There's also healing threat to be taken into account. Supposed that (Improved) Rune Tap heals for a full 7k, that's ~10k threat to all targets in Frost Presence.
It's less. Healing only gives threat equal to half the healing done, so if you don't overheal and heal for 7k, that's 3500 base threat. That's 7250 threat with Frost Presence and baked-in Salvation. Healing threat further gets divided by the amount of targets aware of you: So if you're tanking 10 mobs, it's only 725 threat each.
It's still a good bit of threat, but it's not quite that powerful.
buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of
There's also healing threat to be taken into account. Supposed that (Improved) Rune Tap heals for a full 7k, that's ~10k threat to all targets in Frost Presence.
Healing threat is divided equally amongst all enemies, not applied equally. How did you get 10k? 7k * .5 * 2.08 = 7.28k healing threat.
It's less. Healing only gives threat equal to half the healing done, so if you don't overheal and heal for 7k, that's 3500 base threat. That's 7250 threat with Frost Presence and baked-in Salvation. Healing threat further gets divided by the amount of targets aware of you: So if you're tanking 10 mobs, it's only 725 threat each.
It's still a good bit of threat, but it's not quite that powerful.
I thought self heals caused double threat, or am just completely sleep deprived and remembering that wrong?
Does healing cause any threat when fighting a single mob by yourself, or is Rune Tap behaving differently? I was checking some raw threat values from certain attacks on a single mob and I hit Rune Tap, healing myself for quite a bit (no overhealing) and the threat value did not increase. Can someone check this out? It was 3/3 Improved Rune Tap if that matters.
Thanks, I actually have Blood and Unholy fairly comfortably modeled, I still need frost. As a side note, you probably would have broken 2200 dps if you used PS before IT in your rotation, and UB before that every full cycle (the two lines above = 1 full cycle) (you'd obviously miss it in the first cycle because you probably wouldn't have 60 RP going into a boss fight.
Some things I could use some help on with the model, however:
1) How to model Empowered Rune Weapon... I haven't found much use for it, but I'm sure you guys have good ideas
2) The coefficients on our spells, and how exactly Impurity works (an example of how to calculate effective spell damage and the coefficients abilities like DC, IT, and diseases use).
3) A frost DPS rotation (and any info on disease uptime %)
4) I need some numbers on ghouls... specifically what is the base % of str/agi/stam/etc they get from their masters. I can figure out the core stats and stats via talents easily on my own.
I've made a lot of progress on the model so far, should be interesting to compare talents and stats when its finished. I'm also trying to formulate an interface to allow custom rotations, but that's still a little ways off.
Sadly IT > PS has become a ritual of sorts since you get so used to it pulling mobs while questing as you level up. I'll change this around. I'm currently working out procs on Glyph of Scourge Strike to see if IT can feasibly be dropped from the rotation after the first application.
As for how to model Empowered Rune Weapon, you mainly use it when rune starvation kicks in (as DPS). It really depends on the situation and whether or not you've got enough RP for a big dump or if you need to re-raise your ghoul, etc to fill those cooldowns.
Does healing cause any threat when fighting a single mob by yourself, or is Rune Tap behaving differently? I was checking some raw threat values from certain attacks on a single mob and I hit Rune Tap, healing myself for quite a bit (no overhealing) and the threat value did not increase. Can someone check this out? It was 3/3 Improved Rune Tap if that matters.
Rune Tap could very well be behaving differently (blizz can modify whether or not an ability does threat) but self-healing (or almost ANY action) causes threat following "normal" rules as described above. There's no doubt that fighting a mob alone creates a threat table and puts you on it with accurate values. Otherwise you could face pull a mob, heal yourself for 10 minutes, stop, then a new person come by, swing, and pull aggro (doesn't happen).... It's more likely that the threat meter you were using didn't have Rune Tap as an ability that generates threat and therefore simply didn't count it. Or maybe Blizzard intentionally made Rune Tap not cause threat, though they said they were trying to get away from abilities having non-normal threat modifiers. Simply tests can be done to test whether or not an ability causes threat. Face pull a mob and let it beat on you. Have someone do ~1 dmg and pull aggro. Heal yourself for significantly more (more than 110% of dmg your partner did) and see if it pulls aggro.
