Not to mention the fact that we'll be summoning the garg in UP anyway, so "+5-7.5% pet damage" could read "+5-7.5% ghoul damage"

Another thing I was curious about was the change to Blood Boil. Has anyone tested the damage on the test realm? If so is it high enough to replace blood strike in our rotations now? I remember a time when the ability functioned as such and it felt right as unholy.

I don't believe Blood Boil refreshes blood runes as death runes.

If you meant 'refreshes blood runes as death runes', I believe it does.

It should with reaping as far as I know. I am questioning the damage of it.

Now that having diseases multiplies your strike damages, Blizz really should look into fixing the stacking issue of EP...

Reported some results earlier in the 3.1 thread: http://elitistjerks.com/1119303-post418.html

Even counting the 1.25multiplier from impurity, since Outbreak no longer affects BB, I doubt that BB will match up to BS for damage.

Don't forget the extra movement speed and the GCD decrease can increase dps on fights involving frequent movement.

Also, In favor of Blood Presence, is that you may have two extra talent points worth of DPS to spend elsewhere if you choose not to take impUP.

Thank you for your work and feedback it is very valuable.

The Gargoyle at the boss dummy did 100dmg more unbuffed than at my last Patchwerk fight.

You're forgetting 15% for BCB and Necrosis resulting from increased speed.

But the bigger factor is simply that you don't run into GCD bottlenecks in Unholy Presence. Maybe I simply need to L2P but I find myself wasting a lot of RP, or leaving runes on cooldown past the 2 second safety zone, while in Blood Presence. Start interleaving horn of winter every 20 seconds and Blood Tap every minute (and a full ERW once per fight) and it just gets tighter.

I'm not arguing that Unholy Presence is definitely superior, just that I'm not quite ready to dismiss it out of hand.

And, yes, on high movement fights where you both want to get to your target faster and go through on/off cycles of dps'ing, Unholy Presence may very well turn out to be the preferred presence. I could see pure dps DKs using dual spec to have two variants of 17/0/54 and switching between them on a fight-by-fight basis.

I would assume also that deathcoil glyph is pretty much worthless if you don't use unholy presence since it just messes up rotation. With 30 extra rp from frost it could be interesting however since it would give you 4 DC's with full RP for movement fights etc.

By the way has someone tested does blood presence affect to to our disease damage? To be honest I've never though about it or tested it since I've just assumed that it only affect direct damage like strikes/spells/melee.

Ah yes forgot about the movement increase for a second.
However the damage is still heavily subpar, so I dont know how the extra dps from the speed relates to the loss in dps from the pressence

Actually no.

First of all BCB, would ultimately scale equal for both BP and UP. Since its 15% more damage per attack vs 15% faster swinging (which should result in about 15% more procs).
However with the new internal cooldown, BCB will actually scale better with blood presence.
So another point for BP

As for Necrosis, it actually scales worse with Unholy Presence. While it is true it gets 15% more damage from 15% more swings.
In Blood Presence Necrosis double dips and gets more. First of all all white swings do 115% damage, Necrosis takes (fully talented) 20% of that number, and Blood Presence multiplies that number with 1.15 again.
Ultimately it does 32.25% extra damage from Blood Presence.

First of all the GCD issue at this moment in time is a non-issue. As said by bathoz, there is no way you can have more than 13 GCDs if you use the right rotation.

After this patch things will get really tight, because of the death coil glyph. But it should be doable in BP.
In worst case you do not, and you'll overcap RP, however will that make the difference between BP and UP i doubt it.

I don't think you can claim we dismiss stuff out of hand, we're writing whole thesis' why we still think BP is superior. I personally hope I'm wrong, because i love unholy presence, for some reason I find it more fun to fight with a 1 sec GCD instead of 1.5. Even if that means I'm not pushing buttons for several seconds.

Also i don't think you can expect many people to dual spec for 2 near identical pve specs.
My first spec is Unholy DPS, my second spec i'm still not sure (tank / pvp / deep frost as 2nd pve dps), but probably not another 2H unholy dps.

The movement speed totally depends on ulduar fights. So far there are not that many fights yet where movement is important.
Sure there is fights like Grobbulus and Thaddius where you move, but you can just keep dpsing while moving. On fights with a lot of movement is an idea to switch to UP just for the movement speed. For example on Sapphiron:
Air phase comes, you switch to UP, run back for an iceblock, run back to sapph after the breath, switch back to blood presence and start your rotation. You hardly lose anything.

