Clawing Shadows

[Beefkow]

Auto attacks are a good amount of your damage, so losing it (as well as SD) would be a hard hit to take

Sorry, I was thinking from a pvp prospective, but in pve I still think AA's are not even that unique anymore.

[Maxweii]

No, one person said it would be cool if they added more talents to make unholy a ranged build. And you, and others, took that to mean clawing shadows means death knights will stand at range, do no auto-attack damage and suck. No one made the claim this talent makes unholy a ranged spec. But in typical online forum fashion other posters took what was said, extrapolated it to the nth degree, made a thousand assumptions and started a debate that didn't exist.

The moment it was said about lost auto attack damage it was implied that the DK was obviously not in range of the target. It's simple as that.

[Kithelle]

With Clawing Shadows being ranged, some of the people here are taking about a possible ranged UH build. It would be a niche, but very cool, spec. However, it is not likely to happen (see also Shuriken Toss).

One ability getting ranged does not make a ranged class...why anyone would think that talent would make Unholy a ranged spec I don't know. They obviously have eliminated hybrid specs...they couldn't balance 2H/DW Frost...what makes them think they're suddenly going to make Unholy a hybrid ranged/melee spec?

How are you going to build Runic Power? Significant festering wounds? It adds ranged utility but it doesn't make Unholy a ranged spec...

Why can't people accept Unholy is what it is? First people want it to be petless and now people want it to be ranged...well it's a melee pet class.

[RuneDK]

One ability getting ranged does not make a ranged class...why anyone would think that talent would make Unholy a ranged spec I don't know. They obviously have eliminated hybrid specs...they couldn't balance 2H/DW Frost...what makes them think they're suddenly going to make Unholy a hybrid ranged/melee spec?

How are you going to build Runic Power? Significant festering wounds? It adds ranged utility but it doesn't make Unholy a ranged spec...

Why can't people accept Unholy is what it is? First people want it to be petless and now people want it to be ranged...well it's a melee pet class.

Oh my god, the point is someone brought up if we could get a talent to make the entire toolkit for unholy as ranged attacks. I really wish people would read before making passive aggressive posts towards people in general but especially to people who've been part of this community for a lot longer than those making the passive aggressive remarks.

[Maxweii]

One ability getting ranged does not make a ranged class...why anyone would think that talent would make Unholy a ranged spec I don't know. They obviously have eliminated hybrid specs...they couldn't balance 2H/DW Frost...what makes them think they're suddenly going to make Unholy a hybrid ranged/melee spec?

How are you going to build Runic Power? Significant festering wounds? It adds ranged utility but it doesn't make Unholy a ranged spec...

Why can't people accept Unholy is what it is? First people want it to be petless and now people want it to be ranged...well it's a melee pet class.

Something like this build here makes it obvious the possibility of a ranged Unholy build could work, and even then the build would work in melee as well. The possibility of being able to do about 80-90% of your damage without being in melee range, as a melee, is huge. Even then the only talents that would more or less have to be taken is Clawing Shadows and Infected Claws, Soul Reaper being the only other talent that more or less doesn't fit but luckily the other two talents fit it.

Really having Unholy being able to go ranged like this is just a tremendous help to it. Let's say there's a council fight, where one of the mobs teleports out as another teleports in on the other side of the room (about 25 yards away). A couple of second before the boss teleports away you start running to the other side of the room, still being able to do almost full damage as well as getting into melee range of the next target so you essentially lose no uptime on it. That's huge, it really is. Having a kit that can turned you into a psuedo ranged dps as a melee really is a part of the mobility we need as well, as if you don't lose uptime from being at ranged then what exactly do you need Sprint or such for?

[nathrizarri]

Sorry I didn't mean to be passive agressive, I was trying to be fully agressive and mock him, humiliate him because of his contradiction between his perspective and actual knowledge/stance.

Target is in range=You auto attack/Use abilities
Target is not in range=You do not auto attack/you do not use melee abilities

We are clear on that? Good, let's go on..

What Clawing Shadows offer is:

Ranged utility

Full shadow damage, no armor mitigation.

