(Edit: I was wrong, this doesn't work.)

Yea for pretty much any spell you can refresh it works the same. It takes your current crit and +% damage buffs only (inlcuding TotT, Cinderglacier, etc) and will keep them as long as you refresh the spell. Other stats and debuffs do not work this way.

Pestilence does not spread the buffed diseases. It just applies a new ones, without bonuses, to everything in range.

Yeah that's just the grace period in action. if you use a rune within 2.5 seconds of it refreshing then it will next refresh 10 seconds after that refresh rather than 10 seconds after you use it.

While that certainly gives you more time to hit the pestilence, the major issue is with the disease duration. You have 21 seconds from the last time you hit pestilence to refresh it, no matter which rune you use or where that rune is in its grace period.

Do we actually know what they changed about GoD and/or pestilence?
My current working theory is that they changed it spreads your diseases to the secondary targets recalculating the damage tick with your current buffs, and if you have the glyph then it resets the duration and recalculates the damage tick using whatever buffs etc were up when you cast it? Is that correct? It might be a good item to have in the faq section.

ETA: I've been playing with my spreadsheet to update it for the nerfed SS (yeah that happened ages ago), and while I haven't done any recent simulations with BiS gear, but looking at my numbers it doesn't seem very likely that GoD is every going to be optimal in a single target situation, although with enough ArPen and crit it might be able to push it.

I've a new idea I'll look to simulate when I get a chance which can help with getting the most out of reaping and gives you nicely aligned runes. Basically the idea is that you use your death runes to put up your diseases which is good as it allows you to always SS with your non death runes, the added advantage however is that you can flip your disease applications between cycles which allows you to squeeze an extra tick out of the diseases every 40 seconds. (yeah you lose RoR on some of your BP ticks but it's still worth it). My spreadsheet estimates that this trick is worth about 90 dps in a 4t9 build or better and which pretty much makes reaping worth it before 2T10.

Okay it seems to sim ok. And it's even better than I thought if you have 2 DKs on the target as RoR works off any BP.

Sorry, I did something wrong. It's not possible .

This depends on your gear selection with my gear ~245-251 ilevel shadowsedge, normal cryptmaker are above byntroll with team robot.

I think this is my first post here EJ, so I'll just grab this opportunity to commend every contributor with an awesome job and an awesome forum. It has been a superb resource for all my chars over the years. Keep it up!


I have some sim results with Kahorie's DK Simulator that puzzles me a bit, alot actually. I feel that my gear should be more than good enough to switch from both T9 4 piece and a Reaping less build to T9 2 piece/T10 2 piece and a Reaping build. I currently operate with two different templates and two different talent setups.

This is my character:
Link to Armory

Link to my different talent builds I am using in the simulator:
Build WITH Reaping
Build WITHOUT Reaping


The templates:

Stat	T9 4P	T10 2P
Strength	1998	1974
Agility	238	237
Armor	14950	15111
Attack Power	450	450
Hit Rating	261	270
Crit Rating	965	1030
Haste Rating	157	107
Armor Penetration Rating	565	635
Expertise Rating	172	186
Weapon DPS	294.7	294.7
Weapon speed	3.7	3.7

And here are my rotations I use in the simulator:

Without Reaping:
With Reaping:

Sim results:

Setup	DPS
T10 template with Reaping rotation and spec	8714 DPS
T10 template without Reaping rotation and spec	8749 DPS
T9 4P template without Reaping rotation and spec	8795 DPS
T9 4P template with Reaping rotation and spec	8692 DPS

So why am I not getting higher DPS output with T10 and Reaping?
And why is my template without Reaping doing higher DPS than with Reaping?
Is there anything wrong with the rotation in Kahorie's DK simulator?

I really want the T10 template with Reaping to give me higher DPS, but at the moment I can't trust it enough to go swap.


EDIT: Managed to swap the rotations above. Should be correct now.

If what you wrote is what you did, you used the reaping-rotation for the non-reaping spec and vice-versa.

