[00:04] class changes on the 12.1 PTR. Today, we'll be talking about Unholy in so far it. Mythic plus and rating isn't available yet. So, all of this had to be
[00:16] tested in some open world content and the new dummy dome they've added on the PTR. Thank you, so we can test your content.
[00:29] there are a couple of changes made to Unholy. Enough to make people wanting new stuff happy and too little to upset people that don't like constant reworks. So, everybody wins, except Frost Death Knights. The biggest change has to come
[00:43] with Army of the Dead and their whole vision on pets. The number of pets Unholy has been summoning was way too high for what the devs would like, which I mean, if I log into a spec that is the master summoner of the dead, I kind of
[00:58] want a lot of ghouls, skellies, and scourge monstrosities, if I can afford it at least. But, I digress. More on that at the end of the video when I give you my two cents. Army now will only summon up to and empower eight lesser
[01:12] ghouls for 30 seconds. This means that if you have some out, it will summon the empowered. [music] While empowered that way, it seems, unless the way this works will change, that whenever you use scourge strike,
[01:27] the ghouls do a strong attack called a death order or an epidemic order. So far, the game seems to track how many targets your scourge strikes hits and if it's one, your ghouls will do the death order, aka the single target ability,
[01:40] while if it's more than one, it will be epidemic order. Although, the obvious way this should work would be based on your consumers, judging by the icons. But, instead, the game just chooses it for you based on the number of enemies.
[01:54] This is well, uh, it's great for people who cannot be bothered to count to two or more, but as far as gameplay's concerned, it's just an automated process or feature to the point where it just might not matter if
[02:08] it's in the tooltip or not. Despite that, it does want you to cast a lot more scourge strikes. Not sure if that will change your rotation priority and maybe force you to spend runes instead of runic power, but that's going to be
[02:20] of runic power, but that's going to be strictly related to tuning. The next big change is to the reanimation capstone, now renamed to Lord of the Dead. Your Petrify will still call out the magus of the dead,
[02:32] but now once you have three magus of the dead, they will be converted into a Lord of the Dead, a team of Kel'Thuzad that actually slaps. Visually, this is great and as far as damage goes, again, it's going to be tied to tuning, but I cannot
[02:47] shake the feeling of a gacha mobile game where I collected my three-star maguses of the dead and now I can convert them into the stronger lord, a four-star legendary champion. But maybe I'm playing way too much mobile phone games.
[03:01] The magus will still chain its frostbolts between enemies and there is a magus with higher duration grant increased power text that I have no idea what it means. Judging by the consistent design of unholy, I would guess it's
[03:14] just passive more damage that you will not influence at all, so just keep summoning, king. You got this. Because of this talent being changed, Menacing Magus also has an additional effect where your Lord of the Dead can chain
[03:29] its attacks to additional enemies, bringing it to a total of five target cleave, as seems to be the magic number with AoE capped classes. Unholy Aura will make every magus of the dead give you one and two percent haste buff for
[03:43] summoned with multiple applications of this buff overlapping and working similar to other effects of the sort. The main difference is the set duration that is not necessarily tied to the magus being alive or there. Not sure if
[03:57] in practice this changes anything, but at least it's clearer and less prone to your pets dying, being sacrificed, or bugged in any way. To finish the magus discussion, the rank three of your apex talents will be updated to your maguses
[04:11] no longer buffing your empowered spenders. However, the dread plague RNG procs who cast putrify has been buffed to make that putrify be cast at 100% effectiveness up from the previous 60%. They want to take some power away from
[04:26] your cooldowns and give it to your baseline abilities as a whole philosophy with every 12.1 class change. Talk about that in a second. Soul Reaper got an interesting change where it now consumes your lesser ghoul
[04:38] stacks up to three to summon them instantly instead of consuming putrified charges. This is one of the weirdly best changes in terms of gameplay since now you get to press more putrifies instead of Soul Reaper pressing it for you,
[04:53] while also having a condition for Soul Reaper to get the maximum value, and that's to have three prepped lesser ghoul charges from your festering strikes or other effects that give you some of them occasionally.
