A Look Back at Unholy Death Knight in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist – Editorial

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Unholy Death Knight Writer, Taeznak, offers a retrospective highlighting Unholy’s journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec’s next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Unholy Retrospective & War Within Wishlist

With A War Within on the horizon and the next leg of our World of Warcraft Journey on the horizon, I’d like to take you guys on a retrospective journey talking about Unholy Death Knights through the course of Dragonflight, and where I’d like to see the spec go from here.
Before we begin, I’m going to pose a question to you. What makes a Death Knight a Death Knight? I want you to ponder this question while reading this article.

Infected Claws Run Deep

Let us start this retrospective with one of the biggest new features, and the evergreen system to be in Dragonflight; the talent trees. Unholy Death Knights got off to a rocky start, being one of the first talent trees shown off in the Dragonflight pre-alpha previews. I’ll be honest here, the tree we were presented back then was a mess. The new talent concepts were very RNG, placing a ton of emphasis on Festering Wounds, didn’t have any sort of clear theme or structure, it just felt as if they didn’t know what they wanted Unholy to be. With so many talents that Unholy Death Knights just didn’t want, or need, the original talent tree would have been disastrous for Unholy. While a lot of its core concepts carried over into the final talent tree we got. While community feedback did manage to help correct some of the largest issues, the Unholy Talent Tree never felt as if it got the same refinement as the trees that were revealed later on. Instead, it has a tree with a ton of talent nodes people just really don’t care about. This lack of refinement continues to show in the present-day iteration of the tree, while also receiving minimal iteration throughout Dragonflight; the tree itself is essentially split in two.

The Unholy Talent Tree we got when things were released focuses heavily on pushing talents meant for different scenarios to different sides of the tree, with some exceptions. The Right side of the tree focuses mostly on single target benefits, boosting our Death Coil, or buffing our Pets. Conversely, the left side focuses heavily on our AoE damage, with many Festering Wound related talents. The center serves as a middle ground between those two, with the talents you’d usually want in any scenario. This separation, I feel is probably one of the largest pain points in the tree we were given. Its layout alone dictates what we can do with the limited number of points we have, and forces Unholy into choosing, do you go strictly AoE focused, or strictly Single Target focused? Without much of a bridge between the two, Unholy got shoehorned into what the community called “hyper-specialization”. While this in itself isn’t the worst thing in the world, if we are told we have to choose between the two, and are presented with a scenario that choice should excel at, we shouldn’t feel as though we are mediocre in those scenarios. Other specializations can do both at the same time, so why can’t we?

An Outbreak of Concerns

Our Choices don’t matter

• When Dragonflight was released, Unholy was incredibly underperforming in almost every scenario, leading to a suffocating feeling rushing across the player base, and unrest with those who wanted their choices to matter. No matter what route we ended up taking (single target or AoE focused), we excelled at neither. Our tree instead had misled us in every sense of the word. We were told we could do very well at this specific thing if we follow this path, and were left with nothing but disappointment. The main contributing factors to this feeling of our choices not mattering boils down to, there’s just WAY too much power in some talents for specific scenarios, while those same talents have little to no value in other scenarios. Alongside this issue, we have an abundance of talents that do nothing in any scenario or really shouldn’t be talents (looking at you Unholy Command, you made the cooldowns of everything else align naturally, why leave Dark Transformation to eat 2 talent points?!), cluttering the tree, wasting our precious talent points, and utterly robbing us of any potential for choice. There’s a reason why we have stuck to the same builds all expansion.

  There have been a few small moments of hope where we had other builds available to use, we noticed that Death Coil, was weak enough to give up almost every talent that boosts it, and still gain enough damage elsewhere to mitigate the loss. We coined this build as “Disease Single Target”. It was a glimpse at the answer we were looking for, we could snag Plaguebringer, Unholy Blight, and Ebon Fever in a more Single Target oriented setup to somewhat bridge the gap between our Single Target and AoE setups. Looking back now, I almost wish it stayed, but alas, not everything can be so obvious until it’s in hindsight.

