Soul reaper is once again not worth pressing in execute. New dks are constantly making the mistake of pressing this button when it is in fact a damage loss.
This happens every patch without specific soul reaper tuning because soul reaper cannot be a massive damage execute and have a short 6 second cooldown, that would be overpowered.
Soul reaper damage and cooldown should be doubled or even tripled so that new players aren’t ruining their damage and experience by using this unintuitive ability.
It’s a dog ability for sure. I have no idea why they’re so hesitant to redesign it into something usable.
Just make it usable 35% health and have it always pop after a few seconds. That’s it, that’s all they gotta do. They can add as many damage buffs and hero talents as they want but nobody wants to use this clunky goofball talent.
back in patch 7.0.3 it did 333% damage
the main problems with it are the damage is split and maybe it should cost more
all the damage should be in the proc that way they could make it melee to ranged and delayed so its still unque kind of execute
I assume you mean as a Frost DK, and not as an Unholy DK, as Soul Reaper seems to be getting used in the top Unholy parses.
It actually can be both though, internal spec balance (ability vs ability) can be seperated from external spec balance (your spec vs someone else’s spec). There is nothing to stop blizzard from increasing the damage of soul reaper if they wanted to, if the total damage profile of the class becomes too strong they could just do an % all damage nerf to lower that damage while keeping the proportions of ability damage the same.
We don’t need to increase the cooldown to increase the damage, and I really don’t like the idea of one soul reaper every 18 seconds getting dispelled in PvP. The cooldown isn’t a damage limitation so much as a guard rail to prevent new players from spamming this ability, wasting runes to reset the debuff before it can do it’s damage. The recent PvP buff to increase the secondary damage of soul reaper by 75% is a lot of fun imo, we could just buff the damage in PvE to make it always worth the button press.
Unless it got huge buffs I still wouldn’t take it PvP. It’s incredibly unreliable with the way health bars ping pong up and down and still costs a rune + a global cooldown that often goes wasted. Feels like I always have something better to press.
I think at this point… it should be a passive that applies when something falls under 35% health and will explode at any point of the threshold when applied.
In my opinion making soul reaper a passive effect would be useless, we already have Reaping for unholy, and mechanics that don’t provide any interactivity are completely ignorable when it comes to gameplay, offering nothing for skill expression.
Though with the recent trends in blizzards design I do wonder how many years we have left until each class just has a single “Damage Button” and everything like cooldowns, buffs, debuffs, damage bursts, crowd control, pets, and everything else you could think of are all just procs on your singular damage button. I mean it would easy for new players to grasp, you would never waste a resource or use the wrong skill, and the entire game can just come down to who has the right spec and who has the best gear, both things you can just copy from a guide without thinking.
Yeah, it’s kind of unfortunate that you can’t really innovate anything in this game anymore. 
Chances are… my Demonology Spec isn’t up to par because I simply HATE Doom but if Demo pumps because of it… to compete, I may have to use it eventually. 
But yeah, as of Soul Reaper… if making it passive is useless because of lack of skill expression, then the other tragic solution is to remove it. Soul Reaper was one of the first Lich King’s abilities we got and I would be really sad to see it go.
It really did watered down from dealing a metric 
ton of damage with a metric ton of haste to… whatever it is now with many different questionable iterations like it giving 2 runes at some point.
Turning it into a passive is one way to go for me so you don’t have to spend your globals and runes on it anymore. It’d be either that or… make it cost global and a rune, the detonation should deal a lot more damage than… whatever the damage it deals now because this ain’t it.
That’s not the only solution, the other solution is just to let it deal good damage. The Death Knight damage breakdown is completely f****d up but I think that has more to do with Blizzard having a cooldown obsession than a design issue with core abilities.
