I multibox 5 shamans, so the accounts with chars 55+ are no issue to me I wouldn't multibox 2 DKs however, just put them in a group when they turn in a quest. I think I'll try it out and try to end up somewhere halfway in lvl 59 when I reach Orgrimar and then gift 1 level to 60.5-ish and proceed to do all my turn ins. (Cloth, Badlands, TB, and later in Zangarmarsh some stuff too, and Scryers tokens I got left) Hopefully it'll give me enough of a boost to stay ahead of the zerg of DKs that's going to flood Outlands
I'll calculate which quest I have to turn in grouped to end up as close to 60 as possible.
Well for this, like was pointed earlier in the thread, it's simply easier to just level normally, but skip the trainer quest, which will make you get out of the storyline at 57.9, at which point you gift 3levels to 60.9, finish the storyline(talking to thrall or wrynn in SW/org) and hit 61.
The reason to dual log both DKs instead of just grouping for quests is you lose the RAF when the characters are too far apart in levels, like 3 or more, so you'd end up losing xp in the end. Might as well just dual log, and put one on follow afk. You don't need to play the 2nd one at all, but to pick up arrows for one quest, and to loot 10 skulls for another(all mobs drop skulls and you have to kill way more than needed for other quests).
Interesting, I actually still have a RAF active linked to my new account, so I might dualbox them. I unfortunatly used up my RAF levels, so can't boost myself that way. Even a little boost is nice, I suppose. Do you get 60 during the starting zone? I'm not actually interested in having 2 DKs and if you hit 60 before the starting zone is over, I'd probably just log off the one I'm not going to play.
[e] Then again, I've got a lot of quest turnins and planned my route around doing WPL so the XP from that might get really messed up if it becomes nearly grey. Bah, need to figure out if it's worth it.
Hey guys, has anybody (or can anybody) see if Quickness (the Night Elf Racial Quickness - Spell - World of Warcraft ) is affected by the avoidance diminishing returns? The DK Tank Craft spreadsheet has it not being affected, and if that's the case it is a ridiculously good racial. The Tauren HP bonus doesn't scale with gear anymore, so the more geared you get, the less bonus HP you have, but if Quickness doesn't get affected by diminishing returns it gets better with gear.
Using the spreadsheet's default values a non night elf DK in 4/5 T7 has a 23.4% chance to be hit, whereas a night elf DK has a 21.4% chance to be hit, meaning a NE takes 8.5% less damage over the course of a fight. If gear improves to the point where a non-NE has an 18% chance to be hit and a NE has a 16% chance to be hit, the NE takes 11% less damage.
Testing this should be pretty easy. Take a premade toon, or choose a specific easy-to-get set of gear, grab a healer friend, and go out and let a mob hit you for 20 minutes, using recount or something to track your avoidance. Compare the NE and non-NE numbers and see if the NE gets hit 2% less of the time. I'd do it, if only I could get access to the beta... QQ
(Btw, this is obviously not a DK-specific issue, but since DKs are the highest avoidance tanks, and you get more benefit from 2% additional avoidance as your avoidance goes up, it will affect DKs the most... and I can't find the "race mechanics" forums.)
Considering the initial rush into outlands at launch, does anyone has thoughs about going directly into zangarmarsh, at level 58? I know it's not recommended most of the time, but I guess the difficulty of zangarmarsh (which is slighty lowered considering DKs are a little overpowered in outland) is lower than the difficulty of competing for drops/mobs and avoinding pvp gank fest that will happen.
We can probably leave zangarmarsh at lvl 63 and procced to lvl a usual on terokkar, instead of skipping half of it, which is happening right now.
Considering the initial rush into outlands at launch, does anyone has thoughs about going directly into zangarmarsh, at level 58? I know it's not recommended most of the time, but I guess the difficulty of zangarmarsh (which is slighty lowered considering DKs are a little overpowered in outland) is lower than the difficulty of competing for drops/mobs and avoinding pvp gank fest that will happen.
We can probably leave zangarmarsh at lvl 63 and procced to lvl a usual on terokkar, instead of skipping half of it, which is happening right now.
There aren't very many quests available at 58, and grinding might be difficult if you're attacking 62+ mobs as you'll be crushed. I wouldn't recommend it.
Hey guys, has anybody (or can anybody) see if Quickness (the Night Elf Racial Quickness - Spell - World of Warcraft ) is affected by the avoidance diminishing returns? The DK Tank Craft spreadsheet has it not being affected, and if that's the case it is a ridiculously good racial. The Tauren HP bonus doesn't scale with gear anymore, so the more geared you get, the less bonus HP you have, but if Quickness doesn't get affected by diminishing returns it gets better with gear.
