There is no way they can let the shadow part double dip, I agree. They've spent forever and a day trying to streamline any move that double dipped to be more straight forward so to suddenly turn around and let an Unholy Death Knight, something the PvP community still has nightmares about, run around with a random nuke just isn’t going to happen. In saying that, the so called 'random nuke' is already looking like a bit of a wet fish.

More than likely the shadow part will be based on the pre-crit value, unfortunately that then leaves us with a rather weak strike.

Well, it is nearly impossible to avoid ArP, so it is nice that Unholy gets a bigger benefit.

GC is a marine biologist that changed to game design. Communiation isn't his strong area, but GC's posting is better than it was pre-GC. Give GC and his team the benefit of the doubt and wait to see how it performs with proper code.

That's basically what they've said they want to do. By letting it double dip on raid buffs, it hopefully becomes strong enough to merit use over a it/ps, ob or bs/bs, but also keeps it weak enough in pvp when those buffs aren't present to not be game breaking. UH DK's are also hardly a PvP nightmare anymore, except maybe in lower end ratings. In serious arena pvp, Dks are very underrepresented right now following the string of nerfs.

Exactly.

What I am afraid of is that the need to stack ArP now in Unholy will gut some of our other damage output in the tree. Losing Str gems in pvp as Unholy is going to be a nerf all in itself. I am not sure what GC is trying to accomplish here but at the moment it looks bad for pvp DK's.

and don't forget you still need to gem Spell penetration for the shadow part.. yay

I totally agree that Unholy Death Knights aren't the monsters they were back in Season 5, that madness ended a while back but the general arena community, perhaps the lower end, still cry for blood when they see DK buffs in fear of the S5 Monster being reborn.

This new Scourge Strike does look like its going to be pretty balanced in raids yea, but unless you have a warrior/rogue following you around in PvP and dropping the major armour debuff on your targets the damage of Scourge Strike will be laughable. A while back GC commented that as a class with no execute style ability, our system revolves around a quazi-execute move like Oblit or SS, a high damaging strike on demand that can be used to burst someone down in a PvP setting. If they are really, truly wanting Scourge Strike to be this double dipping then it makes a joke of this. The Unholy DK has to stack Armour Pen and Spell Pen for one move in addition to all the other stuff, then score a double crit in PvP and hope that they are already low enough to finish them cause we all know that sort of luck doesn't come often. This is assuming the diseases haven’t been removed of course.

This change would make DK's semi dangerous in the lower end arena while a joke in the upper bracket and like you said, last time I checked Unholy isn’t rampaging around in the arena like back at release so I cant understand this nerf.

Maybe you don't understand PvP, but this SS change does not mean you stack ArP, just that stat goes from worst stat that Unholy dislikes to have on gear to something that is nice. You still need Spell pen, but that is nothing new (just that you get rewarded even more).

Unholy is by far the best PvP spec (17/54), with 7% being Blood and Frost. However with the rise of Shaman, DK are underrepresented, so the SS change can be allowed to be a positive without messing up PvP balance.

Anyway, there are two steps to implementing a new ability: mechanics first, and then numbers later. First they need to get the physical + magic done right, then they can tweak what it does.

By saying that the best pvp spec is 17/0/54 I think you need to play your DK a little more bro. The only viable pvp specs for Unholy right now are 0/17/54 and 3/17/51(3% crit on SS), which allows a player to get Lich. Putting 17 points in blood for Unholy pvp is pretty ignorant.

I made a typo, of course the "best" spec is 17 Frost 54 Unholy. That has the most "PvP" type talents so the cookie cutter spec isn't going to change much in 3.3. Unholy needs a PvP buff since SS got nerfed too much and this change is aimed at providing it.

Whether it will be enough should be better known in a future PTR builds, which is my point. Don't complain or lament until you see something in its intended action.

Short bit in regard to your earlier post: I have nothing against Ghostcrawler what so ever, i think the game has gotten way better since he's posting on the forums. All i was saying was that he is not really making the mechanics of Scourge Strike very clear in his post.
The way it works now totally goes against blizzards "campaign" not to have wacky attacks in the game that either do no damage or do insane damage depending on a dice roll.

The SS change does not mean you stack ArP, i think you understand people in here the wrong way. We are saying that the new SS requires you to have some form of armor mitigation for it to be good enough in pvp.
This is not about numbers, this is simple deduction. If in PvE SS is to be balanced where bosses have around 30% armor mitigation all the time, its either going to be very strong or very weak in pvp depending what type of player you hit.

I play arena (and BG) pvp on my DK too. The reason unholy is the favored spec is because unholy has the most utility. Anti-Magic Zone, Ghoul with a stun, Bone shield (best defensive CD), high damaging diseases, gargoyle (very strong burst CD).
You dip into frost simply because of lichborne and mainly because of endless winter. (So you can chain + PS and are done with diseases and have him snared at the same time).

The problem unholy (DK's in general but unholy in particular) have is that we lack an execute move. We have 3 abilities that do some burst: Death Coil / Scourge Strike and last is our 3 min CD gargoyle. If scourge strike is not longer viable as a burst attack in pvp unholy have nothing left in PvP other than great control. (which is good but other classes can do that + a ton of burst).

So far it seems the new scourge strike is going to have individual crits, and in that way also a "Shadow Tripple crit" so to say, where the shadow component double dips.
To balance that out they need to make the single crits weaker than the current crit. So that the Tripple crit won't get overpowered.
That means that the only burst you'll see on scourge strike is when Mars and Jupiter allign and you get the mythical tripple crit. That seems like very bad design.

Not to mention dispels. When i fight arena against shaman teams i have to assume i'm fighting targets with pretty much no diseases all the time.
When i fight priests I have to assume my target has abolish disease up all the time.
When i fight paladins, i have to assume that when my chains get cleansed, so do the diseases.
Only druids can not cure diseases.

I know numbers are not final yet. But that means that at the moment we can only discuss the mechanics of the new SS (and even of that we are not sure).
And the new SS is really the only 3.3 topic its currently worth talking about.

I still think it will double dip, not with everything however. Part one will be ability (think about it as real SS) using melee crit, while shadow part will be spell (200% crit, using spell crit, not affected by Subv, 2h spec, VS, Outbreak or 2xT10).

Big problem, especially in PvP, comes from shields. If it will work same way as for Paladins - Judgement absorbed, no mana from JotW - then it will be terrible vs anything that uses shield - physical part absorbed, no shadow part = joke damage. While this creates some interesting choices (if shield then use DS) it is nerf.

I don't see double crit a problem in PvP. SS will be too situational to be viable: any team with disease cleaner or target with shield up = new SS does absolutely joke damage. OB is definitely better choice in any case if new SS will stay this way.

In any case I don't see why they play with new SS when it will be just OB with different icon and more complicated formula behind it...