When there are no tanks alive. You shouldn't use it otherwise.
All of the ghouls taunt. Don't be the guy that starts spinning and moving the raid boss around for no reason when the fight is in hand.
The only time I can see it being useful is maybe Gothik on the adds. If they took out the taunt part, it would be a pretty decent cooldown. I remember testing out their DPS on a training dummy and they easily did ~1K+ DPS (back when I was in 80 blues/greens) when they were up. Imagine summoning DRW, and then using this. It would be a big DPS boost.
Wandering plague has an internal cooldown (I *think* it's three seconds... I might be wrong). In beta, when it didn't, AOE packs just exploded.
One second or less, actually, though yes there's an ICD. I actually suspect it's more like 1/10 of a second, but I'm too lazy to try testing timing that exact.
When there are no tanks alive. You shouldn't use it otherwise.
All of the ghouls taunt. Don't be the guy that starts spinning and moving the raid boss around for no reason when the fight is in hand.
If you use it when no tanks are alive, it won't matter. It takes about 6-7 seconds before the first ghoul gets to the boss to taunt, and by that time 3-4 people will likely have exploded from being hit by the boss.
Use Army of the Dead:
When you're fighting a tauntable boss and something has gone wrong (too many healers died, main tank died and OT has the boss, etc).
When there's a tauntable boss with a predictable damage spike (Jedoga in Old Kingdom when her adds get through, for example - one AotD will last for the full enrage duration).
When you're tanking and desperately need another shield wall.
When the boss isn't tauntable and you need more DPS. Although, I'm not sure if it's worth the loss of personal DPS from channeling it for 8 seconds unless you're the one tanking the boss.
NEVER use it when the boss is tauntable and has a nasty frontal AOE (Malygos).
After raiding last night, I feel that I greatly undervalued the importance of 4pc T7. With it, I was able to continue channeling gargoyle AND still keep UB up at ALL times. In addition, [Darkmoon Card: Greatness] was every bit as amazing as I had thought.
Just gonna have to agree about how amazing 4pc is during gargoyle. While I have not had a chance to test it in a raid, from the hour or so of dummy testing I did last night, I was able to keep UB up as well as drop occasional death coils. It also increases the value of the SS glyph, since you're getting a fair amount more of RP when you don't need to use IT/PS. I did notice going over cap a bit more, but I think that's just because I haven't had much time to practice with it yet.
You can use Army of the Dead prepull/during the pull of Patchwerk, as far as I could tell last time I did during a wipe, they don't taunt him or do anything, and they don't even soak HS. If you channel before the fight though, it's basically free DPS. However other than that, and other than tanking, I don't know many bosses that are not tauntable in WoTLK. Malygos and Sartharion are a definite no since they're tauntable and have a pretty heavy breath. Kelthuzad I guess would work fine, he'd turn around but his only attacks are frostbolts so wouldn't be a big problem. Thaddius would probably be a bad idea since ghouls don't benefit from charges, so the only thing they'd do is reduce your tank threat if it's not a DK. Gluth, Faerlina(if you don't bother moving out of rain of fire), Noth, Gothik, Blaumeux(4hm), Loatheb and Razuvious all seem fine.
Pretty interesting bit about Gargoyle I haven't seen discussed before.
If you are in Unholy Presence before summoning him, Gargoyle Strikes will cast at a 1.7s speed, without any delay in between. You can go back to Blood Presence and he keeps the faster cast time. I would imagine this gives a pretty notable increase in DPS if you keep it up for the full minute, at the cost of only two runes.
I still want to test the Gargoyle with Bloodlust, but haven't gotten the chance. Does anyone have anything confirmed as to whether or not it gains the buff, casts faster, and doesn't have any delay between Gargoyle Strikes (as someone suggested it might be casted with a hidden "energy" of sorts)? It doesn't seem to be able to gain any buffs like Unholy Aura and Horn of Winter so I'm guessing it doesn't.
I have found lots of uses for army of the dead in heroics, but none really apply to raiding. When I'm tanking, I like to use them as a frontal damage assault on appropriate bosses. Since they are so actively taunting, they can sometimes end up tanking for 50% of the fight plus add some nice damage. With raiding being a bit more calculated I doubt its as good of an idea.
In PvP...wow I love to make an assualt on someone with my army, they tear them apart.
K thanks on the info for Wandering Plague... got a cple more questions if anyone has tested it or heard the valid answer yet...once again thanks in advance...
1- Army of the Dead, Gargoyle, Ghoul(pet or temp.) : Do these guys' strikes work off of the DK's crit % ...... I know the ghoul mechanics work off of our STR and Gargoyle off our ATT PWR... but do all of em use our crit % while they fight?
