12.1 Changes for Unholy Death Knights
The core changes for 12.1 for Unholy boil down to 2 major aspects: reducing the number of minions we have active at any point in time, and reducing the damage we do in our burst windows. Changes focused on reducing the number of minions we have active are the major changes to Army of the Dead and Reanimation (now Lord of the Dead). Conversely, the rest of the changes are focused on reducing our damage in our burst windows, although these are a smidge confusing from that perspective. Many of the changes compound to offset these reductions to burst damage, such as increasing Necrotic Coil and Graveyard damage, increasing the duration of our army ghouls to 30 seconds, and giving us a new minion in Lord of the Dead which deals substantial damage, most of which will be concentrated into our burst windows.
Impacts of the changes
The changes to Army of the Dead specifically have some implications for both our usual rotational gameplay and our talent choices. Due to the way this change functions, it essentially prevents us from summoning more ghouls during Army of the Dead. This causes some knock-on effects, preventing Doomed Bidding from working at all as a talent (which is likely a bug, but needed to be mentioned anyway), and drastically reduces the power of Outnumber, Infected Claws, Soul Reaper, Necromancer's Cunning, Grave Mastery, and Commander of the Dead.
While many of these talents were very frequently taken previously, none of them were exceedingly powerful compared to competing talents, which is going to put some serious pressure on the talent tree, leading to many talents focused on our lesser ghoul summons to feel lackluster. Most notable among these is Outnumber, as this capstone, while strong enough to almost always be taken, wasn't exceedingly powerful. Now with these changes, it will likely be worse than the preceding node. I wouldn't be shocked even if we skipped this capstone entirely, even in the content it is meant to be favored in. For a capstone talent, that is quite a disappointing outcome.
During Army of the Dead, when it comes to the gameplay itself, things will be similar, but different. Instead of Scourge Strike with Lesser Ghoul buff stacks summoning more ghouls, we will instead command our 8 ghouls to do either Death Order, or Epidemic Order. Which one of these gets triggered is based on the number of enemies near the ghouls, meaning we have no actual control over what is executed. All this realistically does is change us from summoning 1 ghoul with Scourge Strike which deals damage over time, to dealing damage instantly with the 8 ghouls we have. In addition to this, Sudden Doom procs are drastically deprioritized. With Doomed Bidding just... not working at all, this leaves Sudden Doom to only deal minorly increased damage, drastically reducing the value of Sudden Doom during Army. All of this said, this encourages us to simply spam Scourge Strike mindlessly. While I expect this aspect of it to be changed, it's bringing us full circle back to the original issues Sudden Doom had, where it's a proc we don't want to get, or don't care about proccing during Army.
And the final gameplay impacting change is the change to Soul Reaper, changing it from consuming up to 2 Putrefy charges, to up to 3 Lesser Ghoul buff stacks. They also tried to do this last patch by removing Putrefy consumption from Soul Reaper, and quickly reverted it because of the implications it has during execute. This change doesn't fix that, and we will still only really want to use Soul Reaper during Dark Transformation due to the damage buff it provides being a multiplier with Commander of the Dead. Nothing will change that unless the damage buff from Soul Reaper is removed. On top of all of that, having this consume up to 3 lesser ghoul stacks puts more pressure on our runes by forcing us to press Festering Strike more. With its 2 rune cost, this can quickly spiral out into resource starvation. Add to this the fact that Festering Strike doesn't even have a guaranteed chance to apply 3 lesser ghoul stacks, we can very easily find ourselves in a situation where we only get 2 from Festering Strike, and are then forced to press Festering Scythe immediately just to get the resources required to be able to take full advantage of Soul Reaper.
Tier Set
Unholy
2-Set Bonus: Your Magus of the Dead and Lord of the Dead cast a more powerful Necrotic Bolt instead of Frostbolt, and Withering Grasp instead of Shadow Bolt.
4-Set Bonus: Necrotic Bolt’s damage is increased by 130%, and Withering Grasp’s damage is increased by 130%, against enemies below 35% health.
Unholy Death Knight's tier set is both interesting and very disappointing at the same time. The interesting aspects come almost entirely from this set focusing on a new aspect of the spec in 12.1, our Lich minions from Lord of the Dead. While the disappointment comes from this set being entirely passive. There's nothing we can do to make better use of this set; there are no gameplay implications, and in general, the 2-piece being more interesting than the 4-piece is an absolute shame. Normally, 4-piece set bonuses are the more interesting aspect of a set bonus, but this being a flat percent damage increase is about as bland and boring as it could possibly get. Sure, it amplifies our execute damage, but that doesn't disguise what it actually is.
