after reading the posts this is the best idea i could come up with for specs for the 44/0/27 The World of Warcraft Armory there is the link. also not sure as to which would be better but i have looked into using OB more in the rotations and this is the build i put together (not invented) The World of Warcraft Armory
i'm wondering which would be a better build for dps and what the best rotation would be for my dps dk's to use in my raids seeing as I'm a tank lol. Thanks
I know that "theoretically" strength is better than expertise, but I always want to stay capped. I personally do not care about theory in regards to hit/expertise capping. When an attack misses or is dodged, it is ZERO dps.
Actually, it's zero damage for that attack, which is in fact factored in to the stat weight calculation. Strength is always better than gemming for hit or expertise. The exception might be dinging 80 in your blues and greens, if you have 0 expertise or hit rating to begin with. But using 1-2 gem slots just to hit the cap? No, not worthwhile.
Actually, it's zero damage for that attack, which is in fact factored in to the stat weight calculation. Strength is always better than gemming for hit or expertise. The exception might be dinging 80 in your blues and greens, if you have 0 expertise or hit rating to begin with. But using 1-2 gem slots just to hit the cap? No, not worthwhile.
Again, this is all theory. Based on my personal swapping of gear and dps in raids, I have noticed that increasing my expertise has given me more dps. Mostly this comes from not messing up a rotation due to dodges. I have had too many situations with IT-PS-HS-dodge-dodge-HS and then my 2 blood runes are 3 seconds apart and completely messes up everything next time around. Yes, it can be fixed by ERW or just waiting 3-4 seconds for them sync again, but one is a 5 minutes cooldown and one is a huge loss of dps.
As for hit rating, what happens when you are the interrupter on Council or Vezax? Mind freeze misses because you barely have the melee hit cap (10% spell hit + 3% talents) and people die to lightning whirl or searing flames. What then? "Sorry guys I am not hit capped and my MF missed and wiped us?" Above dps reasons, it's absurd to not go for the hit cap.
Again, this is all theory. Based on my personal swapping of gear and dps in raids, I have noticed that increasing my expertise has given me more dps. Mostly this comes from not messing up a rotation due to dodges. I have had too many situations with IT-PS-HS-dodge-dodge-HS and then my 2 blood runes are 3 seconds apart and completely messes up everything next time around. Yes, it can be fixed by ERW or just waiting 3-4 seconds for them sync again, but one is a 5 minutes cooldown and one is a huge loss of dps.
As for hit rating, what happens when you are the interrupter on Council or Vezax? Mind freeze misses because you barely have the melee hit cap (10% spell hit + 3% talents) and people die to lightning whirl or searing flames. What then? "Sorry guys I am not hit capped and my MF missed and wiped us?" Above dps reasons, it's absurd to not go for the hit cap.
Not only that but everyone here has leveled up a toon and without proper hit or expertise sometimes things can become very frustrating to play. I find expertise very important, I absolutely cant stand when i get a dodge or a miss, the rotation is tight enough i cant afford that GCD. Also the stat weights credited by Methods on the BiS thread hit, expertise, armor pen and str are extremely close in a dps increase and not getting near the cap to at least a couple points for blood (255+ hit, 24+ expertise) i find is not very wise when considering your rotations as described by Yek above.
Stat weighting isn't the be-all end-all for gear itemization. Hit/Expertise are obviously very valuable stats and should be sought after, but I feel that its all about personal comfort within your rotation. When obtaining gear its quite easy to reach the hit cap especially in Ulduar, but the expertise cap isn't so easy. I've noticed a decent dps increase from 17 expertise to 21 expertise, but I also noticed a dps increase when going from 26 expertise back down to 21 because I replaced those gems with ArP/Strength gems.
I never said you shouldn't go for the hit cap. I said that gemming for hit/exp is suboptimal. If you're not already close to either cap with your gear, you're doing something wrong.
I don't know where so many posters get this weird attitude about "theory" being worthless. Figuring out what is optimal in real situations, not imaginary ones, is what this thread is about. The entire point behind stat weighting is that we are estimating that yes, in fact, on average, you will do more dps by prioritizing str. Feeling like you do more dps with a particular stat is just as silly an argument as "well a miss does 0 damage". This whole argument has been played out several times though in this thread, so I'm done.
I suppose I could clarify a bit more about this. I do tend to assume a lot. With the gear set up I have been looking at, I will have T8.5 chest, Bladebearer's signet, and Sif's Promise. These add 6.71, 4.39, and 5.12 respectively. Together, with Vot3W, that is 22.22 expertise. For me, I get 3 more from being a human, so in my specific case, 8 expertise rating will put me just over the cap. No this isn't the case for others, but maybe using a 16 expertise gem with 2 8exp/12stam gems to match useful sockets while fulfilling the meta requirement.
