Adenthiel

What are opinions on switching to t8 from t7? Right now I'm 2 7.5 and 2 t8/.5 with a 226 chest. Does this seem optimal or would I be best sticking with 4/4 7.5?

After the nerf I switched. Seems to be working fine, definitely comes ahead on fights like Hodir (Probably contributes to my threat problems on the fight)

 

ltjackdaniel

I agree, I have zero threat issues with this build. It is a nice change from 2h Blood (although I still raid with this spec more often than not)

DW Unholy is quite gear dependent. You should go with a standard 2h spec until you get the gear to make this viable.

 

Kaitliac

I've been following DW for a long time, and came to a similar conclusion.

The hypothesis that I followed from there with was that ultimately, both unholy and frost are no longer suited on their own to dual wield, at least not over similar quality two handed weapons. Going by dps breakdowns, a similarly geared two handed wielding and specced death knight should always out perform a dual wielding death knight under current circumstances.

Let's break things down as to why the old dual wield spec was so strong:

"Spell"/AP reliant - weapons became a bonus instead of the focus of the build, the opposite of most two hand builds. All main points of interactive damage were spell based
Proc reliant - two relatively faster weapons helped with Killing Machine procs (yes I know this changed over time as the KM mechanic was repeatedly tweaked back and forth)
Weapon damage proc reliant - Necrosis and BCB theoretically scale higher with DW than 2hd, even after the DW penalties to OH damage and hit rate.

With the changes to the talent trees, we are left essentially with Necrosis and BCB being strengths unique to DW. The AP versus weapon damage reliance is a nice thing for entry level death knights with no access to good weapons, but once ilvls are equivalent it quickly becomes relatively meaningless... if we ignore everything directly related to weapon damage, a two hand wielding DK will scale equivalent to a dual wield DK.


There is a problem with this hypothesis. While Strike damage is higher on a two hand DK, melee damage, Necrosis, and BCB remain higher on a DW DK, or at least that is the conclusion I was arriving at after going over both target dummy numbers and comparative damage figures in raids.


So we arrive at the following for 3.1:

DW strengths

• Melee damage
• Melee damage based procs (Necrosis, BCB)

DW weaknesses

• Strikes

Now, it would seem that we would want to choose talents that entirely focus on increasing melee damage, and thereby increasing the associated procs. The only "pure" melee related talents are all in blood... the 45 point talents in frost and unholy both relate to "abilities" but not either melee or "all" damage. As such I've been working with a 51/0/20 blood build.

This build seems to do as well or better for me than any of the three Unholy builds (and yes I realize this is the "DW unholy" thread, but it's also the only remaining DW thread... if warranted I can spin off another) when using a large amount of armor penetration. I'm still familiarizing myself with the sim and running numbers there. Work using target dummies for comparison purposes has proven entirely useless, due to the competing buff and buff scaling situations. I use Vengeful Heart with this build due to damage breakdowns showing a far higher % of my damage done being death coil than death strike, even with the limited RP generation in this build. Granted BCB loses a disease, but even for BCB alone the physical damage gains seem to outweigh this.

The build centers around synergizing Blood Gorged and Bloody Vengeance with Necrosis and Bloodcaked Blade. The lack of Nerves of Cold Steel is unfortunate (Black Ice more so) but Necrosis and BCB are both higher dps per talent expenditure than sinking 8+ points into frost, when dual wielding. Given the % of my damage that is either unholy or frost compared to physical with this build, it would seem exceptionally foolish to drop points out of Blood Gorged as well.

Current conjecture: It may be worth dropping dancing rune weapon for unholy blight or dirge, need to run numbers. DRW is fun but feels gimmicky for anything but spamming bloodboil on large AE trash packs with all death runes up when dual wielding. I'm concerned that without the traditional increasers (Black Ice, Impurity) Unholy Blight may not be a benefit over it, and may eat into DC RP that does have multipliers applying to it too much.


From preliminary work using the sim, it sims very high, but the numbers I'm seeing there are actually higher than I've been able to generally sustain in Ulduar so far. Usually I'm in the top 3 dps, with recount showing 4-4.5k dps for most fights (obviously fights like XT and Hodir vary wildly and are worthless for comparison purposes). I need to crop my combat log and run it through a parser, because those numbers seem low. I see other people in comparable gear showing higher dps parses here with unholy, but their raid-wide dps is usually often higher as well, so I can't tell if I've been doing something wrong when I use unholy, or if it's a buff to timeframe ratio issue (bloodlust, etc having a more pronounced effect the shorter the fight is due to high overall raid dps), or maybe some issue with recount versus log parsers.