Clawing shadows does not make you lose auto attacks. Your current position does. Clawing shadows enables you to perform extra actions from distance which you will not be performing without it(Ranged utility).

I assumed you were talking something like Archimonde/doomfire. Doomfire spawns, you tab switch to it and use Clawing Shadows, meanwhile losing auto attack(!).

No you won't. You do not need to. If this is happening, you are doing something wrong. Personally If someone misses an AA I wouldn't mind, won't rage, insult them anyway. You have 2 alternative, playmaking oppurtinities there.

Focus/mouseover targetting:

Focus may take some target switching but with a proper macro you can do it once per doomfire and get away with it. In order not to lose an AA you must have a bar/timer for your auto attacks. When you perform a melee swing, regardless your target is in range or not, It starts It's cooldown. Wheter you AA or not is determined by the range when yourt next swing time arrives. It is basically a fixed, auto casting spell. Your character can blink 40 yards away and back within that 3.6 seconds(default melee swing time) and when you are in range at the end of that 3.6, you perform the next AA.

Mouseover is more of a long term investment, your mouse indicator must be there when you are casting the ability. Short term it is harder but when you get used to it, you do it automatically and you do not need to watch your swing timer like your focus targetting.

3rd option is to create a macro for mouseover focusing,

[Maxweii]

nathrizarri, considering your position on this and the fact you're nit picking past obvious well worded arguments to try to come out looking like you're correct on this matter, you should take a step back and stop trying to back everyone here for no reason.

[Kithelle]

Oh my god, the point is someone brought up if we could get a talent to make the entire toolkit for unholy as ranged attacks. I really wish people would read before making passive aggressive posts towards people in general but especially to people who've been part of this community for a lot longer than those making the passive aggressive remarks.

Yet completely ignored what I said...they want Unholy to be Melee Pet...dual purpose specs are dead for at least Legion if not forever...it started with Petless Unholy and now it's Ranged Unholy...neither are going to happen.

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Something like this build here makes it obvious the possibility of a ranged Unholy build could work, and even then the build would work in melee as well. The possibility of being able to do about 80-90% of your damage without being in melee range, as a melee, is huge. Even then the only talents that would more or less have to be taken is Clawing Shadows and Infected Claws, Soul Reaper being the only other talent that more or less doesn't fit but luckily the other two talents fit it.

Really having Unholy being able to go ranged like this is just a tremendous help to it. Let's say there's a council fight, where one of the mobs teleports out as another teleports in on the other side of the room (about 25 yards away). A couple of second before the boss teleports away you start running to the other side of the room, still being able to do almost full damage as well as getting into melee range of the next target so you essentially lose no uptime on it. That's huge, it really is. Having a kit that can turned you into a psuedo ranged dps as a melee really is a part of the mobility we need as well, as if you don't lose uptime from being at ranged then what exactly do you need Sprint or such for?

Except you aren't going to be doing 80-90%...those numbers are completely made up.

First off unless the ghoul suddenly gets unlimited energy you aren't going to see a whole lot of infected claws proccing unless you get lucky. You're gonna lose sudden doom procs which affects damage...even more damage lost if you take Vile Malady. You're gonna lose auto attacks...even if it isn't a ton of damage it's still damage. You've got 3 talents based on festering wounds...with a chain of bad RNG you could potentially got for periods of time with little or no wounds. How are you going to apply your disease?

Your AOE will be pretty much nothing...what would be the point of calling it a *ranged* spec when you have to melee?

[Nayami]

Something like this build here makes it obvious the possibility of a ranged Unholy build could work, and even then the build would work in melee as well. The possibility of being able to do about 80-90% of your damage without being in melee range, as a melee, is huge. Even then the only talents that would more or less have to be taken is Clawing Shadows and Infected Claws, Soul Reaper being the only other talent that more or less doesn't fit but luckily the other two talents fit it.

Would be great if this could actually work, however would Infected Claws actually be enough as the only Festering Wound builder? It's a 50% chance to apply 1 stack when using Claw. I don't know the current 'up-time' on Claw in Legion, but if the energy regen is too low then I have my doubts about the talent. Hopefully we'll see it as a viable build someday on live or at least something similar.

