That said, there are arguments for bringing back Unholy Blight, too. That makes Howling Blast a much more complicated AoE attack. Plus, since Unholy Blight was activated by runic power, you'd pretty much have no trouble activating it and keeping it activated as long as you were in combat. The cost of a frost/unholy rune combination means you are giving up a much stronger single target Obliterate. But Howling Blast has some drawbacks (at least in its most current balanced state) that make it easier to keep than AoE Unholy Blight. Of course, frost does have an extra AoE attack in Howling Blast, so one could argue that unholy deserves it as well. With all those variables working together to keep Unholy Blight powerful, it may be no surprised that they despaired of the whole thing and changed the most basic way Unholy Blight works.
Add on to that Rage of Rivendare, and you're looking at massive amounts of damage on top of what Unholy Blight does at its base. Unholy, as a tree, is tailor made to magnify magic with Ebon Plaguebringer and Impurity. Part of the issue with AoE Unholy Blight wasn't just the AoE damage itself, but the fact that it was being magnified so much. Unfortunately, it probably was justified. In short, our poor, neglected 21-point talent, once a signature identity of the unholy tree that made both AoE DPSing and tanking simple and fun, isn't even recognizable, and certainly is not much fun these days.īut it's worth it to ask a question: Was it justified, and how can we restore Unholy Blight to its former glory? Finally, Blizzard reduced it to a small DoT that did first 30% of Death Coil's damage, then 10%. However, as unholy death knights dominated damage meters in the big AoE trash fights, the calls to nerf the blight became louder and louder. Of course, being a 21-point talent, and low enough on the tier to continue to tempt both blood and frost DPSers (who were also creating a weird hybrid frost/unholy AoE build until Blizzard moved Howling Blast from 31 points to 51 points in the tree), that left it open to more damage debuffs. This was because Gargoyle was so overly powerful that blood DPSers were taking it over their own 51-point talent, and Blizzard decided to fix that by putting it well out of their reach. UB also suffered from a switch down to the 21-point slot.
The loss of the fourth disease pushed unholy death knights down to three diseases and gave an immediate secondary nerf to Scourge Strike and Blood Strike damage.
At its peak, it not only served as a functionally constant aura of high damage around the unholy death knight, pushing AoE damage to unbelievable heights, but it served as a fourth disease, which in turn pushed Scourge Strikes and Blood Strikes to unbelievable levels, as they do additional damage for each disease on the target.
#Unholy dk talents free
Unholy Blight has had a pretty huge free fall from its former pinnacle. Let's start our look back with Unholy, specifically by looking at two of its most volatile abilities: Unholy Blight and Scourge Strike. Certainly this means there's a comparative breadth to what we have experienced, but Wrath was a time of great change and turmoil for all of our mechanics and trees as well. Yes, I know that death knights were technically introduced this expansion.
#Unholy dk talents Patch
With the last announced content patch of Wrath of the Lich King released, and the devs stating that they don't plan to make any major class changes until patch 4.0 and the Cataclysm expansion, It's a good time to start taking a look at how our trees have fared this expansion. Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly peek into the ins and outs of the death knight class.