Sorry to poke at such a small part of your post, but isn't this example more a player issue than anything else? Since DRW's CD is half Hysteria's... the situation you're describing already suggests that the player is messing up the timing on his DRW's to begin with. Especially since your primary example is Vezax, where nothing would really hold DRW back for 30 seconds to begin with.

Iam sorry to ask here but- Iam not realy familiar with the DRW. In the OP the two first important things for DRW are Diseases up and 4 Deathrunes - So if i would use DRW on CD My Rotation should look like: IT -> PS -> HS -> HS -> DS -> DS. With 2 Points in Epidemic now i should have 14 seconds~ left where my Disese Ticks. (i think ill come down to this). Now ill must wait for my Runes to coming up as Blood/Blood/4Deathrunes After that Castin DRW with Hysteria and other Proccs/Potions/Trinkets. But what should i do then ? 6HS and my Diseases are running out. reapply FF/BP before i cast DRW ? Iam realy dont know how the real Rotation is before/after the the part where i get my 4 Death runes. iam really happy if someone could give me some advise on this.

They dont mean you should have diseases on the target, that is a given they should always be up. They mean you should have a frost and UH rune and 4 other death runes comming up. Then you pop Hysteria if it is available, then DRW then you put up both diseases and hit HS 4 times followed by DS then HS's and disease re-application.

The 3.2.0 Patch Notes are out, one snippet that caught my attention:

The pet change could be a significant buff to DRW if it's affected. However, the "pets" distinction makes it seem unlikely. If I recall correctly, DRW isn't affected by the +5% pet damage Orc racial. Unless Blizzard makes a specific exception, DRW may not be affected by this change either.

The direct DRW change should be the final, final nail in the coffin for comparing it to DC Spam or UB. It should be a lot easier to use in this form.

I'm half convinced the Blood Strike change is a typo. This could easily throw us back to using the Blood Strike Glyph and dumping Heart Strike as a single target DPS/TPS ability.

Another thing:

Note the "to" 50% per disease. It's now 12.5% per disease, so this is a quadrupling of it, assuming the wording in the PTR notes is correct.

Is this an attempt to push Blood Strike to be the main Blood Rune attack, with Heart Strike relegated to cleave usage? It seems to me that this change would push Blood Strike DPS over Heart Strike's.

Anyone with a better head for numbers got some input?

This must be a mistake. Increased by 50% to 15% would be more like it. That value would make it close to HS, but not better.

Well it's fairly simple, as there are no talents affecting Heart Strike which do not also affect Blood Strike. So our values are:

Blood Strike: (40% Weapon Damage + 305.6)*(1 + 50%/Disease)
Heart Strike: (50% Weapon Damage + 368)*(1 + 10%/Disease)

With 2 Diseases:
Blood Strike: 80% Weapon Damage + 611.2
Heart Strike: 60% Weapon Damage + 441.6

Without having to do any further math, Blood Strike is clearly better in all single target situations (though Heart Strike is still better in two target situations). Note that the Blood Strike Glyph was not included in this calculation. If you previously made good use of that glyph, it will likely replace one of your current glyphs unless Blizzard makes further changes.

This is why I agree with dr_AllCOM3 that this has to be a mistake.

50% of 12.5% is 6.25%. The increase would be to 18.75%, not 15%.

I somehow thought it's 10% . Anyway, I quickly updated my sheet and 18.75% places BS 400 damage behind HS. That's pretty obvious for me.

This is the more likely situation. When they say they are increasing the bonus by 50% they mean increasing the existing bonus from 12.5% to 18.75%. Hence the terminology Blizzard normally uses is 'increasing by 50%' and not 'increasing to 50%'. They have made patch notes very similar in wording in the past and it always seems to lead to this type of confusion.

I wrote this up for discussion on my guild's forums, but it applies here. Note that the math is very rough napkin-type shit and may not be completely accurate, but it's worth discussing.

The Mimiron in question I'm looking at was a Phase 1 wipe at the end of the night of our 10-man attempts. No Bloodlust, only enough time to use DRW once, but I had enough time on Mimiron to use DRW to the full effect.

--

Unholy Blight - Really hard to categorize this. On one hand, it's a nerf to Unholy AE capability, but Unholy had far and away the best AoE of any class/spec in the game, so it's probably needed. On the other hand, this is a pretty significant buff to single target damage. WHAT'S MORE, with the nerf to DRW, this will probably be preferrable to deep Blood over that.