As for gemming versus gearing for the full expertise cap, it is still a tough choice. You are 3.78 short of the cap with the gear above, and there aren't any great pieces that we know of that don't drastically drop stats to gain the extra expertise.
Simulation probably undervalues hit and expertise. Any time you HS off a death rune while blood runes coming off cooldown, a miss or dodge can delay spending the death rune until the blood runes are up. When that happens you get one solitary death rune and no good way to spend it until you've burned through the blood runes. You get the same problem if you're trying to spend death runes with other death runes coming off cooldown. A HS gets dodged, which delays you until the second death rune pair is up, and you end up spending both death (unholy) runes before the death (frost) runes. Both of those situations mean lost GCDs 10 seconds later while you sit on a useless unholy rune, and I don't think either one shows up in simulation.
Simulation uses a perfect rotation, which is probably the best case for misses/dodges. If you start your cycle with no death runes coming up and never deviate from it, you have to miss several times in a row before you're in any danger of splitting a pair of death runes. In actual gameplay with target swaps and CC and pulls ending while you have death runes up, that kind of precision is impossible. You can run your priority system completely right and still get onto a cycle where one dodge splits a pair of death runes. I'm not sure how much of an impact that has though, and it can't be simulated because it depends on boss mechanics.
Simulation uses a perfect rotation, which is probably the best case for misses/dodges. If you start your cycle with no death runes coming up and never deviate from it, you have to miss several times in a row before you're in any danger of splitting a pair of death runes. In actual gameplay with target swaps and CC and pulls ending while you have death runes up, that kind of precision is impossible. You can run your priority system completely right and still get onto a cycle where one dodge splits a pair of death runes. I'm not sure how much of an impact that has though, and it can't be simulated because it depends on boss mechanics.
Its safe to say that aiming for the expertise and hit caps is not a waste of gear points, some hit enchants are actually very great (precision, ice walker). The sim also doesn't take into account latency where a miss or dodge can actually throw the whole rotation into a series of gaps. As far as min/maxing goes i still prefer geming my gear with Str and ArP rather then geming for hit and expertise and worrying about hit/exp through gear and enchants instead. If you're way off the mark though it might be best to do what it takes to reach those goals.
I was also thinking that the OP is lacking a lot of the general information for the spec. Most of it is scattered throughout the forum and other threads as well. If we can get some information compiled and everything posted that might help with a lot of the questions. As much as i like to see the armory and "help me with my dps" posts and giggle it does help to keep them away.
This could probably go in the BiS thread as well, but MMO posted shoulders from 10man Algalon that look promising. Clearly better than T8.5 and Auriaya ones individually.
My final post on the exp/str topic:
It is impossible to compare the statistical theory with specific case encounters. If you are asking whether to gem for expertise or strength, statistics and theory tell us that across a sufficiently large and random set of boss encounters, you WILL do more damage by gemming for strength as opposed to expertise. The additional damage you do in 95+% of your attacks will be greater than the missed damage from the few dodges and missed rotations you experience.
That being said, if you have a specific encounter/strategy in mind (ie. "I'm on interrupt duty for Stormcaller Brundir!"), or have an especially tough time with reacting to changes in your rotation, you may not fit the statistical norm and you may benefit from expertise more than other players.
Additionally if your top priority is "never missing" for various personal reasons (ie. "I hate missing!"), you will want to cap expertise. Just be aware that dodging and missing is factored into theory calculations, and gemming expertise at the expense of strength means over the long run and all bosses considered, you will be giving up some dps.
Strength is generally recommended for dps gems, especially for your base gear set, because it will give you more general-purpose dps gain than would expertise. Any individual considerations are just that, something for you to consider personally.
Theory models the average case and while it is true that increasing the average always means doing more DPS on average this ignores the purpose of DPS. Take the following as an example:
A guild is progressing through a boss and requires 6000 DPS from a death knight in order the successfully complete the encounter. Which death knight should they choose:
Death Knight S - Average DPS = 6300 S Dev = 300 DPS
or
Death Knight E - Average DPS = 6200 S Dev = 100 DPS
The first Death Knight will fulfill the requirements of the raid approximately 84.1% of the time, the second 97.7% of the time.
