WotLK Discussion - Talents and abilities. - Page 69

nevinera · 09/03/08, 1:31 PM

Originally Posted by Stoical

If you're talking extended dps in the current build, never. With the old rune masteries and investment into talents that speed up and emphasize white attacks, maybe dual wield, unholy presence was arguably better in that you would be proccing so many faster rune cooldowns. Now, without rune masteries, the math is much simpler: 15% haste is at best equal to 15% damage in the long run for some abilities (white attacks), but for many abilities (anything depending on runes) it will always be significantly worse, meaning you're always going to be better overall using blood, even if your spec heavily favors white damage.

Unholy shines if you're soloing mobs that you easily kill in one rotation so you can blast through that rotation faster. So if PS+IT+SS=115% or more dead, you may as well PS+IT+SS with Unholy.

Of course, the burst potential for PvP is great, and at the very least it's like a poor man's Crusader Aura.

Don't knock it too hard now!

In deep frost you can actually use 7 gcds every other cycle, and most builds use 6, so every time you miss (or get dodged, etc), you'll need an extra gcd to burn that rune in, or your rotation gets pushed back by a second (or two). In blood presence, that's a real issue - if you miss with anything, you'll lose a significant amount of damage; in unholy, a miss costs you much less, as you generally have the time to just strike again.

Unholy has some major advantages, particularly for specific builds. It's certainly not so obvious a choice as you'd make it out to be.

Stoical · 09/03/08, 5:08 PM

Originally Posted by nevinera

Don't knock it too hard now!

In deep frost you can actually use 7 gcds every other cycle, and most builds use 6, so every time you miss (or get dodged, etc), you'll need an extra gcd to burn that rune in, or your rotation gets pushed back by a second (or two). In blood presence, that's a real issue - if you miss with anything, you'll lose a significant amount of damage; in unholy, a miss costs you much less, as you generally have the time to just strike again.

Unholy has some major advantages, particularly for specific builds. It's certainly not so obvious a choice as you'd make it out to be.

How so?

I see several GCDs to make up for the occasional miss/dodge/parry (for the sake of this post I'll just call that a "miss"). You shouldn't be wasting RP or GCDs on DC as frost, so your RP is just going towards FS and the occasional Rune Strike at the same time as another ability to soak up the extra RP if you pick up Butchery. Here is the cycle I see, in Blood Presence, assuming some variant of deep frost with Annihilation and Epidemic.

Cycle 1:

0.0 - 00 RP - IT
1.5 - 20 RP - PS
3.0 - 30 RP - HB
4.5 - 50 RP - BS
6.0 - 60 RP - BS
7.5 - 70 RP - FS
9.0 - 30 RP - ..
10.5 - 30 RP - .. (wait an extra second for Unholy refresh)

Cycle 2:

11.5 - 30 RP - HB
13.0 - 50 RP - OB
14.5 - 60 RP - FS
16.0 - 20 RP - BS
17.5 - 30 RP - BS
19.0 - 40 RP - FS
20.5 - 00 RP - .. (wait an extra second for Frost refresh)

Cycle 3 = Cycle 1

21.5 - 00 RP - IT
etc.

If you get a miss in your first cycle, you just fill up that empty GCD. If you get two, you'll be behind .5s. If you get one in your second cycle, you'll be .5s behind. In any of those cases, I would wager the benefits of blood aura will outweigh the .5s you lose in your cycle.

If you miss twice in your second cycle, or more than twice in your first cycle, you're going to start seeing a lot more GCD starvation, but at 6 abilities in each cycle, even 1 miss = 16.67% miss rate, which is much higher than you should be seeing. My enhancement shaman doesn't even miss that much with white attacks, and he's dual-wielding and not hit-capped.

