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Unholy DK: First Impression of the New Death Knight Talent Trees in Dragonflight
Dragonflight
Опубликовано
26.06.2022 в 23:55
Bicepspump
With the recent reveal of the Dragonflight Death Knight talent trees, our Unholy Death Knight writer provides initial reactions and first impressions to this revamped system. We break down the DK and Unholy trees, discussing the new talents and providing some sample builds. Join us as we predict how this class could play in Dragonflight!
To learn about the best PvE talent builds in Dragonflight for this class, and export these builds into the game, please check out our Blood, Frost, and Unholy Death Knight class guides:
Blood Death Knight Talent BuildsFrost Death Knight Talent BuildsUnholy Death Knight Talent Builds
Death Knight Dragonflight Class Tree
Death Knight Dragonflight Talents - What's New?
The Dragonflight expansion has introduced a completely new take on talents and abilities. Instead of learning spells as we level and picking one out of three talent choices in set of rows, we now have talent trees that do both. You get one generic tree shared between the three Death Knight specs, as well as a spec-specific tree. The points you gain as you level will both be used to build out your ability toolkit as well as picking up passives that empower your abilities.
The class-tree allows us to pick up spells and passives previously only available to the other specs in our class.
Ослепляющая наледь
,
Воля мертвых
,
Руническое усиление
and
Усиление рунического оружия
are some notable examples for the Unholy Death Knight. We'll be able to dip into the resource-generating spells of the Frost Death Knight and the great defensives of the Blood Death Knight! Overall, we will have the possibility to pick up lots of utility that was previously locked behind the other two specs, as well as interesting passive and active abilities that will have a profound impact on how the Unholy Death Knight feels to play.
We will also have access to brand new abilities within this tree. is a powerful new passive deep in the Unholy branch, most likely drawing inspiration from
Тщательная подготовка
. We will also be able to pick up which brings a proc-based strength buff based on Runes used. Overall though, there isn't anything awfully new and exciting within the tree.
Death Knight Dragonflight Talent Tree - First Impressions
My first impression of the class-specific Death Knight tree is excitement. I feel like there's lots of stuff in it that will make the Unholy Death Knight a strong class, especially the defensives we can pick up from the Blood part of the tree.
Having said that, I do feel like the tree is slightly unbalanced as it currently sits. The Blood portion holds an absolute ton of utility.
Поступь смерти
,
Зона антимагии
,
Антимагический барьер
,
Рука поганища
and
Асфиксия
are all spells that find great use in many PvE scenarios. You can pick up three of the earlier spells but you are unlikely to want to go all the way down to
Рука поганища
, reinforcing the Blood Death Knight as the "utility dk" amongst the three specs. Blood has historically had both a shorter Cooldown on
Хватка смерти
as well as access to
Хватка Кровожада
, putting it firmly ahead of the DPS DKs. I would like to see these utility spells spread out more across the three branches of the tree. I can foresee scenarios where you are forced as a DPS DK to build deep into the Blood branch to run
Рука поганища
for an encounter requiring heavy grip utility (forsaking DPS by doing so).
Another thought is the relative weakness of Unholy's middle portion of the tree. The only thing that will be useful in most cases is the 4% strength buff from . Otherwise, the utility is niche at best. Compare that to the huge throughput increase of
Руническое усиление
from the frost tree or the big utility in the blood portion, it just feels a bit meh.
My very early thoughts bring me to the following general tree for Unholy DKs:
View on Dragonflight Talent Tree
It picks up all the throughput it can get its hands on, following the Unholy and Frost branches all the way to the bottom. I believe the interesting aspect here is what choices we can make within this build, which spells do we want to change up in different scenarios etc? I'd like to start by highlighting a resource vs defensive choice at the bottom portion of the tree,
Руническое затухание
vs
Воля мертвых
. We only have 11 points to spend here and there is a lot of good stuff, creating a lot of competition.
Руническое затухание
is most likely the weakest choice in terms of throughput, making it the natural choice to give up for something else useful.