I'm one of the players who probably will spec two almost identical pve dps specs. I doubt there are many out there like me though.
I don't pvp, there is, at this moment, no need for me to tank anything and I don't enjoy blood.

So for me the opportunity to have two 17/54 specs, one with imp. UP and one without is the only use for Dual Spec.
Imp. UP is so situational though that it will heavily depend on the boss fights in Ulduar whether or not I keep a secondary spec with Imp. UP in it.

And my personal guess is that we'll see changes to Imp UP, or maybe even a new incarnation of Unholy Aura by the time 3.1 goes live, so I don't plan too much ahead, this is after all the firsts days of testing.

They should merge On a Pale Horse with new UA, then remove NotD and give aoe avoidance for DK pets as baseline. Next step would be change AotD so that it would be purely tanking skill and compensate that loss with player damage - increase damage done by diseases for example.

Those changes would do good overall, making DK's less of "melee hunters". Currently ~30% damage of Unholy is based on pets which is especially bad in AotD case (low hp, no aoe reduction). This should be changed, no class should loose 1/3 of dps on pet unfriendly fight (yes hunters and locks should not either).

After you purchase dual specs for 1000g, if you choose to respec you simply pay the fee you've traditionally paid, on that note I see no reason why someone wouldn't spec dual pve builds and maximize dps.

For example:

On a patchwerk style fight you could spec:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...4&version=9614

Other fights:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...0&version=9614

Note: On the second build I've opted for the second point in epidemic instead of maxing out points in bladed armor. The logic behind this is that the larger buffer on diseases will allow you to squeeze in an additional SS. On fights with a lot of movement this may prove to be more helpful that the additional AP bladed armor would provide but alas it is speculation at this point.

Your operating under the assumption that all those roles and needs aren't already fulfilled. I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone maximizing their potential dps, regardless of whether you feel someone may or may not notice, an increase in dps is an increase in dps. We also don't know what Ulduar holds just yet, and if there are fights like Brutallus in ulduar, every bit of dps may count.

As I wanted to know how much this "time issue" was and if it really exists or not, I did some testing, always ending up with the same result:
60 Seconds of time striking with only bloodstrike on a banished enemy (normal GCD, but Rune isn`t lost), made an outcome of 38 Strikes, while really only hammering that button (I am not sure if I would be able to repeat this with different keys and maybe while moving, not to mention my finger woulda hurt after the first 3 minute Boss ^^).

Thus instead of 40+1 bloodstrikes (you get one on second 0 and on second 60 the last) I only got 38, means I lost sth between 2 and 3 Cooldowns in 1 minute. So I end up losing 3 - 4,5 seconds into nothing. 4,5 Seconds divided among 38 Strikes means each Strike took an average of 0,118 seconds more than it should have.

So when I use a normal 13 GCD-rotation, for me it will take about 1,54 seconds more in GCD than the theory would come out with. Thus I lose about 0,84 seconds per 13 GCD-Rotation, as my next rotation will be delayed by that much. And to be honest I fear that this time will at least go up a bitin real encounters, as mentioned before and I am not sure if it has an impact on the time as well, if you try to spam Rune-abilities that you are actually waiting for runes to refresh, you might end up losing some more time here as well, due to the game.

If you used impUP you would still have the same Problem (I will take my tiime to test a lot more), my GCD would be 1,154s not 1s, but that wouldn`t do any delay to the rotations.

Foxx, I would be glad if you could take some time as well and test out a bit what your "real" GCD is looking like, best would be of course to gather information in a raid using a normal rotation, but I guess Dummies/banished mobs would be ok as well.

I like to stay in UP a bit longer to summon the garg then change. Just delaying a death rune 10s.

This is a valid concern.

I'm not on PTR so i can't do any tests with all the new abilities unfortunately.
However we can look at some stuff together on the forum.

First lets break down the availablity of GCDs.
A rotation consists of 2x 10 second cycles.
I'm naming 2 things here:
- Rotations are 20 second repeatable sequences
- Cycles are 10 seconds long and are defined by the rune refresh timer
I don't care if these are the right terms, i just always call them that way.

The 2 cycles in 1 rotation are somewhat flexible due to rune cushioning. Its hard to explain but let me show you with this simple overview:

T0 rune used -> T10 the rune will be up again
T9.5 we use a death coil -> Due to GCD we cant use the rune that refreshes at T10 when it comes up.
T11 rune used -> T20 the rune will be up again, due to rune cushioning (it has been waiting for 1 sec, so CD is -1 sec)

This allows you to make 1 cycle in a rotation a bit longer than the other.

