Death Knight: Simple Questions thread reboot -- new kinder gentler rule-7-free zone
 

This is the thread for simple questions that don't fit anywhere else. If your question applies to one of the existing thread topics, please post it there instead. If you expect to generate significant additional discussion, create a new thread. If, however, you have a simple question that only requires a simple answer and don't see a better place to post it, this is your thread.

If you're struggling to push reasonable dps or keep your teammates alive and you don't know why, start by reading the guide at the start of the thread for your spec. You should verify that the answer isn't already easily available before posting. If you still can't figure out what you're doing wrong, or you didn't understand what you've read, ask here. Maybe someone will help you. But if you don't get a response, tactics like asking again or bumping your post will earn you an infraction.

Note that all forum rules other than the injunction against hand holding requests still apply in this thread, and that rule still applies everywhere else. Clear communication is important even in short posts. A short "no" or "choose trinket B" response to a question isn't helpful, and will receive an infraction -- briefly explain the why and how of things. The goal is to educate, not babysit.

I'll repeat the point I made in that last paragraph -- click this link and read the rules before posting, and follow them when you do post.

Alright, this is my issue. I have pretty rough gear currently and I was trying to figure out in actuality I should be sitting dps wise in general with a lower level of gear than my guildmates. I'm just wondering if given my character and what I have, should I be stressing a lot about how much damage I'm doing currently or am I pretty much at where I should be at with what I have? I have been simming around 90k on a patchwerk type of fight, but that seems low to me.

I have reforged and save a couple things due to gold I have all the enchants/gems I should be using. Also I just really started playing about a month ago due to some surgery so I am extremely late on rep grinding as I just hit revered with Golden Lotus.

TL;DR What kind of damage were you doing before you hit around an ilevel of 490ish/2 piece or 4 piece set bonus as frost?

If this was in bad format I apologize.

Simcraft is currently accurate as far as frost dks on patchwerk fights at present. 90k seems around the ballpark for that gear leve(ilevel 485-490)l. Personally, I was doing around the same with the same gear level.
Death knights scale quite well with gear for the time being, ranging from 130k at full BiS down to 65k in full blues. I hope that answers your question, not really sure what else you are asking.

I was wondering when the calculation for soul reapers execute damage was calculated. More specifically, has anyone tested if a soul reaper cast on a boss at say 35.3% triggers the execute assuming the boss is sub 35% after the 5 seconds, or if it calculates whether or not it will trigger on application.

I assume that the trigger is calculated after the elapsed time, because A) the ability is usable at any percentage, as opposed to -only- available in the execute range, and B) because in pvp it can be applied sub 35% but opponent can be healed to >35% and dodge the trigger.

Has anyone confirmed this themselves before?

The game checks after the debuff has elapsed if the target is sub 35% and then triggers the execute damage (or not).

2h Frost: Mastery vs. Crit
 

Having a hard time wrapping my head around why crit is valued higher, at all, than mastery. Here's a post I made on the battle.net dk forums with some maths I jotted down - please take a look:

2h Frost: Mastery vs. Crit - bad napkin math - Forums - World of Warcraft

Overall, I'm wondering if anybody else can provide a clear explanation as to why (considering the amount of frost damage we do, as well as how much KM devalues crit) crit should ever be rated above mastery for 2h frost.

And - yes - I'm basically saying that I don't believe the sims.

1% of crit rating (600 rating) allows everything you do that does damage a 1% chance to do double damage, so it's basically a 1% dmg increase. However, it's a 1% increase to your base damage before crits. If 1% of the time you do 100% extra dmg, it's the same as doing 1% extra dmg 100% of the time. Let's say you do 1 dmg per hit, and 100 hits every fight with no crit chance. If you increased the crit chance to 1%, you would crit once, and do 2 dmg for that hit, bringing your total to 101 dmg, or a 1% increase. Likewise, if you do 100% extra dmg 50% of the time, it's the same as doing 50% extra dmg 100% of the time. While going from 0-1% crit rating is a straight up 1% dmg increase, going from 50-51% is a 0.67% dmg increase. Back to the first example, doing 100 hits for 1 dmg each in a fight, but this time with a 50% crit chance to start with. Your dmg would be 50 hits of 1 and 50 hits of 2, or 150 total. Going up another 1% would give you one more crit, and increase your dmg by 1, to 151 total, or a 0.67% overall dmg increase.
The formula to find out how big an increase 1% extra crit chance would be is
(crit % +101)/(crit chance+100)
However, this doesn't take 3 special abilities into account. The first of which is howling blast, which, being our only ability that takes the spell crit rate instead of the melee crit rate, crits 5% less of the time compared to every normal ability. Now, howling blast accounts for about 7.5% of 2hand's total dmg. To adjust the above formula, we simply split the HB dmg and the rest of the dmg into
((crit % +101)/(crit chance+100)*.925) + ((crit % +96)/(crit chance+95)*.075)
Now we need to take KM procs for both FS and oblit into account. A 50k iteration sim tells us that, on average, 19.1% of FS's crits and 25.3% of oblits crits come from KM.
Frost strike accounts for 26.2% of the overall dmg, with 170.2 total casts. With 19.1% of those casts being KM crits, that's 32.5 crits from KM, each worth 120200 dmg. That means 33.3% of FS dmg is from km procs, and that's 8.72% of the total dmg from frost that doesn't benefit from crit rating.
Now the same thing with obliterate.
Oblit is 32.2% of frosts total dmg, with 105.7 total casts. With 25.3% of those being KM crits, that's 26.74 crits, each worth 226972 dmg. Which leaves 35.6% of oblit dmg being caused by KM, and 11.46% of frosts dmg not benefiting from crits.
That's a total of 20.18% of frosts dmg not benefitting from crit rating, which gives us the below formula for the value of crit.
((crit % +101)/(crit chance+100)*.723) + ((crit % +96)/(crit chance+95)*.075)
The BiS melee crit chance is 14.5%, which when plugged into out little formula, gives us a
0.631% + 0.068%, or 0.699% dmg increase per 600 crit rating. This is multiplied by 1.06, to account for the meta gem, giving us a final value of
0.741% increased dps.
Keep in mind this doesn't take skull banners into account, which would increase the value slightly but are very difficult to model.