Воля мертвых
is such an incredibly strong defensive pick, essentially giving you a permanent
Незыблемость льда
when you're below 30% health... It's hard to say at this point how balanced Unholy will be resource-wise. It's a possibility that we have a ton of resources already, diminishing
Руническое затухание
's value and making
Воля мертвых
an obvious pick. We might also end up picking
Воля мертвых
only for when it really matters for those high damage-intake bosses, we'll see!
Another interesting choice will be the allocation of the final point outside of the bottom 11. In the example tree I put it in
Антимагический барьер
but it can go anywhere really. for AoE CC,
Асфиксия
for a nice stun,
Рука смерти
for longer grips, for some nice extra Runic Power off interrupts, there are a lot of options! Still, I think it would be nice if there was a bit more overall choice. I can obviously be very wrong about the relative power of the different options here but it feels unnecessarily rigid.
Unholy Death Knight Spec Tree
Unholy Death Knight Talents for Raiding - What's New?
The spec-specific tree contains some completely new spells, as well as a couple of returning ones.
is like an inverse
Четвертый урок инструктора
that helps to randomly build a large number of extra wounds.
is a new passive that feeds strongly into our execute. 20% increased damage on our main direct damage spells whenever the target is below 35% health!
is a new passive that allows
Лик смерти
to burst
Гнойная язва
, a concept we have not seen before!
is returning! Once an Azerite trait in BFA and we can now pick it up deep into the Unholy tree. This is an extremely fun passive that makes the Unholy AoE playstyle much more rewarding!
brings a new aspect to
Лик смерти
making it cleave to one more enemy. Interesting synergies with and !
reminds us of the
Мертвенная аура
PvP talent but now only affecting pets. Will be really strong with any pet-focused build!
brings extra damage per disease we have active on the target. This synergises well with
Смертоносная чума
and as well as any other potential diseases in Dragonflight! I get the feeling that the Shadowlands version of
Нечестивая порча
was split up into the two talent nodes we now see. Once you combine them, you get the same effect but to all damage done!
I think all of these new and returning spells are interesting in their own way. They move your mind to distinct playstyles and affect the rotation in various ways! I must say my favourite is but I'm also biased from having way too much fun playing Unholy in BFA... The most lackluster one is probably since there aren't many options for focusing on a disease heavy build. The only thing we can do is to pick up and make sure we have as much uptime on our diseases as possible.
Unholy Death Knight Dragonflight Talent Tree - First Impressions
To start off, I feel like the devs have had a couple of builds in mind when creating this tree. You can clearly see a wound-based build and a pet-based build. There are some talents that point to a more disease-focused build but I don't feel like that would be a defining attribute. One of my first thoughts is the distribution of talents across the tree. The different branches aren't made consistent with the builds I just mentioned. Sure, the tree shouldn't be structured in such a way that it's blatantly obvious what path to take for a specific build, but there should still be some consistency.
I think the most clear example of this comes with the location of . It's a vital part of any wound-based AoE build, but it's completely disconnected to any other talent you'd pick up if you were focusing on such a build. Instead, you find these mostly present in the left-most part of the tree. I think it would make a lot more sense if swapped places with ! Furthermore, it would make the left part of the tree a lot more interesting, since it's currently exceptionally weak in comparison to the other branches. Both and are particularly weak talents and render that entire branch uninteresting to any build type.
The locations of the traits buffing
Лик смерти
are also worrying. , and would all synergise nicely but they are completely disconnected to eachother. None of these traits lie on connected paths where one is required to spec into another.
When it comes to actual builds, I think we'll have two major ones. The wound-based build could look something like the following:
View on Dragonflight Talent Tree
This build focuses heavily on building and bursting as many
Гнойная язва
s as possible. and will increase our wound generation greatly and will assist in bursting them. Interestingly enough, this build forsakes picking up . This is mainly due to the increased random nature of our
Гнойная язва
generation. Properly setting up for will be difficult without wasting resources since we risk overcapping on
Гнойная язва
whenever we use at above 0 wounds... Furthermore, not picking up will result in our cooldowns desyncing, further devaluing . It's currently unclear whether or not this waste is worth it or not, it will just feel bad whenever it happens. I predict that this will be a fast-paced and proc-based playstyle with a lot of resources to spare!
