New Soul Reaper

Classes Death Knight
1
  • New Talent: Soul Reaper – Rupture the soul of your enemy, dealing Shadowfrost damage and causing the foe to take 20% increased damage from your plagues and minions for 8 seconds. Only usable on enemies below 35% maximum health. 1 Rune. 15 second cooldown.
  • Reaping has been updated – Putrefy resets Soul Reaper’s cooldown and allows it to be used on any target. Moved to gate 3, replacing Blighted.
  • Putrefy has been updated – Command your oldest Lesser Ghoul to leap and strike the enemy for Shadow damage, then have them explode for Shadow damage to nearby enemies. Putrefy no longer has a delay, now has 1 charge (was 2), and a 30 second cooldown (was 15 seconds).
  • Harbinger of Doom now has an additional effect – Consuming Sudden Doom reduces the cooldown of Putrefy by 5 seconds. Class 4-set bonus will be updated.

So we got a new soul reaper for unholy, and based upon the last soul reaper thread this is probably what 9/10 dks wanted, so if nothing else blizzard is in fact listening.

I think the new soul reaper is going to feel like garbage, like a worse execute that is actually just a maintenance buff.

Biggest problem is tying it to putrefy, first off is that these two abilities are suppose to deal a large amount of damage, but forcing them to be used in sequence will decrease the damage and burst budget they can afford.

In addition during execute phase you will have to be holding back on putrefy to not overlap with the natural cooldown of soul reaper or the 8 seconds of pet damage, causing more of the annoying gameplay they are trying to avoid.

This also means the damage from this ability and the damage bonus it gives are not going to feel powerful during an execute phase, as you are already doing this ability rotationally, the execute becomes the extra function while the primary use is after every putrefy.

It punishes you for wanting to use putrefy twice in a row for burst, as you are losing the minion and disease damage increase.

On any encounter where you burst in the opening (see most boss fights, most arena matches ect) You will want to get soul reaper up to get the most out of your bonus pets, thus we now need to do another launch sequence of Army->Putrefy->SoulReaper->~6seconds of fill->putrefy->SoulReaper, which is the same problem all over again.

I think we should just remove soul reaper from PvE entirely, maybe add bonus pet and disease damage to reaping, and then provide a PvP talent for classic soul reaper with mongo damage.

Also slightly unrelated, but when we use putrefy the ghouls remaining duration should be inherited by your existing ghouls, Maybe give it to your most recent ghoul or something to avoid players worrying about ghoul timers.

2 Likes
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Are they moving Soul Reaper from the class talent tree to Unholy tree only?

3

I would be surprised. It fixes some issues, but it is still delayed execute damage. Which causes issues itself.

Yes.

I agree with the points you make. And to add:

It adds additionally tracking. Not just minions, but also additional considerations between Putrefy’s CD and Dark Transformation. And of course you need to factor in if the target going to live 8 secs or if you need to save it for the next target.

It is a ‘you really need Weakauras’ ability structure. But of course we wont have Weakauras.

My feeling is that if they want us to have an active cast execute, it just needs to be a single big hit. Not something tied to our pets, since that just adds layers of interaction that then need to be tracked.

Basically, yes.

It was already removed from the class tree. They are now adding it to the Unholy tree.

2 Likes
4

See… I always thought that the best solution for Soul Reaper is just yeeting it at this point for simplicity sake.

Yes, it is a different ability now from a delayed 6 second burst with an odd execute constraints requiring the target to reach below 35% health and… yeah, tying the condition of applying to any target at a cost of Putrify sounds weird to me. You must take Putrid Echoes now. :sweat_smile:

The fact that it can just be applied below 35% health to begin was my solution to Soul Reaper… if not tying to anything else and crank that damage up to 11 and even then it still doesn’t feel great.

If anything they want Soul Reaper to work… they would probably make it so like for the next 7 seconds, your Disease and Minion damage to it are recorded and increase its damage based on the target’s missing health. When that time is up or is dispelled, the Soul Reaper damages the affected target. This way you can plan ahead of how much disease and minion damage the affected target with take with a bonus based on the target’s missing health to keep that Execute mechanic without putting you some silly restraints.

Something like that would have been interesting. It synergizes very well with what you are trying to accomplish with Soul Reaper rather than just weaving it with Putrify and create awkward situations with it.

5

It’d be fine without the buff attached to it.

1 Like
6

I think we’re still at the throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks phase. I’m not a huge fan of this version of SR either, but I’m glad that they’re trying stuff.

It’s just a weird talent…only affecting diseases/minions with an 8s duration is certainly a choice…feels like it’ll barely do anything outside of CDs and it’s more chore than fun overall.

At this point UH really needs a talent that can create some excitement in the rotation and define some sort of niche for UH in M+, and I don’t see this version SR as that.

3 Likes
7

I am not sure what to think of it. Personally, I would much rather have it be a real execute, something that does good damage in execute windows. The buff to keep up just feels… like a step backward in their philosophy on how they want specs to function in midnight. Just another thing to track…

1 Like
8

it actually was a pvp talent for a while, the problem is DK no matter the spec has 3-5 mandatory pvp talents and only 3 slots, so even if you wanted to use pvp soul reaper, you couldn’t because of talent requirements, when they moved it to the base class tree this was a godsend as you could take soul reaper and your mandatory pvp talents.

1 Like
9

Given even after ALL this time our diseases only tick every 3 seconds it’s weird we’ll only get 2-3 ticks of disease damage in this. so the majority of damage from this is entirely our minions…

10

According to the notes, yes. That’s what it looks like.

