Unholy Dps | 3.3.5, King of Anything - Page 211

ahz · 04/07/10, 3:29 PM

RE: Rota versus Priority

I've been sticking to a Priority system for using skills for the most part in a 17/0/54 spec with reaping, dirge, GODD, and 0/3 morbidity. I prioritize diseases > scourge strike > death coil > blood strike. Often, I'll be churning through my priority and run into a situation where i can spend all my gcd's on SS and DC, skipping the blood runes alltogether for one round.

I do have the 4pc tier 10, and am wondering if letting that 3% damage buff drop off by not spending those 2 gcds on blood runes is worth it for priority gcd on DC and SS? If I focused on a rune rotation, squeezing in DC when the runes are on cooldown I suspect I'll suffer a DPS loss. Do the sims have logic for this?

Yubble · 04/07/10, 3:51 PM

Originally Posted by ahz

RE: Rota versus Priority

I've been sticking to a Priority system for using skills for the most part in a 17/0/54 spec with reaping, dirge, GODD, and 0/3 morbidity. I prioritize diseases > scourge strike > death coil > blood strike. Often, I'll be churning through my priority and run into a situation where i can spend all my gcd's on SS and DC, skipping the blood runes alltogether for one round.

I do have the 4pc tier 10, and am wondering if letting that 3% damage buff drop off by not spending those 2 gcds on blood runes is worth it for priority gcd on DC and SS? If I focused on a rune rotation, squeezing in DC when the runes are on cooldown I suspect I'll suffer a DPS loss. Do the sims have logic for this?

You're prioritizing DC over Blood Strike, skipping Blood Strike completely sometimes, yet have a reaping spec (which depends on B to D runes) and 0/3 Morbidity (which increases your DC damage)? That all seems very counterproductive to me. You also lose desolation... a 5% increase in damage.

I'm betting you'd get more dps by using those blood runes so that you can get an extra SS rather than trying to squeeze in more DC's, as well as getting the 3% damage boost.

ahz · 04/07/10, 5:23 PM

It's potentially minutia, but you have a 15 second duration for 4pT10. It's generally not typical for Desolation to fall off as its duration is 20 seconds (2 full rune cycles). The blood runes do get used/converted, but I'd say I'm trading a blood rune for a death coil every 3rd cycle.

What you're arguing for essentially is more of a strict rota.

resky · 04/07/10, 6:04 PM

Under priority rotation, Blood Strikes should be higher priority than Death Coils even though they hit for less - you get rune power from using them. You need to use runes as soon as they come up to maintain RP generation so you can death coil more. This only applies if you are not getting more rune power than you can spend though. If you get spammed with rune power gains from revitalize/rapture/AMS you should be burning excess off with DCs until desolation is about to fall off, assuming you can't SS that is.

Morrtir · 04/07/10, 6:08 PM

Originally Posted by Malkiah

i think the question is a little more complicated than that - though potentially only so based solely on the particulars of one's rot and general play style. it's an issue that i've been pondering lately as well, as a matter of fact, and would love some input on.
i'm using a 0/17/54 with one significant change from what is recommended here: i've dropped UB and dirge in favor of 3/3 morbidity, because it just feels more useful to me.
i've been contemplating dropping to 2/3 morbid and picking up UB since in theory that's 5% damage vs. 10% damage for a single point, but given the way that DC is doing damage for me i've been reluctant to commit to it.

perhaps you can offer some insight into this because i think i also don't quite get it...
doing what i feel is a totally standard rot on the kind of tank-and-spank i've seen in ICC thus far - IT, PS, BS, SS, BS, DC, SS, SS, BS, DC, BS, DC, repeat... i find that i'm *never* short of RP to dump DC when my GCDs come up, even without dirge (which is why i never got it, i didn't see the use in doing so since i never lacked RP) - have i somehow catastrophically screwed up my rot?
assuming not, it strikes me that the rolling nature of UB (being highly variable based on the damage of the last DC that planted it, in particular whether or not it crit) means that at the end, you're not actually seeing 10% of total DC damage in UB - but a fair bit less.
so making the inherent leap that you're looking at 2/3 morbid with UB vs. 3/3 morbid without UB, is there really any reason to bother with UB?

It's an interesting question. I find myself skipping the last BS in a rotation at times in favor of an additional DC. DC does far more damage than BS, after all. Dirge is essentially worth 1 extra DC per two rotations. It provides 10 RP for each half of a rotation, as each half of a rotation will have either a PS and a SS or two SS. If we say each rotation is 20 seconds long, it's an additional DC every 40 seconds. Doing another basic analysis, on my last log (and counting total death coils for kill attempts only), my average death coil (total damage/number of DCs) was 6055. Ignoring GCD limitations for this simplistic analysis, that's an approximately 151 DPS gain over not having Dirge. Note this assumes no RP was wasted and every extra DC was used without slowing the rotation at all. I am left wondering how 2/3 Morbidity would stand up. I can't simply add 10% to my DC damage to get a DPS increase since some of those death coils would not have happened without Dirge. I wonder if anyone else could provide some additional insight.

