In response to whoever said swapping targets makes GoDisease less valuable, I disagree totally. I have been using it for months just for that reason. In a movement heavy fight it's much easier to make contact with one ability than 2. Granted one of them is a ranged ability but it's still 2 gcd's that you have to focused on that particular target. Whereas, especially in the case of fights with multiple adds, which seem to be more and more common, you don't have actually target the boss to refresh his diseases as long as your target is within pest range.

I personally use it in place of drw because, while I have no hard math to back it up, DC is such a big part of our dps with sudden doom, and drw is such a pain having to bank rp (thank god for the change in 3.2), it just seems to be the better choice to replace.

It's situational. "Swapping targets" actually obfuscates what they were trying to say. The point is more that there are times where you are going to swap to a target which is not diseased, or times where your primary target forces you away for long enough (or at an inconvenient time) such that your diseases drop. In these situations the glyph's benefit is deferred for 20 seconds. The question is how frequently the individual encounters these situations.

Just summing up some of the info I've seen in the thread, and challenging a couple of ideas concerning dancing rune weapon use. Specifically, is putting up diseases during DRW is a good idea? Should I time DRW with trinkets such as Mjolnir and Greatness? If i'm off track i'd love to be corrected, but please back up your statements with objective data.

1) Ideal Rotation: DS, PS, IT, HSx4, DS, DCx2, HSx2 repeat. (12 GCD, 18 secs, +37 net runic power per cycle)

Goals: No disease down-time, DS always used with >25 runic power, HS always used with diseases up, no wasted global cooldowns.

I run with 1 point in epidemic. The rotation fits exactly into the time frame so that if done perfectly no disease down-time exists. There is user error and lag to account for, so I use a death strike before refreshing diseases because it doesn't need them to deal max damage. This gives you a 2 second window where disease uptime is less critical. For this rotation to work, you need 8 second rune refresh times. This means that the first cycle in combat will NOT work smoothly because there is a 10 sec rune refresh the first usage. There are many options to fill in the extra time: Pull out ghoul, use horn of winter, pop blood tap, use empower rune weapon, death coil etc.

2) What to do when the rotation fails: If there is less than 8 seconds left on diseases I just start over from the beginning. If I have more than 8s I HS through my blood and death runes then DC, DS, DC, horn, DC, PS, IT, HSx4. I’m still not confident I know the best answer to this question. If you know a better way of doing it post!

3) Use Dancing Rune Weapon during your first combat-trinket procs.

If you can get 100 RP and use DRW while Mjolnir/Greatness are up, the third proc will be up when dancing rune weapon becomes available (45sec internal cooldown x2 = 1m30s). This can be done with empower rune weapon or by spamming horn+D&D before combat starts

4) Ideal DRW usage: DS, DRW-macro, PS, IT, HS, HS, Bloodtap-HS, HS, HS, DS, HS.
Totals are 1 PS, 1 IT, 1 DS, 6 HS.

Some interesting facts about DRW: If you have 2 seconds left on a buff and use DRW, the clone gets the buff for its entire duration, even after your character has lost the buff. If you use DRW and then get a buff, the clone gets no benefit at all from the buff. Note that DRW does NOT benefit from your diseases. It must have its own up on the target to get increased HS damage. Also note, PS and IT both do more damage than a HS if you include initial and disease damage. I have extensively tested all of these points. If you would like to review my parses check below.

5) DRW Macro: /cast [target=player] Dancing Rune weapon.

DRW will activate on the far side of any enemy you have targeted. If you are attacking from behind, this means that the rune weapon will be in front of the boss and subject to block/parry. We don’t want that so changing the target to yourself ensures the clone will attack from the same place you are at. If you are attacking from the front, don’t use the macro so your clone will be behind the target.

6) What part of the rotation works well for DRW: *DS, PS, IT, HSx2*HSx2, *DS, DCx2, HSx2. If you use it at the red asterisk: DS, empower rune weapon, DRW, PS, IT, HSx5 etc

7) Convince the raid leader to call for bloodlust at 1m40s or 3m15s into the fight!
Given that many dps classes use trinkets which proc every 45-50 seconds, the ideal times for bloodlust are right at pull, at 45s, 1m30s, 2m15s, 3m etc. Most tanks don’t like BL on pull cause it makes it hard to build threat. This means that for us, we like BL in 1m30S intervals after the pull. That way we make use of both our DRW and our melee trinket procs during the lust. If it’s a long fight, we will want to use hysteria twice: once on pull and once with lust at 3m10s in. If the raid lead plans on using lust at different times, we need to know and plan accordingly (XT heart phase, etc)

8) Using Cooldowns: I do NOT recommend using your DRW macro to activate dps cooldowns. My reasons? I like to time DRW to happen during a proc such as Lust or Greatness. However, not every part of the typical blood rotation is a wise time to use DRW. My solution is, activate your dps cooldowns immediately when you get a proc, then wait until a good point in the rotation to activated DRW. Just make sure you have 2 secs left on the buffs so you get the benefit for your clone.


