Exactly, that can actually be useful.
If you do 15+ Atal with Tyrannical then every spider on Yazma is close to a one-shot and there will be tons. Melee classes can get really screwed by that, especially since they have to run back and forth to drop the clones anyway. Melee loose a ton of dps just because of mechanics here. Switch to Clawing Shadows and at least you can do 70-80% of your rotation (Wound application is the one thing you cannot do at range except though the pet, but by throwing Scourge Strikes and Death Coils you are at least doing something)
It also helps in some encounters with Explosive. Like the Faceless in Shrine (forgot the name), when he drops an explosive in one of his silence pools it is quite impossible for melee to kill it, if you have no ranged dps that is a problem.
So yes, it is most certainly a dps loss to slot Clawing Shadows, but the Utility of making 70% of our rotation ranged is quite useful in some situations and a very unique abilty that comes with Unholy.
I don't like the wound mechanic. It slows down the spec and makes it feel like I'm constantly setting up for damage, rather than doing damage. This is only further compounded in open-world content and pvp, where I find the spec cumbersome and un-intuitive.
Add on Unholy being a Pet AND a dot spec just makes this worse. There are also too many cooldowns (Transformation, Soul Reaper, Army of the Dead, Apocalypse, Unholy Frenzy, Gargoyle), so when they aren't up, I feel like I'm not really doing anything, which is made worse by the fact that I need to "set up" my wounds to feel like I'm doing anything in the first place.
The large number of cooldowns only exacerbates the GCD as well. The flow of gameplay seems to be too much of setting up wounds, wanting to spend them, but being interrupted by higher priority cooldowns.
Also, Unholy has really weak animations / spell effects. The fantasy is great, the spec just lacks any sort of "coolness" factor. Give me bigger and better pets, and more of them. Give Death and Decay a new animation (Why is this using the same effect as Blood?). Make scourge strike cleave the same animation that Blood has for Heartstrike cleave. Clawing shadows should release some sort purple claw from your weapon. There's a lot of potential here, and I would look at the necromancer in D3 for inspiration, but right now the only cool looking ability is Apocalypse.
Look up the UHDK on Wowhead written by Biceps or the youtube video by Marcellian (Unholy DK 8.3 or something to that effect) and join the Acherus Discord (DK Discord) don't listen to anything written here it's all trash, mostly anyway !
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That is simply not true, with high enough mastery CS is perfectly viable for ST fights.
Absolutely, I find it very unsatisfying, not only you put so much work to do okayish, but the sounds and visuals are underwhelming. Hissing and slushing, along with invisible minimalist black effects that are completely lost in a fight.
Frost is passable with most of its attacks having a nice punchy feedback, but Unholy and Blood are absent.
The point is Clawing Shadows isn't behind in dps btw, in the 8.3 world where you might get stuck with mastery corruptions or gear, or just might have naturally high mastery from high ilvl gear.
For the final words on Clawing Shadows vs All Will Serve as the only ST options, I'm just gonna leave this amazing quote from the awesome Chewie on #Acherus Discord:
Originally Posted by Chewie
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Also known as Kalrell ingame and @Kalrell on Twitters.
Here's the thing.
"Play to its strengths" might work for high-end people it is still a limiting factor that one options is basically passive while the other one requires actual setup and extra attention.
At this point Clawing Shadows would not need to be comparable to All Will Serve, it would need to actually be noticably stronger in order to warrant usage.
Because if there is a possiblity of failure then being "kinda equal" just does not cut it when the other option is literally passive.
Even with mastery corruption.
And then again, I would rather fish for more useful corruption items than mastery boosting ones.
It's not the question of "can I justify using this over the other one" but more of "why would I justify using this over a passive effect that is stronger without any setup".
You are not doing service to the level of play this question is coming from when you tell them stuff like this.
You are giving them false hope that they might do a tiny bit more dps with double the effort rather then just making them have a passive talent that does good dps no matter what. Cuz at the end, they will not do better dps at all.
What? Clawing Shadows IS comparable to All Will Serve, if not better, depending on your mastery. It is also prone to the usual pathing issues and the like. It sims about 600dps more than AWS for me
I run CS unless in using CS/BS for cleave. CS is very strong since there is a lot of movement in Nyalotha and maintaining uptime with a few ranged hits is going to do more damage than SS when you're out of range
Even if CS was EQUAL DPS to AWS on high movement fights, your uptime would be higher anyway. Now add the fact that in some cases it can sim higher just makes it a better choice over AWS on ST fights. Maybe in a perfect world where you drop BiS all the time it is not the case, but on my toon on a pure ST fight CS sims higher than AWS (Raden Skittra, Maut, Wrathion, Xanesh, Drest, Shad etc) why would I gimp myself by not picking it ?