♦ LuvRugby · 04/07/10, 6:16 PM

Originally Posted by ahz

RE: Rota versus Priority

I've been sticking to a Priority system for using skills for the most part in a 17/0/54 spec with reaping, dirge, GODD, and 0/3 morbidity. I prioritize diseases > scourge strike > death coil > blood strike. Often, I'll be churning through my priority and run into a situation where i can spend all my gcd's on SS and DC, skipping the blood runes alltogether for one round.

I do have the 4pc tier 10, and am wondering if letting that 3% damage buff drop off by not spending those 2 gcds on blood runes is worth it for priority gcd on DC and SS? If I focused on a rune rotation, squeezing in DC when the runes are on cooldown I suspect I'll suffer a DPS loss. Do the sims have logic for this?

Rotations cannot compete with priority striking. Priority striking will always produce higher dps values and your strike selection will be per fight and should not be fixed, you loose fluidity when you do that. Everytime you skip using ur blood strike and turning ur runes you loose the opportunity to hit with your most powerful strikes. I can understand that you believe getting in an extra DC over a SS can be better, but it is not the most efficient use of your rune system. Turning the blood runes is good, it provides you an extra SS which is a 91% weapon dmg, plus 946 phys dmg, and dont forget the 36% of phys damage for your three diseases. For me this is about 2053 dmg per strike, and that is w/o it critting of course. Whereas getting another DC is 509 plus 15% or about 585 dmg, I think I would rather have the SS.

I suggest you turn the runes and gain as many SS you can from the added death runes. Also, dont forget to consider the damage you inflict from the BS with its 40% weapon dmg, 306 adder and 12.5% per disease as well. I vote for keeping the BS and adding the extra SS in the priority based system.

Yubble · 04/07/10, 6:25 PM

Originally Posted by ahz

It's potentially minutia, but you have a 15 second duration for 4pT10. It's generally not typical for Desolation to fall off as its duration is 20 seconds (2 full rune cycles). The blood runes do get used/converted, but I'd say I'm trading a blood rune for a death coil every 3rd cycle.

What you're arguing for essentially is more of a strict rota.

Well when you said you skip blood strikes for "one whole round", I guess I assumed that meant two rune cycles, as a typical full "rotation" uses only 2 BS's per "round." If that were the case, then desolation would fall off for about 8 or 9 seconds.

Anyway... if you find yourself liking your priority system, you'd be better off going 0/17/54, non-reaping, 2/3 morbidity. Reaping isn't doing you much good if you're skipping BS's, and the talents in Frost and morbidity will increase your DC damage by a decent amount.

Amroo · 04/07/10, 7:14 PM

Originally Posted by Malkiah

so making the inherent leap that you're looking at 2/3 morbid with UB vs. 3/3 morbid without UB, is there really any reason to bother with UB?

A shift from 2/3 Morbidity to 3/3 Morbidity is an increase from 110% DC damage to 115% DC damage. A shift from no UB to UB is a change from 110% to 121% DC damage. In a perfect world UB is more than twice as strong as 1 point in Morbidity. UB reaches never its promised 10%, but I haven't seen one log (even of fights where things die frequently, thus clipping UB ticks a lot) where UB is less than 5% of total DC damage (usually between 0.7 and 0.9%). Since the D&D-part of a third point in morbidity is irrelevant, this third point will never be stronger than UB.

• frmorrison · 04/08/10, 12:18 AM

Originally Posted by Valtiel

The underlying issue still remains, tho; Paladins are doing that because it's a very sensible choice for them. I've not run an extensive comparison but I would be inclined to think there's no particular reason why DKs should scale sensibly more with Str then paladins do (FC is certainly a big offender, but still), so the bottom line there would be that Paladins get the most out of Shadowmourne right now, correct?

Did anyone run a simulation to try and see how much of a dps upgrade SM is for the 3 plate classes? I'll tackle that later in case nobody has (can't do that right now since I'm at work). I'm reading on the Paladin RAWR thread that SM is modeling for them to be an about 1.6k dps upgrade over 277 weapons; how much of an upgrade it is for UH or Blood DKs?

DKs have always scaled with Strength better, FC and the scaling with the Ghoul helps a bit. I woud say DK get about 20% more out of strength.

The difference between the best 277 Ret weapon (Bloodfall) and the Shadowmourne is 1500 dps. The cancel trick gives about 200 of that dps. If Ret's strength value went up 20%, I would guess that it is be a bad idea to cancel there.

Valtiel · 04/08/10, 4:19 AM

Originally Posted by frmorrison

DKs have always scaled with Strength better, FC and the scaling with the Ghoul helps a bit. I woud say DK get about 20% more out of strength.

