Yes I'm aware. This is currently not the case on the PTR obviously and provided this change goes through to Live not much will change in how we allocate talent points. I enjoy my live version of Necrosis quite a bit, but if its to be changed I'd rather have a solid sense of how to move forward with my talent point allocation, not how it used to be. The point of my post is that regardless of the change, there's not a whole lot else to spend points on anyway. We'll likely still end up with Necrosis, just maybe not 5/5 as we have in the past.

And of course, its always possible they won't go forward with this change for live servers. One can hope for the best but prepare for the future anyway.

Necrosis will lose out from the following multipliers:

Ebon Plague: 13%
Bone Shield: 2%
Desecration: 5%
Blood Presence: 15%
Ferocious Inspiration: 3%

This will result in Necrosis doing ~70% of the damage it currently does on live.

Good point, although no 2H unholy build used desecration. But i forgot the other 2.
Doing indeed 73.25% damage of what it currently does.

That hurts, but its still good. Like I said my necrosis atm does 5-6% of my total dps, so that would still make it do about 4% which is about 0.8% dps per point.

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On the side, there have been some new updates. Other than changing death strike for the 6th time

We have (and i only took out the 2 changes that affect unholy dps):
# Summon Gargoyle now lasts up to 40 sec. (Down from 1 min)
# Ghoul Frenzy now Grants your pet 25% haste for 30 sec (up from 15 sec) and heals it for 60% (up from 30%) of its health over the duration.

The first one, doesn't come as a surprise to me personally. Although I hope this doesn't permanently dropkick unholy out of the competition with blood for high dps.

The second one is more interesting. Apart from still having the insanely annoying 1U rune cost. It now increases pet haste by 25% for 30 seconds.
Just checking my last patchwerk kill dps sheet (which btw again surprises me how much dps the ghoul adds), the ghoul did 12.5% damage purely from white attacks.

Some quick calculations:
- Assuming you use Ghoul Frenzy twice per minute for the haste.
- 1 time per minute you lose 1 SS and gain 1 GF + 1 IT (or a deathrune, but thats only with good timing, and i guess you'd still wanna use that on IT, unless BS or PS will be superior)
- The other time you use it, you can combine it with blood tap meaning you lose nothing.
- My SS does (and im seriously rounding stuff here) 3000 damage, and about 50% crit chance with a 2.3x crit modifier, which averages about 5000 damage
- My IT does about 1500 damage, with a 20% crit chance, giving an average of 1800 damage

So basically we trade:

1 SS for 2 GF + 1 IT
per minute

Assuming the ghoul does 12.5% of your dps. Assume dps is 6000 (i like that number for ulduar) and you have 750 dps from ghoul attacks (not claw).
Improving that with 25% means an extra 187.5 dps, which equals 11250 damage per minute. (Remember with the change GF would be up 100% when using it twice per minute)

11250 + 1800 (IT) - 5000 (SS lost) = 8050 damage

8050 / 60 = 134 dps
134 / 6000 * 100% = 2.23% dps

Am I just making a huge mistake here, or is the new ghoul frenzy worth the cost ?

Of course i didn't include the fact that SS procs desecration and the glyph, but be realistic, this is 1 SS per minute we talk about.

Interesting change, that might work out well.

Just some extra's:

Not using it together with BT (meaning sacrificing 2 SSs) gives 81 dps, equaling 1.35% dps

Using it only once per rotation while using BT (meaning not sacrificing any SSs) gives 96 dps, equaling 1.60% dps

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Seems to me like Ghoul Frenzy is now worth taking, unless i made some dire mistake in my assumptions.

[e]: Seems i undervalued Icy Touch a bit, seems it has about 30% crit rate. However, this just increases the dps of ghoul frenzy, proving my point all the more.

Yes, calculations look right. So in the best case you get a 2.23% damage increase and there isn't any other talent that you skip for GF that yields a higher dps gain. This doesn't even take into account the fact that for the entire time the ghoul heals 2% of its health every second, increasing its survivability in AoE-heavy fights even more.

I like the new Ghoul Frenzy when you look at Ulduar AoE fest.

