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.
I sometimes doubt people understand how FotFF works: it puts a buff on you, not a debuff on your target. It doesn't matter at all if you have to switch targets frequently (in that case it's probably even better than any on-proc-mechanic) as long as you aren't out of melee range for more than 10 seconds.
So Razorscale or Freya or XT adds don't matter because you DPS boss, run for 3 seconds, DPS adds, run for 3 seconds, and so on. You never have gaps of 10 seconds or more, even during the Auriaya fear (Feared for 5 seconds - if one takes more than 3 to get back to the boss he should consider deleting his character).
Special cases like the Kologarn arm a moot point, as well, since an on-proc-trinket can just proc at that time and you waste the whole proc. Of course, anything is personal preference, but for the sake of optimizing FotFF is still one of the best trinkets Unholy can possibly get.
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.
The proc from Death card has more damage modifier (being shadow damage it also gets a +10%damage bonus from Black Ice provided you spec into that of course) as well as having a higher baseline damage - 1750 compare to 1504 on Bandit's Insignia.
Would really love to see some maths on it.
speaking of trinkets. Anyone did any napkin math on [Elemental Focus Stone] Despite the description as a spell damage proc it actually procs 522 haste rating.
Also what is the rule of thumb gear curve for making the transition from 12/0/59 style builds to 0/10/61? I have been running 12/0/59 and getting pretty solid numbers but I just picked up a betrayer and was wondering if that would push me into viability for black ice.
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 my opinion this is a hugely underestimated benefit.
Simply turning all trinkets into AEP numbers, makes you miss certain variables that play a big role as well.
Both types have their benefits and disadvantages.
Auto-proc trinkets (like Greatness), are semi-passive effects, meaning that you dont have to bother with them, the disadvantage (which i personally experience ALL the time) is that its harder to adjust your cooldowns on them.
It happens quite often that i have to make the choice when popping something like gargoyle, do i wait and hope a second trinket or FC procs as well? Or will the effect fade by then and do I miss out on either buff.
Use-effect trinkets, are active, meaning you can control when to use them. Especially nice since you can combine them very good with bloodlust and/or (semi-)passive trinkets so you can get optimal benefit of all your procs.
Downside is that (i personally) often either forget to use them, or not use them every 2 minutes, which means you lose a lot of potential power very fast. A 3 minute cooldown one would've been easier since you can combine that with gargyle, but a 2 minute like Wrath stone is a bit harder to fit in well.
Assuming you want to save Wrathstone for gargoyle, and only use it once per 3 minutes, you go from 143 AP over time, to 95 AP over time. Which is a pretty heavy loss.
It also depends on the fight, and how you can anticipate on it. If you can use your trinket at the 1, 3 and 5 minute marks and can use your gargoyle twice at minute 1 and minute 5 then you're solid, but if the fight lasts slightly longer you wouldve been able to use gargoyle 3 times if you had popped it every cooldown.
-----------
On this topic, is there any priority of buffs we should consider when popping gargoyle.
I personally use Mirror of Truth since we simply haven't seen anything better drop so far (FotFF and BI are a lie !).
Before the nerf to FC i worked out that it was absolute king. 30% strenght roughly meant 500+ strength.
After the nerf its not that strong anymore, however since it synergises with greatness you can get some odd priorities at times.
Mirror of Truth with 1000 AP for me seems like absolute best now (of course the proc rate is low enough for it to be a relative bad trinket, but the proc itself combined with a cooldown is rather good).
But assuming most people don't have mirror we could make a priority list. Probably ignoring BI and FotFF since those are passive anyway.
But including:
- Bloodlust (assuming this is the biggest gargoyle dps increase, so you should use at least 1 gargoyle when this is up)
- Wrathstone
- Greatness
- Rune of the Fallen Crusader
The latter is of course depending on the strength you have, but also has increased effectiveness due to kings and in combination with greatness for example.
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.
Well with bloodtap it should be up at least once per minute unless its Bone shield charges are being eaten alive.
I felt like ghoul white attacks doing 10% was only important when compared to our other downs on the same boss when I did not have Ghoul Frenzy. They were all solidly at 4-6% of my overall damage wws. My ghoul white attacks contribution to my overall dps basically doubled with only using GF on BT when it wasn't needed for Bone Shield.