Looking at our last Mimiron 10 Firefighter attempt last night, I did 90k damage with 19 Death Coils, and DRW accounted for 60k damage. The duration reduction to DRW will knock maybe 20% of the damage off of that (most of that last 6 seconds isn't optimal usage, since I've already blown all my big strikes and am probably just putting diseases back up or something). Also factored in is the fact that DRW will cost a max of 60 RP in 3.2, as opposed to 130 RP for full duration now. 70 RP saved is 1.75 Death Coils, or ~8.2k damage. So figure 3.2 DRW will be 56.2k damage.

Compared to that, Unholy Blight (with the glyph, taking the bonus damage up to 42%) will add 38k damage to my Death Coils if I'm doing the math right. What also isn't factored in is that I spent 130RP to activate DRW, which is 3 Death Coils I didn't fire. That's another 14k damage I'd get from not using DRW, plus 42% on top of that, which is 6k.

In the end, napkin math says:

3.2 DRW: 56.2k damage
3.2 UB+extra DC usage for not using DRW: 58k damage

50/0/21 hello?

To further unbalance it, the example damage from last night's Mimiron was a full power, Hysteria-buffed Dancing Rune Weapon, with Empower Rune Weapon used in the middle for extra damage. Which means 56.2k damage is an all-buffs-up outlier. Meanwhile, the UB+DC amount wouldn't be affected by that, so the damage will always be that good.

Edit: Note, this is with Sigil of the Vengeful Heart, which obviously is a significant buff to DC damage. Without it, DRW is probably clearly better. Too lazy to do the math to figure out exactly how much. :V

Regarding the new UB vs DRW napkin math, keep in mind that even though UB may do slightly more damage overall, it's also way less 'on demand'. In a lot of fights there's a ~90 second burst situation that is more significant than other parts of the fight - like Steelbreaker or the Saronite Animus. In those situations, DRW is still significantly better (assuming the above math is correct).

That said, the math is probably questionable since Mimiron is a bad fight to use as a general basis since there's all the downtime between phases where your cooldowns are ticking away, increasing the relative value of DRW vs. coil.

Edit: Mixed something up with Desolation .

My mistake, missed the note about it being a P1 wipe. Another fairly big swing factor here is going to be the DC sigil, but looking at your armory I see you have it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it seem more reasonable that they increased the weapon damage from 40% to 50%?

Based on this assumption, the numbers would look like this:

Blood Strike: (50% Weapon Damage + 305.6)*(1 + 12.5%/Disease)
Heart Strike: (50% Weapon Damage + 368)*(1 + 10%/Disease)

So With 2 Diseases we have:
Blood Strike: 62.5% Weapon Damage + 382
Heart Strike: 60% Weapon Damage + 441.6


The change seems a bit more likely that it's supposed to bump up the base weapon damage percentage rather than the per disease bonus.

I have a few issues with the way you went about your math. First, DRW will be set at 12/17 seconds (without/with Glyph). This is only a reduction for those who specced into RPM, and only a 3 second reduction (down from 20 seconds). As a result, it's a 15% reduction in DRW at most, and you yourself said that the back end of DRW is less potent. You also call your DRW an all buffs up outlier, but already stated that Bloodlust/Heroism wasn't used, and didn't mention Fallen Crusader or any trinket procs (though you may have meant those by "full power").

There are also other factors we can't account for. Given that you are in a 10 man group it's possible you're missing key buffs that would greatly increase DRW's damage, but not DC's (I'm often missing Windfury/Imp Icy Talons). We don't know because you didn't link the report.

Finally, it's all up in the air thanks to the confusing Blood Strike change, and the possibility of it being affected by the pet change.

Whatever the case, a lot of testing will need to be done once the PTR goes up to account for all this. It's very hard to know one way or the other as it stands.

That would reasonable, but it's a much bigger stretch than dr_AllCOM3's theory. While mistakenly putting a to instead of a by is a fairly simple mistake, discussing disease modifiers instead of weapon damage takes a rather monumental screwup.

You threw 19 DCs, which means either you're talking about more than 2 minutes of fight time, or you're AMSing doomfire and using the forced downtime from shockblast to work in extra deathcoils. Either way, on a typical fight 19 DCs is >120 seconds worth, which you're comparing to only 90 seconds worth of DRW (one cast). You're effectively giving UB a 33% handicap and it's still coming out only barely ahead. If I were working based solely off your data I'd say DRW is hands-down better.

