@frmorrison: It's obvious that deadDPS = ODPS. I'm saying bluntly that, unless you yourself make a pseudo-apocalyptic mistake during an encounter, you don't proactively use IBF/AMS to mitigate incoming damage, or it's already a wipe then.....(assuming an even moderately talented raid) there is just no reason you should need access to that amount of health that fast.
KJ called, he wants you to visit and reminisce about old times. When you put hundreds of attempts on new bosses with random or obscene raid damage as was prevalent in TBC, your statement seems idiotic. Using WotLK's entry level 25 man, which is recycled, dated and certainly not difficult content as a benchmark for the future is destined for failure.
Just thought I would throw this out there. This is something Ghostcrawler just posted recently and proves what some of us suspected, but here's the hard proof.
We're okay with ignoring diseases on very easy targets but you should never feel like you can build a valid spec or rotation around ignoring Icy Touch or Plague Strike. Some of the 3.1 changes should support this a bit more.
I wonder how they're planning on making diseases worthwhile.
Some easy things would be making reapplication not interrupt disease ticks. PS hitting harder than a level 5 priest. And most importantly scaling bonuses for diseases for all the strikes.
Or more likely, nerfing strike damage into the ground and adding static bonus damage for diseases so that anyone in blues breaks even and raiders get boned.
I wonder how they're planning on making diseases worthwhile.
Some easy things would be making reapplication not interrupt disease ticks. PS hitting harder than a level 5 priest. And most importantly scaling bonuses for diseases for all the strikes.
Or more likely, nerfing strike damage into the ground and adding static bonus damage for diseases so that anyone in blues breaks even and raiders get boned.
Somehow I find the capacity for hope in me, that Blizz learns from it's mistakes.
Any number of things could be done to make this happen.
Bring PS damage up to say 60%
Change static damage gains to % damage gains. (enough to make it worthwhile)
Make Blood Plague increase raid dps or something.
The possibilities are endless, however nerfing to equalize isnt the way it should be done.
I think there is a factor in DRM that you have not considered: Trash dps. You can do 2xOB to generate some Death Runes then proceed to HS spamming.
So if you want the most pure dps talents, DRM is the way to go. After all, as stated above, you don't really need that much survival in this content (some may argue though).
I think there is a factor in DRM that you have not considered: Trash dps. You can do 2xOB to generate some Death Runes then proceed to HS spamming.
I don't think anyone's too concerned about trash dps in general, let alone with blood. Unholy and frost stomp blood for trash dps all around.
As for the blizzard quote. I see them taking large percents off of Oblit, SS, heart and blood strike, and having them added back in by having diseases up. EG. Heart strike nerfed to 50% weapon damage, but gets 5% weapon damage +110 per disease. That would more strongly force people to use disease with out reducing the damage at all. It would be a typical blizzard way to nerf a play style they don't want to support.
If the strike damage gets nerfed to support greater buffs to diseases then if Blood is to remain at a competitive rate Annihilation needs to be much more available in the frost tree, or favourably Obliterate to no longer remove diseases.
As things stand, a 51/0/20 spec is not breaking the game in terms of damage output compaired to 2h Unholy/Frost or DW, it's just working against Blizzard's intention of DK gameplay and style by ignoring diseases for a better damage output.
Pigeonholing Blood into disease based rotations means they're going to have to be very careful on a spec that many (fairly or unfairly) already seem to denounce as lacking compaired to other trees.
When I first read the post of nerfing disease-less rotations I thought to myself, "How would blizzard do something like that?" Then I thought "Oh, just nerf the weapon damage to the ground and buff the diseases damage bonus. The question though, is how this will play out in the arenas with all the dispelling and such? If my diseases are not up, I'm going to do shit damage this every-time a paladin cleanses my PS and IT I have to re-strike thus the loss of runes to do anything viable?
Aside from that I have a question. A diseases-less blood rotation probably isn't viable with a 186 dps weapon, even though you have the sigil of awareness now is it?
KJ called, he wants you to visit and reminisce about old times. When you put hundreds of attempts on new bosses with random or obscene raid damage as was prevalent in TBC, your statement seems idiotic. Using WotLK's entry level 25 man, which is recycled, dated and certainly not difficult content as a benchmark for the future is destined for failure.
