Im working on an excel visual basic based dps simulator for the DK class, and have a few outstanding questions.


1.) Is scourge strike considered a spell, as its damage is shadow? Or in general, is any non-physical damage a spell?

2.) Necrosis seems to be tacked on to the end of each auto, however the damage it does is not 10% of the auto. From what value is it derived?

3.) It seems that all diseases share the same AP coefficient. Is their damage purely based on the AP coefficient or is there some base value?

4.) What is the base % healing for Deathstrike?

5.) Does Unholy Blight get an AP coefficient?



That should cover me for the short term

Cutting the number of plague strikes in half is much more significant. If there's any danger of capping, you can use a frost strike instead of the second plague strike (net cost 50 rp) for a major damage boost.

1.) Scourge Strike (and any other attack that deals non-physical damage, such as Frost Strike) benefits from all buffs and debuffs that increase magical damage or spell damage, if that's what you're asking. It's not technically a spell; it can't be silenced, for example, and it can be blocked/dodged/parried. It can also be partially (but not fully) resisted.
2.) It deals 10% of the damage your auto-attack dealt * modifiers. Necrosis's damage is intentionally improved by things such as Ebon Plague and Blood Presence.
3.) The base pre-scaling damage value for diseases at level 80 is 31.1 per tick.
4.) Unless it's changed, it's 100% per disease, or just 100% if it lands the killing blow.
5.) All our non-Strike abilities get an AP coefficient. UB's is 1% per tick. Beaulshevik keeps this post on the beta boards updated with the current scaling values of all our spells.

That's actually what I find very interesting and appealing about this whole class. Even changing 2 talent points can alter how you would play and what skills you would use and when. I can't think of a single class that has that capability.

I suppose some people would see this as a flaw in the class, but I counter with other classes just being more limited.

After Unholy blight gets toned down, what I like best about DKs is currently Blood and Frost are equal in dps (Unholy will be there after one more nerf).

Sadly, there is one tree that is better for tanking (Frost), but at least the other two trees aren't far behind.


The only issues I see is DRW is weak and the Blood tree doesn't have the same "fun" as the other two trees.

Aha! This was the information I've been looking for. Looks like I might have the Rawr DK DPS module done by this weekend... I have some tweaking to do in other areas but it will have talent, gear, and stat comparisons, along with a DPS breakdown by ability (and talent where applicable).

Thanks Zurai!

Its hard to go through all the 107 pages and find where people are only talking about tanking or DPS or both. Though in my test on Beta DRW is still a great talent because on "most" fights you are simply attacking from behind(if you are not tanking) and so does the weapon. All 3 trees seem a little bit more balance to me as well.

The Spec I currently use is: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Of course a few things may change depending on 1. Raid Makeup 2. Certain buffs stacking.

According to a blue post:

From all of our tests, we concluded Dancing Rune Weapon is still probably the most powerful ability death knights have in terms of raw damage. It can add 200 dps easily to a level 80 death knight.

I noticed that blue post myself and was toying around with trying a new spec. Yet I've got a question about your spec. Why all the buffs to Icy Touch just to get Annihilation? I mean Annihilation is a fantastic talent, to be sure, but it seems like perhaps your points would be better spent in Toughness then Glacier Rot and Imp Icy Touch. And Black Ice is significantly less appealing now that it only effects Frost damage (despite what the tooltip says).

Seems like this would be better from a dps stand point. This spec directly buffs more of your damage and I'd think Necrosis, Blood-Caked Blade and Shadow Of Death more then make up for the epic journey you have to take to reach Annihilation.

DRW may add 200 dps, but what about Unholy's 21 pointer? That adds nearly the same dps (about 150) on my tests, and it doesn't parry haste my target.

Thanks for the info, that helps a ton. Still a bit unclear on the Scourge Strike though, heres a couple more questions:

Scourge Strike:
1.) Is it subject to glancing blows or resists? both? though it seems like only 1 type of reduction should apply
2.) Which hit mechanic governs it, spell hit (14% base boss miss) or physical hit (9% base boss miss)?
3.) Do partial resists vary in magnitude? From the think tank discussions its a bit unclear if each resist is a fixed value or not.


Thanks for the link Tantlin, I'll take a look and see if theres anything I can assimilate.

To play devil's advocate real quick, as a dps DK won't you normally be behind the target? Kind of moots the parry haste argument.

