Can we get the thread limited extened please? Decent discussions on SS here.

Edit: Looks like it's already exteneded...

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Q u o t e:

It was making Death Coil worth more than Scourge Strike.

That being said, the current approach seems a little backwards.

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Thanks god we have something actually useful right now which is death coil since SS is a Noodle Strike.

There is shadow frost tree v2 that uses Deathcoil a lot, that produces equal damage as SS build just being more range and more forgiving by reducing dodges and parries when SS is used. How many people use that build that is death coil based... i haven't seen a single one and now IT Glyph nerf because of that. Honestly that moderator that made a comment "IT glyph is little too generous " needs to shut up. DC is the only thing that does decent damage now days and not that WET noodle strike that requires 2 deceases to be up, crit and 2 runes in order to do decent damage.

I am not even going to dispelling issue.

Weeks pass... Blizzard stays quite.... and still going ahead with new SS... I am beginning to think they realized that DK's were mistake.... so they are going to announce in Expansion all who rolled DK's will get substitution for another class in equal gear...

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Q u o t e:


I used an earlier EJ stat weight that doesn't use the new BS-heavy rotation, because the BS-heavy rotation is a band-aid to a crappy SS. In other words, the build is trying to avoid SS as much as possible, and has a stat weight that reflects that. Arpen for example has a higher stat weight than before because it's trying to use more physical DPS damage--which is exactly a reflection that SS itself is falling behind. The earlier stat weights are based off how DKs "should" play, meaning using more SS than BS. Plus, there will be a sizable disease nerf for 4pc T10 in the upcoming patch, so thinking that Unholy PvE DPS will be just as fine would be unrealistic. Once you have that 4-pc bonus nerfed, those Jaraxxus DPS numbers won't look so amazing anymore.

Maybe I should have clarified further to say that SS scaling is insufficient--Unholy PvE DPS has never been in the sewers, and has stayed competitive. That was never the contention though. The contention was that SS needs to scale so that it won't get phased out, be it by OB or BS x2. My point is there are other ways around it, like scaling haste more and applying that scaling to *only* SS, through proccing UB through SS. The Unholy tree is a whole doesn't need to scale more, SS needs to scale more. I've never coined it as "Unholy PvE DPS needs buffs!" and it seems you're interpreting it that way.

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You used stat weights from around January. Also APE stat weights only work among a single spec. You need DPS stat weights to compare actual scaling between different rotations/specs/classes. If a spec gets .1 DPS from 1 AP and 1 DPS from 1 haste you may think that their APE of 10 is good compared to a haste APE of say 2 from another spec until you realize that the other spec gets .7 instead of .1 DPS per AP.

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Q u o t e:
Any feed back from people pvp'ing on PTR and using this? I think we understand in principle what the pro's and con's of this thing are, but would be good to hear some anecdotal evidence/responses :P

Anyone 2 shot a clothie, or sit on a pally for 38 minutes before he afk'ed out of arena?

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well at the risk of sounding like a whine, It is a fairly large pvp nerf, I have been testing it in pvp on the PTR.

Its not just the fact that SS being physical becomes such a huge nerf to a spec that had the rest of its dps ballanced around the fact that their main strike ignored armor, its also the fact that the glyph of icy touch nerf leads to one less deathcoil per rotation.

taking an entire additional instant attack out of a classes rotation is a huge burst dmg nerf, especially bad for a class that has been suffering mediocre burst dmg to begin with, couple that with the outrageous range of SS's dmg, ive seen it do 400 - 12,000 dmg(0 res training dummy, all procs up double crit), what other ability has such a ludacris range?

now lets look at SS further, it is now so dependant on scaling with factors that are only present in a 25 man pve raid with pve gear, that when used in PVP, it really does hit like a "wet noodle", now that it is reduced by armor, in my pvp tests ive found that the only class it actually hits harder is a mage with no absorbs up, on rogues and warlocks it does about the same dmg as live, and on every other class its a substantial to very large nerf depending on the class.

the next thing is that it is dependant on getting a double crit to do note worthy dmg, but the second half of the crit is based off spell crit rate and DKs in pvp gear have ~18% spell crit, when you subtract 11 - 12% crit rate from healer Resilience and 9 - 10% from dps class resilience, your left with a whopping 6-7% crit chance on healers and an 8-9% crit chance on dps classes, AND the first part has to crit as well to even make the second part critting matter.

The chances of the double crit in pvp are so low that it literally almost never happens, its maybe a 1% chance at most.

what this leads to is the dmg output being terrible 99% of the time with random rare longshot RNG chances of you gibbing a mage.

given that the overall package of the ITglyph nerf and the SS redesign has further reduced our already mediocre burst dmg in PVP, I would hope that blizz will be decent enough to provide some compensation this time around, as they nerfing yet again a class that has already been heavily over nerfed.

How could it possibly be ballanced that warriors, wich we are the same archtype as DKs (non healer hybrid) do more burst dmg and have 75% healing reduction?


TLDR: no I havnt 2 shot a clothy yet because to do so you would need back to back double crits, and double crit is about a 1% chance of happening and ive never seen it happen twice in a row, in fact out of about 5 hours of BGing I only recall seeing it happen twice, once was vs a warrior for a mindblowing 4200 and the other was a bear form feral druid for 3600.

