For tanks: If you're in beta, please contribute there. If you're not, and think we have missed anything about which you've read, please let me know at EJ or pwnwear.
**Editing out Imp Icy Talons as after rereading the talent at this time its unlikely to effect rune cd, Also had my symbols reversed.**
Just a bit of thought about how the new haste could effects DK's.
The following math assumes the haste increase of regen rates follow the same math as spell cast time reduction.
x is the seconds of time needed to regenerate a rune fully.
Ut is the haste needed in talented Unholy presence + 1.
U is the haste needed in Unholy presence + 1.
F is the haste needed in Frost presence + 1.
The number to look at here, I think, is 7 seconds. If Blizzard hold true to their promise with combat ratings being much tougher to "max out" which I assume means most likely two things, diminishing returns and more rating required to up your stats. If this is the case, then the difference between getting 24% haste from rating and getting 43% from rating maybe even larger.
This brings up multiple questions.
First, is haste going to effect the GCD in general now instead of only spells? Unholy presence in beta no longer says it gives a .5 GCD reduction. The question I find myself asking is is this a tool tip misnomer, did they remove this function replacing it with the 10% rune CD decrease, or is it to account for an already present or soon to be present change in how haste effects melee classes and their GCD?
Second, if we're stuck with a 1.5 GCD on melee strikes, how useful is getting extra strikes when we will not be able to use all of our runic power? Or for that matter procs, And what if we do for some reason get off a FS/DC and we proc a refreshed rune?
Third, if our GCD is in some way reduced by haste will there come a point where a 10% increased rune refresh and attack speed will be greater than the 15% extra damage? If haste is not on diminishing returns then I think if its not better at all times it never will be better. However, if haste is on diminishing returns then I think at some point, and I suspect near 20% haste, it will be better to be in Unholy presence over Frost.
Fourth, how important in general is haste going to be for DK's. With the changes I think we might find that after a certain base amount of crit and strength that haste becomes our most important stat, but this all depends on the previous questions and their answers.
The number to look at here, I think, is 6 seconds. If Blizzard hold true to their promise with combat ratings being much tougher to "max out" which I assume means most likely two things, diminishing returns and more rating required to up your stats. If this is the case, then the difference between getting 21% haste from rating and getting 33% from rating maybe very large indeed.
This brings up multiple questions.
First, is haste going to effect the GCD in general now instead of only spells? Unholy presence in beta no longer says it gives a .5 GCD reduction. The question I find myself asking is is this a tool tip misnomer, did they remove this function replacing it with the 10% rune CD decrease, or is it to account for an already present or soon to be present change in how haste effects melee classes and their GCD?
Second, if we're stuck with a 1.5 GCD on melee strikes, how useful is getting extra strikes when we will not be able to use all of our runic power? Or for that matter Howling Blast procs, And what if we do for some reason get off a frost strike and we proc a refreshed rune?
Third, if our GCD is in some way reduced by haste will there come a point where a 10% increased rune refresh and attack speed will be greater than the 15% extra damage? If haste is not on diminishing returns then I think if its not better at all times it never will be better. However, if haste is on diminishing returns then I think at some point, and I suspect near 20% haste, it will be better to be in Unholy presence over Frost.
Fourth, how important in general is haste going to be for DK's but especially Frost DK's. With the changes I think we might find that after a certain base amount of crit and strength that haste becomes our most important stat, but this all depends on the previous questions and their answers.
Hey, that sure must have taken you a while to calculate and write down. But unfortunately this is very wrong and confusing. The 3rd line of your post pretty much says everything that follows is incorrect. Icy talons = melee haste. In live, it does not give you +25% haste or it doesn't lower your GDC by that amount either. Your melee swings simply hit 25% faster, and will not affect our runes.
Secondly, did i see your X = 10 secs? Because our runes Downtime in Cata is 20 secs baseline.
Question 1: Yes the .5 sec GDC is gone in Cata, replaced by a 10% haste bonus. So 10% haste on 20 sec runes should equal -2%= 18 secs. With improved UP you are looking at 17 secs.
Question 2: With new calculations you will find yourself with 2x rune downtime and half as much runic power. This pretty much answers your question.
