The new Scourge Strike is absolute garbage against Shamans and Paladins who know how to dispel. I surely enjoyed "hitting" for 1k or less physical damage without any diseases up on the PTR. That's right, only 1k or less on a clean target, and no extra shadow damage since there are no diseaes. That's about a 600-800 nerf from live, where a disease-less Scourge Strike hits for an average of 1600; as shadow damage.

I'd like to know why the shadow portion *has to be* mitigated by physical damage. Balancing PvE aside, it pretty much destroys the main benefit of shadow damage in PvP--that it doesn't get affected by armor. With this change the shadow damage is spell damage only in technicality, in that it scales off talent X (Black Ice) instead of talent Y. It nullifies the uniqueness of SS, in a confusing way. Might as well get rid of SS from the Unholy tree and replace it with something else while letting PvEers use OB as the FU ability.

Can the numbers be fixed for PvE? I'm sure they will. But the issue that a lot of DKs are raising is that the change becomes a PvP disadvantage just by nature of
a) physical damage over spell damage
b) greater reliance on diseases being up with 25% bonus per disease

I'm not seeing why number crunching is necessary, a greater reliance on diseases being up, plus the chronic problem of DKs being susceptible to disease dispel make this a very bad change for PvP. I'm not seeing the logic in thinking that this will be a neutral issue for Unholy DK.

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I'd like to know why the shadow portion *has to be* mitigated by physical damage.

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Simple, so that it benefits from ArmorPen. Not saying its a good idea, but there it is.

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Simple, so that it benefits from ArmorPen. Not saying its a good idea, but there it is.

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Not only that, but with the talents buffing it and such in the DKs favor, if it wasn't mitigated by the physical portion it may very well be OP be it pve or pvp.

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Simple, so that it benefits from ArmorPen. Not saying its a good idea, but there it is.

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That has nothing to do with why SHADOW damage has to be calculated post-physical mitigation. It's perfectly possible to have the ability do shadow damage based on pre-mitigation.

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I just posted a pic so your math is obviously wrong.

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It isn't.

This is what you said:

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I was using a blood/unholy spec so no black ice and saw a 4k physical hit on an unsundered target followed by a 5.7k shadow crit. I'm pretty sure it would have been a 7.6k crit if it was working as intended(if im wrong someone correct me). So a 11.6k crit only self buffed.

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Here are the pics

http://imgur.com/c1juh.jpg
^^ blood/unholy

http://imgur.com/vyxmo.jpg
^^ 10/61 black ice

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I do not see any 4k hits on the physical part.

All I see is a 3711 physical crit.

A 4K physical hit with SS in your gear on a target with 0 Armor and 0 Resilience is impossible.

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Not only that, but with the talents buffing it and such in the DKs favor, if it wasn't mitigated by the physical portion it may very well be OP be it pve or pvp.

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"May very well be" is pure conjecture. There are a lot of parameters to mess with to not make it OP, like % bonus from disease, the "plus XXX damage" portion, how much weapon dmg % the physical does, etc.

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That has nothing to do with why SHADOW damage has to be calculated post-physical mitigation. It's perfectly possible to have the ability do shadow damage based on pre-mitigation.

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Then it wouldn't benefit from ArmorPen.

It's really shadow damage in name only, so it can take advantage of the talents.

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This thread is only going to be useful if you read the entire thread. Folks who just see a Scourge Strike thread and use it to post "I just hit some guy on the PTR and it hit like a wet noodle" probably aren't contributing much to the conversation.

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I remember you saying that you no longer wanted to see "colossal" scourge strike crits anymore. Were you referring to both pve and pvp or just pvp? I'm asking this because atm if I spec into black ice and both the physical and shadow portion of scourge strike crit then I just did well over 12k damage. With pve gear on a zero resil target of course.

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Then it wouldn't benefit from ArmorPen.

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/facepalm

Uhh, it would STILL have physical damage, so it would STILL benefit from Arpen.

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That has nothing to do with why SHADOW damage has to be calculated post-physical mitigation. It's perfectly possible to have the ability do shadow damage based on pre-mitigation.

