Quick question about enchants, apologies if this has already been covered but about our weapons is it better to go with the Rune forging enchants or go 110 ap to weapon? Rune of the fallen crusader seems nice with the strength buff (i assume kings affects it to?) but i remember reading it had a 1 ppm. I was just wondering if something like this is still better than the static 110 or 85 ap enchant, thoughts?

30% of current strength will give your something like 360 AP (it is for my current stats, blue 80 lvl gear, should be more in naxx gear). This is more than 110, obviously. The next thing I saw from Xyrm's WWS is that the buff is up for a lot of time (the proc rate seems about 35% - proced 146 times, and 140 times proced shaman' unleashed rage, which proc each melee crit, and melee crit is about 35%, according to same WWS).
What the disadvantage is that it is temporary buff, and basically it could proc exactly when you need to move, so you can not hit. These are my 2 cents.
What would be nice to see here is what the proc rate because I had no chance to verify it by myself yet.

[quote=Pyran;993689]I was looking at the DPS compendium again (specifically, the 51/13/7 Blood spec, which I'm working towards) and I have a question: Why is Toughness ignored, given the synergy with Bladed Armor?

Also, I just noticed, Improved Icy Touch and Glyph of Plague Strike would be incompatible, wouldn't they. Each one provides more damaged to diseased enemies, so if you have both one of the spells on your IT-PS-HS rotation (or PS-IT-HS) wouldn't get the benefit.

If you weren't using the Glyph would the tradeoff of Toughness for Improved Icy Touch/Glacier Rot even be worth it? I calculate that at 10k armor the extra bonus from Toughness would add just over 41 ap (assuming Blood Presence or Unholy Presence):

Are you saying trade only Icy Talons OR Glacier Rot for points in Toughness, or filling out Toughness for both?

At 5/5, Toughness would add 3,000 armor to a 10,000 armor base. 3000/180*5 ~= 80AP gained.

Granted, it's nothing to sneeze at, and it scales, but general theory is that five entire talent points spent for such a relatively minimal gain isn't worth it, even in a min max setting.


As for Icy Touch, between Glacier Rot and Black Ice it'll hit and crit for around as much damage as Blood Strike in pre-heroic gear. It won't approach Heart Strike and Obliterate, but it becomes a fairly strong attack, especially when it crits with the fact that it ignores armor and crits for 200% damage through class mechanics alone.

Fallen Crusader is a 1ppm enchant as far as I've seen in this thread.

Can someone please verify this? I seem to remember seeing my fallen crusader proc several times within a 10 second window....

delete

I'll go test it myself once the servers are back up, because honestly now I don't know. For some reason I was of the impression that it definitely shared the common 1ppm with other enchants, but you're not the only person to have suggested differently, and what's more, it's possible there's not even an internal cooldown on it right now, though the Unholy Strength buff it grants won't stack (could have some dual wielding implications regarding approaching 100% uptime while maintaining decent healing).

Therein lies the confusion people are seeing then in assuming that 1ppm automatically means it can only proc once every 60 seconds instead of statistically proccing once per minute.

Now for some different questions for the mix: Which attacks can it proc from? I'd assume every auto attack and strike, but not spells. Also, can it proc from BCB procs? That would lead into further discussion about any benefits of placing it on both weapons in a dual wielding build for greater uptime.

Also, I checked a couple of WWS reports and noted 4 procs over 3'44" for one deathknight, and 6 procs over 3'45" for another. Chances are that it procced more than that, but since WWS only records buff gains, and a proc while Unholy Strength was up wouldn't count towards the total, it's difficult to tell. Still, those two in particular had a 1.08ppm rate, and 1.7ppm respectively, meaning they had 27% and 40% uptime of the buff. (60 seconds / 244 seconds, 90 seconds / 244 seconds)

My understanding of the PPM mechanic is that it's even more complex. The likelihood of any strike proccing the enchant is a function of the PPM and the weapon speed. But that chance doesn't change based on haste and specials. So if you use a special every GCD and are hasted, you'll see better uptime of the enchant, and this means a slow weapon will have a better chance to proc off of specials.

IOW: if you have a 1 PPM enchant, and you hit a target dummy with auto attack for N minutes, you should see N procs. If you do other stuff, you'll see more procs. That's why mongoose was so great on my rogue, it was up all the time, between the SnD buff for haste and all the sinister striking, I was attacking a lot faster than the base rate.

I don't remember seeing this explained in any of the threads on these forums.

But, is there a "breaking point" where one runeforge is better than another in terms of Personal DPS, and Raid DPS?

Right...So for a 3.5 speed weapon, you should have (1/60)*(60/3.5)= 21% chance per autoattack to proc it.

Which is then applied to special attacks right, since they're not factored into the PPM calc? So 21% per attack?

I'm currently testing out a DW spec that allows me at lvl 75 to do a consistent 1200 dps in a 5 man instance.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

this is my current gear i may still be in tank gear when you click the link i dont know how long it will take to update armory.

The World of Warcraft Armory

typically my rotation for single target is

IT->HB->BS->BS->FS
IT->HB->BS->BS->FS->FS

my rotation for aoe is

IT->Pestilience->HB->BS->FS

im just looking to get some feedback on this spec. It seems to be great on single target and aoe dps seeing as the main ability for it is an aoe. Since I'm DW Killing Machine is almost always up making most of my frost strikes crit.

Are you not using Plague Strike at all? It provides good damage, a buffer for your Blood Strikes and make use of that Unholy Rune you're letting rot.

