This seems like a solid choice for Shadowlands, however I'm looking forward to the Frost DK write up. Frost gets rid of the pet bar and another whole bar of abilities and still does comparable damage.
I love Unholy's GCD ramp; it's a pretty unique part of the gameplay. They have a ton of cooldowns, so they trade a quick ramp for big, juicy compounding. Afterwards, their CDs are all desynched, and so it's up to the player to decide whether it's worth staggering a CD, or taking the quick payout. "Fixing" either of those "problems" feels like a step towards homogenization that's already run rampant among most of the other classes (in my opinion).
I'm gonna wait for the frost one, might go back to frost in shadowlands after reading all this..
The GCD part is misleading. First you say that Festering Strike is part of your core rotation, but then you add that to the list twice like it wasn't that. Second you're taking every talent that adds an aditional ability, of course if you do that you're going to have more abilities on your opener. Third you're casting Army of the Death in the middle of your rotation, cast it 3 second before pull so you can get your runes back. And forth, all your spells actually do something, so they don't count as wasted GCDs, only Unholy Frenzy is just a buff and a dead GCD but not only is the last one, it's a talent you decided to take.
Still excited to main my UH DK in Shadowlands. The GCD stuff does feel bad, it already didn't flow too well for me in BFA. Out of all the options though, UH DK remains one of the coolest specs to play for me personally, both thematically and rotation-wise. Keeping my fingers crossed for at least *some* of the opener spells getting off the GCD.
Removed
Another opinion article that doesn't represent everyone. As all other articles, it says that the spec is feeling bad etc. Main question is - what is feeling good then? Why are you playing what's feeling bad? These articles are all about whining and complaining masked by 'pro opinions from top players'. And comments here prove that. Oh and yes, I love how someone gives a reasonable argument and others start attack personally, very mature. The thing is - just play whatever you feel is fun. If you think that unholy dk has too many buttons to press, try another spec or another character or another game. Find something that you like to do instead of doing something that you hate. But people don't do that, because deep inside they either enjoy the spec and complaint just because it's cool to hate blizzard now or because they like to suffer and do things they don't like doing.
I have been trying to use this rotation in PTR.With so many spells, that I have to use, now I have to use mouse clicks to active a few of them. Some of them I even don't remember to use during a fight. Some of the buffs just run out before I could use my main rotation. If all of them are suppose to add to my DPS then it seems I have to remember like 20+ spells and their cooldown timers! Also I have run out of space on my two action bars trying to put all those in with along with my heal pot, and defensive abilities :-(.Now I am wondering whether I should play this character at all.Could someone suggest a specialised approach whereby we could ignore some spells and use the rest without sacrificing on DPS output?
Thanks for this article! Since I got beta I was worried about many things You mentioned, mainly the length of our opener as well as the not so smart SS/CS targeting. Hopefully Devs read it and do something about it.
We actually will end up equipping more than one legendary.
Has anything changed since this article was last updated in mid-August?
I stopped reading at the second entry, stating that Gargoyle is baseline as about a month ago (a couple weeks after this was written), Gargoyle was moved back to a level 50 talent. I'd find another guide or wait for guides to be written as of at least prepatch date. Things are/were still very much in flux.