Talents change that on certain abilities.

A moonkin could innervate the mage next to him, or he could innervate himself (assuming of course a healer doesn't need it). Nothing past 3.0 has lived long enough so mana has been a real issue, but I know in the past most moonkins needed their own innervate to have enough mana for the fight. Priests had shadowfiends, mages had mana gems, and moonkins had innervates. It may be that this is our own beastial wrath or recklessness, but that there's an option to use it on someone else. I hope our DPS wasn't scaled based on the assumption we'd use it on ourselves.

In a situation where threat wasn't an issue putting it on the highest physical DPS makes sense from a min/max perspective, but often the highest threat people are riding the tank's threat. A non-beastmaster hunter might be a good choice because they can wipe threat (and won't be splitting their damage done with their pets), but a warrior might be a bad one because they can't manage their threat effectively. I hope DK DPS is close enough to the top that we can use it on ourselves.

At least now and later Naxx 25, threat is not an issue (as long as you wait 2 seconds), and if a Paladin can Hand of Salv to reduce total threat by 10%, so you want it on your highest physical damage guy (likely a Warrior).

I wont claim to have played a large amount of the Beta or to have done tanking in the small bit that I have with the Deathknight, but there is a bit of knowledge that seems very useful here and that should also be applied to questions of dps.

As previously discusses, Blizzard wants all 3 DK trees to be equal in DPS, Tanking, and PvP correct? At the moment they are apparently attempting to balance the 3 trees to each other so that they are on the same playing field. After that Blizz seems to want to raise them all up to the levels of other classes at the same time, once our 3 trees are equal. It makes sense to me and seems to fit with the way the patches have been coming. I have seen this discussed before and I dont honestly think that Blizz would leave its new hero class at sub-par dps and tanking...

Basically, my point is that it is true that DKs seem weaker than other classes in most areas at the moment, but wait a month or so and watch the patches. I'm hoping for some significant buffs. I hope thats not wishful thinking.

I see the runes as pairs, too. Now I just have to write a rune addon that reflects that (plus a warning when a rune misses). The existing ones aren't very good, in fact they are bad.

I agree completely that there is no difference from being 1 threat point above the necessary aggro threshold and 2 billion. My concern is the difficulty of maintaining that advantage, versus the relative ease from other classes, especially considering that the only stats we have to increase our TPS as gear levels increase is str, armor, and hit/expertise. I've already taken a couple upgrades from Naxx-10 to 25 gear that had less armor,str or hit/expertise for a wealth of more avoidance.

I had much more success with TPS before the frost nerfs.

I'm not really agree with this, formula is [Normalized Weapon Damage] + [ 50% Weapon Dmg] + disease * 95.5
Source : Blood Strike - Spell - World of Warcraft
And Normalized weapon Damage is : Base Weapon Damage + AP / 14 * Delay + Bonus
With Delay :
+ Two-handed weapons: 3.3
+ Daggers: 1.7
+ All other one-handed weapons: 2.4
And bonus : 191

My math seems more accurate than yours on this point.

Yes SS take one less GCD than twice BS, but as pure damage deal, BS + BS > SS. So if you have at least one GCD free in the rotation you better do BS + BS than SS and skip reaping for more damage talent.

Edit : now i attack UB nerf, since the last build, UB do 1% AP + 48 per seconds during 20 sec for the cost of 60 RP
60 RP is 1.5 * DC (1.5*40 RP = 60 RP)
1 DC = ( 15% AP + 443 ) * 1.15 ( from morbidity )
1.5 DC = 1.25875*AP + 764.175
1 UB = 1.20*AP + 960

Difference is 195.825 more damage for UB, but DC have a better scaling on AP, 5.875% better than UB.
It mean with 3333.191489 AP, you're 1.5 DC will do same damage as your UB, and for more AP, you will have more benefit using DC than UB...

Since they remove the disease's effect from UB, this skill turn kinda useless since it's not the best RP burn anymore.
This way the rotation would be PS-IT-SS-DC-BS-BS-DC (you lack 1 RP with butchery wich can easily be found by switch presence before game start or using death grip on an immune boss just to bump RP at the start of fight).

Edit 2 : as for armor reduction, i use data collect in the topic about rating at lvl 80.

By deep frost I meant 13 points. A number of people in this thread have shown putting those points into unholy is a better investment (and this was true back when black ice effected both shadow and frost).

But a couple people have mentioned the use of Hysteria. I think its worth pointing out that DK dps is balanced around raid dps contribution. As a result, your dps is benchmarked to include the damage of said hunter while under hysteria (or at least the bonus caused by hysteria). As a result, blood should appear lower on dps charts if they're using it to buff someone else.

Now when I wrote that post it wasn't to criticize your raid performance as much as to debunk the myth that DK couldn't dps and using you as an example. If you're putting Hysteria on a hunter, then your dps contribution is higher than a service like recount will report. If you look at the other people I talked about in the post you start to see what my actually criticizing someone might look like.


@Moratia: I know when the UB nerf first went through it was still getting the bonus from crypt fever as if it was a disease (it just didn't count for abilities). I'm not sure if this is still true. Did you take that into account?

you can actually use them as pretty good measurements because you typically have every buff all the time and 1 heroism

... I think you need to reread what I said, or at least I'm operating on the assumption you don't understand the implications of what I wrote (there are alternative explanations, but I'd rather not mention them).


