Guys, good discussion for 3.1 going on but throwing a little pre-patch stuff in if that's ok.

Just read about the effectiveness of 4pc t7.5 and wondering whether i should have replaced it earlier.

Currently 21/50 - using obsd greathelm and h sapph chest in place of valorous helm/chest.

After reading about the 4pc bonus great scaling.. would it be ok to lose major expertise and some ap for the 4pc bonus?

ty :o

You'll lose a small 1-2% off of OB/BS (1-2% more dodges) for 20% more FS dps (5->6 per rotation). There really isn't much of a comparison atm. So yes, it's worth it since only 45% of our rotation is affected by expertise anyways.

Ok, I'm sitting on a war chest of new numbers to post--kinda glad I took the day off of thread maintenance yesterday because I would've had to do a bunch of work twice :p--AND I figured out what was making OB scale stupidly well on the god-sheet (mistake on my part added one of the IT or +Frost talents to it; I know I corrected that on one branch of the sheet but I guess it missed the 3.1 version :-/).

So, I need ONE thing before I can post with a clear conscience: 4T8 - should I ADD 20% to the 12.5%/disease scaling (17% boost to OB) or should I MULTIPLY it in (2% increase to OB)?

Gut is saying add as multiply results in basically no increase and 2T8/2T7 is, at times, way better than 4T8 (all else held equal) for all but one or two rotations... Which is pretty retarded.

Its hard to say without being able to test it on the PTR. The former sounds more reasonable and in line with other T8 bonuses I've seen, but the latter seems more realistic and pretty bad.

I also noticed you still have 0/50/21 taking the single target crown on the first page. I've noticed 0/49/22 has yet to be included in the first page post and wondered where it falls after the correction of your math.

I think i worded that sentence badly. I meant by ArP not meaning the Armor pen stats but the change to Sunder and armor reduction abilities to percentage base. Means Obliterate on live and Obliterate on PTR may hit for different amounts with the new mechanics and ArP buff when all else is the same. So player A's Obliterate on Live hits for an 8k crit in full buffs and debuffs, could hit for 9k on 3.1 after the changes or maybe less.

You are making the false assumption that Blood Presence limits you to 5xFS every two rune sets. It does not. The traditional strategy for making use of the excess RP is to dance between 13-GCD and 14-GCD by appending additional FS, extending the rotation by a GCD. This generates above-rotation-average damage with the excess RP (which means that post-GCD-limit RP is worth much less than pre-GCD-limit RP). However, you have to remember that, while the "appending" strategy is easy to execute, it does not necessarily maximize DPS.

For Frost builds, your weakest resources are your two Blood runes. Additional RP will let you decrease the use frequency of a Blood rune, generating above-Blood-rune-average damage with the excess RP (which, of course, makes the excess RP worth much more than its above-rotation-average cousin). However, you have to pay a "RP overhead" to get this higher damage conversion rate for your excess RP (reduced use frequency of a Blood runes carries with it reduced RP generation).

For a quick visualization of this (without worrying about the exact numbers, since they are specific to gear/rotation/specs), imagine an "appending" conversion rate of 1 damage per RP and a "Blood-delay" conversion rate of 3 damage per RP with a 15 RP overhead. At 20 excess RP, the "appending" strategy will generate 20 damage, while the "Blood-delay" strategy will generate 15; on the other hand, at 40 excess RP, the "appending" strategy will generate 40 damage, while the "Blood-delay" strategy will generate 75.

At this point, you can probably see that, for the "Blood-delay" strategy to be effective, you need to be generating significantly more RP than you have the GCDs to use (to overcome the overhead, then take advantage of the higher conversion rate with what is left) but generating the RP in few enough GCDs not to need Unholy Presence. On live, this "Blood-delay" strategy sweet spot does not appear to exist. This is because the low-tier Blood talents simply add too much more damage than the low-tier Unholy talents required to reach Dirge do. However, with tier-4 perma-ghouls, this will no longer be the case.