Spiry · 09/03/08, 5:18 PM

Maybe I've misunderstood somewhere, but Unholy Presence lowers the GCD to 1.0 second

Stoical · 09/03/08, 5:24 PM

Originally Posted by Spiry

Maybe I've misunderstood somewhere, but Unholy Presence lowers the GCD to 1.0 second

You don't misunderstand Unholy Presence, but you misunderstand my post:

Originally Posted by Stoical

Here is the cycle I see, in Blood Presence, assuming some variant of deep frost with Annihilation and Epidemic.

nevinera · 09/03/08, 5:28 PM

Originally Posted by Stoical

How so?

I see several GCDs to make up for the occasional miss/dodge/parry (for the sake of this post I'll just call that a "miss"). You shouldn't be wasting RP or GCDs on DC as frost, so your RP is just going towards FS and the occasional Rune Strike at the same time as another ability to soak up the extra RP if you pick up Butchery. Here is the cycle I see, in Blood Presence, assuming some variant of deep frost with Annihilation and Epidemic.

(cycles)

If you get a miss in your first cycle, you just fill up that empty GCD. If you get two, you'll be behind .5s. If you get one in your second cycle, you'll be .5s behind. In any of those cases, I would wager the benefits of blood aura will outweigh the .5s you lose in your cycle.

If you miss twice in your second cycle, or more than twice in your first cycle, you're going to start seeing a lot more GCD starvation, but at 6 abilities in each cycle, even 1 miss = 16.67% miss rate, which is much higher than you should be seeing. My enhancement shaman doesn't even miss that much with white attacks, and he's dual-wielding and not hit-capped.

Yes, with that particular cycle, you'd use blood presence.

I'm fairly certain that using Icy Touches in the second cycle instead of Obliterate (and possibly BS) does more damage, as well as being an even cycle (using up all runes as they come available - switching back and forth between a 5strike and a 4strike cycle loses you some rune regen). The extra 1.25 frost strikes (or FS + RS) makes up the difference between 2xIT vs. Oblit. (As well as the full cycle being 20s instead of 21.5)

Edit: was leaving GoG out of maths. Not certain that the unholy rotation is competitive anymore.
Edit2: Nope, still keeps up. I'm using the .2 APC from wotlkwiki.info though - do we have different information on IT's coefficient now?
Edit3: On the other hand, it only outdamages by ~8% on my math, which isn't enough reason to use unholy presence. So if everything stays *exactly* as it is, your rotation will be better :-\ (There will be an inflection point at which my rotation in unholy will beat yours in blood, but it looks pretty high)

nevinera · 09/03/08, 5:55 PM

Another thought - If you used a frost rotation while DW fast weapons, using ITs instead of Oblit and HSs would be a *great* move. Not only do they hit for less, Killing Machine will be proccing a great deal more.

A build to consider: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...00000000000000

With a rotation like
PS, IT, HB, BS, BS .. PS, IT, HB, IT, IT (With frost strikes and rune strikes wherever).

Zaroua · 09/03/08, 10:47 PM

So I went and played around with the target dummies in Dalaran for a few hours and ended up with some fairly interesting results.

Necosis increases auto-attack DPS by up to 42% with Blood Presence, Black Ice, Bloody Vengeance and 13% magic damage debuff.
Blood Caked Blade is bugged to hell, but it benefits from the diseases of OTHER Death Knights. Having no diseases up yourself and getting a BCB proc while another DK has his diseases up yields a true proc instead of 1 dmg.
With enough hit, expertise and haste, it'll be easily possible to keep up a maxed stack of Frozen Rune Weapon while dual wielding the enchant on the off-hand.
Rune of Cingerglacier doesn't work with Frost Strike.
Blood still does very good DPS even compared to other spec, even staying really close to Unholy: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...00000000000000 clocked in at over 3500DPS on the dummies (they're lvl 1, remember)
Rune Strike macro'd into your other abilities does very reasonable DPS even considering 35% crit rate on the dummy but no Rune Strike procs on specials. It'll most likely favor Blood spec the most because of Dark Conviction and Bloody Vengeance, but if Unholy Blight and Wandering Plague crits can proc it then it'll also be quite good for Unholy spec.
Maxing out Expertise (6.50% against Dodge/Parry) and Hit (9%) is going to be crucial for Death Knights. The DPS drops considerably when your rotation goes out of control, mostly because it becomes a lot harder to fit in Death Coils in the rotation and because (as people were discussing above) any attack that doesn't land because of a miss or whatnot will be pushing back your rotation and forcing you to wait to spend your runes.
Obliterate as Blood hits damn hard and certainly doesn't feel like it needs a buff to be competitive.

