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Q u o t e:


On a target dummy, that is pathetic.

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That's about as hard as my self-buffed MS hits on a target dummy, I don't see what the problem is.

I've read that the change benefits armor pen gemming and gear.

Perhaps it's a damage increase with decent amounts or armor pen?

Bursticide thats not a fair comparison given that the dk in question massively outgears you.



Also Burstacide your opinion on arena centered pvp balance is not exactly expert level, so we really dont care what you think of scourge strike. Real warriors are doing much better than dks in 3v3 and 5v5 at top levels. Scourge strike is not what's holding you back in arena progress so dont get all happy about this like it will in any way help you.

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Q u o t e:


so on Live I go from... 7400ish + Strikes too.... 5200 ones? I'll just stay with obliterate i guess. :/ It scales better anyway.

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no, with your 4.1k strikes doing 75% more shadow damage (3 diseases) +13% because of ebon plague bringer, you'll be sitting at about 7500 damage. 7574.75 to be exact.

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Q u o t e:
no, with your 4.1k strikes doing 75% more shadow damage (3 diseases) +13% because of ebon plague bringer, you'll be sitting at about 7500 damage. 7574.75 to be exact.

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where am I hitting for 4.1k? My max on PTR with SS was around 3400 or 3700. Factoring in the bugged damage brings it to 5200-5500. Which is a net loss of about 2k damage per swing.

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Q u o t e:
I've read that the change benefits armor pen gemming and gear.

Perhaps it's a damage increase with decent amounts or armor pen?

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I am TIRED of re-specing and regemming and re-gearing this death knight every time something changes about it.

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Q u o t e:
no, with your 4.1k strikes doing 75% more shadow damage (3 diseases) +13% because of ebon plague bringer, you'll be sitting at about 7500 damage. 7574.75 to be exact.

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Also, necrosis (which is the only thing we can assume ScS works like given it's bugged state) doesn't scale with ebon plauge, so there's no reason to believe (until things are fixed at least) that the secondary portion of ScS will either.

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Q u o t e:

Also, necrosis (which is the only thing we can assume ScS works like given it's bugged state) doesn't scale with ebon plauge, so there's no reason to believe (until things are fixed at least) that the secondary portion of ScS will either.

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It also benefits less from Black Ice. :/ This change rather complicates everything IMO.

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Q u o t e:


It also benefits less from Black Ice. :/ This change rather complicates everything IMO.

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Exactly, they should just change it back to the 3.1 coeff's.

So much less complicated.

And get the dispel overhaul onto the front burner for the love of god.

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Q u o t e:
Hits for 3.4k on PTR? is this a joke? Seriously? That's my highest I could manage to get, If its meant to stay like this please reconsider the rune cost of using this ability or else im going back to the obliterate unholy spec.

Also on PTR I'm missing a chunk of attack power, in all my PVP gear.

4445--> 4193, where did it go?

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was that 3.4k crit or not crit?

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Q u o t e:
Scourge Strike doesn't work like Necrosis. There is no need to draw inferences from one to the other. If Scourge Strike benefits from EP and Black Ice on live, then the Shadow portion of it will in 3.3.

All we did was change part of the attack to physical damage, which lets us increase the amount that it hits for overall. This means it should do more damage against lightly armored or fully sundered targets but less damage against heavily armored targets (assuming no armor pen). Magic attacks (even melee weapon swings) typically hit for less since they ignore armor. Switching some of the damage to physical let us inflate the number.

Our goals were to make armor pen slightly more valuable to Unholy DKs and just make Scourge Strike and Reaping valuable to Unholy DKs. I understand many of you just wanted us to boost the numbers because you wanted for it to hit more, but under the way we balance it isn't fair for a magical attack to hit for as much as a physical attack.

The nerf to Unholy Blight was in part because we think SS will be contributing to more damage overall.

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Ok GC but on the PTR even if it works like you are saying I am calculating a overall 5-10% damage nerf against plate targets which I can not deal with because my damage against plate is already really low.

I am barely breaking 3500 crit damage on the Dummies, and against 1k resilience cloth priest I was struggling to break 2800 crit. I hit for 4800-5300 on priest on live which is already extremely low.

So what does this mean for say PvP? It will do more damage than previously if the diseases are getting pulled off? So, I guess it's a PvP...buff...kinda?

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Q u o t e:
That's about as hard as my self-buffed MS hits on a target dummy, I don't see what the problem is.

