Looks like all hardmode gear was published today by mmo-champ: Ulduar - Hard Mode Gear List

There don't appear to be any changes to the possible BiS list however. A few additional pieces that may work as fill in for hit caps until better is found, but nothing staggering sadly.

Hi all. Thx for a great thread.

I am a blood dps DK. I am still a bit confused about what to gem and enchant for. So far I have been going for Hit(263) --> Expertise(26) --> Strength --> Crit(now ArP it seems)

So when I have gotten a new piece of gear, I have re-gemmed and re-enchanted with hit+exp caps as main priority. I understand that now ArP is a great stat to stack, better than crit and in some cases close to strength. This is however not the source of my confusion. Expertise is. I was participating in a thread on another forum. The thread starter was asking what to gem for etc. I noticed he had 5 expertise (something like 1.2%).. So I told him to get hit+exp capped and then go for strength. A couple of other deathknights also participating in the same thread told him to just go for ArP/Str and completely disregard expertise, except for getting it on gear.. This lead to a discussion about the importance of expertise for Blood dps DK´s.
I have been gemming/enchanting my DK under the impression that hit+exp caps were the most important. As blood, white strikes are my second highest damage ability and account for around 20-25% of my damage, having say 5% dodges on white strikes would be a lot of damage gone. My current gear does not have a lot of expertise on it, so all my red gems + bracer enchant + glove enchant are expertise, also a few blues are exp+stam gems. I still manage around 5k AP 25 man buffed. The 2 dk´s in the thread meant that I should immediately replace my red gems, enchants etc with strength and so on. My point of view being that 1-300 AP is not worth gimping your expertise down to say 1%. So what is the right thing to do? Has expertise cap become nonessential?

My DK
The World of Warcraft Armory

I also have the legplates of double strikes(think thats the name) in inventory, will be playing around with them later today..

Thanks in advance. Sorry if oftopic or wrong forum.

Gnome McFugly

[Edit]
Seems Armory is a bit bugged. Shows my expertise as 17, when currently it is 23.. But anyways, them gems etc are the most important.

To me, the main effect of exp is not to decrease the amount of dodge on your white strikes, but on your special abilities.


When Heart Strike, or Death Strike or IT/PS get dodged, you regain the runes. However, what you do not regain is the GCD that the dodge cost you. This is a lost of 1.5 seconds of dps in your rotation. When it comes to something like Unholy, which has a TON of extra GCD's this is not very debilitating, but Blood is GCD packed. The loss of a GCD can throw off your rotation, having a ripple effect on your dps, far beyond the loss of dps just from the dodge itself.

Basically, exp is huge. Your thought process is correct.

Do the various sims, spreadsheets and programs out there calculate this accurately? It seems like it'd be hard (impossible?) to model properly which would lead to pre-cap expertise being undervalued.

Can't dodge IT (or DC for that matter). Further, the loss of the GCD is already accounted for in the loss of the strike. No double counting handwaving allowed here.

Beyond missing the strike, the only additional impact i can see is if the pushback on your rotation causes diseases to fall off before a HS lands. This is accounted for by taking 2/2 epidemic though.

I agree that using a simple rotation with capped hit & exp is really easy, but reduced complexity is only beneficial if one can't handle the complexity.

I don´t get what you mean by

I agree that using a simple rotation with capped hit & exp is really easy, but reduced complexity is only beneficial if one can't handle the complexity

Are you saying there is a more complex rotation, without hit+exp capped that is better, or what do you mean?

So what do you guys think so far about the two set gains? It seems like we gain so much more from Method's set than we gain from Lushen's set. I mean i know we gain the 98pen but does it seriously outweigh all of those other stats? I'm not entirely sure. I know the 4set bonus isn't really that great but even if we get the 4piece set bonus and sacrifice 98 armor pen we not only get the bonus but all of those other stats due to Method's set.