Talent changes making things worse

• In an attempt to bridge the gap between our Single Target focused setups, and AoE focused setups, the tree was adjusted slightly. Epidemic and Unholy Blight swapped places to give us easier access to our main AoE Runic Power spender without too much cost elsewhere. Ironically, this move had the opposite effect. No longer did we have our Single Target Disease build due to the new position of Unholy Blight on the tree. While Epidemic provides good value in AoE, it does nothing for us in single target, unlike Unholy Blight which gave us a benefit in both. Now we had a node that gave us nothing on our path to get to Ebon Fever… Back to the “you only get one or the other” jail we go.

  in the only other change we saw to our talent tree all expansion, Unholy Pact, and Defile split from a choice node, into individual nodes. Unholy Pact remains where the old choice node was, and Defile now replacing Pestilent Pustules. At the same time, they drastically buffed Defile giving it a Mastery buff to try to increase its use. The sheer power Defile now had was honestly terrifying. Not only did it drastically increase our AoE potential, but, once again we now had a node in the AoE section that could counteract the value of the Death Coil buffing talents( Improved Death Coil and Coil of Devastation). Birthing what we now utilize as our self-made bridge between AoE and single target, the Defile Single Target build. Not all was well and good though, sadly, everything comes with a cost. Using Defile again after so many years of obscurity brought back one of the biggest issues the ability has, Defile’s visual effect applies on top of almost every other ground visual effect in the game, covering up swirlies and other important ground mechanics. This put us in a predicament, do we try to bridge this gap we have in our tree and potentially die trying? Or do we give up, succumbing to the design we were presented with? In AoE, we can now do decent damage with the Defile changes, but, we put ourselves at a massive risk to do so.

This is where Unholy is left today, we are still in this predicament. Still trying our best to come up with our own solution to our tree’s shortcomings, but with how many nodes on the tree do so little for us outside of very specific scenarios, and having our attention split 50 ways with all the buffs and debuffs to track, there’s not a whole lot to work with.

The Unholy Bond with our Army of the Dead

When you think of an Unholy Death Knight, what is the first thing that comes to mind usually? I’d bet it’s an undead army of minions, with maybe some plague and pestilence thrown into the mix. Hitting on these core themes of the spec itself can be incredibly hard to do well, making the player feel immersed with the spec they chose to play. While Unholy does this pretty well in terms of its pets, this has become a bit of a double-edged sword. We have our army of undead minions, but almost every single one of them comes from pressing our cooldowns. In our opener, we summon 4 ghouls with Apocalypse, 8 ghouls with Army of the Dead, a Magus of the Dead from each (2 from Apocalypse with the season 3 tier set), a gargoyle or dark arbiter from pressing Summon Gargoyle. We then buff all of these undead minions by pressing Dark Transformation to turn our main ghoul into a Monstrosity, buff them further by using Empower Rune Weapon to give them haste, and finally use Unholy Assault to increase their damage. During this time, our pets are doing an incredible amount of damage, but, what about us the player? We are left mostly just pressing Death Coil and Clawing Shadows, not engaging with those pets at all in any meaningful way and doing very little damage ourselves. We have an army of undead minions at our disposal, but we have little influence over them at all.

In all of this, where is the core engagement? While it can be fun to press all of our cooldowns summon all of our pets and watch them blast a ton of damage, that novelty wears off fast. Once it wears off, we are left with only our core gameplay loop to try to keep us engaged with the game, and having fun. But… There’s a hole in Unholy, a vacuum of space that was opened up by pushing so much of our power into our pets, and not even letting us engage with them rotationally. The most engaging bit we have in our core rotation is building and bursting Festering Wounds. As I am sure a lot of you reading this already know, the wound system itself has a lot of issues that haven’t been solved since its introduction in Legion. For those who aren’t familiar with them, they are essentially Rogue combo points, except they are stuck to one target. Press Festering Strike to generate Festering Wounds, press our Clawing Shadows or Scourge Strike to consume those Festering Wounds, and press Death Coil to spend the Runic Power generated by doing those 2 things. But, that’s all there is to it.