Question 3 & 4:There is no real diminishing return to the haste stat on gear, but if you mean gemming haste over strength in order to use Frost presence... These questions are way too early to tell. Only an updated simulator should be used and we are far form that.
Hey, that sure must have taken you a while to calculate and write down. But unfortunately this is very wrong and confusing. The 3rd line of your post pretty much says everything that follows is incorrect. Icy talons = melee haste. In live, it does not give you +25% haste or it doesn't lower your GDC by that amount either. Your melee swings simply hit 25% faster, and will not affect our runes.
Secondly, did i see your X = 10 secs? Because our runes Downtime in Cata is 20 secs baseline.
Question 1: Yes the .5 sec GDC is gone in Cata, replaced by a 10% haste bonus. So 10% haste on 20 sec runes should equal -2%= 18 secs. With improved UP you are looking at 17 secs.
Question 2: With new calculations you will find yourself with 2x rune downtime and half as much runic power. This pretty much answers your question.
Question 3 & 4:There is no real diminishing return to the haste stat on gear, but if you mean gemming haste over strength in order to use Frost presence... These questions are way too early to tell. Only an updated simulator should be used and we are far form that.
I reread Imp Icy Talons and If you mean it does not give you haste at all, just improves your attack speed by 25%. Then I would say you may have a point.
As you can see from:
Originally Posted by Blizzard
The new rune system will change how runes regenerate, from filling simultaneously to filling sequentially. For example, if you use two Blood runes, then the first rune will fill up before the second one starts to fill up. Essentially, you have three sets of runes filling every 10 seconds instead of six individual runes filling every 10 seconds. (Haste will cause runes to fill faster.) Another way to think of this is having three runes that go up to 200% each (allowing extra "storage"), rather than six runes that go up to 100% each
10 seconds is correct for a 100% of each rune. It would take base 20 seconds to go from 0% to 200%.
How do you know the .5 GCD reduction is gone? Only from the tool tip, or has someone reported it? Also there is very little way of knowing if haste will effect GCd for everyone in Cataclysm, not just spells. While it may not be implemented yet (no idea whether it is or not) they very well could implement it later. I think my question still stands.
With Haste effecting rune refresh you are unlikely to have twice as much rune down time, even not taking into account the other changes.
Also, runic power and runes are going to change from the current model, even beyond the haste and the new rune refresh model. With the new runic empowerment any time we use a runic ability we have a 45% chance to refresh a fully depleted rune, spending this rune will take time and create more runic power to spend. Also Talents like Rime and Chill of the Grave, got changes to increase chance of proc or amount respectively.
While it may take a great amount of haste I do see a point where we run out of GCDs if we are limited to a 1.5 GCD.
I do mean diminishing returns, and it is too early to tell, but not the way you mean it. It is too early to tell because they are not finished with beta. If I remember correctly, it wasn't until the very end of the wrath beta that avoidance got its diminishing returns. Not that this beta has to follow the same model.
I think until we know beta is done saying anything will work a certain way is foolhardy. They could very well change anything about the game next week and probably already have on internal versions.
Third, if our GCD is in some way reduced by haste will there come a point where a 10% increased rune refresh and attack speed will be greater than the 15% extra damage? If haste is not on diminishing returns then I think if its not better at all times it never will be better. However, if haste is on diminishing returns then I think at some point, and I suspect near 20% haste, it will be better to be in Unholy presence over Frost.
Fourth, how important in general is haste going to be for DK's. With the changes I think we might find that after a certain base amount of crit and strength that haste becomes our most important stat, but this all depends on the previous questions and their answers.
I think you may be right about UH presence for Frost DK's, the irony is, that Frost presence could well outweigh UH presence for an UH DK due to its mastery being disease damage, and UH presence has no impact on disease ticks.
My basic (probably flawed) theorycraft was as follows
Our choice is 15% faster attacks (with 2 points) or 10% more damage from Frost presence, so everything that is affected by UH presence will make 5% more DPS everything that isnt will make 10% less. UH mastery is built around disease damage, so diseases will be a major part of our damage in endgame.