[05:12] briefly just to give you a sense of where the devs want unholy to be in season two, but take these with a pinch of salt since nothing is ever final considering there is no end game on the PTR to test and see if these are good
[05:26] enough. First of all, lesser ghoul deals 10% more damage baseline, but the army summoned and empowered ghouls deal 20% less. This is in tune with their desire
[05:38] to make specs less bursty and feel like they don't do anything outside cooldowns, something that we could all appreciate, it, Necrotic coil and Graveyard have been buffed by 20% [music] likely to compensate the lack of
[05:51] your magics no longer ramping their damage from the Apex talent. Commander of the Dead has been nerfed in unexpected fashion to buff your summons unexpected fashion to buff your summons by 10 and 20% down from 15 and 30%
[06:03] from your dark transformation once again. These are all numbers that need to be tested and simmed and readjusted by the time 12.1 launches, but suffice
[06:15] to say you do more damage baseline and less damage in your DPS cooldowns. However, we're seeing a few too many nerfs to your DPS cooldowns and not enough baseline buffs, so I am a little bit skeptical that the tuning is where
[06:27] it needs to be at the moment. One more reason to just stay tuned and not draw reason to just stay tuned and not draw any final conclusions. Lastly, Ruptured Viscera or what we think Necromancer Cunning is has been soft-capped at five
[06:39] targets. This damage source is not a big part of your overall output, but still a good one, and having it nerfed might not impact you as much. However, this will matter if they buff it in turn, and if it's capped, maybe they can actually do
[06:52] it. On big pulls like the current Algeth'ar Academy, top Unholy Death Knights seem to have this at around 3% of their overall damage output, which is eh, but nerf it and it will 100% turn into a
[07:05] meh mechanic unless I am missing some math somewhere. Lastly, Permafrost, the Death Knight class talent, will give you shields of 35% of your damage instead of 30%. This is a change to align with RHB increasing by 25% next patch, but also
[07:20] the damage that we take increase by 25% as well. spec plays more or less the same. I suspect the bigger changes will come
[07:33] suspect the bigger changes will come when the tuning is finalized, and maybe we will like one ability a bit more than the other, and that will >> slightly influence our priority. The tier set does not impact your gameplay
[07:46] either. The two set will turn your Magus and Lord of the Dead regular frost bolts into necrotic bolts and shadow bolts turned into withering grasp. The damage they deal, again, is relative since we don't have proper tuning yet, but I
[08:00] assume it will follow a standard tier set tuning where overall the two-piece bonus set should be about 5% damage increase. The four set is slightly more interesting where these spells will be buffed by 130% in execute essentially on
[08:15] enemies with 35% or less health. This means unholy will become a proper execute damage dealer and seeing how hard the single target version of the tier set hits, I suspect a nerf to it to begin with. The damage profile of a four
[08:29] set is usually around 7 to 10% player power. If it only works in execute and it will be buffed to accordingly give you the average 10% damage gain, but all packed into execute, that means either unholy will be the best or at least a
[08:43] big execute monster or it will be absolute considering it does nothing if your enemies are not low on health. The tuning of this will be so delicate that I imagine it will be slightly reworked by the time season two
[08:57] comes out since you cannot guarantee a consistent execute phase so that the four set for unholy can actually provide a good enough bonus to be worth a good enough bonus to be worth considering.
[09:14] to unholy and in terms of the damage output, which most people will be interested in, we can only talk about the philosophy here. First, damage inside cooldowns giving giga burst is really fun, but having tank damage
[09:29] outside the cooldowns is giga lame. A balance between the two is nothing new and has been a yo-yo tuning knob for as long as tuning existed. What's important is the niche of Unholy. Will we be burst machines? Will we be bland consistent
[09:44] output specs? Unlikely with this current tier [music] set. That brings us to the second thing. The tier set clearly buffs maguses and lords, meaning damage gains all the time and not just when army or dark transformation is out. That is
[09:58] good. The fact that this means any hope of picking talents on the left side is dead is bad. We've been playing with pets in the first season and honestly a lot of people were hoping for some disease gameplay. To be honest with you,
[10:13] the disease design of current Unholy is very weak. There's almost nothing going on as far as diseases are concerned in your spec design tree, but also even if you do end up picking every disease talent available, you still have way
[10:27] more minion talents left over that you will take. And at that point the minion buffing talents being better than the disease talents means no matter what you do, minions are the only way to play unless we get yet another rework.
[10:40] Because right side and middle side is all minions, this version of Unholy will likely never have disease builds unless they buff them to such a ridiculous amount where you cannot ignore them. At which point what does it even matter
[10:54] what the fantasy of the spec is if stupid tuning is the only deciding factor, which sounds silly cuz that's kind of how all specs might be, but there is no simple choice here. At least demonology had during the course of
[11:08] >> [music] >> that focused on different summoned demons, which even now are fairly close and can be played in high-end game content, mostly mythic plus. Cannot say that about Unholy. But we can say that
[11:21] the 12.1 is a pretty large and ambitious patch with certain features that it brings. You can check it out right here and don't forget that we will go over all of the specs in 12.1 eventually, so stay subbed to our channel so you can
[11:33] get quick access to all of those videos upcoming the next few weeks.