There is no interaction with our pets, no interactions with our diseases. Just, press your pet cooldowns and watch them do damage without you. Where is the meat and potatoes, the substance, the things a player sees from the outside and thinks “That’s awesome, I want to try that!”? Right now, it’s missing. Whatever it is that’s missing, I sadly don’t know, and I think it’s a huge missed opportunity with a specialization based on one of the most iconic figures in gaming history. The current state Unholy is in, I do not believe can be salvaged in any simple manner with talent tree changes, blizzard keeps trying, but, those piles of bandaids and tape over a broken foundation are only going to get more and more unstable. It is coming up on 8 years since this broken foundation was introduced, lets please stop trying to justify it with the sunk cost fallacy and start anew.

A Vile Infusion of Tier Sets

Season 1

• Season 1’s 2-piece tier set was a simple, yet fairly effective tier set for the first tier, bursting a Festering Wound would give our main ghoul pet Vile Infusion, increasing their damage and haste by a bit. Ghoulish Infusion was the 4 set for this season, providing us the same benefits we provided our ghoul previously, but, proccing off of ghoul’s attacks. Since our ghoul controlled our 4-piece, this can’t impact gameplay in any meaningful way. All in all, this set did its job, and was different from the norm of tier sets Unholy usually receives, which specifically buff Death Coil or Dark Transformation. Which, sadly, the season 2 tier set decided to fall back on.

Season 2

• Season 2’s 2-pc simply buffs Death Coil and Epidemic a bit and makes them give us stacks of a buff which is then consumed by Dark Transformation to give us some mastery. the 4pc Instantly gives max stacks of the buff when we press Army of the Dead, and makes Sudden Doom give 2 stacks of that stacking buff. Honestly, this set was incredibly disappointing in a season with many transformative tier sets for other specializations. Where is the gameplay changing aspect? Where is the change of pace to allow us to shift into different builds?

Season 3

• Season 3 is a return to grace for Unholy tier set-wise, with a tier set that was specifically targeted at fixing one of Unholy’s issues that has been present all expansion, creating a bridge between Single Target and AoE. With the 2-set allowing our Magus of the Dead to cleave, and also summoning a second Magus of the Dead with Apocalypse, things were looking great. Apocalypse’s main issue is that it has no practical value in any AoE scenario, it is one of the many buttons we have that does absolutely nothing in AoE, and this tier set mixes up that perception. Magus of the Dead now does a MASSIVE amount of damage in AoE scenarios due to this set and is buffed by most of our single target build’s abilities. Throw in the 4 set which allows us to extend Magus of the Dead’s duration by spending Runes, and you have a recipe for something special. It changes up the gameplay (albeit minorly), fills a gap that the spec has had, and does it in a way that subverts the expectations of an ability. This is the best tier set Unholy has ever had, and it’s not even close. While it didn’t change up the build we were playing, I don’t know if it’s even possible to do so with the current tree. More tier sets like this in the future, please.

Sadly, this tier set has seen little play though, due to a dwindling player base of Death Knights. It’s a real shame when there’s something so special to be had here, but, why is the player base dwindling?

A Death Grip on Utility

When entering season 3 of Dragonflight, a lot of Unholy Death Knight players were concerned. We just got a slew of ability rebalancing to try to reduce our reliance on our cooldowns, sadly these changes failed spectacularly and we ended up doing just as much burst with our cooldowns as we did before the patch. But, that wasn’t the only concern present. Up until that point in PTR raid testing, we hadn’t seen a single boss where Death Grip could be useful past a minor convenience. Fyrakk was our only hope to keep a foothold as a specialization that raids want to bring into their group. Instead, Echo and Liquid ended up scouring through expansions old enchantments to avoid bringing a DPS Death Knight specifically. This event set a tone that has been looming over Unholy all of season 3.