1 Like
11

Agreed, and I honestly would just prefer the classic soul reaper, it’s one of my favorite abilities in the game and it really sucks to see it go. I’m not surprised that blizzard is trying a redesign as many players were complaining about soul reaper. I like my delayed gratification and in that classic soul reaper provided.

Agreed :slight_smile:

I think blizzard is now a bit stuck though, they want to redesign soul reaper, but they don’t want to just give DK’s “execute but shadow damage” for flavor reasons, so they are trying to find a way to make it unique and tie it into the DK fantasy.

The buff also eats up all the damage budget for the ability, for example, lets say you have 30% of your total damage (pre soul reaper) coming from pets, buffing pet damage by 20% would be a 6% total dps increase while active, throw in a 25% uptime from putrefy and you get 1.5% total dps increase, basically no budget left for the ability itself to hit hard, and this feels even worse as it’s one of our two melee buttons, going into melee just to debuff someone so your pets hit harder doesn’t feel cool, it feels like work.

I think it would be much better without the buff attached to it, so I mostly agree. I just also think that attaching it to putrefy is going to hurt it’s ability to deal good damage. If we take a damage budget of 10000, and a hypothetical ~6 minute boss fight then you can only execute for the last 2 minutes and only every 15 seconds, so you cast 8 soul reapers each dealing 1250 damage. If we include one putrefy every 30 seconds then you get at least 16 soul (more but the math gets tricky) so that would be 625 damage per cast. If sudden doom procs make putrefy more like once every 15 seconds then we cast at least 24 soul reapers or 416 damage per cast.

Attaching Soul reaper to putrefy basically reduces the damage a single soul reaper can do by at least 50-66%.

12

Aw, I guess my idea of Soul Reaper doesn’t stick. :frowning:

Ah well. YEET IT. MJ parody style.

1 Like
13

It seems more weirder now that it is in Unholy talent tree. Soul reaper should’ve been like Deathbringer’s soul rupture in the sense of way

2 Likes
14

With the recent patch they’ve decided to make putrefy only proc soul reaper 25% of the time.

This change does help with the damage budget, giving soul reaper more room to deal better damage.

However considering how powerful the pet and disease damage buff still is they still lack space for soul reaper to deal good direct damage. Most of Soul Reaper’s damage budget will still be spent on the buff for our pets, and I find it disappointing I want soul reaper to be our one big direct damage button, not another setup button.

—

EDIT: I realized another issue with the new design. Between Army, Dark Transformation, and Commander of the Dead we will have drastically higher pet damage during our spike compared to the rest of the fight. This means getting the 25% proc for soul reaper to increase pet damage will drastically effect the potency of our spike, basically we check RNG to see if our spike damage gets to be full power, or not. We are going to be double casting putrefy to try our shot at good dps, and holding charges of putrefy to only be used during dark transformation, as that will net more damage.

They should really just remove the bonus pet (and disease) damage from soul reaper, as it seems to be causing nothing but trouble for the health of this ability and by extension the health of putrefy as well.

I want to be able to cast putrefy based upon combat situations that call for burst or aoe, not holding it back so I can get a better cooldown launch sequence. I want soul reaper to just deal good damage so it’s exciting to press when execute (or proc) comes up.

4 Likes
15

This 100%.

16

They told it, “Don’t you ever come around here”
“Don’t wanna see your wounds, it was oddly festering”

Don’t wanna use my globals to interact and clear
So yeet it, just yeet it.

You better raise them, you better do what you can
Don’t wanna see no wuundz, like a necro man
You wanna putrify them and do whatever you can
So yeet it, but you wanna be bad

Just yeet it (yeet it), yeet it (yeet it)
If you ever feel defeated
Show them how gloomy and big is your lad
It doesn’t matter if it is good or bad

Just yeet it (yeet it)
Just yeet it (yeet it)
Just yeet it (yeet it)
Just yeet it (yeet it, :man_playing_handball: )

17

“Striking an enemy with Soul Reaper grants 1 charge of Marrowgrasp.

After 6 charges, Soul Reaper transforms into Raise Lord Marrowgar.”

2 Likes
19

I like the idea in concept. But it does create a problems.

The first is that design is would pull a lot of power out of the Soul Reaver ability itself (which is kind of what we are wanting to fix). It would do a lot less, because summoning Marrowgar would be the big moment (unless you make Marrowgar a wet noodle, which I am guessing you wouldn’t want). So, pushing Soul Reaper itself would feel less valuable. Which compounds with the second issue…

Timing. Having to build the 6 charges is going to mean wasted chances at Marrowgar. It will be kind of like the live version of Festering Scythe. If things die at the wrong time, we just don’t get it. And even on bosses, execute windows are not often all that long. Having a CD that you need to make sure you can hit more than 6 times in an execute window (plus have the boss live whatever duration Marrowgar would be summoned for) to actually get it’s value is going to cause lots of issues. Even factoring in procs allowing Soul Reaper casts before the execute window just adds a level of RNG that would feel bad. And, since Soul Reaper would have to have low damage itself, summoning Marrowgar being governed by by RNG and how fast your raid can kill the boss in execute phase, it would cause wild swings in Soul Reaper’s value outside of the DK player’s control.

To make it work on Soul Reaper you would have to: (1) Remove the CD from Soul Reaper at least until Marrowgar is summoned, which would further weaken the damage it could do. And even then, it wouldn’t entirely solve the issue. (2) Completely remove the execute range requirement and just make it part of the overall rotation. Which would still cause some balancing issues, but far less significant.

I would not be opposed to an ability having a similar kind of mechanic as part of an overall rotation, likely as a talent choice. But I don’t think it is a good solve for Soul Reaper’s problems.

2 Likes