New EP values, without reaping, and all that jazz:

EP:50	AttackPower	1
EP:50	Strength	3.03
EP:50	Agility	1.03
EP:50	CritRating	2.03
EP:50	HasteRating	1.74
EP:50	ArmorPenetrationRating	1.13
EP:50	ExpertiseRating	1.39
EP:50	BeforeMeleeHitCap<8%	2.81
EP:26	AfterMeleeHitCap	1.55
EP:10	WeaponDPS	5.97
EP:0.1	WeaponSpeed	290.32
EP:	2T7	60.34
EP:	4T7	203.45
EP:	2T8	115.52
EP:	4T8	127.59
EP:	2T9	144.83
EP:	4T9	708.62
	Template	17054noReap
	Priority	Unholy
	Presence	Blood
	Sigil	Virulence
	RuneEnchant	FallenCrusader
	Pet Calculation	True

As predicted, ArP went up by almost exactly 15% in value (/pats self on back). Everything else was roughly the same (or if it was different, the difference was explainable - such as with the t7 set bonuses) except for expertise and hit - they both went down (slightly) in value, and I'm not completely sure why. If anything I would have expected the opposite, as you have less free gcds. I'll run the numbers again to see if it was just some sort of fluke, I suppose, but still; I don't think it is - these numbers should be pretty accurate - but I just can't think of an explanation for it.

So, I'm wondering, if 17/0/54 without reaping is the new way to play Unholy in 3.2.2 (assuming nothing changes) How would the Glyph of BS compare to UB (I think its the weakest one?) assuming you raid with a FF Mage?

Yes, Glyph of BS is superior. Not hugely so, but superior indeed. I don't keep up on mages but, at least judging by my guilds own mages, I'm under the impression FF is not optimal? The gain you would get from GoBS would be less than 50 dps, so the mage is much better off just actually speccing fire (or arcane or whatever is best in 3.2.2).

If they're FFB anyways, then yeah, it is worthwhile.

DK's that have a Feral Druid tanking for them on a regular basis should probably pick up the Glyph of Blood Strike because of the snare that Feral Druids provide through Infected Wounds.

This new build didn't really change anything that we didn't already know from the patch notes update, EXCEPT:

Bone Shield now lasts 1 min. (Down from 5 min)

As far as relevancy to Unholy DPS, this could mean some DPS loss from being obliged to refresh your Bone Shield much sooner than you otherwise would.

Not really. Even without Reaping, you still have a free GCD a minute, so it's actually a buff if you aren't getting extra RP from AMS/Revitalize/etc, as BT + BS does generate 20 RP (and 20 RP + 0 damage > 0 damage!). If you are getting extra RP from one of those various sources, you would still be better off BT + BSing over HoWing (as 20 RP > 10 RP). Unless you are getting so much RP that you can drop every Horn from your rotation, it's a buff. A slight one, but definitely a buff.

Not that it was probably intended as such. Not that it was probably intended as a dps nerf, either. I'm sure it was a purely tanking-oriented change, and they figured it would have so slight an effect on dps (if one at all) that it wouldn't matter. And it hardly does. But that oh so slight effect was positive, no doubt.

They also changed the wording on GoSS, but I think it's simply a tooltip clarification to show that it will extend Ebon Plague as well.

Oh, yes, yes. Relative to live. Relative to the past build of the PTR it's simply a wash, as you would be wanting to use BT + BS on cooldown anyways.

No loss ^^

This is offtopic but i've tried that macro on the first page for raise ally:

/cast [target=party1,exists,dead] Raise Ally; [target=party2,exists,dead] Raise Ally; [target=party3,exists,dead] Raise Ally; [target=party4,exists,dead] Raise Ally

But it doesn't seem to work, people are saying "Macros CANNOT target <Player X> automatically anymore" true/false?