Final Opinions
Let's start by talking about the tier set, since it's the simplest of all the options. In my opinion, the 4-piece in particular needs a LOT of work. While the 2-piece bonus is vaguely interesting by introducing a new thing, it's also something that's entirely passive and not something we even have any control over. We summon Magi and Liches, and they cast something different from what they did before. I'd generally prefer set bonuses that change our actual rotation, or let us focus on talents that we didn't take before to change up gameplay season to season. This accomplishes neither of these things and in the end, that makes this a very disappointing tier set.
When it comes to the spec changes, things are a bit of a mixed bag. I do quite like a lot of the concepts of these changes, and the direction they seem to be trying to go in but I also think the execution of these needs work, a LOT of work. While i understand the sheer number of pets we were summoning before became issue-prone, and commanding our existing ghouls to do things is significantly more interesting than sheer numbers, the execution of this falls entirely flat. We just... press 1 button, we don't have any decisions to make here, and there's not even a hint of complexity, no thought behind it at all. I'd much rather every rotational button we have do something for these ghouls, so we have actual choices. Why name the 2 abilities they can cast after Coil and Epidemic, if these don't even affect it?
The only other pet that also does things based on what we are pressing, Risen Skulker, also uses Death Coil and Epidemic as triggers, though is sadly blocked behind 2 AoE talents, preventing us from taking it in any scenario we would like it anyway (this really needs to be swapped with Ghoulish Frenzy on the tree so we can take All Will Serve in single target). I can see making Army of the Dead ghouls trigger things based on Epidemic or Coil clashing with Forbidden Knowledge due to that already doing things with Epidemic and Coil during Army, but why even stop there? Scourge strike should do something, Festering Strike should do something else, same with Coil, Epidemic, Soul Reaper, Death and Decay, and even Putrefy. I can see the idea, I can see the intention, and it's incredible, but as it stands, it's half-baked and needs work.
The Soul Reaper change is a bit confusing as well. I believe the intention here was to allow us to use Soul Reaper more freely, but this has the same problems as before. The damage buff it provides is too potent for us to ignore, and we will always want to overlap it with Commander of the Dead while possible. Consuming 3 lesser ghoul stacks has the same issues as consuming 2 putrefy charges in this regard; both want to be buffed by Commander of the Dead if possible. We are just overcomplicating this button for no good reason. Why can it not just be a very powerful button press every 15 seconds in execute range? Why does it need to apply a buff and consume something else?
For Soul Reaper, it seems like we are stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of trying to give it extra effects, rather than fixing the core issue that Soul Reaper, as a button, just isn't as powerful as it needs to be baseline. In my honest opinion, change it to just consume 1 lesser ghoul stack, so we dont lose anything by pressing Soul Reaper over Scourge Strike, remove the random pet damage buff from it, and buff its base damage. This fixes just about all of the issues this button has, without leading to lesser ghoul stack overflow from pressing Scourge Strike less, and doesn't force us into resource starvation by making us press Festering Strike more than before. The core of our rotation after all, is almost entirely optimized around pressing Festering Strike as little as humanly possible.
Finally, let's talk about the changes to our burst damage. While I did notice the homogenization of burst specializations, which basically just do the same thing in slightly different ways, the changes to Unholy for that purpose are all over the place. These changes both affirm that Unholy should burst less, but then immediately go back and increase its burst damage. Simultaneously, none of our core rotational abilities got any buffs to increase our sustained damage, outside of an undocumented change to make base lesser ghouls last 8 seconds (up from 6), which is actually about neutral compared to the ~7.8-8.2s we would get before with our current mastery levels and Commander of the Dead talented (the ghoul duration increase aspect of this was removed which is also undocumented. So, all that's been accomplished is that our sustained damage was generally left alone, while our burst damage was flipped a little bit from ghoul damage to lich and graveyard/necrotic coil damage. The messaging around it is both confusing and contradictory. We need a clear sense of direction here. Do you want Unholy to be a more sustained specialization, or do you want it to continue to do ~80% of its damage with cooldowns?