Lets assume 40% damage from DoTs/Diseases fair?
40% x 0.1 = 4% increase in DPS in Frost presence
Everything else is 60% of our damage
60% x 0.05 = 3% increase in DPS in UH presence
All of this gets worse as mastery further increases disease damage, the only way this presence will work is if it is a true 15% haste affecting everything from rune regen times, to faster dot ticks. That is the only way it can compete with a flat damage increase talent.
Haste is clearly superior to UH presence, and Frost Presence will allow room for more haste.
Thus far experimenting, I am finding UH presence giving me too many runes / too much RP to utilize, at 83 / 670 haste. And this is without being able to use a proc watch addon for sudden doom procs or RE procs - such addons would improve DPS even further.
500 mastery rating at 83 is giving me about 5 additional points of mastery, which would give 12.5% extra disease damage. Things are too broken still to come to any conclusions for the time being, but haste appears to give more DPS than mastery would per point thus far if I DPS in frost presence.
There's really only one significant choice to make in unholy talent builds right now, and that's choosing between BCB and NoCS - as dual wielding is quite viable due to unholy's mastery not being affected by weapon choice. Both talents benefit from haste and don't benefit at all from mastery. Haste affects so much more of our damage as unholy that I can't see mastery being a stat to choose over haste with the current scaling. With enough sudden doom procs, we are GCD capped even in frost presence when dual wielding; I have been able to dps on a boss dummy for three minutes straight without any downtime simply due to sudden doom and runic empowerment procs constantly giving me more buttons to mash. The playstyle is virtually identical to the old DW death coil spam priority button mashing playstyle, which I enjoyed more than any other.
I'd like to see mastery be a more important stat for unholy than just a damage increase on a portion of our damage, as if we were to go live right now haste would be practically the only gear stat we would want or reforge for after hit rating.
It is almost impossible to tell how Sudden doom will impact on GCD's as it doesn't work at present.
Sure it procs, but it still consumes RP or won't fire if you dont have 40 rp.
Due to it consuming the rp, we cannot tell just how badly gcd capped we actually are, if we have a major glut of resource, then it clearly needs a lot more work.
It is almost impossible to tell how Sudden doom will impact on GCD's as it doesn't work at present.
Liburrito's melee swing hits Highlord's Nemesis Trainer for 1817 Physical.(Glancing)
Liburrito gains Liburrito's Sudden Doom.
[etc]
Liburrito's Sudden Doom fades from Liburrito.
Liburrito casts Death Coil at Highlord's Nemesis Trainer.
Liburrito's Death Coil hits Highlord's Nemesis Trainer for 7795 Shadow.(Critical)
This was tested with me at 100 RP. I stayed at 100RP. I also tested with myself at sub-40 RP. Sudden doom procs, death coil button lights up, press button, death coil fires and does damage.
It is working as of today (and has been working for two weeks now, since I first got on).
As Unholy stands right now it looks like a darker version of Enhancement Shamans. If there are no RP problems then a build such as this will come out on top due to auto-attacks and the talents that proc from them. Some napkin math I've done for 2H weapon versus 2 1H weapons seems to show them neck and neck as far as auto-attacks go. Instant weapon-based strikes favor 2H weapons but the mechanics of BCB and SD seem to favor DW more. Don't forget that haste will also affect how fast diseases tick, meaning haste and mastery will have some sort of tie-in at least.
10 seconds in, Sudden doom procs, fire death coil, consumes RP, SD stays procced, wont fire a DC.
That video was taken on live within the last hour.
You must have some other issue because I saw you mashing the DC button with over half RP and it still wasn't firing, sudden doom or not. I doubt it's the issue but the old rune strike tie-in macros (and a lot of macros) don't work anymore or work in beta obviously, which would result in errors like that.
You must have some other issue because I saw you mashing the DC button with over half RP and it still wasn't firing, sudden doom or not. I doubt it's the issue but the old rune strike tie-in macros (and a lot of macros) don't work anymore or work in beta obviously, which would result in errors like that.