Obviously this is a drastically oversimplified scenario but conclusion is still meaningful, DPS is not done in a vacuum and gearing only for max average DPS and ignoring the variance of that DPS can be suboptimal for the raid even though it will look better for the Death Knight when the meters are posted. While it is true that simulations and spreadsheets generally give weights that accurately reflect the utility of each stat in increasing average DPS it is not true that this is all that matters. At the very least this means that when two item/gems/trinkets offer the same average DPS the one with hit and/or expertise should be taken over the one without. What else it means is entirely up to how much risk the individual player is willing to take to increase their average DPS.
It is impossible to compare the statistical theory with specific case encounters. If you are asking whether to gem for expertise or strength, statistics and theory tell us that across a sufficiently large and random set of boss encounters, you WILL do more damage by gemming for strength as opposed to expertise. The additional damage you do in 95+% of your attacks will be greater than the missed damage from the few dodges and missed rotations you experience.
Where do these statistics come from? The EP weights we use are generated by sims. The best tool I know for polling actual boss DPS is WMO, and the WMO leaderboards include tons of parses from people who aren't completely minmaxed. Last I looked about a third of the blood DKs on the leaderboards didn't take bloodworms. Kroot's top raid DPS thread had several people putting out leading numbers despite using fish feasts instead of strength food.
I'm not trying to say minmaxing doesn't matter. If it didn't we wouldn't be having this discussion. My point is that I don't know of any polling tool with a large enough sample size to draw these kinds of conclusions. If you do, by all means link it.
I'm not trying to say minmaxing doesn't matter. If it didn't we wouldn't be having this discussion. My point is that I don't know of any polling tool with a large enough sample size to draw these kinds of conclusions. If you do, by all means link it.
There is no 'best' tool for polling boss DPS, they are all equally flawed by their short duration and small sample size. Average DPS is average DPS, the fact that their are players who have not completely maxed their average DPS on the leaderboards is irrelevent to the discussion because average DPS is the best metric we have for maximising DPS utility at the moment. The leaderboards are no less anacdotal than any other combat log and as such they prove nothing.
Hello, is there a decided upon rotation for the 51/0/20 spec? Any chance of updating that first post to include it if so? <snip> Haven't found my dps to be terribly impression so I'm assuming there's something wrong with my rotation.
I'm having the same problem as well. As a lifetime unholy DK, my primary job is MT/OT - but there are a number of fights where I get to dps. I've been unhappy at trying to manage ghoul+frenzy, gargoyle, and UB as well as timers so I decided to give blood a shot. So I'm using a 51/0/20 spec from Page 1. I also tried a rotation I found on Page 1 that doesn't seem to work well: IT -> PS -> HS -> HS -> DS -> Dump -> HS -> HS -> HS -> HS -> DS -> Dump.
First, being new to blood I have no idea if this is a decent rotation or a crappy one. The specific problem I have with it is that after the first rp dump I have all my runes on cooldown and no ability to HS right away. If I wait for HS to come up, I end up running diseaseless for the last few hits in the rotation which doesn't seem correct.
Could someone help with an up-to-date rotation? I've read back through the past few pages and didn't find anything current.
I'm having the same problem as well. As a lifetime unholy DK, my primary job is MT/OT - but there are a number of fights where I get to dps. I've been unhappy at trying to manage ghoul+frenzy, gargoyle, and UB as well as timers so I decided to give blood a shot. So I'm giving blood a shot and using a 51/0/20 spec from Page 1. I also tried a rotation I found on Page 1 that doesn't seem to work well: IT -> PS -> HS -> HS -> DS -> Dump -> HS -> HS -> HS -> HS -> DS -> Dump.
First, being new to blood I have no idea if this is a decent rotation or a crappy one. The specific problem I have with it is that after the first rp dump I have all my runes on cooldown and no ability to HS right away. If I wait for HS to come up, I end up running diseaseless for the last few hits in the rotation which doesn't seem correct.
Could someone help with an up-to-date rotation? I've read back through the past few pages and didn't find anything current.
The problem with that rotation is it's trying to use the runes in the wrong order for the second half. One of these two rotations works best:
IT -> PS -> HS -> HS -> DS -> DC -> DC
DS -> HS -> HS -> HS -> HS -> DC
or
DS -> IT -> PS -> HS -> HS -> DC -> DC
HS -> HS -> DS -> HS -> HS -> DC
Even if you front load with HoW, you only have a max of 25 rp when you need 40 for the second DC (not counting 2rp5s from Butchery - by starting with HoW, I was at 66 rp for the first DC and 28 rp [needed 40] for the second). What am I missing?
The new Scent of Blood gives RP from direct damage.... I wonder if this includes most bosses abilities that hit the raid. It might be worth it in that case to get SoB over blood worms. I am often RP starved as blood at the moment and thinking it might be nice... especially with 2/2 RPM.
