Welcome to the Death Knight Simple Questions thread. This thread is for all your simple questions which you expect to have simple answers and thus do not require their own thread.

Note that all forum rules still apply: we said simple questions, not stupid questions (which have no place on these forums). You're still expected to make a reasonable effort to find the answer yourself by searching and reading the threads and making use of spreadsheets and any other tools that may be available. If, however, you're fairly confident that your question is not easily answered with available information, but don't think it will generate sufficient discussion to require it's own thread, this is the place to ask.

Is Blood Tap really usable at all, considering that each spec can turn certain runes into Death Runes?

---

Hi,

I have very simple question, and I hope, that this is the right topic to ask.

We try to kill Alysrazor. I run as a DK tank. I have trouble with killing the adds. 2-3 times/10 fight I can manage alone, but during the other try DPS must help. 1-2 times the adds will live until the tornado phases.
My ilvl364-365. I use Impatience of youth trinket, Golemblood potion, strenghts food+flask, and rune of fallen crusader on my Magmaw mace (359)
I use DRW on CD. (together with IPoY trinket and GB poti)
Hit: 4.23% Exp: 21
I try to use every GCD, so if neccessary pull the adds, i use the pull-stop-hit-pull method.
Our druid give me the thorn spell, paladin give aura.
How can I improve my DPS a bit more?
If I change some of my gear to DPS gear it can decrease my survavibility,isn't it?
What is your suggestion?

Impatience of Youth is a bad trinket. Use Essence of the Eternal Flame, Heart of Rage, or License to Slay for your dps trinkets. DRW is a survivability cooldown, not a damage cooldown on this fight. The weapon does not benefit from the damage buff, so using it is actually a DPS loss because of runic power wasted that could have been used on Rune Strike. The same is true for Raise Dead. You could also put Fallen Crusader on your weapon instead of Swordshattering for this fight.

Simple question regarding 2h vs DW frost (I cant use SimCraft at the moment : <).

Is it better to use Heroic Skullstealer Greataxe (391) or 2x Obsidian Cleaver (378) in normal firelands gear? And how big of a difference is there, or is there notable one at all?

Nope. The reason SPs can do it is because of the 6sec of 90% DR with Dispersion. DKs don't have anything even close to that. AMZ and AMS would only last like 1 tick each past 10 stacks. DP/DS/HS aren't good enough heals, and IBF is only 20% DR, which won't help at all near the end like Dispersion does.

Even if healers could somehow keep you up, you'd be such a mana sponge, they wouldn't be able to last the whole fight.

I have a question about the Frost priority system.

The guide says that Obliterate becomes first priority after diseases when either KM is up or "if both Frost/Unholy pairs and/or both Death runes are up". It then goes on to explain why this is: "Keeping runes on cooldown is next on priority. This means getting one of each rune on cooldown before starting on the other set of runes." My question is this: does Obliterate retain this high priority when two runes of only one of the types are up (such as FFU or UUD)? This would only come into play in the rare instances where you're either runic capped or Rime is up (because only those take priority over just Obliterating anyway when you can), but with the RNG of Runic Empowerment, having odd runes up is more frequent than it was in Wrath. I can see arguments for it either way, and was curious to find out if it had already been figured out.

I think you're asking "what do I do if my RP is capped and I have UUFfdd" or "what do I do if my Rime has procced and I have UUFfdd." if that's what you mean, then in the first case I'd frost strike followed by oblit and in the second I'd HB and then oblit. Quick and dirty mental math seems to equate either a frost strike vs one second of a rune cooldown, or a howling blast vs one second of a rune cooldown. Assuming an 8 second rune refresh, one second of a rune would be roughly equal to one sixteenth of an obliterate, again, according to my quick and dirty reasoning. One sixteenth of an obliterate, in the form of one second of a single rune wasted, should not approach the damage lost by losing a potential (45% chance) of a rime proc, nor should it approach the 66% of a frost strike you're losing in RP by obliterating while capped.

I haven't raided as UH since ToC and I'd like to ask three things about current UH:

1) Which stats does the ghoul/garg inherit? I'm under the impression pets inherit your Str, but not your AP (meaning Bladed Armor does not affect the ghoul), in the UH thread there was discussion the pet doesn't inherit your Crit. I assume it does inherit your haste/hit though?

2) Who is the optimal target for Frenzy? Assuming roughly equal ilvl, is there some class that gains disproportionately more than us? I'm tempted to assume Ferals

3) While there is clear indication Haste is king and Mastery second, (while hitcapped, of course) I am safe in assuming not exp capping isn't an issue, correct? This would suggest an almost zero mastery, as practically, the only mastery you'll end with is from items that have it as base. Everything else should have either/both Hst+Mst and if not should get reforged to them.

1. The Ghoul and Gargoyle only inherit the DK's Strength, Haste, and Hit. You're correct that they gain nothing from AP. Note that the Ghoul's Expertise is based on your Hit, so having 8% Hit Rating on one's character will give the Ghoul 8% Hit and 26 Expertise. I say Hit Rating since a Draenei's racial and the talent Nerves of Cold Steel do not add onto it. The first isn't too much of an issue, and the latter most definitely isn't.

2. Once upon a time a Fury Warrior was the best target for Frenzy because their Mastery boosts the effects of enrages. Since their Mastery got nerfed though, it's pretty much best to use it on ourselves just before Gargoyle. There are cases where a Haste-loving spec and appropriately skilled player in the raid might benefit from it more than the DK, but that call is made case by case.

