There Will Be Blood (DPS) - Meet the new thread/Same as the old thread - Page 54

Washow · 05/23/09, 12:30 AM

I've been unholy for my entire DK's existence so I decided to go Blood to try it out. I picked the usual 51/0/20 spec and played around with the dummy and some easy raids.

I was a bit disappointed because even when I stacked my arpen, the damage wasn't that great. From reading posts in this threads, looks like HS is supposed to do like 10k but mine's doing 6k 7k at most with both diseases up. My blood dps set is both hit/exp capped and has 4120 ap with just the horn. And at the moment I'm using sigil of awareness and death's bite as a weapon.

What am I doing wrong?

Soilantgreen64 · 05/23/09, 1:00 AM

Originally Posted by Washow

I've been unholy for my entire DK's existence so I decided to go Blood to try it out. I picked the usual 51/0/20 spec and played around with the dummy and some easy raids.

I was a bit disappointed because even when I stacked my arpen, the damage wasn't that great. From reading posts in this threads, looks like HS is supposed to do like 10k but mine's doing 6k 7k at most with both diseases up. My blood dps set is both hit/exp capped and has 4120 ap with just the horn. And at the moment I'm using sigil of awareness and death's bite as a weapon.

What am I doing wrong?

You're probably not going to hit 10k on a dummy, my highest that I have a record of is 8200 (only logged a few tests). Blood scales really well with gear and raid buffs, so if you weren't doing 25 man with full buffs you might not see 10k either. My highs in Ulduar on non gimmick fights is usually around 12k. It looks like your mostly Naxx geared with a fairly low (for blood) AP. Once you start getting more Ulduar gear it should improve.

Defac · 05/23/09, 1:02 AM

Originally Posted by Washow

I've been unholy for my entire DK's existence so I decided to go Blood to try it out. I picked the usual 51/0/20 spec and played around with the dummy and some easy raids.

I was a bit disappointed because even when I stacked my arpen, the damage wasn't that great. From reading posts in this threads, looks like HS is supposed to do like 10k but mine's doing 6k 7k at most with both diseases up. My blood dps set is both hit/exp capped and has 4120 ap with just the horn. And at the moment I'm using sigil of awareness and death's bite as a weapon.

What am I doing wrong?

Based off this alone, we can't really accurately tell you what's wrong. You could be not using the correct rotation, you could be messing up on x or y, and without any form of data or log, we can't tell you.

yek366 · 05/23/09, 1:05 AM

Originally Posted by Soilantgreen64

You're probably not going to hit 10k on a dummy, my highest that I have a record of is 8200 (only logged a few tests). Blood scales really well with gear and raid buffs, so if you weren't doing 25 man with full buffs you might not see 10k either. My highs in Ulduar on non gimmick fights is usually around 12k. It looks like your mostly Naxx geared with a fairly low (for blood) AP. Once you start getting more Ulduar gear it should improve.

Just to reinforce this, I have hit only a couple 10k+ HS on non-gimmick Ulduar fights wearing mostly naxx gear with 4100 unbuffed AP and betrayer. However, this is with full procs up, and hysteria.

As for the scaling, here's some proof for it. I have 6k on a patch since the patch, but just this week I only did 4700. I did not mess up anything, but I was missing BoM and 5% crit only. Just these 2 buffs destroyed my dps. You'll see the HS damage increase with gear, just give it time to get there.

concept84 · 05/23/09, 1:36 AM

There seems to be alot of discussion about how hard HS should hit. Here is a parse of Ignis w/no AOE (non-gimmick numbers).

Using Aesir's Edge, 25% ArP from gear, 6300 raid buffed AP.

Wow Web Stats

Zercsies · 05/23/09, 5:43 AM

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

Leaflock · 05/23/09, 10:26 AM

Originally Posted by yek366

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.

yek366 · 05/23/09, 11:18 AM

Originally Posted by Leaflock

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.

Veszrak · 05/23/09, 2:39 PM

Originally Posted by yek366

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.

concept84 · 05/23/09, 3:33 PM

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.

Leaflock · 05/23/09, 3:40 PM

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.

yek366 · 05/24/09, 12:00 AM

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.

KnThrak · 05/24/09, 8:49 AM

(edit) Delete please, need to learn to read. :S

Lujaar · 05/25/09, 6:35 PM

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.

Veszrak · 05/26/09, 12:09 AM

Originally Posted by Lujaar

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.