The thing about self healing, especially in frequent intervals, is that we are no where near as efficient at self healing as other classes. If you need more healing beyond what your healers can provide along with seal of light, blood aura, potion, healthstone, bandage, etc. The group you are running with needs to consider changing the balance. Yes, rune tap will alleviate some of the healing required, but are you helping by not dealing damage? Most occasions where a rune tap would save you from death are preventable by better game play anyways. Which also leads to, if you have to rune tap with any frequency, you are probably a burden to your raid. On the flip side, if you do need the healing from rune tap to keep you alive (meaning yes, you are a burden), then yes the argument for rune tap is valid.
I'm sure blizzard will design all future encounters such that we won't need to rune tap every 30 seconds (otherwise, why did they insert a 1 potion per fight cooldown?).
Blood worms provides some passive healing (a plus) and passive damage. Rune tap provides some active healing at the cost of a cooldown. From a dps perspective the decision seems pretty clear to me.
Progressive raiding is all about reacting to new things, mistakes and odd strategic and tactical choices made due to inexperience on a specific encounter. If someone likes blood worms for farm content hard won by reading bosskillers strategies, have fun. Saying Rune Tap is categorically useless because 'you could have been better' completely ignores the fact that your first kills (or all kills, for some bosses) on new and more difficult content are going to be non-ideal at best, and a messy piece of trash no one should ever have to witness at worst. Of course, maybe what some people consider 'bad luck' deaths are turned around with a cooldown and what others call 'good reactions'.
I'd argue that blood worms is just as helpful for progressive raiding. Passive healing is very helpful in that it prevents a healer from having to directly heal you, which means they have less people to worry about.
As long as your healers aren't bored, You can never have too much passive healing!
I think an interesting change they could make is simply make each disease last about 20 seconds, and then 30 with Epidemic, allowing for us to actually use them, rather then reapply every 10 seconds.
With that In mind, 51-0-20 could do 3 cycle rotations, rather then 2 cycle. Such as:
IT PS HS HS OB
OB HS HS OB
HS HS HS HS HS HS (since sudden doom change makes 2x HS > 1xOB in 3.1)
and THEN repeat. Otherwise diseases are a complete hassle.
That seems the easiest way for blizzard to go, keep disease DPS at the same level, but make emm last longer, and increase static bonuses. Or, make static bonuses % bonuses.
Or my personal favorite, though it probably requires a bit of coding.
Make the static bonuses not static, add in an AP coeff. to them, like you did with evicserate after 1.8 or something like that.
Evic is .35AP coeff at 5 CP's, so to make it remotely balanced, maybe something like
Heart Strike:
Instantly strike the target and his nearest ally, causing 60% weapon damage plus (95 + .15 AP) plus (42.5 +.15 AP)
Which at 3000 AP transfers to
Instantly strike the target and his nearest ally, causing 60% weapon damage plus 545 plus 492 per disease.
It might seem overpowered when compared to the current version:
@ ZERO AP
Instantly strike the target and his nearest ally, causing 60% weapon damage plus 220.8 +110.4x2 = 441.6
So the increase would cause a net gain of 595 damage per strike at 3000 AP, which is easily attainable for mildly geared deathknights.
It wouldn't be completely overpowered, considering you are sacrificing an obliterate for that 595 extra damage.
i dont really know why you guys bomb on diseased rotations so much..the diseased rotation isnt really that much of a big difference if you can actually stick to the rotation and actually not mess up..and espiacly with ebon plauge up in a raid situation a diseased rotation will be on par with a diseaseless one..tbh with you guys they are plenty of blood dks that can pull off a diseased rotation and get equal numbers from a diseasless one...you just need to stick to the rotation
KJ called, he wants you to visit and reminisce about old times. When you put hundreds of attempts on new bosses with random or obscene raid damage as was prevalent in TBC, your statement seems idiotic. Using WotLK's entry level 25 man, which is recycled, dated and certainly not difficult content as a benchmark for the future is destined for failure.
Bad sarcasm is bad. Blizzard has already stated that raid content won't compete with the later half of Sunwell as it was in it's pre-patch form. I enjoy your humor though. Looks like I'll be speccing into imp blood tap for the one "optional" boss in Ulduar which is rumored to have an increased amount of difficulty...OWAIT. I agree with your post about progression being about reacting to new things, but even at the Sunwell level you're holding dear to your heart, those "new things" weren't likely to be saved by something like to a rune tap, the only remedy was trial, error, and then later perfection. Even then, everyone was min-maxing to squeeze out the best performance they possibly could. If you don't trust yourself to avoid 5 meter high neon blue void circles, mile high walls of fire, or at least even read your own debuffs, then sure spec to tap for a slight DPS reduction... But I'm assuming since you are from such a reputable guild, we can agree that you could trust your skill and your healers' skill enough to opt for better damage.
