Infraction for Zurm: Waste of Time

LodeRunner · 10/31/08, 12:14 AM

Post: [Death Knight] WotLK Discussion - Talents and abilities.
User: Zurm
Infraction: Waste of Time
Points: 3

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

Shamelessly giving you three infraction points where one would have sufficed.

Thoughts?

Original Post:

Shamelessly copied from the Deathknight.Info's Forum:

(Source, last post on the page, by Liquidwulfe)

So I have been thinking over the last few days...and have come up with some interesting thoughts (dangerous I know).

Several points first.
-Everything I have seen seems to indicate that Blood Strike does about 300 more damage than Plague Strike
-Desecration lasts 12 seconds, and buffs damage 5%.
-Corpse Explosion does 53% of the ghouls overall health.
-This data assumes a deathknight is putting out 2000 dps in a raid environment (minus his ghoul damage).

"So what Liquid? Get to the point!"
-Screw you hippie, I am getting there.

The basic argument here is that the current rotation of IT>PS>SS>BS>BS followed by SS>SS>SS is wrong. Instead I argue that the following rotation is superior.

For your initial rotation, we use the following:

PS>IT>BS>BS>SS

After the initial rotation is done, we do a sustained rotation of these two:

Rotation1: X>BS>SS>SS In these rotations, X is either PS or IT.
Rotation2: BS>X>SS>SS

Why is this rotation superior? Simple. If we only use Plague Strike every other rotation (once per 20 seconds), we have 8 seconds where desecration is not up. Assuming 2000 dps, this is a loss of 800 damage, costing us far more than we would gain if we had just replaced a Bloody Strike with a Plague Strike.

Additionally, the rotation is much simpler. We do not have the "dual rune cooldown" problem, where we cant burn a rune instantly because we need another rune to come off of cooldown before burning a dual rune ability. Every rune is burned EXACTLY when it comes off of cooldown.

Above, I placed an X in the rotations. This is where Plague Strike is used every rotation, HOWEVER, I am assuming you have the Glyph of Scourge Strike equipped. The purpose of using this glyph is to give us consistent access to Frost Fever without using an Ice Rune. When the X comes up (which will be a death rune), if the target does not have Icy Touch running, then you should burn the X for an Icy Touch instead. This ensures that our Scourge Strikes are operating at max damage always. Otherwise, we drop another Plague Strike, and benefit from an almost continuous uptime of Desecration.

Even more DPS!

Yes, we can squeeze even more dps out of our beloved unholy spec. How? Simple. Blow the crap out of our ghoul. That's right, sacrifice our slobbering friends raggedy ass for the greater good. The above rotation gives us 3 ranks of Night of the Dead per rotation. After three rotations (30 seconds) we will have 9 ranks of NotD making our ghoul instantly raisable (9 ranks + 30 seconds. How convenient!).

We then cast Corpse Explosion on him, causing him to Jihad allover our chosen prey's face, causing anywhere from 4.5k to 7.5k damage. We can then instantly resummon his raggedy ass to continue the fight.

Thoughts? I haven't had much time to think about it, but it seems like a good idea to me. The weakness of course is that you can't fully rely on the SS glyph to keep FF up, but it will certainly minimize the amount Desecration downtime if you pay attention.