And then what? Use the death rune on a blood strike?

In the current 1 disease frost rotation you could replace Blood Strike with Plague strike and gain extra damage from Oblit. I am sure there is other clever ways to use Death Runes to alter rotations increasing dps.

Plague Strike's usefulness depends on your build. For my build, 0/13/58, it actually scales better than Blood Strike.

Plague Strike: Multipliers are Glyph (20%), Outbreak (45%), Rage of Riverdare (10%), Vicious Strikes (30% crit modifier and 6% crit), Desecration (5%), Bone Shield (2%), and Blood Presence (15%).

Plague Strike AP Scaling: It's 43-44% of weapon damage so I just use 43%. 1/14 * 0.43 = 0.030714 which gets multiplied by the weapon speed. Let's assume the weapon is [Titansteel Bonecrusher] . Titansteel Bonecrusher has a speed of 2.5 so multiply that in and you get: 0.0767857. So for non-crit:

0.0767857 * 1.45 * 1.2 * 1.15 * 1.1 * 1.05 * 1.02 = 0.181

Crit: 233% due to epic gem. 0.42176

Plague Strike Weapon Scaling: 43% of 143.6 is 61.748 DPS

Now, I'll do Blood Strike. Multipliers are Glyph (20%), Rage of Rivendare (10%), Desecration (5%), Bone Shield (2%), and Blood Presence (15%).

Blood Strike AP Scaling: It's 50% of weapon damage. 1/14 * 0.5 = 0.035714 * 2.5 = 0.0892857

Non-crit: 0.0892857 * 1.2 * 1.15 * 1.1 * 1.05 * 1.02 = 0.145

Crit: 203% due to epic gem. 0.29467

Blood Strike weapon scaling: 50% of 143.6 is 71.8 DPS

So the base damage of Blood Strike is higher but Plague Strike gets more benefit from AP. Plague Strike crits about 6% more often and scales much better when it does.

Simply put, how much damage an strike does depends greatly on your build. Two-Handed builds do more strike damage. Unholy builds can deal more plague strike damage and Icy Touch damage. Blood builds get Heart Strike and deal a lot more damage with that but Icy Touch and Plague Strike don't get much love. Frost builds have crappy plague strikes and unless they get impurity, Icy Touch isn't as good as the Unholy build. They have good Blood Strikes compared to Unholy though.

Orlgin, I'm not sure what your point is, but Plague Strike is bad. It doesn't matter what your build is or whether you can prove mathematically that with a certain bad build it scales better than another strike, it's still bad, whether you're Unholy, Frost, or Blood. They could add a strike that scales at 200% higher than any other strike, but if it hits for an average of 100, it's still going to suck. To put some actual numbers behind it, I'm 17/0/54, and in my most recent Naxx-25 clear, my average non-crit PS hit for 703, average crit for 1550. My average non-crit BS hit for 1595, and my average crit for 3276. So BS is hitting over twice as hard as PS in a build that hardly targets BS at all. PS is bad.

You're answering the problem by restating it. The concern just is that for two out of three trees Plague Strike, the only way to apply one of your core diseases, is a skill not worth using. Nobody's putting forward that PS is a skill no one uses. What we're saying is that PS (or perhaps a talented replacement that also applies Blood Plague) is a skill everyone should be using, and we're passing the time dreaming up ways to make that happen.

This probably isn't especially productive, but it's something fun to talk about until more real 3.1 information surfaces.

I think probably increasing plague strikes weapon damage to 60% + damage per runic power would be a good idea. In PvP you probably would not have much runic power stockpiled, and in pve you would and could use Plague Strike right before a runic power dump to maximize it. In addition turning it into shadow damage, and scourge strike into physical damage probably would be a good idea if your seeking to lower the burst of scourge strike without hurting pve.

You could just put a cool-down on plague strike for 5 seconds to prevent that. In addition if adding a cool-down you'd want to remove the Degeneration aspect of the initial strike and the Disease itself, and introduce a 50% healing reduction.

The goal is to have Plague Strike hit as hard as Icy Touch at the very least (with Black Ice that is).

I completely disagree. IT hits too hard as it is (for some builds, which I'm sure was not intended by Blizzard). The goal is to have PS and IT hit just hard enough, combined with the damage of BP and FF, that you want to use them once every 12 (or 18) seconds, no more and no less. The combined damage of the abilities and the DoTs needs to be greater than any other use of those abilities, but the damage of PS and IT not including the DoTs should not be greater than any other use of those runes while the diseases are already ticking.

