It's not just IT. It's 10% more on IT, and DC, the addition of UB, an extra 3% crit on autoattacks, and a tremendous amount of RP, but the sigil provides 250+ dps for the spec over 0/23/29, which is a good chunk to make up. The crit seems minor but every extra 1% crit is something like 3% higher chance at a KM proc in 3 seconds.

My current thinking is something along the lines of something like this. The reason I ask about WoA is because it takes 30% haste for a IT BB PS IT DC PS IT DC cycle to get down to 10 seconds. If WoA+Swift Retribution affects all those casts, then that's 13% and an extra 6% on gear puts the rotation at 10.5 seconds without latency. That cycle generates 100 RP so one of the PS gets replaced by a DC every third cycle to keep from overflowing.

I need a spreadsheet to fine tune the build, give the tradeoffs for NotD, see if I can't pare down the rotation, determine if the build can be tweaked to make it work in unholy presence by dropping UB and possibly 1 in RoR for 2 CotG and pulling a 115 RP rotation (so close on the triple DC), calculate EP, etc. I'm in the process of writing it, but I'm exercising corners of the DK abilities that I haven't experienced or read about and my questions are mostly going unanswered so I'll have to be testing all the stuff myself.

can someone point me in the right direction? I have all naxx10man gear, the titansteel Mace and the Grasscutter for OH. both have razorice on them.

1) my spec is
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

2) is it redundant to have razorice on both weapons?

3) I've been trying out PS IT IT BS BS gargoyle/trinket PS IT IT IT IT DC DC and repeat. This is of course on a dummy and I don't have any raid buffs. I was thinking that this would be maximum DMG against a boss mob. Trash rotation would deff have HB in it but don't see it being useful with this spec against solo mobs. I was wondering if it was normal to only see 2.5k DPS on dummies or do I have this all wrong?

Ive read most of the posts but haven't really seen anything that could really answer my questions. Sorry if this has already been asked.

Question Ren, your numbers for some fights are absurd. My guess is this is due to gargoyle being cast during trinket procs, and the simple fact that your entire raid demolished the bosses in short order.

My question is, your patchwerk was 5200. I pulled 6200 this week and my gear is far worse than yours in most respects. The only significant difference is that I'm both spellhit and expertise capped. I'm wondering if something happened to lower your patch dps? I can't imagine doing 7400 to fearlina and only 5200 to patch.

He pulled 6.5k on Patch. The wws-log is bugged.

Emi- I have titansteel mace and grasscutter aslo, but I have FC on titan and razor on grasscutter and I fight in unholy pres and I see some difference in damage. Gear wise you have better than me, but seems like your rotation is different than what I have seen or read on the forums. Most people either go IT PS BS BS HB RP or PS IT BS BS HB RP. Yes it might seem bit off, but with FC I see my damage increase and for me it procs lot and razorice stacks x5 for me quickly..Having razorice x2 is pointless cause it only stacks once, so stacking x5 will happen quicker, but all thats all your getting so having two of the same thing is pointless. You could try cinder and razorice that seems to work lot too. Just pref of Fc and Razor or Cinder and Razor

See post 606(http://elitistjerks.com/1031982-post606.html).

We don't AoE Faerlina; any HB damage on them is purely incidental (when she's being repositioned for Rain of Fire) unless we were actually killing them.

This makes perfect sense, I can't believe I missed that... Considering the same thing happened in my wws.


Well sir, I'd say that your dps results warrant more discussion on gem and hit/expertise priorities. I had always gone by the whole hit to cap, expertise to cap suggestion, but it seems that stacking straight strength with gems may just be the way to go.

Damn you, I think I have to drop the money for jewelcrafting now.

Well done.

As DW, there is no real reason to reach either the hit or the expertise cap. This is because expertise will only really affect your white damage, and only about 20% of you damage is generated from white hits and you should be withing a couple percent of the spell hit cap (and at the melee special cap) with raid buffs and raid gear. Gemming strength will likely ALWAYS be the best thing to do as a DK, as it affects ALL of your damage, and is directly transfered over to your pets (ghoul will get 100% of DK strength with glyphs next patch). Furthermore, strength gets a bonus from many DK talents (Veteran of the Third War, Ravenous Dead etc) and BoK so you actually get more strength from each gem than is actually listed.

-I should have been more clear, the general advice in this thread so far has been to Cap Spell hit. (Of course not actual white hits.)

- A few pages back we discussed using the Unholy stat weights, which was not refuted by anyone. This new post by Ren seems to make a complete mockery of the statweights unholy uses.

I would tend to agree with you that strength seems to be the way to go, but is it good enough to ignore expertise other than what we happen to pick up from gear? That is the question.

Ok, I woke up today and tried the same thing as yesterday but today I only made 2.3k doing the EXACT same thing as yesterday when I did 2.8-2.9k dps on the boss dummy.

So something sure is bugged. I checked recount and the ghoul's damage wasn't even registered. But even if it had been, the ghoul is only responsible for like 300-400 dps.

I tried some more things and I discovered that when I use plague strike, my pet's damage disappears from Recount. Desecration was the first thing that popped up in my mind. I removed that stupid talent and POOF the Ghoul showed up in recount again.

Now of course, that did not help me one single bit as I'm still doing 300 less dps than yesterday doing the exact same thing with the exact same gear. And even though I removed Desecration, that talent is not responsible for 300 dps so that's not the problem.

