The Unholy Death Knight tier changes quite significantly, spreading its power out more evenly throughout any given fight (instead of being almost purely focused on execute). It has also removed the risk of using
Seelenernter outside of execute, and spamming
Geißelstoß/
Reißende Schatten blindly within execute. I believe the changes are good overall, but the current tuning doesn't quite hit the mark. We'll do good damage in execute, but otherwise not so much.
Many thanks to Taeznak and Arma for being so prompt in providing the TC tools as always!
The 2-Set casts a
Seelenernter for every 5th
Geißelstoß/
Reißende Schatten you use. It also summons an
Armee der Toten-ghoul for 15 seconds. Not currently in the text but stated on the forums is that only
Geißelstoß/
Reißende Schatten that bursts a
Schwärende Wunde will count.
Previously, the 20% attack speed buff the 2-Set provided when using
Seelenernter would've made you cast the spell manually for your
Dunkle Transformation windows - even outside of execute. I think it's generally a bad idea to move more casts of
Seelenernter outside of the execute rotation, mostly because they make it more clunky. Removing this possibility is therefore a good thing in my opinion.
Tying the
Geißelstoß/
Reißende Schatten casts to bursting
Schwärende Wunde was added solely to combat degenerative gameplay of single-button spam in execute. Essentially, pressing only
Geißelstoß/
Reißende Schatten instead of first building up and then bursting
Schwärende Wundes would've been more beneficial, just to trigger more
Seelenernters. I don't think it's a good idea for a set to reduce the core rotation of Unholy into a single-button spam so I'm happy for this change. It does come with some drawbacks though since it's not as easy to trigger it anymore. For instance, in AoE it's quite common to cast naked
Geißelstoß/
Reißende Schatten in our
Tod und Verfall windows, not triggering the tier set. However, I don't think this is a large loss since the 2-Set has so little value in AoE anyway. I do believe this will make it more difficult to leverage the set in PvP, which is unfortunate. Finally, being tied to
Schwärende Wundes effectively removes situations where you'd lose out on
Seelenernter triggers due to stacking them too quickly. The mechanic is a bit funky but I think it should be fine by now.
I still believe that changing the set to be purely based on wounds being burst would've been better. It achieves the same goal of maintaining the core rotation, with the benefit of scaling far better in AoE and being more useful in PvP. I'm not sure if there are technical difficulties with too many
Seelenernters being triggered on a target in a short timeframe thought, so might not be possible. The damage from the set is broadly in line with what I understand the power level should be, bringing 4-5% single target.
The new 4-Set provides a constant 5% pet damage increase, with a boost up to 20% for 8 seconds whenever the secondary effect of
Seelenernter triggers. We essentially get a flat 5% boost, and instead of summoning an
Armee der Toten-ghoul, we get a boost to our pet damage. I think this is overall a good change! Having a baseline buff spreads out the power of the 4-set throughout the fight. Where we previously saw 100% of the power come from 35% of the boss fight, we now see a slightly more even distribution. Furthermore, since our pet deals quite a large portion of our AoE damage, we can now leverage the set in AoE as well! My only current issue is with the present tuning. 5 and 20% only bring 4-5% overall damage increase, quite small for a 4-Set compared to others. It's an easy knob to turn though so I hope we'll see a boost in the future! Just to provide some context napkin math, roughly 50% of the Unholy DK's damage comes from pets. Increasing that damage by 4% in 65% of the fight and 20% for 35% gives 0.5 x (0.04 x 0.65 + 0.2 x 0.35) = 4.8%.
One thing I do like about this tier set is the potential of funneling. Whenever there are adds, we can use
Seelenernter to get a nice boost to our single target throughput (and AoE). This should also trigger properly on death, something that was previously bugged.
Summary
The Unholy Tier Set continues to be focused on execute damage, but now also brings some AoE and throughput throughout the fight. I like how the design is now less intrusive to our rotation, maintaining it's core but also opening up new sniping gameplay. I do think it's fine that the tier-set is focused on single target, since that opens up for alternative talent picks in AoE situations. We can be more greedy in AoE damage while still doing good single target. Overall, I'm happy with the changes but I feel like the numbers aren't quite there.
