Bullshifter

To me, it looks like Plague Strike got a nice buff, and will hit pretty hard, especially glyphed, but it doesn't seem like it's going to scale as well as SS ultimately.

Looking at:
Plague Strike now deals 50% weapon damage plus 189 and infects the target with Blood Plague, a disease dealing Shadow damage over time. (No longer removes a HoT)

vs.

Scourge Strike (Tier 9) now deals 55% of weapon damage as Shadow damage plus 185.63, increased 9% per each of your diseases on the target. (Previously dealt 60% of weapon damage as Shadow damage plus 81, and an additional 40.5 bonus damage per disease.)

It just seems that once we get geared into Ulduar and whatnot, Scourge Strike will have far outstripped it. Am I missing something? PS will scale with weapons and stuff, but SS will scale exactly as well + the 9% per disease rather than the +40 damage per disease as before, whereas PS doesn't get any scaling from diseases.

To me the PS buff looks more like a buff to a spec that is offspecing into Unholy, such as 0/51/20, rather than a serious buff to Deep Unholy.

edit- Hmm, looking at it closer, perhaps that glyph would actually provide more scaling for PS than SS receives from diseases. I'm confused now, lol...

edit #2- just realized that PS is mitigated by armor, so more than likely will never scale quite like SS does ultimately.

 

methods

Fine... Here's my math:
2200 wpndmg
45% crit
Mitigation after new Sunders/FF = ~60-61% damage goes through on bosses

PS
(0.5 * WPNDMG + 189)*(1+Critchance*Vicious Strikes)*Outbreak*Rage of rivendare*PS Glyph*Mitigation =
(0.5*2200+189)*(1+(.45+.06)*1.3)*1.45*1.1*1.6*.6 = 3282.29 avg PS damage

SS (Assuming a humble Arthritic Binding Sigil)
(0.55* WPNDMG + 185 +(Sigil damage 203)+(0.09*Disease Count*WPNDMG))*(1+Critchance*Vicious Strikes)*Outbreak*RoR*EbonP =
(0.55*2200+185+203+(0.09*3*2200))*(1+(.45+.06)*1.3)*1.3*1.1*1.13 = 5890.43 avg SS damage

If you see any errors let me know. Edit: I didn't include the 5% crit gained from 2p T7.

Aside from double Death rune situations SS is still the king with current gear (even more so with Sigil of Awareness)

 

Foxx2405

As Fugazor said, GF is twice as often as BT, so this isnt the best option. And I personally indeed use BT to refresh BS when needed.


Hmm. At first I hadn't seen the insane PS glyph yet. I'm very skeptic that will actually make it to live. But lets get some things straight.

PS modifiers:
50% weapon damage + 189 dmg
45% dmg increase from Outbreak
60% dmg increase from glyph
----------------------------------- Total
116% weapon dmg + 438.48 dmg // For 1 unholy rune

SS modifiers:
55% weapon dmg + 185.63
27% dmg increase with 3 diseases up
30% dmg increase from outbreak
13% dmg increase from Ebon Plaguebringer
------------------------------------------ Total
112.61% weapon dmg + 346.32 // For 1 Unholy + 1 Frost rune

Now its important to note that SS is ignoring armor. However for the cost of an extra rune thats a heavy price.
This worries me a bit, and I hope they kept this in mind, this seems like a pretty dodgy situation for deep unholy.

As for the glyphs. The new ones will make it very hard.
IMO the ghoul and Deathcoil ones are must haves.

Besides that it gets a lot harder.
- Scourge Strike: I still love this glyph if only for the fact it gives dynamic to an otherwise static rotation.
- Unholy Blight: Basically instead of doing 3 UBs per minute we do 2 per minute. So you get 1 extra DC per minute. Which is around 50 dps or so.
- Plague Strike: This is an extremely strong glyph in its current incarnation. And it might just turn out that we will be using this one for deep unholy, together with desecration.

As for the pestilence glyph, to be honest it sounds a bit like its a minor glyph. That aside, I doubt its a real option for unholy as PT doesnt turn blood glyphs into death glyphs.

 

Bullshifter

Thanks Methods for putting the math on it for me

 

Ghraabthar

I don't think the plague strike glyph is meant for unholy builds per say. Its just more of an incentive for frost and blood dks to actually use it and not do single disease or diseaseless specs. Unholy DKs were the only ones using blood plague regularly, and we have the benefit of the SS glyph to compensate. Also it'll be nice to have a 3rd glyph option that will actually see a more tangible dps increase. SS glyph, and glyph of the ghoul are already kinda consensus choices. Now we have DC and UB glyphs as well. I'm more partial too the UB glyph personally, and I'm a bit lazy now to do the math to figure out which one will net a greater dps increase.

