That's correct, what GoD does ist "[refreshing] disease durations on your primary target back to their maximum duration". It does not reapply diseases (which is why it doesn't work with Improved Icy Talons for Frost DKs) and has no effect on when each disease ticks (they continue to tick at three second intervals for the entire time).

Shouldn't Banner of Victory still surpass Needle Encrusted scorpion?

Needle has an IC of 50 seconds wich only procs of crit and , opposed to Banner wich has a 45 IC for the 1004 AP while Banner still provides a 6% static ArP.
Atleast on paper it still looks like Banner surpasses Needle , Even running it trough a spreadsheet.
Mabye i'm calculating something wrong?

At 245 gear NES is about 8 dps less than Banner, but at 264 gear it starts to come ahead (because ArP large proc scales better than AP) about 10 dps. They are comparable.

I used Rawr for that.

I was able to run some more tests, but still couldn't get the sims to model the damage correctly. At this point though its probably not worth bothering taking any further. In the best scenario I could get, which would involve getting Tricks at the beginning of the pull and rolling that damage the full fight I could only get an increase in DPS when using 4PT10, as the loss of Blood Strikes with 2P92P10 isn't worth it. Furthermore, even though I could get more DPS straight up comparing just damage done from diseases and strikes, what I could not quantify was whether any and/or how many runic dumps you lose by missing out on 15 RP every full rotation. So while you have an extra GCD, you have less RP to utilize it. The last item worth noting is that using Pestilence with Tricks up will not up the disease damage on your current target. To roll Tricks DPS increase with diseases you have to recast Icy Touch and Plague Strike with tricks active and this damage can be kept up indefinitely with Pestilence/GoD. I ran some tests on a Heroic Dummy this morning just to verify this. In the end, its just too much of a PITA to try to get tricks at the start of a fight and thats the only realistic scenario where this could work out to be a DPS increase.

Just curious on the first post indicating 15 str glove enchant being superior to 44 ap when it seems nobody is using the str enchant, is it actually better?

It's a very slight increase, and finding people with the 15 strength enchant isn't nearly as easy as finding someone who has 44ap. That's probably the most common reason why you don't see it too often.

With the way that ArP scales exponentially with our gear, would there be a point in which gemming for ArP would surpass Str? And is it possible to calculate that point? Im aware that changing over to ArP gems would throw off the EPs of other stats as well but it still might be a dps gain.

Obviously it would not be beneficial for AoE related fights but w/ all the badges we'll be able to farm, even without the 4 instances and now only two, perhaps having a second set with ArP gems would be more beneficial for single target fights such as Saurfang and the Plagueworks wing would be better dps. Im just unsure how to calculate where this point would be.

This has been asked many times already, and I highly doubt the answer has changed, even with the new SS and two piece t10.
Edit: Short answer: Don't do it.
Longer answer: It's better on single target and worse on AoE, so unless you have two sets of gear, still no.

Is previous discussion on this topic valid after the FC uptime nerf? Or was it not significant enough to change anything?

I'd still say it'll be up for a large portion of the fight, but I haven't ran any logs recently thanks to not having a raid guild.
So previous discussion should still be valid. Diseases, Gargoyle, Ghoul, and DC do not benefit from ArP, and I'd say they're about 40% ish of your damage (if not more).

Seylina is correct - FC uptime is still extremely high; the log I have from DBS here shows a 96% uptime on FC. The log was taken this Friday.

ArP will give you a slight DPS increase in near BiS 277 gear, but its advantage over strength is minor, and for fights which have at least 1 add of some sort, ArP will most likely fall behind Str. Str is still the best way to be gemming.

I always assumed 44 ap > 15 strength in AoE Situations as well. A good portion of the strength weighing is because of how our ghouls scales with strength, our ghoul is a much lower percentage of our damage in AoE situations.

As for the Glyph of Disease debate, generally I think it's considered as a dps loss compared to the other glyphs.(this has been posted multiple times) There's a few fights where it's a huge dps increase, however. Twins is a really good fight for glyph of disease atm. The obvious reason is you pestilence to keep diseases on 2 targets anyways, but also with just how ridiculous SS scales with fight gimmicks.

WoW Meters Online - Combatlog Replay

The parse shows SS being over a 3rd of my dmg with only one empowered. For this reasoning, i'm considering dropping glyph of the ghoul this week for Blood Queen to pick-up glyph of disease. SS should have ridiculous scaling factors on the fight so getting in as many as possible I'd assume would give the best benefits.

As far the the armor pen vs strength gemming debate, there's almost no AoE fights in ICC(Dreamwalker is the only one that comes to mind pending Lich king). If Armor pen proved to be superior at some gear level I'd defiantly consider making the switch.

I just need clarification on the subject of GoD. I'm really sorry if I'm beating a dead horse, I hope I don't sound redundant. I just want to get a few things straight.

As for single target (assuming you are using t10 2pc), glyph of dark death(over GoD) causes you to use IT/PS over SS in your rotation, but it adds another blood strike as well. Giving the 15% DC+, which adds with unholy blight and another chance at t92pc proc. This is supposed to be superior single target DPS.


As for GoD, you sacrifice a blood strike, but gain another SS in your rotation, but you lose 15% DC/UB stuff. You lose an additional chance at t92pc proc as well.

So overall, you are sacrificing 15% DC/UB damage, another chance at t92pc proc for an extra SS. Since SS is our hardest hitting ability we have, and how well it scales with gear, it just doesn't seem like a blood strike and 15%DC/UB damage is better than another SS. Am I just plain wrong in my assumptions?

Again, my apologize if this has been beaten to death, I'm just tryin to get my facts straight.

Must say I was quite suprised to see that simcraft still claims 4p t9 to be 200dps ahead of 2p t10 + reaping spec for my alt death knight. Armory is what I'm currently sporting on it and these setups are what I have access on: Profiler - Wowhead with t10 chest and Profiler - Wowhead with t10 helm(comes out top).
There's a fair share of 264 loot in my t10 helm setup and 264 weapon so the result was quite a shock for me.

You don't just lose a single blood strike and 15% DC/UB damage, you lose the damage done by IT and PS as well. So in the end it's more like comparing the damage done by 15%DC+IT+PS+BS+1/8 DC (Due to 5 extra RP from IT+PS over SS) with a SS + 1 tick of Frost Fever and Blood Plague due to you don't clip them with GoD.
Which is why GoDD > GoD, except in AoE situation like Anub25hc ofc

Does anyone know how the [Nevermelting Ice Crystal] does with 4p T9 Set (and the [Glyph of Disease])? Currently, locks and priests can roll this crit through refreshing their DoTs - was wondering if the same would work for Unholy DKs (and Wandering Plague would give a significant boost too while the crit bonus was maxed). I know GoD pestilence checks and resets AP setting to current when rolling, but does it reset to current crit % as well?

The quote I read was:

Did I miss something?

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

Ghostcrawler made a post regarding this stating that they didn't feel rolling crit was a problem and likely won't be changed any time soon.

With that in mind combined with anyone holding off on quickly swapping to T10, is the Ice Crystal actually worth farming and using?

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 .