And now with a full weeks' worth of testing done... I just can't see myself taking other talents over this; given the alternatives available. It easily outperforms 1 point in necrosis or conviction even with minimal uptime for myself in my gear and spec (12/0/59).
I actually picked up a Wrathstone, which confused a few of my guildmates. I tried to explain that it's pretty common to get Greatness and Unholy Strength to pop at the same time. It's not common for my Mirror to proc while both of those are up, and let alone to pop during a bloodlust. The odds of a Greatness and Unholy Strength proccing at the same time during a lust are pretty good, or I'll get *at least* one of them to work with. I can then pop blood fury and wrathstone on top for a highly stacked gargoyle.
TBH, I haven't noticed a huge difference in my DPS. I remain in the top 5 generally, often making my way to the top 3, depending on how the rogues do and if our feral shows up. I'm still in the first half of Ulduar, though. We'll see what happens in later fights, but as of right now, the ability to combine all my CDs/Procs is nice.
As far as specifics of how it's been effective, in my fights, I've run into:
Flame Levi - N/A
Razorscale - Good for initial ground phases!
Ignis - Meh
XT - Great for Hearts
Kologarn - Helps Burn down an arm
Council - Should have enough time between tendrils if doing Brundir last
Auriaya - Nothing exceptional
Freya - Nothing exceptional except maybe burning a big add down faster
Thorim - Still learning this fight
It seems like at least in half the fights I've done there are plenty of great places to have the extra on demand burst.
I actually picked up a Wrathstone, which confused a few of my guildmates.
TBH, I haven't noticed a huge difference in my DPS.
Other than a new weapon, one piece of gear usually isn't going to give you a lot of extra dps. Rawr says about 50 dps over Mirror. Certainly on demand burst is very handy, although the AP use from trinket and Orc racial should not affect the Garg.
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
Other than a new weapon, one piece of gear usually isn't going to give you a lot of extra dps. Rawr says about 50 dps over Mirror. Certainly on demand burst is very handy, although the AP use from trinket and Orc racial should not affect the Garg.
The reason I expected to see a difference is because unless something has changed, the sole purpose of upgrading to the wrathstone was to get the controlled AP bonus to stack trinkets for a gargoyle. As I understand the gargoyle, like other temporary pets (non-talented ghoul, DRW) takes a snapshot of your AP when you pop them. As such, if you had greatness, unholy strength, wrathstone, and blood frenzy up, you'd see a few thousand extra AP when you pop your gargoyle and thus it would be noticably stronger.
Am I incorrect about the snapshot of stats on a gargoyle?
The reason I expected to see a difference is because unless something has changed, the sole purpose of upgrading to the wrathstone was to get the controlled AP bonus to stack trinkets for a gargoyle. As I understand the gargoyle, like other temporary pets (non-talented ghoul, DRW) takes a snapshot of your AP when you pop them. As such, if you had greatness, unholy strength, wrathstone, and blood frenzy up, you'd see a few thousand extra AP when you pop your gargoyle and thus it would be noticably stronger.
Am I incorrect about the snapshot of stats on a gargoyle?
This should still be correct, I didn't read of any changes and won't assume that there were any. Popping your trinket will give you a burst and you are right that this also helps your gargoyle, if you do this before you summon your gargoyle.
I would also assume that this "on use ... AP" should be weighted more, since it lets you pop your gargoyle together with this trinkets buff plus greatness or other buffs more frequently. Having two trinkets that proc can be frustrating as you rarely get both procs together when your gargoyle cd is up, hence why this one should be performing better than most proc trinkets.
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).
I did the math a while back (I was trying to justify taking the Wrathstone, since I got one on our first Kologarn kill). I couldn't find it, so I just redid it while my server still isn't up. For reference, I'm comparing [Wrathstone] to [Bandit's Insignia], using the stat weights from the OP (Unholy BiS 0/10/61).
Bandit's Insignia:
190 AEP + 1504-2256 damage (45s ICD), able to crit for 150%, and modified by all relevant modifiers (Blood Presence, Bone Shield, Desecration, Ebon Plague). Crits based off spell crit%.