Say hi to Slayton for me.
Originally Posted by Darian_TruBlade
Except you can't. If you skip DRM you still have to decide between Bloodworms and Blood Aura/Mark of Blood.
The points you would normally allocate in DRM *must* be spent before you can reach Bloodworms. In fact, they must be spent before you can even get to the fifth tier. This is what clairecakes was noting. All skipping DRM does is make taking Rune Tap (and Imp Rune Tap) easier.
I apologize for not catching this post earlier, and the potential double post.
The argument was not over Bloodworms vs. Blood aura/Mark. It was Blood Worms vs. ImpTap if I read correctly. In the latter scenario, Allocating the points from DRM into Tap and then Imp Tap would allow you to extend into lower tiers. With a spec like: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft you can see that Zurm would be correct in saying for this particular spec both are possible.
Last edited by Chicken : 02/13/09 at 7:16 AM.
Reason: Turned the double post into a single post.
Wait... Doesn't the FAQ show OB-OB-HS-HS-Dump -> HS-HS-HS-HS-HS-HS-Dump to be the rotation? Unless I missed someone posting that instead of going with HSx6 going back to OB-OB-HS-HS is better, wouldn't you need DRM then to generate the death runes to run HSx6?
The argument was not over Bloodworms vs. Blood aura/Mark. It was Blood Worms vs. ImpTap if I read correctly. In the latter scenario, Allocating the points from DRM into Tap and then Imp Tap would allow you to extend into lower tiers. With a spec like: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft you can see that Zurm would be correct in saying for this particular spec both are possible.
Nope. This has been stated a few times over the last 2 pages already. The spec you linked has Imp. Tap and Bloodworms, but Zurm specifically was trying to say you can get both Bloodworms and Mark of Blood/Blood Aura...which you did not prove. (and which you can't do anyway with 51/x/x)
You have to spend 3 points in either DRM or Imp. Tap to get to the 5th tier of blood. This is very clear.
you are sitting at 33 points spent. You only have 3 points of leeway left because you are going to spend 15 on Sudden Doom, Heart Strike, MoM, Blood Gorged, and DRW.
Your choices for those 3 points are:
Mark of Blood/Blood Aura
Imp. Tap or DRM (whichever you did not choose first)
Bloodworms
Since you can't make 6 out of 3, you aren't getting any 2 of the above 3 choices.
As Lazareth said, tiny personal dps and healing vs. 4% passive raid healing seems like an easy choice. You will NEVER have Mark of Blood/Blood Aura and Bloodworms in the same spec. (unless you break it by dropping 3 of the last 15 points or spend more than 51)
i dont really know why you guys bomb on diseased rotations so much..the diseased rotation isnt really that much of a big difference if you can actually stick to the rotation and actually not mess up..and espiacly with ebon plauge up in a raid situation a diseased rotation will be on par with a diseaseless one..tbh with you guys they are plenty of blood dks that can pull off a diseased rotation and get equal numbers from a diseasless one...you just need to stick to the rotation
This was a parse from our Naxx25 last night. I agree that disease rotations shouldn't be discounted completely as they are necessary for poorer geared blood DKs to keep up with their Unholy counterparts. For those of us who are lacking Betrayer + Sigil (like myself), we still have to weave in those IT/PS. I use Nen's priority system (not really a rotation). Basically I open with OB, PS/IT, and then HS until diseases are almost done in which case I'll OB and re-apply.
Bad sarcasm is bad. Blizzard has already stated that raid content won't compete with the later half of Sunwell as it was in it's pre-patch form. I enjoy your humor though. Looks like I'll be speccing into imp blood tap for the one "optional" boss in Ulduar which is rumored to have an increased amount of difficulty...OWAIT. I agree with your post about progression being about reacting to new things, but even at the Sunwell level you're holding dear to your heart, those "new things" weren't likely to be saved by something like to a rune tap, the only remedy was trial, error, and then later perfection. Even then, everyone was min-maxing to squeeze out the best performance they possibly could. If you don't trust yourself to avoid 5 meter high neon blue void circles, mile high walls of fire, or at least even read your own debuffs, then sure spec to tap for a slight DPS reduction... But I'm assuming since you are from such a reputable guild, we can agree that you could trust your skill and your healers' skill enough to opt for better damage.
Trusting your healers is good, being able to help your healers is even better.