I don't know if anybody still remembers the 13-GCD rotations discussion from way back. The gist of it is, unlike Frost, Unholy can realistically have 2 free GCDs when raid-buffed if you design your rotation properly and you do not have high effective latency. When I manually modeled Reapingless builds like the one you posted, I found them to be around 150~200 DPS loss compared to GoIT 17-0-54 type builds running 2xIT rotations along the line of:

SS>BS>BS>dc>PS>IT
SS>dc>SS>dc>PS>IT(>dc)

The use frequency of the final DC is close to 100%, because the rotation is able to carry a full DC worth of RP in reserve to drain 2 RP at a time without going over.

Timing tests on dummies from way back showed that, with 150 haste rating and raid buffs, the effective latency threshold for executing 7-strike-6-spell rotations was around 155-160 ms. However, I have yet to see an existing tool capable of modeling this correctly. For example, I don't know if it's a rune timing/rotation modeling issue or something else I am missing, but Kalorie's sim calculates the effective latency threshold for executing 13-GCD Unholy rotations to be about 25-30 ms as far as I can tell.

You can get around that problem by simply setting the sim to run at 25-30 ms latency or lower. However, there is an additional problem with the way it models disease tick timing. When I used the sim as a cross-check for my own numbers, the sim would inexplicably lose ~3-4% of disease ticks when running 13-GCD rotations even when set to below the threahold (50-60 ms effective latency is about as low as I can go personally in practice, and even at that effective latency I am nowhere near the point where I can go below 6 ticks per 20 sec).

I can't think of an easy way to get aruond the second problem when using the sim; figuring the phantom disease tick loss in manually puts the sim about 60-70 DPS off of my numbers.

Why would you waste Blood tap to refresh bone shield if the duration was not up? That death rune = 1 PS or 1 IT, or 1 BS, or 1 BB, etcetera

It isn't as if the strikes are on a cooldown separate from the rune refresh. As soon as blood tap goes off, all the single rune strikes become available.

If you are using bone shield solely to generate RP, you are really missing out on DPS.

As I understood it:

The Unholy single-target rotation, as it stands now, has a recurring free GCD in which the DK uses Horn of Winter to generate 10 RP.

Come 3.2.2, instead of a HoW, the DK can slot-in a Blood Tap+Bone Shield combo, which generates 20 RP instead of 10 RP.

This is a DPS gain, since you're spending just as many GCDs, meaning your rotation does not change, but you gain an extra 10 RP per minute by replacing the HoW with the BT+BS.

Since the idea is to cast Bone Shield every minute, even if you already have the Bone Shield running with 4 minutes left on the duration, then losing the extra duration is an effective neutral change.

Doing the Sims without epidemic as mentioned above:

Predefined 2H Ulduar Set + 4PCT9 + 200 Str - 150ms Latency

17-0-54 NoReaping, UB-Glyph

Rotation: No - Priority: Unholy - 7930 dps


17-0-54 Reaping, NoEpidemic, IT-Glyph

Rotation: PS-IT-SS-BS-BS-Dump-PS-IT-SS-SS-Dump (repeat) - Priority: No - 7984 dps


17-0-54 NoReaping, No Epidemic, IT-Glyph

Rotation: PS-IT-SS-BS-BS-Dump (repeat) - Priority: No - 7986 dps


If my sims are not really way off, the simpliest Rotation offers the most dps (by a small margin)

Just do: PS-IT-SS-BS-BS-DUMP until the end... i didn´t let the sims retry my DC, but the sim did retry all Rune-Abilities in my Rotation.

Clark, remember that Bone Shield grants a 2% damage buff while active, and while I don't know how much that would add up to on average, I'm fairly sure it's 2k or more over the course of a fight per minute. If you never used the Blood Tap to use it, you'd lose that or else lose damage keeping it up without the extra blood Tap rune (via destroying a SS cast).

Granted if Bone shield ends very fast in a specific fight with lots of AoE, possibly the Blood Strike would be higher. But if that is the case, perhaps something could be said for the low maintenance you are in that kind of scenario.

Has anyone found a macro that makes Raise Ally work right anymore? Cause rezzing someone midfight was one of my favorite things to do pre-3.1 and I have no idea why they can't fix it like it used to be.