I mean at least on paper looks like Unholy 2H got buffed overall, especially with the new outbreak talent and the new disease scaling system. I think personally I get 26 to 29% of overall dmg from SS, which means an 8 to 9% increase in dps for 3 talent points. Also the 9% bonus on SS damage should also be an overall increase as well. With Betrayer + Awareness unbuffed the new math would indicate I get 170ish bonus dmg per disease, which is almost twice the benefit listed currently. All that will scale with raid buffs. Looking forward to 10k scourge strikes on a regular basis once 3.1 hits hehe

 

Stein

Are the stat weights in the OP still the best ones for unholy?

Anyone feel like guessing how much impact 3.1 will have on stat weights?

 

Kyruski

With what I'm seeing in the patch, I might be looking at a PS Spam build, something like this 17/0/54 in Unholy Presence with a Rotation as follows:

PS(15) > IT(35) > DC(3) > PS(18) > IT(38) > DC(6) > Blood Tap(16)[No GCD] > PS(31) > BS(41) > UB(1)
PS(16) > IT(36) > DC(4) > PS(19) > IT(39) > DC(7) > BS(17) > PS(32) > DC(0)

I would have the IT, PS, and DC Glyphs and it is a 9 piece rotation which I think fits fairly well. Points can be taken out of BCB to put into Impurity.

I see a lot of people saying BCB isn't too good now but that's only assuming your weapon speed is below 3.00 (Though in Unholy Presence, That would be true).

 

Nerub

An Unholy rotation that ignores SS in favor of PS is bound to fail like the disease-less rotations Blood uses currently. It violates the design philisophy. There is no way that the PS Glyph will survive the PTR in its current form.

 

Kyruski

But for the time being, whether or not the PS glyph succeeds, does this build look somewhat alright? Because it seems like it will have a more solid rotation and more overall DPS than using SS from what I can see.

 

Fugazor

Quick numbers from Silvermoon heroic dummy on PTR with 17/0/54 and Sigil of Awarness:
(skill - avg. hit / avg. crit)
SS - 3300 / 7850
PS - 1350 / 3300
IT - 950 / 2100

It seems that PS glyph works only on additional damage not weapon damage. Tooltip says "72 to 73% plus 395" with 3/3 Outbreak and PS glyph and above numbers seems to confirm that. Question is: intended or bugged?

 

Bullshifter

My money would be on intended. It would completely boggle my mind if they designed our new tree to exclude the talented strike in any form or fashion, which making the PS glyph work on weapon damage as well would appear in danger of doing.

 

methods

The talent itself says increase damage which would mean all damage and not the base multiplier. So for example:
PS = (.5*WPNDMG+base)*(1+outbreak%)*(1+ps glyph%)

At least that's how most of the modifiers have worked in the past when labeled the same way.

 

Kyruski

This would completely change my intended build. I think most of us were assuming it would add an additional 60% weapon damage. I could see blizz doing something like this. I'm tempted to say it's intended, and if so, ignore my previous post on the possible PS build.

 

Nerub

So it is 0,50*1,45=0,725 for Outbreak. The PS Glyph only affecting bonus damage instantly turns it craptastic again.

 

Foxx2405

Awesome, that got me worried

This seems intended, and fortunately this means we wont get any funky PS based rotations going.
Also makes PS glyph somewhat useless, but I guess with all the new glyphs thats something we don't really mind.

Your quote from the 3.1 topic. Totally agreed, I'm really disappointed that blizzard doesn't yet realize that anything non-FU/B/RP is totally worthless unless we can have something worthwile to spend single F / U runes on, which we dont really. Icy Touch and Plague Strike are (the latter after this change) options, but i very much dislike using those attacks as a filler.
I hope blizzard changes their mind and either make it a FU ability (maybe slightly stronger) or an RP ability. (I don't really favor blood since that also would mess up our rotations)

 

aldy

SS Live vs. PTR:
Live: common 17/0/54 build
PTR: this 17/0/54 build
format: LIVE; PTR
count: 100; 100
#hit: 59; 63
avg hit: 2657; 3348
#crit: 39; 35
avg crit: 6500; 7725

Incidentally, unbuffed dps went from 2950 to 3150; no gargoyle.

 

Mulgero

Thanks for the info I'm kinda relieved. I don't really want odd PS screw things up. We don't know about future sigils but I'm not likely seeing Awareness ever unless I get really really lucky so PS/SS difference will be smaller but still looks that 1xSS will outperform 2xPS regardless of sigil.