That being said I'd think it comes down to up time. DRW and Gargoyle do very similar damage. Gargoyle costs 30 rp initially and needs 8rpps to stay up for a maximum of 60 seconds. DRW costs 50rp for an initial 10 seconds and needs 5rpps to be maintained. Currently it seems to disappear after about 30 seconds and I'm unsure of what it's limit is supposed to be.

So 30 seconds vs 60 seconds puts the Gargoyle ahead.

Scourge Strike can glance? I was unaware that any special ability in the game could glance.

No, but it can partially resist

After my previous posts on Frost rotations and specs i was doing some investigating into the value of runic power mastery chill of the grave and general priorities.

From my own experience and testing in order of priority while using an oblit glyph,plague glyph

in terms of damage per GCD(deathcoil not included because of same opportunity cost as frost strike at lower damage)

1. initial IT(bonus damage to all abilities and howling blast included)
2. initial PS(bonus damage to oblit and bs included)
3. Howling blast + killing machine OR Howling blast + deathchill
4. Obliterate
5. FS + killing machine
6. Howling blast
7. FS
8. BS
9. IT
10. PS

from which we can derive the following rules(sorry for the obvious)
1. IT and PS must be used every rotation to keep frost fever and blood plague rolling
2. Howling blast can only take the place of Oblit or frost strike(with freezing fog)
3. Howling blast should only be used with runes in replacement of Oblit if killing machine is up otherwise its a damage loss
4. If Freezing fog is up, Howling blast should always replace a Frost strike, because both conditions of using Howling blast are better than their Frost strike counterparts ex. KM+HB > KM+FS && HB>FS
5. If Freezing fog and KM is up and FU is available, use Oblit and wait to use HB during an FS GCD.
6. Obliterate is the highest damage per GCD of any other ability not requiring procs so the general idea of a rotation should be to execute as many Obliterates as possible.
7. Because of #6 2 x BS should be used in preference of FS and HB even with KM because of the long term effects on DPS.(not to mention screwy rotations)

using these rules i came up with my rotation.
IT->PS->OB->BS->BS->FS->OB->IT->PS->OB->FS->OB->FS->FS
where FS = FS unless freezing fog is procced
and OB = OB unless KM is procced, HB isnt on cooldown, and freezing fog is not procced

WHEW!!! OK with that out of the way, we approach the original problem which is, what is the value of runic master, and chill of the grave in terms of this rotation.

runic mastery:

The problem with runic mastery is that in any given rotation your RP can be expressed as the NET runic gain/use over the course of a single rotation. which is to say, that based upon your rotation you will ALWAYS either approach infinite, negative infinite or 0 runic power, With the ideal being that you always use exactly the amount of RP you gain, or approach 0. This is done either in 1 of 2 ways, either you bake in your gain and loss within a single rotation, OR you swap between an infinite gain and an infinite loss rotation. With no significant (read DRW or gargoyle) RP dump frost must rely on the first option. Which means that your max runic power never needs to be greater than the total amount of RP you use in a row. In the case of my rotation above that number is 80, so with my rotation i will never need a single point in runic mastery.

Chill of the Grave:

Thankfully chill of the grave is simple to model thanks to having my rotation already established. And to model out some similar RP gain i created the following table.



I appoligize in advance if formatting doesnt quite work for this. however as you can see the base net loss in RP is -32, with each point in chill adding +15 to that total, Which means that 2 points doesnt quite cover it. However 2 points with the Glyph is overkill, leading towards infinite at a very quick rate. So the ideal RP gain is glyph of IT with 1 point Chill OR if you have 4pc t7 you can skip them both.

/edit Oh forgot, this is i believe the optimal spec for this rotation.
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

It is subject only to partial resists. Only auto-attacks can glance.
9% miss rate as normal for a weapon-based special attack.
Partial resists do vary, but only in 10% chunks. You can resist 0%, 10%, 20%, 30%, etc, of magical damage. You cannot resist 25%, 33%, etc. I know in the past the cap on spell resistance was 75%, but I'm not sure if that's still valid any more. Regardless, you're not likely to ever see more than a 30% resist on Scourge or Frost Strikes unless you're fighting something with actual Shadow or Frost resistances. The highest I've seen in over 20,000,000 damage on the training dummies is 20% resists.

I don't buy this. You can verify the 8 second cooldown by using a single ability over and over, without pausing. It will always be 8 seconds after the first. You can also back away from the target, wait, and as long as you don't exit combat, it will still be 8 seconds. If the cooldown really varied as much as you say, it would completely mess up rotations.

