Then the only other reason I could see would be that with trying too hard to keep Ghoul Frenzy up you don't get as many SS's in as you could. Other than that I don't have any idea, as RPM is no DPS increase and Desecration > Necrosis > Morbidity in single target DPS.
And the math for that is simple 5% overall dmg increase compared to 15% of your DC's.
To make this discussion simpler, can you give us WWS parses of both specs? That way we don't have to guess and can see directly what is going on.

People who see ghoul frenzy as a DPS loss often use Ghoul Frenzy in a bad way.

Ghoul Frenzy is a tool, not a button you fix in your rotation, you use ghoul frenzy:

- Before the pull, if used right your unholy rune is not wasted because its up again by the time you need it for that SS

- When your ghoul is taking damage, keeping your ghoul up in those cases is better than using a scourge strike for overal dps. An example of this is phase 2 on mimiron, where your ghoul takes damage from the lasers as well

- Any dead moment in a fight where you are out of range. You can often use blood boil (although not anymore since the patch i think) and icy touches. But unholy runes are unused. Often perfect in this case.

Examples for this are: When you run away from the mimiron AoE in phase 1 (phase 4 too, but im often too busy to care), i recall my ghoul, and use ghoul frenzy before running back in. Never had any problems this way
Another is hodir on flash freezes. If the safe zone is out of melee range, use ghoul frenzy.
Iron Council on Death Runes works as well, or right when the little guy is "Stepping off of his lightning scooter". (People who did the fight know what i mean)

- Strategical moments, some fights have a phase where you take it easy and a phase where you unleash hell. I often use it right before that to give my ghoul that extra kick
Example for this is: XT about 2% before his heart phase starts, dps in the heart phase is twice as powerful, i'll gladly give up 1 SS if my ghoul does 10% more damage during that period.

What I'm saying is that there is no way ghoul frenzy can be a dps loss if you use it with care. I personally never even use it with blood tap, because i tend to save that for a possible miss hap in my rotation or to reapply bone shield.

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There are so many variables on dpsin a target dummy that we really can't say.

Could be a lucky crit streak, maybe in the first 3 minutes you had a lot of SS glyph procs, maybe you miss used ghoul frenzy, or overcapped on RP. There is just no telling.

If your guildies hate Desecration, they can turn off the setting in their video options. I know it's a pain because i've killed some guildies that way as well with the "Pokeballs of doom".
However you only really need <Insert video setting which i can't remember then name off>, on Hodir to see where the ice drops.
And i personally found that in that fight, desecration appears below the bright blue circles so, thats all good.

I know it's really annoying sometimes, but desecration is a solid 4-5% of your dps, nothing to sneeze at.

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Well first of all, if you switch spec its a totally different world.

I tried some blood dps the other day, and i dropped from a constant top 1 position in my guild to a 10th place as well. Not because my rotation was that bad, mostly because i had to focus too much on my runes and couldn't watch anything else. It gets easier when you roll into it, which takes time.

Unholy on Thorim (assuming you stay in the arena) should be insanely good. On Mimiron however, a lot less. Mimiron isn't particularly an unholy friendly fight.

Also, to restate. Dummy DPS is really awkward, there are so many factors that play a role you can't say anything about it. Comparing builds or specs is even worse because without raid buffs, and in particular sunder armor, your physical component will suffer quite a bit.

I agree with you and just wanted to post my findings after a night of testing this talent in a raid situation for the first time.

I initially avoided this talent like the plague because of its clumsiness of use and potential to mess things up royally if used at the wrong time. Yesterday though, I decided I was going to try it and do my very best to use it correctly. I set up special timers and alerts in my addons to help me manage it. Truthfully, it is alot more trouble to use it than to just skip it and let that point sit in necrosis or somewhere, but I was able to get the hang of it.

I knew it was a good talent if used properly, but its value scales greatly on some fights apparently. This morning I am sitting here analyzing the WWS and seeing that my ghoul's swing and claw (10+4=~14%) and is actually is rivaling my white attacks (19%) in my percent of total damage done on some attempts at Deconstructor. I'd also like to point out that was with gnaw active all night by mistake (I know... fail).

So in other words, I have enough evidence of my own to get better with this talent and learn to use it more effectively even though it can be a PITA.