I put together a basic spreadsheet for Frost DW (the rotation/spec I mentioned earlier based on 8s runes). It clocks in around 3600 dps in random nax25 epics. Is that high or low? What's the bar like anymore?
I counted a few things as less than I should probably, but I wasn't sure how to estimate the dps gain from Chill of the Grave. I also ignored the ghoul, since I have no idea what dps they do, and how they scale.
I couldn't find good info on the diseases (I hear they scale at 5.5% per tick, but I don't know base damage), so I assumed 600/tick, as someone mentioned earlier in the thread. Does anyone have real numbers for diseases I can borrow?
Any of the beta players got some sort of disease watcher?
DoTimer and Natur aren't working.
Working boss mod would be appreciated as well.
Runewatch has a disease timer, it also lets you move you Runebar and RP bar into the middle of your screen
If you don't like that SorrenTimers also track diseases. You can find either on wowinterface.com
About the diminishing returns on Forceful deflection, or lack of it, I have not confirmed it myself, I just read it here. I'll check it out after my raid tonight though.
It's less. Healing only gives threat equal to half the healing done, so if you don't overheal and heal for 7k, that's 3500 base threat. That's 7250 threat with Frost Presence and baked-in Salvation. Healing threat further gets divided by the amount of targets aware of you: So if you're tanking 10 mobs, it's only 725 threat each.
It's still a good bit of threat, but it's not quite that powerful.
I stand corrected. Still, I think it's a very useful talent. It's a bit like today's Prayer of Mending, giving a nice buffer when you take the first damage after a pull, and the threat goes to you instead of a healer. I've seen lots of tank deaths right after a pull due to untimely healing for whatever reason, so this may help.
Does healing cause any threat when fighting a single mob by yourself, or is Rune Tap behaving differently? I was checking some raw threat values from certain attacks on a single mob and I hit Rune Tap, healing myself for quite a bit (no overhealing) and the threat value did not increase. Can someone check this out? It was 3/3 Improved Rune Tap if that matters.
I know that most (probably all, other than Healthstone) Warlock self-healing abilities don't cause any threat. I would be surprised if Death Knight self-healing abilities caused any threat at all.
I stand corrected. Still, I think it's a very useful talent. It's a bit like today's Prayer of Mending, giving a nice buffer when you take the first damage after a pull, and the threat goes to you instead of a healer. I've seen lots of tank deaths right after a pull due to untimely healing for whatever reason, so this may help.
Just as an fyi Prayer of Mending, Earth shield.. etc are going to give threat to the person casting. Not sure if it is going in at 3.0 (most likely) or the xpac itself.
Read the rotation I mentioned - at capped hit and expertise, you do not cap rune power at any point. The assumption that " to do max dps, we need to burn every rune ability at the precise moment the rune pops up" is correct, given that our rotation should never allow RP to be capped..
Your reference to capping rune power makes me think that you were using the wrong rotation or spec to do well in unholy presence during your test. I'll go make or adapt a spreadsheet for this spec/rotation and report back.
I think you misunderstood me. I started waxing philosophical about DK design and resource management. I'm not saying that your rotation in Unholy presence caps out on runic power. Of course not; that's the point of using Unholy Presence in this experiment. Compare it to Blood Presence: with an 8 second rune cooldown, there's almost no room to use GCDs for any runic power abilities.
0 PS
1.5 IT
3 HS
4.5 HS
6 OB
7.5 wait
8 PS
1.5 IT
3 HS
4.5 HS
6 HS
7.5 HS
This is what you'd have to do in Blood Presence to fit in every Rune ability on its 8 second cooldown. It's actually impossible, since after this rotation, your first U rune pops .5 seconds after your last HS, but you have 1 sec left on the GCD.
Unholy presence is better if you assume that all of the best rotations need to use every ability precisely on its rune cooldown. My point is that that assumption turns out to be incorrect. Unholy presence is a tradeoff. You give up 15% damage to be able to fit runic power abilities inside that 8 second window. In Blood Presence, though, that 8 second window isn't the first priority for doing the most damage, which was my argument. Your rotation isn't determined by merely one of two resources (rune cooldowns)-- you need to expediently use both, even if in Blood Presence runes may be available to use again.
