My suggestion comes down to this:
Buff the axe cd reduction of Unholy Fervor from 20 to 33%.
Here is why:
Generally, I think Spiteful Spirit should’ve gotten the same treatment as Weakening Shroud, which has no icd. It just doesn’t make sense to have a trait gated by two different cooldowns.
Robert Gee said in Ready Up “we wanted this to activate whenever you activate Death Shroud”, he also mentioned that the dagger trait isn’t even in the same specialization.
Fair enough, Unholy Fervor and Spiteful Spirit are in the same specialization for some cooldown synergy. However, even if you take them both you’re still left with a 2 second gap between the cd of Shroud and the trait. This is guaranteed to have Spiteful Spirit fail a lot, and in that case effectively double or tripple its cooldown depending on how much time you spend in Death Shroud.
Also, let’s take a look at the traits that compete with Unholy Fervor and Spiteful Spirit:
The way I see it there will be 2 “most popular” trait combinations in Spite:
- Chill of Death + Signets of Suffering
- Unholy Fervor + Close to Death
The first one is the option for corrupting boons. Unholy Feast will also corrupt after the patch, but there really is no contest when you compare it to Chill of Death and Signets of Suffering. Especially when combined with Plague Sending, Blood Bond and additional signets on your utility bar, this trait combo will turn necros into boon corrupting machines.
The second combo will be taken for the damage modifiers, especially in PvE where people are already speculating that both axe and focus weapon traits will be taken for their damage mods without actually having to run either of those weapons.
I’m also sure that Rending Shroud will occasionally have a viable place in some builds.
So Unholy Fervor + Spiteful Spirit is really the underdog combination of Spite traits, but ironically they are actually supposed to synergize directly.
How would 33% cd reduction improve the situation:
1. You could actually sync up the cooldown of Shroud with Unholy Feast.
(unless you’ve additionally traited Speed of Shadows)
2. This provides an incentive to use Unholy Fervor as a utility option over the certainly still more dominant “Chill of Death + Signets of Suffering” combo.
3. It would also provide more of an incentive to actually take Spiteful Sprit if you would otherwise trait Unholy Fervor only for the damage mod against vulnerable foes.
4. Last but not least: the axe would be buffed.
Very few people use the axe because it is generally considered to be weak.
However, even if people could make decent use of Unholy Fervor and Spiteful Spirit without actually having an axe, a cd reduction for
Ghastly Claws from 8 to 5.25 sec (plus 2.25 sec cast time), and
Unholy Feast from 15 to 10 sec
would maybe sway some players to pick up an axe afterall.