To be truly constructive - @GC:
Please do 3 things at least for your hero class vendor machine:

1. Revert whatever your team has decided to go with the problematic physical + shadow idea on scourge strike, buff its damage by increase the base % of weapon damage to make it viable in PVE a little more for the PVE heroes - which in fact they don't really need such buff - unholy pve was fine.

2. Fix the disease cleansing in PVP - brainless class countering mechanism should not be allowed for whatever reason. And thinking into making the strike less dependent on disease for its damage but still "dependent" is just not going to work.

3. Stop attempting to make ever stats "valuable" to the unholy tree. The unholy tree's strength and attractive feature is a magical melee spec. Forcing armor pen into the spec just for some narrow sighted PVE consideration is a violation of the original design concept behind the scene.

The words below are whining but not whining:

The fact is blizzard is very good at playing dumb or deaf.
Sadly the above statement is whining but more sadly is - it is just true.

When I was on my warlock and "trolled" (in fact complained about the poor quality of life of the class) for an entire s5, GC's response and the proposed "fixes" are just pathetically unacceptable. As a result, a huge portion of the warlock player base rerolled other classes amongst which DK is the most popular choice.

And now we've been put back into the desperate situation 2 seasons back again. And I do believe this time, Scourge Strike will move on to live with the "brilliant" physical + shadow damage design and make a hero class completely useless in every spec inside arena. Then when new expansion launches, they will introduce some so-called quality of life fixes which will eventually fix the mistake they made 6 months ago.

The above being said, they are whining but not whining - because this is based on a 3 year WoW subscriber's experience who had "joyfully" spent hundreds of dollars and a handful of time into this game. Sadly to state it as a "conclusion" over the years, but yes, it is.

Thank you.

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Q u o t e:
It was making Death Coil worth more than Scourge Strike..

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Death Coil is making Death Coil worth more than Scourge Strike. An Unholy Blight nerf won't change that in the slightest.

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Q u o t e:
I dont understand. DKs are doing terrible in PvP. Why would they nerf them more?

It's like Frost in 3.1-3.2 all over again...

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it kinda seems like they are punishing DKs for being overpowered in S5, but thats just silly I know its not the case, but it sure seems like it.

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Q u o t e:
I dont understand. DKs are doing terrible in PvP. Why would they nerf them more?

It's like Frost in 3.1-3.2 all over again...

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That's pretty much what the whole DK PVP community is wondering. It's like they are scared to death to buff us even the slightest (dispel protection). Wouldn't surprise me if the current SS on PTR goes live and we are off SS'ing heavy plate for 1.6k with 3 diseases up.

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Q u o t e:
Weeks pass... Blizzard stays quite.... and still going ahead with new SS... I am beginning to think they realized that DK's were mistake.... so they are going to announce in Expansion all who rolled DK's will get substitution for another class in equal gear...

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I wouldn't mind that, I would love to go back to my warrior if I could at this point.

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Q u o t e:
You used stat weights from around January. Also APE stat weights only work among a single spec. You need DPS stat weights to compare actual scaling between different rotations/specs/classes. If a spec gets .1 DPS from 1 AP and 1 DPS from 1 haste you may think that their APE of 10 is good compared to a haste APE of say 2 from another spec until you realize that the other spec gets .7 instead of .1 DPS per AP.

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As I already mentioned in an earlier post, stat weight isn't static, and does change according to spec, tier bonuses, etc. Stat weight is a reflection of the overall scaling of a spec, versus the scaling pertaining to a single skill (such as Scourge Strike), which makes it complicated for discussions and anaylsis of SS scaling. But Blizzard clearly thinks the current best rotation is "wrong," so we'd need to have stat weights based on what Blizzard would feel is the "right" rotation, which would likely be the rotation before OB or before BSx2.

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Q u o t e:
I dont understand. DKs are doing terrible in PvP. Why would they nerf them more?

It's like Frost in 3.1-3.2 all over again...

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Because this change is mainly for PvE... which annoys me since PvE has one already stable/viable spec with Blood, and this threatens to ruin the only viable PvP spec.

There is a lot of time till the next patch goes live. Hopefully development focus will switch back to fixing the PTR SS into something a little better than what it is at the moment (this would include disease protection). I wouldn't hold your breath though...

There has been a lot of constructive feedback and good questions that have been asked over the last week that have received no responses. Perhaps it's time to give an update?

Thank You GC, it's starting to get fairly derailed.

YO GC can we get some feedback please?

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Q u o t e:
Thank You GC, it's starting to get fairly derailed.

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Putting it lightly lol.

I think it is fairly obvious that the change to SS is a boon to pve. Rotations, specs, and glyphs are all changing to max scourge strike, which is a great thing for unholy pve. I love using scourge strike because its a big fat 2handed strike. Kudos for getting it there in pve.

Pvp is another story. The damage range is wildly unpredictable and large. A hit/hit is so low compared to a crit/crit that it just makes pvp frustrating praying for the double crit to happen to put out substantial pressure. If there was someway to reliably get a double crit a la deathchill/cold blood, that would be something.

I'd also suggest that the damage of the shadow portion be brought down a bit, or the modifiers brought down, and have the shadow portion benefit from vicious strikes and subversion, so it has a decent crit rate in pvp.