Short Version (for the TLDR crowd)

51/0/20 DW blood build seems competitive, but may be user error =P Possibly offers better gear scaling at high end.

 

Kaitliac

While I would generally agree with the "tanks are the issue, tell them to l2p" statements above, I'd first like to know if this is specific to Hodir, and if you're standing in the light beams when this is becoming an issue. Also, are you helping to free flash freezes (yes it will lower your personal dps, but freeing is crucial to the raid... and will give your tank some extra room)?

The haste from light beams scales VERY well for certain class/specs, DW DKs are amongst them. This *does* create threat issues if your tank is not also using light beams when needed (and your tank generally won't be gaining as much), or if you are not swapping off to flash freezes.

Also, keep in mind your tank may be wearing gear specific to Hodir that is affecting their threat gen negatively (FR). You'll notice the lack of Subversion more on Hodir, especially with a low threat gen tank who is giving melee good positioning for light beams, but I wouldn't consider respeccing over threat issues on Hodir alone. It would also help to know what class of tanks you have.

 

Kadorzun

My guess is that ay 80 I should be able to pump out 1900/2k dps with 0/13/57. How much of a loss is it if i go DW instead of buying a nice Titansteel Destroyer?

 

Adenthiel

It's definitely not just Hodir and I definitely make optimal use of the buffs whenever I can.

 

Orlgin

@Kaitliac: The reason why 50/0/20 isn't competitive with DW Unholy is a matter of numbers. The reason why Unholy makes the best DW isn't because it's tops in melee damage. The reason is because so much of it's damage isn't strike damage.

I said it once and I'll say it again: it's likely no DW build is competitive unless it has a ghoul. The reason for this is quite simple: it produces 10% of your DPS that has virtually nothing to do with your weapon.

0/13/58 has a number of advantages of 50/0/20:

1) Higher disease damage. This is due to Impurity and Black Ice. This is also damage that doesn't care what kind of weapon you are using. Wandering Plague allows you to turn critical rating into more disease damage.

2) Best Death Coils. The best runic dump that isn't a strike belongs to Unholy. As a result, it deals a higher percentage of it's damage this way. Another large source of DPS that doesn't care what weapon you are using.

3) Gargoyle. The best runic power dump in the game doesn't care what weapon you are using either. On a three minute timer, this turns what would be 2% Death Coil DPS into 6% Gargoyle damage.

4) The mighty aforementioned Ghoul. For the reason mentioned above. He also scales with haste rating which gives the stat more bang for it's buck.

5) Much stronger Icy Touch. You have to use it every 20 seconds so it's nice that it deals more damage. It also doesn't care about which weapon you use.

6) Army of the Dead. While all Death Knights have it, we get it with a 10 minute timer. This means we use it for more bosses than 50/0/20 does. The army also doesn't care what weapon you use.

7) Scourge Strike. While it's not a super scaling machine, it has a ton of bonus damage. All of that bonus damage doesn't care what weapon you use. As a result, one handed Scourge Strikes don't suffer as large of a damage penalty.

8) Nerves of Cold Steel. This changes your off-hand from 50% damage to 57.5% damage and adds 3% Hit. One of the higher DPS talents, this averages over 1% DPS per point.

Let's be clear about what makes a duel-wielding build better than a 2-Hand build. You want your melee and melee based damage to be equal to or greater than your strike damage. If this is the case, DW scales about 40% higher in damage and Strikes scale 37.5% with a 2-Hander. The DW scaling number is higher so it will produce more DPS that way. Switching to a 2-hander will automatically lower your DPS at that point unless you shift your stats drastically to favor strikes.

The reason I said earlier in the other thread that it's likely that builds without a ghoul won't be viable is simple. Without the ghoul, you need 10% personal DPS to make up the gap. This means you are going to produce a higher percentage of DPS using Strikes. As a result, you typically go over the cap that makes Duel-Wield worth using.

If you want to make a DW build viable, I suggest starting with 26 points in Unholy with a full 5 points in Impurity and the last in Ghoul. This ensures that you get higher damaging Death Coils, higher damage diseases, and the ghoul.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...5&version=9901

44/0/27 is a better version for DW. If you want to test Blood DW, you start there and start tweaking it from there. It will be a lot like 01/18/52 in that you want to stack Armor Penetration.

