No. You're basing your assumption on what weapons provide best DPS based on a rotation that has many factors of weapon DPS. Without analysing the actual combat you just produced and seeing if the stats match up at all reasonably (crit rate, hit rate, damage range, proc numbers, space between procs, etc etc) you can't draw any conclusions. I could go and test slow/fast and come out with a DPS value of 2500, try fast/fast and get 2000 DPS, yet if my miss rate is 20% in the second test and 5% in the first the test is completely invalidated because they are not similar. The longer the test, the less these discrepancies should affect the test, but even with a large sample size you can easily get big differences in something such as crit rate, especially with an effect like Killing Machine that can back-to-back proc and proc directly before an ability you didn't want to eat the charge.

Also consider that different things scale at different rates. Spell damage will scale differently from white damage because of different things affecting them. If your melee raid buffs give you +20% melee damage, but your spell raid buffs give you +40% damage, then your proportion of spell damage is being undervalued in a dummy test. Your weapon stats may therefore be more important than the DPS of them, depending on how the different factors scale. This is especially important in regards to pets, as they gain some contribution of some stats but not of others. If you have two melee weapons, one that is 100 DPS and has 50 strength (~100 AP = 7 DPS) and another of 110 DPS and 0 strength, then you may overvalue the one with pure DPS if you do a test without raid buffs and without pets. The other one may actually pull ahead because of its contribution to pet DPS and spells in a fully raid buffed test with pets.

Also look at the difference in DPS values being posted in raid buffed situations and those on dummies. The average values I've seen from dummy DPS vary between 2k and 3k, while the raid buffed situations vary between 5k and 7k. This variance due to short term effects, lucky crit rates and other thing are exactly the kind of things that can completely throw off dummy DPS tests.


Disclaimer: This is an example. Although the methodology of thinking about what may affect your dummy DPS compared to raid DPS is correct, the actual conclusion (slower is better because of frost strike) is not a real conclusion, merely an example.

Take, for example, the spell portion of your damage (IT/HB/DC as the major parts). Spells are affected by +3% hit, +13% damage, +AP contribution, and 8% haste. A build including Frost Strike may significantly underestimate the portion of damage they're doing with FS on a dummy because of misses and lack of haste giving an extra GCD per cycle which means more runic power dump time is available. By doing dummy tests you may come to the conclusion that a fast weapon in the main hand is just as profitable as a slow weapon because frost strike damage is not a signficant portion of your damage, while in an actual raid buffed situation you have a lot more opportunities to runic power dump, therefore you get more damage from frost strike and a slow weapon does edge out a fast weapon.


You should be thinking about these ancilliary effects whenever you do a test and trying to minimise them as much as possible. If you cannot minimise them, think about their impact and whether it is negligible or not. If not, then estimate what kind of effect you think it may have, and include it in your results.

They're not the only ones =\

Most of us come here to avoid as many repeat questions and naive statements as possible, yet this thread seems full of them.

This thread has made me far more apathetic about theorycrafting than I've ever been. Not because of dumb posts and not wanting to sift through them...it's simply because it seems the final result of all the discussion is "it depends". Obviously everyone is coming here to help find the ideal to shoot for, and because they find DW builds fun, but as has been pointed out, there are SO many variables when it comes to DK dps it's far more difficult to model/discuss than any other class. Therefore, I believe everyone should try to be a lot less definitive in their statements...what you think is "hard evidence" might not be.

Also, although there obviously exists an optimal situation to reach, I think the game has finally reached a point where all things being equal, facerolling is within a few hundred dps of the maximum. It's kind of liberating and depressing at the same time, but given that I've been playing for 4 years I'm strangely fine with it.

Testing in raid is the same as dummy maybe little worse. DPS in raid is affected by too many aspects. And one important aspect is other dps members. Their high dps = your high dps. So players can't compare their dps if they aren't in the same raid and dps can be very different with same gear, specc and rotation. And another thing is that one player can't compare his own dps from first and second raid week because of changes in raid composition. Maybe you can get the same buffs but a change in dps members is change in your dps too. At the dummy u can have the same buff as another players and u aren't affected by another dps in party...
That low dps on dummy is very small affected by lack of raid buffs so if players want to compare their dps and new ideas than this way -=>>> dummy
For example my top dps in naxx25 at patchwerk is just crapy 5100 and its the top dps in our raid too... no one pass 5000 dps at PW in my raid just me... I'm sure that in better raid I'll hit 6000+ whats really big difference

I'm 0/32/39 for a while now but I'm still not sure what the best aoe rotation is. Right now, my rotation is IT->PS->Pestilence->HB. But somehow, it doesn't feel right, not to use DnD. Maybe you can help?