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I want you to think long and hard about this. Hint: MS comes with a debuff. A debuff we don't get. MS is also just 1 of several of your abilities you get to use. We get SS and Death Coil. Every other source of damage we do is autoattack or considerably worse.

Not to mention, as stated, your gear leaves much to be desired. 5k Scourges are going to be the absolute top end any DK will ever get and that's before any resilience. Given a 2k as a base hit, the only bonuses SS get will be 10% from RoR and 20% from Outbreak. 2000 * 0.5 * 1.75 * 1.1 * 1.2 = 2310 damage BEFORE ANY ARMOR. 40% armor and 10% resil reduction puts this at 1250 damage.

1250 damage as our MAIN .. !@**ING .. STRIKE. I'd also like to emphasize this is a best case scenario with 3 diseases. 0 diseases means we'd hit the same target for 650 damage. Shaman who keeps diseases off him in perpetuity (trivial to do) will have us crit him for 1500 damage. Yea, this game is really balanced.

We all realize it's PTR and could change, but if it doesn't, the silver lining is I get 4 free points back (SS and Outbreak) to spend elsewhere as I'll be having to use oblit which will hit harder in every single situation.

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Q u o t e:
Scourge Strike doesn't work like Necrosis. There is no need to draw inferences from one to the other. If Scourge Strike benefits from EP and Black Ice on live, then the Shadow portion of it will in 3.3.

All we did was change part of the attack to physical damage, which lets us increase the amount that it hits for overall. This means it should do more damage against lightly armored or fully sundered targets but less damage against heavily armored targets (assuming no armor pen). Magic attacks (even melee weapon swings) typically hit for less since they ignore armor. Switching some of the damage to physical let us inflate the number.

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Too bad the ability is like 10 X harder to use than something like say, MS, and hits for less on plate and cloth 8 (

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Q u o t e:
Scourge Strike doesn't work like Necrosis. There is no need to draw inferences from one to the other. If Scourge Strike benefits from EP and Black Ice on live, then the Shadow portion of it will in 3.3.

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Thanks GC, I was really worried about this.

Will Armor and Block also decrease the shadow portion of the spell?

Will Armor Pen also increase the shadow portion of the spell?

Perhaps you should clarify between the tooltips in the new SS and Necrosis, as they are both worded very similar.

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Q u o t e:
Scourge Strike doesn't work like Necrosis. There is no need to draw inferences from one to the other. If Scourge Strike benefits from EP and Black Ice on live, then the Shadow portion of it will in 3.3.

All we did was change part of the attack to physical damage, which lets us increase the amount that it hits for overall. This means it should do more damage against lightly armored or fully sundered targets but less damage against heavily armored targets (assuming no armor pen). Magic attacks (even melee weapon swings) typically hit for less since they ignore armor. Switching some of the damage to physical let us inflate the number.

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Oh good. It would have been troublesome if it was necrosis-like as your first response to the subject would indicate with a "lawyer-y" reading of it.

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Q u o t e:

Our goals were to make armor pen slightly more valuable to Unholy DKs and just make Scourge Strike and Reaping valuable to Unholy DKs. I understand many of you just wanted us to boost the numbers because you wanted for it to hit more, but under the way we balance it isn't fair for a magical attack to hit for as much as a physical attack.

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I hope that you intended to boost the numbers overall though, even if there's a portion of physical damage. I also hope you intend to introduce some kind of significant dispel resistance because as other people pointed out diseases accounting for a 75% DPS increase instead of a 30% DPS increase is a pretty significant change.

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Q u o t e:

The nerf to Unholy Blight was in part because we think SS will be contributing to more damage overall.

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I hope you're right because it seems like often when you are wrong about these sorts of changes they get left in :(

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Q u o t e:
I want you to think long and hard about this. Hint: MS comes with a debuff. A debuff we don't get. MS is also just 1 of several of your abilities you get to use. We get SS and Death Coil. Every other source of damage we do is autoattack or considerably worse.

Not to mention, as stated, your gear leaves much to be desired. 5k Scourges are going to be the absolute top end any DK will ever get and that's before any resilience. Given a 2k as a base hit, the only bonuses SS get will be 10% from RoR and 20% from Outbreak. 2000 * 0.5 * 1.75 * 1.1 * 1.2 = 2310 damage BEFORE ANY ARMOR. 40% armor and 10% resil reduction puts this at 1250 damage.

