Unholy Dps | 3.3.5, King of Anything - Page 53

ShinKosh · 10/08/09, 8:40 AM

Well if that is correct, and there are no further factors are added into the math, then to make ArP more of an interesting and worthwhile stat for PvE Unholy (yet still nowhere near amazing), PvP unholy gets dropped onto a sliding scale bar, anything with less than 36% mitigation and you’re in the plus, anything with more (Mail and plate mainly) and your taking a damage drop on your spec strike.

Granted if you happen to find a clothie without their token shield or armor up you'll blow them up it seems an odd move to make bursting down a Resto Shammie even harder that it is currently given our dependency on our diseases not being dispelled.

Dwarfisshort · 10/08/09, 8:51 AM

ShinKosh: Unless I missed it, I don't believe you included Black Ice, a talent mostly ignored in this PvE focussed thread, but in almost every single UH PVP spec. The fact that it either doesn't contribute to the PTR ScS (or only partially contributes, depending on how it ends up being coded) means that even if the change breaks even or is a slight improvement for PvE, it's completely possible it will be a significant nerf for PvP.

ShinKosh · 10/08/09, 9:06 AM

I did miss out Black Ice yes, and yes it is a talent I live by in PvP but I also missed it out from the Pre-Nerf and Live math as well. If you take a pure Shadow damage based SS from live you get +10% from BI while from the PTR you will get less since the strike is now only around 45% shadow based, wouldn’t Black Ice only then boost a SS hit by around 5%?

Rough math granted but if Im in error Im happy for someone to correct me.

And yes, apologies for bringing up the PvP ramifications of this change into this predominantly PvE but you guys seem to know your numbers.

Foxx2405 · 10/08/09, 9:30 AM

I don't think you should we can draw a definitive conclusion on PvP yet though.

Ghostcrawler mentioned previously (don't have the quote, but i think it was in the same post as the one mentioning the cleansing totem change), that they wanted to tackle the disease issue in pvp.

I hope that gets dealt with in this patch. Scourge Strike is one of the few burst attacks that shadowfrost (main pvp spec) has, and with the change to IT glyph even more so.
If diseases are still (as easily) cleansable like they are now. This change could destroy (or at least have dire impact), unholy pvp burst.
Where before diseases affected 1 - 1/1.3 * 100% = 23% of scourge strike's damage. Now it is 1 - 1/1.75 * 100% = 43% of scourge strike's total damage.
Cleansing diseases would pretty much kill any unholy pvp burst.
But that is food for thought for another topic.

As far as PvE goes, this change seems decent. Assuming the shadow component is 75% of the damage done and Fugazor's calculations are right it's a small boost.
However, it depends a bit on gear. If I'm not mistaken bosses have about 65% damage reduction from armor (at least they had back in Naxxrammas, not sure about Ulduar and ToC).
Not sure how that translates (is the 25% armor taken of straightly or by division ?). And i'm not sure how many extra armor penetration one would need to get to the 30% cap.

Clark · 10/08/09, 10:14 AM

Originally Posted by Bensch78

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.

However, for each disease the death knight has on the target, the target will take additional shadow damage equal to 25% of the physical damage done.

It depends on what they mean by physical damage done. The way I read it, it will be based on the mitigated damage, which means that the "shadow" damage is just flavor. It may or may not scale with Ebon Plague, but it will already be reduced by armor.

Now I may be wrong, we won't know until they fix it on the PTR.

Grigori · 10/08/09, 10:29 AM

Originally Posted by CyrusII

The way GC frames the changes it sounds like they are trying to make SS more attractive, as in benefiting from ArP and having supposedly higher damage. But mostly I think this is a PvP change, preventing DKs from slicing through plate like it wasn't there. Scourge Strike seems headed in the same direction as Frost strike, where the unavoidable unmitigated damage was deemed unbalanced.

SS is supposed to do more damage than it does now. Almost everything else has been designed around SS doing more damage, and the fact that SS is doing wussy damage causes some basic elements of the pseudo-combo design to break down.

