Is there supposed to be some ... supreme raid build or something like that? I see these last couple of mages discussing blood specs and rotations, and I assumed blood was the spec that would mostly be used for raiding, but i was just watching an unholy DK get about 2500 DPS on the raid target dummy in Ebon Hold while I was struggling for 1400 DPS as Blood (51/13/7), using various DPS rotations here.

I wasn't popping things like Empowering Rune Weapon, Dancing Rune Weapon, Hysteria or Horn ... i'm not sure where to fit those in without throwing off a rotation.

EDIT: double post accidentally =(

True and if that turns out to be the case (entirely likely), the modification is really easy. 5/5 toughness, 5/5 Black Ice, 1 for Lichborne (you need this) and some free points for 9 in Blood, probably pushing Rune Power generation with talents like Scent of Blood and Butchery, and picking up 2/2 2Hand mastery.

Tzen: if there is any way I can help with your spreadsheets I would like to. I only know how to use xls though, and I apparently dont have as much time as you, but they are fun to me.

One thing that has bothered me with building rotations though. When you create a rotation with Epidemic (In other words, when you choose to apply FF and BP once every 20 seconds) you run into the problem of the FU abilities desynching your rotation.

For instance, going IT PS BB BB SS / SS SS SS you will now have both your F and your U coming up at the same time. However, because you didnt get both the F and U till 1.5 sec of the second rune rotation, this means you cant IT till 1.5 sec of the third. Which means, 20 second rotations become 21.5 sec rotations unless you try to shift moves up, which makes it worse.

For my unholy rotation there I chose to make the rotations BB BB SS SS / IT PS SS SS. I just create a single time initial order of BB BB IT PS SS then start the above rotation. You lose a tad bit of DPS from the loss of one SS initially but after that you dont need to wait since you always se single rune abilities with the same runes.

Also, that 2 seconds of no disease is a DPS loss. Its actually large too when you look at how much diseases do (check the spreadsheet I did unless Tzen added it to his). I think that glyph for SS comes in handy here as it will most likely reapply those diseases enough to kill that 2 seconds of downtime.

However for Blood rotations this becomes a problem as you cant avoid it with single rune abilities as your death runes come from dual rune abilities. Then again, maybe oblit will become superior to two HSs once they up it.

DK theorycrafting is so much fun cause there is so much to think about

I think they said that at the end of the day, all three specs should produce similar DPS. So if you and this unholy DK were in equal gear, it probably just means the skills need to be tuned a bit better.

I gave this some thought, and here's what I came up with as to why I think signs point to blood as a more prevalent dps spec:

1) Blood spec seems designed to scale better with better gear, in terms of single target dps. What I mean is that your primary damage abilities all scale significantly with weapon damage, whereas Unholy damage is from diseases and Scourge Strike. These should be roughly balanced by the time Wrath goes live, but I would predict that Blood will surpass Unholy at a high level of gear, mainly because of the % modifiers to weapon and overall damage available in the tree. (Having played both a druid and rogue in endgame during BC, I can attest to how much of a difference the weapon damage modifier makes).

2) Blood brings useful buffs to the raid. You'll want Abomination's might if you don't have an enh shaman, and Blood Aura now healing 2% of all damage dealt is a pretty nice perk too.

3) Blood is still due for some buffs. GC has said that strikes that deal flat bonuses for diseases will also deal bonus weapon damage, so these should scale better than they do currently. These strikes are the bread and butter of Blood spec, whereas Unholy only really uses Scourge Strike to this effect.

Besides that, not using your cooldowns and other normal buffs is a non-trivial difference in dps. A lot of Blood's bonuses and procs stack. In particular, Dancing Rune Weapon is ridiculous-- it's doubling your damage for 20 seconds. Timed properly with other cooldowns (Hysteria, AP trinket, Orc racial), procs, and your high damage strikes, it does an absurd amount of damage in a short span of time.

That said, this doesn't mean you're doing it wrong-- unholy does more damage right now. The devs have said they're shooting for all 3 specs as capable of equivalent dps and tanking, and it's not there yet. Buffs and nerfs are still to come in order to bring the specs into balance with each other and other dpsers. I see them as becoming more situational, anyway-- you might spec for blood or unholy (or frost, if it works out) for single target vs AoE situations, or which one you find more flexible for switching between dps and tanking depending on your role in the fight.

HB currently hits for more than oblit(as does froststrike) but oblit has a +145% crit modifier and howling blast has a +50%. I'd imagine we still have deathcoil, scourgestrike, deathstrike, blood/heart, and maybe plague strike buffs still coming as the minimum.