I wasn't criticizing your Unholy Presence rotation. Unholy presence enables you to fit all your abilities in the 8 second window, at the cost of additional damage. Blood Presence rotations will be longer in duration, but do more damage. Any comparison of the two presences in spreadsheets or modeling or whatever should consider the different rules for their use.
Also, yeah-- blood tanking is teh proverbial suck. Blood dps is fine.
Edit: @ Kharnator: Someone here earlier said The parry from forceful deflection is NOT affected by diminishing returns, whoever your quoting says it is. He's also not counting that FP makes DKs scale better with HP and armour. I don't know if that's enough to make up for the loss of block, but it shouldn't be ignored.
The thread here Combat Ratings at 80 says forceful deflection affects diminishing returns.
The post was before the 60% FP buff, so it is out of date.
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
I've tanked Naxx 10 and 25 with great success. My question is: Why is blood of the north so popular in frost tanking? I see it as a talent that buffs a then-less-frequently used ability, just to be able to Oblit or IT/IT instead every other rotation. Seems very costly for 5 points. I'd rather spend my 5 points for 5% crit in blood. Can someone explain why most frost tank specs in this thread include it?
I think the big thing is that Bloodstrike is the least damaging strike (for frost) doing mediocre damage and not adding a disease. From a DPS rotation, it takes 2 blood strikes out of the equation and replaces it with a HB/Oblit. When tanking, you can't double HB due to the cooldown, but having the rune flexibility is nice. You can spam some IT which can't be parried or go for a deathstrike. It also makes it easier to put up a Death and Decay. I think, also, that while you have death runes up, your parry buff continues to renew whereas if they came back as blood runes, you'd have to spend them. Agreed, though, that it is a mediocre talent. I take it because it saves a GCD on the back half of a dps rotation where I can use a FS.
I think you misunderstood me. I started waxing philosophical about DK design and resource management. I'm not saying that your rotation in Unholy presence caps out on runic power. Of course not; that's the point of using Unholy Presence in this experiment. Compare it to Blood Presence: with an 8 second rune cooldown, there's almost no room to use GCDs for any runic power abilities.
[numbers]
This is what you'd have to do in Blood Presence to fit in every Rune ability on its 8 second cooldown. It's actually impossible, since after this rotation, your first U rune pops .5 seconds after your last HS, but you have 1 sec left on the GCD.
Unholy presence is better if you assume that all of the best rotations need to use every ability precisely on its rune cooldown. My point is that that assumption turns out to be incorrect. Unholy presence is a tradeoff. You give up 15% damage to be able to fit runic power abilities inside that 8 second window. In Blood Presence, though, that 8 second window isn't the first priority for doing the most damage, which was my argument. Your rotation isn't determined by merely one of two resources (rune cooldowns)-- you need to expediently use both, even if in Blood Presence runes may be available to use again.
I wasn't criticizing your Unholy Presence rotation. Unholy presence enables you to fit all your abilities in the 8 second window, at the cost of additional damage. Blood Presence rotations will be longer in duration, but do more damage. Any comparison of the two presences in spreadsheets or modeling or whatever should consider the different rules for their use.
Also, yeah-- blood tanking is teh proverbial suck. Blood dps is fine.
Ah. That makes sense, but I wasn't actually assuming that you skimped out on rp abilities when using blood presence. The real question I asked myself was "do I get to use my resources more than 15% faster?" I agree that it's a very complicated question, that can't really be answered without figuring out a bunch of rotations, testing them, and checking net dps.. but my gut says that I do in frost.
In particular, Unholy is the only spec that really gets to use ALL of its runes and rp in blood presence, with a ps,it,SS,SS,bs,bs,SS,SS style rotation, and UB with the occasional death coil eating the runepower.
Interestingly, if we really do have 'best possible' rotations where we replace a rune ability with an RP ability sometimes, it seems possible that we'd get a better return by swapping to unholy presence every few rotations to burn off the extra RP and then back despite the rune cost.
From the simplified spreadsheet, I have white damage at 33% of my damage, even as DW, and assuming the BCB gets fixed to actually proc 30%, and that fraction remains roughly the same if we add 3000 ap. Does that seem a little odd to you? I'm including necrosis and BCB as white damage, using unholy presence, and windfury.. The scaling is at around 2ap per 1 dps improvement at nax25 gear level.
