This change IS nice, but there's to many problems with how dks work in pvp to make this change viable.


1. We currently need at least 110+ spell pent so our spells, like strangulate and death coil, aren't resisted. Strength is by far our best stat, and with VERY little pvp gear with arp (only the neck) we would have to either wear pve gear with arp or drop strength gems which are vastly superior to make scourge strike work. I don't think we can get enough of every stat that we need for everything to work and be viable in pvp. With how prevalent "wizard cleave" is dropping pvp gear to get arp pve gear really isn't an option. I still get blown up by casters with heroism at 1k resilience, so there's no real way to drop anymore pvp gear for pve. Unlike mages who can get away with 500~ res only wearing pvp offset pieces with tier set pieces.

2. New version of scourge strike is way to dependent on diseases. We're already having a hard time using spells other than chains, plague strike, and death coil for our main "rotation" in pvp. Disease cleansing is straight up to powerful against us. Without a change to either how easy and mindless current disease dispelling is, or additional protection to our diseases this change will be the nail in the coffin for scourge strike usage in pvp. I'm not saying everyone will quit dk or its a doomsday scenario, but I think most people will go shadowfrost and play mostly ranged.

3. Damage vs high armor targets, and destro locks. I'm worried that without tons of arp or arp debuffs our damage against high armor targets will just suck. Current numbers and testing support this. Armor double dips because the lower your strike damage the lower the shadow portion is. Throw in high resilience and there are problems. Also can nether protection be looked at? 30% damage reduction to most of our damage that's up 90%+ of the time is a little insane. It's better than most defensive cooldowns! I don't see how 30% is balanced for a passive ability.

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Q u o t e:
The crit damage should definitely be at 200% (as are all DK spell attacks). I suspect the spell hit, if that is indeed happening, is also a bug.

We're going to wait for more numbers to trickle in before we make any additional decisions.

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Why are you guys so opposed to just buffing the damage level back up to where it was in 3.1? The resil change and the sigil of the vengeful heart covered all the burst problems dks had pre 3.2.

The 3.2 SS nerf threw a loop in the class's pve dps (hell, if you don't have a sigil of virulence you don't even play a scourge strike build, you play a death coil build and spam disease appliers) and pvp burst that could have been avoided completely if the resil buff had gone in before the SS nerf. Now it seems like your team is going about fixing the issue the complete wrong way.

Making the strike based off physical damage takes away the one strength unholy still had in 3.2, the ability to do solid damage to plate classes, and hardly even buffs the damage against cloth classes. It also makes us reliant on armor penetration, which makes little to no sense since the only abilities armor pen even buffs for us are blood strike (which we would be using fewer of with the 3.1 scourge strike, since we'd still have reaping), plague strike (again, we would be using fewer if scourge strike did a significant amount of damage more than an IT+PS), and our white damage.

Basically, I just don't see why your team doesn't just bring back the 3.1 mechanics. Yeah, if the stars align and you manage to drop an ERW burst into a target and all 3 diseases stay up and you get some crits and your gargoyle is out and you use ghoul stun and strangulate then you could cause some serious pressure with the 3.1 scourge strike. But the odds of 3 diseases staying up when you burst against any team with a shaman, a priest, or a paladin of any spec is slim to none unless you're playing bad players. The odds of your gargoyle not getting shackled/turn eviled/curse of tonguesed/interrupted/line of sighted/killed are pretty low too.

Compare that to the odds/difficulty of a destro lock getting a chaos bolt conflag combo off, or a frost mage getting a shatter off with a brain freeze proc, or an elemental shaman getting a lava burst elemental mastery chain lightning combo off, or a hunter getting a lock and load proc, or a warrior hitting sweeping strikes bladestorm, or a feral druid critting a shred, and you'll see why dks are so low represented right now. If you aren't going to fix the overpowered burst of certain classes, don't nerf dks to the level where every class should be, then require us to keep 3 debuffs up to even think about bursting when 2 classes can hit 1 button to just stop our diseases indefinitely.

At least give us one competitive spec where I don't think "Man, if I was an elemental shaman/destro lock/frost mage/feral druid right now instead of a death knight my team would be much better off."

Saw this coming from much further than a mile away, the entire concept of having an attack deal half physical and half magical damage is so bad that it's not even worth trying.

they either need to make SS entirely physical or make it magical again.