Putting a cooldown on PS would be a terrible idea. It's bad enough missing DoT applying attacks without a cooldown, missing them with a cooldown would be way too detrimental. Especially for a class that is designed around having their diseases on the target at all times.

Ultimately, it needs to be worth it for every spec to always have both diseases up, not necessarily to use the disease applying abilities.

Not to be a dick, but this post is wild speculation at the intentions of the class designers, and it is based solely on your idea of 'balanced'. The differences between the Frost and Unholy talents, and the math behind the scaling of both the Icy Touch and Plague Strike abilities should make it obvious that the goal was not to make them hit "just hard enough" or make them do the same amount of damage. If that was, in fact, the goal...they obviously did it very wrong, and have introduced Sigils to go even further into the "doing it wrong" category.

I only agree with the bolded statements. I feel your icy touch hitting too hard comments to be completely unfounded.

All I'd do to plague strike at this point them is just increase the damage to icy touch level when properly specced into. I'd see no problem with that. Plague Strike itself needs to feel useful. Hitting for 600-800 is just unacceptable unless the DoT gets a major buff in damage. I can't see THAT happening without unholy getting nerfed in some way.

I think PS' damage needs to be tuned up, and the functionality of the strike changed somehow. HoT removal is just too situational in my opinion. To go with an extreme example, PS could become a "single target pestilence" which refreshes FF and EB on your target on top of applying BP (if they're up).

We can all see an IT nerf is coming. The question is whether PS will be buffed enough to offset it. I just want a better reason to push the PS button other than applying one more disease to make my strikes hit slightly harder.

They could rename it to "Druid Strike" while they're at it. The whole HoT association has been a bad idea since its inception and I've said as much since it was merged with Degeneration in beta. It should be scrapped and some kind of penalty which has a more equal effect to a variety of healers put in place.

The problem is if they leave the disease increase as a static number then all it does is make Oblit useless.

Imagine an OB that does 10% of weapon damage +500 per disease on the target. That is a fantastic ability for a newly 80 DK with a crappy green weapon and 1800 attack power. It's also completely trash when you have a BoH and top level armor.

That is an extreme example, but the point is that at some point a flat modifier breaks down.

If they must change the scaling on OB it should be more like DS. That is, each disease increases damage by a percentage. 50% weapon damage +50% weapon damage per disease or something. With a traditional frost spec you could get 150% weapon damage with both diseases up, or Unholy could get 200% weapon damage, but at the cost of either a funky spec or losing 3 diseases.

Thats fine, they can make it a flat reduction in all heals for all I care. 50% would probably be fair considering that it can be removed.

I don't think the fact that PS hurts druids is an accident at all. I don't know if you PvPed much in TBC but druids were the best healer in 2s and 3s. A lot of that was because they could toss hots on the run, some of it was cyclone and feral charge. So Bliz is putting in a new class and figures they will make them ideal to countercomp that one dominant healer. Seems to make sense to me.

If you're giving up on the cooldown (and I think you have to...there's a reason cooldowns are being stripped out of other abilities: they're artificial and they make resource management excessively complicated), then you're still caught between the concerns I mentioned earlier. You can't fix this just by making the number bigger unless it's on the DoT side, otherwise the skill just gets spammed.

Another option to discourage spam would be a blooming or CoA-like-effect. Strike hits for nominal damage, DoT ticks increase as it approaches the end of the duration. This would, again, conflict with Glyph of ScS, but I'm on team "redo that glyph" anyway. I also think they'd want to be careful not to excessively penalize an early refresh. I do worry about tanking utility since we're already struggling with an initial threat burst compared to other tanks, but I don't think many of the other solutions (apart from "+500 dmg and haz nukes!") help with that anyhow.

I'd just like to point out that this isn't really a problem. The total damage of IT + PS needs to be higher than a single FU ability, but this total damage includes the bonus to other strikes and disease damage. Once the diseases are up, casting further IT + PS only reapplies the initial damage.

So essentially, you just need to balance it such that;

IT or PS (disease not up) > FU > IT or PS (disease already up)

The balance of Blood is screwed up because;

FU > PS or IT (disease not up) > PS or IT (disease already up)

They don't need to make any drastic changes, and probably the best solution is to buff the disease / debuff component rather than the initial damage.

Exactly. That's why, for blood spec, 51/13/7 was previously dominant-- with Annihilation and Epidemic, the total damage of PS + IT + FF + BP + bonuses to OB and HS over 20 seconds exceeded the damage of an Obliterate crit. Diseases were worth using.

