This is interesting because truly without Desecration as seems to be a heavy topic (Though I'm swayed to think it's not worth it for raiding) seems like a great reason to get the SS Glyph. Other than the randomness of it, I assume that the proc of this glyph also procs Ebon Plaguebringer, if it doesn't nevermind.

But it adds another level of skill to the DK, utilizing this glyph and not having it proc the diseases just gives you a chance with to apply them appropriately. If you can manage your diseases well with this glyph I would assume the payoff for it would be quite impressive, rewarding your disease management with increased DPS.

I use the SS Glyph, and for PvE it absolutely trumps other options in terms of raw potential. you need to pay attention to your disease timers, but you need to do that anyways. If you are going to use the SS glyph, and I recommend you do so, then you must also spec into Reaping (you should have this anyways but still) to allow you to smash out an additional 2 Scourge Strikes after your two Blood Strikes. Having all three diseases refreshed to 18 seconds is absolutely killer for pumping out additional dps, since you lose a lot of it when you need to reapply with untalented Icy Touch and Plague Strike. I too have gone about a minute full out with Scourge Strike reapplying my diseases for me, making my rotation really really simple, BS>BS>SS>SS>SS, dump runic power, and check your diseases, repeat.

While we are at it, Outbreak flat out sucks, and Blood Boil also appears to suck at its current coefficient, just Blood Tap and use DnD instead if you are aoeing. I am also finding the ghoul to be a minimal contributor to my DPS, even with the Ghoul Strength talent. I think the ghoul might be better in PvP, unless he gains some AOE avoidance effects and behavior like other pets.

On the whole, tentative rotations are okay for a DK to know about, but do not slave yourself to the absolute min-max rotation and then attempt to always do it successfully. You just won't. Unholy DPS in particular requires you to keep a very close eye on those diseases, and to manage your gargoyle and other cooldowns and effectively weave them into your DPS. Besides, you need to be using Bone Shield if it needs refreshing, or Ice-bound Fortitude if there is atmospheric damage. One less dps to heal through cleaves is a good thing.

Am I wrong, or is the idea of assuming that the SS glyph will not proc, and 5 SS rotations, incongruous? Wouldn't a 5 SS rotation entail getting within 1.5 seconds of a disease dropping at some point? If you're supposed to assume that it won't proc, and so switch to PS/IT in that situation, it seems like 5 SS would be troublesome.

I would say after your 4th SS you would use IT and PS ONLY if you do not see the timers refresh. If they do there would be no need to do so. So yes, it's troublesome in the manner you have to think on the fly whether or not you need to refresh those diseases manually, but if you do not have to then it means your DPS just benefited, perhaps significantly as well depending on your luck.

If what you are saying is that the rotation has to be tight in order to get SS's in during diseases, then yes, that is true. It makes playing a DK in practice MUCH different than planning rotations on paper. What we have written here is ideal situations, (patchwerk?), not normal situations for raid bosses. That is one of the reasons I am considering switching to a frost DPS spec once I get out of heroics and into 25 mans.

Actually...I just wasn't thinking about it correctly.

Yeah, the people getting a 5 SS rotation going for a minute were, I assume, getting lucky enough for it to proc by the 3rd or 4th SS each time, and not banking on the 5th SS to proc.

I finally got the chance to do a good amount of heroics and raiding this weekend, so I wanted to share my thoughts.

#1) Scourge Strike Glyph is a requirement

This glyph is ridiculously good. I also had situations where I didn't need to refresh icy touch and plague strike for a minute straight. Remember that the competitive alternative is Glyph of Bone Shield, which isn't actually a DPS increase unless you have very heavy AoE damage. It particularly shines in fights where you have to stop DPS on the boss, as you get more disease ticks in the movement downtime.