Sinazeel · 09/03/08, 11:29 PM

So would the Axepertise (see what I did there?) from the Orc racial be more beneficial than the Tauren's 5% health? If I understand the Expertise mechanic correctly, the orc racial gives 5 Expertise when using Axes, so that's 5% against Dodge/Parry, meaning you'd only need 1.6 Expertise left to cap it?

And if you only need 6.5 Expertise before capping, why does Will of the Necropolis give a maximum of 12 Expertise? Or am I not understanding this right?

Oke · 09/03/08, 11:35 PM

Originally Posted by Sinazeel

So would the Axepertise (see what I did there?) from the Orc racial be more beneficial than the Tauren's 5% health? If I understand the Expertise mechanic correctly, the orc racial gives 5 Expertise when using Axes, so that's 5% against Dodge/Parry, meaning you'd only need 1.6 Expertise left to cap it?

And if you only need 6.5 Expertise before capping, why does Will of the Necropolis give a maximum of 12 Expertise? Or am I not understanding this right?

1 Expertise = -.25% dodge, so the racial is only 1.25%
Expertise - WoWWiki

Edit for link

Sinazeel · 09/03/08, 11:58 PM

Okay, thanks. For some reason I thought that 1 Expertise = 1% against dodge/parry.

Pyros · 09/04/08, 1:13 AM

For DPSing orcs is definitely the best choice, since you get expertise, the bloodfury thingie and pet dmg for ghouls, taurens provide nothing for DPS. For tanking well, tauren bonus is king I guess.

About the dummy tests, it's hard to figure what's really better for general DPS, since dummies have 0 armor and stuff. There's quite a difference between blood physical attacks and unholy magic damage(assuming you don't get resists which still remain to be seen I guess). Next patch with the boss level dummy, it'll be better to compare. They'll probably fix scourge strike damage too, to have a better overview.

About cinderglacier and frost strike, do you mean FS isn't affected by it? I mean, they probably fixed it, but when I had a frost build, last patch, FS wouldn't expand cinderglacier charges, but it'd still benefit. It's one of the reasons it led to such stupid crits. It does seem to do it with scourge strike, but haven't checked in detail, the damage variance is pretty big.

Buanna · 09/04/08, 1:38 AM

Originally Posted by Zaroua

[*]Maxing out Expertise (6.50% against Dodge/Parry) and Hit (9%) is going to be crucial for Death Knights.[/list]

We won't know that for sure until we know what percentages of non-melee damage is expected in the endgame. Frost and Unholy may both be non-trivial in that regard.

Zaroua · 09/04/08, 3:08 AM

Originally Posted by Buanna

We won't know that for sure until we know what percentages of non-melee damage is expected in the endgame. Frost and Unholy may both be non-trivial in that regard.

Melee damage being crucial or not in end game, you'll still want your hit maxed for your spells to land anyways. Plus you need to have Plague Strike and Icy Touch land consistently with pretty much any spec or risk losing the disease debuffs, forcing you to re-cast your abilities and messing up a rotation.

For example:

IT > PS > SS > BB > BB > UB
SS > SS > SS > DC

IT > PS > SS > BB > BB resist, UB falls off > UB, Blood rune wasted or push back Frost/Unholy runes
SS > SS > either you recasted BB in your previous rotation and you can SS again a bit later (DPS loss), or you're stuck with 1B1D rune and low on RP (DPS loss)
And then you start your IT > PS rotation again, having lost DPS

Keep in mind that lacking expertise also means more parries when a boss turns around for a random secondary target ability, leading to an increased chance of parry gib and just more DPS lost.

