unholy-balance

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  • Lichborne: Unholy death knights get some gifts in patch 5.2

    by 
    Daniel Whitcomb
    Daniel Whitcomb
    12.26.2012

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. Given that I have been talking the past few weeks about unholy's woes and some things Blizzard will probably never give us, I wanted to spend this week talking about some of the good things Blizzard has given us. Luckily, Blizzard decided to give us the greatest Christmas gift of all: Meaningful balance and mechanics changes to the unholy death knight on the upcoming patch 5.2 PTR. Plague Strike delivers both diseases Applying diseases when Outbreak is on cool down has been one of the most awkward parts of playing unholy ever since Scourge Strike was switched to a single rune model. Applying via the usual Plague Strike/Icy Touch model leaves orphaned runes that cannot easily be spent on a standard strike that fits into the basic unholy priority system, throwing off the rotation in a pretty jarring manner and making fights with multiple target switches a bit of a pain. However, in patch 5.2, Ebon Plaguebringer will allow Plague Strike to apply both Frost Fever and Blood Plague.

  • Lichborne: Why unholy death knights aren't popular

    by 
    Daniel Whitcomb
    Daniel Whitcomb
    12.11.2012

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. On the PvE side of the death community, one of the most hot button topics right now is unholy DPS. All through the Mists beta, there was a large clamoring for an overhaul to the spec that never really came, and while Blizzard did add some decent quality of life and power changes, overall, many death knights felt the base flaws remained. As it's played out in Mists so far, unholy death knights do appear to be a much rarer creature than frost death knights at the raid level. In addition, while sims suggest unholy should only lag slightly behind frost, actual raid parses often show unholy lagging behind by a far larger margin. What does all this mean? How does unholy continue to have these issues? This week, we'll look at some unholy spec issues, and consider how, or if, they should be fixed.

  • Lichborne: A BlizzCon death knight wishlist

    by 
    Daniel Whitcomb
    Daniel Whitcomb
    10.18.2011

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. BlizzCon's just around the corner, and while we discussed bandaid fixes last week, the recent winding down of the class feedback threads and the existence of a class talent panel at BlizzCon itself suggests that we may be getting so more long-term information soon, if not on the death knight class, on the general focus of class development in general. With that in mind, this week I wanted to discuss some of the possible long-term changes the death knight class could use to keep it fresh, relevant, and fun to play in patch 5.0 and beyond, some of which we might just expect to hear about or ask questions about this coming weekend.