So I was dinking around on the beta and playing with the level 100 talents and before actually playing I was thinking how Defile and Necrotic Plague would both be pretty nifty and I couldn't wait to try them out and etc so that is basically the first thing I did.
I really, really dislike necrotic plague unfortunately.
For those who haven't played with it yet, when you apply it to a target, it starts at one stack and starts increasing each tick as you would expect it to. And it "spreads" to new targets with each tick although it never leaves the original target like the lich king's necrotic plague does. When it spreads to new targets, each new instance of the dot begins at the same stack count as the original and it is given a duration equal to the remaining duration from the original disease.
There is also no way to refresh the disease. It basically just slowly ramps up and spreads, then it hits 15 and boom, it's gone. You have to re-apply it and start over at 1 again.
Now the functionality it's self is kind of annoying, but i'd be ok with it if it was like a decent damage increase over your other diseases. The problem is, it isn't. At around 10 stacks necrotic plague does about the same damage as blood plague + frost fever. So past that it does a little more, capping out at 15 of course, but for all the stacks earlier than that it is less damage. I don't have a damage meter at the moment but it's hard to imagine a disease that does less damage than your other 2 combined could somehow end up doing more damage than them when it spends 2/3rds of the time doing less damage.
And I mean yeah it's beta, they haven't done the final damage tuning pass yet and all that jazz, but considering how close the damage is with NP and the other two diseases, even when they tweak the final numbers I really feel like the relation between the diseases and necrotic plague will be pretty similiar to what it is now in terms of damage. I mean it's entirely possible it might blow the other 2 out of the water when it's done, but I doubt it.
Anyway, just a little disappointed by it and was wondering if anyone else has played with it and had a similar experience or if they have perhaps found some use for it?
If only the disease had the full 30 second duration each time it spread, you could have it jump back to the original carrier once his fell off and have it work like a never ending wild fire of spread and growth but unfortunately it's functionality prevents that. If you take that plaguebringer talent you can jump it's stacks up to 15 a little faster than it goes on it's own so you can get more ticks at max stacks but it still just feels so underwhelming and I also find it very annoying to have to re apply it every 30 seconds.
One really cool thing I did notice in my time playing with it though is it can help me get out of things that i'd normally be defenseless against. A good bit of my testing was done in 25man ICC where i'd just use abilities and watch and see what they did. Those big ol spiders would wrap me in webs which stunned me. Normally someone else in your raid would switch to them and kill them to get you out, and you are helpless to save yourself, but my necrotic plague jumped on that web and broke it for me. Might be some potential there, although generally things like that (using ice tombs on thok for example) have a lot of health and your disease does insignificant amounts of damage relative to that health pool, but the concept is kinda neat at least, might prove useful somewhere somehow. I wonder if your necrotic plague when used on garrosh would cause it to jump to you after you got mind controlled? Would be kinda funny to die to your own disease.