Speaking from an unholy point of view, Rider of the Apocalypse offers nothing in terms of skill expression, yet consumes a large portion of our damage profile both with summoning them all on the already damage boosting Abomination, or with randomly summoning one or two when you spend runes. San’layn suffers from similar issues, not changing our rotation or featuring any skill expression in it’s normal usage, it however is much worse in the cooldown phase, encouraging us to actually simplify our rotation into spamming one button over and over again instead of managing all our resources. San’layn also randomly summons blood beasts to deal more damage for us, in a way that again has no room for skill expression.
When cooldowns are this powerful, and when they are further enhanced by passive hero talents blizzard simply runs out of damage budget to make sure the rest of the abilities provide fun and interesting interactions.
I would rather play a game where we have no cooldowns but all our abilities have interesting mechanics that require thought and practice (like soul reaper) than play a game where cooldowns are plentiful and powerful but our base rotation is literally one button, and unfortunately wow is way closer to the latter than the former atm.
Just get rid of it. Its bad. I dont know of a single time where people were talking about the execute damage but they absolutely wanted the insane haste buff when you applied it to something that would die in the next hit.
Just get rid of it and just bring back Merciless Combat in the class tree.
Thanks for making this post, had no idea I wasn’t supposed to be pressing it. Not even at the end for increased rune regeneration?
They should do better work here and change to active only after 35%, like an execute. I also made some mistakes when using it in my rotation without noticing that.
Just make it a stronger execute on a 10~15s cd, done.
Should just proc at 45% for unholy like it did in wod problem solved
Look, I am all in for Soul Reaper doing a metric ton of damage again. But kind of at the same time… even with the amount of dammies it can potentially deal when buffed… I… just don’t see the point.
I don’t know. Maybe I am black pilled when it comes to Soul Reaper.
The 75 percent damage buff seems to make it worth using - it isn’t terrifying - but it does put pressure on the healers and helps us finish off our targets after cooldowns end.
Yeah I hear it’s not terrible for unholy now. Not sure why frost couldn’t get the buff too but whatever lol. I’d still argue that it should be redesigned, though.
Even with doubling the damage in pvp it’s still not being used by most of the top dks because wasting a rune and a gcd on an ability that might just whiff is not a recipe for winning.
In pve the talent is only taken because there are no other dps talents in the same row, it’s still not worth pressing in execute most of the time. On a dungeon boss playing optimally as unholy you soul reaper maybe 2-3 times, sometimes never.
New players are taking the talent and using it when it’s a damage loss, because intuitively you’d think an execute would be worth pressing in execute.
If the cooldown and damage doubled it would be worth pressing in single target without needing to drastically nerf damage elsewhere to compensate.
I could be wrong here but I feel like it needs some stuff down the spec tree to incorporate it into the rotation for it to be good. If you look at warrior execute each tree has talents to help it work better with the spec. If we had something that gave it an option to proc a free use and guarantee the proc effect while also making that proc effect do something useful for each spec it might …. Become an option. But is it worth the time and effort to make this ability work.
A few things are frustrating about this topic, first is that people aren’t saying “Frost” or “Unholy” or “Blood” the are just saying “Death Knights”, when this ability deals drastically more damage for Unholy, and is integrated into hero talents for Frost/Blood.
Second is that if the problem is damage the solution is more damage. Redesigning the ability won’t necessarily fix the problem, it actually has a good chance of making the problem worse as you can never accurately predict how an ability will be used before implementation, and if the new implementation requires a huge damage buff to make it viable then you have solved nothing you couldn’t have solved with just a damage buff, other than frustrate users like myself who like the current implementation.
Third and finally, a “quality of life” improvement to make soul reaper easier to use would trigger a PvP nerf. There is a reason that Unholy’s Reaping talent is nerfed by 50% in PvP where Soul Reaper is buffed by 75% in PvP. Skill cap matters, if both Altaholic Andy and Hardcore Harry have an easier time killing people, then the entire class will get nerfed, however if Andy has some difficulty getting soul reaper to work for him then that gives room for Harry’s use of the ability to shine, as there is contrast between good players and bad. When a skill is required it isn’t just the class you pick that determines if you win, but how well you play said class, if everyone can do it first try then the class will remain “mid” in the balance and never shine.