[Maxweii]

Except you aren't going to be doing 80-90%...those numbers are completely made up.

First off unless the ghoul suddenly gets unlimited energy you aren't going to see a whole lot of infected claws proccing unless you get lucky. You're gonna lose sudden doom procs which affects damage...even more damage lost if you take Vile Malady. You're gonna lose auto attacks...even if it isn't a ton of damage it's still damage. You've got 3 talents based on festering wounds...with a chain of bad RNG you could potentially got for periods of time with little or no wounds. How are you going to apply your disease?

Your AOE will be pretty much nothing...what would be the point of calling it a *ranged* spec when you have to melee?

"Sighs"

Really, you're nitpicking and not even reading what I wrote.

The only talents that matter in this "build" are Infected Claws and Clawing Shadows. Other then that, and not taking Soul Reaper, I just took some random talents. You could also do this build, or what about this build, or even could take this one.

How will we apply our disease? I dunno maybe through Outbreak which is the way we apply it in Legion, which is a ranged attack.
AoE would be nothing, yet you can drop DnD from range and still use Clawing Shadows to cleave targets in it.

There's literally no point in nitpicking this. It's a build, that while it's application are limited, is in early alpha. The possibility of having Unholy be able to do ~80-90% of it's damage from range is there, but that doesn't mean we will be at range all the time because of it. It's a way to circumvent lack of mobility, by being able to do a good portion of our damage/rotation from range.
Really, I even put in an example of where this would be very helpful to use it, please read through things entirely and think about what was said before stating everything put was wrong.

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Would be great if this could actually work, however would Infected Claws actually be enough as the only Festering Wound builder? It's a 50% chance to apply 1 stack when using Claw. I don't know the current 'up-time' on Claw in Legion, but if the energy regen is too low then I have my doubts about the talent. Hopefully we'll see it as a viable build someday on live or at least something similar.

Each Death Coil you use will restore 10 Energy to your ghoul. Seeing as we have all Death Runes and can use SS anytime because of it (or well CS here), you're not really losing runic power generation at all. Also you will get 3 runic from each FW popped, which isn't much but over the course of a fight it will end up being a lot (and with increased runic power gen from our artifact each rune we spend would give us I think 13 runic power when that talent is maxed out anyways, which helps us a lot overall).

I mean there's tons of subtleties to this. It's obviously not going to make Unholy ranged completely, but it gives us a real strong way to do almost full damage at ranged, meaning we don't lose boss uptime because of movement or switching to a distant target. Likely it would be a very strong build for a high mobility fight as it would remove a lot of our downtime, but realistically on a more static fight it wouldn't be as good as it can't be utilized as much.

[Kronik85]

This thread sure went downhill fast lol. For a fully ranged UH build to work (100% performance outside of melee range) then all we need is another talent that buffs the Ghoul's damage when the DK isn't in melee range of the target and allows it to generate Sudden Doom procs.

Apparently I need to bullet proof this post to avoid posters leaping at me so I'm not saying the build currently exists, will ever exist or may even be an optimal build. Just the extra talents we would need for a fully ranged build to exist.

[Nayami]

Each Death Coil you use will restore 10 Energy to your ghoul. Seeing as we have all Death Runes and can use SS anytime because of it (or well CS here), you're not really losing runic power generation at all. Also you will get 3 runic from each FW popped, which isn't much but over the course of a fight it will end up being a lot (and with increased runic power gen from our artifact each rune we spend would give us I think 13 runic power when that talent is maxed out anyways, which helps us a lot overall).

Didn't know that about Death Coil, it's not mentioned within the tooltip in the wowhead talent calculator so I never saw it, but I saw it now on the mmo-c talent calculator. Can see how it could work, there's also an artifact trait that gives us a 30% chance (at 3/3) to refund a rune so should help too.

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This thread sure went downhill fast lol. For a fully ranged UH build to work (100% performance outside of melee range) then all we need is another talent that buffs the Ghoul's damage when the DK isn't in melee range of the target and allows it to generate Sudden Doom procs.

