Clandestine

No.

 

Shadowalker

Is Death Coil affected by Two-Handed Specialization while using a Two Hander, or does it only affect weapon based attacks? I would assume it only affects weapon based attacks, but I need confirmation before I finalize my calculations.

 

Clandestine

Weapon based attacks only.

 

Charkh

Does the armor from Gatekeeper get buffed with frost presence and assuming I have defense covered, is the benefit from that increased armor significant (assume mostly BIS items)?

 

Traz9

Hey, I have looked at several Best in Slot lists and know that this may be a hard question to answer, so forgive me if it is.
But excluding the Betrayer of Humanity, what is the next best in slot weapon for someone around hit cap and expertise cap.
Right now I have Death's Bite and I am under the impression it can be considered second best. True?
Does it matter on the spec as well? I am Unholy right now, but plan to go two handed frost in the near future, so if there is a weapon i should aim for, let me know.
Thanks in advance.

 

winst

I'm not entirely sure what's going on, or if I'm missing something as I don't play unholy that often but my death runes seem to have some weird bug.

Standard 17/0/54 doing what I assume (and read) is the standard rotation of :

PS > IT > SS > BS > BS > RP

after RP i then have two frost, two unholy and two death runes which essentially means 3 scourge strikes and back to two of each rune whereby I start up the rotation again, adjusting if my glyph doesn't refresh diseases.

I'm not entirely sure why, but after scourge striking off the death runes, one refreshes as death, the other as blood. Now I can just ignore this and use the death rune and the blood rune to do the two blood strikes as usual, but is this common behaviour and I've just not read about it ?

edit: just noticed it does this as dualweild (32/39) too, after icy touching my two death runes off, one refreshes as blood like it should, the other returns to death.

 

Rayven01

No. As of 3.0.8 bonus armor on items does not get benefits from armor multipliers of any kind.

 

Dharts

I have seen numerous test results that show Necrosis doing more damage than BCB, and am trying to understand why that is. It seems to me that Necrosis adds 4% auto-damage per strike, while BCB adds a 10% chance to do 50% weapon damage (assuming two diseases up, more for Unholy) per strike, which is 5%, and more per point than Necrosis. What factors am I not considering that lead to the results we see?

 

• Darkside

Necrosis double-dips into all damage multipliers. This means that it benefits from things like Blood Presence initially (when the swing damage is calculated) and when the Necrosis damage is calculated.

Example:

Your white-hit swing hits Mob X for 1000.

1000*0.04 = 40 base Necrosis Damage

Multipliers:

Blood Presence = 1.15
Ebon Plague = 1.13
Desecration = 1.05
Bone Shield = 1.02

Final Necrosis Damage = 40*1.15*1.13*1.05*1.02 = 56

This is actually a 5.6% increase instead of the 4% you are led to believe from the tooltip.

Furthermore, Necrosis can "crit" in that whenever your swings crit, it calculates its damage from that value. BCB cannot, to the best of my knowledge, crit (though it can be dodged, something that has always bothered me).

<XI|> if your dog barks do you debate the philosophical reason behind him barking
<XI|> no
<XI|> you say shut up idiot

 

BrainJuggler

Everyone is saying the 20/51 "IT spam" build got nerfed out of contention. I'm looking through the PTR notes and the only nerf I can find is the change to the sigil of frozen conscience. Was that enough to ruin the build or am I missing something?

 

f1reburn

Let's say you're tanking a boss that does a cast every once in a while that you need to interrupt, like Caribdis the priest does in the Fathom-Lord Karathress fight. You're a frost specced tank and you need to keep one blood rune (for Strangulate) or 20 runic power (Mind freeze) available at all times.

What's the threat maximizing rotation in this situation? Is it simply Rune striking less or is there more to it?

 

soellie

Consider there's at least 2 dk's in the raid, if one of them would use the 3.1.0 glyph of pestilence, would that also refresh the diseases from the other dk (on both the main target and the surrounding mobs)? Or doesn't pestilence refresh other-dk diseases at all?

 

Ashur25

All abilities that have something to do with diseases (be it extradamage from strikes or whatever) only count your own diseases thus it is most unlikely that pestilence will refresh anything beyond your own diseases (and to be clear if it does it's a bug)

 

soellie

Thats what I always thought. However when looking at the tooltips alone :

Deathstrike:

Pestilence:

Which would suggest otherwise.

Guess this can be easily tested on ptr with 2 dk's, which I will do unless anyone knows something conclusive

 

Ashur25

There's an error in your line of thinking regarding the wording. You quoted the live tooltip of Pestilence (since it still says "does xx damage"). If you were right Pestilence would already work the way you think it will work but it clearly doesn't. So Blizzard would have to alter it, which would go directly against their intentions for DKs(own diseases affect only you).

