Thank you. I wanted to make certain that it was still up-to-date.

For those of us that can't afford Greatness, I was wondering about the ranking of trinkets. I have Bandit's insignia and Loatheb's Shadow, could buy Mirror of Truth. And Fury of five flights is out there as a future possibility. How do we rank those for PvE, 1,2,3,4 ?

edit: Feel free to list the top 6 or 7, for reference's sake. There's also that damage on spell tick one that apparently ticks on our diseases, maybe that's on the list too? Curious to see these rankings thanks.

I'm asking for 2h Unholy build specifically

[Extract of Necromantic Power]

I'm currently using that + [Mirror of Truth] because I'm too poor to own a Greatness card.

If I could find some WWS of runs where I wasn't being lazy, I would be able to substantiate the general observations from Recount that the proc alone accounts for 1.5-2.0% of my damage done on a typical Naxx25 clear.

In my opinion it's certainly worth picking up for people who are on a budget.

It's probably a good idea to get some updated math on trinkets in here. So as to avoid reinventing the wheel, I'm using Yo!'s formulas on the trinkets from the enhancement shaman threads; there's a nice post on the Enhance TTT where you can see those formulas and someone kindly even put Yo!'s formulas into a convenient Google Document where you can replace the EP values with our own relevant values.

The most recent solid EP values I've seen are in Method's 12/16/08 post in this thread for Unholy+Ghoul. His numbers assume you're below expertise cap, at melee hit cap, but not at spell hit cap. I like those assumptions as it's really easy to hit melee hit cap without trying so I don't like overvaluing items with hit by assuming I'm under melee hit cap. The numbers in the DK TTT post are way outdated and, in my opinion, pretty off. Method's numbers are:

AP: 1; Str: 2.792; Crit: 1.176; Hit: 1.12497; Haste: 0.8464; Exp: 2.5835; AP-R: 0.7165; Agi: 0.9231; Armor: 0.0278.

Using those numbers in Yo!'s formulas gives the following top 10 list:

[Darkmoon Card: Greatness] - 530.48
[Fury of the Five Flights] - 310 (320 would be on-target full-time, so this one is arguable and generally viewed as lower in practice than Bandit's Insignia)
[Bandit's Insignia] - 290.76
[Mirror of Truth] - 265.45
[Loatheb's Shadow] - 210.45
[Grim Toll] - 191.4247
[Incisor Fragment] - 182.75
[Sphere of Red Dragon's Blood] - 180.4
[Meteorite Whetstone] - 162.18
[Mark of Norgannon] - 150.41

[Extract of Necromantic Power] has a 15s internal cooldown and affliction locks generally say it procs every 20s. I suspect we'll see it proc about every 30s, although if someone with it can correct that with dummy test numbers, please feel free. Given that Bandit's Insignia procs about every 50s and the proc is buffed in the same way, I'll just use Yo!'s formula for Bandit's Insignia with substituted values and EP values:

(95*1.176)+[(1+.34)*(788+1312)/2]/30 * 2 = 205.52

If those assumptions are correct, it's not terrible, but it's not very good either. If those assumptions are slightly off and it procs a bit more, it could easily move above Loatheb's Shadow into #5 after Card, Fury, Bandit's, and Mirror.

So with the change in our RP gains and the lower cost to UB, I present a question on 4 peice set bonus. Is this still a valuable bonus or can 1 or 2 slots be dropped for more pure dps piece's like said haste pants...


edit: hows the new Kirin tor ring? STR, Crit and Expertise!! looks sexy but worth the price tag?

Does your equivalency math include the benefit of proc/on-use AP trinkets towards gargoyle? Your mirror of truth number in particular looks low; that's about the value that classes with no gargoyle mechanic have given it.

Tested Morbidity last night in Naxx. Specifically asked people to observe their FPS for an hour or so. Then I specced out of it, and especially melee saw an instant improvement in FPS. I'd like other people to test it in somewhat of an objective manner, my method was obviously not idea, but there was definitely an increase in FPS, for myself as well.

I apologize for not doing it myself, but I'm not familiar with the resources you used. Can you run these numbers on [Darkmoon Card: Death]?

It has a 45s internal cooldown with an extremely high proc rate, resulting in just slightly over 45s between each proc. So if we just assume 45s:

(85*1.176)+[(1+.34)*(744+956)/2]/45 * 2 = 150.58

I'm not entirely convinced that the formula on damage procs is accurate because it seems to just assume that 1 proc dps = 2 EP (the formula for the damage proc is just average hit taking into account crits, divided by number of seconds in between procs, times 2), and I haven't seen anything to back that up. But I also haven't seen anyone else take a stab at better formulas, and Rawwr still seems totally inaccurate for DK testing, so it's the best we have to go on for now.

At the very least, this number does seem in-line with anecdotal information I've heard, which is that it gets beaten out by the better blue dungeon trinkets because the internal cooldown is so high and the damage proc is so low.

I was on a test dummy and when i would use scourge strike on a death rune pair only one of them would turn back into blood.

WoW Meter Online - The Best World of Warcraft Combat Log Analyse System!Fully support Wrath of the Lich King! here is my wowmeters from patchwerk this week after reading all the posts and trying out my dps with the changes i was surprised to see my dps go up.

Been using standard 17/54 build for quite sometime now but after patch I'm not quite sure how to distribute couple talent points virulence/necrosis/corpse explosion.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Since after Necrosis buff it has been been doing 4.6-5% of my total damage with 5/5 so tempted to keep it maxed and only put 1 or 2p to virulence. Now corpse explosion looks to be quite decent for aoe after all (plus it's quite fun) I'd like to take it as well even I'm not convinced that it's very usefull on bosses.