For the first set, you use Blood Tap which will make it look like this:

PS -> IT -> DS -> HS -> HS -> (BT)HS
UB -> DS -> HS -> HS -> HS -> HS -> DC

Second set looks like this:

PS -> IT -> DS -> HS -> HS -> DC
DC -> DS -> HS -> HS -> HS -> HS -> UB

Third set looks like this:

PS -> IT -> DS -> HS -> HS -> DC
DC -> DS -> HS -> HS -> HS -> HS -> DC

Now just repeat the three sets. If it sounds like I've been working on it, I used to in my spare time. The reason I found it intriguing is that Sudden Doom essentially causes Heart Strike to produce 16 runic power but doesn't require a GCD to channel off the excess runic power. Heart Strike is like Scourge Strike in that it has a lower weapon percentage but a higher bonus damage. The catch was Death Strike just sucks. The only reason it's used at all is to ensure 100% uptime for Abomination's Might. Getting 15 runic power for two runes is terrible. On the bright side, it creates death runes which means that you can produce more death runes later.

Unholy Blight + Glyph seemed a good way to get the most out of the limited runic power available to such a build. It generates a lot of DPS for the runic power used.

But it was all theoretical. I never determined if it met the breakpoint where strike damage was low enough to make it worth using DW. I spent most of my time on what eventually turned into 01/18/52.

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
Martin Luther King Jr.

 

Fauh

I know that it might be off-topic but the poster above who spoke of a blood-dualwield spec got me thinking and I think that he might be on to something.

Could a 51/0/20 spec be viable?

Taking the logic from former posts we can sum up that what makes Dual-Wield viable is the fact that it has:

+ More whitehit damage
+ More BCB and Necrosis damage
+ More uptime on FC

I believe that there is no argument whatsoever about this. Moving on what Dual-Wields weakens compared to 2-handers we get:

- Less damage from strikes.

The crux of making DW viable is to make the increased meleedamage, BCB and Necrosis weigh up the lost damage from the strikes.

There are only two ways that we can do this. Either we reduce the damage lost from strikes or we increase the damage of meleedamage, BCB and Necrosis.

I believe that the 0/17/54 spec does the first as it uses very few strikes whatsoever.

Now to speak about the 0/13/58. I believe that it both reduces the damage from strikes and somewhat increases meleedamage, BCB and Necrosis.

Moving on to the blood build I think we can conclude that it does indeed increase the damage done with meleedamage, and quite considerably. It has a nearly 100% uptime on a 9% increase in physical with Bloody Vengence, and 10% natural ArP and another 10% increased damage with nearly full uptime with Blood-Gorged.

In addition I bet there is more minor details that weighs back and forth between the builds but I think that the real question is that if the gains on melee whitedamage outweighs or atleast is viable to the current Unholy.

As of now I have had no time to do extensive research on the matter but I would think that in the end blood will sadly fall behind a little with the loss of Perma-Ghoul for example.

Nevertheless I shall investigate!

 

Nemantopia

Honestly, the 'tank l2p' argument to be accurate but ignorant. WotLK tanking does have vastly improved threat gen. A similarly geared tank in most situations should not have threat issues with DPS. Issues with tanks preferring a small head-start to generate threat hasn't gone away. DPS riding close to tank threat overall generally won't have an issue. But anything that causes sharp spikes in your short-term threat without the tank matching will cause spikes, and if the DPS out-gears the tank even a little-bit and is tight on rotations a crit-drought for the tank combined with a haste/crit flood for the DK can break it. There's a reason threat-reduction talents have never truly been considered 'opional' for DPS. It lets you do MORE DPS within the threat range the tank provides, which means if you have threat spiking abilities they aren't an issue...they should jet you close to tank threat and then settle away from it after the spike. Through the roof DPS is meaningless if there simply isn't a tank that can keep you from through the floor dead.

It could even something that could be fixed with a simple 'in my experience...' advice on motion in a fight, finding out if it really is their rotation or ability priority and saying 'focus a bit more on Ability Y, it produces more threat'. And sometimes, a tank can't safely utilize a raid-mechanic because repoisitiong risks wiping the raid, which is something the DPS needs to be aware so they can watch their threat. Clearly, I'm not in any way speaking from experience, because that would make me an intelligent poster providing advice instead of a tank griping at you for being 'lazy DPS'. N00bz need to l2p, newbs just need a gentle correction. If you can't make the distinction between willfully ignorant and unintentionally under-informed, get comfortable with making a lot of un-needed enemies instead of improved raiding experience.