Maybe I'll make a post in the suggestions forum =/

The Epidemic-less results are interesting, but the problem is AoE. On a single target, it's essentially a matter of PS + IT verse SS, and similar to 2x BS, although the SS wins out, it isn't by much, and the extra talent points/RP apparently push the first option over. But on multiple targets? No epidemic also comes at the cost of additional pestilences as well, pestilences which could be blood boils or parts of DnDs.

For clarification, the problem isn't the same problem as with GoSS and no epidemic. There, on top of this issue, you also had GoSS becoming useless. GoIT obviously still functions when AoEing.

Like anything regarding AoE, it's a pain to actually work the numbers, since it all comes down to how many targets. That said, if your numbers are accurate (which I'm not questioning, simply haven't done it for myself yet) it might be worth the trade off as the gain is larger than the miniscule 11/0/60 gain. Although, speaking of such, the more points you take out of stuff like Epidemic and Reaping, the more identical the two builds become. The difference between 11/0/60 and 17/0/54, assuming Epidemic and Reaping become no-gos, is a single talent point. There becomes almost no point in differentiating the two.

Then again, perhaps the two builds of choice won't be 11/0/60 or 17/0/54 but, instead, 17/0/54 with Epidemic and 16/0/55 without Epidemic. You take the latter and you gain 60ish dps on single targets at whatever the AoE cost is or you take the former. Might be the best way to present the choice in the OP. Decisions, decisions.

Any which way, such a rotation also has the side benefit of being the shortest - which means that stuff like switching targets, having to run out/back in, so on and so forth become less painful as there's a smaller window for it to mess things up (and if you have to restart your rotation from scratch, there's less dps loss since the rotation is smaller).

Also, despite using the most GCDs, the spec is probably the most latency/error/etc friendly since the disease duration is longest relative to how often they're applied.

Does hurt the value of SoV a bit more than the lack of Reaping did, but that doesn't matter that much.

____________________________________________

I didn't realize that macro no longer worked, my apologies. I simply took it straight from the previous thread. Consider it removed.

____________________________________________

Edit:

Running the sims, the gap I got between the two specs was actually somewhat larger (I used my own current gear as opposed to the default 2H set, which could explain some sort of scaling difference between the two, which would actually be a good thing. I dislike the default 2H set due to the high amount of AP and low amount of Str, personally, which is why I usually don't use it. Not to mention the fact that most people are getting more and more TotC gear by the week, so basing spec choices on a previous tier's gear level is kinda silly. Although it's odd that you're numbers are individually higher than mine. /shrug).

17/0/54 without Reaping, with Epidemic, with Glyph of Unholy Blight: 7860 DPS
17/0/54 without Reaping, without Epidemic, with Glyph of Icy Touch: 7952 DPS

Closer to a 100 dps difference. Worth the 1 BB per 20 seconds you lose on AoE? A personal choice but, the more I think about it, and the more I look at my various parses, I'm going to have to go with yes. There's only one fight in CC where you even use Blood Boil - hard Anub - and even then, you aren't using it constantly. Looking at my 30ish wipes on the fight last week, BB seemed to average between 2.5% and 5% of my overall damage. If no epidemic cuts the number of Blood Boils you do in half (which it very nearly does), that's 1.25% to 2.5% of one's damage on an AoE fight like that lost. In return you gain ~100ish dps which is an approximate 1.5% gain on a single target and a 1%ish gain on an AoE encounter. So you gain ~100ish dps on a single target and lose ~100ish dps on an AoE encounter. Seems worth the trade off to me.

Also, irrelevant but amusing - without Epidemic and Reaping, Scourge Strike drops to less of our overall damage than Blood Strike.

Actually, looking at it, 2x BS does outdamage 1x SS, in either spec. I'm not sure if that's because of the different weapon (when I previously did the sims I was using an ilvl 232 - Aesir's Edge - now I'm using an ilvl 245 - Lothar's Edge - which is quite a gap in weapon damage) and BS simply scales better or what. Odd. So much for Reaping simply being a small dps gain as to a dps loss.

For those curious about the specifics, 1 BS was 3367-3377 damage, on average, between the various parses of the various specs. 1 SS, on the other hand, was ~6634 (almost exactly every time).

Hm...

Let´s look at the possible AoE-dps-loss without epidemic.