We can agree that helping healers by not taking extraneous damage is good. Anything one can do to reduce the strain on the healers is generally considered better. But reducing strain is not limited to avoiding damage, but propping yourself up. Healthstones aren't valued because we feel sorry for Warlocks, but because they're genuinely useful.
Rune Tap, and Healthstones, are certainly unlikely to make the difference between a kill and a wipe. There are, however, two points to make here. 1) The unlikely happens in raiding, especially progression. 2) There's more to progression than whether the end result is a kill or a wipe.
You only need to look as far as your last 1% wipe to see point 1, or perhaps the last time a healer had to prioritize someone else. Mistakes happen, and being able to mitigate that and allow the raid to continue on as normal is big. Moreover, the longer a raid can survive the more of a boss fight they can experience. The difference between wiping on Phase 2 and Phase 3 is non-trivial in both information and experience acquired.
I'm not going to claim that Rune Tap is mandatory, but not a talent choice and certainly not useless. If you're skipping DRM it's the obvious place to spend the freed up points.
Last edited by Montegomery : 02/13/09 at 12:49 PM.
What I lack in intelligence I make up for in verbosity.
Part of the problem with this whole conversation is that raiding has turned into nothing but a selfish ePeen stroking contest. Who can get the top of the charts, even if it means sacrificing raid utility. Raiding shouldn't be about that, even on farm content.
Are you saying that you are so perfect as to never screw up and never need a heal? You are lagging a bit and hit a fire wall on Sarth, or you get hit by a slime thingy on Heigan. It's a very real possibility, and because you were so selfish as to take 1% extra dps because you were trying to beat that fury warrior, you cost your entire raid the heroic version of Safety Dance because you had no instant way to get health (note: most healers can't stop to heal while dancing the heigan dance).
Nobody is perfect, mistakes happen, and raid utility is so far overlooked nowadays that it's pretty pathetic. I took Blood Aura because part of what people do in raid is bring raid buffs and raid utility.
/rant off
(Note: This isn't directed at anyone, just a general "you" in a general response to the personal dps vs raid utility argument)
Oh yeah, Blood worms die to everything. Passive 4% RAID WIDE HEALING does not. How the hell do people justify putting such crap personal boost above such significant (relatively) raid survivability.
Agreed. Now that we're limited to 1 healthstone and 1 health pot per encounter, abilities like Rune Tap are extremely valuable. A 6k heal on a 30 second cooldown (and that's in dps gear) borders on OP in terms of progression fights.
DKs bring a lot to a raid not just because of leetsauce dps, but because our survivability and self-sufficiency is invaluable. Blood DKs have some of the most useful tools in this regard. Besides self-healing with Death Strike, using AMS to avoid spell damage or prevent debuffs from being applied (Inevitable Doom, Flame Tsunami, etc), we have a built-in Last Stand and unlimited 30 second super-potions.
Yeah, Naxx is easy, but DKs really shine on Sarth+3, 10 and 25-man-- the only fights resembling progression fights so far. You can taunt/grip adds off of healers and know you'll be able to live. You can tank the disciples in the twilight just by switching presences, and you don't need a healer to come down with you. I can off-tank other encounters and main tank 10-mans in my blood dps spec because Rune Tap and Vampiric Blood are just that good.
For max dps in a vacuum, sure, bloodworms will give you a little more damage. For everything else we can do, there are much more useful talents.
@the other conversation: I'm gonna be interested to see what they decide to do to make diseases worth using for Blood again. I talked about it in the 3.1 changes thread, but the gist of my thoughts were that PS needs to be buffed a lot, and the ability for Obliterate to not remove diseases needs to be made more accessible. I don't think they'll nerf weapon damage, because that's bulk of our dps regardless. They just need to tip the scales so that it's possible and beneficial to get the full duration of both diseases, and that the total damage of PS + IT + BP + FF exceeds any other opening button push for those 20 seconds.
I guess I need to look at the healing meters, but I see my bloodworms healing me pretty good for sarth +3. I don't have problems with them dieing, but the tank is pretty good about getting out of the way. They really help keep me up and dps'ing while twilight torment is up.
Although, I can't say how well they work in other situations. It's the only fight we have any blood spec'd dks for, but all the passive healing we have going is very nice (2 x blood auras, seal of light, imp LotP).
A point we all agree on though, blood aura > rune tap or bloodworms (Any blood spec should have blood aura). I'd say blood worms == rune tap based on preference and/or situational requirements.