On notes of MH/OH and abilities, DW isn't as tremendously reliant on crit for DPS as, say Frost which relied on Killing Machine. Hence a fast off-hand and high-crit was the way to go, for the most part. Unholy doesn't have crit procs. In theory, BCB and Necrosis gain no particular beenfit from a faster weapon, and being based on the Weapon hit and base damage, would a similarly or equally rated slow 1H be better in the OH slot? So, would it better to have two SLOW 1H to scale better due to weapon speed? I'm asking because the listed BiS [pre Heroic hardmodes] are both @1.6 speed and have identical weapon damage. I guess specifically, I'm asking why Malice isn't the OH of choice pre-heroichard. Vs Remorse, Malice gains significant weight for the first build but gets left slightly behind for the second. That's actually an argument for a second Caress as well. What keeps these from outranking or equaling Remorse and Stonerender for OH?

This is not the signature you're looking for. You are free to move along.

-Curse you, Raglu!
Generation 28:
The first time you see this, copy it into your signature on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social experiment.

 

Sten

I have been raiding as 0/17/54 since 3.1 and recently got hold of Vulmir, Malice and Stonerender while rest of my gear is still only item level 213 loot. Do you think switching to 0/13/58 would be a good choice now to get more out of the strike damage coming from these weapons as they are superior to the rest of my gear?

EDIT: Just remembered that I got Sigil of Awareness to go with the SS spec instead of the Icy Touch sigil im using atm which alone is a boost in dps.

 

Kyruski

This can easily be answered by something kurokaze posted in the Dual Wield thread. Fast vs. Slow Argument. I think there are a couple more reasons but I can't think of them off the top of my head. I know one of them is if you use FotFF it get stacked faster, but there are more reasons.

EDIT: Sten: I'm looking at your gear and you do not have 4pT7 or 4pT8, so as of right now, if you can't get that, sticking with 0/17/54 might be better, It's up to you though, test out 0/13/58 for a while and see which you like better.

 

Resurge

I have a question to which i have not been able to find an answer. I run the standard 0/13/58 build and was wondering why 3/3 wandering plague and only 1/3 morbidity. The standard argument seems to usually center around morbidity vs desecration, and in that situation, i see why desecration wins ..but why not 1/3 wandering plague and 3/3 morbidity? ..you will still get the procs from WP ..they may not do as much dmg, but your death coil will do 10% more. I guess i am failing to understand how 66% more added dmg on wandering plague procs is worth more than 10% more DC dmg. Is it just because of its power in AE situations? I am primarily concerned with single target boss dmg with this build and altho i do realize and appreciate it's AE potential i am not as concerned with increasing it, especially if it is at the cost of single target dps.

 

Adenthiel

I've had fights where WP has done > 7% of my single target DPS *shrugs* It's an awesome talent and I can't see 2 points in morbidity making up that kind of a difference.

EDIT: Good point below me mongoose =)

 

mongoose221

Resurge, most of the bosses in Ulduar at the moment have some form of AoE component to them (be it Decons corner packs, Razorscales 1st phase, Freya, Auriya, Thorim, etc etc... you see my point) so WP tends to be a higher DPS if you look at it that way. Also look at the fact that a 0/13/58 build tends to have less RP than the 0/17/54 IT RP build without SS. the 0/13/58 build uses SS as a major component to its damage, hence the Awareness sigil being used, and in turn fires off less RP building moves, which is why I believe Morbidity is relegated to playing second fiddle to WP.

 

Resurge

I am aware of the nature of the ulduar fights ..i have a somewhat unique situation where i tank on several fights, and DPS on others ..thus my interest in the single target DPS of morbidity vs wandering plague. As far as RP generation in the build is concerned - to suggest that the 13/58 build is deficient in RP is in my opinion a gross overstatement. It may not generate as much rp as the IT based build but the build is based around SS spam to build RP for DC -and any build which utilizes the dark death glyph will certainly benefit well from 10% more DC dmg. While it may be true that WP can be as high as 7% of your overall dmg, i am sure DC does more. SS, DC and white dmg compete for the top 3 in my DPS logs every time.

