Some numbers coming up on Scourge Strike now:

Scourge Strike has been revamped - An unholy strike that deals 50% of weapon damage as Physical damage plus 400 (Shows as 40000 in the tooltip but I'll assume it's a typo). In addition, for each of your diseases on your target, you deal an additional 25% of the Physical damage done as Shadow damage.

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The tooltip in game shows 60% as Physical, just as a side note.

Also, the shadow portion of the attacks is coming out to as much or more than the physical part (w/3 diseases) so it's definitely double-dipping. The shadow part definitely crits independent of the physical; It can also double-crit. I notice sometimes the physical portion crits, which in turn raises the shadow dmg done by a similar amount (meaning both parts of the strike do approximately the same). I also had one where the shadow portion crit as well as the physical, and the shadow portion was a good 60-70% higher that the physical.

Another thing to consider is that I've had the shadow portion MISS, when the physical hit, so I am wondering if maybe it uses Spell Hit (which I don't have capped), or if it was because I didn't have a draenei in party (I'm under the hit cap without a draenei). Further testing is required.

That would be the effect of the talent Outbreak applying to the base 50%. If you look in live, you'll see 48% instead of 40% due to this talent.

SS got a big buff from the current ptr, Was getting about 6.5k physical crits followed by a 11k shadow crits.
However the shadow part seems to be criting less then the physical part (might be effected by spell crit and not melee crit).

Critting less as in critting for less, or critting less as in critting less often?

If it's the first, it has nothing to do with whether or not it's classified as a spell. It's more likely a matter of whether or not it's affected by Vicious Strikes.

If it's the second, then yes, that could certainly be due to it being a spell. It could also be due to it not being affected by Subversion/Vicious Strikes if, for whatever reason, that second portion doesn't dip into those SS-specific talents.

Glad to see it fixed, and if it truly does double dip into everything (as numbers seem to suggest), there's zero question it's a buff. The only real thing to then decide is whether or not it's large enough of a buff to warrant spending three talent point in Reaping over 3 talent points in the alternatives (Dark Conviction, most likely). Dark Conviction is currently ~50ish dps/point, meaning for Reaping to be better, 1 SS has to deal 3k more damage than 2 BS (as that's what Reaping does - it gives you 1 SS per 20 seconds in place of 2 BS). That doesn't sound too unlikely with the type of number being thrown around.

As to the sigil, that's simply... godly. 365 strength, with (what the wording makes it sound like) a 100% uptime after it's stacked. That's almost twice as good as the current sigil.

less often.

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Those numbers were done to lvl 55 dummies, had only self buffs and a flask.

Mind hitting the boss dummy? It's going to have a lot more armor than the level 55 ones :/

Sure, however those level 55 dummies best simulate a fully debuffed boss.

With mjolnir up: 5250 + 7620.
without: 4243 + 6871.

Both are crits ofc.

Looking at the other relics, either the 73 strength should be 44 or it should only stack 3 times. Still it should be 220 strength once fully stacked. I hope its the latter, because otherwise it would take the best part of 20 seconds to get it stacked to max even using ERW.

Even if they do, showing your highest crit damage isnt what we need or are interested in. Death Strike has over 50% crit while the crit chance for both SS hits to crit is a lot lower.

Posting absolutely high numbers (or low) isnt hat interesting, i am more interested in:
- is the shadow part based on spell hit and spell crit?
- what are the average numbers for those hits and crits?

On the lvl55 dumimies, i had an average of 9k per SS. Seems to me a little too much for raidbuffed.

That's got to be a mistake, if you look at the other classes:

Druid: The periodic damage from your Lacerate and Rake abilities grants 44 Agility for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.
Paladin: Your Crusader Strike ability grants 44 Strength for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.
Shaman: Your Stormstrike ability grant 146 attack power rating for 15 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.

I think our sigil will be 73 str stacks 3 times or 44 str stacks 5 times both give 219-220 str respectfully.

