Either I did something really wrong in the sim or the new SS glyph just sucks.
This is the char I used.
11-0-60 is the best spec I got so far, anything with Black Ice unfortunately can't keep up. Then I switched the SS glyph with the UB glyph and my dps were a good 100 higher. I didn't really expect that .

You got it right . Can you provide your 12-0-59 spec? 11-0-60 seems to be better with a 281dps weapon, Necrosis scales nicely.

For 12/0/59, it's the same as 11/0/60, simply a point from Necrosis into a point of Bladed Armor.

But, yeah, Necrosis certainly wins out (although not hugely so, better is better. And, looking to the future, Necrosis will, without a doubt, scale better). I'll add it to my previous post, but:
11/0/60 + GoUB w/ 2t8 and 2t9 - 7243 DPS
11/0/60 + GoUB w/ 4t9 - 7516 DPS

Quite interesting. Beats 12/0/59.

Edit: Doing 11/0/60, but taking a point from Bladed Armor and putting it into Dark Conviction (http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...S7b1,FQJ,10433 1/5 in a talent and 3/5 in another is odd - I hate incomplete talents, but whatever!) seemed a possibility with 4t9, so I tried it. 7522 dps - a winner!

Sooo, yeah. Necrosis > Dark Conviction > Bladed Armor, it would appear, although the differences are all single digit.

Scattering my brain for other potential combinations, but can't think of many which I know won't be automatically inferior.

On the topic of the SS glyph--does the simulator clip diseases? Standard rotation will always clip the last tick of FF/BP, which trades diseased IT/PS damage for a tick of FF/BP. However, with 30s diseases, assuming more or less ideal dps conditions (no unexpected rune delays), it will be possible to get all ten ticks of FF/BP while still keeping 100% EP uptime, so while your PS won't benefit from RoR, IT should. The upshot of this is that in addition to an extra SS every minute, you gain two additional ticks of both diseases. Of course, there is only one GCD's lag time available to refresh your first disease (and keep EP up) before your second disease will fall off.

Anyway, I was wondering how the simulator handles this, since this is easily the sort of behavior that could swing dps by 100 either way. Does it attempt to clip diseases with a standard priority-based rotation, or will it always wait for diseases to fall off? Does the SS glyph affect this behavior, as it would a real rotation?

You forgot FF.

You gain 2 ticks of FF as well as 2 ticks of BP; there is no EP downtime for the raid, because when BP drops and is immediately reapplied, FF is still 1 GCD away from doing the same. You only lose the RoR damage.

However, even with that, the SS glyph is underwhelming to the point of being a waste of [Resilient Parchment], unless something else yet undatamined shifts things in the glyph's favor. Given what we do know, the SS glyph is simply not the significant factor for the new Unholy Ghostcrawler expects it to be.

Bladed armor and dark conviction (with 4t9) also affect diseases as well as death and decay and have a significant impact on AE. I wouldn't find that an acceptable tradeoff for a single-digit single-target DPS increase.

The subversion buff and the dirge nerf are, however, so it's a somewhat moot point. SS Unholy will overtake Oblit Unholy and it will be at next to no dps loss - so Blizzard accomplished its goal, even if it wasn't exactly by the means they expected.

Besides, if Glyph of Scourge Strike was the significant factor, then Glyph of Unholy Blight becomes worthless. Is the opposite really any worse?

As well, it's not so much that GoSS is bad than the fact that due to AoE reasons, you can't go GoSS + No Epidemic (if you could, it would be a contender). If they could somehow make GoSS increase the duration of all of your active FF/BP diseases by 3 seconds until the cap of 9, or something of that nature, than it would be fine. Without redoing the Glyph completely, however, there is no other way to make it viable due to the AoE constraints (you could make it have no cap on the extension which would make it stellar for single targets, but that still wouldn't fix the AoE issues).

True, and thus you would want to go 16/0/55. It's still valuable to know, however, which talents are superior in terms of strictly single targets, and determining the differences.

That said, I'm sure most people would willingly trade ~20 ST dps for several (several) times that AoE dps.

Just a thought regarding the idea about not clipping diseases.

With Frost, Tundra Stalker does not affect Frost Fever ticks unless it is reapplied with IT (or HB glyph) with a Frost Fever already affecting the target (yours or someone else's).