2% more frost dmg (600 rating) is similar to crit in how we can model it. Going from 0 to 2% is a 2% increase for frost dmg, and going from 50-52% is a (152/150) (1.01333%) increase for frost dmg.
Which gives us a similar formula
(mastery% + 102)/(mastery% +100) *(% of dmg total that is frost/100)
Frost damage sources for 2hand are howling blast, frost strike, and frost fever. These total at 37.5% of frost's dmg for the default BiS profile on simcraft.
Raid buffed, BiS lists put us at 36.54% mastery.
Plugging that into the formula says that frost gets 0.549% increased dps for 600 mastery rating.

Sims have crit at 1.4, and mastery at 1.09, so crit's about 29% higher according to the sims. My evaluation puts crit at about 35% higher. Seems about right.


TL;DR
So crit > mastery
Because crit effects more than twice as much of your dmg than mastery, for twice the rating per %.

All numbers taken from BiS 2hand T14 sim 510-9, feel free to sub in a logs numbers if you want. However, I didn't use the scaling feature at all, only pulling numbers like average oblits and crit%s and km procs, and so on and so forth. Formulas also provided, if you want to use them for your gear setup.



Edit: math mistake throwing off crit numbers, old math below for reference, OP updated.

Does anyone know a way to know exactly when Bladelord does his overwhelming strike on you? I'm trying to use glyphed IBF but I can't reliably time it with dbm when the strike comes at the same time as another ability such as unseen strike.

Personally, I never used timers for Overwhelming Assault and just looked at the time remaining on the previous debuff but from what I remember, the second OA happens 2-3 seconds after Unseen Strike so you can pop a cooldown when the boss arrives at your position just after the knockback.

Though I do have to ask, why are using glyphed IBF here anyway? On heroic you never take a second OA before your co-tank taunts off of you and on normal you should be perfectly fine alternating IBF and Vampiric Blood + Bone Shield (+Rune Tap to get you to full health just before the OA).

Hello there!
I've returned to playing a DK after a Hiatus of about 2 years. Once again I'm loving the way the class plays, but I have a simple question which I couldn't find an answer to anywhere: I'm coming back as a DPS DK, and have traditionally played unholy. My Ilvl is still fairly low (around the 480 mark), but I'm unsure which spec will actually produce better numbers; Frost or Unholy. Are they approxiamtely equal nowadays, or is there some magic gear lvl where one becomes better than the other?
I'm both hit capped and expertise (soft) capped, and have a decent 2H weapon.

Many thanks!

The general consensus for the time being is DW > 2hand > unholy.
To explain further, as far as frost goes, DW and 2hand are balanced extremely well single target, within 1% of each other, and for whichever one you have the best weapon (2 1handers or 1 2hander) is the one you would do best in single target. However, DW excels at cleaving, due to the nature of both gearing towards mastery and having HB as the primary rune dump. 2-hand is better at burst, but throughout the fights this tier, you need to cleave a whole lot more than you need to burst, leaving DW as the "best" spec. However, both 2hand and DW are competitive in raiding, and both have a significant player-base at both the very high level, and all the other levels of raiding. Unholy on the other hand, is having trouble right now. Simcraft places unholy about ~5% lower than both frost specs single target, but due to a bug in the way simcraft handles unholy disease, that's most likely closer to 3%. Unholy has, IMO, better sustained aoe, but we're not getting that many numbers to prove it due to the fact that only about 10% of dks are playing unholy right now. Unholy is receiving significant QoL changes in 5.2, as well as a straight up buff to gary, which will *hopefully* bring it in line with frost.
If you're feeling adventurous, go unholy and be prepared to be called wrong by the dks that assume frost is the only spec right now, otherwise stick to the Fotm.

I got a question i got [Pauldrons of the Broken Blade]And [Chestguard of Eternal Vigilance] But if i use them i lose my 4set Bonus.So shall i use the 2hc gear and lose my 4set bonus?

Edit:Sry for OT and bad english

Thanks very much, that's a lot to chew on.
I've always pretty much played Unholy and I've always found it to be competitive in terms of DPS, especially in terms of AoE where I'm placing much much higher than many other better geared players. That said, I've found that sustained DPS against a single target is where I'm lacking - I very often have to wait for Runes and RP for my abilities when not using UF. I didn't think my haste was terrible, I think I'm sitting around 40% self buffed so perhaps it's just my priority which is lacking.
As I understand, frost is a little more forgiving in terms of GCD's and priority, so I may give it a whirl. I'd miss Gary though...

The 4 set bonus is worth roughly 1500 mastery at your gear level (add BoM to your mastery rating and multiply by 0.1), not counting the increased Death Strike heal. It's up to you to decide if that is worth the loss in avoidance/health from the lower item level (but considering the mastery heavy gearing, it looks like it is).

I'm at 53.49% unbuffed and I still run into 2-4sec rough patches as unholy where you simply have to sit and wait. During UF with 4p in a raid being over 100% haste with RC proccing is where the fun is at. As Mendenbar said even if Unholy were to sim the same numbers as frost it would still lose because this tier is mostly about cleaves. However don't throw unholy out just yet; it does scale well with gear, and I have a hinting suspicion a properly played unholy spec will pull ahead next tier.