Unholy Death Knight Review of San’layn Hero Talents – Concentrating Power in Cooldowns

This past week, Blizzard revealed new Hero Talent Trees in a First Look at the new system coming with the The War Within expansion. Our Unholy DK guide writer, Taeznak, offers an early review of the San’layn Hero Talents for Unholy concentrating much of the added power into cooldown windows, a consistent problem throughout Dragonflight.

Vampiric Strike
Your Death Coil and Death Strike have a 10% chance to make your next Heart Strike or Scourge Strike become Vampiric Strike.

Vampiric Strike heals you for 3% of your maximum health and grants you Essence of the Blood Queen, increasing your haste by 1.5%, up to 7.5% for 20 seconds.Newly Turned
Raise Ally revives players at full health and grants you an absorption shield equal to 20% of your maximum health.Vampiric Speed
Death’s advance and Wraith Walk movement speed bonuses are increased by 10%.

Activating Death’s Advance of Wraith Walk increases 4 nearby allies movement speed by 20% for 5 seconds.Blood-Soaked Ground
While you are within your Death and Decay, your physical damage taken is reduced by 5% and your chance to gain Vampiric Strike is increased by 5%.Vampiric Aura
Your Leech is increased by 3%. While Lichborne is active the Leech amount is increased by 100% and affects 4 nearby allies.Bloody Fortitude
Icebound Fortitude reduces all damage you take by up to an additional 30% based on your missing health.

Killing enemies that grant experience or honor reduces the cooldown of Icebound Fortitude by 3 seconds.Infliction of Sorrow
When Vampiric Strike damages an enemy affected by Blood Plague or Virulent Plague it consumes the disease dealing 200% of the remaining damage.

While Gift of the San’kayn is active, Vampiric Strike no longer consumes your disease and instead extends the duration of your disease by 3 seconds and deals 20% of the remaining damage to the enemy.Frenzied Bloodthirst
Essence of the Blood Queen stacks 2 additional times and increases the damage of your Death Coil and Deah Strike by 5%.The Blood is Life
Vampiric Strike has a chance to summon a Blood Beast to attack your enemy for 10 seconds.

Each time the Blood Beast attacks it stores a portion of the damage dealt and when the Blood Beast dies it explodes dealing 50% of the damage accumulated to nearby enemies, healing the Death Knight for the same amount.Viscreral Regeneration
Your Heart Strike and Scourge Strike have a 3% chance per stack of Essence of the Blood Queen to refund a Rune. Vampiric Strike doubles the chance to refund a Rune.Incite Terror
Heart Strike and Scourge Strike extend the duration of Essence of the Blood Queen by 0.5 seconds. Vampiric Strike increases the extension by 100%.Sanguine Scent
Your Death Coil and Death Strike have a 15% chance to trigger Vampiric Strike when dealing damage to enemies below 35% health and it is guaranteed to critically strike.Pact of the San’layn
You store 50% of all the Shadow damage dealt into your Blood Beast to explode for additional damage when it expires.Gift of the San’layn
While Vampiric Blood or Dark Transformation is active you gain Gift of the San’layn.

Gift of the San’layn increases the effectiveness of your Essence of the Blood Queen by 100% and replaces your Heart Strike and Scourge Strike with Vampiric Strike for the duration.Essence of the Blood Queen
Haste increased by 1.5% per stack. Lasts 20 seconds.

San’layn Death Knight Hero Talent Tree

The new San’layn Hero Talent tree has been revealed for Unholy and Blood Death Knights, let’s quickly go over the general function of the tree, and what it might mean for Unholy Death Knights. Though before we get started, it’s worth noting that I expect the numbers we were given to be placeholder values, as their current values sometimes don’t make a lot of sense which you’ll see below.