Also, I do realize deconstructor has alot of variables and definitely favors talents like this, but I feel this 1 talent point is going to be part of everyone's build once we all nail down exactly how to use it.

Yea, the only question in the end is:

Do I take the extra tool that is useful in only certain situations. Or do i go for the passive dps increase that necrosis provides.

Taking your numbers of 19% white dps, 10% ghoul white dps. Which seem pretty realistic, mine are usually around the same values. Lets for the ease of calculations just say 20% white swing, 10% ghoul white dps.

Also ghoul yellow swings aren't increased by haste, since its dependent on the energy of your ghoul.

20% white dps translates to 0.8% dps per point of necrosis
10% ghoul white dps translates to Ghoul Frenzy increasing your dps by 2.5% for the duration.
These are rough figures of course, but we can put things in perspective

For those to equal out you have to have an uptime on ghoul frenzy of: 0.8 / 2.5 = 0.32; or 32%

With an uptime of 30 seconds, it means using ghoul frenzy once every 1.5 minute to outclass necrosis, in a straight up dps duel.

In a 7.5 minute fight, which seems to me to be a decent boss fight length. And assuming you use GF on the pull (which you always should) that means you have to reapply it 4 times throughout the fight.

Whether that is doable, I don't know. On some fights it is on others it isnt.
But again I see Ghoul Frenzy more as a utility than as a pure 100% dps talent. It heals the ghoul on fights where it takes periodic non-burst damage. It serves as a tool usable when out of range. It's a "Pet hysteria" when you need that extra burst on demand.

If it's a hassle then don't take it, its also another button on a pretty full action bar. And checking most of my WWS logs, i probably don't even come close to a 32% uptime (probably closer to 10-20%).
It has a good amount of uses though, which makes me doubt about switching it in for a pure passive dps talent like necrosis.

I look at ghoul frenzy like corpse explosion, which I also take. It's situationally useful, and the flexibility is worth losing 0.7% overall DPS from one point in necrosis. Ghoul frenzy is well worth using before pulls and during periods of deadtime running out of voidzones and such, and corpse explosion is amazing on trash and bosses with adds like thorim's arena. If you're optimizing for maximum singletarget boss damage, you wouldn't take either talent-- but then you'd probably spec blood anyway.

Well, it depends on the boss and your usual pet management whether gf would be a single target boss dps increase or not. And from what I know Blood isn't necessary the best single target dps spec. It all depends on which boss we are talking about.
And as stated already, GF is a talent which depends on your preference and playstyle. It can be a DPS increase if used right and can be a major DPS loss if used wrong, but so can any talent. The only question everybody has to ask themself is if you want to spend the 1 point in it or not.
I can see that corpse explosion might be a talent worth to pick up, if you want to maximize your AOE damage, but then you lose some points on single target DPS.
So there are several different ways to spend some of our points and it is all about what your guild needs you for and what your playstyle is like.

Haste also increases your Necrosis and BCB damage in addition to increased attack speed on Ghoul and Gargoyle.

Haste affects white damage, and is one of the few stats that actually affect pets (with AP and hit). Also it affects necrosis (though the increase in white dps), and BCB. Although the latter 2 are rather small increases.

What makes haste good isn't only that. Because face it, crit increases most of that as well, maybe not pet damage, but crit does work on scourge strike.

So in reality 1% haste is worse than 1% crit, however thats not how gear works. And that is where the big difference lies.
For 1% haste we only need 25.21 haste rating, for 1% crit we need 45.91 crit rating.
And that is where haste outclasses crit. for the same value you can get nearly twice as much haste%.

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If you wonder why haste isn't that good for other specs, the answer lies in the mechanics that unholy uses.
First of all we of course have the pets that benefit of haste, blood and frost have far less reliance on pets, thus haste only really affects their white dps.

Second of all unholy diseases dont fully benefit from crit, Wandering Plague goes a long way, but WP is not a 100% transfer of melee crit% to dots critting.
Due to the internal cooldown on it, its closer to 50-75%.

Add on that we have unholy blight that can't crit. And our crit doesn't transfer over to pets, and you have a situation where haste might affect 35% of our dps, and crit affects 60% of our dps effectively and you bridge that gap with the bigger rating to percent conversion of haste.