The problem with Unholy is that it has no real identity other than the "pve aoe" spec. Im really confused as to how blizzard thinks this is going to simultaneously make arp useful while not nerfing pvp. Heres a very interesting post from AJ:

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Q u o t e:
Did results again accounting for apparent double dipping from RoR and Blood Presence on PTR.

0 disease Scourge Strike is better on <2112 armor.
Frost Fever Scourge Strike is better on <5222 armor.
Blood Plague Scourge Strike is better on <5977 armor.
Ebon Plague Scourge Strike is better on <3656 armor.
Frost Fever + Blood Plague Scourge Strike is better on <9195 armor.
Frost Fever + Ebon Plague Scourge Strike is better on <6605 armor.
Blood Plague + Ebon Plague Scourge Strike is better on <7341 armor.
3-diseases Scourge Strike is better on <10120 armor.


3-disease Scourge Strike gains 66,44% damage on 0 armor targets, 35,34% on 3500 armor targets, 14% on 7k armor targets, evens out at 10120 armor, loses 6,9% damage on 12k armor targets, -13,27% on 14k armor, -18,83% on 16k armor, and goes up to -38,51% on 26k armor aka bears/frostpresence/shield.

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DKs dont need to do ~25% more damage to rogues, or ~40% more damage to warlocks and mages. Nor do we need to do ~15-16% less damage to Ret Pallies/Warriors/other Dks and ~39% less damage against Holy Paladins (due to shields).

Unholy needs an identity. Some ways that could be done are:

1.) Attach Unholy Blight to SS instead of Death Coil, and have it do 10% of SS's damage over 3-6 seconds.

2.) Remove the bloat from Unholy. If Unholy DKs were using SS and taking Reaping, these are all the useful talents Unholy could take: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#jZZfMhIxcdg0ux0uIqo
Requiring 60 points for 1 tree is WAY too much. Some of these talents either need to be combined (Impurity and Desolation? Dirge and Reaping?) or redesigned.

3.) Put SS's damage back close to where it was in 3.1: ~42-45% weapon damage + ~10-11% per disease. Factoring in the resilience changes, 10k SSs simply arent going to happen in pvp.

4.) Wandering Plague redesign: Frost Fever and Blood Plague can now crit on your primary target only. (I think most DKs can agree that in AoE situations, Wandering Plague is OP)

5.) Attach an Unstable Affliction type ability to Ebon Plaguebringer. This way DK diseases dont need to be undispellable, but dispelling them comes with a consequence (ie a buff for the dk or a debuff for the target).

6.) Give Scourge Strike an identity. Mortal Strike attaches a healing debuff. Death Strike heals. If you want Unholy DKs to use SS without making it crit for 10k in pvp again, then give it something to make it worth using instead of simple +damage.

7.) Change the SS glyph. With Glyph of Disease running around, the SS glyph is just isnt that useful. Perhaps the SS glyph could be changed to: Whenever your Blood Plague is dispelled, there is a 33% or 50% chance that your next SS will apply Blood Plague.

8.) Change Unholy Blight to work like the old Amplify Curse: Your next Frost Fever and Blood Plague have their damage increased by 20% or 25% or 33%, 2min cooldown.

9.) Give Unholy an ability similar to Rime in the Frost tree: Whenever your Blood Plague deals damage, there is a 5-10% chance your next SS will cost no runes.

Im not saying any of those suggestions are the right ones, but this SS change seems shortsighted. By making SS work with ArP, this may inadvertently make Blood Strike even more attractive in the future (especially with the Unholy Blight nerf, which may make the Death Coil glyph less attractive than the Blood Strike glyph if ArP suddenly becomes useful). Lets compare SS and BS.

SS = 50% of weapon damage as Physical damage plus 400, in addition, for each of your diseases on your target, you deal an additional 25% of the Physical damage done as Shadow damage.
BS = 40% weapon damage + 305.6, total damage increased by 12.5% for each of your diseases on the target. (physical damage)

Thats not a large difference between the two, when you consider that BS is a 1 rune ability. And while SS may have Outbreak increasing its damage by 20%, Blood Strike also has the Blood Strike glyph ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=43826 ). And it wasnt too long ago that Blood DKs were using the BS glyph to increase Heart Strike damage. So there MUST be some snares that work on a boss in raids. Making ArP useful for Unholy DKs may simply push them even further away from SS and towards BS.

