Unholy Death Knights have received one of the nicest kinds of World of Warcraft buffs: the sort Blizzard technically calls a bug fix.
The September 23 hotfixes corrected an issue with Blightfall that caused the ability to deal progressively less damage depending on how long a plague had been active on the target. Fixing that problem is worth roughly a 12% single-target damage increase on its own for the affected Blightfall build, according to current calculations.
Compared with where Unholy stood last week, the combined effect of the recent tuning and this bug fix works out to roughly 15% more single-target damage.
Apparently death really is only a temporary setback.
Blightfall Was Quietly Losing Damage
The problem was hidden inside Blightfall's interaction with Unholy's diseases. Blizzard recently doubled the amount of remaining plague damage consumed by Blightfall from 100% to 200% as part of the enormous September 22 class tuning pass.
That buff was specifically intended to bring the Blightfall build back into contention after previous fixes had pushed it out of the meta.
There was just one problem.
Blightfall was not consistently receiving the damage it was supposed to receive. The longer a plague had been active before being consumed, the more damage the ability could effectively lose. Blizzard's September 23 hotfix now states that the issue has been resolved.
In practical terms, this is considerably more important than the rather innocent-looking words “resolved an issue” suggest.
The Bug Fix Is Worth Around 12% in Single Target
Wowhead's analysis of the corrected Blightfall estimates that fixing the bug alone increases Unholy single-target performance by roughly 12%.
AoE also benefits, although not quite as dramatically, with an estimated increase of around 6% from the fix.
When combined with the September 22 class changes, that leaves the Blightfall setup approximately 15% stronger in single-target and 7% stronger in AoE than it was last week.
Those are enormous numbers for something that technically does not appear under a heading marked “damage increased.”
Unholy Has Been Here Before
There is also something wonderfully familiar about all this.
Unholy entered Season 2 with a history of performance swinging wildly as Blizzard fixed interactions, changed plague mechanics and adjusted Hero Talent builds. Back in July, we covered how Unholy climbed back into S Tier after earlier bug fixes and tuning.
Then, shortly after Season 2 launched, Blizzard fixed another collection of broken interactions that effectively gave the specialization a quiet damage increase without technically buffing it.
Unholy Death Knight is apparently becoming the class equivalent of an old car where repairing the indicators unexpectedly adds twenty horsepower.
This Could Matter in Raids More Than Mythic+
The biggest beneficiary should be raid performance, because Blizzard explicitly said the September tuning was intended to improve Unholy in single-target encounters.
That does not mean the fix is irrelevant in Mythic+. AoE is still improving, and current dungeon groups are already timing an extraordinary percentage of their runs. As we recently covered, more than 91% of recorded Midnight Season 2 Mythic+ keys are currently being completed within the timer.
But a 12% single-target swing can have a much larger effect on raid rankings, particularly for a specialization that Blizzard already believed was underperforming there.
Expect the Rankings to Move
The important thing now is to give logs time to catch up.
Existing performance data includes thousands of pulls made before the bug was fixed, so Unholy's current ranking will not immediately reflect the new damage profile. Once several days of post-hotfix raid data accumulate, we should get a much clearer picture of where Blightfall actually sits.
For now, though, Unholy players received a rather pleasant surprise.
No sweeping redesign. No emergency aura buff.
Blizzard simply made the ability do the damage it was supposed to do.
Turns out that helps quite a lot.
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