Vontre's Deathgraf - DK theorycraft tool (beta)

◊ Vontre · 09/26/08, 2:57 PM

Greetings fellows and sirs! I've just completed a stable and working beta of magegraf built specifically for Deathknights! Oh joy!

I'm going to copy my post from the magegraf thread because it's basically the same thing:

How it works
Deathgraf is almost a simulator, providing incredible detail and accuracy while still being fast enough to recalculate on a whim. Deathgraf calculates an optimal sequence of ability firing and individualy calculates each ability's damage over x amount of time. However, the things we know; crit/hit averages, average damage, proc rates; are averaged out for each ability, so you always get the same perfect result. It then makes a graf of fite (tm) that looks something like this:

Do you see that shit? It's a fucking beautiful graph. Er, graf. That's what this shit does, it makes grafs and they tell you stuff.

The tool comes with a variety of output and fact checking options, so other theorycrafters can verify what's going on under the hood. With peer review, we know we're getting the right results.

Deathgraf is in beta right now, we are still pounding out bugs to make sure everything is accurate. This is now the official deathgraf thread, so post any questions, comments or suggestions here.

Edit: I forgot to mention one of the best features, the ability to instantly share your results. Every calculation has a unique url hash associated to it, so just copy the url out of your browser to show other people what you're seeing.

http://www.magegraf.com/deathknight

Important note here. IF YOU ARE POSTING AN ERROR, please include a link to your results so I can quickly find out what the problem is. Thank you.

Notes
Pets fire their abilities in tandem with player abilities, and a percentage of the damage is applied based on the timing compared to how often it would actually fire. This process isn't visible right now, sorry. Also claw is simply counted as a 4 second cooldown, there is no energy model.

All the values are based on the most recent PTR build as of 01/01/2008.
Things That Still Need To Be Done

Empower Rune Weapon and Blood Tap.

• frmorrison · 09/26/08, 3:14 PM

Did you list what spec you are using for each build?

edit: Listed updated builds:

For Blood I use 51/13/7

For Frost I use 14/50/7

For Unholy I use 16/0/55

This may help with items: RapidShare: Easy Filehosting

• vank · 09/26/08, 3:14 PM

I thought you were cool before, but now... thanks Vontre. I didn't know you were doing anything for DKs on account of I never saw you posting.

◊ Vontre · 09/26/08, 9:18 PM

I think I need to review the talent allocations, actually, I believe blood is using unholy as the secondary (bad).

Acix · 10/05/08, 11:09 AM

Thanks vontre. You have been very helpful to me as a mage, infact the reason I specced Arcane. And now when I'm about to reroll Death knight you come and post this beautiful graf

Thanks alot!

◊ Vontre · 10/13/08, 6:23 PM

I'm currently fixing a ton of bugs in the implementation. More updates posted later.

◊ Vontre · 10/27/08, 8:34 PM

Just got finished with a major update here. Vulajin helped clean up some of the melee calculations, and I added all the melee raid synergies. Also added custom spec support you can copy specs from mmo-champ or wow official and compare them.

http://www.magegraf.com/deathknight/...0afb7d24e2cac4

The degree of accuracy should be pretty high now.

Master of Ghouls is really overpowered, though I'm not 100% on these pet calculations, I think they are pretty close.

Oh and I should also mention Vulajin and I are collaborating on a roguegraf using the magegraf engine. That's my idea of a press release, suck it.

Eishara · 10/27/08, 9:31 PM

Are Gargoyles not currently implemented for DeathGraf? I was looking at the Cast Sequence for various specs and noticed that for all ones with Gargoyles that it only listed one instance of Gargoyle Strike at 0 seconds and then nothing for the rest of the duration of the sequence. I realize that it's not quite finished yet but I didn't know where else to mention it.

◊ Zerchi · 10/27/08, 9:33 PM

Hooray a nifty tool. Thanks for this.

One thing I've noticed right off though is that you have rune strike in your rotations and that ability has been made reactive for tanking (only works on target dodge or parry now).

Mind posting the three "reference" specs you include by default (or just adding a "view" link to them like you do for specs we add)?

Edit: found a code error trying to render the stat analysis (happens for your link and any others as far as I can tell):

Warning: include_once(includes/stat_analyze.php) [function.include-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/public_html/magegraf.com/public/includes/home.php on line 851

Warning: include_once() [function.include]: Failed opening 'includes/stat_analyze.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear') in /var/www/public_html/magegraf.com/public/includes/home.php on line 851

Fatal error: Class 'Stat_Analyzer' not found in /var/www/public_html/magegraf.com/public/includes/home.php on line 853

Lanlaorn · 10/27/08, 9:43 PM

Looking at the rotations in the Cast Sequence, your rotations just seem to repeat themselves, reapplying diseases every time (not utilizing Epidemic) and not making use of Death Runes.