9) Parses:

Dancing Rune Weapon: Wow Web Stats
Boss data where the DRW parse comes from: Wow Web Stats

Attack---------------------Average Damage

Frost Fever----------------160x6 = 960 damage

Blood Plague--------------171x6 = 1026

Icy Touch------------------524x.68+1095x.29=674

Plague Strike--------------546x.61+1191x.33=726

Heart Strike---------------1002x.55+2401x.39=1487

IT + FF--------------------1634

PS + BP-------------------1752

IT and PS are more damage per GCD than HS. Also keep in mind, i only used HS after diseases were put up by the DRW. Without the diseases the HS damage would go down by around 20%

I can see Darian's point. Although another good side to GoDisease I have found is that if the movement of the fight makes you miss a few strikes, the rotation is very much like a priority where you are basicly either making death runes or using them, using DS or HS with Pest thrown in when diseases are about to run out, making it easy to adjust to make up for those missed strikes by just continuing the priority until you have to Pest and reset the cycle. When using the standard rotation you can get into a spot where you have some funky rune configs with no diseases up and you have to decide to either throw diseases back up, if the runes are available, or just finish the rotation diseaseless, which seems like a dps loss. I really like the flexibility that the GoDisease gives.

Edit: to clarify, when I said missed strikes I meant being away from the boss and missing opportunities, not actual misses/dodges/etc.

Hiho... I've got a pretty odd question on Hysteria and I couldn't find a reasonable answer.

Our Raidleaders wants us BloodDKs to buff Classes like Rouges or our Ferals to be buffed with it. His explanation is, that those classes would do much more physical DPS than any DK. We argued a bit, an finally i took my calculator with the Result, that he was wrong. Though I blelieve so . On any WWS, or Recount after a fight like the Iron Council or else I got a total ammount of 74 -75% of pure physical damage in my summary of the fight. Our best Rouge, also one of our best damagedealers, has a maximum to 70% of physical damage.
I know that throwing out those numbers issn't quit resonable, but is there any calculation that suggests giving my max DPSbuff to anyone else than me??

Rogues are not an optimal class for Hysteria due to so much of their damage being poison based. That being said, unless your Feral is awful, he will benefit from Hysteria far more than you will as he should be doing considerably more damage than you.

The only time I don't use Hysteria on a Feral is tanking Steelbreaker hard mode when he's the last one remaining and I have the buff. Then I use it on myself. Even tanking I'll break 20K dps until I explode.

I was going to break the post into mulitple quotes and hit on each one just so I could feel the warm wrath of Kaubel, but I decided against it. Really quickly adressing this post, rotations that start with DS are bad, already been explained. You ALWAYS want to overlap all your CD's with DRW, if you cast DRW with 2 seconds left on buffs, sure it still gets them, but then you are using ERW etc. when the buffs have dropped off you, very suboptimal.

All the evidence I've seen still points to casting diseases before DRW. You gave us a Naxx log where your DRW had a huge miss rate on Heart Strike. Maybe we could bump it up against a BWL log and see if we can figure out the issue. It may be an issue of your gear, bad trinket, seems like you're forcing ArP below an optimal level of AP from a quick glance. Whatever the cause, generally accepted practices won't be changed with dated content logs.


@Kenjin - Ferals are pretty broken right now, if you have a good feral you could give them your Hysteria. Dont give it to rogues. Just tell the raid leader you have it macroed to your DRW and you benefit from it more due to cooldown syncing.

I think, in a situation, were I as BloodDk would be the worst PhysicalDD, considering Gear, broken rotation, brainlag, I think you get the point, it could be the best Option, to give it to the best physical DD. On a Steelbrakerfight I do about 400k less damage as our best Rouge. Though, fresh got into the guild, doing most of all hardmodes, my gear needs some improvement and I'm doiing better with each item I get.
It would be a really nice Help to get proven Numbers on Hysteria. First point is, that most of our styles are weapondamage related. And considering ArP those numbers improve with every Point.

edit:
I'll give it a try, but it could lead to a point, were other DKs were prefered in Raids^^

Has anyone checked if hysteria increases the damage of bleed effects.

Yes it does.

As a side note: If you are going to be putting hysteria on a feral, the best way to optimize their use is to try and coordinate it so you apply it right before they apply a Rip and when their Berserk is coming off cooldown (same CD as hysteria), this way they get the +20% damage buff when their skills cost half energy and the +20% damage to two Rips rather than one. (This is more efficient than trying to coordinate it with trinket procs.)

'Should I use hysteria on other melee' is a very different question to 'If I am poorly geared, should I use hysteria on other melee that blow me away in damage'. The answer to the second one is always yes.

The advice from the first question assumes that the other melee are doing roughly similar damage to you.

http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t61176-b...e/#post1259405

The post you linked does not consider disease damage or the fact that PS is physical damage.