The SS nerf resulted from Unholy providing its own major magic raid debuff as part of its normal pseudo-combo. SS's damage simply isn't reduced enough from the lack of raid buff/debuff in a PvP environment (i.e. the Sunder Armor issue). The goal of this change is very simple: Increasing SS's PvE damage in the raid-buffed/debuffed environment while keeping its PvP damage under control in the limited-buffed/debuffed environment. This will undo the design "lameness" problems which have resulted from the wussy SS damage without breaking PvP.

Given that, it is reasonably safe to assume that Blizzard wants SS to do substantially more damage in PvE when fully raid-buffed/debuffed (and do around the same damage as it does now with only EP). Whether they will succeed in doing so by the time 3.3 goes live is another question entirely, of course.

- - -

Back in liveland, I have decided to drop GF for 2/2 Epidemic and tweak the rotation in the 15-sec rotation 18/0/53 "Death Mastery" DW build after a night of testing. The additional leeway the second point of Epidemic provided simply proved too valuable in practice when dealing with interruptions.

Athansor · 10/08/09, 10:29 AM

If they really wanted to make armor pen attractive they could just make it useful for pets. Pets should really be inheriting everything anyway just to scale properly, even if that means lowering base damage.

They need to fix the PTR so we can verify the actual math. Curious to see how this is going to effect a Dual Wield setup. Obviously having weapon damage be a more significant component sucks for dw. It could end up that epiidemic is the way to go for 2handers and dw will be stuck back on a 10s rotation.

I'll be curious to see new sigils too. Without a sigil proccing off of scourge strike the importance of scourge strike goes down even more for dual wield.

Hope they don't force me to a 2hander or to go dw frost!

P.S. Thanks Bensch for running those numbers before. I probably just need to reinstall my .net framework again and i'll be up and running on the sim.

Bensch78 · 10/08/09, 10:30 AM

Looking at GC answer, when asking for clarification:

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - [Scourge Strike] - Clarification

Originally Posted by Foxx2405

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.

IF the shadow-dmg component of SS would depend on the phys. dmg done after mitigation, then the whole dmg of SS would be mitigated by armor. That would not make any sense, because GC himself said, that some of the dmg will become physical and mitigated by armor. You guys are mitigating every single dmg by armor.

For me it looks like the following way:

SS will do 50% of weapon dmg as physical damage. This is the physical damage done by this attack. The shadow component will be 75% of this 50%, as it is 75% of the physical damage done. After that, the physical damage done will be mitigated by armor.

Looking at 30% reduction:

SS with 3.3 will be 50% x 0.7 + 37.5% x 1.13 = 77.375 % x 1.2 = 92.85 %
SS with 3.2.2 is 40% x 1.3 x 1.13 = 58.76 % x 1.2 = 70.51 %
SS was 45% x 1.3 x 1.13 = 67.63 % x 1.2 = 81.16 %
SS with 50% (just to compare) 50% x 1.3 x 1.13 = 73.45 % x 1.2 = 88.14 %

OB (not glyphed) is 80% x 0.7 x 1.375 = 77%
OB (glyphed) is 80% x 0.7 x 1.375 x 1.2 = 92.4%

Looking at 50% reduction: (Shaman)

SS with 3.3 will be 50% x 0.5 + 37.5% x 1.13 = 67.375 % x 1.2 = 80.85 %
SS with 3.2.2 is 40% x 1.3 x 1.13 = 58.76 % x 1.2 = 70.51 %
SS was 45% x 1.3 x 1.13 = 67.63 % x 1.2 = 81.16 %
SS with 50% (just to compare) 50% x 1.3 x 1.13 = 73.45 % x 1.2 = 88.14 %

Looking at 60% reduction: (Paladin)

SS with 3.3 will be 50% x 0.4 + 37.5% x 1.13 = 62.375 % x 1.2 = 74.85 %
SS with 3.2.2 is 40% x 1.3 x 1.13 = 58.76 % x 1.2 = 70.51 %
SS was 45% x 1.3 x 1.13 = 67.63 % x 1.2 = 81.16 %
SS with 50% (just to compare) 50% x 1.3 x 1.13 = 73.45 % x 1.2 = 88.14 %

This numbers look quite reasonable for me. As shinkosh mentioned, if it would be the other way, they would completely destroy Unholy-PvP.

