's
Sweeping Claws
. It's the source of the insane scaling through the uncapped generation of
Festering Wound
s . By limiting our
Death and Decay
window the gameplay of spreading
Festering Wound
s through tab-targeting with
Festering Strike
becomes unrewarding and we potentially reach scenarios where we might not even utilise the
Scourge Strike
and
Clawing Shadows
interaction with
Death and Decay
.
Unholy Blight
now stacks up to 4 times, increasing DoT damage and pet damage to target for each stack
This is a very interesting change that has plenty of implications. First of all, in conjunction with
Outbreak
being nerfed (making
Ebon Fever
less powerful) and an increase in damage, the raw output is now much better than BFA. Furthermore, the pet damage increase (currently only works on main ghoul, unclear if intended) is really valuable. If it works on all our ghouls, we'll want to properly time the usage of
Unholy Blight
to maximise the overlap between 4-stack uptime and our pets dealing heavy damage. I think it'll add some flavour to our rotation.
New Spells and Talents
Lichborne
is now baseline
A great change, both for thematics but also for utility. The ability to negative Charms, Fears and Sleeps often prove useful one or more times throughout the dungeons and raid tiers in an expansion. Furthermore, the Leech provides a useful self-heal, especially potent in heavy AoE scenarios where one might draw aggro. It then gives us the tool to stay healthy. Furthermore, it also allows us to heal ourselves with
Death Coil
. This can be useful in scenarios where
Death Strike
isn't possible or when it simply heals more.
Anti-Magic Zone
is now baseline (dmg reduction is 20%)
Another wonderful change. The ability to help your party or raid is great for any class. 20% magic damage reduction is significant and I'm confident we will see its usefulness in raids and dungeon content. We'll definitely be included in defensive CD rotations when applicable!
Sacrificial Pact
added to our base kit
The ability to explode your pet probably reminds you of the
Last Surprise
azerite trait. An added heal and agency over when the explosion happens makes this new spell much more versatile. It's an emergency heal as well as a possible addition to your rotation. It's unclear if the damage is enough to warrant a single target use (two GCDs to explode and resummon might be worth spending on other spells). For AoE though, it will almost certainly be part of our rotation. You can currently simply click off the pet in the totem bar to explode it, thus saving you a GCD. Don't think this is intended but might be a minmax thing you can do.
Unholy Pact
added to the final talent row (to replace
Summon Gargoyle
)
This is the only new talent we'll receive in Shadowlands. The damage portion works identically to the
Helchains
Azerite trait, making both you and your pet deal damage around you, as well as dealing damage in a straight line between you (the range is very forgiving so there's no need to ever worry about it not hitting the targets in your pull). The addition comes in the form of the 8% strength increase. This provides a significant damage increase and has great synergy with legendaries and conduits that increase the uptime on
Dark Transformation
(currently doesn't scale with increased duration, possibly a bug). There exists possibilities of stacking the strength buff with other CDs but it's unclear if it'll be worth to hold on to for any lengthy periods of time.
5 new Runeforges
It's awesome to see some additions to an otherwise stale corner of the Death Knight ability kit. However, it doesn't seem like anything will dethrone
Rune of the Fallen Crusader
in end-game PVE content.
Rune of Hysteria
With 20 extra Runic Power and a Runic power generation increase, this runeforge is obviously targeted at resource generation. It helps to reduce downtime in our rotation and to avoid capping resources. It will make your rotation feel better, but not do a lot more damage. A Frost Death Knight would find this more useful since it directly helps to increase the duration of
Breath of Sindragosa
.
Rune of Sanguination
Increased damage to
Death Strike
as well as a heal when your health falls low, this runeforge is obviously catered towards Blood Death Knights. It might see play in situations where survivability is of utmost importance, but even then,
Rune of the Fallen Crusader
probably heals for more overall.
Rune of Spellwarding
A fully defensive runeforge that really doesn't synergise with Unholy at all. Might see play for Blood DKs or in PvP?
Rune of the Apocalypse
A very thematic runeforge that inherits the mechanics of an Artifact Trait from Legion:
Armies of the Damned
. Unfortunately, it's a bit worse since it's only your main ghoul that apply the debuffs. Lots of possibly useful outcomes when using this runeforge, but unfortunately not any significantly good ones in the current state. Would need a buff to be competitive.
Rune of Unending Thirst
This rune has a very specific niche: leveling, and it does it really well. I'd recommend using this rune while leveling in any content. Movement speed after every kill as well as a nice heal will keep you healthy and allow swift obliteration of your enemies. The fact that the target killed needs to reward experience or honour makes it useless in end-game PvE content.
Legendary Powers
Shadowlands brings with it a number of legendary powers for us to use. A couple of the effects have been seen before but we also get lots of completely fresh ones. If I'd had to place a bet on what we'll want to prioritise, I'd say
Frenzied Monstrosity
because of the big damage increase as well as the versatile use cases. Possible contenders would be
Superstrain
and
Phearomones
which also have good output.
