Maybe I'm thinking about this the wrong way, but wouldn't the value of crit vs damage fluctuate with the amount of time spent dpsing? Because probability is very different from frequency, which is to say, given infinite time, a probability value will become a frequency, but a probability doesn't start out as a frequency. Of course blizzard could calculate criticals differently than how its "supposed" to be, I admit I don't have much experience in knowing how the calcs are done. Or it could be that the time needed for a given amount of crit to outdamage static damage is so short that its not even worth talking about.

I think the biggest problem doesnt lie in the predictability of crits, but rather in the percentage of our dps that is actually affected by crits. At least all the dots we use are not affected by crit% and neither is our ghoul (but he probably doesnt get affected by the 5% overall dmg either)[has anyone gotten a female ghoul yet?]

There's maths around here somewhere that show that Dark Conviction affects around 61% of your damage. Whereas the 5% bonus to damage affects all damage, including your crits.

edit- well, not your ghoul I guess.

All non-pet damage actually, which isn't 100% of our damage. So Desecration doesn't affect all our damage either

5% extra crit isnt 5% extra damage.

Say you have 40% crit.

That means you do your normal damage 100%, and 40% of it does double damage.
That means you do 140% damage.

Say you get 5% crit, that turns into 145% damage.

The increase is 145/140 * 100% = 103.57%
That means a 3.57% dps increase from 5% crit

On top of that not all of our damage is affected by it, as far as i know pets aren't, dots aren't directly although they do get WP, but thats kind hard to calculate due to having an internal CD, so for this experiment lets just assume they can crit in the form of WP.
Unholy blight can not crit either.
All together about 75% of our damage is affected by crit.

So 3.57 * 0.75 = 2.68% damage increase => 0.54% per point

This is very abstract napkin math, but at least it shows you why 5% crit doesnt mean 5% extra damage.

To even copy your character to the PTR you need to log in to the website and go through a short process. If you dont have your password then you dont have characters on either of the PTR realms. There was no mirroring of accounts.
Also since your name and personal info is permanently attached to your account you can call them and provide the neccesary information and they will reset your password for you.

In addition to Foxx's math, search this thread for "dark conviction" and you can scroll down to posts by Fugazor and me for some parse analysis. I came out to .6% per point and he came out to .58% per point, both of which are pretty close to Foxx's .54%.

I was noticing in the PTR Scourge Strike wasn't hitting to hard. I would get it hitting at 1200 Max crit, without Black Ice.
3/13/53 +2 I tried a new spec, where you wouldn't use Scourge Strike but instead Obliterate instead. I mean on the test dummy my dps ranged at like 1200 which is quite sad,(Unholy) i do have good gear. When i tried using the obliterate in the rotation instead i saw it go up to 1500.

I don't have the numbers quite down yet but i'm sure most of you good number crunchers could tell me if my idea is terrible or good.

Rotation would be the usual Unholy rotation but just replace SS with Oblit

IT-PS-BS-BS-OB-UB
OB-OB-OB-RP dump

Glyph of Oblit, Icy Touch, Dark Death

terrible (as is your spec btw). Scourge Strike consists of more than just the raw damage it does (a lot of talents in the unholy tree buff SS but not Obliterate), the SS glyph is a big difference.

But first of all, seeing your live gear you should be doing 2.5k+ on the test dummy, the fact that you did half of it highly suggests you don't have a clue how you do damage as Unholy

The thing is i was doing 2k+ in a previous build but then i came to this new build couldn't get it high, but the fact that its low is partially cause i didn't dps too long on the dummy it was normally for about 5 minutes and i stopped. Which is the wrong way to approach it.

I pulled 2.7k on a dummy with my build

As far as i know they haven't changed anything with scourge strike the last build though.

The 45% damage from the patch notes already had been implanted in one of the first builds, they just never updated the tooltips.

If you're doing 1200 max crits something is very wrong on your side most likely. Because even naked you should be able to get higher than that.

Definitely been unholy before so i do have SS Trained

Very strange, as has been said you should be able to pull out more than 1200 crits even naked.

With my gear self-buffed (horn + procs) my SS was hitting for roughly 8.7k-9k crits on the dummy.