Now this is not the same as saying that a 5x Scourge Strike, 2x Blood Strike rotation is optimal. Even if the math says Desecration is good talent, you will still want to use the scourge strike glyph. I'm certain that 5 SS, 2 BS is optimal when you have even one of the following three things:

• Sigil of Awakening
• 2 piece T7 bonus
• 4 piece T7 bonus

And it's probably better without any of them.

By the way, I'm certain you want to wait for the last tick of the disease to expire before refreshing diseases. If you have even 2 seconds left, manually refreshing the diseases when you could scourge strike instead will provide a DPS loss. That's because the diseases will start ticking from when the current strike lands, which effectively makes it like the disease wasn't up when you refreshed it anyway. As long as scourge strike gets the increased damage benefit of disease, you should cast it. If you get that last minute disease refresh proc, so much for the better.

You can also use Empower Rune Weapon if things get tight, as it gives you 2.5 additional scourge strikes in a very short period of time. I used Empower Rune Weapon this way on most fights.

#2) Desecration is probably not worthwhile

The question of Desecration isn't one of a 12 second rotation (keeping full Desecration uptime) and a 20 second rotation, given that you'll have the Scourge Strike glyph anyway. The question is whether it's a DPS increase to keep up desecration once every 12 seconds, or if you should only plague strike after your diseases have run out (perhaps once every 45 to 60 seconds). I'm not 100% convinced it's a bad talent, but it probably is. If you do more damage only refreshing desecration when you run out of scourge strike glyphs, desecration should not be taken at all.

To really test this, we should have someone with 5/5 desecration do DPS tests on a target dummy where they attempt to get 100% desecration uptime and compare it to the scourge strike rotation. I just don't see it making a big difference though, especially given that the full 5/5 Desecration requires stealing 2 points from Dark Conviction or Bladed Armor. And as Naxxramas gear guarantees Scourge Strike is the better choice, I'm happy writing this talent off as a red herring if everyone else is.

#3) Reaping is really good

With the Scourge Strike glyph, you always prefer to Scourge Strike rather than 2x Blood Strike. But even discounting that, there's another good reason to have reaping. It gives you two extra Icy Touch casts when you are at range. If for whatever reason you can't stand in melee range of the boss, you shouldn't let your runes go to waste. Spamming four Icy Touch (and getting 80 runic power for two Death Coils) is still a reasonable amount of damage.

#4) Gargoyle uptime requires attention

The gargoyle is clearly a lot of damage, and I found it easy to mess up. Part of my problem was reflexively casting Death Coil and losing him. But there's also the issue that with so much runic power generation, you still want to death coil occasionally to avoid overflow. Learning exactly when to do this and not lose the gargoyle will take practice, I believe. Empower Rune Weapon is also a good emergency button for situations when your Gargoyle is about to run out of power, I'll note.

#5) Night of the Dead isn't terrible

I had a point to blow in my spec and was unhappy with the returns on Outbreak and Virulence, so I tossed it into Night of the Dead. Currently my ghoul accounts for around 15% of my damage, so losing him is a pretty big deal. I feel like having the ability to resummon him basically on command is valuable. Even if it's a slight DPS loss over other options (and it's not like Virulence is making us push the numbers), I believe the consistency makes it valuable. I doubt corpse explosion makes Night of the Dead worthwhile, but having a spare ghoul is useful on its own. The free resummon also helps when you need to sac the ghoul for 20% extra health-- not a bad emergency button all things considered.

However, it's worth noting this isn't a talent you take 1/2 points in. Reducing the cooldown from 5 minutes to 2.5 minutes was not sufficient in situations where my ghoul got ganked. It's a talent where you spend 0 or 2 points. Lacking other options, I believe 2 is the right choice, which gives us 2 points to spend elsewhere in the tree (one of which must be in the first 4 tiers).