So, I tried an earlier recount and got the exact same result.

BUT I noticed that once every blue moon, I do get 3.2k dps for like . However, that only happens when I crit like 85% of my howling blasts. Normally it takes around 10 seconds to get a killing machine proc which is weird cause I did the math and I should get one every 5 seconds since I have 1.14 speed (with icy talons) on MH and 1.22 speed on off hand which gives me about 17 hits every 10 seconds. Out of those 17, 26% should it so that's 4.42 crits every 10 seconds, and 50% of those should give me a KM proc.

And sometimes it's not only 10 seconds. It happens once in awhile I have to wait about 20 seconds for a KM proc. Not sure if my math is wrong, if I'm extremely unlucky or if the game is bugged, but it's frustrating.

Again, you should always always always gem strength as a DW DK so long as you are at the melee special cap. Expertise will only affect about 20-25% of your damage and strength will affect everything.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but Expertise Capping makes it so that there are no holes in your rotation. Doges on a PS or BS will cause your rotation to stall slightly and can have major DPS consequences depending on the rotation used, especially if its very tight on disease timers.

Ren, may I ask how many of your Icy Touches and Howling blasts are crits when you hit the training dummy?

I follow this exact rotation:

IT>PS>HB>BS>BS>DC>
IT>PS>HB>IT>IT>DC>
IT>PS>HB>IT>BS>BS>DC>
IT>PS>HB>IT>IT>DC...

I assume this is almost exactly what your rotation looks like. The problem I see with this rotation is that the only time a KM procc will benefit your HB is between your Icy Touch and the Howling blast which means it has to happen within 2 seconds. How on earth you crit 86% of your HBs in raid with this rotation, I have no idea but you must be doing something I'm not which means must have misread your rotation in some way.

And I litteraly get lower dps every time I try this rotation. Now I'm happy if I get above 2600 dps. It seems like just randomly bashing the 5 buttons give me more dps.

I'm not sure why that rotation would be better, it was probably more of a random choice.

It should seem pretty obvious that there's free dps to be had with the 'guaranteed' KM proc for the first HB by splitting UF pairs in addition to keeping the rune usage cleaner without random interruptions leading to blood/frost or blood/unholy pairs quite as often.

There shouldn't be a set rotation for a DW build.

When there is a KM proc HB should be prioritized as your next attack unless its JUST been on CD (in that case use the proc on IT), if there is 4s or less on the CD then use DC or whatever to fill in that gap till the CD is up.

BTW Ren has ALOT of AP for a DW build, his gear is insane. It doesn't really come as a surprise to me he did that much on patch, 270ish hit is probably fine in a raid with all the right classes and buffs.

Blood aura or Unholy aura?
Some people said the first, some people said the second, any real answer? I'm using blood aura with F/F on 32/39 and it works fine, maybe it's not the better choice.

I'm really enjoying 33/39 at the moment but I have a question regarding Rime.
I've been running this rotation mentioned earlier:

PT/IT/BS/BS/HB>DC
PT/IT/IT/IT/HB>DC

The question I have is what to do with the spare runes at the end of a cycle if Rime procced. I've tried a for an hour or so using it for an obliterate but that seems to trash my damage as it replaces a DC in the rune dump and extends my next cycle slowly messing things up due to the extra gcd within the cycle. I then tried using PS/IT,1x DC then your first runes are up again and strating the cycle over.

Neither seem very efficent in this regard, anyone got any suggestions? Of course after 3.08 it won't be an issue as with no cd on HB we can just use another.

It has been discussed many times in this thread and answered so many times.

Blood>Unholy for more info just read the posts more carefully

The sigil adds 203 x 1.3 x 1.1 x 1.3 = 377 damage for 0/32/39, and 10% more or 415 damage for 0/20/51. Including shareable buffs (13% spell damage, 5% from Razorice) and crit (generously using 75% here), the damage delta per IT is roughly 78 damage, or (with 6 ITs/cycle) 23.5 dps.

The data we gained from Ren's runs made it very clear that stacking str/ap should be one of two top priorities after the 8% cap. Crit seems to be fine around 24% without buffs and armor pen. falls short since most damage comes from spells. Since expertise seems to be rather worthless also, judging by the provided data, haste is the only stat left worth considering.
It lowers the gcd on spells (IT, HB, dc) and should improve swings/minute. When meteorite whetstone procs, BL is up,(imp)icy talons is up and add to that some passive haste from your gear and whatnot, you'll be waving those one handers at mach speed, optimizing the likeliness of more KM procs per minute.

Is this a valid train of thought or am I missing something?

Thanks for the great posts Ren.

With a few minor changes I went from 2600 to 3200 DPS on the heroic dummy

9.5% hit 9 expertise 24% crit 2920 AP.

I've just done some testing of the new sigil on the PTR, spreadsheet (.ods) attached which shows the damage ranges I got after a few tests of each scenario (with each talent, with sigil + each talent individually). Although I didn't test each variant very many times, the damage range on Icy Touch is so small that I didn't think it necessary.

It appears that the only talent that affects the sigil out of the 4 I tested is Black Ice. I would assume this is to do with when the sigil damage is added, being after everything else is calculated for Icy Touch, but before total damage done is calculated. This would explain the reason IIT and GR don't affect it but BI does. I assume Impurity doesn't affect it for obvious reasons (straight damage increase while the talent is AP only), but I wanted to make sure.