Eww...You know it's a bad sign when a Blue posts before a new Build goes up to prepare you. I feel rather bad for Ghostcrawler. She has been a friend of the DK community, a reliable person and very receptive of our feedback. Now most treat her as if she's the enemy; like she is responsible for Unstable servers and ...this.
Now we all knew it was going to happen; Scourge Strike needed to get knocked down some. There was no ifs, ands or buts here. A 75 popping off (albeit rarely) a 9K crit on a mob or another player is more than a little OP. I for one was greatly looking forward to getting that issue ironed out so we can come closer to finalizing everything and getting a Release Date set.
Which is why when I saw the new Tool Tip for SS my jaw quite literaly hit the floor. Scourge Strike, after all, is the Deep Unholy substitute for Obliterate. Our primary finisher. Now? Not so much.
The situation gets worse. They cut us across the board. Literally every offensive ability we have was slashed almost in half. Like many I figured SS was the problem and was the primary focus of change. I figured it was utilizing talents and enchants it should not (Impurity, Black Ice, Cinderglacier, etc) to get those massive crits, and that these things would be looked into closely (which they may have been. I can't say for sure). But instead the ability itself took a massive hit. And the disease scaling. And the abilities that inflict those diseases. And so on.
Not only that, but any legitimate talents we had that improved SS had it removed from them, while Oblit got reapplied to several. The reward for investing deeply in Unholy; the alternative to Oblit, is not so much an even alternative now.
To explain it to those that haven't played a Death Knight before, I tend to compare them to Frost Mages with their Shatter Combos, but obviously melee. Regardless of spec, everything we do besides CC during a fight is a set up to increase the size and power of our finisher. Our "shatter". In the case of Blood it may be DRW with Oblit or Heart Strike. For Frost it is a freeze effect for Howling Blast. For Unholy we are talking diseases to amp up Scourge Strike. Now I've seen Mages at 70 in good gear crit easily 3-3.5K. Scourge Strike versus an equal level foe? Lucky if it crits past 2K.
I'm not going to go into the bugs too much as I know that they will be fixed soon (I hope), but having Blood Boil and Unholy Blight broken on top of everything else being so badly downgraded makes it very difficult to handle AoE grinding with the expertise we did before, not to mention PvPing.
On that note, I do have to point out something that ruffled my feathers that Ghostcrawler did say;
"Death knights shouldn't be able to obliterate rogues (see what I did there?). In fact, many players will tell you that rogues can defeat characters of higher level if they get the drop on them. Death knights should have to rely on all of their tools and not just spam the hardest hitting ones. Death knights should not do the most damage in an instance while tanking. All of those things were happening before. Some were bugs, but some were just very generous numbers or stacking talents. "
Now first of all we all know some classes just have a natural counter class. Ask Warlocks how they feel about Rogues and you'll see what I mean. Between AoE's, DoT's and hard hitting finishers, Death Knights are a great counter class for a Rogue. The nerf to Disease DoT and to D&D hinders us against this class by quite abit. And the idea of a Rogue, unlike other classes being able to defeat higher level players because they can "get the drop on them" seems a bizzare thing to champion when you are speaking of balance. I've fought several Rogues as Unholy and I never just "spammed the hardest hitting abilities". There is alot of CC involved with taking on a Rogue, especially if he gets the drop on you. Death Knight or no. Seems just an odd statement to stand by to me.
As for the Tanking and top-DPS issue, I agree completely. However we need to look at what the groups were comprised of and what spec the DK was.
Scourge Strike was very broken. The rest of the abilities were not. I'm honestly baffled by this change, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it gets resolved. Surely there must be a happy medium somewhere.
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