Can you post a screenshot of recount (or similar) with skill details, just so that we can check if there are abnormalities in other skills, as well?

Unfortunately I have now found out the errors of why my SS was hitting that low. Apparently the Boss level dummy in Ebon Hold was slightly bugged making my SS hit for like ~1000 i decided to try another dummy and voila, 7k Scourge Strikes. This solves this mystery thanks for your help.

I have been catching up on this thread from the weekend break, so forgive me if I missed something. I have a few questions for 2h Unholy dps.

Are our glyphs going to remain ghoul/dark death/ss? I haven't seen anything that would suggest UB will provide more utility than dark death for Ulduar, especially considering the time spent moving/out of melee range. Am I mistaken?

Secondly, with the black ice build 0/10/61, quickly becoming our new raiding spec, can anyone run a comparison in Ulduar between the black ice build, and the 51/0/20 blood build? I am very interested to know if either spec is clearly better or if they are both competitive.

So far people claim Ghoul / Dark Death and Scourge Strike glyphs are the ones to go for.

Whether the UB one is better is pretty easy to calculate.
UB glyph adds 10 seconds to UB. Which in the end means that per minute you only have to use UB twice instead of 3 times. Saving you 40 RP
The DC glyph gives you 15% more damage per death coil.

For the DC glyph to be better you need to get at least the damage of one extra DC out of it, that means higher than 100%.
15%* 7 = 105%

So if you use 7 death coils per minute, Dark Death is better than Unholy Blight.

Not counting the Tier 7 bonus and assuming your rotation for a full minute is:
SS>BS>BS>SS // SS>SS>SS
You generate 20+10+10+20+20+20+20 = 120 RP every 20 seconds = 360 RP every minute.
120 RP of that is used keeping Unholy Blight up, which leaves 240 RP for death coils. With means 6 death coils every minute.

Assuming this, and the fact that Unholy Blight glyph frees up 1 GCD every minute (its not much but hey, it counts).
Unholy Blight glyph should now be better on a static fight.

However since we'll keep using the T7 bonus for a while, Dark Death will start off as the best one.

However it does seem Unholy Blight is the better choice after we're back to our lower RP generation.

I have seen no real evidence yet that 10/61 is gonna be better than a 12/0/59 build. It's pretty obvious it scales better, so eventually it'll be better but whether that already happens early in Ulduar, I'm not sure.

All these dummy tests are quite useless, because you don't really get a realistic picture of what the best spec is.

Also the new unholy build, as far as i know is still gonna stick to blood presence. Unless for some reason we get to a point where we can actually utilize the extra GCDs, unholy presence is still worse.

Sorry, not from unholy presence, from Unholy aura the movement speed talent which will now decrease the cooldowns by 10% on our runes (IE anywhere from .8 seconds - 1 second depending on when you use the rune)

Improved Unholy Presence <- You are required to be in Unholy Presence for the talent to take affect. No one is going to PvE in UP, not seriously anyways.

My primary concern with glyphing UB is that there are a significant amount of fights in which you will not be around enough for the benefits of UB to outweigh DC. This is very dependent on how long you stay in before moving out, and realistically how much moving you must do during the fight. Obviously this comes down more on the playstyle side more than the efficiency side, but I would think that alot of it depends on your proximity to the boss.

I'm sure that once the patch comes out there will be a whole new slew of information to digest, but as for now it looks like the new DC glyph will start off as being the best and we will have plenty of time to figure up the point that UB becomes better.

Oh hah I never looked at that... ugh that's terrible

On the same note, what about when you use your gargoyle? Being able to throw on a UB and have it run longer during gargoyle would be a nice touch for sure.

So I just realized; they're taking away the raid wide benefit of the improved auras?

I would like to see some proof that 0/10/61 is better at anything than 12/0/59.

As for 51/0/20 it is very good but it requires Unholy DK in raid for desecration (blood glyph) and EP to reach maximum potential. I hated old Blood but new one is actually fun and completely viable in both single target and aoe.

Frost doesn't look that good, it lacks its own Gargoyle/DRW boost to be competitive, it doesn't have added survivability (like Bone Shield or DS healing), it doesn't bring any important buffs, even aoe got nerfed. Those are my feelings at least and I can be wrong of course.