The second DC in the pair is essentially optional, but 90% of the time you'll have the RP to use it. That rotation generates 118 RP including Butchery, but spends 120 RP. Barring outside sources of RP generation, every 13th rotation will require you to skip the second DC for something else, which is to say once every 4.3 minutes. You'll probably never encounter a fight where you'll be able to perform the rotation long enough to reach that point due to movement, AoE requirements etc.
Just remember that if you're going to skip a DC, skip the second one in the rotation rather than the last one.
What I lack in intelligence I make up for in verbosity. Monte's LoL Blog
Even if you front load with HoW, you only have a max of 25 rp when you need 40 for the second DC (not counting 2rp5s from Butchery - by starting with HoW, I was at 66 rp for the first DC and 28 rp [needed 40] for the second). What am I missing?
You're starting combat with 0 RP, which means you're missing some key pre-pull prep.
Just before combat is initiated, drop DnD (15 RP), cast Horn of Winter (10 RP) You should still have at least 15 RP by the time your IT lands (cast from range as you charge in) and all of your DnD runes will be off cooldown by the time you need them.
Also, Don't be afraid to blow ERW. As mentioned above, you're going to have to skip one DC every 4.2 minutes. By starting with 15 more RP, and blowing ERW if you are low on RP, you shouldn't ever have to skip a DC. Also, you're generating more RP every second because of your tier one talent, so - again - you shouldn't ever have to skip a DC.
You're starting combat with 0 RP, which means you're missing some key pre-pull prep.
Just before combat is initiated, drop DnD (15 RP), cast Horn of Winter (10 RP) You should still have at least 15 RP by the time your IT lands (cast from range as you charge in) and all of your DnD runes will be off cooldown by the time you need them.
Also, Don't be afraid to blow ERW. As mentioned above, you're going to have to skip one DC every 4.2 minutes. By starting with 15 more RP, and blowing ERW if you are low on RP, you shouldn't ever have to skip a DC. Also, you're generating more RP every second because of your tier one talent, so - again - you shouldn't ever have to skip a DC.
ERW for blood shouldn't be used as a tool for more rp gen. Use it during hysteria.
Even if you front load with HoW, you only have a max of 25 rp when you need 40 for the second DC (not counting 2rp5s from Butchery - by starting with HoW, I was at 66 rp for the first DC and 28 rp [needed 40] for the second). What am I missing?
This isn't necessarily intended to be the first rotation you use, but it will be the one you use the most throughout the fight. I usually end up skipping some or all of the DCs the first time through anyway so I can fire off an early DRW.
There is no 'best' tool for polling boss DPS, they are all equally flawed by their short duration and small sample size. Average DPS is average DPS, the fact that their are players who have not completely maxed their average DPS on the leaderboards is irrelevent to the discussion because average DPS is the best metric we have for maximising DPS utility at the moment. The leaderboards are no less anacdotal than any other combat log and as such they prove nothing.
That's exactly my point. Leaderboards or any other collection of combat logs can't give us stat weights. If the top blood parse for some boss uses a fish feast instead of strength food, that obviously doesn't mean that fish feast is better than strength food. It follows that we also can't look at how people in WMO parses gem and say, "these guys did a lot of DPS so the stats he chose are best." That means we don't have a tool for polling DPS that can show that gemming for hit/exp is or is not a good idea.
I was responding to Canadianloaf's post about theory and statistics showing that gemming hit/exp is a dps loss. Sims probably don't give us accurate values for hit/exp as I explained a few posts up, and combat logs doesn't help us either. That means we don't have theory and statistics showing anything of the sort.
My final post on the exp/str topic:
It is impossible to compare the statistical theory with specific case encounters. If you are asking whether to gem for expertise or strength, statistics and theory tell us that across a sufficiently large and random set of boss encounters, you WILL do more damage by gemming for strength as opposed to expertise.
That is of course, assuming your statistical theory is accurate.
The writers of those simulators that were used to generate the stat weights will be the first to admit they are not perfect. For example: the way it handles misses, dodges, & parry is entirely an approximation. What they do is assume is a perfect rotation is used and everything hits every time; then multiply the damage by a reduction factor to simulate that some missed (a character with a 4% miss rate would multiple his damage by 0.96 to simulate 4% being misses). This de-values +hit & +exp stats because it does not take into account things like a messed up rotation because of it.
I am not saying the simulators are bad, in fact they are very useful and powerful. But rather that the data obtained from them is not perfect and should be taken as a good starting guideline and not strict rules of how to min/max your character because of it.
05/23/09, 10:26 AM