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Q u o t e:


Even before crunching numbers, I think there's been a lack of communication on this ability, and Blizzard's intentions behind it (yes it may seem self-evident from your perspective, but it's not often clear for us on the other side)

1) Are you aware of the potential adverse PvP implications?
2) If this proves to be a PvE buff to SS scaling but a nerf to PvP, will this still go live?
3) If this is going live and 2) proves to be true, will Unholy PvP be augmented with some kind of dispel resistance?

Answering questions like these (esp preemptively) would go a long way towards assuaging fears of more PvP nerfs.

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Well put.

It would go a long way to get some assurance that they are in fact aware of the devastating impact this might have on DK's in PVP

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Q u o t e:
The crit damage should definitely be at 200% (as are all DK spell attacks). I suspect the spell hit, if that is indeed happening, is also a bug.

We're going to wait for more numbers to trickle in before we make any additional decisions.

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so....can we get any form of disease protection? cause 30% does absolutely nothing. We need some form of UA or some form of greater protection. We can't do any damage or even use scourge strike if we have to waste runs re-applying our diseases which are they immediately cleansed again.

I think the new change sounded fun, but the for SS to be useful/used in pvp it has to be robust (pve is a much more stable world) -- we can't have someone put on a shield and have it totally negate our primary strike.

Solution 1: 3.3 SS's shadow damage is no longer linked to physical portion of attack.
Solution 2: 3.3 SS's shadow damage is linked to physical damage portion post armor mitigation, pre shield mitigation.
Solution 3: 3.1 SS comes back -- possibly with less disease dependence built in.
Solution 4: Unholy tree supports Oblit, thats really the damage functionality the new SS is supposed to be.

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Q u o t e:
The problem with Unholy is that it has no real identity other than the "pve aoe" spec.

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While I would agree that Unholy could use a more refined identity, i think calling it the "PvE AoE" tree is oversimplifying it. As it stands now, Unholy is more like the "AoE-Raid Utility-Disease-Deathcoil-Summon" tree.

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Q u o t e:
Unholy needs an identity. Some ways that could be done are:

1.) Attach Unholy Blight to SS instead of Death Coil, and have it do 10% of SS's damage over 3-6 seconds.

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I could see this working.

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Q u o t e:
2.) Remove the bloat from Unholy. If Unholy DKs were using SS and taking Reaping, these are all the useful talents Unholy could take: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#jZZfMhIxcdg0ux0uIqo
Requiring 60 points for 1 tree is WAY too much. Some of these talents either need to be combined (Impurity and Desolation? Dirge and Reaping?) or redesigned.

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This probably won't happen until Cataclysm, when every tree in the game will see their bloat reduced.

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Q u o t e:
3.) Put SS's damage back close to where it was in 3.1: ~42-45% weapon damage + ~10-11% per disease. Factoring in the resilience changes, 10k SSs simply arent going to happen in pvp.

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Doing this won't solve SS's scaling issues, though. Without some way of scaling with ArP, Oblit will still Outscale SS with enough ArP. In this scenario, Oblit would still hit just as hard as SS, but would scale from all the ArP found on everything in Ulduar and ToC. As has been mentioned before, Oblit is still very competitive with SS builds right now, even with the Dirge nerf.

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Q u o t e:
4.) Wandering Plague redesign: Frost Fever and Blood Plague can now crit on your primary target only. (I think most DKs can agree that in AoE situations, Wandering Plague is OP)

5.) Attach an Unstable Affliction type ability to Ebon Plaguebringer. This way DK diseases dont need to be undispellable, but dispelling them comes with a consequence (ie a buff for the dk or a debuff for the target).

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Not bad ideas, though making WP only crit on the primary target kinda takes the "Wandering" part out of "Wandering Plague." Maybe have it give your Blood Plague a chance to spread your diseases to all non-CC'd targets within 10 yards?

The rest of your suggestions are pretty good, but I don't have time to comment on them just now.

It doesn't seem to be double dipping external damage buffs such as Berserking from a quick test on the PTR. The damage still seems pretty meh though, unless you are in BP with the sigil. Crits on the physical portion do increase the shadow portion.

I really don't see why they have the shadow portion of the damage based on physical damage, it seems like a serious oversight because it just makes the shadow damage suffer from armor like physical damage (the advantage of it piercing armor is completely negated) and if it double dips it provides potential for seriously stupid crits.