Plus: Tooltips are rarely right

 

soellie

Well true, I linked the live one because I couldn't find one for test. Though I figured the text itself wouldn't change besides the damage part.
Then the question would also include the current situation if pestilence also spreads all dk diseases in live.

 

Foxx2405

Don't pets also benefit from the haste ?

 

• frmorrison

They would get imp Icy Talents (the raid-wide buff like WF totem), but don't get the personal buff. DK Pets only get haste rating from their master.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Foxx2405

Hmm you give 2 conflicting statements here.

First you say pets only gain the raid version (improved icy talons) and then you say pets get haste from their master.

I know the latter is true, hence i was assuming that 20% melee haste from Icy Talons, is transcended to the pets.
Of course this is assuming you don't have a raid buff version.

Much like they also gain the haste from Unholy Presence, and the haste from a Potion of Speed.

So as far as i know, Icy Talons (or any of the other raid wide haste buffs) affect:

- White damage
- Pets (DRW / Ghoul / Garg / AotD)
- Procs

 

Buanna

In 3.1, does gaining additional runic power after casting DRW or Gargoyle no longer add to their duration?

Boni and Bonii are not words.
Bonuses is.

 

Ashur25

They still do. What makes you think they don't? both tooltips clearly state it

Edit: Sorry, misread the question, Amroo is right about the DRW part and Gargoyle still needs RP to keep him after the initial 10s (only the RP/s part got lowered from 8 to 3 RP/s)

 

Amroo

I believe DRW never had this feature, it lasted for a time proportional to the amount of RP you had when casting it ("Unleashes all available runic power"). That's why it is now interesting for Blood DKs to get RPM in Frost (longer DRW duration). Gargoyle had this feature and still has it (so it consumes RP during its uptime after the initial 10 seconds have passed).

 

Spotnick

Hello,

I have read a good part of this thread, I'm totally noob to unholy having been blood for leveling and DW frost/unholy until last night when I finally got a 2H weapon worth switching for (plus the upcoming patch nerfing it obviously)

My question is actually simple, Unholy seems to have a lot of down time in the rotation where you are blocked by death runes who stops you from doing blood strike or stuff like that. I can always use ERW to save myself once, but this prevents you pretty much from using a castsequence macro to ease your job. I'm wondering, what should you do when everything in cooldown, wait or pop anything that isn't on cooldown, like Icy Touch to maximize your dps.

I have not raided yet with this spec, but it's doing more dps on a training dummy that my DW build was doing so I am confident.

Another thing, I have seen mixed opinion on this, so I'm still looking for insights, but I have enough gear to swap to play with most spec, and I am wondering with Unholy if the spell hit cap is THAT important over crit... good example is I have Sapphiron's breast plate vs the 100 hit breast plate (from Noth or Heigan, I don't remember).. all sources are saying the Breatplate of Frozen Pain is better, but that doesn't make me spell hit capped, while the others, and with other elements in my gear, would make me (I can stack up to 500 hit in raid with some gear configuration, which obviously is way too much)

So, I understand strength and AP should go first, but no theory I'm reading really tell you if the gap between melee hit and spell hit is important before crit, obviously I understand that the melee hit is important but that's not really a problem.

Since it's a new spec and I'm trying to get everything I need to perform well, I'll continue reading all these thread and look forward to use this spec for 3.1

Thanks.

 

• Darkside

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, so I'll throw out the generic unholy rotation for you to have a look at.

Generally, you open up with Icy Touch -> Plauge Strike -> Scourge Strike -> 2x Blood Strike.

From there, you empty all your Runic Power, either through Unholy Blight or Death Coil, depending on the fight.

If your runes have recharged yet, wait for them to do so and then slam 2x Scourge Strikes. If you get a proc off the glyph, drop another in. If not, then you'll probably need to reapply your diseases.

From there, empty your RP again, and simply repeat the whole cycle ad infinitum, using your Garg whenever the raidleader calls for a lust (hopefully they're not retarded and are lusting early). It's that easy.

<XI|> if your dog barks do you debate the philosophical reason behind him barking
<XI|> no
<XI|> you say shut up idiot

 

Spotnick

For some reason, sometimes, 2xBS will convert 2 runes into death runes, once used, you are hitting a cooldown on unholy runes so you can't do it 4x on the 2nd part of the rotation. I had the same issue with dual wielding when I hit howling blast and it consumed the 2 death runes leaving me with no blood rune for the upcoming blood strikes.

Question for rotation is, should you wait until the cooldown is over or pop anything you can until you can get back into the "standard" rotation...