It look like it's my fault. There should be Retry="0" on Horn. Try editing that and it should make your DPS a bit higher

Hey guys,

I was lookin at the BiS lists and was wondering why the hit rating on all these lists are so low. Unless I am making a mistake, the list "All currently known loot, sans 25m heroic loot and Shadowmourne" has only 183 hit rating (5.58%). This comes from the gloves, bracers, and ring.

Looking at the stat weights, hit rating is the highest rated stat before 8% hit. I understand aiming for 7% hit so that a draenei can push you to 8%, but why do the BiS lists have such low hit rating? Are there any other raid debuffs that affect our hit rating on bosses? Virulence only talks about our spells, but not abilities, so I assume it does not apply to abilities such as scourge strike.

Thanks for the help
-Dusk

P.S. Thanks for the guide Consider. Very helpful indeed.

I am currently and UD Frost DK, but it seems that it is time to switch back to my levelling spec, Unholy... Right now I am really liking UD and was all set to switch to Orc last night, but now that I think about it I really want to stay a zombie!

What are the DPS gains from Orc?

Blood Fury has no healing penalty, so it is now viable for raids, it does 322 AP for 15 sec every 120 seconds. ( I believe I have this correct): How much DPS are we actually going to be seeing/damage done? I have guesstimated it to be a constant bonus of about ~30 AP, but that is only if you can DPS for the full duration.

Expertise I beleive is +5 or something? Is this anything noticeable, besides on paper?

Pet damage increased by 5%.. while this sounded like all I needed to switch me to an Orc, I thought about it, and if your pet is pulling 400 DPS (completely arbitrary), it is only 20 DPS, and stays low double digits even if your pet is pulling like 600 DPS! (which I doubt any Ghoul is doing)

This has led me to beleive that changing to Orc will not be the substantial DPS increase that I was about to rush into... I don't know how AP factors into DK DPS, but as I see it, were talking +100 dps in a perfect scenario... not sure if its worth $25 and losing my zombie with bones poking out and the works..

I love soaking things with AMS; I think it is a signature DK ability. In fact, looking back over combat logs from last week's reset, I notice I am able to soak a tremendous amount of RP from most bosses without particularly trying beyond using it when it might be useful: Marrowgar (222 RP), Deathwhisper (78 RP, some Butchery RP as well), Gunship (who cares), Saurfang (sadly 0), Festergut (162 RP), Rotface (497 RP), Putricide (270 RP, though I was being conservative). This is a significant amount of RP that effectively goes to waste with a non-reaping build as there just are too few GCDs to make use of it. Comparing the DPS loss of going to Reaping, which basically gives your rotation a free GCD, I find that if I can death coil once per minute, it is a wash in terms of DPS. With the upcoming fights this week being heavy in raid damage (Lana'thel having a pulsing AOE damage and fire on the ground should in particular be nice, and the princes look quite magic-filled as well), and with Sindragosa (known magic damage) and the Lich King himself (unknown, but very likely there will be plenty of magic flying around), I've decided to switch to Reaping while still wearing 4pc T9. I am sure I can get more RP from those fights knowingly stepping in fires etc, but even defensively, it is a clear benefit.

Beyond just Anti-Magic Shell, Revitalize is a significant portion of RP in every fight (raid damage or not -- trees love to blanket HOT). Even more free RP floating around that the traditional rotation makes difficult to use. With pulses of 4500 every 2-3 seconds in many fights, that corresponds to a non-GCD ability generating 45-90 RP alone, disregarding other damage that may be flying around. Rapture as well can provide RP, as can Butchery if adds die (Deathwhisper and Gunship and probably Dreamwalker).

I plan on adding support to simulationcraft to support periodic AMS-based (and possibly revitalize-based) RP gains, but just comparing my current gear level, it looks to be a win. I am curious if others have experimented with pushing this free GCD's limits and turned what, on paper, is a lower DPS spec into a higher DPS spec in practice? I suspect this is another occasion of real-world fights having a dynamic simulators don't currently model. For the one fight so far where AMS+Reaping isn't a DPS gain, we have eight others where it is either a wash or a boost. The major downside is it is slightly less AOE damage (3% less crit), but so far, this isn't an issue in ICC anyway.