I am not at luxury to test this at the moment, but perhaps this applies to RoR as well? If we Plague Strike right after BP drops, will the BP ticks be increased by 10% from RoR?

I removed the 9s restriction just for fun and the UB glyph is still better. The lead was cut by about half.

Curious. Even without the 9s restriction, you would still have to refresh diseases eventually, I suppose, which would explain why it's still not worth it. At 5 (assuming you don't have to IT/PS) SSes per 20 seconds, you're only extending it by 15 seconds, meaning you're losing time on the debuff regardless.

Any which way, even if they made the glyph give 6 seconds to your diseases without a cap (or, for simplicity's sake, just make it work like Glyph of Disease - except it would be better due to not causing you to lose a BS every 20 seconds), thus allowing you to never have to reapply IT/PS, it would still have the AoE issue (which I so overlooked at first glance). Going the GoD route would be interesting, though, and could have potential...

Speaking of that, I'ld be curious (if you have the time and/or inclination) if you could calculate what sort of dps that would be - if GoSS essentially read something along the lines of, "Your Scourge Strike ability now refreshes disease durations on your primary target as well as any target within 10 yards back to their maximum duration" where it followed the exact same mechanics of GoD, except with the 10 yard addition to get rid of the pesky AoE issue the current glyph causes.

Another alternative would be if they caused GoSS to simply refresh Blood Plague to max duration (and BP alone). What that would cause you to do is then substitute a PS for a Ghoul Frenzy every 20 seconds. With a slight change to Ghoul Frenzy (lower the duration to 20 seconds, slightly buff the haste - or cause the haste to also apply to you, perhaps, to a lesser degree? - or make the haste also increase the rate at which the Ghoul regenerates energy), it would actually make GF worthwhile, while also giving GoSS its place.

At any rate, the GoSS change was simply a means to an end, and the end was reached regardless. Although it being viable would be nice, it's not all that big of a deal, as there are plenty of worthless (or suboptimal - one in the same, to most people) glyphs out there.

Edit: Some random info from the Blood thread which is probably of interest here: 4p t9 works off your melee crit rate. As well, similar to how it "snapshots" your AP with Glyph of Disease and then "rolls" the highest to date, it "snapshots" your crit rate. Aside from a few rare trinkets - Dark Matter, specifically - this doesn't matter a ton, since your crit rate doesn't fluctuate like your AP, but still. Something worth noting. I'm sure there are ways out there to take advantage of it.

Yes, it is this.


I haven't looked at the amth on this but every second without diseases on target is a second without Ebon Plagubringer buff (13% to spell damage taken), which would hurt all spell based dps your whole raid delivers during that time. So I'd rather refresh early than late.

----------------------------------

I did some napkin math trying to figure out why 7+ points in Blood clocks better DPS than 10+ points in Frost. The difference between the two is Butchery+Subversion+2H-spec vs. ImpIT+RPM+Black Ice. For simplicity I’ll leave Butchery and RPM out of calculations.

Assuming that Melee is 13%, Scourge Strike is 13% of your DPS, Deathcoil is 13% of your DPS, Blood Strike is 5%, Plague Strike is 4% and Icy Touch is 4% of your DPS the breakdown would be following:

ImpIT + Black Ice (Icy Touch) = 1,15*1,10*0,05 = 1,325% dps
Black Ice (Scourge Strike) = 1,10*0,13 = 1,3% dps
Black Ice (Deathcoil) = 1,10*0,13 = 1,3% dps
TOTAL 3,925% dps

2-H Spec (Melee) = 1,04*0,13 = 0,52%
Subversion+2-H Spec (Scourge Strike) = 1,09*1,04*0,13 = 1,737% dps
Subversion+2-H Spec (Blood Strike) = 1,09*1,04*0,05 = 0,567% dps
Subversion+2-H Spec (Plague Strike) = 1,09*1,04*0,03 = 0,4% dps
TOTAL 3,224% dps

Unless my math is badly off in some point (for example if Blood Strike is actually a lot more than 5% of total dps) the difference must be lying not in Subversion+2-H Spec but the fact that they aren’t that so much worse than Black Ice that it would make up for the dps increase of Bladed Armor+Dark Conviction scaling to our pets and Dark Conviction also gives more wandering plague procs.