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If the shadow part wasn't based off the physical part, then it wouldn't benefit from armor penetration. The shadow part benefiting from armor penetration is the idea behind the change, so that Unholy can use the same exact stats as Blood or Frost.

IMHO, not all classes and specs need to benefit from the same exact stats. Its cool that spec X might need a different stat then spec Y.

Eventually it'll get dumbed down to everyone all just to stacking one stat and it'll be called "stat"

Think about it, if the stats on the gear are placed out in the same exact ratio so that there is no question to "is this an upgrade?" why even have more than one stat? They can just make one stat and call it "stat" and all classes can benefit from it the same exact way.

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If the shadow part wasn't based off the physical part, then it wouldn't benefit from armor penetration. The shadow part benefiting from armor penetration is the idea behind the change, so that Unholy can use the same exact stats as Blood or Frost.

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It doesn't need a shadow portion to benefit from arpen, not sure why you think a strike needs a secondary effect to scale with arpen. Arpen bonus should be applied to the physical portion, separate from shadow.

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IMHO, not all classes and specs need to benefit from the same exact stats. Its cool that spec X might need a different stat then spec Y.

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Flawed and irrelevant line of reasoning. Nowhere did I appeal for homogenization of stats. If anything this latest change is a cop-out since it effectively makes the ability more similar to Oblit.

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/facepalm

Uhh, it would STILL have physical damage, so it would STILL benefit from Arpen.

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But then only part of the skill would benefit, so it wouldn't contribute as much.

The problem is SS didn't scale with Armor Pen at all. It had no effect. So naturally, as the tiers progressed and more armor penetration became unavoidable, SS actually became worse than most of the other strikes that DID scale with armor pen. This led to different strange rotations and death coil spam builds.

Blizzard does not want that.

Blizzard wants you to favor SS over your other strikes.

Blizzard wants you to want to go for the Glpyh of SS to get a 30 second rotation.

SS has to scale with armor pen.

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But then only part of the skill would benefit, so it wouldn't contribute as much.

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...and that is why the shadow portion benefits from Black Ice.

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SS has to scale with armor pen.

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No DK is doubting that SS needs to scale better, esp w/ Arpen for PvE. Where do you see anybody saying anything to contrary for PvE? The problem is in the proposed execution.

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...and that is why the shadow portion benefits from Black Ice.

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But it still wouldn't scale well, it would just not scale well at 10% higher.

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...and that is why the shadow portion benefits from Black Ice.

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Ok smartguy, since you keep shooting back and forth comments, how would you get it to scale WITHOUT counting in talents that boost the damage? Write a design tooltip so we can see your stellar brilliance, otherwise you're just blowing smoke. Both halves of the attack MUST scale without the use of talents in some fashion, so how would you do it?

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...and that is why the shadow portion benefits from Black Ice.

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No, its balanced to benefit from BI even with the physical mitigation.

I really don't get why you're arguing here. The skill is designed so both the physical and shadow halves are mitigated by armor, benefit from armor pen, while the shadow still benefits from the shadow talents.

You can complain you dislike the change (I certainly do), but that is how it is implemented and that is how it is intended to be.

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Ok smartguy, since you keep shooting back and forth comments, how would you get it to scale WITHOUT counting in talents that boost the damage? Write a design tooltip so we can see your stellar brilliance, otherwise you're just blowing smoke. Both halves of the attack MUST scale without the use of talents in some fashion, so how would you do it?

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Except the balance of SS is based on COUNTING the talents to boost damage--why else do you think the Subversion change happened (which is proof that they balance SS scaling using other talents)? Why does GC explicitly mention Black Ice in scaling with SS? The balancing of abilities doesn't happen in a vacuum of other abilities, not sure why you think that's the case.

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You can complain you dislike the change (I certainly do), but that is how it is implemented and that is how it is intended to be.

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Except the point of it being on PTR is that it's not final, and is subject to change. It's not implemented yet, hence it's in PTR.