Bloodworms are useful for some situations, but in general you wont need low constant healing, you need something to stop a sudden burst of damage from killing you before your raid healer HOT's you up.
I agree 200% with Leaf, I would have /killed/ for half of the survivability that DK's have when we were doing KJ (I was the arms warrior)
I actually really like the "disease wiping" mechanic of obliterate but our problem is its a main dps ability that we constantly throw out, not a short cooldown like MS that you need skill in timing at the last tic of your diseases.
I admit I have not consistently followed this thread, I prefer to just check in from time to time in search of new ideas on blood dps improvement. I do a considerable amount of theorycrafting on my own however and the recent developments on these boards conflict greatly with my own findings.
I have a very hard time mathematically showing that a disease-less rotation outperforms one with diseases, even without ebon plague/crypt fever or curse of elements. I use a standard priority ~17.5 second rotation (oblit it ps hsX6 w/dcs during available gcds). I am melee (and nearly spell, with raid buffs) hit and expertise capped so I only clip the last tick of my diseases 90% of the time. My diseases tick for a little under 800 damage each, which means 800*5*2=8000 damage from diseases per rotation. IT hits for about 1300 and PS hits for ~900. So that's about 11,000 damage for 2 global cooldowns. Keep in mind that this is strictly non-crit damage (guaranteed minimum). Obliterates hit for ~4.5k non-crit, about 12k crit 50% of the time, which means a single obliterate hits for about 8250 on average for 1 global cooldown (keep in mind this is WITH diseases). These numbers are very consistent with my spreadsheet's. So... my conclusion is that PER GLOBAL COOLDOWN, Obliterate IS better than applying 2 diseases. The problem here though, is that in a diseaseless rotation you have a lot of free GCDs which cannot be filled with anything (other than random lucky sudden doom procs).
The second assumption that the diseaseless rotation bandwagon is riding on, is that a single obliterate hits harder than 2 heart strikes. This is simply not true. 60% of weapon damage X2 is already better than a single 100% weapon damage attack. Add bloody strikes in there (and subtract the disease damage bonus difference) and voila! HSx2>Oblit Want some "hard data?" My heart strike hits for 2.3k non-crit, and obliterate as i mentioned before for about 4.5. Sure the difference is relatively small and again, 2 heart strikes take up 2 global cooldowns... But look at it this way: Diseaseless rotation - 2 obliterate 2 heart strikes in 10 seconds. Rotation with diseases - 1 Obliterate 6 heart strikes in 17.5 seconds. Converting 1 obliterate to 2 heart strikes for the sake of approximate damage comparison we have 4 HS in 10 sec VS 8 HS in 17.5 sec. With a diseaseless rotation 8 HS would take 20 sec to use, and also keep in mind that there're diseases being applied and ticking during those 17.5 sec in the rotation with diseases.
To put it simply, I have a hard time seeing how a diseaseless rotation can possibly provide higher dps numbers than one with diseases. I agree that diseaseless rotations scale much better with physical dps stats and POTENTIALLY can outperform diseases in Ulduar and beyond. But I don't think we are there quite yet.
Here's me doing 11k DPS on Thaddius with diseases - Wow Web Stats Slow kill, took extra healers for Immortal only to fail it on a bugged ice block on saph. Also, some fights from that night didn't parse for whatever reason.
If anyone is interested I can provide greater mathematical backing for my theory (that diseaseless rotations aren't as great as they're made out to be), the evidence presented here is largely anecdotal.
I am very interested in hearing feedback on the information I presented here. As I mentioned earlier, I have not followed this thread very thoroughly so if I missed some lengthy mathematical explanation or if my assumptions about diseaseless rotations are somehow wrong, please point it out.
I messed up the beginning of PW so my damage is low but DPS is high. I also noted that Army of the Dead is not being counted on Patchwerk (and perhaps all of WWS in general) but at the end of the Patchwerk kill my Recount was showing me as 5800 DPS, so I guess not counting Army of the Dead is significant.
As for the whole raid utility vs. personal DPS argument, I dropped Blood Aura simply because when I checked the numbers it was overhealing almost 75% of the time. I didn't really consider that a good investment for 2 points, so when I changed to diseaseless Blood I dropped it and picked 3/3 Bloodworms instead. They do about 80 DPS which is not insignificant, nor is it amazing. I think Blood Aura needs a buff (hopefully in 3.1) to make it actually more useful than where most of it is essentially wasted right now.
02/11/09, 6:09 PM
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