Let´s look at 5 Targets... possibly a good example, because of Anub´arak 25 Heroic. There are 4 adds and anub himself.


Napkin Math:

Would you only do one pestilence in 20 Seconds like you do now, you just lose one tick one every target. (the 18th second-tick). Because of that, you would lose 8 ticks (4xFF, 4xBP) and the Raid would loose the 13%. Not an Option.


Now let´s do a pestilence every 10 Seconds... you would lose one BB on 5 Targets... would be roundabout 10k dmg... 500 dps loss in an AoE Encounter like Anub. That´s a pretty static AoE Encounter.


But when you face a AoE Encounter like Thorim, you would have to use Pest more often. You won´t lose anything while dropping epidemic. You would have to switch target very often. Perhabs it would even be a dps gain.


I think it all comes down to personal preference.

I think the decision will be easy for everyone.

You won´t lose that much AoE-Power while dropping Epidemic, but you will have a single-target dps increase, simplicity of the rotation and much room for error.

Edit: With Anub stationary i just pointed out, that you have to AoE for a while. (The Adds outlast 10 seconds). Just forgot about Yogg + 0

Edit2:

Just another sim. 2H Ulduar - 4PCT9 - +200STR

17-0-54 2/3 Morbidity, 5/5 Desolation - 7998 dps

17-0-54 3/3 Morbidity, 4/5 Desolation - 7986 dps

Rotation: PS-IT-SS-BS-BS-Dump

This would be another Single-Target-dps increase.

The question however is, do you really use D&D every 15 seconds in AoE-Encounters, then it would be a AoE-dps-loss.

Or do you use D&D every 20 seconds to fit better into your rotation? Then you would notice no difference in AoE at all.

Edit3:

Simmed under LIVE conditions

2H Ulduar - 4PCT9 - +200STR

3-13-55 UnholyOB - Priority: UnholyOB - 7865 dps

17-0-54 2/3 Morbidity, 5/5 Desolation - Rotation: PS-IT-SS-BS-BS-Dump - 7948 dps

This new 17-0-54 spec does about 80 dps more than the 0-17-54 Oblit or 3-13-55 Oblit on live servers. (I just simmed 10 rp gain in 10 sec to redo the changes made to dirge in the sim for 3.2.2 and recalculated the SS-Crit-Ratio, which yields a 0.5 decrease in dmg in 3.2 cause of the lack of 9% crit from subversion)

If my sims are correct, we could change our spec right now, without waiting for 3.2.2.

It seems to me that players who tend to get a lot of RP from revitalize/rapture and those who use AMS frequently (there are plenty of opportunities in TOC, just like ulduar) will find less of a dps discrepancy between an Icy Touch-no epidemic build than those who don't. The RP from outside sources when I raid seems to fill about half of my rotations with enough RP to skip HOW and fill in a DC in its place, and if I manage to AMS soak it can actually take a minute or so to bleed off the extra RP in our free GCDs.

When that is taken into consideration, it seems that the extra RP in an epidemic-free IT glyph *almost* becomes moot. However, that is my experience, the mileage this setup provides may vary.

I found the easiest way to deal with Raise Ally is to forget it exists because it has a 15 minute cooldown now.

Er, wait, I mean use raid frames. Ever since Freya's Detonating Lasher adds, I've had the default UI raid frames out on one side of my screen so I could see the health of everyone else in the raid in case I have some sort of influence over their survival. With raid frames up it's easy to click on whoever is dead and use Raise Ally, assuming the frames don't bug out and not let me select players like they do sometimes.

I'm not a big fan of how they dealt with Raise Ally in arena by giving it a 15 minute cooldown rather than just flagging it as unusable in arena. It really impacted the fun of the spell by the frequency it could be used in PvE. The 5 minute duration of the ghoul doesn't much make up for it because in most situations they don't live that long. Faction Champions in the only fight I can think of where someone I've ghoul'd has lived to the end of the fight (rather, they Corpse Exploded on the last champion left up).

