Unholy DPS | Cataclysm, Semi-Charmed Life - Page 5

Spepijn · 10/07/10, 6:14 PM

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

Originally Posted by Tikiman49

Has anyone determined the haste cap for Unholy DKs?

For example, transferred over my DK to the Beta realms twice. On the first toon, I reforged all my haste into mastery (just to get rid of it) as much as I could, putting me at about 13% haste, and had no problems having time to hit runes and prioritize. Was never RP capped.

However, with the other copy I have ~23% haste and don't have time to hit all my runes before they're off cooldown (~7sec refresh, ~4sec with Runic Corruption up),

I see people referring to haste as the best stat for Unholy, but at what point does it become overkill. When do you start losing dps due to unused runes/RP?

TL;DR - What's the haste softcap regarding rune regen?

Edit: numbers incorrect

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?

Sulika · 10/07/10, 8:11 PM

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.

Zelretch · 10/08/10, 1:07 AM

Originally Posted by Karashote

Correct me if i am wrong, but wouldn't IT > PS > BT > SS > SS > FeS be the best opener? Instead of using a BS?

IT > PS > BS > BT leaves you with two charged Death Runes. You can still follow up with SS > SS > FeS without noticeable disruption in your rune cooldowns.

aethereal · 10/08/10, 9:03 AM

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.

Coincidence · 10/08/10, 3:58 PM

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.

Kosinissa16 · 10/08/10, 9:02 PM

Originally Posted by Darkcorre

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.

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

Sajuukh · 10/09/10, 3:17 AM

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.

Spepijn · 10/09/10, 9:30 AM

Originally Posted by Coincidence

With hit rating being 960 and Draenei needing only 840, that's 120 extra haste if I understand reforging correctly.

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.

Zandranas · 10/09/10, 9:41 AM

It's the racial passive bonus, the 120 hit rating granted cannot be reforged into haste or crit, as such it'll retain it's full value(up to the cap). The meta requirement is easy to activate if you reforge all your hit into crit and haste and gem back up to the hit cap.

Consider · 10/09/10, 10:42 AM

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.

Flopi · 10/09/10, 1:15 PM

Originally Posted by Consider

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

Omedus · 10/09/10, 6:16 PM

Originally Posted by Flopi

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 magic than 'move really quick' and sprint is on cooldown and so on but I'm still a bit concerned.

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.

rh8452 · 10/09/10, 8:31 PM

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.

Nauthul · 10/09/10, 11:08 PM

Originally Posted by darkkran

What about the use of Archaeology for a secondary skill? Is there anything that puts it on par with the rest?

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.

Solitari · 10/10/10, 5:34 AM

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.