Just tested the new scourge strike on PTR. Noticed this: my average physical crit was like 5.5-6k, then the shadow proc HITS for 6k. Now if I got a double crit, that physical is (of course) the same 6k, and the shadow CRIT is around 9k. So the shadow crit damage is like 150% crit, not 200 or 230 as it should(?) be.


EDIT: Screenshots from combatlog:
CRIT/HIT


CRIT/CRIT


EDIT2: Another thing is that damage meters, such as Recount, track them as a single strike. Therefore it's hard to really know how high the average crit rating on the shadow damage portion is. I mean if it's based on physical crit or spell crit, and does it calculate all talents etc...

The crit damage should be at 200% (as are all DK spell attacks). So their is a bug somewhere in the code.

From this reply GC confirms the crit should be 200% and should not use spell hit.

That would put the sigil at a very small upgrade at best, most likely a sidegrade or even a downgrade. Going from a single proc 200 str to a 3 proc 219 str is going to be inferior in a lot of places.

With virulence at an 80% proc chance you will have on average:

160, 192, 198 str on the first three scourge strikes. With the new sigil as a three proc limit you would have:
73, 146, 219 str on the first three scourge strikes. So you have 8.5 seconds at an average of 87 lower str, followed by 1.5 seconds at an average of 46 lower str, 10 seconds at an average of 21 higher str and then the remainder of the fight at an average of 19 higher str (the fractional chance of not getting a virulence proc in your first 4 scourge strikes being ignored for now).

So the breakeven point for buff uptime, would be ((87 * 8.5 + 46 * 1.5) - (21 * 10)) / 19 + 10 = 41.5 seconds. So anytime the buff drops it is going to take you 41.5 seconds (after your first scourge strike) just to get back to where you would be just using Sigil of Virulence.

It also makes it harder to get the proc up for your initial gargoyle cast since you either have to wait 10 more seconds for the second rotation to get the sigil fully procced potentially losing some gargoyle uptime later in the fight and also potentially losing the procs from some other trinkets etc, most notably if your Death's Verdict procs in the first couple of autoattacks it will have dropped by the end of the second rotation.

Overall I would say that at 3 procs of 73 str the sigil would at be pretty much a sidegrade. If it requires 5 procs of 44 then it would probably end up being a downgrade.

Of course, as written with 5 procs of 73 str the sigil looks like a pretty sizable upgrade. As written you would have:

8.5 seconds at 87 lower str. (Time from first SS first rotation to first SS of second rotation)
1.5 seconds at 46 lower str. (Time from first SS second rotation to second SS of second rotation)
3.0 seconds at 21 higher str. (Time from second SS second rotation to third SS of second rotation)
6.0 seconds at 92 higher str. (Time from third SS second rotation to first SS of third rotation)
Remainder at 165 higher str.

This assumes a 2nd rotation of 3 scourge strikes (assuming of course that Blizz succeed in making that rotation desirable again as seems to be the goal).

The breakeven point here would be 20.2 seconds after the first Scourge Strike and from that point forward you are at 165 higher str which is pretty substantial.

If our rotation doesn't change and the PS-IT-SS-BS-BS-Burn rotation stays then You have the simpler

10 seconds at 87 lower str.
10 seconds at 46 lower str.
10 seconds at 21 higher str.
10 seconds at 92 higher str.
Remainder at 165 higher str.

This wouldn't break even for 41.2 seconds.

Lastly the 15 second time to drop means that in an AoE situation where you are gettin 1 scourge strike per 20 seconds the Virulence sigil will of course remain superior.

New post by GC:

It almost sounds too good to be true.

Basically it double dips, but only when in our favour.

Nah, I understand the function. Necrosis doesn't double-dip because that would make it better than they want it. Scourge Strike is allowed to Double Dip because they want SS doing approximately that much damage, at least right now. They'll probably change it again once we figure out how to maximize it.


Does this significantly change the value of +crit for us?