Method's set, based on current simulations, is slightly ahead. But if what others have said is true (that ArP is better than Str after ~6200 AP) then my set will likely be better going forward. Using some general stat weights: Str = 2.8, ArP = 2.5, Crit = 1.5, Haste = 1.5, hit = 2.0 (this value can be found on page 1 of the Unholy thread. I would assume this value is the same for us).

My set: 293
Method's set: 298.1

Now, if we assume going forward that ArP begins to outweigh Str, then lets do a calculation with 2.8 for Str and 2.8 for ArP.

My set: 322.4
Method's set: 298.1

Now a calculation with 2.8 str and 3.0 ArP.

My set: 342
Method's set: 298.1

It all depends on what happens going forward.

Edit: I can say this, however. During beta, my Blood tests using [Chestguard of the Recluse], [Melancholy Sabatons], [Titanium Impact Band], and [Favor of the Dragon Queen] yielded 3100-3250 dps on boss dummys. Now with the additions of [Strength of the Automaton], [Clockwork Legplates], and [Girdle of Embers], my boss dummy dps has skyrocketed to 3575-3670. This is by no means a 100% accurate test. The test lasted about 3 minutes in both cases, with HoW and no buffs on the dummy. And in both cases, Necrosis was being counted.

The point of this is simple: ArP is really really good for Blood...and we probably dont know how good quite yet.

You're forgetting [Belt of the Titans] and [Steelbreaker's Embrace], although obviously the latter is only an alternative to the T8 chestpiece. I discussed the options here in a bit more detail.

edit: Yeah obviously you're correct that there's not enough expertise options. The ilvl 239 amulet and cloak really should have had expertise on but instead there's even more fucking hit rating. :/

Exactly. Why would anyone want to take [Belt of the Titans] over [Girdle of Embers] or [Belt of Colossal Rage]? (Thanks for finding that belt though, btw. completely missed it). The itemization of our set gear, and plate dps gear in general, is very puzzling. It seems like blizzard needs to create 2 item sets for DKs: One for Blood, and one for Unholy/Frost. If I were an Unholy or Frost DK, Id be wanting itemization similar to the Ret Pally set: lots of crit and haste.

As a Blood DK, I wish our set was itemized like the warrior set: 2 pieces with expertise, 2 pieces with ArP, 2 pieces with crit, 2 pieces with hit. Instead, it seems like blizzard attempted to combine the Ret Pally and Warrior set, and were left with too much haste and not enough expertise. On our non set gear, we are again left with too little expertise, and way too much hit. Its making gear choices as Blood rather limiting.

Well, Iron Council's [Steelbreaker's Embrace] got some expertise (even more than T8 imo).

Edit: I shall l2 read all replies first before making my 2 cents

This logic gets repeated a lot in threads on DoT type damage and reguardless of which rotation deals better damage it's completly specious. The fact that the player is forced to move out of range but the DoT keeps ticking is totally irrelevent to which combination of abilities deals the most damage. Diseases may very well end up dealing more damage in the above scenario than any alternative but it has nothing to do with the fact that a DoT was ticking during down time.

This still doesn´t really make any sense to me. Having hit+exp capped makes it a simpel rotation. Not having hit+exp capped is much more complex according to you. Do you stand on your head and pick your nose for the 1.5 sec GCD after a miss on a special ability, or what makes this so "complex"..

"The implication is that if you can handle the misses, hitting harder and missing sometimes is better than hitting all the time."

What does "handle the misses" imply?

I am not trying to counter your arguments, merely understand them. And as I understand what you write, I am using a simple rotation with hit+exp capped, but there is an alternate more "complex" way of playing that somewhat negates the need for the exp cap (as a blood dps dk)?? Or am I missing your point entirely?

I'm not sure I should take the time to spell this out or not; i doubt it will help

Some examples of properly/improperly handling a miss:

You miss a PS...Optimal: PS again; Suboptimal: HS
You miss a DC and a blood rune came up...Optimal: ignore DC and HS; Suboptimal: blindly DC

It boils down to using a priority system over using a locked in rotation.