Perhaps my question should be rephrased: In a single target situation, does anyone know the dps per talent point figures for a 0/13/58 build concerning these 2 talents. Perhaps the OP or someone else has tested this, while working on creating and testing this build, and has some concrete numbers. Admittedly i am not good at some of the math and i generally leave that to others, but it seems to me that point for point the last 2 points in morbidity "should" outweigh the last 2 points in WP.

 

Kyruski

Think of it this way, Let's say (and this is being very generous to DC) you do 20% of your DPS as DC. With 1 point in Morbidity, that's 5% more damage from DC, so it turns out to be 21% of you damage is DC, a 1% per point, and that's being generous. Now with WP, You're doing about 1.66% per point if 3/3 WP does 5%. More if it's at 7%. These are just examples and as your DPS increase, those %s will decrease, but just a general idea for you.

 

mongoose221

Kyruski beat me to it, but that is the gist of what I was getting at. I in no way meant that the 0/13/58 SS build was deficient of RP, but it is compared to the 0/17/54 build. The major thing to look at, which I do not feel Kyr got across fully is that WP is 33% per point, vs. 5% per point for Morbidity. I usually have anywhere from 13%-16% of DC as my damage, with WP pulling about 6%-9%. Using an average of 5k dps (easy number to use) puts DC at 650-800 DPS total, with WP at 300-450 DPS total. Subtracting 2 points from WP means I lose 66% of 300-450 while gaining 10% of 650-800. Doing that math means I am generally losing 231-297 dps off my WP, or dropping it to 99-150 dps, vs. gaining 10% onto DC damage or 65-80 average DPS increase. This returns a net difference average increase of 34-70 DPS for WP over DC with a 5k DPS average and using a 13%-16% DC and 6%-9% WP numbers. In the end, it is not a "huge" single target difference, although WP still comes out ahead, and in the AoE portions of fights, DC is completely useless, vs WP doing significant damage to the surrounding mobs, especially when you disease up and pestilence.

I mentioned it higher in the post, but the real key is that WP is worth 33% multiplier per point, versus 5% for DC.

 

sfxsfx

Hello, i'm posting here first time, but im fallowing the "old" thread from very begin. I was playing long in 0/17/54 but recently "we" lost ench shammy in guild, and i was asked to keep the 20% haste(IIT) buff. But i wanted to stay Unholy DW, so i came up with:

0/28/43, in UP and FC/FC
and my rotation is something like:

1.IT,PS,BS,BS,UB,OB,DC,OB,OB,DC
2.IT,PS,DC,BS,BS,UB,OB,DC,OB,HoW,DC
3.IT,PS,IT,IT,UB,OB,DC,OB,DC

It's siming pretty well, but i want to know some professional opinion, im not so good with math. I know its off topic and i'm sorry for that.
start with 1,2, then 3,2 and repeat.

 

Kaitliac

It's not really off topic, and I believe its been brought up before. I'd recommend dropping the points in Merciless Combat and moving them to either Desecration or Wandering Plague (I'd go for wandering plague but haven't simmed out the difference)... Merciless Combat is a poor overall dps gain for this build, it amounts to an averaged 4% damage gain for only two abilities. You may want to drop Improved Unholy Presence as well, unless you're trying to use Unholy Presence to dps in. A run speed enchant would be better than spending two talent points, if not quite as fast.

Like was pointed out by Kyruski above, the best way to gauge comparative damage increases from talents is to look at a reasonably normal (you may want to look at both a single target and multi target boss fight separately) boss fight damage breakdown for yourself. Talents like Merciless Combat need to be averaged across the fight, additionally (so .35 * .12). Then multiply the talent gain against the percent of your damage the talent is actually affecting. This will give you the percent overall increase to your damage, which may be counter intuitive (sometimes seemingly big numbers are only actually affecting a small portion of your dps, and are lower gains than a smaller number affecting a wider range of your damage). For non immediately obvious gains such as impurity, you'll want to use a sim or training dummy to get comparative figures, and you may want to anyway, but this gives you an easy way to draw some quick conclusions to base more in depth analysis off from.

 

Kyruski

Just want to point out that you have the right idea, but something to consider is once you get to that 35% area, The Damage to the boss increases for quite a few classes, so you'll actually have less time to do that increased damage, making it account for the time/damage equal to less than 35%. So it's not a solid calculation that can be done without knowing the whole raid comp, spec, play style, etc... of everyone and even then, it is near impossible to determine the actual gain. But for a ballpark/approximate dps increase for things that worry about the percentage that the boss is at, you can simply do what Kaitliac talks about above.