One boss does 14,000 damage every 20 seconds (It may be reduced by 70%, so 4200) plus other random AoE the boss does, so having a nearly 100% uptime passive HoT on the pet sounds very useful.

Regarding the comparison between Dark Conviction and Desecration:

Let TD = Total Damage done in any given DK offensive ability
Let E(TD) = Expected Total Damage done in any given DK offensive ability without Dark Conviction nor Desecration
Let c = Crit chance (i.e. 0.3 for 30% crit chance)
Let CDM = Crit Damage Multiplier (i.e a value that is greater than or equal to 2)

Desecration:

5 points in Desecration means a 5% damage increase to all of the DK's offensive ability.

Let E(TDD) = Expected Total Damage done in any given DK offensive ability with Desecration

E(TDD)= E(TD)*(1.05) = E(TD) + 0.05*E(TD)

The bonus damage component from Desecration can simply be represented as 0.05*E(TD)

Now let's have a look at

Dark Conviction:

Let E(TDDC) = Expected Total Damage done in any given DK offensive ability with Dark Conviction

E(TD)=(1-c)*TD + c*TD*CDM


E(TDDC) =

[1-(c+0.05)]*TD + (c+0.05)*TD*CDM

(1-c)*TD - 0.05*TD + c*TD*CDM + 0.05*TD*CDM

E(TD) -0.05*TD + 0.05*TD*CDM

E(TD) + 0.05*TD*(CDM -1)

The bonus damage component from Dark Conviction can be represented as 0.05*TD*(CDM -1).

The comparison between the two talent ultimately comes down to the comparison between 0.05*E(TD) and 0.05*TD*(CDM -1), or E(TD) VS TD*(CDM -1)

Let's drill down more, Vicious Stirke talent gives a CDM value of 2.3, that allows us to further simplify the formula to E(TD) VS 1.3*TD

A simple spreadsheet Solver application will tells us that, if your crit chance is above 23% then your points spent on Desecration will yield more total damage done that that of Dark Conviction. If you crit chance is below 23%, then the reverse is true.

Thanks for the prompt reply Darkside.

However, DK disease CAN crit, this is disguised in the talent Wandering Plague. It is worded differently, but for all intend and purposes, it does the same trick as a critical damage (thou the Critical Damage Multiplier will be limited to 2 in this case)

It also seems that Unholy DK is dropping BCB in favour of Outbreak in 3.1.

However, it's worth noting that Dark Conviction specifies "weapons, spells, and abilites". Does the 5% crit even factor into Wandering Plague's chance for double disease damage? Strange that they seemed to need to specify what crit chances it modifies, since I'm assuming "weapons" includes auto-attack, is there anything else that can normally crit (no WP) that isn't covered by Dark Conviction? Perhaps they specifically put that in there to imply that it doesn't work on WP?

Dark Conviction goes on your character sheet, last I checked.

That's what I thought, as well (not at my home PC atm, so I can't log on and check for sure). I just thought it was weird that they specified types of crit and didn't just say "Increases critical strike chance by 1/2/3/4/5%" ala Malice.

Blizzard added more details to the DK talent so players would not be confused to what abilities the crit chance affected (which is anything that has the ability to crit). Rogues are a simpler class with regard to their melee abilities, so they don't need the extra wording.

Apologies if this has already been covered, I didn't see it after looking -- I know the ability is called "ghoul frenzy", but any chance it's working on gargs?

Ghoul Frenzy effects only your ghoul.


I haven't seen mentioned anywhere the fact that glyph of diseases says "Your Pestilence ability now refreshes disease durations on your primary target back to their maximum duration." implying that it will refresh not only your own diseases but all diseases on the current target. This seems like it could make it extremely strong depending on your raid comp.

We already covered that in the simple questions thread, it doesn't work like that (only affects your own diseases like any other thing that has to do with diseases except CE)

This is actually a very good point. One DK with the glyph of diseases could massively improve the damage on every other Dk's rotation.

Can we get some confirmation of this?