Look at the bolded numbers of OB and SS with 30% reduction.

I just showed the numbers off SS with 50% weapon dmg, with live disease-modifiers. They could not buff SS this way, because then Unholy-PvP would be too strong again. The solution they found seems good to me. But only with my above math, otherwise you can just give up PvP as Unholy.

ShinKosh · 10/08/09, 10:55 AM

Bensch78, I would love for your math to be right but it's the wording of the new discription that has me worried;

However, for each disease the death knight has on the target, the target will take additional shadow damage equal to 25% of the physical damage done.

That part there seems to lead me to think its whatever your physical part hits for, the shadow part will be 75% of that, and against higher armoured targets the damage quickly drops to a joke.

We can wait and see what happens when they fix the PTR.

sweberry · 10/08/09, 11:08 AM

@ShinKosh:
I can see how you could think that but it doesn't rule out the fact that it might be the exact physical damage, the 50%, before mitigation. As Bensch points out GC said straight out that:

It should work pretty similarly to how it does now except that some of the damage is physical.

This sounds pretty much like some of the damage will be mitigated, some won't. And Bensch's math looks awfully decent and reasonable too.

But then again, Blizzard has been known to not realizing what they've done at first (if all is mitigated) but also to word spells and abilities shitty as hell. The best way to go is just wait and see.

Kithus · 10/08/09, 11:24 AM

It will be interesting to see which way it works. If the shadow damage is based off the unmitigated physical damage as Bensch suggests then SS is the way to go. However, if its calculated using the mitigated physical damage then there's a good chance unholy is still using oblit.

Foxx2405 · 10/08/09, 11:25 AM

Originally Posted by Bensch78

Looking at GC answer, when asking for clarification:

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - [Scourge Strike] - Clarification

IF the shadow-dmg component of SS would depend on the phys. dmg done after mitigation, then the whole dmg of SS would be mitigated by armor. That would not make any sense, because GC himself said, that some of the dmg will become physical and mitigated by armor. You guys are mitigating every single dmg by armor.

Well that is what the confusion is about.

I had the exact same train of thought. When i read the tooltip change (or what was in the patchnotes) i read as the shadow damage will be calculated after armor. Thus SS is affected by armor reduction.
(Someone asked for the reason why it would be shadow in that case, that's simply because otherwise it would get hit by armor reduction a second time)

When I read ghost crawlers reply though, i read it as what you propose. He is claiming that SS is partially physical and partially unreduced damage. Which can only mean that the shadow component is not linked to the actual damage done.

I guess we will know once PTR gets fixed.

ShinKosh · 10/08/09, 11:25 AM

I kinda feel like the harbinger of woe with all the doom and gloom Im posting here but something else just crossed my mind. Scourge Strike damage will now be split, part physical and part shadow. Does that mean you press SS and see 2 sets of damage numbers flashing up? Due to armour and spell resistance I cant see them trying to tie them together.

So does this mean for each Scourge Strike, we have to roll a double crit to see a full critical strike? One for each part of the strike?

Loothorde · 10/08/09, 11:35 AM

Anyone notice this nurf from the latest 3.3 patch notes?

Death Knight Tier-9 4-Piece Bonus: This set bonus no longer grants Frost Fever a chance to be a critical strike. It still grants that possibility to Blood Plague.

I assume it's because of the new GoIT functionality. :/

Kithus · 10/08/09, 11:40 AM

Originally Posted by Loothorde

Anyone notice this nurf from the latest 3.3 patch notes?

I assume it's because of the new GoIT functionality. :/

Even without the new GoIT it was OP. They probably figured out the new T10 set bonuses for DKs and realized there was no way we'd upgrade away from 4pT9. The way 4pT9 was working with wandering plague and crypt fever (as well as the new GoIT glyph) it was an absurd DPS increase. The fact that it was nerfed shouldn't be a real surprise to anyone.