The difference between the best 277 Ret weapon (Bloodfall) and the Shadowmourne is 1500 dps. The cancel trick gives about 200 of that dps. If Ret's strength value went up 20%, I would guess that it is be a bad idea to cancel there.

Isn't the sacrifice in overall Str uptime for the /cancelaura tactic fairly trivial anyways?

Assuming a 20% increase (say, having strength go for 2.5AEP to 3AEP), we would need to look at a constant 300 strength increase to obtain a 200 dps increase.

Maybe I'm not being clear - I'm not suggesting DKs should cancelaura, but this probably simply means Shadowmourne is (like a laundry list of ICC procc items) massively better for Ret paladins.

legitpanda · 04/08/10, 9:30 AM

Am I mistaken in recalling the non-reaping unholy playstyle from TOC revolving around using BB>Bstrike (since BB is on the spell GCD) in situations where you have the RP to float an extra DC without losing a step in our rune rotation? I believe that a minimum haste threshold was determined to be the breaking point by which this became possible. Does this scenario apply to our present state, and if so, does the haste buff from the frost subspec obviate the need to stack haste to this point?

Tadyrius · 04/08/10, 10:10 AM

Originally Posted by Amroo

A shift from 2/3 Morbidity to 3/3 Morbidity is an increase from 110% DC damage to 115% DC damage. A shift from no UB to UB is a change from 110% to 121% DC damage. In a perfect world UB is more than twice as strong as 1 point in Morbidity. UB reaches never its promised 10%, but I haven't seen one log (even of fights where things die frequently, thus clipping UB ticks a lot) where UB is less than 5% of total DC damage (usually between 0.7 and 0.9%). Since the D&D-part of a third point in morbidity is irrelevant, this third point will never be stronger than UB.

Unholy blight works in the SAME way as Deep Wounds for example, meaning you NEVER lose Damage due to clipping, if UB is present on a target and another DC hits, the Timer Resets, but the Damage is added up, meaning you don`t lose the old damage.

Thinking of why UB is never 10% or more of DCs damage, I think it`s due to partial resists.

kc102 · 04/08/10, 11:07 AM

So, if I throw 10 DC's at a target the UB will stack up so when it ticks off it'll be like a complete DC?

Nyth_ · 04/08/10, 11:42 AM

Originally Posted by kc102

So, if I throw 10 DC's at a target the UB will stack up so when it ticks off it'll be like a complete DC?

No. That would only work if you could fire 10 DCs in a split second.

A simple explaination would be:

Deathcoil A does 1000 damage.
Unholy Blight A will now do 100 damage over 10 seconds or 10 damage per tick.

Deathcoil B does 2000 damage. At that time Unholy Blight A still has 5 ticks remaining or a total of 50 damage.
Unholy Blight B does 200 damage over 10 seconds, the 50 damage remaining from unholy blight A is added for a total of 250 damage over 10 seconds.
Unholy blight will now tick for 25 damage every second.

Deathcoil C does 1000 damage. At that moment there are still 2 seconds left on Unholy Blight B, that's again 50 damage.
Unholy Blight C will do 100 + 50 damage over 10 seconds; or 15 damage per second.

I think the basic of it was like that. This is a really basic example though.

Even if you would fire 10 deathcoils in a row in unholy presence (assuming you have infinite RP) you would never get up to the damage of a full deathcoil.
Because by the time you fire your 2nd deathcoil and it refreshes unholy blight. It would already have dealt 10% of its total damage, meaning the 2nd UB will deal 19% of a full DC.

In fact if you would do that and fire 10 deathcoils every second, you'd do 65% of a full deathcoil after the 10th has fired.

Tadyrius · 04/08/10, 11:45 AM

Originally Posted by kc102

So, if I throw 10 DC's at a target the UB will stack up so when it ticks off it'll be like a complete DC?

No. Oo

As far as I know it works somehow like this, easy math:

1st DC hits for 100 damage, UB will do 10 damage in 10 secs (1 dmg/tick).
2n DC hits for 100 damage, 5 seconds after the 1st one, means UB will now deal 10 damage plus the remaining 5, so it`s 15 damage, 1,5/tick
3rd DC for 100 damage hits again 5 seconds after the second, meaning there are still 7,5 damage to deal plus 10, going to be 17,5 for 1,75/tick.
4th DC (100 dmg) 5 seconds later, with still 8,75, thus it will be 18,75 over 10.
5th DC (100 dmg) again 5 secs later means 9,375 plus 10 to deal, 19,375 in total

This will get closer and closer to 20% of DC damage. This is no big surprise, as 2 DC were cast every 10 Seconds and as such every 10 Seconds 10%*2 of your DC damage should be dealt.

Easy to understand: You always deal 10% more DC damage with UB, minus the partial resists.

P.S.: Guy above me posted while I was writing ;(