There is no section in cooldowns devoted to ERW. Is this intentional?

For mods, I understand the concept behind the talent, I only wanted to make Consider aware in case the omission was not intentional.

The omission of ERW is intentional. It's just really difficult to say "this is when you should use it". When all your runes are down, they're not going to be up in a second, you have less than 34 RP, HoW is down, AMS is down, ideally DT isn't up, and so on... that would be the ideal time, but it's also an incredibly unlikely scenario. Best left to one's own judgement, in my opinion.

No, haste does not decrease the time between disease ticks, and no, SF isn't a disease.

I was so curious about others thoughts on AMZ that I made an account, but Damokt beat me to the question (24 hour post delay from signup).

Is there anyone with Beta access, or a better knowledge of the ability that can answer this question?

AMZ is a unique Raid buff as far as I can tell, and could be extremely useful on some fights (I would think). Is it worth shifting a point into? I would think so, and IBT looks like the best choice, but I sure would like to see some others thoughts on this.

AMZ is pretty weak. For my premade lvl 85 DK in i318/333 with HoW, the AMZ tooltip says it will absorb 28,000 dmg before disappearing (with raid buffs that would get bumped up a bit more). That DK has 83,000 hp. In terms of personal survival, 28k out of 83k is quite good, but as soon as you start sharing that with a few other raid members it becomes pretty worthless. I.E. if you share it with 2 other people in your raid, you're looking at about 10% hp. On a 2 minute CD. Requiring your best dmg rune.

As for it being unique utility, didn't priests get PW:Barrier, which absorbs much much more, or did that get scrapped again?

Delete post.

Use blood strike after your first FeS. Theoretically, that would be the only BS you use, until you have to restart your rotation due to phase change, etc, I think. After that, any blood runes (or death runes) that come up with a frost rune also available should be used to FeS, but that is only after burning every UH/Death on SS until that point. That is sort of confusing sounding, sorry.

My bad, hit rating must still give expertise.

Anyway the sentence is still incorrect "So if you had 131 hit (4%), the pet gains 13 expertise. 263 hit (8%), the pet gains 26 expertise."
It should read (for level 85):
So if you had 480 hit rating, the pet gains 13 expertise. With 960 hit rating, the pet gains 26 expertise.

I watched a video of a Goblin using the rocket racial and it caused a GCD and a beta tester I asked confirmed. Goblins are still good, just not off the GCD good!

Disc Priests have it and it works on all damage.

Just a small correction to your post, but I believe the orc racial for expertise on axes is 5 not 3.

Anyways thank you for taking the time to not only do the research, but put this all together. I am pretty sure we would all be completely lost without this.

A couple of things possibly worth mentioning.

First, at present using Death Coil as a heal while you have a Sudden Doom proc does not consume the proc. It does not refund runic power, nor does it proc Runic Empowerment, but casting it on your ghoul will give him a stack of the Ghoul Frenzy buff. So if your sudden doom procs at a point when you have some free GCDs and your ghoul is not currently transformed then you can cast a couple of free Death Coil heals on him to stack the buff fast. It also means that at any time you have a SD proc you can heal your ghoul for free without any loss of DPS (assuming you have a free GCD of course).

Next, and this I suspect will only come into play at 85 but right now you have 0.5% melee crit and 0% spell crit naked when you ding 85. The problem this presents is that you need to get a huge amount of crit on your gear just to overcome the 4.8% crit reduction the boss has. This should mean that the value of crit on your gear is reduced proportional to the amount of useless crit you need to get to overcome this penalty. If you raid with a 5% increased crit buff from some source then it won't be an issue but if not it will probably mean that crit is a pretty terrible stat. So if your crit chance is low and your typical raid setup does not include crit chance increasing buffs it is quite possible that your crit rating is wasted almost completely.

I was just reading the "Cataclysm Death Knight Changes" treat and someone posted this:


I know the numbers arn't correct (he is saying so in his post) But it did got me wondering. Is it possible to be GCD locked like he is claiming to be with 23% haste? And if so, would swapping to frost presence be a good idear then?

With 23% haste it is highly unlikely. Perhaps his post is from before they reduced the GCD to 1 second in unholy presence?

That said, when 4.0.1 hits you will probably have close to 40% haste in top end gear. Throw in another 10% haste from raid buffs and 15% from talents and you have ~65% haste on your rune regen.

That puts you on a 6 second rune refresh timer. With full uptime on RE that would give you 3 seconds to use each set of runes which would be not enough time to use all your runes and still squeeze in enough death coils to use all your SD procs and runic power so being GCD capped at least some of the time is a possibility. With a DBW haste proc up it would be almost a certainty I imagine.

Whether doing what you can to remove haste from your gear would be advantageous I don't know. I suspect moving some haste into crit would probably be a good idea though what the maximum amount of haste at which you can play efficiently will vary quite a bit based on individual circumstance and ability I imagine. Once you start drifting so close to being GCD locked the value of expertise probably will go up too I imagine.