General Powers
Death's Embrace
A purely defensive legendary which makes
Anti-Magic Shell
much more potent. Can see potential niche use when there are magic abilities that must be soaked, and a normal
Anti-Magic Shell
can't get the job done. It has a tiny offensive perk since it can allow for a greater amount of Runic Power generation.
Grip of the Everlasting
Providing a small utility increase (an extra grip right after using
Death Grip
isn't very powerful...) this legendary will probably not see use in any end-game PVE situation for us.
Phearomones
A significant damage increase connected to your
Death and Decay
/
Defile
makes the ability much more worthwhile to use in single target. Also creates value in
Defile
due to the decreased cooldown. The added CC (fearomones heh) is nice but you also have the risk of the targets moving out of your
Death and Decay
/
Defile
. Scales well in both single target and AoE, however, it suffers grately during phases of heavy boss/add movement.
Superstrain
This legendary provides us with both
Frost Fever
and
Blood Plague
, both giving a lot of damage as well as two nice perks.
Frost Fever
has a chance of giving 5 Runic Power every time it ticks, and
Blood Plague
passively heals you, really nice. Works well in single target but shines in AoE.
Unholy Specific
Deadliest Coil
Decreasing the cost of
Death Coil
gives you more resources in your rotation, making it feel more fluent and decreases downtime. The CD reduction on
Dark Transformation
is significant and can allow us to reach 100% uptime if used in conjunction with the conduit that increases
Dark Transformation
duration. Currently unclear if it's powerful enough. Will work best in prolonged AoE encounters or when you have heavy synergy with
Dark Transformation
uptime.
Death's Certainty
Death Strike
damage increase isn't too valuable but
Death Coil
does provide a good bonus. The cooldown reduction on
Death and Decay
/
Defile
can be very powerful if you synergise it with spells such as
Death's Due
and
Phearomones
. If you don't have any synergy, the cooldown reduction really isn't worth it (if it was,
Defile
would've been a useful talent in BFA...). Another legendary that suffers from heavy boss movement and I think it'll be required to run heavy synergy for it to be useful.
Frenzied Monstrosity
Looking like a very powerful legendary, 20% attack speed and damage increase at 25% uptime is great. Scales really well with
Deadliest Coil
. Currently has a fixed duration of 15 seconds (hopefully a bug) so increasing the duration with a conduit doesn't synergise here. Due to the flat damage increase, this legendary works really well in all situations. Versatile in its use with few drawbacks.
Reanimated Shambler
Another legendary inspired by a Legion artifact ability. Scaling well with AoE with both high damage and spreading wounds, this legendary can be useful in dungeons. However, the low proc rate (1.5 RPPM) is a severely limiting factor. Furthermore, since we now have difficulties actually bursting wounds in AoE, the additional wounds possibly aren't that useful.
Covenant Abilities
Lots of new abilities for us to use here. If I were to pick a covenant at this stage it would be Night Fae. Both because of the big potential output from
Death's Due
but also because of
Soulshape
providing the movement ability we sorely lack.
Kyrian
Shackle the Unworthy
A solid single target dps increase that reaches high levels of uptime. Definitely a good option for situations where you don't need to care about AoE damage.
Summon Steward
A cleanse with a heal gives good utility. Can definitely have really high value if you can cleanse a big debuff.
Venthyr
Swarming Mist
An AoE damage ability that also provides a significant amount of resources (at 5+ targets, it's 135 Runic Power total, 15 per sec). This ability allows you to spam
Epidemic
in heavy AoE as well as dealing significant damage itself.
Door of Shadows
A teleport with a channeling time. Provides some moveability during encounters but the channeling time is a big negative. Will certainly see situations where its really useful. Does provide the possibility of skips in dungeons!
Necrolord
Abomination Limb
AoE damage in combination with a grip, this covenant ability doesn't have the same damage output as the other options. It's also difficult to foresee situations where the grip is actually useful in PVE. Overall lackluster compared to other options.
Fleshcraft
A purely defensive ability with some really nice flavour to it. Channeling it near a corpse to build a larger shield feels like something a Death Knight would do! A 20% shield can be crucial in situations where abilities bring you really low in a single instance, or simply as a heal during any encounter.
Night Fae
Death's Due
An interesting ability that makes
Death and Decay
/
Defile
much more valuable. Each time it deals damage, you get 1% strength increase up to 15%. If you have a single target you'd get 1% at the first tick, 2% at second up to 11% once your
Death's Due
finishes. The buff itself pandemics so that total duration becomes 23 seconds. The ability currently doesn't work with
Defile
at all but if it does, and the cooldown becomes 20 seconds, you could chain this buff to receive a 15% strength increase with 100% uptime. Probably the strongest ability on paper and only suffers with high movement.
Soulshape
It's not secret that Death Knights are amongst the slowest specs in the game. An ability that provides both a small teleport and a big movement speed buff is therefore
very
valuable. Useful in pretty much all content!