Apparently I need to bullet proof this post to avoid posters leaping at me so I'm not saying the build currently exists, will ever exist or may even be an optimal build. Just the extra talents we would need for a fully ranged build to exist.

Do you even focus/mouseover macro bro? (Just kidding)

Nice suggestion regarding sudden doom with pet. Maybe it could be added into Infected Claws where it would also make the ghoul generate sudden doom procs instead of the DK.

[Maxweii]

This thread sure went downhill fast lol. For a fully ranged UH build to work (100% performance outside of melee range) then all we need is another talent that buffs the Ghoul's damage when the DK isn't in melee range of the target and allows it to generate Sudden Doom procs.

Apparently I need to bullet proof this post to avoid posters leaping at me so I'm not saying the build currently exists, will ever exist or may even be an optimal build. Just the extra talents we would need for a fully ranged build to exist.

It's alpha/beta time in the DK forums, same thing happened in WoD where random people come out of nowhere and have infallible logic without reason and can never be proven wrong. Give it time, it will pass.

Didn't know that about Death Coil, it's not mentioned within the tooltip in the wowhead talent calculator so I never saw it, but I saw it now on the mmo-c talent calculator. Can see how it could work, there's also an artifact trait that gives us a 30% chance (at 3/3) to refund a rune so should help too.

Yeah dunno why wowhead doesn't have it listed, as it's rather important. The increased runic along with the refund chance could likely be very lucrative to help it along. More or less just having the option to do so is amazing, because as I said, it essentially supplements lack of mobility talents or such for Unholy.

[Challenge]

I wish we had insight on what sludge belcher does and what it does when dark transformed

[Kithelle]

"Sighs"

Really, you're nitpicking and not even reading what I wrote.

The only talents that matter in this "build" are Infected Claws and Clawing Shadows. Other then that, and not taking Soul Reaper, I just took some random talents. You could also do this build, or what about this build, or even could take this one.

How will we apply our disease? I dunno maybe through Outbreak which is the way we apply it in Legion, which is a ranged attack.
AoE would be nothing, yet you can drop DnD from range and still use Clawing Shadows to cleave targets in it.

There's literally no point in nitpicking this. It's a build, that while it's application are limited, is in early alpha. The possibility of having Unholy be able to do ~80-90% of it's damage from range is there, but that doesn't mean we will be at range all the time because of it. It's a way to circumvent lack of mobility, by being able to do a good portion of our damage/rotation from range.
Really, I even put in an example of where this would be very helpful to use it, please read through things entirely and think about what was said before stating everything put was wrong.

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Each Death Coil you use will restore 10 Energy to your ghoul. Seeing as we have all Death Runes and can use SS anytime because of it (or well CS here), you're not really losing runic power generation at all. Also you will get 3 runic from each FW popped, which isn't much but over the course of a fight it will end up being a lot (and with increased runic power gen from our artifact each rune we spend would give us I think 13 runic power when that talent is maxed out anyways, which helps us a lot overall).

I mean there's tons of subtleties to this. It's obviously not going to make Unholy ranged completely, but it gives us a real strong way to do almost full damage at ranged, meaning we don't lose boss uptime because of movement or switching to a distant target. Likely it would be a very strong build for a high mobility fight as it would remove a lot of our downtime, but realistically on a more static fight it wouldn't be as good as it can't be utilized as much.

You're still making assumptions...you aren't going to be doing 90% of your damage from range...you get two death coils from 6 clawing shadows...that's only 20 energy...not even enough for another claw...he never regenerated energy that fast.

You just are overly estimating something that hasn't even been tested...so far from the looks of it you're tossing a ton of damage up to RNG.

If infected claws doesn't proc much you're not getting any damage out of festering wounds or bursting sores and not getting extra runic power from goreseeker.

A good chunk of your damage literally depends on a that has a 50% chance to proc...50/50...which means you have just as much of a chance for it to happen as it doesn't...so you have as much chance to do decent damage as you do to do no almost no damage.

But eh up to you...if you want to risk doing horrible damage so you can feel like a special snowflake it's now sweat off my back.

[Maxweii]

You're still making assumptions...you aren't going to be doing 90% of your damage from range...you get two death coils from 6 clawing shadows...that's only 20 energy...not even enough for another claw...he never regenerated energy that fast.