1250 damage as our MAIN .. !@**ING .. STRIKE. I'd also like to emphasize this is a best case scenario with 3 diseases. 0 diseases means we'd hit the same target for 650 damage. Shaman who keeps diseases off him in perpetuity (trivial to do) will have us crit him for 1500 damage. Yea, this game is really balanced.

We all realize it's PTR and could change, but if it doesn't, the silver lining is I get 4 free points back (SS and Outbreak) to spend elsewhere as I'll be having to use oblit which will hit harder in every single situation.

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Test it and report it if it's not fitting properly, imo. GC's stated pretty clearly that they want Unholy to use SS and he just admitted it isn't supposed to be a nerf against less-armored or sundered targets. If that turns out to not be the case once they fix the bug with it right now then report the issue so they can fix it. We know the intention now. It's just a matter of tweaking and player reports help bring more details to any possible problems.

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Q u o t e:
Will Armor and Block also decrease the shadow portion of the spell?

Will Armor Pen also increase the shadow portion of the spell?

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These would be good things to test as well. Hopefully they get the bug fixed soon. Obviously armor/arp won't reduce shadow damage but if the shadow damage is based on post-reduction amounts then it would end up dropping the shadow damage, too. Hopefully that's not the case.

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Q u o t e:
I understand many of you just wanted us to boost the numbers because you wanted for it to hit more, but under the way we balance it isn't fair for a magical attack to hit for as much as a physical attack.

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Just curious, do the devs take into consideration the fact that SS can be dodged, blocked, parried and resisted, while a physical attack can only be dodged, blocked, and parried, when calculating this penalty?

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Q u o t e:
Scourge Strike doesn't work like Necrosis. There is no need to draw inferences from one to the other. If Scourge Strike benefits from EP and Black Ice on live, then the Shadow portion of it will in 3.3.

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And perhaps you need to come to the realization that EVEN IF THIS WERE TRUE, it now only applies to less than HALF the damage the strike deals, completely neutering the entire strike's scaling.

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Q u o t e:
Our goals were to make armor pen slightly more valuable to Unholy DKs and just make Scourge Strike and Reaping valuable to Unholy DKs. I understand many of you just wanted us to boost the numbers because you wanted for it to hit more, but under the way we balance it isn't fair for a magical attack to hit for as much as a physical attack.

The nerf to Unholy Blight was in part because we think SS will be contributing to more damage overall.

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I have lost all faith in both you and your company. DKs have barely a 2% representation in competitive pvp and you seek to lower our damage FURTHER? You also now make us reliant on armor pen when there is almost no pvp gear with the stat? You require us to gem 3-4 blues for spell pen and waste our cloak enchant as a melee class then have the gall to suggest we now should spend what few available gem slots we do have on armor pen when the entire point of the spec from 3.0 until now has been a melee class that does magical damage?

What could POSSIBLY be the precedent for this, we have the right to know. If this is intended to change pve, there are other means to do that without kicking the worst arena class in the game even further down the stairs. This, by the way, at the same time you announce that mousover cleansing totem macros are gone and quite possibly make finding oddly placed totems completely impossible.

We deserve an explanation. The class has needed serious pvp help since before season 6 ended and all we have gotten is nerf after nerf while some of the strongest classes (see: shaman) get buff after buff. You know nothing about the game you are a representative for. Shame on you.

I love this game blizzard, but your making me hate my favorite thing about it. Seriously, DONT NERF ME BRA. Like...DKs are the least represented class in arenas period. As for PVE who gives a damn about the lame PVE carefest. Its ridic that warriors MS ppl for 6-7 k, and apply a 50% healing debuff, or rogues evisc ppl for 9.5k, or locks/ele shamans dropping ppl in one global cooldown with Lava burst/conflag/chaosbolt etc. But god forbid DKs hit harder than 5k. Stop listening to the kids who are still butt hurt about s5 DKs and balance us, don't give us non sensical nerfs that destroy the synergy of the only tree that is even viable for DK PVP(and viable is stretching it lol).

This change is stupid. A damage buff is needed for unholy DKs in one way or another. But making it so we gain a bit of SS dmg against clothies and lose it agianst mail/plate wearers is ridic. DKs niche atm is destroying clothies...why make us more powerful against the one thing we really dont struggle against, while nerfing our damage against plate wearers. WTF am i sposed to do in 2s...just CoI spam the warrior till he gets DCed? If i can't SS hard enough to force a shield up hes gonna drop me or my healer.....come on blizz. I love this game and your really driving me crazy with all these DK changes. I should just switch back to my rogue and eviscerate kids for 9.5k CUZ THATS REALLY BALANCED.