It is probably too early for any kind of decision on what spec will be best, and it is definitely too early for deciding which scales better.

I really haven't spent the time to figure out rotations correctly so basically I'm just guessing at this point. I tried to modify my sheet to be more like yours for that part, but right now I'm still working out the bugs mainly.

As for ods, its almost identical to xls, except you use ';' in functions. Additionally, openoffice is free, unlike ms office, and backwards compatible with xls.

If you'd like to download openoffice this link should help: download: OpenOffice.org Downloads
I've also uploaded the latest spreadsheet here: RapidShare: Easy Filehosting
and just for you the xls version: RapidShare: Easy Filehosting

I've finished the paper doll and even added some armor to play around with.
Its not hooked into the dps cycles yet, but I hope to have that done by this afternoon.


SS actually gets a 1.53 scaling on it (before you consider Ebon plaguebringer), which isn't as good at the 1.73 you get on Plague strike or 1.99 on Blood Boil (but nothing scales better than blood boil), but is Way better than the 1.38 on Oblit with a blood spec and almost as good asthan 1.63 on heart (again in blood spec). So I wouldn't say it scales horribly, it actually scales pretty well.

I was talking about the base weapon scaling (SS is 65%, oblit is 100% and will be 120% with the glyph) and thus much larger.

But that also brings up something I had to fix on your spreadsheet and you should fix on your new one. Multipliers from talents and such arent multiplicitive - they are additive. This means like, when you get a 30% bonus and a 15% bonus, its not 1.53, its 1.45. You have all your multipliers being multiplied by themselves and creating bloated bonuses. You did it as (1+talent affect)*(1+talent affect) when it should be (0+talent affect)+(0+talent affect).

I would look into that cause it is making certain things like Blood Boil and diseases give higher numbers than they should on your spreadsheet.

Are you sure it is additive? I can't think of a way to test it, but I'm willing to take your word.

I've been looking around and trying to research the DK dps abilities and I was thinking that 44/0/27 might end up being a little more dps then going with rune weapon. Anyone tried this out, please give any feed back you can.

All of these really should be tested, since the DK is a bit of a new realm in terms of mechanics. However, in general, talents are additive with each other, and then talents that give buffs are added together and multiplied by that. For example, Blood Gorged gives you +10% damage, so you deal 110%. In Blood presence, you gain a buff for +15% damage, so it's multiplicative-- you do 1.15 * 1.10 = 1.26 -- 126% damage. With a three-stack of Bloody Vengeance (I feel like I'm saying "blood" a lot, which is kind of morbid), you gain a 9% damage bonus buff. All your buffs are added, and then multiplied by talents: 1.10 * (1.15 + .09) = 1.36 -- 136% damage. The tooltip on the character sheet accurately reflects this.

Also, tzenes, when you were throwing out the scaling values for different abilities, what were you referring to exactly? Attack power scaling? Weapon damage? crit bonuses? When you reduced it to a single number I didn't quite follow how you got them, sorry.

When I have blood presence and bloody vengeance stacked to 3, the character sheet says I have 125%, so I think those two are atleast multiplicative. Perhaps presence isn't in the same category as buff, or talent.

Allow me to elaborate:

Take scourge strike. It does X damage. Now add Blood presence: X*1.15. Now add Rage of Rivendale: X*1.15*1.10. Now add Black Ice: X*1.15*1.10*1.15. Now add Desecration: X*1.15*1.10*1.15*1.05 or X*1.52.

Now if its additive we end up with 1.45.

I also wondered about Blood presence. It clearly increases your weapon damage by 15%, but then does it also increase your Scourge Strike damage by 15%?

IE: (weapon*1.15*.65+197+98*2)*1.15?
or does it only apply once

If we want to do serious theory crafting this is an important question

I have always thought that all talents and such that specifically add to certain abilities were additive to one another, then talents and abilities that add to overall damage (such as blood presence adding 15% to final damage, or blood gorged adding 10% to final damage) then are additive to one another but multiplicitive to the speific ones.

This is confusing as hell, but I was always under the impression in the end, it was all additive. Due to multiplicitive bonuses spiraling out of control. With almost all classes back in the day there werent enough bonuses over the course of any trees for it to be noticeable though. DKs are heavy on stacking multipliers.

Anyway the best way to think of how tzen talks about scaling is this. He is talking about the multiplier for the final damage, which comes after the % of weapon damage + the bonus damage. Or in the case of spells, after the ATP bonus to damage. This affects scaling a ton, but I was referring to the actual weapon damage scaling. Which is also affected by the final bonus, so this is important as well. But oblit will soon be almost double the weapon scale of SS before talents. SS doesnt get that much more on its own.