To see what kind of damage this would do on a low armor/low resilience target (ie. a clothie who just hit 80 in a BG, or other people with an ArP stacked DK), I went and beat on a level 60 target dummy for a bit. If the physical portion crits for 5400, the shadow portion hits for 6k. With a double crit I had a 5300 physical crit and a 9200 shadow crit (and this is with the shadow portion only critting for 1.5x! and not affected by vicious strikes apparently). Edit: That would have been about 15000 shadow damage if things were "working", combined with the physical that's going to one-shot most newbies in bgs.

While this ability might (somehow) be balanced in PvE in Blizzard's opinion, it's completely, in no way balanced in PvP. On hard targets it hits for next to nothing, on targets with shields it hits for nothing-- ie. won't break shields. On newbies and casuals in BGs, it <censored>... when it easily generates 10k+ crits from an instant strike just because the person is wearing cloth or doesn't have 500+ resilience, there is a very serious design flaw. Plus, on any boss where there's some kind of damage buff (like Hodir, or Yogg +1-4) there's the danger that SS will double dip giving Unholy DKs incredibly high DPS if they are balanced without those buffs.

Another thought: Keep Scourge Strike as a Shadow damage spell and make it unique where Armor Pen works as a direct +% damage to the spell. Bingo, it's fixed in PvE and I doubt it'd make that big of a function in PvP. Switching a ton of sockets/using a boatload of PvE gear just so SS hits ~20% harder wouldn't be the smartest thing to do in Arena.

I think that'll probably make a lot of DK's happier about Scourge Strike ^_^.

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Q u o t e:
1) Scourge Strike should crit for 200% damage like other DK spell effects.

2) The Shadow part of the damage should never miss if the physical part hits.

3) The Shadow part of the damage should never be decreased additionally to the physical damage. It should not "double dip" from resilience et al. Example: My physical portion that hits for 2000 is reduced to 1000. The Shadow part should then hit for 1000 (modulo bonuses) and not 500 or whatever.

4) The Shadow part of the damage will still be increased additionally by talents and anything else that buff Shadow damage. It will "double dip" in the DKs favor. Example: My physical portion hits for 2000 and is reduced to 1000. The Shadow portion hits for 1500 because I have +50% Shadow damage.

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Since resilience has been clarified; does this mean the shadow damage penetrates resist buffs such as Nether Protection? Or will the damage be resisted on top of being effected by the armor of the target?

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Q u o t e:
1) Scourge Strike should crit for 200% damage like other DK spell effects.

2) The Shadow part of the damage should never miss if the physical part hits.

3) The Shadow part of the damage should never be decreased additionally to the physical damage. It should not "double dip" from resilience et al. Example: My physical portion that hits for 2000 is reduced to 1000. The Shadow part should then hit for 1000 (modulo bonuses) and not 500 or whatever.

4) The Shadow part of the damage will still be increased additionally by talents and anything else that buff Shadow damage. It will "double dip" in the DKs favor. Example: My physical portion hits for 2000 and is reduced to 1000. The Shadow portion hits for 1500 because I have +50% Shadow damage.

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I have a few more questions that are fairly important relating to balance and the ability of SS to gib people:

1) Should the shadow damage increase if the physical damage crits? ie. if I normally hit for 1k and because of mods the shadow damage hits for 1k, if I crit for 2k, should the shadow damage also hit for 2k (which means it should crit for 4k)? If a physical crit is supposed to increase baseline shadow damage it makes the ability very dangerous in many situations (since it's effectively double dipping crit damage...).

2) In response to your response (1) should the shadow portion of scourge strike be increased by Vicious Strikes (ie. crit for 2.3x?) ?

3) In response to your response (4) should the shadow damage portion double dip things like Blood Presence, or is it intended only to increase based on things that buff shadow damage? If so, wouldn't that be more or less that same as just buffing the coefficient and making it ignore those abilities?

4) Do you have any concerns about the increased reliance on diseases to do damage when DKs are already having trouble against dispellers?

5) Is it intended that the shadow portion be non-existent if part of the strike is absorbed? If it's intended it means it will double dip Soul Link which is not in the DK's favor.

In general I don't think "double dip" should apply to things like Black Ice, since it's only affecting the ability once, but to straight damage mods like BP, RoR or Outbreak the term double dip is appropriate I think.

Edit: Wrong letter. Section 4, 5.

Has anyone tested out the threat numbers with the 3.3 SS?

Would be interesting to see how much threat jumps for Unholy Tank builds, seeing as how one of the issues with the spec is single target threat.

Hmmmm....