The proc is then (1504+2256)/2 or 1880 average damage (non-crit). 1880*1.15*1.02*1.05*1.13=2616.52.
Assuming 30% spell crit, the average damage is then 0.7*2616.52+0.3*(2616.52*1.5)=3008.998 Note: I'm really uncertain if this model of crit% is correct, but the number seems fairly reasonable so I went with it. Someone please correct me if it is inaccurate.
With a 45s ICD, assuming it procs on CD, it is 3008.998/45=66.867 DPS.
So Bandit's Insignia is 190 AEP + 66.867 DPS.
Wrathstone:
The passive 108 crit rating is 108*1.341 or 144.828 AEP. The on-use is 856 AEP/20 seconds with a 2min CD. If you pop it on CD, it is up 1/6 of the time, so it averages to 856/6=142.667 AEP. In total, 287.495 AEP.
So the question then, is how does 97.495 AEP compare with 66.867 DPS?
Next, lets look at the DPS gained (or perhaps lost) by using Wrathstone before Summoning a gargoyle. From the OP, gargoyle strike does 40% AP+150. For our purposes, the base damage does not matter, since we are only concerned about how much this trinket increases our DPS. 856*0.4=342.4 damage added to each gargoyle strike. Gargoyle strike can crit (~5% crit rate, from what WWSes I could find) for 150%, so the average damage added is 342.4*0.95+342.4*0.05*1.5=350.96 average damage added. (See above comment about crit modeling)
The number of gargoyle strikes varies based on boss/haste/RNG, but in a quick test on the dummies, I averaged about 13 casts per summon. With 13 casts, each increased by 350.96, using Wrathstone for gargoyle results in a net increase of 4562.48 damage per summon. With a 3 min CD, this averages to 4562.48/180=25.347 DPS increase.
We also need to take into account the lower AEP from using Wrathstone every 3 min, instead of every 2. The proc is 20 seconds every 3 mins, so it is up 1/9 of the time, for 856/9=95.11 AEP. Net: 95.11+144.828=239.939 AEP
Results:
97.495 AEP(Wrathstone) vs 66.867 DPS(Bandit's) -- Popping Wrathstone on CD, ignoring the benefits to Gargoyle.
49.939 AEP(Wrathstone) vs 41.52 DPS(Bandit's) -- Popping Wrathstone every 3 mins, with Gargoyle.
I'm still unsure about how AEP translates to real DPS, so I'm not sure how to make a solid decision based on this.
Note: As I mentioned above, I'm very unsure about how I approximated crit%, something seems wrong about it to me. The numbers seemed reasonable, so I left them in. I didn't add in the benefit to gargoyle when popping wrathstone on CD, because it varies depending on fight length.
Note2: If you are only concerned about the average, since you can pop wrathstone with every other gargoyle, it has 1/2 the DPS increase from popping it with gargoyle every time, so 12.674 DPS. I won't include that above, since in real application, the increase varies extremely on fight length.
Note3: I'm fairly certain I over-valued the DPS of Bandit's proc, since it will not proc on CD in practice. I was unsure about how to approximate time to proc after the ICD was up, so I simplified it. The proc rate is 15% outside of ICD, if anyone else wants to do the math.
I'm sure I screwed something up, so please feel free to correct my math. (First time doing it for more than myself)
Maybe you could work with the assumption Garg will be used with Heroism. That would mean 30% more hits. Another thing possible is to use a Potion of Speed with other procs for Gargoyle, that's another 15%.
Well I was reading up on the forums before I started packing for Cali this weekend and found these gems by none other than GC.
We think Unholy dps is probably too high on fights with adds, which ends up being a lot of Ulduar bosses. From looking at the numbers, the main culprit seems to be using Death and Decay, Unholy Blight, Pestilence and Blood Boil all together. None of those are a problem alone, but they work really well together. Unholy Blight is the spell we would most likely change. It has never really found a niche-GC
Just make sure you are looking at what the data really show and not just the ranks that a website puts the classes in. For example, on Ignis what we see a lot is an Unholy DK who does a lot of AE to constructs... accomplishing absolutely nothing except for padding the meters. You can do the same thing on Emalon. Yay I won the meters!