With 3.0.8, the change to Necrosis pushed 51/0/20 ahead more obviously, especially since the early Unholy tree talents are just better. Without Annihilation, you need convoluted rotations to get the full 18 second benefit of diseases. Diseases fall by the wayside. Honestly, I think Necrosis got buffed to compensate Unholy 2h for the Gargoyle nerf, and the diseaseless blood spec was an unforeseen consequence.

That was my reasoning behind my previous posts. Specs that use Obliterate need Annihilation for diseases to be worth using. I think Lujaar hit the nail on the head a page back when he pointed out the "Frost tree shuffling" might answer this issue. Annihilation as a tier 1 talent would be decent solution.

@jacclark and others: Disease bonuses did scale %-wise in beta. You gained an additional portion of weapon damage per disease. The problem was that Scourge Strike in particular spiraled out of control, especially with 4 diseases (counting UB), so they changed all the strikes to flat damage bonuses instead.

I don't really think this is a huge issue, to be honest-- several other primary melee attacks have a flat damage modifier (sinister strike and mutilate, for instance). Bonus damage to attacks is icing on the cake, as long as IT + PS + full duration diseases do enough damage on a single target to make them worth the rune-use.

If IT and/or its supporting talents are nerfed/moved as to make IT's use as a primary DPS "strike" less appealing for DW specs I hope they rework strike mechanics to compensate. What would be a workable solution IMO, is to add a mutilate-esque mechanic (attack with both weapons) to the two primary strikes, so basically attacking with both weapons. For Scourge Strike, just bake it straight into the talent. For Obliterate, I could see them adding a Mut mechanic to Obliterate either via the Annihilation talent, or further down and tack it on to Rime or further up and tack it on to Nerves of Cold Steel (which I think makes the most sense).

After normalizing all of the weapon damage used (4000 AP) I found that using slow/slow (Angry Dread and Silent Crusader in this specific case) for DW and reducing normalized value of the off-hand by 55% you will get an almost identical value that you would for Betrayer for Scourge Strike, Obliterate and Plague Strike. Betrayer comes out ahead by one point of damage or less on each strike, which pretty much can be ignored completely. I have attached the spreadsheet I used to come up with magic number off 55%.

Weapon Strike Damage Spreadsheet

There's a fundamental difference between the DK situation and the Rogue abilities you mentioned: Rogues don't choose whether or not they get the flat bonus. It's a non-issue, effectively the same as base damage on a spell.

While you're right that so long as IT and PS do sufficient damage they'll be used, the issue now is that they don't (particularly PS), and the issue in the future is whether they scale well enough to compete. Blizzard can buff PS now, but if it doesn't scale to Ulduar we'll be back to diseaseless rotations again.

I think the most Blizzard-like solution to Plague Strike at the current time would be to add replenishment to it (attached to a talent which Unholy doesn't take, since they actually use it at the current time).

As for the concept of buffing the disease portions of of PS and IT so they become desirable, I feel that this is likely to still make them feel like a burden: you put them up because you have to, not because you want to. Even if the disease damage is amazing, a Plague strike that hits for 700 just isn't satisfying. The inferior damage options of other classes do decent damage themselves (think Scorch, Heamo), PS would almost be nicer if it was soley the dot: remove the damage portion altogether and be done with it, so we can think of it as a good dot, rather than a very mediocre strike.

This is not true. Scaling percentage based weapon damage increases from diseases were never implemented, only hinted at due to concerns over the "Lazy Blood" playstyle. The period of time where Scourge Strike 'spiraled out of control' was when Outbreak and Black Ice (which used to affect Shadow damage as well) all multiplicatively affected Scourge Strike. It's not like scaling percentage based weapon damage increases is a tried and discarded solution.

There has been talk of having an ability as a mutilate-esque ability, ie: hitting with two duel wielding weapons instantaneously, in one of the talent trees. The problem here is that would make that talent tree the duel wield tree. You either need to make one (or all) of the core abilities hit with both weapons or have a talent in each, or at least two, of the trees.

On Scourge Strike and disease refreshing, why not make the glyph work like the Druid [Glyph of Starfire]? Due to the number of Scourge Strikes you can get out by adding 3s onto each disease per Scourge Strike will not keep the diseases up indefinatley so there is no need for a maximum. (In a 20s rotation you can get off a maximum of 5 Scourge Strikes with converting Blood Runes to Death Runes, which is 15s added every 20s which pass). You would need to reapply your diseases after about a minute.

There are also ways to make diseases important without having to keep them up all the time. For example if when a Howling Blast hits the target it does bonus damage equal to the amount of damage Frost Fever would have done. Like Swiftmend in reverse. Scaling would be required. The more I think about it the more I like the idea of having a diseaseless spec being viable, it will create more versatility within the class but balance could be hard to reach.