What's the opinion about spending points to those 3 talents? I was thinking about dropping virulence to 1p only and make it up with couple high hit rating gear pieces. Problem is that hit rating past 263 only affects to spell hit and it was calculated to be about 0.9 at first post inflating the high value of the hit items.

Since I'm tied to 10man loot for the moment there are few options to play around hit if I want to keep expertise capped as well. (boots, belt, cloak and maybe pants/helm).

Any math wizards or opinions what combination would yield best damage? Lose some itemization points for hit rating, lose straight damage from buffed necrosis or just skip CE and be done with it?

I noticed that alot of poeple still arent fully expertise capped and yet still get high dps numbers. I have made it a priority to get expertise and hit capped. so much so that I only have 2800 ap and 26 crit.

That is because people are under the illusion that all the other stats are somehow in vein if you aren't capped.

It also depends on your luck and rotation.
If you're lucky you wont see any dodges even without hardly any expertise.

Also the unholy rotation is more forgiving than say a blood spec's rotation.

You have 12 seconds to dump your runes before your cycle runs out (10 seconds + 2 seconds leeway), that means in blood presence you can do 8 attacks.

A unholy cycle ranges from 4 attacks ( SS>SS>SS>RP) to 7 attacks ( PS>IT>BS>BS>SS>RP>RP ), and everything in between. That means you have 1-4 extra GCDs worth of "expansion space" in case you get a dodge / miss.
Yes this still means you lose dps, but at least you'll still be able to get off all your attacks.

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I personally think that what you did with your gear isn't that smart though. I think you went a bit too far on stacking expertise gems, thereby lacking behind in other stats.

This week, I was feeling that the changes to the ghoul and UB made it much easier to come closer to a theoretical peak for me as the DK to mitigate the gargoyle loss. My UB uptime generally doubled and my DC usage has gone up by 1/3 to 1/2. Looking at my PW numbers, the garg went from 117k damage to 31k. Granted the first he was up twice, but the second time was only for 9 seconds that's only 4 strikes if it summons and starts immediately and I was right on the CD which knowing me is doubtful, so 117k less 10k for the 4 strikes. The changes to Necrosis and UB netted me personally an extra 62k damage over a 3min fight. Leaving me about 10k damage short of where I was a week ago.

One change this patch that seems to have been ninja'd in, is that any attack used with Death Runes that for whatever reason misses (miss, dodge/parry) keeps the runes as Death Runes, instead of reverting them to their original type.

This is easily noticed by taking off all your hit/expertise gear and beating on a Heroic Training Dummy for a minute.

Kind of nice for those who aren't melee hit/dodge neglect capped, and those times where you get a parry or Icy Touch miss on Death Runes.

with the new Patch... wat is the new "cookie-cutter" unholy dps?

It's still the one listed on the first page.

Hello again guys,

I'm a bit confused lately with the 3.0.8 glyph changes. Is the Icy Touch glyph still recommended? I'm running with IT/Ghoul/SS major glyphs, but with the reduced RP required of Unholy Blight, the more streamlined use of RP by the gargoyle, and 4 piece t7 bonus, i tend to fill my RP bar faster than I spend it. I was considering switching the IT glyph to (probably) Death & Decay glyph. Would that be a wise choice?

My second question is (again) regarding trinkets. If I manage to obtain the Greatness card, would it be that big of an upgrade compared to [Mirror of Truth]? For some reason, (I think) my crit rating even unbuffed is very high (37.38% crit unbuffed, 39.86% with Horn), so I believe I can drop some crit for as the comments on wowhead say roughly 165 STR trinket as it equals out over time.

THanks!

regarding 1st question: Do you use DnD on boss fights? i think not and trash is going down fast enough as unholy. That said i haven't been in a situation where i couldn't dump all my RP as unholy even with 4pc t7

2nd question: If you get the Greatness deck you should probably change trinkets based on fights. Fury/Greatness on static fights, Greatness/MoT on mobile fights. Someone calculated in the Blood thread that Greatness is 384 AP on average as blood (likely a little less for unholy due to lower +str talents), so it's defintely an upgrade over every other trinket ingame right now. And from personal experience i can tell you it's well worth it

Bandit's Insigna is a very good trinket that people keep overlooking, the proc is about 2-3% overall dps + 190AP, its a lot more than it sounds.

After taking a look at these trinket numbers I was inspired to go back to the old spreadsheet and crank out some Unholy numbers for my current gear + trinkets when considering ideal procs for gargoyle. The results were around what I had expected.

If you are doing around 4.2k dps on a 3 minute fight by not paying attention to gargoyle(or being unlucky) you can improve your dps by close to 300 more give or take another 100 with proper timing(+luck).

My sheet dps for a static fight as 17/0/54 2H with my current armory gear +greatness card:

Without attention to proc timing: 4180 or so (10 man raid buffs and no AoTD)
With full procs (mirror and greatness) +haste pot and heroism up: 4434

I know this is obvious to some but it's proof enough for me to not be lazy any more.

Also, it seems haste is almost as valuable as crit with my most recent AEP summary but it may be a glitch somewhere. Even still both are not near the value of strength so it may be irrelevant in the long run.

PS: I have very little time to make changes so Doc and Kurokaze are well ahead of me in polish. Someday I may post it anyway.

Edit: Also, has anyone checked if Garg's AP Coeff has changed or was it just the base damage and uptime?