You could do path of frost - bone shield - death and decay - blood boil before you start the encounter and have that set bonus up and running when you start the encounter. All you have to do is to time it properly, like we do with bone shield in live at the moment, so that you have your runes ready when you actually start the encounter.

I still think the short time we played obliterate unholy was the best setup for unholy so far. Arp was not bad, and did not need to be avoided at all. What blizz is trying to do is just being proved not worthy by math so far (still early) and if not, just complicated.

Why does SS need to replace the FU strike?

Scourge Strike: 1 Unholy; Instant; Melee Range - A vicious strike that deals 50% weapon damage plus 189 as shadow damage, and infects the target with Blood Plague, a disease dealing Shadow damage over time. It also grants your pet 25% haste for 20 sec and heals it for 40% of its health over the duration.

*Delete Ghoul Frenzy (we never liked it).
*Remove the part of obliterate that says it consumes diseases.
*Make anihilation do something nice to frost strike (not too good, a minor buff at best).
*Tweak some numbers around to make sure nothing becomes too overpowered.

Arp would be a good stat for all dks again (more or less depending on spec, but never bad), ghoul frenzy nice design gets used without hammering the rotations.

Don't think anything else would really have to be changed, increased crit dmg and proc abom's might would still keep blood with DS.

The new mechanic is fine it just needs a slight adjustment on the numbers.

Say 33.3% per disease for 100% Shadow bonus damage.

Rough maths would make that equal (if not slightly better) then Obliterate.

Considering it crits over 12k with a 1 hander, it's not that hard to believe.

My guess is that their intend is for SS to be at a status quo compared to live, but they want it to scale with future gear upgrades.

We can't say much yet though, since the exact mechanics seem a bit vague.

From what i can tell by the math so far it seems like you need 11% ArP from gear for the PTR SS to pull even to the live SS (+ 20% from sunder + 5% from Faerie fire). Which does not seem like a "status quo" to me, but we might be misinterpretting data.

What I wonder more though, whether this will drive us back to using Obliterate.
On paper Obliterate seems a long stronger, so my first thought was that it would. But if you think about it, i'm not so sure. You lose 5 RP from dirge (not a huge loss, but a loss nontheless), and you either have to spec into frost for annihilation or use this rotation: Ob>PS>IT>BS>BS>dump; which works but means you have a 85% uptime on BP and a 70% uptime on FF, instead of 100% on both. Which seems like a significant loss as well.

I'm pretty sure they are still working on the balance though. The main thing blizzard does NOT want is to start it off too strong, they made that mistake in the past too often (beta, 3.1 patch). And it always blew up in their face.

For me the new SS sounds like this:

(50% wpn-dmg + 317) mitigated + ((50% wpn-dmg + 317) x 0.25) x 3 unmitigated

giving an example:

Weapon-DMG: 1000

SS would be: [817 mitigated + 612,75 x 1.13 (EP) unmitigated] x 1.2 (Outbreak) = 980 mitigated + 831 unmitigated

OB would be: [800 + 467] x 1.375 mitigated = 1742 mitigated x 1.2 (if Glyphed) = 2090 mitigated

Now let´s take 30% reduction through armor:

SS: 980 x 0.7 + 831 = 1517 dmg

OB: 2090 x 0.7 = 1463 dmg

with 20%:

SS: 1615 dmg

OB: 1672 dmg


-----------------------

Wpn-Dmg: 2000

with 30%:

SS: 1317 x 0.7 + 988 = 1909 dmg

OB: 3410 x 0.7 = 2387 dmg (1989 unglyphed) dmg.


Now factor in the lower crit-ratio of OB and the lower crit-modifier you will lose with OB against SS.

It all depends on how the Shadow dmg works. If it's coded like Necrosis (which is a flat 20% of whatever the melee hit was) then it's calculated AFTER dmg is mitigated by armor, meaning it's worse than being all physical.

Until it's fixed on PTR (seriously, who is surprised that it's broken?), we just won't know.

Although that sounds a more logical approach, the tooltip seems to disagree on that.

To me that reads as:

You do 50% weapon damage + X as physical damage.
For each disease on the target, you do 25% of the physical damge you did EXTRA as shadow damage.

You you do X damage mitigated + 0.75*X extra shadow damage. A bit like how unholy blight works.
Physical damage DONE is the keyword here.

The change strikes me a bit as odd though. Blizzard want's to simplify attacks. This just complicates the attack.
Although assuming this train of tought though, the "+75% of damage done" approach is easiest to understand.

What worries me is now Unholy Death Knights need to stack all the normal stuff for PvP, such as Str, Crit, go for the hit cap and around the 100 Spell pen mark, we now also need to think about Armor Pen as well. At least with pure shadow SS we could miss it out.

From the napkin math that is floating around atm, the PTR SS 'looks' slightly harder hitting than the Live SS but that is of course if I’m reading it right. Of course the damage bonus changing from 10% per disease to 25% means that in a PvP situation, if you are having your diseases removed your damage will drop like a stone.

If we assume 30% mitigation, 3 diseases and CoE up and ignore base damage for simplicity:
Pre-nerf SS: 45% * 1.33 = 59.85% *1.13 = 67.63%
Live SS: 40% * 1.3 = 52% *1.13 = 58.76%
PTR SS: (50% * 0.7) + ((50% * 0.7) * 0.75) = 35% + (26.25% * 1.13) = 64.66%

In short that should bump current raid-buffed SS damage by 10%. I am currently using 17/0/54 "old school" build with SS glyph (btw: doing absolutely fine with it) and along with UB nerf that is very slight (~1%) dps increase. Also with those changes taking reaping would give me extra ~100 dps and one GCD (useless). That is most likely still worse than other talents.

Well making SS based on physical mitigation obviously makes it much worse vs high armor targets. It might be possible that for PvP OB will be better, especially that you need to put 17 points into frost anyway.