Perhaps if you were in T7 or lower gear, but otherwise a dps should never use tanking gear, even if the set bonus is nice. The only use is if a normal tank had to dps for some reason, then perhaps that bonus would be stronger than whatever leftovers the tank had for dps.

I am still unsure how a fixed RP DRW is an improvement to dps unless blizz decides to reduce its CD too.
However the change in UB to become a single target disease is promising but at the expense of DRW is difficult to swallow.

Are heartstrikes getting buffed? I don't see it in the latest PTR 3.2 patch notes.

It is a gain of 1 second to it's length for 40 less RP, so 1 extra DC. Also since it's fixed you can launch a DC while waiting for the procs instead of just wasting RP. UB is not even competitive with the recent nerf.

Let me get this right.

Currently at 100RP, DRW will be up for 10s plus an additional 6s for the 60RP leftover from casting DRW which gives it a total uptime of 16s excluding glyph effect

In the new patch, we'll see a fixed 12s uptime with a leftover 40RP which presumably I'll use for DC.

So, in summary at 100RP,

its a case of 16s DRW uptime vs 12s + 40RP (with no glyphs).

Still can't say if this is an improvement or not.

I reckoned that extra 4s in scenario puts out more dmg than an extra 40RP.

Clarification sought.

Thanks

Currently DRW starts at 5 seconds base, and is increased by 1s per additional 10 RP. Without RPM, this means you can get 11s @ 100 RP before glyph.

On live realms non glyphed DRW is up for for 5 seconds (costing 60RP) plus 1s/10RP (Unleashes all available runic power to summon a second rune weapon that fights on its own for 5 sec plus 1 sec per 10 additional runic power, doing the same attacks as the Death Knight but for 50% reduced damage.). You are probably looking at your spellbook where active glyphs are taken into account hence the confusion.

A small post just to inform everyone that on the latest PTR, both Blood Strike and Heart Strike bonus damage per disease are back to what they are on live, i.e. respectively 12.5% and 10% per disease.
The +15% disease damage seems to be active, necrosis/bcb are fixed, but DRW is bugged, it doesn't consume any RP when used.

Which confirms my idea that Blood won't really be touched, Unholy will get a slight buff through DC and Frost well, we will have to see. I guess they will implement the BS damage buff into a Frost talent, since it was meant to compensate Frost nerfs.

Unholy also gets far more benefit out of the disease buff than the other trees - 15% extra disease damage is a 2.5-3% increase which should offset the SS nerf even before the UB change is taken into account.

As for frost, I expect the buffs will come solely from ToT and they'll effectively abandon it as a 2h (dps) tree which is what they've already implied.

Nobody has even been able to test UB in its PTR form because it doesn't work properly yet.

I suspect the same, even if we need to consider that if KM goes live as a guaranteed crit to MH alone, if the contribution of damage frost strike provides isn't consistently reduced than it will be a card going for 2h builds. DW may be losing some 2-3k damage on each KM procc that way.

Do you know if they have reverted the stealth HS buff yet?

HS is currently listed on the PTR as 10% per disease, beyond that I couldn't tell you.

Random FYI - My own copied DK is completely broken and I can't do anything with her. It gives me old Desecration, Rime, and the old Unholy Blight by default and none of my talents stick no matter how many times I respec and try again. Could be isolated, but I'd otherwise recommend grabbing a premade to test anything at the moment, even if they have awkward gear.

well my bloodstrikes are doing the same dmg as on the live servers, although the tooltip still says 25% per disease.
Either its a intended nerf and they haven´t updated the tooltips yet or some kind of bug. Since they are always slow with the tooltips, i guess its intended to be 12,5% / 10%.

Regarding the new DPS sigil, has there been any word if the wording on the tooltip is simply missing Death Strike (it only mentions proc'ing off Scourge Strike and Obliterate) or what the reasoning is for not proc'ing off DS?

At this point most new loot is probably just placeholder tooltips and graphics. If it does end up being something that affects Scourge Strike and Obliterate I think it's safe to say Death Strike will be affected as well.

Besides, even if it was, burst dps is just better than sustained dps.

Having cooldowns to blow is essential for most hardmodes. It's not always true, but in general it's much better to be able to hold say 5k dps with 8k dps spikes than having 6k stable dps, assuming the total damage over time evens out.

The only time where UB would be the best pic is if it granted a redicolous dps increase that was somewhat competitive with the kind of dps blood can pull under DRW - otherwise, if both talents grant say 1 million damage over 4 minutes, I'll pick the talent that allows me to frontload 1/4 of that in a few seconds when I need it.

Hello, first time poster. Have read the thread. Understand the general mechanics of Armor Pen. 100% cap, stat weight increases the more you have. Currently at ~49% armor pen with gear + gems. I understand that puts me over 100% with grim toll proc and I lose out on whatever Armor Pen % is over the 100. My question is: Should I continue to stack Armor Pen? In other words, does the benefit of the passive Armor pen over what is needed to reach 100% with grim toll proc outweigh the loss of armor pen over 100 + other theoretical stats I could gear for.

I asked this question in the general deathknight WOW boards and an answer was given:

"Mirror of Truth theoretically becomes better than Grim Toll when Grim Toll gives you less than 363.63 ArP.

Since the APE of ArP is 2.75, 363.63 * 2.75 = 999.98

In order for Grim Toll to give you less than 363.63 ArP you need to have more than 436.52 ArP rating. This is assuming you have Blood Gorged, Sunder Armor, and Faerie Fire on the boss, which is 65% ArP.

NOTE: APE's can change as your gear changes so this might number might not be true for you "

Does this ring true to anyone who has thought about this issue? Keeping in mind getting gear needed to bring up my expertise, it looks like I could probably still get another 10% passive armor pen pretty easily to end up around 59%+ with gear and gems I think.

Thanks in advance, enjoy reading the forums.

From what I understand, debuffs on the target like sunder and faerie fire are counted BEFORE your ArP and are not subject to the 100% cap, so don't include them in your overall %. Blood gorged is though.

This is correct; this was done to insure that the change of sunder/faerie fire from static reductions to percentage based reductions did not have any great PvE impact. You can read more about the change here: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t29453-c...evel_80_a/p16/

ArP is a weird stat because of the way it behaves. Its value can fluctuate greatly based upon gear choices. Currently the ArP trinkets are amazing for us, so I'd keep that in your gear lineup. With Grim Toll or Runestone you want to shoot for around 420 ArP because this puts you right around 100% when it procs. Anything over that in ArP from gear and the trinket starts to become less effective. Removing the trinket for one that is less valuable is also a bad idea.

In your situation you have a simple solution, and that is to just regem your gear to Str. This should bring your ArP rating closer to where you want to be with the trinket proc, so you can get full and proper use out of all your gear.

Given that you're Blood specced on live, I'm assuming you tested this as Blood on the PTR. In that case, you forgot to account for the change to Bloody Strikes.

The disease bonus is probably still +25%, but you're seeing equivalent damage due to the above change.