 

Kaitliac

I can tell you flat out that 50/0/21 (at this point it's certain that dancing rune weapon is a dps loss) is competitive with two hand builds. I finally had a chance to DPS on an off-night (half alts and new 80s Naxx) patchwerk and was sustaining ~5.1k dps before a tank died at 30% and all the melee poofed one after another. 7.8k on Thaddius, but that's Thaddius. What I can't tell you is whether it is capable of out dpsing unholy DW, and at what point the crossover is.

It is, imo, a more gear reliant build than even dualwield unholy-frost, heavily favoring armor penetration and strength... however both of these can be found in high quantities in Ulduar.

While not caring what kind of weapon you are using is a plus, the downside is it doesn't scale with weapon dps, either DW or 2HD. As such while comparing favorably to blood, it makes no distinction from 2HD unholy.

I believe this is incorrect, but I'd have to do MATH (oh noes) in more detail than I care to right now. Simply put, however, the 3% hit should only be affecting your melee hits (and not melee specials either, I'll get to that). While Necrosis and BCB effectively scale into this (can't proc if you don't hit), this is still less than a 1% overall damage per 1% hit bonus. The off hand damage increase is mediocre and translates to a minimal overall damage gain even with Necrosis and BCB procs taken into account.

As to why you only gain on pure (white) melee damage, you should already be soft capped for melee abilities in order to be at or at least near the spell hit cap... even with Virulence you'll soft cap on melee before spells.

I may still be underestimating the talent, but it came up point per point short compared to other sources of damage when testing, especially with the investment needed to reach it.

• Ghoul

All DKs can summon one, and unless they are using them on trash should always have the CD ready for a boss fight, the issue is duration. On a short boss fight, however, you can easily near 50% uptime. The same for a 4m fight. AE damage obviously is a problem. I would tend to compare blood to unholy as averaging about 70%-80% less ghoul damage on boss fights, but it's not completely gone.

• AotD

Granted, AotD CD will not always be ready by the time clearing trash is done, much less wipe recovery. I have a bad habit of forgetting to use mine sometimes, but still, definitely in unholy's favor. Note to self: do more checking on whether Night of the Dead is still not affecting AotD (I think it's still not affecting, they die insanely fast to splash damage).

• 7) Scourge Strike. While it's not a super scaling machine, it has a ton of bonus damage. All of that bonus damage doesn't care what weapon you use. As a result, one handed Scourge Strikes don't suffer as large of a damage penalty.

Versus Heart Strike which only costs 1 rune and has a 15% chance to fire off a free deathcoil. Heart Strike actually has a higher bonus damage gain (well, barely... +368 vs +357 max rank) but slightly lower per disease scaling and (of course) you lose a disease. At best this is basically a wash between the two, imo. Granted SS has better RP gen, but the lower rune cost of HS along with free DCs may still even that out. And of course, HS cleaves.

Icy touch is making up such a minimal amount of my damage as unholy DW (SS or Oblit specs) as to be negligible. Any % modifier to it is essentially wasted, when only looking at the gains to IT. Buffing Frost Fever, however, is certainly a plus.

Here's where I think your premise for comparison to blood DW is incorrect. Blood DW does not need to increase strike damage to make up for ghoul loss, because unlike any other tree it actually includes talents with straight bonuses to all damage/physical damage, including melee. In fact, if we assume that while DWing, melee damage will always be our most significant source of damage output, blood has more talents directly benefiting that damage than either of the other trees, for more significant amounts.

The question becomes one of whether the lost third disease, RP gen, perma-ghoul, gargoyle, increased disease damage (keep in mind, increasing a relatively smaller portion of your dps vs melee), "crittable" diseases, and higher DC damage is counter balanced and to what extent by the physical damage increasors in Blood and their magnification of what is generally DW's raison d'etre over 2HD, high melee dps.

There's no question in my mind that DW blood works in a general sense, because I wouldn't be pulling top or near top dps in my raids if it wasn't. Does it require significant gear investment to scale well? definitely, I think it would certainly be *far* inferior with either lower quality weapons or low ArP (I'm at over 450 rating, and just picked up a Grim Toll tonight). What I'm having trouble determining on my own is an exact comparison to Unholy DW, both in terms of raw dps and high end (or at least Ulduar heroic pre hard modes) scalability. I'm seeing dps losses when I switch back to unholy, generally, but I may also be screwing up a rotation somehow or... something.

