Hello my fellow dks, so here is my question:
How’s ebon fever with the conduit that increases the damage and duration of vp?
Its worth It? It can compete with unholy blight?
That’s a really good question, and a bit tricky to answer, but currently Unholy Blight might just be a little too good.
The BFA Outbreak had a few seconds where the primary target would spread the dot, and that spreader was actually allowed to refresh the dot (which was not halved in duration by ebon fever), which did wonders to extend the duration of ebon fever outbreaks and thereby its damage per cast. Unfortunately, because of the changes to Outbreak (removing the spreader and making it a simple aoe), Ebon Fever isn’t quite as strong as it was anymore. And alas, the new conduit’s additional duration increase is halved by ebon fever.
Unholy Blight applies virulent plague and lasts 6 seconds, so assuming you’re on top of your targets the entire time, they’re effectively taking 33s (without conduit, 36s with) of the dot. So relative to normal Outbreak, you’re actually getting 20% more total damage on Virulent Plague per cast with Unholy Blight. It’s crazy, and this doesn’t directly address dps, but that’s actually a bit more damage per cast than an ebon fever outbreak, and that’s not even taking into account Unholy Blight’s other dot!
The other dot right now is insane. At face value it’s a lower duration but harder ticking dot, basically an ebon fever plague on top of your normal plague. It can last an effective 20s, and it allows your ghouls to do 12% extra damage to your enemies, which can be a significant amount of extra damage when you pair it with any ghoul damage windows.
One other thing to consider is that resources matter. We’re not as resource efficient as we were with lucid dreams in bfa, so every bit is important. Casting outbreak will always be worse for your resources than Scourge Strike/Clawing Shadows because the latter should always be netting you at least 13 runic power/cast (as opposed to Outbreak’s 10). In other words, you want to have to cast your dot as little as possible. In this sense, ebon fever actually hurts your overall runic power gain, while Unholy Blight is actually more efficient with how often you have to refresh it than default Outbreak.
So I guess here’s a tricky bit. Unholy Blight makes Virulent Plague last long enough that, assuming you’re fighting the same pack of mobs, you never want to refresh it by using normal Outbreak (or use Outbreak in general); you just let it fall off and wait until Blight comes off cooldown ~9s later, because 9 seconds of Virulent Plague damage isn’t worth the cast.
So I guess it ultimately kinda comes down to what content you’re running. If you’re running content where fights are relatively short and you’re hopping from pack to pack or need to be able to apply dots at range, Ebon Fever is actually really good. If you’re doing content with longer pulls/fights, Unholy Blight is most likely your best bet. You also wanna keep in mind how much you’re wanting to use Epidemic, since that ability is tied to having Virulent Plague active!
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I’m only doing normal, hc dungeon and casual pvp gor a while. Still, i feel like the 36 sec of vp is too slow of a dot and it does lees damage than frost fever. It may just be me though.