2- I enter a fight on 5 mobs, throw out Death and Decay, then the diseases, Pestilence, and then Unholy Blight... I do not renew the D&D so it only ticks for that 10 sec... the blight is usually up the entire time of the fight of 20sec since it takes like 20 to 25 to kill the last of 5 mobs..... when I look at recount it says my D&D is doing 25% of my total damage...and my Blight is doing like 7 to 8%. Does anyone know if Death and Decay crits and Blight doesn't? There's gotta be a reason that 10 seconds is so supreme on damage.
3- Is there a CAP at 80 on agility and crit rating beyond that of normal diminished returns? A point where even 80's conversion rates get diminished even further? If so does anyone know what those limits are?
When you're tanking and desperately need another shield wall.
Are you sure about this? I was under the impression that while channeling, you can't dodge or parry. So while you do take reduced damage, it's at the cost of avoidance.
2- I enter a fight on 5 mobs, throw out Death and Decay, then the diseases, Pestilence, and then Unholy Blight... I do not renew the D&D so it only ticks for that 10 sec... the blight is usually up the entire time of the fight of 20sec since it takes like 20 to 25 to kill the last of 5 mobs..... when I look at recount it says my D&D is doing 25% of my total damage...and my Blight is doing like 7 to 8%. Does anyone know if Death and Decay crits and Blight doesn't? There's gotta be a reason that 10 seconds is so supreme on damage.
Yes, Death and Decay can crit, while Unholy Blight cannot. In addition, while some of the mobs might die after Unholy Blight runs out, many will not, increasing the % time that DnD was damaging the mob, skewing the results slightly.
Are you sure about this? I was under the impression that while channeling, you can't dodge or parry. So while you do take reduced damage, it's at the cost of avoidance.
You're correct that you can't dodge or parry while channeling a spell, but if you time it right you'll have over 50% damage reduction during the cast, and 50% damage reduction is better than praying for a string of avoidances in some situations. One such situation is when there's major magical damage incoming, such as Kael's Pyroblasts. There's no bosses I can think of right now that have a similar telegraphed attack in the current raids, but it's a sure bet there will be eventually.
I did say "desperate", mind. Chances are you're not going to have three runes available when you need the shield wall effect, unless you pop Empowered Rune Weapon to do it (which isn't a bad idea, actually, now that I think of it - I'll make a macro to combine those two).
You're correct that you can't dodge or parry while channeling a spell, but if you time it right you'll have over 50% damage reduction during the cast, and 50% damage reduction is better than praying for a string of avoidances in some situations. One such situation is when there's major magical damage incoming, such as Kael's Pyroblasts. There's no bosses I can think of right now that have a similar telegraphed attack in the current raids, but it's a sure bet there will be eventually.
I did say "desperate", mind. Chances are you're not going to have three runes available when you need the shield wall effect, unless you pop Empowered Rune Weapon to do it (which isn't a bad idea, actually, now that I think of it - I'll make a macro to combine those two).
Aside from the shield wall aspect of it you also have the advantage of the ghouls soaking 10 hits for you as long as the boss is tauntable and doesn't cleave or some other AOE on the tank. There are a lot of bosses though that have much potential for disaster if AotD is used on them though.
Care to elaborate? I've had a rough time valuing Haste and ArP. The melee crit from Agility is quite nice, and haste is very iffy. Choosing between items like [Melancholy Sabatons] and [Sabatons of Sudden Reprisal] makes my head spin.
Err my mistake, it's the other way around. 22 agi is ~1.4x better than 23 haste. Long day :~
The uses could be two-fold; if the damage of CE has been improved on the pet (and if you can /cast [target=pet] Corpse Explosion after the patch as well) to fall in line with the damage increase to the normal spell you can sacrifice your pet more often because A) CE won't suck and B) You'll always have him back in less than a minute anyways with NotD.
This would give your pet more survivability in receiving AoE and more usefulness in doing AoE.
Besides that, you can always Explode your pet, wait 5 seconds, and then explode his corpse, then raise a new one depending on how powerful the new CE is.
Personally I love CE, it's been my favorite ability since I rolled a DK. I'm glad they're improving it.
The one funny thing I could see coming from NotD would be if the pet took 70% less damage from CEing itself; as in it would survive and you could continuously blow it up every 5 seconds as long as it had health. I assume this won't happen, but I would laugh if it did due to an oversight.
I agree with you, CE will be very good and I will try it out. Best thing is you just put one point from Virulence and put it in CE.
I was comparing your Patchwerk kill to my own guild's, and I noticed a huge difference in the percent of total damage that Scourge Strike and auto-attack are responsible for. My Scourge Strike did 28%, white damage did 21%. Yours were 20%/26% respectively. This seems like a dramatic difference. At first I figured it was just the Sigil doing the work, but I did some math on how often we both Scourge Strike and found a big difference there:
You did 31 SS in 2:38, or 1 per ~5.1 seconds.
I did 58 SS in 3:58, or 1 per ~4.1 seconds.
% Heroism uptime can't be responsible, since it doesn't make runes cool down any faster.
I compared several other bosses, and the difference was there too, so I doubt very much that I'm getting that many more glyph procs.