I'm curious what other people think about Army of the Dead. I cast it a few times and it seemed... not terrible but not exceptional either. From my estimate, the ghouls themselves were doing between 1k and 2k DPS while they were up. It costs you 6 seconds of not doing DPS, but if you had 3 runes on cooldown already, you haven't lost that much damage, as the runes will be coming off cooldown when the channeling ends. Reducing the cooldown from 20 minutes to 10 minutes seems like it *might* be useful in an exceptionally long boss fight, as you'd get two casts of it. On the other hand, I saw the ghouls get aggro a lot, which makes me think they taunt. Pets that can taunt the boss seems like a really poor choice for a lot of boss fights, so maybe this is just some gimmick that's never actually useful.

At any rate, here's the spec I'm currently going with: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I actually put the last 2 points into On a Pale Horse. This isn't so much for movement speed as it is for stun and fear reduction. There's still a reasonable amount of fears and stuns in raiding, and I have to believe that it will matter more than 20% damage on plague strike (cast once every minute) or 2% spell hit on death coil. The other option is 2% dodge, but I'd still rather have 20% stun and fear reduction. Along with being an orc, that's a total of 35% stun time reduction-- a sizable amount.

So you're confirming that refreshed diseases could potentially make you lose some disease ticks, but it's a dps increase regardless?

I thought some maths had already been done showing that the loss of dps time from diseases, if you SS immediately before diseases are about to fall off, is not worth having replaced a PS/IT with that last SS. Do we have any new calculations on that?

I haven't done Northrend instances yet with my ghoul, so I don't know what its survivability is, but it does seem to me that 1 point in Night of Dead could provide enough of a smoothing factor to be worth the one point, and it seems like rune tap could still be a nice place to put that last point, for emergency need of healing.

I don't think this class and its abilities lends it self very well to effective modeling to that point. Potential loss is there, sure; however, that loss should be outweighed by the potential gains of another four scourge strikes (at minimum) without the need to use runes on IT/PS.

I think what is more of a valid question in terms of dps loss is runic power, Every rotation that skips an icy touch + ps pair you loose out on 5 runic power you could be dumping on raw damage.

This also brings up the question of how much damage you lose out on using a build without dirge.

To model this we would need to apply some form of dk damage weight. (damage per rune, damage per runicpower).

Let me be more specific. Your diseases tick once every 3 seconds. Lets say there's 1 second left until the disease ticks (ie. 2 seconds since last tick) and you refresh plague strike. The new plague strike will overwrite the old one and its first tick will be 5 seconds from now. This means that there's a 5 second gap between the last tick and the next tick, whereas before it was ticking once every 3 seconds. This is functionally the same as having 2 seconds of disease downtime, even though you cast plague strike while the disease was still on the boss. If you waited 1 second to cast plague strike, you'd get the full value of an extra tick, but you cost yourself the damage of deferring your rune cooldowns. Since only 5 of the 6 disease ticks triggered, you end up with a disease tick cycle that has 5 ticks every 17 seconds, or one tick every 3.4 seconds. (In practice it's not that consistent, but it suffices for example.)

Of course, if a disease has been down for 2 seconds and you refresh it, you still have 2 seconds of downtime. But now you have 6 ticks of disease plus 2 seconds of downtime. That's 6 ticks over 20 seconds, which is one tick every 3.33 seconds. So deferring the refresh as long as possible effectively gives you a higher number of ticks per second.

Now I don't know what effect scourge strike procs have on disease ticks. It's possible the glyph works like the priest talent Pain and Suffering, which refreshes shadow word pain with a specially crafted duration that doesn't interfere with the tick rate. But my suspicion is that the glyph overwrites the old one, which could account for lost ticks if you get too many procs in succession. A quick look at a combat log entry with a refresh would confirm or refute this. I'm still convinced the glyph is a net win, however.

It's actually 15 runic power lost, because Icy Touch is 20 runic power (with Glyph). That's the better part of a death coil. A few pages back I ran the numbers on this and concluded that Scourge Strike still barely beat out the occasional icy touch / plague strike option, even with the 15 runic power deficit.

