Orlgin,

The 13/58 build in your opening post currently has no skillpoint in Scourge Strike.

Other then that great post. Was just wondering if you ever use Unholy Blight or if that point is better spent somewhere else in the 18/53 build?

Edit: I was wrong :<

I am aware 18/53 is an Obliterate build. The other build (13/58) was listed as Scourge Strike build on the opening post. With no point in Scourge Strike. Besides its corrected now

I have a question regarding the 0/13/58 Scourge Strike build in the original post. Currently I do not understand some of the Glyph choices resp. talent choices.

As I see it there are two cases:

Case 1: IT+PS deals more damage than SS and/or generates more runic power for a net benefit. In this case 0/17/54 just seems superior.

Case2: SS deals more damage and/or produces more runic power than IT+PS for a net benefit. In this case I would guess that the best rotation is similar to the 2H-Unholy rotation, and I would expect the Glyph of Scourge Strike to be used and 2/2 Epidemic to be talented.

What am I missing?

Edit: I am not sure it was mentioned, but one advantage of 0/17/54 is that it does not in any way benefit from the T7 set bonuses, so we are less restricted in our gear choices.

Ah my bad :< was reading it wrong

@Kobol: We get a maximum of seven GCDs in Blood Presence in 10 seconds. PS + IT produce more damage and runic power than SS alone. But Scourge Strike deals more damage in one GCD than either of those two alone. If you are using the 4pc T7, it also generates more runic power than any of those moves alone.

Kyruski, can you post which glyphs and rotation you used for 0/13/58 in the simulation? It's possible he used the spammy SS version instead of the one that's similiar to mine but substitutes Scourge Strike. In that case, I'll edit the OP.

Hmm, wouldn't it be an option then to use GF only when Blood Tap is available? Yes, this would probably cut the value of the talent in half, but it was quite a strong talent to start with.

I did some major editing of the OP. Kyruski's 0/13/58 build is now listed along with his priority list.

As requested, I reworked the gear set to include more expertise. I also added more Armor Penetration as was suggested. The end result trades a whole lot of crit rating for other stats. Strength was a very high priority for the set.

282 Armor Penetration. 357 Haste Rating, 127 Expertise, 270 Hit w/ no enchants. You can get 22 Haste, 15 Expertise, and 20 Hit from enchants.

You'll note that I moved from T7 to T8. This changes how much runic power the build generates. An example of the Obliterate priority system:

0.0 Plague Strike (15)
1.6 Icy Touch (40)
2.9 Obliterate (65)
4.5 Blood Strike (75)
6.1 Blood Strike (85)
7.7 Death Coil (45)
9.0 Death Coil (5)
10.3 Plague Strike (20)
11.9 Icy Touch (45)
13.2 Obliterate (70)
14.8 Icy Touch (95)
16.1 Icy Touch (120)
17.4 Death Coil (80)
18.7 Death Coil (40)
20.0 Death Coil (0)

This is based on 1.2 spell GCD (379 haste) and 100 ms latency.

Edit: I also changed the spec. I removed Improved Unholy Presence, 2 points in Epidemic, and Unholy Blight for 5/5 Desecration. This improved the scaling nicely. Overall, I'm pleased with the result.

The problem is you then need to pull that point for GF from somewhere else. If you wanted to do that, the best place might be Morbidity since that actually gives the least DPS gain per point with this build. It still has to be a DPS gain though to consider it. Basically it's a personal choice.

Is this how you would code the Priority system with the Simulator?
I am still trying to get a better understanding of how to do the code for a priority system from a rotation.

Thanks.

There have been a lot of confusion about how attacks like Obliterate work. To help end this confusion for those who take the time to search for results, I decided to write this. If you have any questions about this or any corrections to any errors I made, please PM me and I will edit this post.

Obliterate damage consists of eight parts:

1) AP scaling. ((WeaponDamage%/100) * 2.4)/14 is the formula. WeaponDamage% depends on modifiers such as Glyph of Obliterate, Rage of Rivendare, number of diseases on the target, 4 pc T8 bonus, Bone Shield, Desecration, and Blood Presence.

Example: Obliterate is 100% weapon damage glyphed. 100% * 1.1 * 1.45 * 1.02 * 1.05 * 1.15 = 196.44% Weapon Damage using all of the modifiers listed. AP conversion is (1.9644 * 2.4)/14 = 0.3367. This means that 10 attack power will add 3.367 damage to Obliterate's damage. 6000 attack power would add 2020.2 damage.

2) Weapon Scaling. I think of this as bonus damage that scales. I use an average damage for calculation purposes so the formula is WeaponDPS * WeaponSpeed * (WeaponDamage%/100) = Weapondamagebonus. Use WeaponDamage% used for part 1 and apply it for this calculation. Note that the actual amount added will be determined by the random number generator and this number is just an average of that amount.