Hit/Exp capp'd with static rotation (requires less focus) == good performance almost all the time
Max Str/ArmPenn => priority (requires more focus) == ?potentially better dps?

The flaw in the reasoning is that it's correct until you read it as "if something screws up, the priority will choose the best dps option, the rotation will go on and lose dmg".

However the big idea of being exp/hit capped is making sure nothing screws up. Sure the priority rotation guy will choose the best way to soften the impact of a dodge, but the exp capped guy will never face the problem, period.

...and the capped guy will have a lower dps ceiling as a result (if the sims & sheets are to be believed).

I'm not saying I, or anyone else, can actually execute a priority system perfectly. I'm just explaining the reasoning behind not capping.

Assume on average:

1) You can do X% more damage stacking Str/ArmPen at the expense of hit/exp (sims & sheets say this is true).
2) You can execute a priority within < X% accuracy.

For any time period, on average, you will do more damage with Str/ArmPenn. Hit/Exp is not front loaded. The only reason it seems front loaded to you is due to the admitted roughness/inaccuracy of your arbitrary numbers. Trust math.

btw - optimizations like the above (skipping DC if it misses and HS is ready), actually make misses less harmful than most people intuitively believe they are.

Ok that was a lot more understandable. Thank you Stein.

I think I will stick with the hit+exp capped setup, for several reasons. Doing the priority system that Stein talks about would mean that you have to be aware of optimal and suboptimal responses to a miss from everyone of your attacks that can miss, you would have to catch that miss every time, respond appropriately, you would have to adjust rotation every time a strike missed, and know how to start the best possible rotation after each kind of miss-response. I see this as a nice theory, but I think it will be a bit hard to pull of for real, or at least take a very long time to optimise.

Kahorie's sim attempts to do this very thing. It uses a priority instead of a rotation and tells us that in fact Str & ArmPenn are better than Hit & Exp.

Is his sim accurate? I'm not sure. Can humans replicate the priority as well as his sim? Of course not. The question is:

Can people execute the priority well enough?

(edit: typed rotation instead of priority >.<)

Well never say never But my guess would be, for the majority of players, no.

When the patch hit I didn't have nearly enough Expertise on my gear to stay capped, and the idea of removing my strength gems made me want to cry, so I used Mark of Norgannon for the first few weeks in Ulduar.

This past week I've been running Grim Toll in its place and a much lower Expertise rating (~17). To be fair I made a belt switch too to compensate for the +hit on Grim Toll, but the belt switch only netted me 2% more crit.

So I was at Hit cap before, I'm now way over it, Expertise is low, but I got 2% more Crit, and a great ArP proc. Running Ulduar25 will the same group and doing the same bosses we have on farm (8 bosses) I noticed a substantial DPS increase, from ~200 more to even ~900 more on one boss.

Hit/Expertise are obviously important, and do seem undervalued on some spreadsheets, but that is because the sheets don't take into account rotation pushback, however, that doesn't mean the basic value of Hit/Expertise is that far off.

Str/ArP are worth missing the cap a slight bit currently for blood DKs because of how much the stat is worth when it comes to our DPS. I'm not saying run 100 Hit and 2 Expertise, but if you are comfortable with a miss when it happens running slightly under might not be a big deal.

-----------------------

On another note, I mentioned previously that after ~6200 AP Armor Penetration starts taking over Strength as our #1 priority stat. This conclusion was calculated based upon a personal ArP of ~150. With a larger amount of ArP (because the more you have, the more its worth) the AP threshold at which ArP surpasses Strength goes down a bit. Later on today after work I'll pop in some numbers and see what I can come up with.

The reason hit/expertise aren't that good is because you only lose that GCD. basically its possible with the forgiveness Blizz puts in to essentially choose which ability to give up from your rotation when you run out of GCDs due to misses/dodges. If you simply choose to cut out a death coil you will lose significantly less damage than if you lost that heart strike/death strike.