I apologise if someone has already commented on this but I'm wondering which strategy yields higher dps for unholy dks when DT is already active:

1. Spend runic power on deathcoils to keep runic corruption up as much as possible.
2. Store up runic power to minimise dark transformation downtime. (was mentioned by some in the official forums as a substantial dps increase)

I'm assuming that there's not enough RP to do both now that dirge no longer exists in the tree. Strategy 1 seems better on paper since faster rune regen would mean more RP generated over time. However, since RC is not a 100% proc, isit likely that RC fails to proc while we have spent all our RP? This would delay the activation of DT since there would be no RP reserve to spam 5 stacks of SI when DT falls off.

Strategy 2 probably yields more consistent dps but there would be 30s where we would only use DC if we were in danger of overcapping RP or if SD procced and I guess RC uptime would be much lower?

Would there be some optimum arrangement where one could balance RC uptime and DT uptime ? Many thanks to anyone who could shed some light on this.

Do we have any math behind the racials DPS wise so far? Worgen mobility alone might put them at the top but it seems like from a pure math stand point Draenei should win out.

With hit rating being 960 and Draenei needing only 840, that's 120 extra haste if I understand reforging correctly. Since raid tiers will scale now, the racial should scale as well. I'm not sure what 120 haste equals percentage wise at 85, but I'm assuming it's around 1.5% and maybe even get up to 2 or 3% more haste than other races as Cata goes on.

Actually this is incorrect, they redesigned all of the weapon skill racials for 4.0 and caty (interesting it still links for 5 though)
Axe Specialization - Spell - World of Warcraft

And you can look at the other ones too i.e gnomes/dwarfs/humans
Sword Specialization - Spell - World of Warcraft

I think that you should add Blood Tap to a rotation on a main post, because it is really handy.
Also currently on beta DKs are often asked to Death Grip some enemies (for example from magic-immune static fields in The Vortex Pinnacle), so it might become an option to spend at least a point in Unholy Command.

You are incorrect here, When reforging a secondary stat like Hit you don't reforge 100% of that stat to (in this case) haste. The actual amount is (give or take) 40% so the 120 hit would result in 48 haste.
And because our new meta gem requires more blue then yellow gems, and that we will be using str/hit gems to meet that requirement, I don't think getting to the hit cap will be hard at all once we start getting better and better raiding gear, thus making the draenei racial lose it value pretty fast.

Draenei racial is equivalent to ~120 hit rating which, based on the fleixibility of reforging and gemming, can essentially be regarded as 120 haste.

Worgen racial is equivalent to ~179 crit rating.

Haste may be superior to crit on a per-rating-point basis, but it's actually no better on a raw-percent basis (i.e, 1% haste verse 1% crit, which is what you're doing here). Another way of looking at it is simple EP values: for 120 haste to beat 179 haste, it would have to have an EP value 50% greater, which simply isn't the case (although it is rather close).

Worgen are undoubtedly superior, especially when you toss in the sprint.

I was thinking that Blizzard is maybe overdoing the sprint. It used to be rogues stuff and then engineering stuff. When they keep the Engineering sprint in Cataclysm and also add the Worgen one then pretty much everyone has it. Don't you think that balancing encounters around that is kind of hard? You either design a raid encounter assuming that everyone has it thus making engi/worgen mandatory or you don't and thus making encounter 'abuseable'. Sure there are other encounter mechanics than 'move really quick' and sprint is on cooldown and so on but I'm still a bit concerned.

edit: typo

I don't know of any boss fight where a sprint is or would be mandatory, obviously there are a handful where it definitely helps. Blizzard can't force people to choose a certain profession, now if there is a fight where a sprint is encouraged, then I would think any player who would want to do well on that fight would try and acquire some sort of sprint ability. They do make Run Speed potions that are available to everyone.

A sprint or equivalent is invaluable on heroic lich king or sindragosa for a number of reasons, and in cataclysm heroics on beta there are many more fights requiring sudden movement and proper individual positioning than there are on live, indicating the raids will also have more of such mechanics.

Archeology is like cooking and fishing. It doesn't count as a profession as in one of the two you can have. Everyone will be able to train it and level it just like cooking. It doesn't have a real benefit to raiding or our DPS, except for maybe that sword you can get to help with entry level raiding.

Did anyone else noticed following rune system functionality? (which I believe is not working as intended).

Example: we have 3 death runes up (2 of them being converted frost pair and one is converted blood). After player spends unholy rune first one to go is converted blood (while both converted frost runes is not filling up and just sitting there) so we waste frost pair filling time. I think in this case frost should be used first then blood then frost again.

It's easy to check if you convert all blood and frost to death and start ss spam. First death runes to be spent is always converted blood, converted frost is not even considered as being there until both converted blood runes are gone.