Example: [Malice]

179.0 * 2.5 * (196.44/100) = 879.069 bonus damage.

3) Bonus Damage. This is the bonus damage given by Obliterate itself. It is a flat amount affected by modifiers such as Blood Presence, Desecration, Bone Shield, Glyph of Obliterate, diseases on the target, and 4pc T8.

Example: Glyphed Obliterate has 584 bonus damage. 584 * 1.15 * 1.05 * 1.02 * 1.45 = 1042.96

4) Critical Percentage. This is the chance that your attack will deal double damage. Your melee critical percentage on your character sheet, bonus critical percentages from talents, metagem bonus, and any talent that raises critical damage bonus all gets factored here. The metagem bonus typically used counts twice which means that while it states 3% on the gem, you actually get 6%.

Example: You are using 0/18/53 and use Obliterate. Obliterate will get a 3% critical chance bonus from Annihilation. If it does critical, the damage will be multiplied by 2.06.

5) Miss percentage. This is the chance you will miss or have the attack dodged by the defender. Your Hit Rating and Expertise Rating will reduce this amount. If you are capped for special attacks and expertise capped, this has no effect.

Example: You are spell hit capped but only have 14 expertise (3.5%). This means your Obliterate has a 3% chance of being dodged if you attack a boss from behind. A dodged Obliterate deals no damage.

6) Armor. Obliterate is a physical attack and thus subject to armor reductions. The base boss armor reduces physical damage by roughly 41.1%. This amount can be reduced by sunder effects in a raid and the stat Armor Penetration. A search of this thread will reveal how the stat Armor Penetration works as it's been discussed already. Sunder effects reduce the total armor by 24%.

Example: You ignore the advice on the OP and take no Armor Penetration at all. You are in a raid and your target gets the sunder effects. Your Obliterate would deal roughly 68.7% of it's damage to the target.

7) Runic Power. An important consideration for any attack is how much runic power is generated. As Death Coil scales extremely well, using as many Death Coils as possible is the goal. Obliterate gets a runic power bonus from both Dirge and Chill to the Grave. It can also get a runic power bonus from the 4pc T7 bonus.

Example: 0/18/53 spec produces Obliterates that generate 25 runic power. If you have 4pc T7, it would be 35.

8) Diseases. If you use Obliterate, you will erase any diseases on the target unless you take the talent Annihilation to it's maximum three points.

Example: 0/18/53 spec has 3/3 Annihilation which means that it can safely use it without erasing any diseases.

Using all of these considerations determines how much damage you should expect on average using Obliterate. While a lot of this data is simplistic, it's easy to miss one of these factors when comparing it to another attack such as Scourge Strike.

Origin, confused on one aspect of your Oblit builds Runeforge choices.

Would CG not be better than RI for personal DPS? Given that DC is your strongest single attack, wouldn't the 20% bonus to Shadow Damage be more beneficial than the RI attributes?

Spell hit and Melee special hit cap is 11%(Spell)/9%(Melee Specials) in a raid setting, as you get 3% Spell hit from Spriest/Boomkin and 3% Spell hit from talents in the Unholy tree. Thus you end up with the required 17%. The rest is better spent getting Str,Haste, AP, ArP etc depending on your build.

I am a first time poster here but I have been trying to keep up with the 0/13/58 build.

I was wondering what the exact rotation would be for this build and what Runes to use. I was thinking the same thing as Octopi... I have been using FC and CG but I noticed that Kyruski was using FC on both weapons... I am a little confused.

Also, I am wondering what the hit cap for this build is? I was hearing that you should be spell hit capped. Is that so?

Thanks in advance.

Razorice no longer gives a raid wide debuff, and this spec is heavily unholy damage focused, so the personal benefit from the stacking debuff is minimized. While it's true that RI will benefit both Icy Touch and Frost Fever, these make up relatively small portions of damage done in any of the unholy DW specs. The 2% extra weapon damage as frost is also a relatively mediocre addition.

Personally I've switched to using double FC, and while I haven't run a severe test and recorded it to parse, some light testing (~500k damage done each time) on test dummies looked like it was achieving much better (nearly 100%) FC uptime and an overall dps increase over FC/RI.

If you *are* going to continue to use RI, I would recommend it on the MH, as I believe the 2% damage as frost is calculated after the DW OH penalty (I haven't gone back and checked). I tried Cinderglacier, but found the proc rate to subjectively feel so low after the change as to seem useless. A nice bit of random burst when it does proc, but that's not what I'm looking for in PvE. Especially for an Oblit build I would highly recommend skipping Cinderglacier.