You have to keep in mind that only Icy Touch, Howling Blast, Unholy Blight, Wandering Plague and Death Coil won't benefit from Expertise (Wandering Plague does, to some extent if you need to apply Blood Plague with a Plague Strike) but will benefit from Hit (not sure about UB needing Hit, would need to double check). Everything else will get benefit from it, including auto-attacks, Necrosis, BCB, Plague Strike, Blood/Heart Strike, Obliterate, Frost Strike and Scourge Strike (which scale extremely well raid buffed and with better weapons).
Even if you could get spells to be up to 50-60% of your DPS - which will probably be lower as gear scales - Expertise and Hit will remain amazing stats and will provide far smoother rotations. And let's be honest here: having to worry about a spell or an ability not landing is time and brain power spent not worrying about more important stuff, like the fire you're standing in.

Pyros · 09/04/08, 5:18 AM

Ok stupid question, anyone tested what our spellhit is? I'm wondering if, like every other caster, we'll have a base miss of 16% on raid bosses, making it extremly hard to cap spellhit, and making frost < unholy < blood due to reliance on spells.

I know the hit rating stats is being merged, but spellhit and melee hit are still 2 different stats, and are still on 2 different scales. You still need 9%hit for melee, and 16% for spells. Unless you DW, there's little chances you'll be spellhitcapped. Retadins spells are actually using melee hit iirc for judgements, the melee ones at least, righteousness was spellhit, but that was when I played oen in early BC, might have changed. Enh shamans will usually try to be capped since they benefit from the melee hit too, but what about DKs? The unholy "pvp" talent helps a bit, but not that much.

Anyone who ran some tests? I guess we'll be able to test next patch on the boss dummy(I sure hope it makes it in, have quite a bit of stuff to test), but asking in case of. If spellhit is 16% for DKs, that would make DW probably more interesting for frost and maybe even unholy, due to being able to stack hit and still benefit from it. Using capped melee hit will result in quite a lot of lost DPS due to diseases failures, and simply pushing back rotations.

Darkrenown · 09/04/08, 9:37 AM

Hasn't the spellhit cap been lowered to 9%, all of which is removable?

rimmer · 09/04/08, 10:41 AM

No the spell hit cap is now 17% reducing your chance to miss 0%

nevinera · 09/04/08, 12:05 PM

Does anyone else hope they buff runestrike and put it back on the gcd?

It seems to me like the easiest way to make a significant number of people use unholy presence for anything but farming.

Deathwing · 09/04/08, 12:45 PM

I dont see how that will accomplish anything, people will just use rune strike or death coil, not both.

nevinera · 09/04/08, 1:16 PM

Originally Posted by Deathwing

I dont see how that will accomplish anything, people will just use rune strike or death coil, not both.

Runestrike has better damage per RP, but lower damage per gcd. Therefore a person who is gcd-capped will get more return out of deathcoil, and a person who is not will get more return out runestrike (when it's up, which will not be often enough to use all of the RP). The entire point I was making was that it creates a difference between the two states (gcd-capped and non-gcd-capped) which is too small at the moment.

I would like for both presences to be of use, depending on spec and gear. As things are now, You would only use unholy for a few small niche-builds, and only until you have sufficient hit/expertise.

Hearteater · 09/04/08, 3:29 PM

I'm wondering if UP will eventually decrease rune cooldown. Would 9 second runes break anything? Would it compare to BP reasonably?

nevinera · 09/04/08, 3:51 PM

Originally Posted by Hearteater

I'm wondering if UP will eventually decrease rune cooldown. Would 9 second runes break anything? Would it compare to BP reasonably?

You'd get ..11% more yellow damage from that change, in an optimal rotation. It would still be lower dps than blood for all but a few builds though, and since blood offers another advantage as well, I can't see it being enough. I like your idea though, it feels in line with the current UP.