Oh and Tzen, I forgot to add this myself too, but you should take into account the bonus from bone armor (2% damage). As dps I would think this buff would be up almost constantly due to not taking damage. Its small, but its there.

Ok, so I did some quick testing to find the answer to my question. I unspec'd all talents, runeforged parry, and put up unholy presence to get a baseline:

In 71 white hits, I averaged 885 damage
In 54 Plague Strike hits, I averaged 277 damage (or 247+30)
885*.3 = 265.5
In 6 Rune Strike hits I averaged 503 damage
885*.6 = 531

Now, it is possible that this is just a statistical deviation as my sample size is small, but my abilities are coming up about 7% short of my prediction. Since the difference between double and single multiplier is 1.5%, there is no way I could test to see if this was accurate.

It is possible that the current abilities are bugged. I'll preform some longer range tests to try and confirm or deny this.

So I took too long to respond initially and missed this post, but yeah. Your white damage doesn't use the same formula as an instant attack. White damage uses your weapon speed, instant attacks are normalized (3.3 for 2hs) since the original zomgarcanite reaper.

Also, it should be noted that GC has said that the strikes that are modified by diseases are being changed so that the weapon damage value also goes up per disease, which will change all these formulas significantly (and do more damage, yay).

Ok, longer test (400 attacks):

White: 752
Plague: 235 (205+30)
752*.3 = 226
Rune: 428
752*.6 = 451

I'm going to need a MUCH longer test to confirm, but its likely that you're right and the AP is normalized, thus explaining the loss in dps.

Ok, latest version of spreadsheets:

I added ap normalization as 3.3 speed
I changed crit modifier for Icy, Blood Boil and Death Coil to 50% base.
I added bone shield as 2% damage modifier
All damage modifiers are treated as additive right now (I will change them back again as soon as I see evidence one way or another as it is a pain in the ass to do).
Frost Fever and Blood Plague had their base damage adjusted to current live values.
Paper Doll is fully functional
Dps is based off Paper Doll stats (as are rotations)


RapidShare: Easy Filehosting
RapidShare: Easy Filehosting

One correction to my previous formula: the wowhead spell page for Scourge Strike (and others) suggests that the % modifier is applied after calculating the normalized weapon damage. In other words, it would be (avg base wpn dmg + (AP/14 * 3.3))*.65 + 197 + 98*diseases, which makes sense. Interestingly, the datamined spell for the current beta build shows a third dummy value at the end, which could explain the sudden change in SS's damage. Where's the tinfoil hat smiley when you need it?

This is what I assumed you ment, as you don't get the ap without the 65% modifier



Edit:

Ok, try the following:

Step 1) spec into Blood Gorged, this will change your weapon damage to 110%
Step 2) turn on Blood Presense, this will change your weapon damage to 126% (110%*115% = 126.5%)
Step 3) Hit targetting dummy till Bloody Vengeance stacks 3 times, this will change your weapon damage to 138% (110%*115%*109% = 137.9%)

Conclusion: these all stack multiplicatively.

Hypothesis: all deathknight damage increasing abilities stack multiplicatively. this will be reflected in the next version of the spreadsheet

I suggest someone start drafting a Theorycrafting Think Tank article for Death Knights so that we can consolidate info that comes from testing. Any volunteers?

I did some testing on Cinderglacier on a level 80 premade tonight. I had it enchanted on a 2-handed axe. Spec was 9/55/7.

-The buff is called Cinderglacier. I couldn't find it in the Wowhead database.
-Buff acts like Imp Shadowbolt; it causes your DoTs to tick higher until you use enough direct damage spells to make it expire.
-Increases damage of IT, IT DoT, Plague Strike DoT, Death and Decay DoT, Death Coil. Death Coil consumes 2 charges (Bug).
-Does proc off Plague Strike, Blood Strike, Frost Strike.
-Doesn't proc off Death Coil or IT.
-Doesn't buff Frost Strike, and isn't consumed by Frost Strike. (Bug?)
-Proc rate is low. It's not unusual to go a minute or two without seeing a proc.

Other stuff that can be confirmed:
-Rune Strike is lit up by Icy Touch and Plague Strike crits.
-The snare granted by Chillblains is a separate debuff from the Icy Touch disease/debuff and is resisted separately. (This is a good thing; as a Mutilate Rogue it's not fun getting Crippling cleansed and losing both your snare and 30% from your direct damage attacks.)