Edit: The rotation you listed is a 17.5s rotation anyway, since you switch back and forth between an oblit and two heartstrikes - The oblit has to wait until the rune the last bloodstrike used pops up again.
I've tanked Naxx 10 and 25 with great success. My question is: Why is blood of the north so popular in frost tanking? I see it as a talent that buffs a then-less-frequently used ability, just to be able to Oblit or IT/IT instead every other rotation. Seems very costly for 5 points. I'd rather spend my 5 points for 5% crit in blood. Can someone explain why most frost tank specs in this thread include it?
Blood of the North (assuming you are using Blood Strike) is more dps than 5% more crit for deep Frost. Death Runes are outstanding.
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
Is it simply Icy Touch x2 replacing Blood Strike x2 (every OTHER rotation)?
IT does more damage than a BS by quite a bit for frost. It also scales better with AP (drastically so), and with the IT glyph, returns 25 runic power. You gain an IT and a third of a Frost Strike for your BS every 8-10 seconds.
Edit: When I did the spreadsheet, I messed up slightly, and had all the strikes scaling with 1.8 speed, like a dagger. With the proper 2.4, the dps for frost DW jumps to just over 5k. It'd be higher in reality - I didn't simulate that the mainhand weapons should be drastically slower than the offhand one, since BCB procs the mainhand from the offhand (like sword spec for a rogue), and I basically counted killing machine as a flat 100dps (it'd be WAY higher, but I don't want to write a sim to try to figure it out just now). I also assumed 20% damage reduction from armor (on physical attacks) - is that reasonable?
Is it simply Icy Touch x2 replacing Blood Strike x2 (every OTHER rotation)?
Obliterate + (increased BS damage) + BS x2 + 1 less GCD used > BS x4. By more than 5% crit would give you.
Don't forget that Oblit gets like a +30% crit chance for a deep Frost build. Even against the boss-level dummies and cruddy premade PvP gear, I end up with almost 50/50 crit/hit split on Obliterates as deep Frost. With gear that doesn't waste a million points on resilience, Oblit will crit easily 60% of the time for +45%. That kicks 2 Blood Strikes' asses to the curb and back.
EDIT: Also, you can't just sacrifice 5/5 BotN for 5/5 Dark Conviction. You're not going to go far enough in Frost to consider BotN and NOT go up to Tundra Stalker for the free 10 expertise or, at the least, Guile of Gorefiend and Frost Strike for threat and IBF duration, so you have to spend 5 points at the tier BotN is in. At that point, the only talents you likely havn't bought are Killing Machine (not very valuable when you're Rune Striking nearly every auto-attack away), Runic Power Mastery (why?), Merciless Combat (not bad, but not really a 1% per point increase when it matters, either), Unbreakable Armor (which you'll take with the free point from the next tier of talents), Deathchill (forgettable), or the one remaining point in Glacier Rot. That doesn't give you enough points to advance to the next tier. You basically HAVE to take BotN to advance.
I've been tracking my Oblit crit rate, and it's not nearly as high as I would have expected. I was down to critting maybe 35% of the time with 19% paperdoll crit whereas I was figuring to be up around 50%. It maye have been maybe talents not properly stacking or maybe just a bad run streak/not maxxed weapon skill/fighting mobs at +1 level.
Of note, the more ITs you throw, the more free rime HBs you proc.
I've been tracking my Oblit crit rate, and it's not nearly as high as I would have expected. I was down to critting maybe 35% of the time with 19% paperdoll crit whereas I was figuring to be up around 50%. It maye have been maybe talents not properly stacking or maybe just a bad run streak/not maxxed weapon skill/fighting mobs at +1 level.
Of note, the more ITs you throw, the more free rime HBs you proc.
The Oblit problem sounds like a run of bad luck. I havn't tested it this build, but last build I actually got an observed 52% crit rate on Oblit against the boss dummy with my premade over 2,000,000 damage.
As for IT: yeah, but not only does 2xIT cost you a GCD vs 1xOblit, the extra HB is not entirely free: it costs you another GCD. That's why I'm not a fan of the IT spam rotation for tanking. GCDs are just way too valuable as a tank.
10/08/08, 12:48 PM
Similar Threads