Using the spreadsheet's default values a non night elf DK in 4/5 T7 has a 23.4% chance to be hit, whereas a night elf DK has a 21.4% chance to be hit, meaning a NE takes 8.5% less damage over the course of a fight. If gear improves to the point where a non-NE has an 18% chance to be hit and a NE has a 16% chance to be hit, the NE takes 11% less damage.
Testing this should be pretty easy. Take a premade toon, or choose a specific easy-to-get set of gear, grab a healer friend, and go out and let a mob hit you for 20 minutes, using recount or something to track your avoidance. Compare the NE and non-NE numbers and see if the NE gets hit 2% less of the time. I'd do it, if only I could get access to the beta... QQ
(Btw, this is obviously not a DK-specific issue, but since DKs are the highest avoidance tanks, and you get more benefit from 2% additional avoidance as your avoidance goes up, it will affect DKs the most... and I can't find the "race mechanics" forums.)
It's not affected by diminishing returns; talents, racials, and other sources of straight avoidance percents are not calculated into the diminishing returns. Only things which grant avoidance ratings such as gear, Forceful Deflection, and the like are calculated into it.
Interesting, I actually still have a RAF active linked to my new account, so I might dualbox them. I unfortunatly used up my RAF levels, so can't boost myself that way. Even a little boost is nice, I suppose. Do you get 60 during the starting zone? I'm not actually interested in having 2 DKs and if you hit 60 before the starting zone is over, I'd probably just log off the one I'm not going to play.
[e] Then again, I've got a lot of quest turnins and planned my route around doing WPL so the XP from that might get really messed up if it becomes nearly grey. Bah, need to figure out if it's worth it.
You get ~60.7 in the starting zone if you RAF everything, quests and mobs. You could skip the whole of WPL easily, so it's mostly a non factor, unless you really do want to turn in the LHC stuff. As I said, if you do it this way, you can hit 61 off the capital cloth turn in quests, or be extremely close. That's what I'm going to do, and skip hellfire/wpl, zangarmarsh shouldn't be too crowded right away, and I should be done and in terrokar by the time people start it, so besides the dedicated people who read these boards and have RAF deals ready, I probably won't see anyone until northrend.
Also, as to the dps discussion, let's not be so quick to throw blood or frost out of the picture just because we've been discussing unholy lately. Sure, unholy is great for leveling, but Tzenes' spreadsheet is already showing Blood pulling ahead in raid-buffed single target dps, which makes sense because it's the most weapon-dependent. Frost is also excellent, and dual-wielders can put up good numbers with it as well. People are saying X spec is suddenly "lackluster" or the "red-headed stepchild" when we're really talking about something like a ~2% theoretical margin here-- they might as well be equivalent. Play the one you enjoy.
My estimations were premature.
Here is the latest version of the spread sheet: tzenes Profile, tzenes Details - FileFront.com
You'll notice its marked v1A for version 1 alpha.
I felt it might be nice to record the changes I made under a version control.
I added the following abilities:
Shadow of Death
Ravenous Dead
Veteran of the Third War
Toughness (in the context of Bladed Armor)
Rime (but only for frost rotation)
Merciless Combat
I still don't have the numbers on Ghoul or Gargoyle to model either.
Killing machine is still giving me problems
Hystaria and DRW remain unmodeled (though I will get to these)
The dps numbers I currently have are close, but I expect both Blood and Unholy to increase by a non-trivial amount (frost will probably be close to this number).
All three specs use my new rotation system. Be gentle to it, as you can still confuse it if you're really trying. As long as you stipulate a rotation that is possible, it will give you accurate results.
Where ## is the talent you want. For DKs the first talent (Butchery) is character 45 and from there they go right to left, and down. I find it pretty convenient to just copy paste a spec and have the spreadsheet fill out the talents for you.
So say on your custom tab you could hide a series of numbers some place that's just 45-129 and reference them and that would let you auto-fill your way to victory for talent point list. Frost starts at 72 and Unholy starts at 100.
You get ~60.7 in the starting zone if you RAF everything, quests and mobs. You could skip the whole of WPL easily, so it's mostly a non factor, unless you really do want to turn in the LHC stuff. As I said, if you do it this way, you can hit 61 off the capital cloth turn in quests, or be extremely close. That's what I'm going to do, and skip hellfire/wpl, zangarmarsh shouldn't be too crowded right away, and I should be done and in terrokar by the time people start it, so besides the dedicated people who read these boards and have RAF deals ready, I probably won't see anyone until northrend.
Thanks for the chat about RAF I'll do it as you suggested, single all the starting zone quests to 57.9, grant myself to 60.9 and then do the cloth turnins to 61 along with every other turnin I have prepared to get a bit into 61 already as well.