So far as melee outpacing strike damage... in my current spec I usually see melee as ~33% of my overall damage done. HS is far lower. With a priority ordering as follows the sims end up with a damage chart of almost exactly the same proportions:

disease
heart strike
death strike
unholy blight
death coil

That's... interesting. You're basically trading Blood Gorged for a Ghoul and Impurity. What I would question is whether the flat damage increase and ArP increase from Blood Gorged is worth the tradeoff... and in turn I'll have to go run it through sims and try it out in a PuG Naxx 10 or something. Hmm. Oddly enough I have a spec just like that in my Talented from when I was working out viable blood specs, but I can't remember if I only dealt with it as a theory spec or if I ever did test work on it. Blah =P

 

Doomers

I really love the freedom of IUP playstyle and I hope that someone else will discover it and even improve. But while I appreciate all of your work - spreadsheets, theorycrafting, SEP tables, gear tables etc, I have to admit one MAJOR, in my oppinion, thing - you seem to severly underestimate player "skill" and the ability to appraise the situation, while place emphasis on "rotations".

My point is that this game, especially in Ulduar, where encounters require a lot of moving, really favours "chaos rotations", which means using most suited skill for the situation, not the one that is next in rotation - and that simple fact totally excludes any defined rotation as they require few seconds to light up and/or are totally screwed when you have to run or simply miss (dodge/parry as sometimes you attack from front). And this is the point where 17/54 build really shine.

So instead of another rotation, I'll give you few tips:

- manage your ghoul - it can't die at any point during the fight - I personally use 3 buttons to controll it - Attack, stances: Defensive, Passive. Keep Ghoul Frenzy all the time. Learn which boss abilities that require running out for your character are acceptable for ghoul - ghoul does almost the same amount of damage as you do with your melee attacks. Feed it. Everytime it dies and you summon another one ask for rebuff if possible; yes, I do ask for my ghoul to be rebuffed during fights,

- use Garg wisely - take care about any proc of Trinket/Buff/Enchant possible. Use Potion of Speed before hitting Garg button,

- where it comes to single target nuking - fire out everything you got to produce RP, than DC, do not let any RP to be wasted - watch it's lvl, and again watch for any proc - I use Power Auras to follow Unholy Strenght, Greatness and Reflection of Torment - if it's possible fire DC only when at least two of them are up. Do not let Blood Plague fade out. Try to use Blood Runes whenever they're up, but care about procs - BS is wour weakest skill.

Gear:

- spreadsheets are usefull under one condition - you know how to use them. It is not the best straegy to hunt "best in slot" items. At any point you have to care about caps: hit (caster) and expertise. But remember that each cap-able stat is worth less and less the closer you're to the cap, some of them are worthless if overcaped - expertise for example. Remember that spreadsheets calculate theoretical dps output which may differ a lot from real conditions,

- gemming - from my personal experience gem +Str only or Str+Haste if socket bonus is worth it (for example 6+ Str for using Yellow gem),

- which weapon - slow/fast or fast/fast or slow/slow? Simple - one with best DPS >>> weapon stats >>> weapon speed. The only skills which gain anything from slow weapons are Blood Strike and Plague Strike, but game experience shows, that dps increase is almost worhless. Think of them only as of RP producing skills.


For some of you these things are obvious, but for some - not. And this is addressed to people who apply everything they've read somewhere - this forum of another - to their characters without understanding.



All above really works fine for me, but it doesn't have to for everybody. With my crappy Naxx weapons I'm able to fight for top dps possition during almost all Ulduar encounters with rogues and other DK's while they have higher ilvl weapons in general. And those are not noobs - we managed to get Twilight Vanquisher title before 3.1 which is a kind of "guild quality meter". You may wonder why i mentioned Sarth +3D - sometimes I'm laughing out loud when i read theories about playing DK written by people who are quest/instance geared.

 

Syrellia

Hi Kaitlac,

I have tried to run the sim with my current gearings, and swapping to your spec loses myself 700 - 800 dps. By swapping to a 2 hander, it gains 200 dps. By swapping to Orlgin's spec, it also gains 200dps.