I agree that this is what I think will happen. Also What about the Scourge Strike Glyph + Plague Strike Glyph + 2 points in Glacial Rot (this is probably outweighed by the Icy Touch Glyph and thus renders this question obsolete, but I'm still curious), so even if you do have to refresh your diseases manually you still could get a damage bonus if you time it right?

I don't know if it's included in any of the DPS charts we have, but I'd love to see a model (and maybe I'll take the time to try and craft it) comparing DPS per rune to DPS Runic Power.

The Icy Touch glyph is still good for situations where you're stuck at range. And even with only one Icy Touch per minute, you still gain one quarter of a Death Coil over 60 seconds, which works out to between 10 and 20 DPS. Not amazing but certainly better than alternatives.

What else would you pick? Bone Shield and Icebound fortitude glyphs are decent, but they don't really increase damage. Blood Strike glyph won't work on bosses. There's no Death Coil glyph. What other damage abilities can we buff when all we use is Scourge Strike, Blood Strike, and Death Coil? (I'm already assuming Glyph of the Ghoul is our third glyph, after Scourge Strike and Icy Touch, by the way.)

I suppose you're right. PS glyph is going to be diminished in the same fashion as the IT glyph, and I'm sure it was already pretty far behind even for Unholy. The only one that would probably be in contention is the BSh glyph for fights where AoE is consistently stripping all four charges per minute; I suppose though that even on those fights the IT glyph is providing more consistent returns.

ted, thanks for pointing out the runic power loss and the glyph i will consider picking up, at least for grinding these last two levels out.

Replying to both of these comments at the same time. the problem with DK's and any type of modeling as of yet is coming up with some form of weighting we can agree on. Yes SS beat out IT/PS in that wws, but all our abilities scale at different rates. Who is to say SS will beat out the runic power loss (and a high co-efficient on DC) at higher ap levels, sorry can't do any form of napkin math at the moment (don't even have the co-efficient of SS and don't have the screen time to work it out right now).

Edit as it is still related:
I'm getting the feeling that for the moment the best move any up and coming dps unholy DK can do is spend some time at ebon hold [target dumbies + trainers] trying out each major spec conclusions we have had so far and using what is best. The problem with this is that we will have to do it at the least every gear plateau we hit (ie weapon upgrades, multiple armor piece changes, sigil upgrades, raid buffed[cry]/unbuffed).

Using this trial and error technique at least until we have more informed conclusions.

The Training dummies aren't perfect either since skills like necrosis have no actual effect with it, though you can obviously paper in the 10% damage from your autoattacks and math it up in there.

And yeah it's very possible DK models will change, and we'll have to adjust accordingly, but right now we can still form a model based on the options we have now and work from there.

This statement is wrong... along the same lines as people who say unholy aura isn't a DPS increase. Bone Shield glyph adds an extra charge, meaning higher uptime on bone shield. Since it provides 2% damage while up, longer uptime means more damage. And 20 free RP every time you have to IBF (which is often in a raiding situation) can be used towards doing damage with deathcoil or UB. Neither of these are really any worse than Glyph of the Ghoul, considering how often a ghoul dies in raids.

In addition, while I certainly respect your appreciation for the Scourge Strike glyph, saying it is absolutely required after running heroics is entirely confusing. I don't think I've found any heroic bosses that take over two minutes to fight, and those that do often involve you having to pull off the boss for extended periods of time (Anub'arak, Loken), making you have to re-apply diseases anyway. Yes, it's value goes up with better gear, there is no question about that, but saying it is absolutely required while running heroics (where disease uptime is 100% purely through the use of pestilence on trash, and bosses rarely live long enough to allow for more than 3 full rotations anyway) seems just plain wrong to me.

Also, I would disagree with you on night of the dead, purely from a raiding perspective. Ghoul survivability in raids is so bad, that spending the GCD to resummon them is often not worth it. I summoned my ghoul on only a few fights... ones where it had no threat of AoE damage (Thaddius because pets are immune, Patchwerk, Maexxna, Razouvius, off the top of my head). In heroics, ghouls stand a much better chance due to far less AoE damage.

