The Scourge Strike's BackFollow

Told you they buffed it, lol.

I was DpSing a little earlier with it, but I still had my pre-3.3 spec, so no SS glyph or Reaping. Was still REALLY enjoying it though. My DpS wasn't anywhere near the others in my group (I don't know if my DpS set can even pass the HFoS gear check) but I may be trying out a new Unholy Tank spec. : D

And you've got the same offensive stats as I do. There goes my dream of seeing interest in blood PvP rise.

Sometimes the latter gets resisted, I think. And if your physical hit gets partially blocked, you don't hit for as much with the shadow part.

It's nice with the delay on the second part of the strike, though. I can't help but give sly smile whenever the physical part crits for 3k+ because I know that moments later I'll get an additional 3-9k damage.

:o

My 2nd spec is Unholy, I know I need a better 2hander (unless I can DW?), and I can check out and see if Unholy loves me still after leaving her for Frost :p

Looking at EJ's post...Unholy looks fun >;D

Edited, Dec 9th 2009 4:39pm by Sandinmygum

Reading EJ's post on both Frost DW DPS and this "new" Unholy, it looks like Unholy is back in the spot light.

Now I just need to better 2h weapon :3

Anyone able to figure out a 51 tree for Unholy now? I can't seem to work one out without going 54.

Side note: Hoping to run sequence and throughput tests for unholy sometime in the next couple of days. If anyone else is running test or models, be sure to post.

edit: Nevermind, it's stupid to shoot for 51.

Edited, Dec 10th 2009 1:02am by TherionSaysWhat

This is probably the fifth time your lame pun makes me giggle, Mazra.

Anyway - upon further though I wonder what this does to unholy death knights in PvP. I'm currently getting 10K death and rune strikes at most with my ~40% armor penetration in blood. I'm thinking fully kitted unholy death knights could start seeing 6000+ crits on full resilience targets with just a little bit of armor pen. Then again, has the focus shifted so much that unholy actually needs to work on gearing armor pen now?

I'm debating it for my DK tank, but I don't know what I'd drop. Probably Disease, since it's very easy to lose a rotation as a tank, and it is useless if diseases drop.

Wait, WHAT? ITS OVER NINE-THOUSAAAAAAAAND!

How the hell do you do that? I realize I'm blood specced, but I crit for a third of that on mobs 2 levels lower than me, and with better gear than you. And I even have Morbidity maxxed out (which counters your Desolation). Just Impurity can't possibly triple your Death Coil damage, can it?

I was purely comparing my Death Knight (and spec) as he currently is to Mazra's - the reason I'm saying Morbidity counters Desolation is because Mazra's DK has 2/3 Morbidity whereas I have 3/3, which means I get 5% additional DC damage where he doesn't - which effectively counters the fact that Mazra's got Desolation (5% DC damage for him) and I don't. None of us have the glyph of Dark Death and I assumed both of us are talking about playing in Blood Presence regardless. I wasn't even really touching gear yet, though my raw damage stats are better than Mazras so if anything my DC should be doing more damage than his if we're looking at it purely through gear.

All of this means that effectively, the only Death Coil damage bonuses Mazra's DK currently has over me are Impurity and EPB (which I admit I forgot in my earlier post) - whereas his Death Coil is alledgedly critting for three times as much as mine is on mobs two levels lower. And that's what's confusing me - if I were to add the Impurity and EPB bonuses to my Death Coil as it currently is, the damage would definitely go up but not even get close to 9K crits.

Regardless, some further thought has given me the idea that Mazra simply meant SS or Scourge Strike in his earlier post and not Death Coil - judging from the gear he has I'd say 9K Scourge Strike crits would seem to fit. 9K Death Coil crits are just obscenely huge.

Remember, just because he gets a 15% bonus and you get a 15% bonus, doesn't mean they'll be linear. If Maz's innate DC damage is higher, then he will be getting a much larger bonus out of BP than you will.

Don't forget Rage of Rivendare as well. An Unholy DK will likely always have that 10% bonus when the PvP DK won't (I imagine you spend a lot of time under 75% health).

Also, don't forget that he's probably getting raid buffs you aren't (with the exception of BGs, I suppose). Kings and (Imp) Might will give him 687.5+(116*2) more AP, which is 165.42 more damage.

Also note that the build Maz has now is different than the one he linked earlier, I think, because he is now 17/0/54.

So, assuming he was running the standard 3.2 spec, he probably had Dark Death and maxed Morbidity.

DC=

523+380+(RAID BUFFED AP=4552.5)*.18=1722.36

(more actually, since I think HoW will give 15.5 more from BoK, and you get AP from food/flasks/GoW).

You are saying your crits hit for 3K? Well this is the estimated DC damage if running with 2 Pallies (or a Warrior/Pally) and no Druid/Blood DK/MM Hunter. His crit, before any damage bonus (including talents and BP, with the exception of Impurity, and using the sigil), would be 3444.72.

Now, we have 1722.36. Assuming bonuses are additive, that means you get:

15% from Morbidity (which Maz may have had before respec, idk), 10% from RoR, 13% from EPB, 15% from Dark Death, 5% from Desolation and then (after those, I believe) 15% from BP. And, not that this is relevent, but it is possible this was factored in, you'd get an extra 10% on UB if it wasn't previously applied (less than 10% otherwise).