You just are overly estimating something that hasn't even been tested...so far from the looks of it you're tossing a ton of damage up to RNG.

If infected claws doesn't proc much you're not getting any damage out of festering wounds or bursting sores and not getting extra runic power from goreseeker.

A good chunk of your damage literally depends on a that has a 50% chance to proc...50/50...which means you have just as much of a chance for it to happen as it doesn't...so you have as much chance to do decent damage as you do to do no almost no damage.

But eh up to you...if you want to risk doing horrible damage so you can feel like a special snowflake it's now sweat off my back.

Missing the point by miles, but continue with this if you want. Not worth trying to reason with you.

[nathrizarri]

nathrizarri, considering your position on this and the fact you're nit picking past obvious well worded arguments to try to come out looking like you're correct on this matter, you should take a step back and stop trying to back everyone here for no reason.

I cannot take a dicussion seriously when core of it hangs on the opposite direction of blizzard's route for now. To be able to support a full range build, there are so many different concerns.

I know blizzard certainly have thought about a full range, plate caster, our weapon is more magical than fully functioning physical striking weapon. In future, like next expansion after legion, we can expect this to be the core of unholy. Remember farms, garrisons. Small step each expansion. But to make a proper discussion, I expect not just complain, come with a solution

[Maxweii]

I cannot take a dicussion seriously when core of it hangs on the opposite direction of blizzard's route for now. To be able to support a full range build, there are so many different concerns.

I know blizzard certainly have thought about a full range, plate caster, our weapon is more magical than fully functioning physical striking weapon. In future, like next expansion after legion, we can expect this to be the core of unholy. Remember farms, garrisons. Small step each expansion. But to make a proper discussion, I expect not just complain, come with a solution

Nobody, not even I, am talking about Unholy going full ranged. We're talking about being able to maintain MOST of your damage at range, not switching from being a melee to range.
Blizz just reworked the class, we're not being turned into a ranged class the expansion after Legion don't worry.

[Amalkatrazz]

It's a pretty cool talent, but it will mostly be used for PvP unless it actually deals more damage than SS considering that it's 100% shadow damage. I would love to see a talent that morphs all our melee abilities into ranged abilities and also gives us some extra damage to make up for the lost auto-attack damage.

That's what I suggested in another thread weeks ago

This is very weak because your ghoul uses Claw only once every 3 seconds or so, and with a 50% chance, it will only cause one FW every 6 seconds on average. This is a much lower rate of FW application than you would normally reach by means of Festering Strike, so Clawing Shadows in their current alpha implementation will not make you into a sufficient RDPS; it is just a filler spell you can use when having to move away from the boss, but standing away all the time and spending all the runes on this one will be a significant DPS loss.

Speaking of Clawing Shadows, I think it would be better to make it into a single powerful game-changer like

"Death from afar.

Your Festering Strike, Death Strike, Scourge Strike, and Necrotic Strike (if taken) can now be used at range of 30m and deal shadow damage. Autoattacks of your pets can now trigger Sudden Doom".

The latest component is to compensate lack of our autoattacks, bc Sudden Doom will still be a valuable effect. Lack of autoattack damage is compensated by these ranged attacks dealing Shadow damage only, so they are 100% Mastery-buffed. Implementation of such a talent will surely create a specific sub-spec like the one made for MM and SV hunters with Lone Wolf, for Warriors with Gladiator, or for Rets with Seraphim. If done like I hereby suggest, UH will be the first plate-wearer RDPS ever in the game. Sounds cool?
Speaking of the Apocalypse's passive effect, it could be changed to proc off special attacks ("yellow ones"), not autoattacks ("white"), for this sub-spec to synergize with the weapon properly.

[Nayami]

That's what I suggested in another thread weeks ago

Yeah, I was thinking of you when I was typing it out! Couldn't find the post again to quote it so just wrote something brief myself. Reading it again makes me excited for the next build, I know that the probability is that it won't happen but I've already been surprised with all of the DK changes we got so maybe, just maybe, we'll see something similar to this talent.