Also, like you said you're getting your numbers from one phase worth of Firefighter, which is a really small sample size with a lot of outside variables.

It seems that there was no typo at all in the Blood Strike change.

Ghostcrawler

So obviously the 50% per disease won't stand, but odds are it's something considerably more significant than what we're use to now.

well atm HS only gets 10% from diseases so with 2 disease up you would have 24% extra dmg instead of 20%, wich isnt realyl a big thing. however in 3,2 with the bloodstrike getting a 50% dmg increase the setbonus will shine. giving 120% extra dmg on bloodstrik with the 4pt8 bonus.

however somehow i doubt the 50% will last untill the release

new UB..
443 + 380 ( with vengeful heart )
823 * 1.15 = 946.45 * 1.15 = 1088.4175

with a .15 * 1.15 * 1.15 = .198375 AP coefficient

Assuming a nice 5000 AP, that's 2080.2925 , 2392.336375 in blood presence

So each death coil would add a 1004.7812775 damage DoT per cast ( don't think it would double dip on BP ), ignoring crits.

Assuming a standard.. .DS-IT-PS-HS-HS-DS-HSx4 rotation, that's 116 RP with butchery or two deathcoils with 36 RP change.. and ( usually ) an additional deathcoil from Sudden Doom .. so I'm just going to round it to about 3 deathcoils per rotation, although it's going to fluctuate with how much RP you're generating... or about 3014.34 damage per rotation from the new UB, or about 167~ DPS.... again, ignoring crits, assuming a 33~% chance to crit ( for easy math assuming 3 Death coils ), that's increased to 4019 damage, or about 223~ DPS


Math is VERY quick and dirty.... I admit I don't know the best way to model sudden doom crits, please correct any mistakes I probably made, the talent looks interesting though to say the least

This is incorrect actually. A blood DK with 4 death runes means 2 blood runes and 4 death runes. You will be at this stage after the second DS in the standard rotation. Pop hysteria, pop DRW, *DO NOT* reapply diseases, instead spam HS. It takes some practice to fit this all in your rotation comfortably, but it's well worth it. It's also acceptable to hit Hysteria/DRW in place of the mid-rotation RP dump and open with DS-HS-HS... the main idea is you are using your hardest-hitting strikes during DRW time.

Why do you not put up diseases with DRW? Read through the forum from the first page -- you should get your answer there.

On the subject of popping DRW, I have always found my max DPS potential to be a few seconds into the fight, a general pull on a static boss (Vezax, Patchwerk, etc.) usually is...

IT > PS > HS > AotD > Ghoul > DC
IT > PS > HS > HS > DS > DC
DS > HS > HS > HS > HS > *NO* DC
IT > PS > Hysteria/DRW > HS > HS > DS
DS > HS > HS > HS > HS > DC > DC

and then it follows into the standard rotation of ...

IT > PS > HS > HS > DS > Dump
DS > HS > HS > HS > HS > Dump

Doing this generally offsets the DRW value 10-15 seconds from your hysteria cooldown due to the runes and their cooldowns. For instance, roughly at 1:15 to 1:20 remaining on your Hysteria cooldown you are effectively back at the point above with full RP to pop DRW (without the use of ERW). However, if you wish to continue to use Hysteria with DRW a second time, you're third DRW (or second Hysteria) will be off set by 20-30 seconds (ie, Hysteria will have been off of cooldown for 20-30 seconds waiting for DRW to refresh).

This is manageable slightly with use of ERW, but I have found that after the initial DRW/Hysteria pop (we usually lust off the bat, hence why it works well for me, but I know many still lust late into a fight) the best course of action is to simply use Hysteria when you have stacked buffs (for me - Unholy Strength from RotFC, Greatness from DMC:G, and the proc from Grim Toll) and simply alternate the two, always having 100 RP available by the time you finish casting IT and PS in a rotation. I have found the benefit from using Hysteria with DRW is minimal at best, and much better used under full procs than waiting an additional 20-30 seconds for DRW to repop to use them both again.

Has anyone else shown this to be true, or is my experience somehow lying to me about the most efficient time to proc Hysteria/DRW? Is there any math to suggest that waiting for DRW to pop for the second Hysteria is worth while?

Technically as long as you pop DRW within any of the 30 seconds that Hysteria is up, DRW will get the benefit. What I've taken to doing is popping them in sync the first time, popping the second DRW when it lines up and then popping Hysteria as soon as it's off cooldown, and popping DRW at the tail end of my Hysteria.