SO, 15+10+13+15+5=58% more damage (assuming no other additions from other class talents, like a Rogue's 3% bonus).

That's 2721.33 damage. Another 15% from BP is 3129.53 (if it is included in previous additive percentages, it is 2979.68).

So, that's a 6.2K crit without being fully raid buffed. Just the basics. 10% AP and GoW would up the damage by (52*2=104+455=559 AP = 100 more damage, 182.9 after buffs. And there are quite a few more talents spread across classes that would up the damage as you go from 10 to 25 mans (Warlock curse, maybe?).

Would you hit 9K at that gear level? I dunno. Buy you'd definitely get to the 6-7.x% area fairly easily.

The balance is that you launch more DCs than Unholy does, due to Sudden Death. Well, maybe not you (being a PvPer) but in general Blood does.

[EDIT]

A 9K crit would require a 4500 reg DC.

With just the above buffs active (and no debuff the DK can't provide) that would take:

4500-3129=1371.

1371=(AP*1.58)*1.15

1192.174=AP*1.58

754=AP

If he uses a 40 Str food, that's 82.4 AP. A Flask of Endless Rage is 180. An Unholy Strength Proc would give him (1160+116)*.15*2= 382.8 AP. All this is 645. Now, assuming he might have rounded up to 9K, we are there.

If he didn't, A druid would get him really close. Into the 700s. A Rogue or Hunter would give him 9Ks.

Edited, Dec 11th 2009 12:41am by idiggory

I was just trying to demonstrate how you could get a 9K DC crit, not saying it was a norm.

And I know they're additive. That's why I did it as such in the second post. Did I make a mistake somewhere?

(Note, didn't mention the 2% from BSh in there).



But, also to note about the new SS, is that it is getting hotfixed to where it may only crit once. I am ASSUMING that means that they are taking away the second's ability to crit, so that there won't be a second multiplier on it.

However, this also means that it cannot crit when the first did not, so it is a larger nerf than it first seems.

However, I'm not convinced that this is a problem. The Unholy Spec I made is currently running with pretty awesome Single-Target TpS, considering it has much higher AoE TpS than Frost did.

Does it suck getting nerfed? Yes. But this still makes Unholy a viable spec for single-target situations.

[EDIT]
I just read GC's post off the front page, and (while I agree with the change) two things he said really bug me.



I have a big issue with the idea that every DK spec HAS TO revolve around diseases. Why? Because a spec like Blood clearly doesn't. A big portion of their damage may come from them, yes, but that isn't at the core of the class. Diseases don't make that spec fun, they just make their numbers go higher.

I think Frost was a middle-of the road option, for those that wanted it. You should try to have 2 diseases when possible, but just FF was okay.

Unholy, to me, is the one you'd take if you wanted to really use diseases. BP was obviously necessary due to RoR, but FF was also a huge boost because of Wandering Plague and EBP.

The idea that diseases need to hit hard for every spec is stupid to me. That's like saying Fury Warriors should get most of their damage from Rend. It's useful in their spec, yes, but it is NOT a core part.

Do I agree with this statement only within the scope of Unholy (and somewhat Frost)? Of course. But I do NOT like the idea that Blizz is shoving diseases down our throats for every spec.



This is the other one that really annoyed me.

Blizz has made DKs change so much because they didn't want trees to use the "other's" ability. They've stated they want it to go Blood-DS, Frost-Oblit, Unholy-SS.

But to claim that it was a mistake to change SS is nonsense, because (at least in 3.2), the ability SUCKED. Even AFTER all the talent boosts it got, two BSs would hit for more.

To say "Meh, we should have just let players abandon their tree's strike because it sucked and we didn't really want to fix it, despite the fact that no talents in their tree boosted the other one" is ridiculous.

Is this change probably valid? Yes (though, I say that when it BARELY affects me, because I rarely go over 10% crit, with many buffs). But I don't like the reasoning he's giving behind the SS work. Saying its a good idea to abandon SS is tantamount to saying its fine to abandon Unholy. The ability is ingrained into the tree. If you have a problem with its damage versus Disease damage, then that needs to be resolved in a way that continues to let the tree's talents function, not because you gave them a stupidly OP 4pc bonus that lets them just ignore half the tree's talents.

Edited, Dec 11th 2009 3:12pm by idiggory

Oh, no, Gory don't mistake what I was trying to say. I was saying that I didn't check the math (glad to see someone is posting actual numbers!). I'm not quite ready to get into my math model and honestly I'm not sure I will. Now that I'm not progression raiding it's kinda low on my list of priority.

But look up the AP coefficients. That should be in there somewheres.

What you're doing in your other parts of that last post though is looking at the trees as a designer without the more complete view that the actual designers have. It's very easy for us to get worked up about mechanic or talent changes but we can't really see the forest for the trees. The game designers have a lot of balancing to do and it's tricky. Overall Blizz has done a pretty good job fixing the major imbalances and I'm sure they'll get to SS at some point to tweak it a bit.

Point being: How we see the class is not how the folks writing the code necessarily do.