Greetings, Death Knights.This week’s alpha build has our first round of changes to both the core class tree and the Unholy spec tree. As stated in our initial messaging our goals for the core tree updates were to shift some of the damage throughput at the end of the talent tree to earlier in the tree. For Unholy our goal was to address some of the flood of resources, reduce the number of things that need to be tracked to play optimally, increase pathing as well as choice, and reduce the number of nodes you need to pick up to play the spec fluidly. We will go into a little more detail below for both the core and Unholy changes.
Core
The core tree has undergone a decent reshuffling of talent placement, node pathing, ability’s becoming baseline and talent rank reduction.Due to the unique leveling experience Death Knights have and not starting from level 1, they had a reduced amount of abilities baseline and had to “buy back” several abilities that other classes and specs would have normally earned as they levelled. Heading into The War Within we are reassessing the stance on this for Death Knight not only for abilities they had to talent into in the core tree but also their spec trees. The hope here is by freeing up some of these talent points you had to spend to make a functional leveling experience you gain a few points that allow you to flex into more optional talents without locking you into one build.We have also updated several pathing nodes and moved around a few nodes to better fit the new tree philosophy. Structurally the bottom of the tree no longer holds 9 throughput talents and they have been shifted to earlier in the tree and many of them have been reduced to 1 point. Again, allowing for more build variety and the ability to pick up situational talents when you might need.We hope that the update to the core tree allows for more expression when building out your talents and not as if you are locked into one talent build with very wiggle room to pick talents reactively for the situation you are facing.
Unholy
The Unholy talent update focuses on reducing the number of talents that you had to pick to make the rotation function in a reasonably coherent way. This includes Epidemic and Outbreak baseline and addressing the number of ability cooldown reduction talents. Unholy suffered from having to choose multiple talents that reduced their cooldowns to align in a way that made sense from a gameplay standpoint. This made playing the spec any other way unreasonably convoluted especially if you were new to the spec and trying to learn to play the spec. We have removed any talent that had any sort of cooldown reduction to abilities and baked them baseline into the spec (this includes Army of the Dead which is now a 3-minute cooldown).Secondly, we wanted to address Sudden Doom which has been feeling lackluster for awhile now. Most notably we’ve updated its proc functionality to be more consistent instead of using our RPPM system which is usually found on trinkets and other item procs. It now has a base 25% chance to proc with bad luck protection built in. The hope here is this feels more fluid and a normally occurring proc that fits well int your rotation instead of one that feels like you can go long periods of time without it. We are still noodling on the base percentage chance and values are subject to change, but we’ve found this to be a good starting point. We’ve also updated its functionality to cause your next Death Coil or Epidemic to crit to add a little extra punch to the proc. Alongside some talents that interacted with Sudden Doom and the new talent Doomed Bidding we hope that Sudden Doom feels much more impactful as a class proc.We’ve also cut several talents that felt somewhat lackluster or just did very little for Unholy, most notably Feasting Strikes and Replenishing Wounds. We hope that with the reduced amount of must pick Cooldown talents, never picked “useless” talents, and new talent choices there are more appealing choices to be made within the tree that allow you customize in a way that fits your needs. Lastly, there are a couple talent nodes that have temporary “Not Yet Implemented” talents. We will be updating in the future build and eyeing talents that add a little more interaction with diseases in potentially exciting ways.Thanks for your patience! We look forward to hearing your feedback on the above. Next up-- we’re working to get our planned Frost and Blood changes in.
