Solithaira

Teyrocar i've done some basic testing of this issue, and while its hard to get an exact confirmation, I believe that this has something to do with overkill.

Its already known that if you die as a result of massive falling damage, you will not return as a ghoul. I also note that if you die as a result of getting hit by the laser beam in the HoS escort quest, you will usually not return as a ghoul. Also when I die to bosses that are known to hit very hard, I do not come back as a ghoul (Patches, final boss in Azjol if i recall, etc).
However, in each of the cases listed above, I have returned as a ghoul if I was at full health and effectively got one shot by the boss for just a little over my total HP - except for falling deaths of course.

My current theory based on what I have seen, is that if you die and suffer a very large amount of overkill damage (have not been able to pin point an amount yet), you are assumed to have died of "environmental" or "unnatural" causes, and thus would not return as a ghoul.

 

• Zurm

From my experience, any raid boss hit that kills you (regardless of overkill amount, even sub 1k) will prevent shadow of death. However, being hit by the raid boss for 99% of your life and then getting killed by an add that effectively hit for the last 1% of your life will allow you to return as a ghoul. I think the overkill amount doesn't really have anything to do with it; I think the game just prevents you from ressing as a ghoul in specific situations. I've had it fail in pvp, but then when I become a ghost I have the buff... I suspect that kind of behavior is a bug.

 

Zurai

I've been raised by Shadow of Death on raid bosses (Kel'Thuzad's frost tomb and Loatheb's doom are the two I remember), and I've been reduced to exactly 1 hp WAY too many times to be a coincidence on other raid bosses. Also, about half the time Shadow of Death doesn't raise me, when I load in at the spirit healer I'm in ghoul form with the buff counting down (even for Naxx - that time sucked).

Shadow of Death is just bugged to hell and back. I keep it for the 2% stam and the chance to stay alive at 1 hp, but every time it doesn't work I grind my teeth.

 

Fugazor

I don't get how pre-cap 1HIT = 2.4631 goes to 1HIT = 1.2497 after melee cap. That is only 50% reduction and I do not believe DC/UB/IT cover 50% of our damage? I would expect hit to drop around 0.5 or so unless I miss something (Gargoyle?).

As for Shadow of Death yep it is bugged like hell. For example in Wintergrasp I often find myself on graveyard as ghoul, happened in PvE deaths too... Quite annoying because I need to watch and cancel ghoul otherwise I will wait for ress two times.

 

Leperchaun

I haven't been able to find any pattern to the shadow of death bug, just seems that sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, but there has to be something that's matching the pattern.

Maybe it has to do with magic vs physical damage, something along those lines. Maybe we can get some combat information to help pinpoint it better.

 

Roybatty

More often than anywhere I get the Shadow of Death bug in Wintergrasp/Strand of the Ancients when I get killed by a vehicle.

Also, for some reason my ghoul on Kel'Thuzad, likes to run after a MC'ed person and begin attacking them. Anyone else have this problem? I'm sure that I wasn't attacked by them too.

 

Clandestine

Shadow of Death can definitely work even if the killing blow is delivered by a raid boss. It was proccing on Malygos most of the time while we were working on an achievement tonight. I've noticed it doesn't seem to proc if I get overkilled by a lot, too. Environmental damage doesn't seem to proc it under any circumstances as well. It's just all-around buggy. On the plus side they seem to be working on it, and I've noticed that you retain rank buffs when dying with Shadow of Death while in Wintergrasp now, thankfully.

 

Sikorae

Apologies if I missed this when reading through the thread, by why are people aiming for 8%hit now? As I understood it, the cap was 9% (295 rating.) Has something changed recently that I'm unaware of?

 

shed

Yes, the cap changed to 8.0%.

 

methods

You were correct. This is off by enough to value crit over it after cap.

My mistake was including hit/exp in calculating FF/BP respectively. I had included these modifiers because I had not implemented the added time per miss on rune abilities (meaning a total loss in disease uptime). It was there for a rough estimate. I believe the new system of adding time per miss makes more sense and is more accurate.

The new after cap (melee) hit and before cap exp conversion should be:

Stat	Unholy	Blood	Frost
1Hit	0.9167	0.9460	1.1139
1exp	2.3366	3.2320	2.4196

Thanks! I knew I forgot something when I made that change. Forever a work in progress it seems.

 

Williedabull

I was going through a few things last night and was wondering:

1. What % of our stats does a ghoul get?
2. At what point does weapon damage out weigh the stats? Specifically [Betrayer of Humanity] vs [Death's Bite] I am wondering if the extra 19 dps is worth the trade of from STR that your ghoul gets.

3. At what point is Agi+AP > STR?

Assuming that Ghoul gets 50% of our stats (I am not sure of this) and assuming that a ghoul is About 15% of our dps. wouldn't 101 STR on a weapon be worth more then 226 AP ? What if we include the 20% more STR glyph?.

Saying that we have 1000 str ( a fair estimate) and our ghoul recieved 50% of that(500) that would make his attack power from STR 1425(based on 1 str=2.85 AP from a previous post). now taking away the 100 str (900) leaves you with 450 str (1285 AP) add in 113 ap (50% of the ap from [Betrayer of Humanity] your ghoul would get 1395 ap.

I realize I am doing some "Fuzzy " math here and maybee someone can help me out, but taking all things into consideration would a little less dps weapon with alot of str be better then a weapon with AP ?

 

• Zurm

Methods made a post about two pages back that outlines stat weights. Weapon dps is a far bigger DPS upgrade for any spec than any other stat. Even adding 80% str to the ghoul through talents/glyphs, it's DPS goes up by maybe 200. The ghoul, in its current form, will never do enough DPS to alter the personal weights for your character by any significant amount.