Your other points are spot-on, however.

In terms of your spec, there really is no justification for taking On a Pale Horse in a PVE situation, unless you can validate mining or herbalism as a legit reason while not running instances. The stun duration is a moot point, you really don't have many fights where a stun is encountered that stun reduction effects work on. I'm not sure what your guild/raiding situation is, but for hardcore raiders I just have to say those points in On a Pale Horse and Night of the Dead need to be moved to Virulence and Outbreak, where they can actually provide some real raid benefits.

It can't do overkill and most the dummies have 1% health, though I guess the boss dummies are exempt from this? Which makes me realize you're probably right that your method will work.

Except that the dummies can parry and dodge from 360 degrees if I remember correct, some of those which you get out of by being behind most bosses.

The variations in builds we are talking about are mostly spell damage variations and the loss of a GCD (parry/dodges don't use runes up) is not normally a huge thing for a DK - for what I have experienced thus far. - parry damage loss differences should be equal across builds over a long enough time period.

And welcome back to the thread zurm.

Have we done actual theorycrafting on the increased uptime of Bone Shield? I feel like we're thinking of this glyph like "oh, guaranteed DPS increase" just like we did with Virulence and Outbreak. Once we did the math and realizing that they are worth on the order of +4 DPS per point spent, we started looking for other options. I don't believe that spending 4 talent points for a total of at most 0.7% extra DPS is min/maxing, especially when those points could be spent elsewhere on improved mitigation. If you think Night of the Dead and On a Pale Horse don't offer enough tangible incentives, I think Anticipation or even Magic Suppression are better choices. Four points that reduce your chance of death by 1% will provide better returns than four points that give less than 1% extra damage.

At any rate, regarding the ghoul, I want to see how much of his death is a failure of my micromanagement and how much is just the ghoul sucking in raids. There's not much point in arguing how to spend 4 points that don't credibly help anywhere though.

I guess that statement was confusing. By "required after running heroics" I meant that quite literally. Once your remaining gear progression is raiding (ie. "after heroics"), Glyph of Scourge Strike is required. DPS in heroics is all about Death and Decay + Pestilence anyway, and not worth theorycrafting. However, I'll note that Glyph of Scourge Strike provides the greatest DPS increase on bosses where you have to pull off the boss. The purpose of the glyph in those situations isn't so refreshes aren't required. It's to increase disease uptime when you're not on the boss. If your disease will wear off 2 seconds after you have to leave, you lose all the disease ticks during the time you're not in melee range. Scourge Strike glyph makes this less likely to occur.

I'm just saying that it IS a DPS increase, albeit a small one. Just don't discount it. Plus, extra charges on BS or easier to cast IBF means a higher chance of survival. You can't DPS when you're dead!

True, micromanagement does play a part. But from my experience, there isn't much you can do on most fights... you could try the painfully weak death coil heals, but most fights it's just not worth it. Due to the ghoul always attacking from behind, it automatically screws it on fights like Grobbulus. Other fights, like Gluth, Grand Widow, Sapph, Malygos, or Sartharion it just doesn't stand even a remote chance.

And yea, I totally misunderstood what you are saying. I fully agree then.

I had good ghoul uptime on Malygos10 and Sartharion10/25. Gluth10/Grand Window 10 He was barely able to stay alive. 25 man Grand Window he lasted only a few seconds.(i believe I could of played better and kept him alive a little longer though) Sapphiron10 he died to first ice bomb because he's terrible and can't hide behind the pillar. I feel I've been lucky with my ghoul not dying, I guess he's been soaking up some heals as well, but he doesnt die too easily with his generous hp pool.

Another worthy note on NotD, you can use the minor glyph and net 20 RP every time you summon a ghoul. Getting free RP when you're on the move is usually nice, even better when you get a ghoul who'll attack for at least a very small amount of time.

Disregard, Just checked the simple question thread and was proved wrong