Our spec is boring, once the shiny aspect of all these new changes wear off, you’ll be bashing Scourge Strike and Death Coil so hard those poor keys are going to be wearing out far ahead of any other button on your keyboard. Can we please look at mixing up the ST/AoE rotation a bit for some variety?
Solution(s)
Clawing Shadows cleave ability either removed or reduced down to a single additional target.
Festering Scythe no longer is free or generates lesser ghoul charges, but is now tuned to be the AoE rune spender.
To take care of the issue where Festering Strike/Scythe spam for AoE is occuring and are generating over the 8 Lesser Ghoul charges, Festering Scythe could consume two charges to spawn an AoE type lesser ghoul.
Scythe of Decay
I agree this needs to go as the ability to cast Death and Decay on demand and at range for its awesome snare effect with Grasp of the Dead is far too good to lose. I still feel like this talent could be reworked to give the Festering Scythe ability some extra oomph.
Solution: Festering Scythe now applies a short duration, stacking DoT plague on targets damaged.
Cycle of Death
I feel like we have more than enough cooldown reduction on Putrefy already, and adding this functionality to Death and Decay which just feels useless to press for damage at this point in time is more annoying than anything else. We could free up a keybind.
Solution: Every 15 sec, your next Putrefy sends a plagued lesser ghoul at the target, its rotting corpse infesting the ground with Death and Decay. Putrefy explosions inside your Death and Decay increase its duration by X sec. Putrefy now has the option to also be ground targeted.
Soul Reaper
I am kind of sad with this change, it made Dark Transformation feel so good when you just had all the boys up blasting with a single GCD, but I guess it did contribute to some crazy burst damage.
All Will Serve
Can we have a Magus of the Dead instead of the Archer? Looks cooler, could also tie into some of the other talents making it a solid pick for the minion fiend player.
The Soul Reaper change is awful, being able to just ignore Putrefy during execute makes the rotation so much smoother compared to how it all worked in The War Within prepatch and going back on that change is going backwards in the spec’s design forcing us to hardcast Putrefy isn’t gonna make it exciting.
I don’t know why Doomed Bidding and Necromancer’s cunning needed to be swapped around but W/E
If you guys keep having to change Abomination trying to make Gargoyle look better perhaps it is not Abomination that is the issue cough
Also why are you forcing us to take 2 points of Unholy Aura* to get to Reanimation now? Can we have one capstone talent that doesn’t require 2 points to take?
*Lets be Real Ancient Power is a joke talent so we ain’t taking that.
Agree with everything you say. They trying to buff Gargoyle by nerfing other options. Soul Reaper auto casting Putrefy made both skills feel good to use.
I’m a bit upset Scythe of Decay is being removed. For years the community asked for Death and Decay to become auto target. We finally get a talent that does exactly that and it’s being removed….
Some additonal feedback after bashing some target dummies.
The Good
Putrid Echoes granting 3 total stacks of Putrefy and it’s ability to send two with a single GCD is good. Although I would still much prefer if Soul Reaper kept this functionality so execute phases can remove pressing Putrefy altogether which DOES currently make execute phases feel alot smoother.
New Blightfall removes any dramas being unable to apply diseases on demand.
Cycle of Death is nice, just a shame Death and Decay still feels terrible to press.
The Bad
Ancient Power/Unholy Aura being two points is too expensive, there is no world where anyone is NOT taking Putrid Echoes and Reanimation and if either of these two talent nodes were just one point, you could then take Doomed Bidding or Blightburst both of which a very handy talents.
Summon Abomination/Gargoyle the constant changes to Abomination in an attempt to get people to use Gargoyle needs proper addressing. I don’t think it should be a simple AoE vs ST option choice. Perhaps make it disease/minions based.
Raise Abomination Solution(s)
Raise Abomination no longer has a disease aura and instead deals large AoE cleave damage. Its attacks also randomly kills nearby lesser ghouls, fueling its frenzy, increasing its attack speed and damage for every death, whilst also triggering Necromancer’s Cunning.