GCD Issues
Let's take a step back from the individual changes and consider the spec as a whole. Unholy in Shadowlands has a significant problem: GCDs. When we jump into Shadowlands, we not only lose the high haste values we've been stacking, we also receive some new GCDs to press.
Summon Gargoyle
becoming baseline,
Unholy Blight
becoming useful, the decreased duration of
Virulent Plague
(in conjunction with the need to press it more than once in AoE) and the decrease in overall stats creates a situation where you spend a significant portion of your time pressing stuff that isn't part of your core rotation.
Unholy has three core spells,
Death Coil
,
Festering Strike
and
Scourge Strike
. In Shadowlands, you end up in situations where you aren't pressing any of these for significant periods of time. It's like you do your rotation, and then you need to press your CDs for a while, and then back to the rotation. Many of the CDs themselves also don't do anything on activation.
Outbreak
,
Unholy Blight
,
Summon Gargoyle
,
Dark Transformation
and
Unholy Assault
all cost a GCD but don't do anything special on activation. In total, we have 9-10 GCDs we press outside of the core three.
To give an example, the current optimal Unholy DK opener looks something like this:
Outbreak
Defile
/
Death's Due
Festering Strike
Army of the Dead
Festering Strike
Unholy Blight
Apocalypse
Summon Gargoyle
Dark Transformation
Unholy Assault
Other Covenant Ability if Applicable
This is 12 GCDs that your locked into in the opener, resulting in 18 seconds worth of pressing stuff (at 0% haste) before you can actually start your core rotation. This simply doesn't feel good. You want to actually start doing damage quickly when fighting a boss!
A simple solution is to take some of the cooldowns off the GCD. Spells like
Unholy Assault
,
Dark Transformation
and
Summon Gargoyle
feel like they don't belong on the GCD. Another solution is to attach spells you gain through talents to already existing CDs. For instance
Unholy Assault
is almost always used in conjunction with
Apocalypse
and could be baked into this CD.
would also fit in here (the 2 runes used to be given by
Apocalypse
in legion). It'd nerf the ability a bit but that wouldn't be too bad since it has dominated the row for the entire expansion. Finally, you can also make the cooldowns do more when pressed. A good example here could be
Unholy Blight
spreading
Virulent Plague
from targets it hits.
Passive Damage
Throughout BFA, our passive damage has been very high. Spells and abilities that we don't interact with other than pressing the button and then seeing the damage tick over a long time. This includes all our pets, the dots and melee damage. With the mastery change in Shadowlands, we'll most likely see the proportion of passive to active damage increase. Less and less of the damage will come from the core abilities and active cooldowns, removing a lot of the agency and skill that should be part of the rotation. Walking up to a boss and not hitting
Death Coil
,
Festering Strike
and
Scourge Strike
would deal 75%+ of the damage of someone using these abilities optimally in the rotation.
It doesn't feel good and I hope that actions can be taken to help this. One could increase the damage of these core abilities, or create agency over our cooldowns. Pet damage from army feels bad since we don't interact with it. If using
Dark Transformation
buffed your pets for instance (Legion legendary), the damage from your army would feel much more like damage you inflicted, instead of some outside source.
Conclusions
Playing Unholy in Shadowlands has the same feel as the BFA version. We've got a series of good changes to our core kit, specifically gaining
Lichborne
and
Anti-Magic Zone
, getting
Summon Gargoyle
baseline, pet damage now scaling with mastery, multiple new runeforges and
Sudden Doom
now working with
Epidemic
. The new systems look interesting and cool, could possibly have been a bit more interactive but I'm still happy. We have seen some changes that aren't as welcome. The way our AoE is capped doesn't quite hit the spot in my opinion because of reasons stated above. The changes to
Outbreak
feel a bit unecessary and the GCD problem is a core issue. I'm excited to see what else Blizzard has in store for us and hope we'll see some more iterative changes moving forward.
Previous Feedback Articles
These are all the spec feedback articles that we have done through the Shadowlands Alpha and Beta. Some of these are older than others, so please make sure to check the date. We'll be doing a second round of these articles once we're closer to the end of Beta.
Blood Death Knight
Arcane Mage
Assassination Rogue
Frost Death Knight
Fire Mage
Outlaw Rogue
Unholy Death Knight
Frost Mage
Subtlety Rogue
Havoc Demon Hunter
Brewmaster Monk
Elemental Shaman
Vengeance Demon Hunter
Mistweaver Monk
Enhancement Shaman
Balance Druid
Windwalker Monk
Restoration Shaman
Feral Druid
Holy Paladin
Affliction Warlock
Guardian Druid
Protection Paladin
Demonology Warlock
Restoration Druid
Retribution Paladin
Destruction Warlock
Beast Mastery Hunter
Discipline Priest
Arms Warrior
Marksmanship Hunter
Holy Priest
Fury Warrior
Survival Hunter
Shadow Priest
Protection Warrior
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Comment by
tomatosaucin
on 2020-10-12T08:23:22-05:00
can anyone get me unbanned from archerus discord? i repent my ways tmt#8087
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