There is a quite a buzz about hand mounted rocket launcher being the best enchant for Rogue DPS atm in some of the Rogue DPS threads. Since its buff on 3.1 and the haste buff on the same patch, does anyone have data / calculation on how hand mounted rocket launcher and hyperspeed accelerator compared to 44 ap to gloves?

My rough work shows that 340 over 10 seconds @ 1 min cd means that hyperspeed accelerator provides passive 340 / 6 = 56.66.. haste rating, which would be better than 44 ap according to the stat chart.

Rocket launcher does avg of (1440 + 1760)/2 = 1600 dmg every 45 seconds, modified by our blood presence, avging 1840 per hit. Since most fights require more than 3 mins to finish, that means for any given fight, rocket launcher will do at least 7360 dmg per fight (adding 32 ~ 40 dps per fight). Will this outweigh the dmg provided by 56.66 haste rating?

Thank you in advance for comments / feedback.

The pyro-rocket is also modified by bone shield, desecration, and ebon plague, for an average damage of ~2226 every 45 seconds, about 50 DPS. In addition, they can crit (for 150% damage) based off spell crit, for a bit more damage. While I don't have hard numbers to back it up, from my experience the pyro-rockets are stronger than the haste enchant. One thing to consider, however, is the DPS increase from popping the haste along with lust for gargoyle. I'm not sure how the gargoyle inherits haste, so I don't know what the DPS increase would be for that.

Even if it would be true, you would have to pick up engineering and either lose JC or Blacksmithing. Did you calculate the additional Str = AP you lose because of that?
JC gives you 3 JC Gems, which will be 9 Str each = 27 Str = roughly 78+ AP
Blacksmithing gives you 2 Sockets, which can wield 2 16Str Gems, which will be 32 Str = roughly 92.8+ AP

The stat weights on the first page don't take into account critters. With BcB, Necrosis (if you took it), ghoul and gargoyle, and raid buff scaling, I'd expect haste to equate to much more than the first page ~90ap.

The stat weights provided on the first page include all pets, Necrosis, BCB, and pretty much anything else that could be effected by Haste rating in a standard rotation.

Hand Rocket is better than haste enchant for all DK types because the Rocket is affected by % damage talents/presence, can be used at range, causes no GCD while being instant, and there is no swing timer reset.

Actually JC provides a bigger benefit than that.

With the meta gem requiring 2 blue gems, you're replacing 8 str / 12 sta gems with the JC 27 str gems.
Not to mention the fact you gain socket bonuses without sacrificing strength.
So in the end, you're most likely ending up replacing 8 str + X gems with 27 strength gems, meaning you gain 57 strength (and lose some crit/hit/stamina).

Aside from Bandits and Greatness, can anyone suggest trinkets for an Unholy DK? Would the Death card be any good?

Hi,

I'm trying to tweak my unholy build and I have a couple of questions:

Better to spend 5 points in Necrosis or in Impurity? At the moment I have them in Impurity but I am not sure it's the best investment. I found some posts discussing both but I did't get to a conclusion. Of course it would be nice to have both... still I am interested in knowing the weight of these 2 talents.

I have 2 points in Subversions now, for threat reduction. In your experience it's a problem not to have them?

Before 3.1 Impurity was (according to the TTT) a 1.07% increase per point. Since it's value has been decresed by 20% it should now be 0.85% per point. However, due to the increase to SS and PS damage with 3.1 the portion of our damage that is affected by Impurity decreased marginally, so a good guess for its value should be around 0.8% per point, which is still far superior to Necrosis (or Dark Conviction for that matter, if anyone dares to start that discussion again).

As for Subversion, I haven't found threat to be an issue (with 0/3 Subversion) anywhere in Ulduar. Curiously, there have been several instances where the lag of threat reduction proved to be beneficial, especially when some add hasn't been properly picked up by a tank yet and DPS are already on it, a Death Knight usually has the highest survivabily of the melee classes (E.g. on an Immortal Guardian of Y.S., I survived a hit which would have annihilated any other DPS if I had had any aggro reduce).
As soon as a mob is properly tanked, threat is a no-issue with or without subversion.