Raise Abomination replaces your ghoul with an Abomination aka the Sludge Belcher from Legion.
Raise Abomination replaces your ghoul’s monstrosity transformation.
Summon Gargoyle Solution(s)
Summon Gargoyle attacks will also cause your plagues to erupt and now gains critical strike damage bonus based on your critical strike chance.
Summon Gargoyle replaces your permanent ghoul. Granting you a ranged companion, Dark Transformation changes it into some other terrifying flyer unit.
Summon Gargoyle is now a passive effect. Death and Decay will summon a gargoyle to AoE bombard the designated area, additionally if you have Soul Reaper it will summon a gargoyle to assault that target for 8 sec.
Death and Decay needs something else, its a cool iconic ability, but its damage and gameplay interaction is very limited. Losing Scythe of Decay is disappointing, and I feel we could rework it somewhere without losing the ranged DnD utility with Grasp of the Dead.
Solution(s)
Scythe of Decay Desecrating Scythe is a baseline ability that will cause your Festering Scythe to desecrate the ground beneath your target. Desecrate would be a recoloured DnD using the sickly green color, pretty much like the old WotLK Desecrated Ground.
Death and Decay replaces Epidemic as the AoE runic power spender, lasts 5 secs and deals improved damage. Becomes Graveyard with Apex talents, add grasping skeletal hands and roaming spirits for further awesomeness owed to an ability called Graveyard.
Bulk Resources even with my garbage gear, there are times where I am drowning in resources and unable to spend them quick enough. Could we look at perhaps making Sudden Doom be able to spend up to an **ADDITIONAL “X” ** runic power and increase the damage of that ability by whatever % of additional runic power spent? Building up runic power to unleash a full runic power bar Death Coil could be something nice.
San’layn New Desecrate Talent needs to deal some more damage in addition to reducing its duration.
San’layn Transfusion seems like it should do something else as its straight up inferior to its Rider talent counterpart which also increases the damage of the riders, ghoul and Skeletal Archer. What if this talent instead caused Vampiric Strike to summon a Blood Mage which hurls Blood Bolts at the target, or a Bloody Lesser Ghoul which inflicts Blood Plague on the target with its attacks?
The Simple thing to do if they want one to be AOE and one to be ST (which is fine its a choice node) would be to just get rid of the Runic Power buff off the Gargoyle and have it do flat damage then tune it.
I know ya’ll got hyper nostalgia for when 30% of our damage was decided by 4 pet attacks but that took us having infinite runic power, death coil costing 50 Runic power and Sudden doom getting a 120% Haste affected RPPM proc rate. It’s time to let Gargoyle go back to being a straight up damage bomb instead of being “interactive”
Festering Scythe in it’s current iteration probably just needs to go, making every other festering strike free is probably really bad for resource balance.
They could have very easily made this a choice node and just baked Cycle of Death into Scythe of Decay for those that have no interest in manually casting DnD.
They have done something similar with shadow priest and windwalker talents.
Not sure its worthwhile to submit specific suggestions, but it feels very frustrating to play currently when you don’t have to manage your lesser ghoul stacks at all. You get so many charges from the Apex putrefy and having to festering strike twice every 30 secs or whatever for the debuff.
Feels like removing Festering Strike and just having us have Festering Scythe would be an improvement there.
Not sure how I feel about the dnd related things coming back again. Dnd still doesn’t feel worth using unless you use it for the slow. I think if you want dnd to be something worth pressing it needs to do more damage, apply a new disease to enemies it ticks on, or something.
Can we have festering scythe completely replace festering strike?
QOL would be massive if the debuff was changed to a buff on the player instead.
Glad to see SR change reverted.
Can ancient power please be updated. This is left over from wounds. I think adding something else here, disease related would be much better.
Lastly, since UH was just buffed, can we remove any nerfs in the patch when it comes?
For the love of god blizzard change the free lesser ghoul from putrefy in the apex talents to anything else. I have so many lesser ghoul stacks that sometimes festering scythe runs off and i still have 3 stacks to burn.