I'll be heading to Zangar asap as well, or definately the second part of Hellfire (or maybe do ramparts/BF for some gear)
You get ~60.7 in the starting zone if you RAF everything, quests and mobs. You could skip the whole of WPL easily, so it's mostly a non factor, unless you really do want to turn in the LHC stuff. As I said, if you do it this way, you can hit 61 off the capital cloth turn in quests, or be extremely close. That's what I'm going to do, and skip hellfire/wpl, zangarmarsh shouldn't be too crowded right away, and I should be done and in terrokar by the time people start it, so besides the dedicated people who read these boards and have RAF deals ready, I probably won't see anyone until northrend.
Not really a point in staying grouped after you hit 60 right? Since then you'll split XP from kills but not gain any bonus?
Where ## is the talent you want. For DKs the first talent (Butchery) is character 45 and from there they go right to left, and down. I find it pretty convenient to just copy paste a spec and have the spreadsheet fill out the talents for you.
So say on your custom tab you could hide a series of numbers some place that's just 45-129 and reference them and that would let you auto-fill your way to victory for talent point list. Frost starts at 72 and Unholy starts at 100.
The talent rp gen is in the next build already.
I'll toss in the talent thing, great suggestion.
I'm hoping that Hellfire won't be too crowded on launch day because of the buffer the start zone creates. Not everyone will get it on launch day, nor at the same time. Nor will a lot of people know what to do in the start zone, and they'll want to enjoy it to the fullest. A lot of people are probably going to level their 70s too...at least that's what I hope. I'll probably slap myself in the face for that, though, as I'm getting ganked looking for damn zeppelin parts.
[Kibler's Bits] give me some interesting ideas. With little question it should be useable on the Master of Ghouls ghoul. According to posts on wowhead things like shadowfiend and one/two feral spirit would get the buff too, but they have pet bars. I wonder if it would have any effect on baseline ghouls? Still, it's a pretty nice buff that people seem to overlook, and it's very inexpensive to make if you know someone with the recipe.
Where ## is the talent you want. For DKs the first talent (Butchery) is character 45 and from there they go right to left, and down. I find it pretty convenient to just copy paste a spec and have the spreadsheet fill out the talents for you.
So say on your custom tab you could hide a series of numbers some place that's just 45-129 and reference them and that would let you auto-fill your way to victory for talent point list. Frost starts at 72 and Unholy starts at 100.
Speaking of addons, the author of ButtonBin started working on Magic Runes which does something that's quite similar to what people are generally looking for in a DK-dedicated addon. It displays and sort timed bars for runes cooldowns. Here's the link.
What is the current consensus on Outbreak (+10/20/30% to Plague Strike, Pestilence, Blood Boil)? I'm guessing it doesn't have any effect on the diseases that PS and Pestilence apply.
To me, this is the equivalent of a hypothetical talent that improves only Druid's Hurricane or Warlock's Hellfire (for example). Seems like it would be great if you were going to Unholy Tank and wanted to specialise in AoE tanking. Otherwise, I just can't see the point in getting it.
For Unholy DPS, you have Wandering Plague and Corpse Explosion, and still have unimproved Blood Boil. I'd rather be putting those points into some solid single-target DPS increase because that'll always be more useful. Thoughts?
EDIT: Checked out Magic Runes (above post) on my Paladin today. Love it so much. Simple, clean, SharedMedia supported, horizontal and vertical layout. Can't really see it in motion for a few days yet though. /sob
Last edited by jokeyrhyme : 11/04/08 at 7:25 AM.
Reason: forgot to mention...
I did a calculation on my sheets as to what talents are the most valuable in a raid setting as 17/0/54. These numbers are based on how much DPS is lost per point removed independently. The rotations were the same as previously discussed for both 20 second (4xSS) and 21.5 second (ps/it every 10 seconds). The DPS itself comes up very close for both. After making some changes to my average Disease DPS it looks like 4xSS is little bit better in a 3 minute fight but it really is going to come down to personal preference.
Edit: Also, I used DC instead of UB because at this level of AP (~4300) you wont get as much out of it unless AoE'ing.
It should also be noted that this is all considering a single target environment. The numbers below are in no way 100% accurate all the time and can be misleading if taken too seriously outside of the given assumptions.