In general I use PS and IT regardless of my build, but I'm open to ideas.

removed!

no i found that plague strike gives me too much down time on rotations and doesnt boost my blood strike enough to compensate

What is the Defense cap for a Tanking Death Knight. I've seen a few numbers thrown out, never seen a difinitive pertaining to us.

did anyone else have any input on my spec and rotation?

Yes.

[Fake Edit: Oh holy crap I just realized you have no points in Rime. Shame on you. However, I'm too lazy to go back and change all the crap I wrote.]

You have Annihilation but you never OB. You say PS won't boost your BS enough, but you're obviously trying to max your BS damage using talents (Bloody Strikes). If you're going to spam BS instead of using the Death Runes they create to OB then drop Annihilation, however considering the huge amount of damage OB will do, especially on crit with GoG, you should drop the two BS in the second part of your first rotation and just OB instead.

And not PSing is just silly. Letting a rune sit unused when you'll have to wait for more to come up is no excuse really. It's free damage you're missing out on. It's a DPS boost for one GCD, fire and forget.

Since the main focus of DW specs is to maximize white damage and use abilities that don't necessarily rely on weapon damage your rotations should look more like:

IT -> PS -> HB -> (OB) -> BS -> BS -> FS
HB -> OB -> OB -> FS

or

IT -> PS -> HB -> BS -> BS -> FS
HB -> OB -> OB -> FS -> (HB)

The section in parentheses are what you do if Rime procced off of your first IT, making your HB cost no runes. Since you don't have Epidemic though, you're going to have to refresh your diseases more often, however that's not really an issue anyways since using IT more is good.

On to your talents:
You have one point in Two-Hand Weapon Specialization. In a dual wield build.
No Rime in a HB centric build. Double yoo tee eff.
Points buffing BS in a DW build.

Personally I'd aim for something like this:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Tundra Stalker is 10% more damage with your abilities when your target has FF on it, which should be always.

The stuff in unholy gives your melee an extra 10%+ damage (since Necrosis is affected by Tundra Stalker/Blood Presence/etc). BCB gives you an additional melee attack to proc Killing Machine with, as well as just more free damage. While I regret not taking Bladed Armor and Dark Conviction I don't feel they play to your strengths as much (though in all honesty everyone should have Bladed Armor. It's that good).

You need Rime. It's just too good for an HB focused build.

Runic Power Mastery is not so good in my opinion, because you should always be dumping your RP before you can hit 100 in an instance. Soloing is a different story, but don't base your builds around soloing.

Virulence helps your HB/IT hit. Once you get enough hit gear you can probably drop it and get Ravenous Dead for some extra strength.


Some notes: If you're not going to OB drop those points and put them somewhere else (Rime for instance). However just realize the huge amount of single-target damage OB can do. Obviously it's a lot less dual-wielding than using a two-hander, but you need to focus your talents in places that will best boost your damage.

Why not just take Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft 50/0/21 and make it 51/0/20?

Hey I'm new here but I've been following this thread closely and lots of great information here. However I still have a few questions that's been bugging me:

1) On the topic of item budget for tanks, I read these conversions somewhere (tankspot or wowwiki I think)

39.35 dodge rating = 1% dodge
41.00 defense rating = 1% avoidance (miss/parry/dodge combined)
49.18 parry rating = 1% parry (also grants haste benefit on top)

With this in mind, I was wondering why people are suggesting top STOP stacking defense after the cap, and go for parry and dodge instead?

With the dodge conversion and defense conversion being so close, wouldn't it be WAY more beneficial to just stack as MUCH defense as possible, even over the 540 cap, seeing as defense would suffer the least from diminishing returns as it effects 3 different avoidance mechanics instead of one? Can someone elaborate why stacking dodge and parry is beneficial in any way if defense is availible?


2) As an unholy tank (mainly for heroics and 10-man Naxx) im currently running with this build:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

(About unholy choices I took OaPH because I fly around alot, and I value AMZ over Desecration for 5-mans. Ghoul and Gargoyle for most dps per point, which helps loads on bosses)

As you can see, I left 4 points out, cause im really unsure what would get me the most bang for the buck.

I do either 4/5 bladed armor or 2/2 2h spec + 2/5 bladed armor.

With my gear it would come out as 290 Attack Power vs 4% twohand damage. I see the 2hand damage being the most beneficial for single target threat, however the attackpower helps boost my aoe threat instead. Is there a clear winner here?

There are a couple of reasons: For one, it's harder for a DK to hit the 540 cap than the other classes due to the limited number of gear slots we have in comparison (no tanking sigils yet, only one of the two weapon slots to be used). Secondly, defense gives us stats we purely don't need, despite giving us ones we do. Once we reach that cap which is already taking up a large part of our item budget, it's time to move on to more specialized stats. Look at things like the [Durable Nerubhide Cape] for an idea of the gearing decisions that occur when you opt between a piece of gear with +defense, and one with +dodge or +parry in the Wrath loot tables.

In any case, here's a blue take on it:

Thanks for the reply, however it still doesn't answer my question.

Defense gives you, point for point, way more avoidance than parry rating and about the same avoidance as dodge rating. However defense doesn't suffer from diminishing returns as bad as the other stats.

Why should I stops stacking defense when I'm uncrittable, given the above facts?

One reason could be that defense is more expensive item-budget wise, but I haven't found any evidence of it being so yet.

Assuming im already uncrittable: 100 defense rating >>> 100 dodge rating? At least it would seem so with the DR penalty.