This is offtopic about what you guys are talking about but..

This new simulator (team robot) is showing bryntoll (264) still being BiS up until the heroic cryptmaker (277). Shows it even passing shadows edge by an extra 18dps.

I've read their simulator is a little off but was still just wondering.

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.

What Amroo said, also the rotation for the first runeset of non-reaping should be BS-SS-BS, not SS-BS-BS.

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

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..

Hate to sound rude, but is 15+ pages of discussion and sims and etc on 4T9 vs 2T10 reaping really necessary? I think its been well established that:
1) depends on your gear
2) depends on the fight
3) its really close either way

Please stop bloating the thread.

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.

So yeah I ran some sims to confirm my theorycrafting.

1) A GoD build pulls level with the standard reaping rotation for single target damage only in the very best of gear.

2) Twisting your diseases is worth around 100 dps to a reaping build. It is also possibly to do it with a non-reaping build, but you have harder timing issues. In general the timing is more crucial than that of the GoD build, as you need to hit your diseases within half a second. (Normal diseases get 90% of the ticks of GoD diseases, twisted diseases get 97.5%) If you have a second DK in the raid you're likely to still have RoR on most of the BP ticks)

3) All the numbers are surprising dependent on latency and the exact sequence of events. I'm not sure the simulator is a good model of what happens in the real world.

4) As mentioned in the previous post there can be a lot of free RP going around allowing you to eat up what free GCDs you have.

ETA:
WRT hit rating and BiS gear. With the way the stat bonuses work, socketing a str-crit gem in a yellow socket to get a +4 or +6 strength bonus is an upgrade even if you were hit capped, in our BiS gear we have many good yellow gem sockets. As hit rating is considered the best stat as long as you are under the cap it makes sense to swap some of those gems for a str-hit gem. Coupled with the available hit enchants it's quite easy to reach the hit cap even if the base gear is low in hit. Expertise kind of works in the reverse way, as when you're socketing for expertise you're giving up some strength.

In that sense when I'm putting together a set of gear, I pretty much decide on what caps I want to reach, and weight the capable stats at whatever the best stat that shares the same base gem colour with it is worth.

As for orc vs Undead: in decent (early ICC) gear your ghoul alone will do more than 1K dps, and your pets around 1.5K dps total. Blood fury averages out at about 40 AP. And the expertise is worth about 40 rating. So the pet bonus is worth about 75 dps, blood fury about 25 dps and the expertise about 50 dps if you can use it optimally. Whether that's worth the money to change over is up to you.

The weapon recommendations in the BiS lists seem off. Using 2xT10 and 2xT9 and Bryntroll comes out well ahead of Cryptmaker and ~150dps ahead of Shadow's Edge. (Using the latest version of Kahorie's Sim).

I thought perhaps gear scaling and 4xT10 would cause the other weapons to pull ahead, so I simmed using the stats from a gearset of 4xT10 (Sanctified, non-heroic), ilvl258/264 offpieces, with DC and DBW trinkets. Bryntroll was still in the lead by 100dps.

I can confirm that, got same result in my gear and also with T10.251 and T10.264 templates.

I also noticed that non-reaping build did same (or more) dps than reaping one until BiS. Sim bug? Using 1.2.0.5, Unholy priority, no intro.

Maybe the sims haven't incorporated the changes to bryntroll yet. Other than that I have no idea.

Also Bornakk made a comment earlier this week about a nerf to all PPM mechanics, especially melee trinkets and weaponprocs like Fallen Crusader. Anyone know exactly what changed ?
Source

It's not double dipping apparently. This doesn't make much sense to me, however it might be working as intended since DK's would be pretty absurd with that debuff.

You have to factor in Boomkins and SPs give 3% chance to hit to raids when speced correctly. This is pretty big and all raids should have at least one of them.

Well as far as orcs go, Blood Fury is a nice little dps increase especially when popped with other things, such as BL, Haste Pots, Garg, etc...

The +5 expertise is pretty big when you consider you are now looking at only needing 21 expertise (173 expertise rating). Thats a savings of 42 expertise rating... *correct me if my numbers are wrong*

The ghoul issue. My ghoul does an average of 1k dps on boss' he's allowed to sit on and just beat up. So taking a 5% increase is pretty damn good. Thats a extra 50DPS + considering other procs buffs ect.. that might be going around.

Over all Orcs > All DPS wise, you gain so much more overall that it makes Orcs that much better then the rest of the classes.

I think you've answered your own question there. If it was double dipping they'd hotfix it pretty damn quick once unholy DKs were doing 20% (or whatever) more damage than everyone else as a vampire. I think they've probably seen enough SS scaling issues to be able to preempt one as obvious as that.

The setup also has 8 yellow sockets.


That only counts towards spell hit.

Edit: Because I can't count.

Hey guys, Just not sure if my math is wrong here or this is just overlooked due to better itemized options available, but shouldn't [Vengeance of the Forsaken] be at least somewhere in that top 17 list from the OP on this thread? I am thinking this only if all of the expertise on it doesn't bring you over the soft cap, which is the same premise the hit based trinkets are listed.

Thanks.

No. Exp is not needed that badly and the use effect takes too long to stack with a 2h weapon.

I think this is something that gets overlooked too often. I've been playing around with rawr & finding that I can minimize wasted item points on hit over cap by dropping a piece of hit gear & gemming for hit. Gaining hit 10-20 rating at a time will allow you to get a lot closer to the cap without going over than trying to get capped using gear with 50+ hit per item. This will also allow you to grab a socket bonus or two that you may otherwise skip. All that combined with the added benefit of being more flexible in what gear you can use make gemming hit an attractive option. I generally hear about gemming hit being a "bad" thing to do, but unless I'm missing something, I'm pretty sure it's a more efficient way to go about getting capped.

In reviewing our parse from last night I noticed that neither my ghoul nor our other DK's ghoul were receiving Leader of the Pack on several fights. Has anyone else experienced this? Could it possibly be required for the druid to re-shift once a new ghoul is summoned in order for them to receive the buff?

I was using an Unholy rotation rather than priority, but glad to see this confirmed. There's a difference in the way the various Sims are actually modeling things, certainly the Bryntroll proc.

In my current gear:
Using Kahorie's 1.2.0.5: Bryntroll > Shadow's Edge by and Non-Reaping > Reaping (Bryntroll proc ~5% total damage)

Using Team Robot Sim: Shadow's Edge > Bryntroll and Reaping > Non-Reaping (Bryntroll proc ~3% total damage)