Needless to say this must be a loss of DPS.

Edit: Posting an example:

Unholy Deathknight
Icy Touch - 0
Plague Strike - 1.37
Blood Strike - 4.29
Blood Strike - 5.79
Scourge Strike - 7.29
Unholy Blight - 8.79
Icy Touch - 15.16
Plague Strike - 16.53
Blood Strike - 18.03
Death Coil - 19.53
Blood Strike - 20.9
Scourge Strike - 22.4

Since I assume your Unholy spec has Epidemic and Reaping, there's a bug in skill priority/rotation somewhere.

Edit #2, How odd, I just looked at the time on those attacks, a 7 second jump from the Unholy Blight to the Icy Touch, perhaps you are using 3x Scourge Strikes there and it's simply not showing in the cast sequence log. There's still something odd going on though.

◊ Vontre · 10/28/08, 3:59 PM

That seems likely. I'll have to take a look at some of these issues, thank you.

◊ Vontre · 10/30/08, 1:02 AM

I found the answer concerning the rotations with Scourge Strike and Blood Strike. The answer is quite simply that under raid conditions, 2 blood strikes does more damage than one scourge strike. The simulator is smart enough to determine which one does more and pick that option whenever it can.

Why? Scourge Strike's main advantage is that it's magic damage and ignores armor. Because raids assume a huge amount of armor reduction via major and minor armor debuffs (sunder and faerie fire), scourge strike's armor piercing advantage is no longer enough to overcome blood strikes higher base damage (when doubled).

So basically death runes are useless to the unholy raiding DK.

Foxx2405 · 10/30/08, 9:43 AM

Not sure if i can totally agree with that.

That might be true if you do a 5/3 rotation like this:
IT>PS>BS>BS>SS
SS>SS>SS

But im not sure if that still goes if you use a 4/4 rotation:
BS>BS>SS>SS
IT>PS>SS>SS

A lot of tests have shown the latter to be higher dps on boss fights since you don't lose any time switching between single / dual runes. And you generally have more time at each rotation to use RP abilities.

Buanna · 10/31/08, 2:40 AM

There's also consternation as to whether Scourge Strike actually outdamages either of its other options (IT+PS or 2 BS).

◊ Vontre · 10/31/08, 3:07 AM

I may take a look at the 4/4 rotation. In the meantime, I just corrected an error that was attributing way too much damage to the ghoul. Unholy should look more in line now.

Also, the new options for presence and glyphs show up in menus, but they don't do anything yet. =x

Azurai · 10/31/08, 4:17 AM

Thanks for the work.

http://www.magegraf.com/deathgraf/in...7942e5dbdde17f (for reference).

Looking through the cast sequence and dps differential, it looks like gargoyle isn't implemented properly yet? It strikes once on the cast sequence and has zero dps increase (ie make any spec and swap garg for something like pale horse and they report identical dps).

Some other oddities for you:

Rune Strike is being used. Could you add a tanking option or simply disable this (optimal dps while tanking is obviously less of a concern).
Ghoul dps listing does not seem to benefit properly from castable buffs when a talent spec has master of ghouls.
Death Strike is used over Obliterate for a blood/unholy spec without epidemic.
If I look at identical specs in the Spell Detail window, it shows the first spec as having 927 dps for autoattack and all the others at 1010? I can switch which spec appears first in the window and it still does that.
Rotations appear to be screwed up in general?
eg (removed autoattacks + ghoul claw + rune strike for clarity):
Death Coil - 246.22
Icy Touch - 247.51
Heart Strike - 248.81
Plague Strike - 250.31
Death Coil - 251.81
Icy Touch - 255.1
Heart Strike - 256.4
Plague Strike - 257.9
Death Coil - 259.4
Heart Strike - 260.69
Death Strike - 262.19
Death Coil - 263.69
Icy Touch - 266.99

Don't mean to bombard you, I realize some of these are nit-picky. Just posting what I find as incongruous with my experience on beta and the obvious errors.

◊ Vontre · 11/01/08, 2:04 AM

I think simulator just isn't authorizing the gargoyle because it thinks it's a dps loss. This is possible after the considerable nerf, but I'll look into it. The single cast is a test to analyze, I need to make it not show up.

