Blizzard's complete botching of SS, sigh.

Blizzard's hotfixing of SS makes me chuckle. Not because it happened, or that I'm happy about the change, but because it was so foreseeable. For months, people were warning that the new SS couldn't hope to stay on live without a nerf, that its burst would be too much for PvP.

Q u o t e:
<Ghostcrawler> Side note 2: We have a design law around the office, named for one of the designers here, that anything overpowered is fun. There was a time when Scourge Strike hit for silly numbers. Many DKs knew it did too much damage.
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The parses that came out of the PTR weren't too bad. There were some big hits of course, but they didn't happen too often and in PvP the damage didn't seem out of control.

There were repeated posts of SS in PTR critting for 17k, 10-12k in PvP. I mean, how many parses of those did you need? How could you let this go live, when time after time people have said its burst was way out of whack? My point isn't that SS needed a nerf, rather that the change shouldn't have gone live to begin with.

What's so ridiculous was that there WAS feedback, for a whopping TWO MONTHS that SS wouldn't work in its double-critting form. Here's my post from 10/14/09:

Q u o t e:
<Aki> Yes the new SS is more scalable and thus possibly more desirable for PvE, but it'll either make SS grossly overpowered or underpowered in PvP, depending on the opponent's armor and your gearing.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=20433766548&postId=205292257777&sid=1#125

Q u o t e:
<Ghostcrawler>Maybe in retrospect we made a mistake messing with Scourge Strike at all. Maybe a superior solution would have been to let some Unholy DKs just migrate over to Obliterate or whatever.

Sadly it took you two months to figure that you messed up--people have been saying the same thing for months. I warned about the new SS months ago, back in 10/11/09:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=20143783373&postId=203084307948&sid=1#382

Q u o t e:
<Aki> The ONLY viable PvP spec right now is Unholy, and this change risks gutting Unholy PvP. I'd rather there to be a viable PvE and PvP spec than for some bizarre change that will screw up PvP and *maybe* resolve PvE issues (given the state of SS on PTR right now the outlook is bleak, even for PvE).

<snip>
If you're having it mitigated by physical armor, might as well just ditch SS entirely and make Unholy use Oblit. It's such a sloppy change that I don't see how PvE Unholy can support it. I'd love to be PvE Unholy again, but not with this convoluted change.

What's the point of putting stuff on PTR when you don't a) notice the obvious issues b) listen to feedback showing data to back that obvious issue? Revisiting Seal of Casino 2.0 with the new SS was screaming for a "hotfix" (aka nerf). What's frustrating isn't so much that you toyed with the change, but that the change had jarring and clear flaws, yet you let it sit in PTR for months and brought it out live. Don't sugarcoat the reality of why this happened: it wasn't because you didn't have enough data from PTR--the data was there. It was because you either ignored the data, or didn't put any weight behind it.

Instead of jarring hotfixes, maybe you should listen to feedback during PTR so that these things can be tested and fixed... in the test realm. Either way, please revert the change so that SS is all spell damage, and do a band-aid fix to slightly buff baseline SS dmg. It's a holdover until Cataclysm, but likely any change to SS at this point would be a rough band-aid since it has so many issues.