Death Grip has a literal death grip on our utility, we can’t have more because when Death Grip is useful, it’s instrumental. But, when it can be replaced, what do we bring? You could say Anti-Magic Zone, but, why specifically bring a Unholy Death Knight for that when blood has ~50% more health, and thus a ~50% more powerful absorb shield? What reason is there for us to exist in a raid group other than damage when you can bring a Blood Death Knight and do everything Unholy can do, but better? It has a shorter cooldown on Death Grip, access to Gorefiend’s Grasp, a larger Anti-Magic Zone absorb shield, and a near 0 DPS loss by taking Insidious Chill. When it comes to the unique utility each spec brings, Blood gets Gorefiend’s Grasp, Frost gets Absolute Zero. So, where is Unholy’s? Unholy can’t even use Control Undead without sacrificing so much of our damage, due to it replacing our main ghoul.

We are suffocating under the pressure Blood puts on us, and if we don’t bring competitive damage we just have no reason to be there. It’s a shame to see Death Knights in this state when we bring some of the most unique utility in the game, but I can’t expect the encounter designers to limit their design room by making Death Grip useful in every raid tier, it would be wholly unfair of me to expect them to do so. So, let us journey into a possible future.

A Need for Assimilation

Since the Legion Reworks to all classes in the game, there’s been a gap that’s been growing across all classes, but, I believe Death Knights suffer from this the most due to the lore behind them, the reason we are. The Legion reworks split the classes up, removed so much of their class identity, and instead focused much more heavily on specialization identity. While this can be fine for a lot of classes in the game, I don’t believe it ended well for Death Knights. Right now, things are too separate, core mechanics of all the specializations are too different. If a new player were to pick up the Death Knight class in its current state and choose to start out playing Blood, none of that knowledge would transfer over to how to play Unholy. We share no core themes anymore, no abilities, nor gameplay aspects. So again, what makes a Death Knight, a Death Knight?

To me, when I think of a Death Knight I think of an embodiment of Arthas, this unstoppable harbinger of death and destruction, using its Rune Weapon to enhance its innate abilities to become this imposing specter of death itself. Whether it be the Frozen embrace of death, blood, bones, and gore, or even the armies of undead and plagues that wrought destruction on the lands. The core of the class itself should include all of those themes, but right now if you were to level up a new Death Knight, our baseline abilities that do damage are Rune Strike, Death Coil, and Death and Decay. That is it, there’s nothing more here to see, nothing to convey those themes to the player. The class itself is entirely lacking a core. Why can we not just be a Death Knight anymore? Can a new player coming into the game for the first time honestly be expected to learn 3 different classes to play the one they chose? I think there’s a reason we often see Death Knight players stick so vehemently to their chosen specialization, the others are so different that it doesn’t feel like the same class. Bring the core of the class back together, please. Let a Frost Death Knight summon an army of the dead. Let a Blood Death Knight embrace the icy touch of death to shatter the bones of its enemies. Let Unholy and Frost Death Knights have gorefiends grasp so we can once again have a moment not in the shadow of Blood. Truly let all Death Knights be Death Knights.

With a War Within giving us a new system, Hero Talents, I have hope that this little dream of mine can come true. With Hero Talent trees being shared between the specializations, there’s no better time to dig in and make sure the core of the class will work with all of these Hero Talents seamlessly. It’s time to start a new era of Death Knights. That era starts with you, the one reading this. As I mentioned in the beginning, feedback is important to make sure things change. So, when A War Within’s alpha, or beta releases, or even when anything Death Knight related is released, get out there. Give them your feedback, tell them how it feels, tell them the good and the bad. Help the designers refine Death Knights into something you really want to play. I want to once again be excited when new details about my favorite class in the game are released, rather than disappointed by the lackluster direction things have been going in.

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.