Unholy DK stat parity: Minions included!

#1 - Oct. 24, 2011, 6:45 a.m.

As many of you may know, our beloved Matron Heartless was at Blizzcon this year, and had the opportunity to ask about the state of Unholy DKs during the Q&A panel

Watch it, and their subsequent response here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_GZ7TJxpgM#t=1m10s

The relevant part of the question, to this thread, is where she points out that our minions don’t benefit from Crit (an obvious bug), nor do they benefit from our Mastery.

Blizzard’s rationale: The Crit bug will not be fixed till 5.0 because it might disrupt secondary stat weights for Unholy DKs right now. Disruption is bad, etc, etc.

While discussing this in the Acherus IRC, we were forced to acknowledge one point: If the Crit bug were indeed to be fixed, Crit would be valued ahead of Mastery. This wouldn’t be something Blizzard would want to introduce, would it?

I was curious: What if minions began benefitting from Mastery instead (by this, I mean doing additional damage as shadow damage)? Would it then eclipse Haste and upset stat weights?
As it turns out, nope. Letting our minions benefit from Mastery would be a decent DPS gain and wouldn’t affect the priority in the slightest.

At this point, we became a little more daring: What if minions began benefitting from Mastery and had the Crit bug fixed?

The answer is pretty hilarious, if not astonishing: The Unholy stat priority would not be affected in the slightest by these two changes. While they’d be closer in value to each other, we’d still value Haste > Mastery > Crit.
No disruption to speak of!

It’s been acknowledged that Unholy hasn’t been a popular or in demand spec since the advent of 4.1. We already know that the 5% Unholy Might buff won’t end up doing anything to affect this.

We’re also discussing how the 10% AP buff to Blessing of Might, etc, doesn’t even uniformly affect the spec because of our minions: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3424684660

Allowing our minions to benefit from these two stats doesn’t just buff our DPS, but brings the exact same secondary stat “parity” that you mentioned as desiring for the spec.

What say you?

#71 - Oct. 28, 2011, 9:27 p.m.

To be clear -- the bug preventing minions from inheriting crit from the DK has been fixed for 4.3.

Our point at Blizzcon was this -- we have a responsibility to adjust stat values as little as possible from patch to patch, because if we swing them wildly, players then feel like they have to constantly adjust their stats (through gems and reforging). It's likely that Unholy DKs will still not value crit as much as other secondary stats, even with the bug fixed.

We apologize for missing the actual nuance of the question at Blizzcon. It’s sometimes hard for the panelists to hear or understand the exact point that the player is getting at (they have to contend with bright lights, sound equipment echoes, and calls for buffs from people in the audience). We didn’t want to make things awkward by asking for the question to be repeated more than once.