If it reduced ALL cds by 10% (runes and abilities), would it be comparable? We need Howling Blast to be on the same CD as the runes, and it would let you get gargoyle, hysteria, DRW, HC, AMZ.. etc out a little faster too. That would make up the difference..

Alternatively, it could do something a bit chaotic. A blue mentioned that a lot of people missed the crazy, chaotic fighting style of DKs with rune masteries, so if UP had a % chance each time you use a rune that it recharges twice as fast as usual, that would provide an interesting alternative presence. (As well as being very tuneable). Potentially more dps, at the expense of taking tons of attention and skill to handle correctly.

Fellwraith · 09/04/08, 4:12 PM

Originally Posted by Zaroua

So I went and played around with the target dummies in Dalaran for a few hours and ended up with some fairly interesting results.

Necosis increases auto-attack DPS by up to 42% with Blood Presence, Black Ice, Bloody Vengeance and 13% magic damage debuff.
Blood Caked Blade is bugged to hell, but it benefits from the diseases of OTHER Death Knights. Having no diseases up yourself and getting a BCB proc while another DK has his diseases up yields a true proc instead of 1 dmg.

Yea I think I posted about both of these earlier in the thread. Necrosis double-dips on bloody vengeance and blood presence buffs. You're getting the 15% from both abilities added to your auto-attack and then added again to your shadow damage from Necrosis. This is one of those multiplicative abilities that are going to make DKs scale pretty well as their "character sheet" or base item damage output is going to get amped up several times.

Blood caked blade has been doing 1 damage without personal diseases up for some time. I think there's a flag on the ability to make sure you have personal diseases up, but after that it's bugged to include every disease. Has anyone figured out if non-DK diseases also increase the damage of it (abilities like devouring plague)?

Zaroua · 09/04/08, 8:19 PM

Official talent calculator has been updated:

Hysteria now costs 1B1U
Might of Mograine has been reduced to 45% but now includes Obliterate again
Blood of the North reduced to 3 talent points
Merciless Combat changed to 20% extra damage when below 35% health
Outbreak doesn't grant a benefit to Scourge Strike

Deathwing · 09/04/08, 8:51 PM

Few more changes:

Bone Shield back down to 30s cooldown(yay!)
Howling Blast's range bumped to 30 yards, still affected by Icy Reach. Also, R1 damage on calculator > R1 damage on WoWhead, not sure if that means it got buffed.
Frost removed from Bloody Vengeance

Bone Shield change probably an error, especially since the other two trees' short cooldowns are still 1 minute.

Curious about the Merciless Combat nerf. 60% -> 20% is a huge jump, such that they couldn't have seen 60% was too big on paper? I was expecting the talent to affect all damage if it was reduced that much.

Pyros · 09/04/08, 9:36 PM

Wouldn't put too much faith in official calculator, thing has been out of date way too often, might be stuff that's not even going to be in next build and stuff. I find weird they'd revert hysteria to 2runes for example, don't really see the point of it. The rest sounds like decent balance changes to prevent multiple talents affecting the same stuff.

I ran Pinnacle earlier, as unholy spec, can honestly say they're probably going to need to nerf the disease stacking buffs. Black Ice+Crypt Fever+Eboneplaguebringer just make this stuff way too brutal, I annihilated everyone on the damage meter with 600-800 blight/D&D ticks the whole run, and I was tanking. Currently I don't really see how protadins can compete for AE threat. I guess with their high block rates they mitigate incoming damage better, since I do die a few times(Flash of light spam with 4elites doesn't work too well it seems), but this aggro I'm passively putting out, it's probably way too high. Might become more balanced as gear advance, but not too sure about that, don't think consecration/holy shield/ret aura scale much better.

I wish they'd put all the talent specific tanking perks all on 30secs cooldown too, like old bone shield. 1minute feels too long. Maybe reduce bone shield a bit to compensate, but unbreakable armor is bad enough that leaving it as is with a 30secs cooldown will still be balanced imo.