The extra up time on double FC also has the added benefit of making it much easier to match up a greatness card proc with unholy strength, which of course is the time to use gargoyle.

However, chances are orglin and Kri have done testing themselves, they might have a reason for suggesting RI or double FC based on simulator results.

Are you sure about that? The tooltip of the glyph says that it "increases the damage of your Obliterate ability by 20%" which pretty strongly suggests multiplicative rather than additive attachment to the weapon damage bonus. Have you tested the actual damage output of OB to verify that?

Also a couple of nits to pick with your analysis as long as you're putting the post forth as a FAQ of sorts. First, the metagem tooltip is absolutely correct; it states that it increases critical damage by 3%, which it does--2*1.03=2.06. It so happens that 3% more critical damage is a 6% increase to the critical damage bonus for OB without GoG, but it's not some weird effect where the meta effect is double-counted. In all cases I'm familiar with, chatoic/relentless metas count after all relevant crit damage increasing talents (lethality, GoG, MoM, vicious strikes).

Second, a minor semantic point: you lump faerie fire/curse of recklessness as "sunder effects" when I would say that sunder armor and expose armor are "sunder effects" or a major armor debuff, while ff/cor are usually just called ff or "minor armor debuff." Of course you're correct that, combined, they provide 24% armor reduction.

Finally, what value are you using for boss armor? My understanding was that it's pretty certain to be 10643 +/- 0.5. Assuming it's exactly 10643, base damage reduction is 39.0% and sundered damage reduction is 32.7% (i.e. damage taken becomes 67.3%); it looks like you're using some value that is a bit higher, and I'm curious what it is.

@ teiglin: I have the glyph and that is what my tooltip reads. I mentioned this earlier in the thread. It is not multiplicative but rather additive. As for armor, my Ghoul has exactly 10627 armor with Horn of Winter up and the tooltip reads 41.10%. That's why I said roughly as it's not exact but pretty close. Reading earlier in the thread would also have told you what Boss armor number I am using which is 10643.

Good point about putting Razorice on the main-hand. I will change that. Cinderglacier was the lowest in my notes for one hand. Fallen Crusader was highest on one hand but much worse on the second hand. When they doubled the uptime of FC and halved the effect, they made it's offhand effectiveness much worse. A indirect nerf to DW if you will. Razorice was slightly higher than Cinderglacier in my notes so I used that. Unfortunately, I didn't save the uptimes that I used so I can't backtrack and look for errors. If someone has better information, I'd love to hear it.

Just a question in regards to the "hit cap" for dw. It seems everywhere I read it's something different, now I know it's 11% so that our spell's don't miss but what I'm wondering is, is it 11% + 3%(talent) + 3%(raid) = 17% or is it something different? I only ask because I've read on a few places that with the 3% + 3% we should aim for 287 which iirc was the "soft cap" as they called it, and the extra 6% would make up the difference, is this true or is the first equation I listed the correct one?

I just started testing the 0/13/58 in game last night. I don't run simulators so all my learning is done in-game. So this may not fit the super perfect rotation but it worked well for me. I am open to any tweak suggestions.

Basic
PS, IT, OB, BS, BS, DC, DC
PS, IT, OB, IT, IT, DC, DC, DC


AoE
PS, IT, Pest, BB, OB, DC, DC

Major Glyphs - Ghoul, Dark Death, Obliterate
Minor Glyphs - Pestilence, Horn of Winter, Raise Dead
*this is listed on the spec link given on page 1

I can't be sure of this but I think the [Glyph of Obliterate] will only scale with what the tooltip of Obliterate is saying ; which is 80 %. So it wouldn't be 80+20 it would in fact be 80+16 (80*0.2=16).

Also, and you might have to explain this to me, but I can't see how you count Rage of Rivendare as 45% as it is 10% to all dmg.

So just to sumarize, I think the correct example on how Obliterate scales would be :

96% * 1.10 * 1.02 * 1.05 * 1.15 = 130.06(224)%

Then the bonus damage thanks to the diseases, also I think someone on EJ wrote that Unholy Blight counts as a disease on the targets it affects, and I would probably put one point in it instead of Dirge.

If UB doesn't count as a disease it's 37.5%
130,06224 * 1,375 = 178,83(558)

if it does count it's 50%.
130,06224 * 1,50 = 195,09(336)

Please correct me if I'm wrong since I'm usually a reader and not a poster here on EJ.

Assuming the OP is right about the 100% weapon damage with glyph its:

100*1,1(rage of rivendare)*1,02(BS)*1,05(desecration)*1,15(BP)=135,4815%

If 4set t8 then its 20% extra for 3 diseases = 1,375 * 1,2 = 1,45

135,4815 * 1,45 = 196,45.