The dps you saw in patchwerk was probably because of cooldown blown. We have always known that Blood has an excellent cooldown called Hysteria, which increase your dps by a tons for a short period of time. The problem with that is during a longer fight, the dps starts to flop and go in line or even less than other specs (in fact, most Sarth 3D zerg has Blood DK for this reason). So I am going to ask you:

1. Was the fight patchwerk take place long enough?
2. What cooldown did you blow? (Army of Dead, Ghoul, Hysteria, BL etc?)

In fact, if the fight is about 1 minute - 2 minutes I can pull 6k - 6.5k dps using Army of Dead, Gargoyle, BL and ofcourse my permanent ghoul in 0/13/58. After that period of time, the dps goes down to about 5.5k to be in line with everyone else. Pre-nerf, dual wield DK can pull 7k+ dps on patchwerk using those cooldowns during 30s - 1min as well according to some parses, but I didn't check if there was any damage gimmick, they probably had someone hysteria'd them or ToTT.

Back to the Sim, with your spec, the Heart Strike damages seem to be about 30% of the overall dps. Death Strike makes up about 5% - 7%. This suggests that if you swap in a 2 handers, your dps could go up by far more.

About the diseases damages: They make up for about 10 - 14% of DW Unholy. Orlgin was comparing it to blood DW specs, not Unholy 2H. Please read above because I have made spectaculations to compare DW Unholy with 2H Unholy. In addition, a 3rd diseases will make your Blood-caked Strike hits harder as well.

And also, regarding to gears scaling, I think Kyruski and Orlgin have already worked out BiS gears for 0/13/58, 1/18/52 and 0/17/54. With those gears the dps showed competitive numbers in Sim, the only thing left is that we have to test if they work IRL or not. You could also try to work out the BiS gearings for your spec using Wowhead and Kahorie's Sim, then we'll see it from there. If you don't trust the Sim number, then you could also try to do some maths with regards to gains/losses over 2H, then compare the 2H specs to see the difference between specs (I'm currently working on Unholy DW vs. 2H).

Good luck with making it work. This could be a start for DW Blood =)

 

Kaitliac

As I recall, I died over two minutes in, possibly closer to three (alt/off nights don't make for memorable patchwerk kills =P ).

I did use all major cooldowns, although whether I saw full use of AotD is debatable... I cast before the pull, and the pull came slightly late. I used Hysteria during bloodlust, and popped a speed pot as well when greatness procced during bloodlust. We were however missing some raid buff/debuff slots.

The 5.1 figure was actually from right after I died, which was nearing the end of the fight. I don't usually keep an eye on my dps throughout fights ^,^

I'll see if I can splice it out from my log file, which is a good reminder that I need to rename my log file to see if anything useful is retrievable... this happens whenever I go a week or so without cutting it to parse, it becomes... a monster that can't be worked on directly, which means my lazy self is even less inclined to get off her ass and deal with it >.>



Do you have a working Armory, Syrellia? I can't seem to pull up your DK =/

I'm trying to figure out how you're simming at 30% heart strike, because usually I see ~23% when I run it in the sim, and 5% Death Strike, which together trail the 31-33% combined main hand/off hand damage. Also I'm curious what your stat distribution is like that it's so divergent compared to mine.

Also while I am seeing a simmed gain from switching to 44/0/27, it's relatively moderate, under 100 dps, and I haven't updated the sim to include swapping Grim Toll in for my AP placeholder (wintergrasp =X ) trinket. I'm wondering if this is because ghouls don't benefit from ArP? I'm *very* heavily ArP stacked, the access to which was what started me down this train of thought in the first place.

With my old stats 50/0/21 is simming for about 5200 dps, and 44/0/27 is simming for around 5260.

Leaving all stats the same and changing the weapon count to 1, weapon dps to 232.6, and speed to 3.6 sims at 5350 for 50/0/21, 5250 with a ghoul.


So, yes, the next step is probably to extrapolate realistic upgrades and then make comparisons at those gear levels.

 

elf-boy

I am runing DW 0-13-58 and 2-h 51-2-18

I get to run in heroics much more then raid... I have found that even with my gear only 1, 10 man item I have significant agro issues even with well geared (for heroics) tanks. With out a very good tank I end up having to switch to my 2-h blood build on trash becasue the AOE I am putting out keeps pulling agro.

I did get to go to Hodir last week and my DW build does out DPS my 2-h.