Castigator Viable?

[friedmudkipz]

Considering you have nothing but heresay and nameless accusations (which actually CS was BUFFED just before Legion went live as it went from weapon damage to attack power based damage). You're not really selling yourself as a knowledgeable source of information.
Actually the reason it was viable was exactly that change from weapon damage to attack power as it allowed for much better scaling on the strike as as such easily allowed it to overtake Cast with certain setups.

Is there any debate that CS was doing inferior damage to baseline scourge strike early in the xpac? I guess the memory of every dk other than you is just unreliable. TIL personal experience qualifies as hearsay.

[Maxweii]

Is there any debate that CS was doing inferior damage to baseline scourge strike early in the xpac? I guess the memory of every dk other than you is just unreliable. TIL personal experience qualifies as hearsay.

Yes there is debate for it, and people showed plenty of it during the time it was out and were always shot down (myself included) because saying anything that isn't the "popular" talent is viable is madness to most people.
Hence why, people saying Castigator is viable now, was met with shitty responses.

[Deleted]

Cast clearly did more DPS in real scenarios back then, there were no logs to show otherwise. It wasnt the biggest difference, but a difference was there no matter what. That was mostly because the bosses were tailor made for Cast, with lots of cleave, high boss uptime etc. So most of the Advantage of CS was basically lost. The first boss where Cast didnt work well anymore was Odyn.

About the current situation: Castigator is mostly useless because half of its effect is wasted. While you still significantly increase the amount of Wounds "spend" with Scourg Striking, building wounds barely increases with the talent, since alot of Wounds come from the 4set. That really diminishes the value of Cast alot. At the same time CS was buffed for T19 and the Encounters are more suited for it.

That might again change for T20 where the Setbonuses seem to favor specs that spend lots of Runes quickly. So Cast+PP might be an Option at least for Cleave/AoE. UF could be nice for pure ST. I guess we will see...

[crazed]

Yes it's viable, I even saw a rank 1 log not long ago with castigator spec.

[Maxweii]

Yes it's viable, I even saw a rank 1 log not long ago with castigator spec.

If you're talking about that Spellblade log that was rank 1 with Cast, it was with the bugged Black Claws where it popped extra wounds and as such has been removed since then.

[veilburner]

Is there any debate that CS was doing inferior damage to baseline scourge strike early in the xpac? I guess the memory of every dk other than you is just unreliable. TIL personal experience qualifies as hearsay.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...lawing+shadows

this is just an example of a debate. i am sure there are more just use search ffs.

Yes there is debate for it, and people showed plenty of it during the time it was out and were always shot down (myself included) because saying anything that isn't the "popular" talent is viable is madness to most people.
Hence why, people saying Castigator is viable now, was met with shitty responses.

you deserve to be shot down because you are ignorant and stupid af

[friedmudkipz]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...lawing+shadows

this is just an example of a debate. i am sure there are more just use search ffs.

You literally just linked a thread debating which of the two talents other than CS to use, which is completely irrelevant to what I said. Did you reply to the wrong post?

[Maxweii]

I wouldn't give him much response thought anymore as he's failed to put much effort into it now.

[Raiz]

you deserve to be shot down because you are ignorant and stupid af

Maybe we don't have the same definition of the word "viable". He/She isn't ignorant. Far from it.

[VakeStorm]

fuck no, CS was stealth nerfed at the start of expansion and did much less damage than SS even with high mastery. castigator was the only viable talent at the time. there was not an issue that it was popular or not. it wasn't viable and it was pure shit. let me rephrase; it did so shit damage that even being a ranged attack couldn't saved from its fate. also if you had bracers legendary, castigator was pretty much mandatory.

i know you are the white knight of the dk forums but do you really want to act like a total ignorant person? what drives you really?

One, no reason to be rude to him.

Two, I would suggest you reread what I wrote a few entries ago.

TL;DR
Viability does not equal best. It means you can do it, but it will prove more challenging to do it well compared to other means. If you had 70+% mastery prior to 7.1.5 you were doing some great damage with CS, better post 7.1.5 for sure, but getting to that level of mastery wasn't as easy compared to 30% crit, 20%, 30+% mastery for CAST in EN. The standard boss drops didn't support it well so you relied on a lot of M+ drop luck.

CS did get a nerf, but it wasn't stealth. It was very up front in the 7.0 pre-legion launch patches. The problem was many of our abilities didn't scale well because our mastery scaling was a little borked from 101 -> 110. Especially, compared to what mastery we had at 100 with HFC gear.

I personally had a great mastery set from HFC so 100 to 107 was a great. Around 108 I noticed I was falling behind. I went CAST for giggles and I was instantly doing better. CAST pulled ahead because SS scaled better because of ilvl/STR.

Yes bracers made CAST total LoLz, but you could have done CS if you had the right gear just fine, including bracers. It was just easier to go the CAST route for many reasons already stated. 7.1.5 just flipped the scales on CAST vs CS. It hasn't made CAST not viable, it's just the harder talent setup to do now.

Again, viable doesn't mean best/top dps, it just means possible to do well with. Outside of a set of parameters it's likely not worth your time. Inside those parameters it's worth considering/could be better. Some gear setups make certain talents/spec more or less better in different situations.

[Deleted]

Castigator was not viable before the new traits, now it's viable.

This. I think the major issue is that why would you want to utilise a talent that increases the RNG in Unholy? If you like that, power to you. But if it's simply 'I have a bunch of crit, so ill use it' - I would recommend planning to go clawing shadows and gearing for that.

[Wildcaard]

Is there any debate that CS was doing inferior damage to baseline scourge strike early in the xpac? I guess the memory of every dk other than you is just unreliable. TIL personal experience qualifies as hearsay.

it sounds like your memory is muddy, clawing shadows was hitting HARD when it first came out and they stealth nerfed it 40% or something, guess you forgot about that.

- - - Updated - - -

If you are planning on going castigator, i found 35% to be optimal for crit, i noticed alot more of those full stack poppings happening when i went to 35 compared to 30. I think with the wound buffs its probably close but the fact that you cant attack from range makes it less desirable in my opinion. For example, on guldan i can help break bonds and spam cs and deathcoil without losing much dps, with castigator you cant do anything. Its less about "what does the most damage" and more about "what has more utility".