Option A - Disease before DRW: 6xHS, 2xDS

Option B - Disease after DRW: IT, PS, 6xHS, 1xDS, FFx6, BPx6 (diseases tick 5, 6 or 7 times depending on epidemic)

Net difference of A vs B: 1 DS vs IT, PS, FFx6, BPx6, HSx1.2

Here is a Freya Parse. Wow Web Stats

Breaking down the data from this we get the following damage chart:

Attack	Average Damage
IT	468
FF	202x6 = 1212
PS	654
BP	213x6=1278
DS	1113
HS	940x.63+2296x.38 = 1465
IT+FF	468 + 1212 = 1680
PS+BP	654 + 1278 = 1932

A) (1465)x6 + (1113)x2 = 11,016 total damage
B) 468 + 654 + (1465x1.2)x6 + 1113 + (202)x6 + (213)x6 = 15,273

Now lets consider Hysteria. add an extra 20% to all physical attacks:
A) (1465x1.2)x6 + (1113x1.2)x2 = 13,219
B) 468 + 654x1.2 + (1465x1.4)x6 + 1113x1.2 + 1212 + 1278 = 17,384

I see only benefit from using diseases during DRW, assuming you DS immediately before activating the clone.

I'll end with this. I think plugging numbers from a parse is a bad way to try to do this analysis. I can find parses from my own experience that support both sides of this argument. In general I think what you are seeing is amplified by your particular gear set. Lacking a GT/MR means you're never hitting the 100% ArP cap, and ArP becomes more effective the more of it you have. This is going to prejudice your results in favor of the attacks not affected by ArP, and similarly for someone who is ArP capped with procs, their results will be more skewed towards eliminating the attacks not affected by ArP.

Some of your numbers compared extremely strangely to mine, where I see DS's averaging 2k and HS's averaging 1.5k, yet disease ticks being lower. We can post logs back and forth all day long, but eliminating the outside factors is close to impossible (are the debuffs on the target identical - do you have an arms warrior, etc.). Add to that the fact that we're at the end of a raid cycle with significant changes coming soon, discussing this further is quite honestly pointless.

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From MMO-champion:

Newest info from PTR build just now posted. Back to where the ability started. Looks like they didn't like the BS-heavy rotations that were going around.

With how Heart Strike has been directly buffed/nerfed based on the blood strike changes, it is important for blood.

I use a similar rotation but I just swap the first DS to the end and put 1 more DC into it. Whit the first rotation I avoid the 10 sec rune refresh at the beginning.

First rotation: DS, IT, PS, HSx2, DC, HoW, HSx2, DS, HSx2, DSx2
N rotations: IT, PS, HSx4, DS, DCx2, HSx2, DS, DC

I stand where the tank stands and HS hit's twice for me (at least according to my scrolling combat text) while hitting the right arm.

I do have a couple questions. I'm currently trying the 44/0/27 experimental build and find my ghoul does a static ~9.5% to ~10% of my dps on most if not all boss fights according to wws reports (i just select all boss fights in the menu and add up all their damage).

I ran 25 Ulduar same bosses 1 run with the 51 in blood and 1 week with the 44 in blood spec. So no this isn't conclusive, and my ability to manage the runic power properly for DRW is a fault I may have. I find my dps is ~100 dps more with the experimental. My gear did not change over the 2 weeks (i finally won a piece last night).

I'm sure there are errors in this, my question isn't directly related at which spec is better, but more towards 3.2. Because of this testing I'm debating either going 50/0/21 or staying 44/0/27 (Perhaps with the change to DRW having static 60 RP that I could also try the 51/0/20).

I believe i read that the 10% ArP from BG is ~4% increase in total physical damage, plus a 10% inc in damage if I stay above 75%, compared to a static 10% from my ghoul, along with changes to UB and Impurity, will this hybrid spec become more viable? Has anyone been able to test this on the PTR? Unfortunately, I keep having issues getting on the PTR.

I used to be good at math, but then I became an accountant which turned into a computer forensic job, that my math skills are lacking. So I apologize for not breaking out the math myself and breaking it all down. I'm still also not sure I understand how impurity works completely.

I'm going to try to get on PTR again and do some testing on a dummy myself, was just curious. I know most don't go for the hybrid spec, but I've been kinda enjoying it.

There's something I've been wondering for awhile now that I can't answer for myself as of yet because my guild isn't currently at the level of doing what needs to be done to get a full set of the gear I'm talking about;

Which would up DPS more, or be more efficient: BiS gear with Armor Pen, or 4set Bonus of tier8 for the 20% increase per disease on Heart Strike?

With all of the Armor Pen on the BiS gear, and getting a full set of that rather than four pieces of tier gear, I can imagine that it would add up to a high amount of Armor Pen, seeing as I don't have too much Ulduar gear as of now but I have over 20% Armor Pen on my character page.
But is the 20% extra damage per disease, adding up to 60% with Frost Fever and Blood Plague, rather than 20% without the set bonus more worth it for DPS?

I was under the impression that it inceased the bonus by 20% multiplicative and not addative. That would result in a 20% increase of 10% which is 12%. So in reality it gives 4% extra damage to HS instead of 40% more damage to HS. The main reason that I was under the impression that it works multiplicative is just that if it was addative it seems to be too good.

If I'm wrong please feel free to correct me and do so as soon as possible(because if it does work the other way around I should stop slacking and get the 4-piece)