 

Fishboss

I guess I want to throw these questions here since I'm Unholy, however they're more general questions (some are beneath you I think)

1) Gemming. Do I just slap +16 str gems to all sockets unless the socket may give me a better stat boost into something I need (example being my belt. ATM the Belt Buckle hasn't been socketed, i plan to put in a +16 str gem, however at the moment it's got 14 AP it's a green gem I need to replace. What I'm getting at should I just slap 2 x 16str gems?) I see some people with the +32 AP and I think that even though they're the same, doesn't kings boost us a BIT more?

2) Crit. What crit should I be shooting for unbuffed? I remember my enhancement shammy needing 36% crit.

3) Where's a good website like MaxDPS which helps gearing us out?

In regards to the 3rd post, I'm pretty crappy with spreadsheet work, I can do the numbers fine but from what I've seen, minmaxing doesn't always directly translate in raids (Don't even want to get in an argument with that statement >.>)

As for my WoW Armory, The World of Warcraft Armory

I really don't have too much to ask as far as spec because Unholy seems easy as pie, I just wonder a few things about how to make it most effective.

 

Williedabull

I didnt realize he took a Ghoul's damage into consideration in relationship to stats. I have however realized that a Ghoul recieves 100% of our STR as a bonus and recieves nothing from AP or Crit. adding the 20% STR glyph makes the difference to pet even greater.

I guess taking all things into consideration is a +19 dps on a weapon > then giving your ghoul 120 str as far as overall dps is concerned ?

 

Kellhus

Do we have any weighting on the set bonuses from the set armor?

I'm at the position where I can get the 4 piece bonus, but it's from using the 10 man set gloves to do it - which means swapping out the 25 man non-set piece which is better in a direct comparison.

Is the 4p good enough that I should be willing to drop stats for it?

 

• Zurm

Yes, I edited my above post to clarify. My ghoul, even with all the possible glyphs and talents, still can't break 700 dps on patchwerk (did 631 last week WITH getting bloodlust). My personal dps last week was over 4500. I can't imagine the ghouls in their current state will ever do enough DPS that you would alter your personal stat weights to increase the ghoul's damage while "nerfing" yours.

Most emphatically, yes. This was, however, covered a page or two. Please make sure to read, or at least search the thread before asking questions.

 

Kellhus

I've read the thread, there is no addition of set bonuses in any of the current stat weighting tables that I've been able to find. There are, however, several posts with anecdotal evidence about how awesome and great the set bonus is(specifically in regards to gargoyle uptime) - I did find those, and they weren't what I was looking for as they are not weighting the bonuses, which again, was actually the question I asked.

 

• Zurm

Ah, my mistake, I misunderstood your question. Well you can't assign a specific stat weight to the 4pc bonus, because it is dependant on your attack power, crit, and hit rating. The 4pc bonus allows you to sneak in more death coils and/or UBs...the exact amount also depends on the boss fight and what you are doing. If you really wanted to average it out in a mathematical model, you could say that it allows you to sneak in an extra death coil every 20 seconds in a typical 4-5x SS roation. Again, however, the actual value of this depends on how hard your death coil hits, your crit, and your hit.

What I can tell you, more specifically to your case, is that the difference in ilvl from a 10 to 25 man item is no where near the benefit of 4pc. I can guarnatee that.

If you really want non-ancedotal evidence, the best that can be given is someone swinging at a dummy with and without the 4pc, but that still won't reflect a raid environment.

 

methods

I just added an extra UB into the rotation I was using while there was dead space during gargoyle. Over 3 minutes being able to add one extra UB is worth about 45 ap. Does that help give you a clearer perspective on its power? The bonus itself would add many more UB/DCs over the course of 3 minutes.

Edit: Based on the same raid stats used previously.

Edit2: I just added as many DCs and UBs as i could fit in the previously used rotation and checked the dps increase and related it to AP values. It seems that over a 3 minute period the T7 4p bonus is worth about 320AP in a fully buffed raid with the same raid gear listed earlier. Remember these are rough estimates and are just for thought and are far from the DK gospel.

 

zenos

In the short run, right clicking the mob will "proc" an auto-attack as a Risen Ally. It's a bit of a pain but when you're out of energy you can spam right click and get some auto-attacks in while you pool.

 

Nacht

I want to make a small comment on this. When I use Method's stat weight (including ghoul for the high strength weight) [Death's Bite] does come out higher rated than [Betrayer of Humanity] for an unholy build. If you don't add in the additional weight to strength from ghoul, then Betrayer does come out superior. This has a lot to do with ghoul only benefiting from strength and unholy being least dependent on weapon DPS. Something to think about.

Another thing about Method's stat weights. Agility still seems to be weighted as a direct ratio to crit rating plus 10% for kings, even though agility doesn't benefit as many abilities as crit rating does. That doesn't change a whole lot for us since most gear we go for is without agility anyway, but you should try to make an adjustment for that. Or at least keep it in mind when comparing some of the Naxx weapons with and without agility.

 

Buanna

Isn't that a confirmed bug?

Boni and Bonii are not words.
Bonuses is.

 

methods

I have separated spell and melee crit. Agility isn't nearly as bad as we previously thought. The majority of unholy damage comes from SS, Melee, DC/UB, Diseases, BS, BCB, Necrosis, Ghoul, etc.

The only things that don't get crit from agility that are significant are UB (which doesn't get crit from anything), DC and our Ghoul (who also doesn't get crit from anything we do as far as I know). Wandering Plague scales off of melee crit. Obviously, our strikes do as well. We do a lot of spell damage. Very little of it is covered by spell crit.

 

Kellhus

Gotcha, thank you much.

 

• Zurm

This seems the wrong way to approach the ghoul to me. Those weights are intended for the player, only. One strength will not provided nearly as much DPS for your ghoul as it will for you.