Placeholder Icons Only

Tree Overview

The core of the tree focuses on a new ability, , which replaces Scourge Strike when it is available and can proc from casting Death Coil, Death Strike, or Epidemic. Casting will give us for 20 seconds, can also proc a Blood Beast when you have , and interacts with our Virulent Plague if you have . The wording on leads me to believe works like Festermight, where its duration does not refresh when you gain a new stack as otherwise, there would be no reason to specify that extends . Some of the other talents instead serve to augment our utility, with talents like providing your group some leech while Lichborne is active. Otherwise, the tree will adjust what or do, such as and .

Rotational Impacts

The major impact of all of this is that during Dark Transformation, you gain , giving you access to for the entire duration. We can also extend this with Eternal Agony, increasing the uptime of quite drastically. Otherwise, all of these talents serve to enhance our base toolkit by modifying it in small ways, though the meager proc chance of does mean that outside of Dark Transformation a lot of these talents just don’t quite work the way I expect they were intended to. At a 10% chance per Death Coil cast, would mean in single target, we would only expect 1 proc every ~30 seconds or so. Combine that with only lasting 20 seconds, and it means that we generally can’t expect to maintain this buff outside of cooldown windows, even with talented. With all that in mind, the rotational impacts of these talents are minor, outside of one talent that’s been heavily debated in the community, .

sometimes consuming our Virulent Plague can be quite troublesome as we don’t cast Outbreak rotationally and only use it to reapply Virulent Plague. With this effect’s damage being based on the remaining damage of Virulent Plague, this might make it optimal to cast Outbreak both before, and after a proc. These factors can lead to a bit of a clunky feel where Unholy players need to calculate on the fly if it is worth pressing Outbreak as soon as they get a proc. In AoE scenarios, I expect this to almost always be worth doing, as 200% of the remaining damage of Virulent Plague can be quite high with both Ebon Fever and Plaguebringer talented. If you have Superstrain talented as well, I expect this to also consume Blood Plague, as it does for Blood, leaving us oddly consuming everything except Frost Fever. While this effect can/will be quite substantial in AoE as mentioned, I’m not sure the clunky feel of having to cast Outbreak twice in quick succession is a net positive in terms of gameplay feel. does fix most of those issues with though, as during we instead extend our disease duration, rather than consuming it. Conversely, without also applying to Frost Fever if Superstrain is talented, we will still have to cast Outbreak frequently to reapply it.

has also been talked about quite a lot in the Unholy community, but I expect its increased proc chance for to be inconsequential. With the current layout of Death Knight’s class talent tree, we will almost always talent into Unholy Ground, which then makes it worthwhile for us to cast Death and Decay during our cooldown windows. Due to this, we will almost always save Death and Decay for those cooldown windows, and with always being active during our cooldowns, the proc chance of just doesn’t matter whenever we have Death and Decay active. The same thing applies if we instead talent into Defile as Unholy, just better to save it for our cooldowns rather than trying to get any extra procs between Dark Transformation windows.

Final Thoughts

While some concepts in this tree are awesome, and all of them honestly work great during , I feel a bit too much power is concentrated into . All of this does exaggerate one of the major issues Unholy has suffered from all of Dragonflight, too much of our damage is concentrated into cooldowns. This hero talent tree does nothing to remedy that, and actively pushes more of our damage potential into Dark Transformation windows. Strides have been taken to try to reduce Unholy’s damage during cooldowns, and this just walks all of that back and more, by giving us even more buffs to actively stack during our cooldowns. This being a haste buff too just reintroduces one of the major issues that was recently solved by making Unholy Assault a damage buff, rather than a haste buff, constantly reaching 100% haste during cooldowns.

If this is to be fixed, the reliance on needs to be lessened drastically, and the proc rate of increased, letting this entire tree work without hinging on Dark Transformation being active to operate as expected.

About the Author

This guide is written by Taeznak, a long time Unholy player, theorycrafter and moderator on the Death Knight Discord server, Acherus. I also help maintain Simulationcraft, supporting both Death Knights as a whole, as well as implementing many of the special effect items you run sims for. If you have any questions about the guide or the content, feel free to reach out to me on discord.