%Dps lost per point in order of Largest to smallest (Unholy tree only)
Rotation PS/IT Rotation SS*4
Skill "21.5"Sec % Per Point Skill 20 sec % Per Point
SS 15.03% exempt SS 19.82% exempt
EbonPlaguebringer 9.08% 3.03% Epidemic 8.23% 4.12%
Bone Shield 1.96% 1.96% EbonPlaguebringer 9.27% 3.09%
Wandering Plague 5.63% 1.88% Bone Shield 1.96% 1.96%
BcB 4.85% 1.62% Wandering Plague 5.83% 1.94%
Crypt Fever 4.74% 1.58% Crypt Fever 4.90% 1.63%
Rage of Rivendare 6.62% 1.32% BcB 4.77% 1.59%
impurity 5.76% 1.15% Rage of Rivendare 6.85% 1.37%
Vicious Strikes 2.20% 1.10% Vicious Strikes 2.56% 1.28%
Desecration 4.76% 0.95% impurity 5.34% 1.07%
Shadow of Death 0.77% 0.77% Shadow of Death 0.75% 0.75%
Morbidity 2.31% 0.77% Morbidity 2.07% 0.69%
Necrosis 3.21% 0.64% Necrosis 3.16% 0.63%
Virulence 1.23% 0.41% Desecration 2.77% 0.55%
Ravenous Dead 1.14% 0.38% Virulence 1.14% 0.38%
Outbreak 0.85% 0.28% Ravenous Dead 1.12% 0.37%
Epidemic 0.00% 0.00% Outbreak 0.46% 0.15%
Let me know if the formatting goes bad for anyone viewing the above table. Having a hard time getting it to look right.
It's a shame that some of the first few talents are so bad, but that does show some interesting information. For one, it appears that the 3 points most people have been putting in outbreak (at least, myself) are better off in virulence.
Using those numbers and putting them into a build (based on tree restrictions) I got:
Isn't Virulence entirely gear dependent? And unholy aura is not a DPS talent at all. Did you test Gargoyle? I was under the impression that it is a pretty great RP dump.
Isn't Virulence entirely gear dependent? And unholy aura is not a DPS talent at all. Did you test Gargoyle? I was under the impression that it is a pretty great RP dump.
Yes, virulence is. But if you have that much hit, especially with a 2her, you are doing something wrong. In regards to unholy aura, read this. It's a naive assumption to think that just because a talent doesn't increase your numbers means it isn't a DPS talent. And for gargoyle, I'd probably take a point out of impurity or 2h spec. I left out gargyole out of habit, it is quite good (I didn't use it for a while because the gargoyle would randomly melee or just sit there a few patches ago).
Last edited by Zurm : 11/04/08 at 11:55 AM.
Formally Xyrm/Zurm, the Ret Pally. Now playing my rogue, Zyrm, more casually with RL friends.
In regards to Unholy Aura not being a DPS talent at all, movement speed buffs are almost always a melee dps buff, and a good one at that. For some reason it seems hard for people to wrap their heads around the idea that more time on a target is more dps. Sure it doesn't apply to every situation, but look at the raid fights you've done in the last year and consider how much you had to move for each; I'll think you'll find that the math applies most of the time. Now multiply that bonus by all your raid's melee. From a few posts ago:
Originally Posted by Zurm
True, but in virtually all fights the MELEE are within those 45 yds. Let's do some napkin math, shall we? In a 25-man, let's assume we have 7 melee DPS. Now lets assume we are on a fight like KT, with approximately 10% running time with no run speed enchant, and let's also assume a personal sunstained dps of all melee to be 4k. These are all fair numbers from what we have seen on beta, shifted slightly to make the math easier to follow.
Now, without any runspeed enchant, we could expect each individual member to do:
4000 * (1-.1) = 3600 dps, and combined:
3600 * 7 = 25200
Now, if we increase running speed by 15%, we increase the (1-.1) = .9 multiplier to 1-.087 = .913. Re-doing this:
Or a net raid dps increase on this fight of 364. This is also just purely the DPS benefit from a running fight. This doesn't factor in the ability to hit your WHOLE raid with a 15% boost on fights like Heigan to make it easier (while it's not needed to have this speed boost on heigen, it certainly helps, especially with the achievement where no one can die t his bursts). Also, you will most likely be near to the tanks at all times, and allowing the tanks to grab targets more easily is extremely helpful.
If you are going to skimp points from unholy aura, you are hurting the raid more than if you were to take those points from impurity or necrosis, for example.
11/03/08, 4:28 PM
I wouldn't multibox 2 DKs however, just put them in a group when they turn in a quest. I think I'll try it out and try to end up somewhere halfway in lvl 59 when I reach Orgrimar and then gift 1 level to 60.5-ish and proceed to do all my turn ins. (Cloth, Badlands, TB, and later in Zangarmarsh some stuff too, and Scryers tokens I got left) Hopefully it'll give me enough of a boost to stay ahead of the zerg of DKs that's going to flood Outlands 
I'll do it as you suggested, single all the starting zone quests to 57.9, grant myself to 60.9 and then do the cloth turnins to 61 along with every other turnin I have prepared to get a bit into 61 already as well.
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