Plugging in the statweights from the OP, and assuming you are melee hit capped, since at end game level I am almost positive you'll be swimming in hit without resorting to trinkets to get it:

For Unholy (T8.5-BiS-0/10/61)

AP:1
Str:2.979
Crit:1.397
Haste: 1.523
Exp: 1.596
ArP:1.026
Agi:1.012
Hit:0.88

From Lootrank with those statweights (procs are included as appropriate):
Greatness: 491.535
Bandit's Insignia: 330
Fury of the Five Flights:310
Blood of the Old God:309.04 (426.554 if you're pre-melee hit cap, hit valued at 1.968/pt)
Wrathstone:292.876
Pyrite Infuser:288.6 (391.96 if you're pre-melee hit cap, hit valued at 1.968/pt)
Mirror of Truth:283.348
Mjolnir Runestone:247.146


Now, things like being able to use the AP bonus on Wrathstone "on demand" might be enough to push it up a rank or two, but based on the sheer statweight, it appears only slightly better than the Mirror of Truth. If anyone else has done math on our trinkets, I'd be interested in seeing what has been found.

As far as the Death card goes, I can't seem to get lootrank to pick it up for ranking- either it's WAY bad, or there's just an oversight there. I tend to think it's the latter somehow. Just using very rough math, if we say the proc is roughly equal to Bandit Insignia's, the the only variance is the 190 AP vs 85 crit. Based on the above stat weights we know that 190 AP is worth 190 points, 85 crit is worth 118.745 points. That means (based on a possibly suspect assumption about the proc), that the Death trinket should be worth something like 71.255 points less than Bandit's. Or 258.745 points, a little bit worse than the Mirror of Truth, but pretty decent in it's newly buffed status, a respectable starter raid trinket now. Of course I could be vastly overestimating the worth of the proc.

FotFF was long ago shown to be less than ideal for Unholy, as it is difficult to keep up, and Blood of the Old God has a ton of Hit that most people will probably not have any use for. Math has never been my strong suit, but it seems to me like 856 AP on demand (aka useitwithgargoyleoryouramoron) could be quite a significant boost in DPS. If I remember correctly, Bandit's proc was estimated to be worth around ~30 DPS (this was pre-3.1, and could very well have changed). If someone can do the math and see if 816 AP (less the 40 APE that Bandit's passive is worth over Wrathstone's passive) during Garg is greater than ~30 DPS (again, assuming that number is still accurate) then we will know which is better.

In the BiS thread the build suggestion that Methods posted uses Wrathstone over Bandit's, which is why I'm so curious.

This was never shown, but only guessed from the fact that most Ulduar fights appeared to be movement reliant and add heavy. However, after running FotFF for a few Ulduar IDs now, I almost always have 99% uptime over the course of the fight.

To be more precise:

No issue: Razorscale, Ignis, XT, Assembly, Kologarn, Auriaya, Thorim, Freya, Vezax

Some issues: Hodir (if snow fields have stupid positions, which almost never happens on Heroic), Mimiron (only phase switches, not during the phases), Yogg (only beginning of phase 1 and when entering portals in P2, where it doesn't really matter)

So on 75% of Ulduar (except Algalon) fights keeping the stack up is no issue and on the other 25% it drops sometimes, but usually it isn't a big deal, either.

Basically, on most fights FotFF is a static 320 AP boost - even for Unholy.

When I said FotFF wasn't looked upon favorably, I was mostly referring to pre-Ulduar raids.

I have a hard time believing that it's possible to have a good uptime on Freya, with all the adds running around and having to constantly switch targets, running out for the debuff, getting knocked back. Arguments can be made against most of those other fights as well (Auriaya fears can cause a stack to drop, Kologarn grip, XT running out for a bomb, Ignis pots you, Razorscale has the add issue...though add DPS is fairly trivial). It seems like keeping it up to have on the Brain in P2 Yogg would be especially tricky, with all the necessary time spent running around and then being vomited out.

Overall, though, FotFF seems like it comes down to preference. I don't know that I want to have to worry about keeping stacks up in the middle of a fight with a lot of other things going on. I guess the best solution would be to have multiple trinkets, and bring out Fury on fights where you know you can have as close to 100% uptime as possible, and then switch out something else for other fights.

I'd still like to see the math on a Wrathstone'd Gargoyle, as it seem like it would be a significant boost, especially when large amounts of damage need to be done in relatively short amounts of time (P2 Yogg, Hard Mode Council, Hodir, etc).