#0 - Jan. 23, 2009, 12:12 p.m.
I would like to talk about why putting Shadow of Death on a 15-minute cooldown was a bad idea. I assume this change was made purely because it was deemed to overpowered in arenas.
First of all, I would like to state that the talent itself isn't overpowered, it's the fact that we don't really die, and therefore get to keep our pets for the duration of the buff. So it's actually a combination of 8 (eight) talents that are deemed overpowered (7 talents for the ghoul pet and 1 for the gargoyle). All these talents are in (semi-)deep in the unholy tree, and are an important part of an unholy Death Knight's damage sources, so you could ask yourself how unreasonable it is that we keep our pets out when the talent activates.
On top of that, if we don't have our pets out at the moment of death, we don't get any chance to summon them, since we are now ghouls with a completely different set of abilities. And what are really the chances of a Death Knight popping Gargoyle (and keeping it up without Runic Power, somehow) just before the moment he or she dies? I would say nearly non-existant, any Death Knight with half a brain will pop Gargoyle ASAP since PvP at this point is all about burst damage and killing your enemies before they have a time to react. So I think we can safely say that having a Gargoyle helping you when you're a ghoul is just a novelty and not a reliability. And even if we somehow managed it, the recent nerfs to Gargoyle have severely decreased the burst damage from him.
Second, there is the 2-3 second resurrect animation during which we can't move, attack or do anything really. We can however get debuffed (I think, feel free to correct me if I am wrong though), so snares, roots and other CC effects can be put on us before we can do anything at all. During these 2-3 seconds the opponent can move out of our LoS, out-range us, heal himself up with a quick heal, or start charging up a big ball of death or something. After that, we get to leap and stun our enemies for about 2 seconds every 30 seconds, so if we are lucky and we get an auto-attack crit and a claw crit, we can get about 4k damage in, and that is if we are not CCed endlessly.
Thirdly, in the event that someone does die from us in ghoul form, isn't that the entire purpose of this talent? Why would we get ressurrected by the forces of evil if all we are meant to do is run around for 25 more seconds untill we can go to the graveyard and wait for our ress? Someone on these forums said that this talent was to make up for something the unholy was lacking. But what do we bring if we are only ressurrected to be CCed for another 25 seconds by pretty much every class out there and then die a second time? And even worse, at points we can not decide ourselves, but do trigger a 15-minute cooldown, which brings me to my next (and probably most important point).
The inability to decide ourselves wether or not we want to ressurrect and waste a 15 minute cooldown to bring in some extra damage. This is a bad thing is PvP as well as in PvE. If you are being zerged in PvP and you die, there is really no reason to ressurrect as a ghoul, because you will only get zerged again before being able to do anything at all, and the next time you die to that lonely mage, who you left on 4% of his health after your battle with him, you don't ressurrect because the talent is on cooldown, if you would have had a saying in when you want to ress, you could have chosen not to ress when the raid killed you, and have your talent available to you when you could have taken out that mage instead.
This is also an issue in PvE, when you wipe, and it is an obvious wipe (boss is on 80% still, healers are dead, half the DPS is dead, that sort of stuff), you would not want to waste your 15 minute cooldown because you won't make a difference, but, it is triggered anyway, you die again and get back to try again. The second try the fight goes a lot better, you get him to 5% when suddenly everyone starts dying, there's still some healer, tank and dps alive, and you wish you didn't ressurrect on that earlier try because else you could have contributed some to the fight as a ghoul by bringing in some extra damage, or maybe even stunning that add that is harrassing your healer.
Now, you can argue that if you can't kill a boss without the extra dmg from an unholy DK in ghoul form, you shouldn't be killing him anyway, but then where is the point in having this talent if we are not meant to use it?
I would like to see a Blizzard response to this, since Blue posters always say they forward posts from our European forums to the developers in the US, I hope this gets forwarded as well. Ofcourse, I hope Ghostcrawler reads this (I think he stated somewhere that he does read EU forums sometimes and responds to our threads by creating a thread on the US forums for it) and will answer these questions.
Also, if you have anything to add to this, please do so, but in an orderly manner, I don't want to turn this into a huge flamefest or anything else that might get my thread locked or otherwise negative attention.
Thank you.