3. Depending on how one plays, capping Expertise isn't an issue. Unholy usually has enough free time that a dodge here and there isn't a big deal. That said, the better one's gear is the higher the value Expertise will have because of stronger hits and wasting more resources as we get higher Haste. In situations where we're GCD-capped most of the time (Sinestra for example), Expertise should be capped because of the wasted globals.

After countless hours on Heroic Ragnaros tonight, I noticed my Outbreaks and Howling Blasts were missing every once in a while, which was really getting on my nerves. I took a look at my character sheet and this is what I saw:



Runic Focus - Spell - World of Warcraft

Since when did the Runic Focus passive effect not take full effect? Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

Runic Focus is still providing the full effect, you forgot to factor in "Nerves of Cold steel" which provides 3% melee hit while dualwielding at max rank. So at a hit rating conversion of 120.109 per 1% of melee hit and 102.446 per 1% of spell hit 603 hitrating would put you just where you are at atm in terms of both melee and spellhit.

Edit: to hit spellhit cap you would need 820 hitrating total.

There has been discussion in the Frost thread about whether or not reaching the spellhit cap is good or not. It's definitely more comfortable and not bad, but not the best investment of DPS stats. That is to say, you should not expressly aim to reach the spellhit cap, but if you find your gear forces you to exceed the melee hit cap it's not at all a total loss.

Given frost's playstyle, the advent of missing an Outbreak really just means being forced to PS once, and losing a Rime proc doesn't have any other impact on game mechanics, so losing a spell here or there is mostly an inconvenience rather than a major DPS loss.

Hi there,

Iv ben looking for a reforger site that was mentioned on one of the forums a few months ago, i have tried searching but obviously the search results for 'reforging' are numerous to say the least. I was wondering if anyone knows what the website is called. To elaborate a bit more, the website basically downloads your character from armoury, you tell it what spec you are, i.e. blood etc, and it lists optimal reforging options, enchants and gems. It also has a 'optimize' button.

Mr. Robot is commonly used for this, but I do not know if that is the specific website for which you are looking.

A fair word of warning when using Mr.Robot- you should probably have your Class / Spec's PvE thread up in a separate tab or window when using it so that you can compare the two, and make a decision based on that.

I'm considering a race change to an actual DPS race since I've now stopped tanking but I'm very undecided right now with all the inaccurate information flying around so figured I'd ask before wasting my money on picking the wrong race.

I've obviously been stuck trying to decide between Orc and Goblin. Since my guild is progressing on Rag Heroic my choice will be mostly dependant on that boss, more specifically the DPS race/check in P3. As you might or might not know you have 135 seconds to burn the boss from ~40% to 10% on Heroic. Which lets you Pillar three times and Blood Fury twice. This is also where most guilds blow Bloodlust (as do we). With that bit of background info I'd like some assistance picking Race. Mind you that racechanging for one boss is a little stupid so if the difference is marginal that would obviously affect my choice. I obviously understand that the Rocket Jump is a little hard to weigh in terms of usefulness.

I've done some napkin maths and the Rocket Barrage just doesn't like that hot to me adding a "whopping" 55k damage over a 16 minute fight? Recent reports say that Goblin is slightly better than Orc but I just don't see how with how little damage Rocket Barrage does (~6k with all procs) how it wins out over Orc...

Is there just stuff that I'm missing? Does the Orc pet racial not work for Ghouls as Frost or do they still get benefit?

CortDK has one of the most recent sims (found here) regarding Goblin and Orc viability as Frost. Both races are equally viable, but Goblin pulls ahead by a few hundred DPS due to Rocket Barrage, the ability to Rocket Jump into a fight just a few seconds early, and the Haste racial.

To answer your question, Orc is superior to Goblin when rolling Unholy, because the Orc racial affects permanent pets, which the Unholy ghoul is, however, the Orc racial does not extend to temporary pets such as Frost ghouls.

I did read that post and it's one of the reasons I'm asking really. The only intention I have of going Unholy would be when I get Heroic Sulfuras, but it's something to keep in mind I guess. I figured that the Command racial would benefit non-permanent Ghouls. I swear that they used to? Guess I might've imagined it then.

So in reality it's only Blood Fury and 3 Expertise vs 1% haste and Rocket Barrage/Rocket Jump for Frost. Still a hard choice, I do like to PvP occasionally so I guess Goblin would be a bit more beneficial in that regard ._.

The prevailing notion seems to be that it's rather difficult to lower your exp rating enough in the current BiS for the 3 exp to truly have much benefit (which, looking at the BiS list, does make some sense).

I was wondering what the haste rating were for getting extra ticks from our diseases and if there is a point while speccing UH to put some extra stats into mastery as opposed to haste if you can't reach certain haste milestones for the extra disease ticks?

The haste percent needed for each extra tick starts at 5%, then goes up 10% each time. (15, 25, etc) The actual haste rating needed for this will depend on what buffs are up since different sources of haste are multiplicative.

That said, haste's impact on disease ticks is so small it's not discussed at all here. Unholy's list of notable haste benefits is:

Faster rune regen
Faster melee swings
More DC from those faster melee swings thanks to Sudden Doom
More rune regen through DC from Runic Corruption
Higher uptime on Dark Transformation from more DC
Faster Ghoul and Gargoyle strikes

As one of the previous Unholy guides said, "Haste is truly the master stat."

Edit: After the reminder from Malicii, I confirmed with WoL that haste doesn't affect a DK's diseases. My memory is fuzzy on whether it ever did, but given its current behavior it probably didn't. Even if it were to gain extra ticks from haste, the actual damage from diseases is so negligible that haste adding onto it would barely make any difference.