Yes, at the pre-GCD-limit RP conversion rate (no 4pT7, no BT bug), BP-0/49/22 clearly beats BP-0/50/21, but given 4pT8, breaking up 4pT7 is far from a certainty at the T8 level. Within the confines of BP-0/49/22, T8 set pieces may beat T7 set pieces at "appending" strategy RP conversion rate, but not at the "Blood-delay" strategy RP conversion rate. Just remember to figure in the lower Blood Plague uptime when you run the numbers for pushing back your BS+PS with additional FS for your gear.

One significant concern about running BP-0/49/22 without 4pT7 is that it loses RP at the pre-GCD-limit rate if it loses the IT glyph. As I explained before, running without the ghoul glyph dramatically decreases your ghoul life expectancy. With low ghoul uptime, 17/51/3 and 20/51/0 will beat you on damage easily. You can get around this by using both spec slots for DPS, of course, but then you won't have the spec slot for tanking or PvP. Note that you can do some pretty sick damage with this BS+PS pushback strategy on BP-0/49/22 if you are willing to (ab)use the BT bug with 4pT7.

The new Sunder/FF/boss armor mechanics net essentially the same armor-mitigation as live does.

My advice would be to skip trying to calculate it now at all. 4T8 will probably take a few weeks at least for anyone to get on live, and till its properly tested it would just be a guess. The more immediate concern would be wether its worthwhile to go from 4pcT7 to 2pcT7+2pcT8, a decision which DKs should face much sooner.

Referring to the discussion about T7 4 piece bonus:

I wouldn't personally be too quick about abandoning the bonus. It's not exactly new possibility that some specs/classes choose to use lower tier pieces just for the set bonuses, even when given easy access to higher tiers. While all of the pieces are not exactly BiS (and even further away from that in 3.1) I'd first like to see the final stats on T8 and other Ulduar loot before ruling 4x T7 out as option for end-Ulduar.

I fear that overtime, i would have to abandon the frost specc. The new set bonuses are a lot weaker than the actual ones, since we already have a lot of killing machine proccs for frost strike und 4p bonus looks overall a lot weaker than the t7 one.

Using 4p t7 seems mandatory to me for a frost specc because its giving you more than 1 extra frost strike every rotation. I dont like the idea of not upgrading my t7 equip just due to that.

Just wanted to go back and ask a specific question. I am assuming then that OB being overscaled was pushing OB based rotations well ahead of PS/IT ones? Specif icily, I would assume the priority rotation I talked about should do significantly better relative to the previous leaders, correct?

I did this testing over a week ago, and unfortunately don't have any screenshots or WWS parses to show. Tests were done in 3 minute intervals, dummies were <35% health so Merciless Combat was active, and there were no outside debuffs on the target.

I do utilize 4/5 T7.5, and I tested the following two specs/rotations:

17/51/3 (essentially the live spec/rotation)

(Blood Tap) > IT > OB > FS > OB > BS > FS dump [Repeat]

Averaged ~3340 DPS.

13/51/7 (for 2/2 Epidemic)

IT > PS > OB > FS > BS > BS > FS // OB > FS > OB > OB > FS dump [Repeat]

Averaged ~3650 DPS

I'm still waiting for the new Glyph of Disease to actually work so that I can try the rotation I've been itching to test:

IT > PS > BS > FS > OB > BS > FS dump
Pestilence > OB > FS > OB > BS > FS // OB > FS > OB > OB > FS dump [Repeat]

While I can't fathom how perma-Ghoul, Necrosis, and BCB wouldn't outdo the passive damage boosts in the Blood tree, I absolutely despise the idea of using the pet, and I really pray that Blood as the secondary tree remains on equal footing with a Frost/Unholy build.

frost/unholy with perma ghoul 'should' outdo blood/frost in most if not all fights where the ghoul is in no danger. Mainly because the ghoul can be raid buffed and you also get garg currently on live but come 3.1 maybe they will even out a bit.

With dual specs coming, frost lovers can simply spec both and switch between those 2 specs when appropriate.

On live, the damage garg does for the RP usage isn't as good as using that RP for FS. Post 3.1, people will spec into blood if they want to do ITx6 or any similar spec that needs the large number of death runes.