Now they only need to make UP better or least par with BP and unholy looks set aside some tweaking here and there.

 

methods

This is on a dummy.... Try adding about 20% more damage to PS's average due to armor debuffs not being present.

 

Bullshifter

Hmm, that muddies the picture a little, but it still looks like SS would come out slightly ahead...with the Sigil of Awareness =P

 

aldy

I ran some tests to see if Black Ice has +10% shadow dmg like the patch notes say, but it doesn't atm (based on a comparison of 0/5/54 vs 0/10/54; 80 SS each, 50 DC each, 150 UB each).
Whether the patch notes or the talent calculator is correct is unknown.

 

Qrio

Patch notes are not a reliable source of info, especially for an early build PTR.
I'd go with what is in the game atm, which is exactly what the talent calculator on mmo-champ is based on.

Remember everything, forget nothing!

 

methods

Just did some math with the new 'Ghoul frenzy'.

If we somehow found a way to use it twice every minute without screwing up rotations it would be worth roughly 50dps for Unholy 17/0/54. Using it once every minute assuming BT its worth roughly 25dps.

So... SKIP! I wonder if they know this. Change it to RP and it would still be hard to justify... maybe equal to a 32rp deathcoil per use.

 

Neckface

Some quick and cheap empirical data: I beat on the target dummy using 17/0/54 and was doing around 2,500 (without using gargoyle or ghoul or other cooldowns), whereas just yesterday on Live I was doing some tests with diseaseless blood and could only get around 2,400 (again without DRW or ghoul or cooldowns). And this is without changing Glyphs. It remains to be seen how ghoul/drw stack up against ghoul/gargoyle, but at least based on this test I was very heartened because I loathe diseaseless blood.

More interestingly (and the real point of this post) I also respecced slightly to get Imp Unholy Presence to see how that would go, figuring that 9 second Rune Cooldowns would mean more specials and faster RP. DPS dropped by around 100, but I was so far under the GCD cap that I was doing a lot of standing around with nothing to do, including HoW and Rune Tap at every cooldown. "So," thought I, "if only I had more RP to spare to fill up those GCDs this might actually be viable."

Lo and behold, new Glyphs are available:

Glyph of Death Coil: reduces RP cost by 8
Glyph of Unholy Blight: increases duration by 10 seconds

That's 20% more Death Coils from the DC Glyph, and a free DC once a minute from the UB savings. I'm not sure I could use all that extra RP in Blood Presence, but in Unholy Presence I could.

I'll try to get my hands on those glyphs tonight and report back some numbers. Dual spec rocks for this kind of A-B testing, by the way.

 

Foxx2405

With the 4xT7 and the DC glyph you need something like 13.10 GCDs to fit everything in, and in a 20 sec rotation you have 13. So unholy WILL change from a laid back, to a tight rotation.

With this in mind, i doubt its worth getting Glyph of Unholy Blight, seeing as the extra RP we'd gain with that seems to get wasted anyway.

Unholy Presence even with the change will never be a real option though.
My previous comparison was way incomplete. If we really state everything we get:

Blood Presence:
+ 15% damage on white dmg
+ 15% damage on strikes
+ 15% damage on other yellow damage (diseases / etc)
NOTE: Necrosis actually double dips in BP, since it gets a boost of both the white dmg and on itself

Unholy Presence:
+ 15% white damage
+ Pet damage (this is very unclear, pets dont get 100% haste, closer to something like 50%, but since Claw doesnt benefit from haste, i think we should assume about 5% dmg for the ghoul and 7.5% for the gargoyle)
+ 10% strike damage (in the best case scenario, which proven by a few post back is not true)
+ 10% RP ability dmg ( you generate RP faster, so you get more DCs )
NOTE: diseases / Wandering Plague none of those benefit from unholy presence

Ultimately that gives:

Blood: +5% strike damage / +15% other yellow damage (inc Necrosis) except for RP abilities
vs
Unholy: +5-7.5% pet damage

I think its pretty clear this isnt worth it.
I think that even if they would lower the rune cooldown to 8 seconds instead of 9, BP would still be better. The benefit of UP are just too limted, since haste doesnt affect yellow damage, and the lower rune CD only affects actual rune abilities.

----------

EDIT:

By the way, does anyone have any information about a possible gargoyle change yet ?

Gargoyle was suppose to get (re-)buffed closer to its original design since it is now a 51 pointer.

 

Valkyre

From the PTR: Gargoyle still lasts 30 seconds and did in some tests on the Boss Target Dummy ~1480 DPS (summoned with at least 2/3 proccs active).