I believe this build will be the most popular AoE build, due to the quadratic scaling nature of the
Гнойная язва
s, as well as the increased ability to both build and burst these wounds. Furthermore, we have again which greatly empowers such a build. Sadly, we probably won't see the glorious days of BFA return. The 5-target cap on
Удар Плети
cleaving is a
major
blocker to the potential and flow of this build. You simply don't have enough GCDs in your
Смерть и разложение
window to reliably burst all wounds. I'd be very happy if the cap was increased just a bit, to 8 would be lovely Blizz.
When it comes to choice here, I don't see too many options. is a potential alternative to to really boost the AoE burst and there's potential to sacrifice a single point in either of these to reach the final talent row. This is probably relevant whenever you want to prioritise more single target, as the final talent row offers quite strong single-target options.
We also have a build focused heavily on empowering our pets:
View on Dragonflight Talent Tree
This resembles what we currently run in Shadowlands with the major addition of ! We again have potential issues with depending on the cooldown of the ability. In Shadowlands, it syncs up nicely with our other cooldowns through the combined effort of
Войско проклятых
and
Песнь мертвых
. We'll lose the conduit meaning that the cooldown reduction available to us is greatly reduced. I hope to see a shorter base cooldown on , around 60 seconds, to allow for the overlap with the appropriate talent selection. We do risk ending up with a clunky opener again when picking up but it shouldn't be all too different compared to what we have in Shadowlands. I feel like potential choice in this build comes from and . really isn't very powerful in Shadowlands so I think it'll depend on tuning if we actually commit to speccing into it.
Overall, I feel like the Unholy spec tree can use some work. There are quite a lot of talents that haven't been impactful in a long time still making it to the tree. , , haven't been good in the last two expansions and I don't expect them to be of any useful in the next on either. I'd much rather see some new/returning spells (
Мертвящая чума
pretty please?) or significant changes to these weak ones. This is also means that the talent tree becomes rigid, since it lacks good choices. It doesn't help that the tree itself has so few choice nodes, a total of two compared to balance druid's 7 for instance. That being said, I feel like the added spells will bring a new and exciting feel to the Unholy Death Knight, as well as more options for players to explore builds!
Unholy Death Knight Dragonflight Talents for Raiding - How Strong is it?
When evaluating the strength of a tree at this stage, we cannot focus on the numbers. Instead, we must consider the niches of the tree, as well as the flexibility of any playstyle. I feel like Unholy will have the ability to swap between two damage profiles. A burst-heavy pet-playstyle that's highly resistant to downtime, as well as a big AoE and constant damage profile that's based on wounds. It's always great to be able to deal a lot of damage without being close to the boss. It makes you a better melee progression spec that doesn't lose as much damage from mechanics. Having the ability to spec into heavy AoE is a very useful attribute when focusing on Mythic+. You can choose to either be the trash-killer, or the boss-killer depending on the affixes and the group. This is also nice! We might run into trouble if the wound-based playstyle ends up being optimal for single target as well. Since the damage is aimed more towards our direct damage-dealing abilities, any downtime will instantly lower our DPS. We can still rely partly on our pets but not to the same degree!
Furthermore, we'll have a lot of options that provide resources. The Frost DK branch of the generic tree brings a ton of extra stuff that we don't have in Shadowlands. This will hopefully give us the opportunity to build a well-balanced Unholy resource-wise. Without
Ужасающий лик смерти
in Shadowlands Unholy plays really quite clunky. I'm hopeful that what we've been given will be sufficient to create a spec that has a much better flow to its rotation!
Final Thoughts on the Death Knight and Unholy Talent Trees
I think my personality shines through a lot in this section but I still have to say it, I'm really excited! I really like the concept of the talent trees, the fun builds one can experiment and try out. With a well-built system, there can be such a large amount of variety of choice! I like the fact that we can tap into the powers of all the different specs, and that we'll build our character from the ground up. Even if the optimal build might quickly be discovered, anyone who doesn't care as much about throughput can truly personalise their character as they want. I hope to see a highly iterative process where the developers address the concerns of the community within the trees and try out new and bold things!
Interested in playing Unholy Death Knight now? Check our out live guide for Unholy Death Knights!
Unholy Death Knight Guide for Season 3
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