There is no place in that video where I am casting DC where I have enough RP and it doesnt fire. There is no other issue, Sudden Doom is bugged, it has been bugged for the last 3 months, and it is still bugged. There are no macros, and of course rune strike macro doesn't work as it is now on the GCD, hence not being used.
I am watching the video you linked. At 0:14 sudden doom procs and you have 72 RP. Your death coil misses the dummy, and you go down 20 RP to 53 (going up from butchery, I assume). From 0:17 to 0:21 the death coil button in your secondary bar is flashing from being hit repeatedly with you at 54-58 RP and a coil is not firing. Sudden doom falls off at about 0:23. You go up to about 80 RP from ability use, then cast a coil using up 40 RP normally at 0:30.
ed: I did all 3 available cata dungeons with guildies tonight (love stonecore). Sudden Doom worked in all 3. It procced with me at 0 RP and the coil button became available, and a coil fired when I pressed the button. The ability works fine and I have never had a problem with it. Perhaps specific beta servers have issues (I am on Gilneas), or it messes up should the free coil miss somehow, but I am not seeing any issues with the ability whatsoever.
0:17 to 0:21 I have 34 runic power, not 54, if it was 54 the blue bar would be well above half with a 100rp resource pool, like I say, just because it works for you does not mean it is not bugged for others.
You have never had a problem, good, glad to hear it, doesn't change the fact it IS bugged, and I have video proof. No need to try and come up with an explanation, I am sure the devs will fix it like they did the RE bug with Death Runes.
DK is not my specialty, but when I tried to play with my DK alt on the Beta realm I was quite amazed by the possibility of making a never-ending rotation of Scourge Strike and Festering Strikes (placing some Death Coils in the middle). I understand that using Runing Empowered death runes for additional Scourge Strikes results in higher dps than simple SS-FS-SS-FS. But since an intensive use of Festering Strikes (basically at least one every 6s) results in diseases never fading (and thus no low dps time when refreshing those), maybe using some death runes for Festering strikes is not such a stupid idea.
DK is not my specialty, but when I tried to play with my DK alt on the Beta realm I was quite amazed by the possibility of making a never-ending rotation of Scourge Strike and Festering Strikes (placing some Death Coils in the middle). I understand that using Runing Empowered death runes for additional Scourge Strikes results in higher dps than simple SS-FS-SS-FS. But since an intensive use of Festering Strikes (basically at least one every 6s) results in diseases never fading (and thus no low dps time when refreshing those), maybe using some death runes for Festering strikes is not such a stupid idea.
What are you thoughts on this?
It is hard to say at present as until the damage is balanced we won't know which is better overall.
In my opinion it will be balanced so that SS is worth more then FeS on a rune for rune basis, and reapplying diseases will be worth while. If I am wrong, then FeS could become top of the prio list in our new FCFS type rotation.
So much is in the balance at the moment, will RE stay as is? Will it be changed to proc a death rune? Will we stick with this new rune system or will they revert to the old one with a longer rune regen time? The silence from GC is deafening
One of the tooltips shown by MMO-Champ says Festering Strike grants "Up to 6 seconds" longer diseases. Is it truly granting 6 seconds total for that disease cycle, or 6 seconds every time FeS is used? If it's granting 6 seconds every time it's used it might be a bug.
Keeping diseases up indefinitely with Festering Strike sounds like a bit too much effort. It'd require a ton of haste (sub-6second rune regeneration), and you'd have to take away from Scourge Strikes to do it. It would be nice, though, to have someone in beta test just how long you can keep diseases up with Festering Stike, to see if we'll eventually hit DRs with the disease extension.
No, there are no diminishing returns on Festering Strike's disease extension. It adds 6 seconds every time used. Blizzard almost always uses "up to" wording just so people don't get confused or whatever when, for instance, they use FeS on a Worgen and only see diseases increased by (6*.85=) 5.1 seconds.
But, yeah, you can keep diseases up essentially endlessly with FeS if you apply them originally with Outbreak, don't use Death Runes on Scourge Strike (or anything else), make sure to utilize RE procs to maximize FeS use, and so on. To be clear though, it's far from optimal to do so, as the damage sacrifice from renewing diseases manually isn't all that large. Besides, in normal play, FeS is more than sufficient enough to ensure all of our disease applications can be done via Outbreak (assuming it's intended to proc Ebon Plague), and if they succeed in uncapping us on GCDs, diseases lasting any longer than that would be completely unnecessary.