I'm not saying all PvE damage is exactly on target. Just be very careful that you understand what is really going on in cases like this. - GC
It is. I said above that we think DK AE is too high. The question then is whether DK single target damage is too high. It is probably higher than warrior single target damage, but we think in this case that warriors (esp. Fury) are a little low.
The Ulduar encounters are very diverse. That's actually a good thing because it chills out some of the obsession with "Is his class better than mine?" However that doesn't absolve us with the responsibility of making some changes when things feel off. -GC
Well I have to say that looking at the meters from various meters and parses, that you had to in a way to see this coming. At the very least, I hope Unholy Blight will still be a better RP investment over time than Death Coil or the rotation grows a bit stale and easy. At least they're smart enough to look into the details of the fights instead of the pure numbers.
It will be interesting to see how they change UB. I doubt they'll make it a disease like before, but maybe something like a HFB effect or short buff of some kind. It's either that or an Unholy equivalent of Frost Strike that will completely replace DC. The quote makes me think it probably won't just be a straight nerf.
Overall I agree with the thought that our AOE is too strong when it actually has a chance to be fully utilized (ie when Pestilence is worth it and the mobs are alive long enough to use BB). I look forward to their change, UB has always seemed like it didn't quite belong.
Other melee classes seem to do pretty decent when it comes to AoE too. I've seen rogues spam fan of knives to steal no.1 spot on DPS meters. Paladins have AoE with Divine Storm which is one of their main attacks. Warriors have cleave and WW.
One thing about Unholy DK AoE is that it needs time to setup. Here is what I mean: Yesterday on XT-002 I had to help kill the incoming adds and I didn't have strong instant AoE. I can't Icy Touch and Plague Strike and Pestilence to spread the diseases so I can Blood Boil them cos my target would die too fast. So I was stuck with dropping DnD and spamming Blood Boil as much as possible.
I don't see the other melee classes having this issue. They just go in and spam their AoE button without a setup time needed.
On the flip side though, on fights like Freya, Unholy DK AoE is king. The adds live long enough for me to setup my diseases, pestilence and blood boil.
So essentially, there are pros and cons. Hopefully, Blizzard takes this into consideration.
With regards to single target DPS, I think we are right where we are. I seem to be keeping abreast with my raid ret pally and warrior. Rogues on the other hand.... blow me out of the water.
So the other night and on nights where I've experimented with the 0/10/61 build, I recognize that I'm doing on average more DPS than I would with 12/0/59. However, on for example the Thorim arena, I can pull aggro on Champions just from DnD. This had never happened when I was specced into Subversion, so I'm questioning whether or not I should try speccing into Subversion only and still keeping 5/5 Black Ice. The only talents I could see removing points from would be Morbidity and Necrosis. Just not entirely sure whether losing three talent points to Subversion would be worth it when the only real time I've noticed a problem was on Thorim's arena. I could just respec entirely back to 12/0/59 as the difference isn't that big yet.
Or you could try and manage your threat a little, do reduced damage for that particular fight (Just a little, like don't use Death and Decay) and stick with the higher DPS for the other 11 fights in the instance.
There's the problem though. It's not like DnD is building up enough threat to pull Champions onto me. I never usually focus on them as generally the next Evoker has spawned by the time we down the first. What's happening is that they're coming into the middle (where all the AoE is coming down), and getting picked up by whoever's AoE is hitting them the hardest. Which sometimes is mine I guess.
I intend on trying to time DnD a little better, but I'm only in the arena because of my strong AoE, and the interrupts on Evokers.
Just shift Death and Decay to the middle or end of your aoe priority for Thorim. I too have experience some severe aoe agro issues as 10/61, and the solution was just toning it down a little and letting our frost DK go to town with Howling Blast instead. Unholy's aoe threat is pretty insane when you have Wandering plague capable diseases on like 7 different mobs, DnD, and Unholy blight all ticking while you spam Blood Boil. Something to consider, especially when it is a chaotic multi-mob fight like Thorim's top arena.