Topic says it all basically. With the new SS changes to 50% wpn dmg and the added shadow dmg based off wpn damage I'm guessing that every DK out there will be having to switch to 2h if they want to stay top dps. No?

The only benefit I could see staying DW would be speccing into Black Ice and hoping that 10% inc shadow damage would greatly affect our SS shadow dmg? Thoughts and comments greatly appreciated, I'd hate to spec out of DW Unholy just b/c SS is getting such a massive boost to it's overall dmg.

If the end result of these changes are that epidemic and reaping are significant DPS increases (and blizzard has explicitly stated that this is the case), then I don't see how dual-wield builds would not fall behind. Right now the two specs are about even, and this change (along with the icy touch glyph change) will improve 2h a lot more than DW. It will only get worse in t10, assuming the 2-piece set bonus makes it live, since that will once again strongly favor scourge strike heavy builds. That's not to say DW builds will completely cease be somewhat viable - none of this is a direct nerf to it - it will just run into scaling problems. How much of an impact those scaling issues will be, and when they'll really kick in, is yet to be seen.

Yeah. I think that's a fairly safe assumption. I'm currently running a GoD build which is naturally rather SS heavy. For that, DW and 2H simulate close to each other. The increased strike damage in the 2H build offset mostly with increased auto-attack damage in the DW build. The only changes I'm likely to take for 3.3 would be to pickup reaping.

While it will obviously depend a little bit on the balance of the weapon damage coefficient to static portion, even a moderate 20% overall buff to SS is likely to be a 50 dps boost in favour of the 2H spec.

I don't think black-ice is likely to save the situation, even my DW builds already take the blood tree over the frost tree, and the portion of magic damage we're going to do is definitely going to drop.

All of the talents that will apply to the new strike can also be taken in 2H builds, and because the 2H version is going to hit harder, they will be bigger dps gains for it.

The one thing I can think of that could make a SS using DW build work would be if they added a shadow version of razor-ice.

Some simple math, for the time being. Should give people a rough idea until the sim is updated or what have you.

I assume Black Ice still isn't taken because, if anything, this actually makes BI worse (as the shadow portion of the new SS won't out damage the entirety of the current SS). I also assume the shadow portion of SS is not affected by 2H specialization, as it appears as if it shouldn't be. Last, but not least, I assume the second portion shouldn't be affected by impurity in the fashion it is (reportedly) being affected by it on the PTR.

Damage the shadow portion deals relative to the physical portion:
0.75 (base) x 1.15 (Blood Presence) x 1.1 (Rage of Rivendare) x 1.05 (Desolation) x 1.02 (Bone Shield) x 1.13 (Ebon Plague) x 1.20 (Outbreak) x 1.03 (Ferocious Inspiration) = 1.41918226.

So, if the physical portion does 4000 damage (which is, approximately, what it should deal in current level gear with appropriate raid buffs, as shown by one's average PS hit. It would actually be somewhat higher, but regardless, 4000 is a nice easy number to work with), then the shadow portion will deal 4000 x 1.41918226 = 5676. That means one SS, on average, would deal about 9700 damage. And this is ignoring the second part being able to crit. And this is rounding down the damage the physical portion would probably deal.

In other words, this is an underestimation, if anything.

That's about a 2700 damage increase over the current SS. Which is almost enough (and probably will be enough after 4p t9 is nerfed/dropped, and if you actually did the 'real' math) to push Reaping over the top. Especially when you factor in 2p t10 and 4p t10, both of which are fantastic if this double dips into them.

I would put my money on 11/0/60 being the build to be.

Also, even ignoring Reaping, this easily covers the UB nerf (and then some). Our dps, even if we didn't change specs/rotations, would go up.

Edit: One question this leaves open is how the new SS is affected by SoA. Even with a 'normal' rotation of 4 SS per 20 seconds, it would still take a lot for SoA to be superior to SoV (or to the new Sigil), but if it double dipped, it could be a possibility.