I was playing with the Talent calculator for the latest build of the beta, and it struck me how few options we had for a sub spec in the Beta. There was nothing really exciting to pick up in the first two tiers of Blood or Ice. Also, I wasn't thrilled with the second tier of Unholy, out of the 7 points to choose from, 4 are PVP based.
Hopefully it'll even out now that we seem to be getting some forward momentum going, and I *am* intrigued by this transforming Ghoul mechanic.
None of the trees have many exciting talents in the first two tiers for subspecs, damage-wise. Blood has BCB, Frost has... nothing, and Unholy has Epidemic.
The recent changes to the Unholy tree are pretty nice (aside from needing 35 or 36 talent points to get all the damage talents, which means they're likely to trim is down a bit more still), so hopefully soon they'll adjust Frost and Blood some and then deal with making the first two tiers for each tree a little more appealing for subspecs.
I definitely like where Shadow Infusion and Dark Transformation are going. Unholy is actually turning out to be pretty cool looking compared to how boring it is right now on live.
Unholy is definitely fun, but there's still a lot of tweaking needed for it to be viable. In the current build, ghouls aren't scaling with str/stam so my ghoul still had 20K HP, and the playstyle is still very much "button mash with a diseases -> sudden doom proc -> SS -> DC -> BS to proc death runes priority", making it rather similar to the old DC spam DW builds. In fact, in a couple brief dummy tests, an FCFS "dark transformation -> mash whatever button lights up and never use any 2-rune attacks" system gave me the same DPS numbers as a more intelligent system did. The death strike changes drastically reduced unholy's survivability in questing and PVP as well. I don't play frost so I'm not sure if 2H frost is viable or not, but unholy is still somewhat of a mess and needs a fair bit of work.
That said comparing numbers with some other classes/specs, our DPS is definitely going to be competitive. Third party addons being enabled allowed me to use recount (current live version appears to work fine in beta) to test things and get a better idea of what works and what doesn't.
None of the trees have many exciting talents in the first two tiers for subspecs, damage-wise. Blood has BCB, Frost has... nothing, and Unholy has Epidemic.
The recent changes to the Unholy tree are pretty nice (aside from needing 35 or 36 talent points to get all the damage talents, which means they're likely to trim is down a bit more still), so hopefully soon they'll adjust Frost and Blood some and then deal with making the first two tiers for each tree a little more appealing for subspecs.
Exciting is a relative term really. Runic Power Mastery could be quite potent with the changes to DKs since being able to cast three or more Death Coils in a row is rather nice for its damage, the chance to refresh a depleted rune, and now for Shadow Infusion too.
Right now it takes 32 talent points to get the straight-up DPS talents. It'd be 31 if Necrosis and Desecration (or Resilient Infection) were switched but I'm guessing the placement of Desec and RI are to give Frost and Blood more options. The value of Magic Suppression will have to be theorycrafted a bit more extensively since it may or may not compete with BCB or even Necrosis.
So I messed around on the PTR and heres some basic data so far:
1:HB now cost 1F rune and no CD.
2:Runic empowerment is nice but the random rune regeneration is more of a pain to frost than other specs because OB uses 2 different runes.
3:I completely removed OB from my rotation and sepc, useing OB is a DPS loss currently because HB hits harder than OB and that is with out any mastery rating to boost my frost damage. In this siuation DD FF UU=3 OB with a proc chance or 4 HB 2 PS and more RP.
With me doing a HB/PS/BS DPS priorty list while spaming FS when runes are on CD and droping GoD for HB so it applies FF and droping OB glpyh for IT for more FF damage my dps is alot higher, runes are easier to manage. I have so much RP its not funny. In its current form DW will be top DPS over 2H for 2 reasons and not because of ToT. Better stat maxing with 2 weapons and useing ROFC and RI.
HB hits harder than OB and that is with out any mastery rating to boost my frost damage.
08/23/10, 9:44 AM
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