And thats just one point. On Anub Hard, diseases make uo to 40% of my damage so that the set bonus gives me (with 43% crit for both diseases) a boost of 16% so you might still wanna take 4pT9 on AOE heavy fights, even after the nerf.

I think the changes are made to make us go back to 2/2 Epidemic und and 3/3 Reaping, buffing SS in PVE. We will have to see, if the magic damage already is mitigated through armor or not.

I suspect we are going to see a nerf to disease damage either later in the built. On AOE, it's much better than any other specc.

Personally, I would have preferred that Blizzard worked out the PvE-versus-PvP environmental issues through crit, thus maintaining the flavor of SS mechanics. Crit chance is substantially decreased with limited raid buff/debuffs and Resilience in a PvP environment. Blizzard could have easily increased SS's raid-buff/debuff damage while keeping its limited-buff/debuff damage under control through crit-based tweaks (for example, changing Unholy Blight to work off SS and DC crits and give GoSS some kind of Hotstreak mechanics, say, landing two consecutive SS crits in a row applies a debuff that counts as a 4th disease for X sec).

Making SS work off armor like some glorified mock-shadow OB feels like the game design equivalent of calling a quarterback draw on 3rd-and-18: Even if it works it's still a lame call for a give-up play.

Shouldn't affect PvE that much, unless the shadow component is tapping out of the spell crit compartment.
Lower chance for double crits, but a higher chance to have a part of SS crit.

For PvP this is a disadvantage though, since crit burst is mostly gone if that is true.

Seems like they are altering SS to similar lines along seal of Corruption.

About the crit-question and double-crits, did you think about the fact that it just may be so that the shadow portion draws it's 75% of the first hit or crits damage, and then has it's own roll. This would make it possible for a semi triple-crit, so to speak.

Interesting.

Will the shadow portion benefit from everything, even modifiers (Ferocious Inspiration, Blood Presence, etc) which affected the physical portion already? If so, then it essentially double dips, and it's probably going to be strong. Really, really strong. Yes, probably enough to make Reaping worthwhile. Even if it doesn't manage that, it will still be enough to make Obliterate/GF using/Etc builds undesirable.

If it double dips, Desolation, Bone Shield, Outbreak, Dark Conviction, (Crit from) EP, Blood Presence, Viscous Strikes (if the shadow portion can crit), Rage of Rivendare - it would double dip in all of these. One could also add 2P T10 and 4P T10 to that last, as they would count too.

Or, on the other hand, will the shadow portion only benefit from talents/buffs/debuffs which affect shadow damage but not physical/both? If so, then it becomes iffy, because all that fits into that category is Black Ice and EP (and Scorch/Winter's Chill/ISB, if it works off of spell crit, and if it can crit at all). Although it would give SS a small boost in damage overall, it wouldn't give it the chunk it needs to make Reaping worth it.

The quote doesn't quite clarify which of the two it is. I would assume the first, but there's simply no way of currently knowing which. The reason I consider the second is simply because double dipping is very difficult to balance, potentially.

First off, the PTR SS needs to work properly before people can tell if Reaping is worth it. Assuming SS does the physical + magic damage in one hit like the tooltip says, then picking up Reaping as a dps boost is the design intention.

It's not double dipping. I think this kind of proves Bensch was right.

The way the new SS will work is that the shadow damage is NOT dependant on the damage you did with the physical component.

The damage will be calculated like this most likely:

50% * weapon damage * physical modifiers * SS modifiers + 50% * ( 0.25 * number of diseases ) * spell modifiers * SS modifiers

Physical modifiers include armor reduction.
Spell modifiers include Ebon Plaguebringer, Black Ice, etc.
Global SS modifiers include Outbreak, RoR, Bone Shield, Blood Presence

Basically you can normalize the strike to this (assuming no black ice, but with EPB / RoR / Boneshield and 3 diseases):

SS damage = (( 50% * strike damage * armor reduction ) + ( 50% * weapon damage * 75% * 1.13)) * 1.2 * 1.1 * 1.15 * 1.03

SS damage = 78.18% of strike damage * armor reduction + 66.26% of strike damage.

What i'm trying to say is that all the general damage modifiers still effect each segment of the strike, but the shadow damage is independant from the damage you do on the physical part. So it will not double dip, nor will it be left out.

The biggest question is, how is crit handled. I assume the shadow part will remain to use melee crit, but that is the question.

The shadowpart will be 25% times the number of diseases times the actual physical dmg before mitigation times multipliers, that only apply to magical dmg. (only EP and BI)

Looking like this:

Shadow SS Component = Physical SS Component x 0.25 x 3 x 1.13 (EP) x 1.1 (BI)

I just think it will be that easy.


If you get a hit for 1000 physical, the shadow component will be 847.5 (with EP only) or 932.25 (with BI)

If you get a crit for 2000 physical dmg, the shadow component will be 1695 (with EP only) or 1864.5 (with BI)


I think this is the reason, why they choose to say, that it depends on the physical damage done. If you get a crit, just double the shadow portion.

After that the phys. dmg component will be reduced by armor.

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World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> New Scourge Strike

Looking at this comment of GC, every word of it supports my theory.

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As my math showed before, the damage of SS against a sundered target with 30% physical damage reduction will rise by roundabout 30% without any form of double dipping.

Look at this post

This will be more than enough to make reaping and epidemic worthwile again.

It's pretty much the same as I said except that in this case the shadow damage is exactly the same as the physical damage (pre-armor reduction). Which indeed makes both the tooltip and GC's words work out.

This would indeed also solve the crit issue. (If they were seperated it would be an odd way to calculate crit).

This does seem overly complicated though. Which seems a bit of a sideturn in blizzards objective to make all mechanics easier to understand.

I guess that changes my calculation into:

SS damage = (( X * armor reduction ) + ( X * 75% * 1.13)) * 1.2 * 1.1 * 1.15 * 1.03

SS damage = 1.56X * armor reduction + 1.33X

Where X is the damage of the physical strike damage, which is: 50% * ( weapon dmg + AP/14 * 3.3 )

So in this case the shadow component is NOT independent from the physical component, however it does not get reduced by armor reduction and it does not double dip from abilities.

Guess it's a bit of a middle way between the two discussed ways.

It would be a good solution, it would make sense as well.

[edit]:

Don't forget that the T10 2 set now gives another 10% dmg increase on SS as well. I think all changes together we might see the old style unholy rotation making a return, although it's somewhat soon to tell.

I plugged in my template and did some sims with the latest version:
I only ran some quick sims and tried some different speccs. To me it seems like 16-0-55 (epidemic, no reaping) is the way to go and using a fixed 20s rotation. You can gain a few fps if you go with 1 point in morbidity and max necrosis. I also did a 400h Ep calculation with the following values:

AttackPower | 1
Strength | 3,03
Agility | 1,24
CritRating | 1,88
HasteRating | 1,3
ArmorPenetrationRating | 1,24
ExpertiseRating | 1,61
BeforeMeleeHitCap<8% | 2,76
SpellHitRating | 1,22
WeaponDPS | 6,36
WeaponSpeed | 333,33
2T9 | 147,62
4T9 | 417,46
2T10 | 166,67
4T10 | 293,65
| Template | unholy-epidemic
| Rotation | unholy-epidemic
| Presence | Blood
| Sigil | Virulence
| RuneEnchant | FallenCrusader /
| RuneEnchant | FallenCrusader
| Pet Calculation | True