Except currently pestilence spreads all diseases on a mob. Try pestilencing KT when a melee gets mind controlled and watch them die from the 8 or 9 diseases (shadow priests and DKs) that end up on them.

Has this been tested, or are we simply assuming based on normal behaviours?

Wrong, you are improving only white Ghoul damage . Also 12,5% total dps is too generous, 10% is more realistic - and we assume 100% uptime which may be big problem (tho GF will help with that for sure).

So we have 600 dps, white damage is let's say 350 dps and increasing that by 25% will give us ~90 dps. Also you cannot always assume Blood Tap as you need to refresh Bone Shield from time to time or you will loose 2% damage and some survivability. Additionally you need to spend one talent point for this which would be most likely going 2/3 Morbidity.

In the end, dps may be same (or within 1-2% of each other) and you get free heal for Ghoul. So maybe because of heal it may be worth it after all but that depends on what kind of damage Ghoul will be getting in Ulduar (gibbed or not).

For clear damage increase (as for now without using Blood Tap it will be some kind of loss) they need to buff it to 50% haste or change it to pure damage increase. Another more obvious option is making it cost either RP or pet focus.

You can sacrifice one point from Necrosis for Ghoul Frenzy and it should equal out + the DPS that is kept form keeping the ghoul alive instead of taking it out of Morbidity.

I am not sure where you are pulling your numbers from but by using a unholy dps dk, with a 3 minute 6000 dps patchwerk parse shown here WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish we get ~550 dps from ghoul white damage.

Though 25% haste isn't going to increase his white dps by a full 25% if we assumed it did that is ~140 dps or a 2.03% personal dps gain. Plugging that into foxx's numbers for damage lost due to doing IT+Frenzy instead of an SS we have a 1.44% gain still which is a pretty good talent point especially considering it adds a lot of ghoul surviability.

Why shouldn't 25% haste increase white dps by 25%?

Assume 2 seconds swing timer and 100 damage per hit, that is 3000 damage per minute

Now assume 2 / 1.25 = 1.6 second swing timer, that is 37.5 swings per minute or 3750 damage per minute, a 25% increase.

edit: Ah, I forgot that the ghoul profits from the death knights own haste, as well. Is the ghoul frenzy haste being calculated multiplicatively or additively? If it's additive it is true, that the benefit is less than 25%.

Ok agreed my 12.5% was pretty and probably too generous.

But 10% should be about right. However i was talking purely white dps already. Claw is a separate entry and is another 5% dps. Thats why i was so surprised, because together the ghoul does about 15% of your total dps.

The BT+BS is indeed something i considered, hence the addition without using BT, thus sacrificing 2 SS's

The point is that this is just napkin math using 3.0.9 numbers. I'm not sure how much the loss of a SS is gonna be in 3.1, i'm not sure how much damage you can do with the left over frost rune in 3.1 (IT damage). I also don't know how well the ghoul scales (although with all the haste we get now i guess its damn good ), and how much of a value the healing will be.

I know for a Naxx like instance the healing from GF is redundant because NotD catches most blows, but i heared ulduar will have more encounters where there will be raid damage of the level of Sartharion / Sapphiron. And in those kind of encounters the ability to heal your ghoul isn't bad.

Look i'm gonna be honest here.
Personally i'm seriously just looking for a reason to run around shattrath with a frenzied ghoul, without having the feeling I'm deliberately lowering my raid dps. (Same for corpse explosion btw, loved it in D2).
However It seems its gonna turn out to be a decent talent.

A lot will be depending on the way Ulduar will be though.
A lot of talents have a bit of a fluctuating value depending a lot on variables like mobility / raid damage.

Last time I checked on live, Pestilence also spread/refreshed non-DK diseases...specifically Devouring Plague. I was 2-manning Golemagg with a priest and for the duration of the fight he had DP ticking on all 3 mobs, all from a single cast. (I've been loathe to bring attention to this in case it's unintended, but figured if GC didn't already know about it he would before long.)

EDIT: It was on live so I didn't have the glyph, of course. I had one add set to focus and was using a "/cast [target=focus] Pestilence]" macro.