Anyway that aside inside 1 rotation we have 13 GCD ( 0 ; 1.5 ; 3.0 ..... 16.5 ; 18 ; 19.5 ), and 0.5 second flexibility space.

Now this is of course with perfect latency and everything, so Tadyrius pointed a valid point where you actually lose time due to all kind of factors. Maybe it would be a good idea to assume that we have 12 GCDs per rotation.

Now lets analyse the rotations we use as deep unholy.

Since a deep unholy rotation is based on a priority system, it's not set in stone and thus differs a lot from time to time. But there are 2 different scenarios.

You either dont, or do have to refresh PS > IT.
On top of that there is another thing to consider, whether you have the 4xT7 set bonus. ATM most people do, but since this is a calculation for Ulduar which features T8 (most likely with a different bonus), we have to consider not having the 4 set as well.
I'm gonna assume people will have the DC glyph, the ghoul glyph and the SS glyph. So you'll use 40 Rp for an UB each rotation and the rest is dumped in DC.
Also an extra 8 RP is added to account for Butchery

Ok there are 4 scenarios.

No disease refresh
With 4xT7: 5 Scourge Strikes + 2 Blood strikes + 1 UB + 4.31 DC = 12 GCD, however that means you'll overcap RP a bit
Without 4xT7: 5 Scourge Strikes + 2 Blood strikes + 1 UB + 2.75 DC = 11 GCD, that is counting 3 DC. This just proves how big an impact the set bonus really has.


With disease refresh
With 4xT7: 4 Scourge Strikes + 2 Blood strikes + 1 PS + 1 IT + 1 UB + 4.15 DC = 13 GCD AND overcapping RP. This is a situation where it gets really tricky. Technically you can pull it all off in 1 rotation, but accounting for all aspects its unlikely.
Without 4xT7: 4 Scourge Strikes + 2 Blood strikes + 1 PS + 1 IT + 1 UB + 2.90 DC = 12 GCD, that is counting 3 DC. This should be doable.

-----

Ok so appart from having this rotation with 4xT7:

PS>IT>BS>BS>SS>UB>DC
SS>SS>SS>DC>DC>DC

All the other stuff should be doable in 12 GCDs

However even if we couldn't, it would not offset the dps loss we would get from Unholy Presence.

Unholy Presence would be a lot more friendly to use though, and it wouldnt suprise me if people chose it for comfort.
However in UP you have an 18 second rotation with 18 GCDs, which means you are doing nothing for about 5 seconds.

I'm still unsure (Improved) Unholy Presence will get a place within the 2H Unholy DPS spec.

When I was testing it out I was using HoW on every cooldown, which is one GCD and +10 RP. So that's 4 seconds, plus one more GCD every 4 rotations. And another second or so lost to latency & imperfect reflexes. 3 seconds. And once a minute I Blood Tap for a free Rune, which costs another GCD. (On the flip side, 30 seconds of every 3 minutes are spent with most or all RP consumed by the Gargoyle. It seems that even in Unholy Presence you might want to go Blood during the Gargoyle.)

Also, maybe I'm doing something wrong but occasionally (frequently?) my UF rune combination doesn't come up synchronized: for instance if they are the same runes I used for IT/PS then I have to wait for the second one before I can SS. If I happen to have the RP available then I can fill the time by DCing, but if not then I have no choice but to wait anyway. This happens in either presence.

So, again, unless I'm doing something wrong, doesn't your model assume ideal conditions that in fact may not exist?

Another factor is that even with hit/expertise caps sometimes you do miss (e.g. fights where the boss changes direction a lot) wasting a GCD. Another reason Unholy Presence might be suited for high-movement fights.

I'm just trying to figure out why, if in theory all my GCDs should fit, in practice it never works out so nicely. I'm trying to avoid concluding that I just suck.

This might sound obvious, but if I'm understanding correctly, that delay may simply be because you were hammering a button. If you use an ability before it cools down, you get a delay at least equal to your latency as this occurs...
1) Your client sends a command. It starts a global cooldown on the client side, preventing you from sending the command again.
2) Wait for the server to error back.
3) Client gets the error response from the server, unlocks your ability to send the command, and prints the error message to your screen.
4) You send the actual command that goes through.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that delay you found looks like this is what you saw. That being the case, if you were to have it perfectly timed rather than hitting the key as fast as you could, you might see less of a delay.

(Honestly though, in practical situations, a tenth of a second delay probably isn't unrealistic as there are various comfounds on timing.)