◊ Vontre · 11/01/08, 3:57 AM

Ok, I'm not sure what think of that section of the rotation. I should mention that excerpt is from the middle of the encounter, not the beginning, which makes a little more sense. I imagine that there's a bit of redshift that goes on as time goes on. Deathgraf doesn't actually adhere to a set rotation, it uses intelligent logic to maintain diseases and then use the best strikes possible in sequence.

I loosened up the disease refresh imperative by 1 tick which increased dps substantially.

I added logic that would allow obliterates to be used at the end of the disease timers for specs that don't have annihilation. However, because you lose damage from dot ticks, and often have to lose rune refresh time by delaying your strike, this resulted in a clear dps loss. Specs without annihilation will end up using Death Strike almost exclusively instead of Obliterate.

The simulator calculated that the gargoyle would do less damage than spamming death coils. I forced it to use the gargoyle anyway just to make sure it was right, and it was.

I'll look into adding castable buffs for the ghoul, and the spell detail glitch.

◊ Vontre · 11/01/08, 4:11 AM

Spell detail problem was because of Bloody Vengeance not resetting properly. I corrected this error.

Illundai · 11/01/08, 12:57 PM

What spec are you using for Blood? I'm getting superiour results from http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...00000000000000

Avenrus · 11/01/08, 2:07 PM

Let me express my gratitude and support by saying; Great job once again Vontre!
With some help from people in the forums, this new tool will excel and DK DPS excellence.

Azurai · 11/01/08, 3:01 PM

Well, the gargoyle is in no way a DPS loss, it does significantly more DPS than DRW from my testing. For blood spec you lose at most 3 deathcoils (rest are usually free due to SD procs) and considering it basically chain-casts equivalent damage spells I'm not sure how it could conceivably consider garg a dps loss. My DC is ~ 1700, crits 2600 while garg chain casts 2k damage bolts.

As for Obliterate, it is a DPS increase if used nearer the end of disease life, but the disease refresh spam of the simulator doesn't like to let them get near expiration at all.

Something still seems amiss with the way it selects skills, though.

Consider the ~21 second block I quoted earlier versus a standard dps rotation of IT/PS/HS/HS/OB/DCx2 .... HSx4/DC repeat.

The simulator used:

4x DC vs 3x DC
3x IT vs 2x IT
2x PS vs 2x PS
3x HS vs 6x HS
1x DS vs 1x OB

Not to mention the fact that the 21s rotation allows the use of gargoyle without losing many DCs, whereas the simulator relies on DC spam to do its dps and choses to lose runes instead of overflow RP. My HS do similar damage to DC solo, and significantly more when in a raid environment and also proc free, crit DCs. There's no way the right choice here is to let blood runes lie dormant while burning every last bit of RP and ignoring the gargoyle.

◊ Vontre · 11/01/08, 6:44 PM

Originally Posted by Azurai

My DC is ~ 1700, crits 2600 while garg chain casts 2k damage bolts.

Your information is from an out of date build, since you should be getting double damage on spell crits (while Gargoyle doesn't), and also Gargoyle doesn't hit nearly that hard anymore. Gargoyle scaling got nerfed severely, he hits maybe 60% as hard as he used to.

◊ Vontre · 11/01/08, 7:04 PM

I did some more sequence evaluation, and for most builds burning up RP on death coil when you're close to max is a dps gain. However, there are some builds for which this is not the case, so I added some crude logic to make that determination which seems to be working out well.

Moratia · 11/02/08, 4:54 AM

You use rune strike as DPS... that won't happen.

Rune Strike
Unholy Deathknight - 3004 dps

Why wait that much time before hit ?
Plague Strike - 1.32
Blood Strike - 4.25

A bit more, this one isn't possible :
0: Array - Icy Touch
1.32: Array - Plague Strike
4.25: Array - Blood Strike
5.75: Array - Blood Strike
7.25: Array - Death Strike
8.75: Array - Death Coil
10.07: Array - Death Coil

10 + 15 + 10 + 2 + 10 + 20 -40 + 2 - 40 = -11 RP
Why it used Death Strike over Scourge Strike ?

When you apply buff, raid buff are last on the list, it mean you can't add all you're strengh modifier from template to the strengh modifier by BoK.
That's first template, then raid buff.

Edit, in addition i used stat of a naked DK using the S5 2H weapon and it end with 1811 DPS, i don't think a naked DK can have this DPS.

Also i had some error :
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