If you are running Kalorie's sim, remember that it underestimates the DPS of the 13-GCD Reaping/GoIT build at those settings. In practice, a properly designed 13-GCD Unholy rotations will only incur a time loss the first time it goes over 12 GCDs under the above conditions (standard Ulduar haste rating, 150 ms effective latency, and raid buffs). After that, the rotation will continue to run at no time loss. This effect was tested and confirmed to work when we had the 13-GCD Unholy rotation discussion way back.

As far as I can tell, Kalorie's sim imposes the first-time loss on every rotation, not just the first. You can get a good idea of what the rotation can do if the sim could model the rotation properly by setting the latency below 25-30 ms. You need to be careful, though, because at that effective latency setting the sim will inflate the numbers for the "no-Reaping/no-Epidemic" spec/rotation you simulated beyond what it can actually do (14-GCD rotations won't compress to lossless under realistic conditions except when under Bloodlust).

- - -

The spec I linked in my previous post has 1/2 Epidemic. I find that to be the best general option.

In extended AE situations, the second point in Epidemic doesn't really do much for you. Running D&D on a 15-sec cycle and PE on a 20-sec cycle for extended AE, you will run into collisions where both D&D and PE needs to be refreshed on the same half rune set, and you will lose uptime on one or the other. The solution is to run PE on a 15-sec cycle (of alternating long-short refreshes with the long refresh being 16 to 17.5 sec and short being 30 to 31 sec minus the long depending on the rotation design). This does not require a second point in Epidemic.

With the 1/2 Epidemic Reaping build you can switch to 4xSS with only RoR loss for 1 disease and 1 PS in situations where you have RP coming in from external sources. With 0/2 Epidemic Reaping/GoIT, you will lose 2 disease ticks if you go 4xSS, which incurs more than 3x the DPS loss of the 1/2 Epidemic build (of course, if you don't have Reaping, you don't have the option of getting a GCD back in those situations at all). While going 0/2 Epidemic is a small single-target DPS gain, personally I think the advantages of 1/2 Epidemic far outweighs that gain.

I do remember that Bone shield grants that 2% buff while active, but it does that on live with a 5 minute duration. It isn't as if I were losing that 2% buff to blood strike. I only use that rune to recast Bone shield once every 5 minutes.

On live, I get that 2% damage buff but I use only 1 rune every 5 minutes, as a DPS with nothing beating on me.

With a 1 minute duration, you have to spend 5 runes every 5 minutes.

That is a net loss of 4 runes/5 minutes.

The point is that people are mistaken saying dropping the duration to 1 minute is a DPS gain. It is definitely a DPS loss over Live.

And please stop saying you would cast Bone shield with Blood tap every 1 minute on live to generate 20RP as if it were a good idea. That Blood Tap death rune could be used to cast Blood Strike or any other single rune damage ability and Blood tap + 1 strike would still generate 20 RP for the exact same global cooldown.

I can see how someone might think that lowering Bone shield cooldown is a net RP gain, but it isn't, because that U rune, or death rune that you used to cast Bone shield could just as easily be used to cast blood boil or Blood Strike for the same RP gain.

Anyone who is recasting Bone shield 1/minute on live by using Blood tap is generating the exactly the same RP as casting Blood tap+Blood Strike 1/minute. You get 20RP per minute. I get 20RP +2k damage/ minute.

TLDR VERSION: Blood TAP + Blood Strike >> Blood Tap + Bone shield. Nerfing the duration to 1 minute is a DPS LOSS.

again, if I am wrong, please tell me how. Aren't your Blood Strikes and Blood Boils macroed with Blood tap for that extra attack once a minute?

You make a valid point Clark

I think where the difference in opinions comes from is that currently most people (correct me if I am wrong) do not use Blood Tap regularly in their rotation as it tends to throw things off balance. With the recently proposed changes to the rotation however it could easily become part of the rotation.

So while yes it definitely is a dps nerf to Bone Shield, the new rotation will more than compensate for it (or at least that's what the last page or 2 of posts sugests) resulting in a net DPS increase over the old rotation. Of course we won't know for sure untill the patch goes live as there might be more changes on the way.

Personaly I wish they changed Bone Shield to consume 1 Blood rune instead of Unholy which will make our lives a lot easier, but that's another story.