Insights, Zurm or anyone?
(I've replaced an item or two since then, but I don't think it's something that simple anyway.)
I still want to test the Gargoyle with Bloodlust, but haven't gotten the chance. Does anyone have anything confirmed as to whether or not it gains the buff, casts faster, and doesn't have any delay between Gargoyle Strikes (as someone suggested it might be casted with a hidden "energy" of sorts)? It doesn't seem to be able to gain any buffs like Unholy Aura and Horn of Winter so I'm guessing it doesn't.
I think gargoyle IS affected by bloodlust. On patchwerk this week, I summoned him before the lust went out, and he cast 31 strikes. That's an average cast of under 2.0. With the typical 2.5s cast, we expect no more than 24 casts in the 1 minute duration. I am 100% sure I spent the whole fight in blood presence, you can look at the combat log itself and see every attack heal me with Blood Presence. I also don't have enough haste on my gear to make up that difference in cast amounts, so even if it took 100% of my haste that wouldn't have changed it.
Formally Xyrm/Zurm, the Ret Pally. Now playing my rogue, Zyrm, more casually with RL friends.
Yeah can corroborate on the bloodlust part, according to this WWS parse the gargoyle cast 27 during its 56 second DPS time duration, bringing the average cast time to 2.2 seconds, which is lower than the assumed 2.5. It should be even lower but this is due to Heroism not being cast right after he was summoned (this is something I remember from the fight). Lucky with timing, I guess. Either way, I've always felt a substantial damage increase when the gargoyle has it.
I have a question regarding Army of the Dead. I have heard conflicting reports about it being a DPS increase to use it. Is this true at all? If so, when would the best time to channel it be?
It is a quite sgnificant DPS increase to use them on patchwerk, he isn't tauntable and they deal approximately 75k damage over their duration. For a 6 second channel this is a pretty much given cooldown to pop for the fight.
Don't know whether they are boosted by talents but this is with a 17 0 54 standard UH spec with the ghoul glyph.
Yeah can corroborate on the bloodlust part, according to this WWS parse the gargoyle cast 27 during its 56 second DPS time duration, bringing the average cast time to 2.2 seconds, which is lower than the assumed 2.5. It should be even lower but this is due to Heroism not being cast right after he was summoned (this is something I remember from the fight). Lucky with timing, I guess. Either way, I've always felt a substantial damage increase when the gargoyle has it.
I summoned my Gargoyle before the heroism on our last Patchwerk kill, he had 32 Gargoyle Strikes according to Wow Web Stats. So you should time your Gargoyle into the heroism phase.
(WWS needs to fix Ghoul damage, he did around 612DPS on that fight. If you look at some of the other fights, i messed up my rotation due to horrible lags/disconnects. Thank you UMTS.)
"Progress just means bad things happen faster." -- Granny Weatherwax
I summoned my Gargoyle before the heroism on our last Patchwerk kill, he had 32 Gargoyle Strikes according to Wow Web Stats. So you should time your Gargoyle into the heroism phase.
(WWS needs to fix Ghoul damage, he did around 612DPS on that fight. If you look at some of the other fights, i messed up my rotation due to horrible lags/disconnects. Thank you UMTS.)
That site wants you to install a Java applet. Sorry, but my natural paranoia won't let me install anything from some random chinese website related to WoW; I don't want to log in one day and find I've gotten the Sexleg!
I know I've been plugging this site a lot in this thread, but it's nice to get accurate numbers.
Yea, I tried it out, it's actually quite fantastic. Speaking of which, here's the same Naxx I linked earlier, but uploaded to the WoW Meter Online site. I was able to learn a good deal more about the ghoul's dps as a result of this. My only gripe is a *slightly* more clumsy interface than WWS, but nothing you can't figure out in a bit of trying.
One other thing I learned looking at this site was just how spikey our DPS can be. I figured it was spikey, but if you look at the real-time DPS chart it generates, my DPS fluctuates from 4.8k to as high as 11k. I'm definitely going to spend a bit of time using the break-downs this site provides.
Formally Xyrm/Zurm, the Ret Pally. Now playing my rogue, Zyrm, more casually with RL friends.
I was working on my respec and ended up looking at one of three talents to drop for Reaping, and when it came down to it, the three I was looking at were Necrosis, BCB, and Impurity. I noticed in my DamageMeter, Necrosis ended up doing more damage than BCB, so then my choices were narrowed down to BCB and Impurity. I can't tell how much damage I get from Impurity because it doesn't have it's own seperate damage counter, so I had to use my basic math to figure out how much it did. But then came the question, what all does Impurity affect? What all is considered to be magic damage? I'm sure Death Coil is magic, but what about abilities like Icy Touch (based off Frost Damage) and Scourge Strike (based off Shadow Damage)? Can anyone list all the things that Impurity could affect so I can calculate the damage properly?
12/11/08, 2:17 PM
I love to make an assualt on someone with my army, they tear them apart.
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