I disagree completely with that assessment by the dev. For unholy to really put out the numbers, you need to: apply diseases, pestilence, drop death and decay, use unholy blight, and then FINALY spamming blood boil. So thats 5+ gcds, and it only works provided the mobs live long enough, something quite rare. While all that was going on, the rogue player just hit the same key, fan of knives, 5 times, and topped the meters.
So while yes we are capable of tremendous aoe, it is quite situational, hard to setup, and depending on a number of variables.
Hello, I've been reading for some time now, first post though as I am curious to why I feel stuck at the same dmg output.
Heres my armory: The World of Warcraft Armory
( I use the Strong-handed Ring over the Hemorrhaging Circle. ( cant figure out the links just yet)
It seems to be for a while now I have been getting passed by numerous blood specs, frost specs at times, and even identical unholy specs. The rotation I use is the one listed, PS-IT-BS-BS-SS-SS-SS-SS but I always run into a lot of downtime in my SS's even with BT. So I RP dump every time SS is down, and back to SS when its up, i figured doing some damage is better then just outright waiting for SS to come back, due to cd on runes of course.
Maybe my rotation is off, or my stats are low somewhere, but if anyone could throw any suggestions that would be awesome. - I usually average out 36-3800 dps occasionally hitting 4-4300 singe target pending on certain fights.
I am aware that the dummy is bugged, on that i can do 3100 solid, if that helps any.
Its really hard to provide a solution w/o looking at a WWS parse or something similar. That being said, I can provide the following generic advice.
1) You are below hit cap. Swap some gear parts and/or gem in order to get to the cap.
2) Ensure your ghoul is up for as much of the fight as possible. Use huddle/leap macros to get him out of AoE situations
3) You didn't mention Unholy Blight. Unholy blight should have a near 100% uptime.
4) Maintain diseases properly. Your rotation appears fine, but ensure you are using some type of mod that tracks your disease, so that you know when to break the SS chain for a new PS/IT.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "large downtime between SS". At most I have one or two GCD's between SS which I use for UB, DC, HoW (In that order).
I disagree completely with that assessment by the dev. For unholy to really put out the numbers, you need to: apply diseases, pestilence, drop death and decay, use unholy blight, and then FINALY spamming blood boil. So thats 5+ gcds, and it only works provided the mobs live long enough, something quite rare.
My unholy DK is always #1 on razorscale, auriaya, thorim, and freya and always in the top 1-3 on kologarn. Admittedly we're a semi-casual raiding guild. We're not even working on hard modes yet, the other players aren't theorycrafters, and they don't aim to mathematically optimize their gameplay (translate: read EJ and follow the guides), but I win every time. Beating other hybrids by a bit isn't a major concern, but I regularly and repeatably outdamage mages, hunters, warlocks, and rogues on fights with heavy AE, and I don't have death and decay glyphed.
How much of that is player skill and how much is the underlying math? The top WWS reports are pretty clear-- even when everybody knows what they're doing, unholy DKs top the charts on AE fights. There are many possible ways to address this, armchair designing isn't difficult, but the devs have chosen to nerf (or hopefully, change) unholy blight. Being nerfed is always a bummer, but their design goals have been clearly stated so it shouldn't come as a huge surprise. DKs shouldn't regularly and sustainably outdamage pure DPS classes.
Slant I would like to point out something GC alluded to in relation to your post. There are a lot of things that players (and DKs specifically) can do to simply inflate their overall damage done. The example GC used was Ignis, where unholy blight and/or D&D was applied to the constructs. Now this serves absolutely zero practical purpose to the raid, but the DK might edge out and "win" damage meters as a result.
On razorscale overall damage done can very easily be manipulated, while ignoring important things such as spell interupts and burst damage done to razorscale during landing phases. On Auriaya, having a lock toss Seed on the boss gets rid of all the adds in very short order - i'm positive DK AoE on this fight would barely be missed.
The point i'm trying to get at is that overall damage is not necessarily equivalent to good or important damage. I find that a lot of the large numbers are simply people having fun and maximizing damage in ways that aren't all that "necessary". The only two fights on which I feel Unholy DK's have a real leg up is Thorim (arena) and Freya (adds). The rest of it is just incidental damage and really I don't find 2 fights out of 14 to signal an overpowered ability.
05/12/09, 9:37 AM
