Icecrown's Scourge Strike

10:45AM on 12 Nov 2009 by shieldbreakr
1 Comment

As we look forward to climbing the heights and plumbing the depths of Icecrown Citadel, many changes are going on behind the scenes to our beloved Unholy Death Knight's arsenal. The most significant change is the newly redesigned Scourge Strike:

The base ability now deals 50% weapon damage plus an additional amount as physical damage. However, for each disease thedeath knight has on the target, the target will take additional shadowdamage equal to 25% of the physical damage done.

This means that if you're holding a cheap ass iLvL 219 Ironsoul like I am, your SS is going to do a nice chunk of damage compared to now(upwards of 8k). Armor pen is going to push SS damage even higher,meaning all you folks who stored up a nice blood set with high ArP might want to give UH DPS a try as your secondary spec to see how theother half lives. As you can see, the damage potential for SS just skyrocketed so long as you can keep your diseases up.

Along with this damage boost, there are several nerfs. Unholy Blight and the 4T9 Bonus got nerfed by 50% each. UB now does 10% bonus damage in the form of a DoT instead of 20% when you throw a deathcoil. 4T9 only makes blood plague critable instead of any disease, which was a response to the crazy frost fever pumping a lot of UHDK's were doing via glyph and frost sub specs. Glyph of Icy Touch got changed from a RP generator to a 20% frost fever damage bonus to curtail the fact that Unholy's most viable rotation involved generating as many DC's a possible (check 2000+ rated DK's in any S7 bracket, notice they're all UH and half don't even have SS). Also, the pets got screwed in PvP by changing Night of the Dead into a 45/90% AoE immunity that applies to PvE only, so expect some drilling on your zombies to occur in arena again, they're no longer just nice little DoTs waiting to be turned into 40% of your hit points.

Unholy is almost reverting back to it's 3.1 state with these changes. Once again the Unholy DK is focusing on keeping diseases up, even clipping them at times, and throwing DC's when spare GCD's are available. I consider this more in line with what a Death Knight should be worried about while DPS'ing, even if a lot of folks disagree with me. The classic Unholy Death Knight is re-emerging.

Unholy is still strong on DPS and competitive (1-2%) with it's Frost and Blood brothers on single target DPS. I believe it is the strongest AoE spec in the entire game. Played correctly, an Unholy DK that knows where to put himself and how to get diseases going is unparalleled indamage capacity. With the nerf on targeted AoE spells coming up, this ability will only shine brighter compared to rogues, mages and hunters trying to beast down packs with fan of knives, blizzard or volley. Ebon Plaguebringer continues to be unique to Unholy DK's and continues to provide that great extra boost that makes bringing an Unholy DK as dps along pay off. With rumors of Bone Shield going to a 5 minute duration (up for 1 minute), life as a DPS Unholy DK is going to get even better.

My lone concern at the moment is arena participation. Without changes to cleansing totem spam or a real improvement in virulence to boost it to 50% disease dispel immunity, I do not see how these changes will make more DK gladiators. Nerfing DC is a kick in the teeth considering it's the only viable arena spec right now. Even improving SS damage is not going to make up for it considering how anaemic it is now. Less than 1% of all gladiators are Death Knights (any spec) and nerfing our chief arena abilities (4T9 and RP generation for DC) is only going to make that number go down. I hate to say it, but Blizzard has stated that classes without MS should do more damage than classes that bring it, where is our PvP damage buff to bring us up to the same level as
Warriors and Rogues?

Over all, I look forward to 3.3 dropping and trying like hell to figure out how to wrangle a Shadowmourne out of the place. My pursuit will probably ultimately fail since all of the raid guilds on Deathwing are ran by 13 year old twits, but I will see Arthas die and enjoy the moment.

Bring it on, Blizz. (I *am* prepared?)

Tags: Unholy DPS 3.3

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02:33PM on 19 Nov 2009

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