The conventional wisdom on partial resists is 2% per level difference which is 6% on bosses, average across the entire fight. However, as they seem to have restructured the resist system that may have changed, and the entire concept of partial resists has never been fully understood or modeled.

While i dont think it works EXACTLY like he described i HAVE noticed this happening in my frost rotations.

IT -> PS then later use those runes for oblit and the frost rune will be ready before the unholy rune. Which is nice because i want to use it in that order:-) but still VERY weird. Perhaps it is running on some full set of rules that govern it based on last used time with a specific rule to reset rune cooldowns when out of combat, this would also explain why occasionally different runes bug out and lock up, requiring a 10 second wait time until they become available for use again. I am not sure if anyone else has experienced this but using an FU ability, having it use U and not F, but F is locked out for 10 seconds. It appears active but really isnt. It may be the system has a catch for those sort of errors.

Thanks for your answers !

I trust you, but I'm under the impression that we also generate largely sufficient aggro. Even without tundra stalker. I'm not on the Beta, so it's only my personnal impression.

If it's the case, I prefer taking a useless "meh" tanking talent than a DPS talent.

Actually I didn't know the expertise was raw, I thought it was rating. (but thinking about it, I was stupid ; never heard of a talent giving rating stats) I totally underestimated this. :o)

I though "direct damage" were including AOE damage too ; just excluding DoTs. But this type of phrasing usually means an exclusion of AOE damages (if I recall clearly), so here again you are right, I suppose.

(The use of leet speaking is actually some kind of derision... In french, so maybe it doesn't work in english. Sorry for that. ;o) )

Of course druids have too much armor, that's not the point. 20k is far away from their capping. A druid with 20k armor would be totaly useless in TBC.

You have a point, though I think it actually works in the two directions. If fights involves a lot of magical damages often, you'll have eventually (well, you're saying this talent is actually useless so I'm ok with that) to take SD as a standard, and respec sometimes for more aggro.

Unfortunately, it seems that bli² (sorry for this abreviation, it's due to a key on my keyboard that doesn't work ;] ), if I trust what's said here, is taking a step back with all the "magic tanking" thing. So the respec will probably be on the other direction... Eventually. (probably never... *sigh*... ? )


If I resume...
- DK eventually lack aggro ( ? )
- there is no heavy magical fight, nor magical tank ( ? )
- SD affect only direct damage spells ( ? ) + is bugged ( ? )
- Expertise from Tundra Stalker is raw expertise, not rating.

I understand there is truly no point in taking Spell Deflection in this case.

DRW has a few things going for it.
It scales with all your melee stats, not just AP. Your weapon's base damage, crit rating, attack speed, damage modifiers. That means it also scales with bloodlust.
Yes, its AI should still be tweaked to act like a normal pet and attack from behind.
Its a fire and forget. You don't maintain it, you dump your entire RP bar for it.

Gargoyle
Lasts longer.
I believe the idea is it does a lot more damage now, and now we just need to compare scaling.
The maintaince to keep it up as blood is not hard. We spend enough GCD's on RP generating moves that essentially fill out our RP meter way before we get a chance to dump it.
Its damage doesn't change in regards to our actions. DRW uses our same strikes, so there is a difference with us in range vs. not, while Gargoyle sticks to the target.
You have a window to maximize its effectiveness. You can drop it earlier and still be able to ride the entire minute.

It might just be a gear dependency. A fresh 80 vs. a raided 80 may say differently.
Or it might be 20 in unholy is better than 13/7 frost/unholy.

Actually, IF the cd varied as suggested, it would make a good deal of sense. For the most part, each class has some mechanism to "decouple" their max performance potential from latency. If DK runes only started their timer from the moment it was available, say T=0, then the sum of time between T=0 and when you use an ability is technically "lost" and reduces dps as your rotation is delayed.

By adding a grace period, ~2.5 secs as suggested, latency effects are absorbed and a player can still maintain maximum theoretical dps. Is it really that hard to get a stop watch out and time the rune cd's though? Seems like this is an issue that should have been figured out a long time ago.



In other news, I guess for my simulator I'll just have to throw a random resist factor in at the accepted resist rate... for now at least.

Also, has anyone noticed that if there are no diseases on the target, CryptFever/EbonPlague has an initial duration of ~22 secs, yet when any disease is up, its refreshed to 18 secs?

Adding a grace period has no effect on maximum dps, since we're still gcd-bound. Server-side queueing is the only solution that would really work for us.