Agreed, I just mentioned garg just because you can spec into it. I personally don't use garg as 44/27 but it can still be useful in some situations.

I wonder if someone could point out anything that I can improve on. I'd say my DK pretty much has BiS (except belt from razuvius, neck from Malygos quest, saphiron trinket, and bladed steelboots once I get betrayer).

I have been sitting at ~5k - 5.2k dps for the past 2-3 weeks. I've seen reports upwards to 6k dps and I wonder if there's something I am missing. Here's the WWS for the last Patchwerk fight (2 min 23 secs) with 4 healers.
Wow Web Stats

I am 8th with 5044 dps. Notice that somehow WWS didn't show my army of the dead. Sometimes it does take that into account, but most of the time it doesn't even show my ghoul.


Standard buffs, flask of endless rage, great feast food buff.

Rotation is:
First on pull: IT - Oblit - BS - Blood Tap - UBA - Oblit
Rest: IT - Oblit - BS - Oblit
FS staggered everytime I have 60 or higher RP.


I kinda expect myself to be at least top 5 with my gear on patchwerk, but I haven't seen it happening yet.
Any obvious mistakes that I miss?

Other then your +27 STR gems, all of your gems should probably be +16 strength. You still could use a slower 2h (like a jawbone), or a BoH which would make a difference. For pure dps increase, you could go 21/50 (2% more str & 2 exp) instead of 17/54. 5k+ with a few more upgrades to get is still impressive. You're close to having BiS, but there's still a few improvements to be made. Having a few more items fall into place and you should be able to get another few hundred dps.

Yeah, it's not unusual for me to go from 10th or so on my group's WWS parses to top 3 once ghoul/AotD damage is included. If you have access to the raw logfiles, WoWMeterOnline seems to do a better job of handling DK pets than WWS, with little variance in the DPS it reports for other classes. (Except warlocks, where WWS tends to miss doomguard damage)

I was finally able to get on the PTR last night to test out a theory on BS vs. OB using this 23/48/0 build:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...4&version=9614

It was my first time and I wasn't glyphed properly and my gear is not end game but I wanted to see if taking points out of TS for Bloody Strikes would produce a respectable hit since BS has always been my weakest strike.

Glyphed OB hits for 120% dam vs. BS w/ 45% from bloody strikes, 15% from BotN and Chillblains w/ Bloody Strike glyph adding another 20% for a total of 130%. I lose 1 point in VotW and 2 in TS at 4% damage but for one rune vs. two I would think the damage per rune would be worth it.

So I found that BS was ahead of OB on normal hits but a hundred behind on crits. Also, BS doesn't crit as often as OB. (18% vs 34%). Like I said though, I didn't have the BS Glyph which I think would really have shown some separation.

My rotation was sloppy and I will try to fine tune and get some screenshot data at my next opportunity. If I'm way off in going down this road, I would like to hear about it. Also, for those smarter than me, any suggestions on rotations using this build would be helpful.

I asked Feorthas to run a "BS spam" rotation trying to take advantage of Bloody Strikes/BotN/Glyph, I don't know if incorporated the glyph or not, but he said that the rotation was ~200-250 dps behind the current "best" PTR rotation, which means it wasn't as bad as I thought. Possible that starter sigil could have swayed the numbers more. I don't recall if it was being run in BP or UP.

Have to ask, which is currently best PTR rotation? I assume youre talking about 0/51/20, correct me if Im wrong.

Run this Blood Presence rotation for 23/48/0 (FS/OB/BS glyphs, no 4pT7):

BS>OB>fs>OB>fs>BS
IT>OB>fs>BS>BS>fs>IT

For Unholy Presence you are better off going 20/51/0, because your Death runes are better spent on ITs due to much higher RP generation and Freezing Fog HBs out-doing the extra damage bonus on 2xBS. In Blood Presence, however, it is an interesting post-4pT7 alternative (specifically, in terms of progression scaling).

What is the PTR And current rotation from this. Looking to change from 44/27 but I am seeing a lot of variation.
Thanks ahead of time.