Consider the following scenario:

30 Seconds of patchwerk dps:

Recount shows
Hunter 4000dps
DK 3500dps
raid: 7500dps

Now, the DK can use Hysteria on himself which produces the following:

Recount shows
DK 4200dps
Hunter 4000dps
raid: 8200dps

or he can use it on the rogue

Recount shows
Hunter 4800dps
DK 3500dps
raid: 8300dps

Obviously the latter is the better choice.

Q: who is doing more dps, the Hunter or the DK?

A: The DK

The DK provides 4200dps in scenario 2 and 4300dps in scenario 3.
The Hunter (alternatively) provides only 4000dps in all three scenarios.

While it may look like the DK is doing less dps on a system like recount, he is actually doing more.
Hysteria breaks the assumption that you typically have all buffs at anytime averaged over the course of the fight.


Now, this does not prove that DK can do more or less damage than a Hunter, merely that recount data needs to be modified with this assumption and can NOT be taken at face value.

Love the analysis but isn't this a far more general conclusion and not limited to Hysteria? There are several targetable buffs that perform similarly, Tricks of the Trade comes to mind.

It doesn't count as a disease for strikes, but it IS affected by crypt fever, which helps its dps some.

I believe they bumped UB's coefficient to 1.3% of AP (Source)

That being said, with all modifiers considered the only time BS is truly better than using SS is with a Unholy/Blood hybrid spec that includes bloody strikes (which I've found is still a net loss overall). RP is the same as well. Either way unholy is not nearly as GCD starved as our other alternatives so that shouldn't be as much of a deciding factor.

Edit: On a side note... does anyone feel Gargoyle is the only real option for dps no matter your spec preference? I've been 'mathing' that to be true. Hope its not. Also, i kind of wish that BcB was a PPM(proc per minute) or something better for equalizing 2H and DW.

I found gargoyle to be a DPS LOSS in my personal tests... the RP it stole from DC's and UB made it not worth it in the end. This was before the change to UB and Gargoyle though, may not be true anymore. I just haven't been a big fan of it, and it's notoriously difficult to model becuase it doesn't purely shoot nature bolts, it also randomly melees for like 100 damage. There is no way to really predict how much damage it does until we get more info into it's behavior.

Good. I knew someone else besides me would notice if it was as good as its theoretical potential (based on 2.5sec cast and 40% APC). I'm going to have to say i'm glad it's not.

I've seen a few people here saying that 2H unholy is better than DW. I'm hoping I'm wrong here too when i say mathematically that is nearly impossible with raid gear, buffs, and a proper rotation (largely due to BcB+Necrosis).

Or other spells like innervate (which was mentioned earlier).

The ONLY important point is that DK dps is benchmarked with abilities like Hysteria in mind (otherwise you'd bring a raid full of blood dks and a rogue to soak up the hysteria, or other stupid raid comps.

Thus if you would like to point out a Blood DK and say: "hey, he's not doing top dps on recount." The proper response should be: No shit, he isn't using hysteria on himself so he shouldn't be (and actually you can further make the argument that under no conditions should he be, as the benefit of hysteria is probably calculated on a higher dps class).

I know this used to be true (it was also still effected by wandering plague) right after the nerf, but I was never sure if this was a bug or "working as intended."

Is it still true?


Also on the subject of gargoyle. Did you find it was a dps loss while it was up? or was it a dps loss over the course of the fight (this would be because of the way your rotation lined up)? I'm certainly glad to hear its doing less damage (a couple pages back it was blowing away abilities like DRW). I would also like to see the analysis of the 50/0/21 spec redone.

I just modeled the 15/37/19 spec into my sheets. Maybe its just the fact that my Rime Proc model may not do it true justice when considering the cooldown on HB. Even though it is a Proc machine it doesn't seem to make up for the lack of 40+ talents. A real test would obviously be better.

On the topic of DW and Unholy. I hope you are right when gear starts to really stack up and people start executing their rotations better. In a perfect rotation I'm showing DW as a good 200dps ahead of 2H (~4150 to ~4350 respectively). Guess only time will tell. I could see 2H being the clear winner in interrupted dps situations (teleports/movement).

That's still within 5%... the fact that its so close (and that, lets face it, our math may be off) leads me to believe its going to be close enough that for now, it doesn't really matter.

Also, keep in mind that the 45pt talents are conditional, and don't necessarily have 100% uptime. I have tested that build I linked, but my gear level was was a lot lower than we expect for a T7 geared player. It may be that by the time we hit T8 or 9 that DW scales much better, or it may not. Keep in mind blizzard said they have one more sweep to go for DKs, but they are waiting closer to wrath while they finish up classes that are currently live. I suspect a (minor, maybe 5% or so) dps increase across all specs incoming.

Assuming Methods figures are right we have to remember that 200 dps with divisors of that size is really about a 4.59% dps increase. That would be the equivilant of 80-100 dps increase these days. It won't make or break your raid.

Additionally,
I am not arguing that better isn't better but that small of a difference is going to come down to a selection of what gear you have available.

If your 2h has even a marginal higher iLevel its going to make up for that and more.
Similarly if the gear you have access to has bucket loads of hit over cap on it and weapons of equal iLevel there's no reason not to DW and squeeze the benefits out.

TLDR: DW and 2h appear v. balanced. Its really a choice of iLevel.

Well at least we can say that PvP will be mostly 2H! Btw Zurm, how is that Rawr Module coming? I'm looking forward to it to be honest.

Gargoyle went from 20% scaling to 67% scaling per attack. It's the highest DPS single talent in any class's talent trees.

It went back down to 40% says the coefficients post. Still good if it's consistent... if...