Unholy 4.0 first raid impressions

Well, I've had a chance to do more than just hit a dummy on PTR finally and while I'm a few weeks late, I'll start by posting on how things are going in my first raids as unholy. While I also realize that things are still going to be changing as we move towards Cataclysm and 85, it's still worth looking at how the mechanics changes are affecting us in raids now.

First of all, yes, people are seeing rather dramatic increases in dps overall. Unholy is doing well, and while the theorycraft says frost should be on par with unholy, due to bugs and some factors that affect actual raid conditions, unholy remains potentially the top dps spec.

AND, that means bupkis. DPS at 80 is unimportant. Sure, it's still fun for the next month, but it's completely meaningless. Blizzard will continue turning knobs and you should expect your dps to go up and down accordingly. What matters is what we'll be doing at 85, so I'll write less about maximizing dps (I know, quite a shock coming from Hine) and more about playstyle for now. While I AM properly gemmed/enchanted/reforged, I'm not even trying to do max dps per se for now (for example as I mentioned earlier, I've already dropped blacksmithing and have leveled mining which is a significant dps loss).

So, in no particular order, a few musings on unholy in raids at the moment.

1. Unholy aoe is still very strong. While they messed around with aoe a lot, and nerfed a lot of coefficients, unholy has several very powerful tools in it's arsenal. Death & Decay remains an extremely powerful tool, especially for large groups. Diseases are at a reasonable level right now, and while they will be tweaked from time to time, Blizzard continues to say that pets and diseases are central to the spec. So naturally, we'll be pestilencing diseases to extra mobs for the forseeable future. Blood boil also is very effective aoe with larger groups, particularly when combined with the pestilence and blood boil glyphs. Even with smaller groups (2-3 larger mobs) unholy can be effective with a Dark Transformed ghoul cleaving like a mini Fury warrior.

2. Unholy pets are insanely good. I have a feeling they're 'too good,' which eventually will result in nerfs. I hope for unholy's sake that Blizz can find a happy medium. The ghoul alone will account for well over 20% of your damage as unholy, while gargoyle and army chip in extra dps as well. I'm very very fond of how the ghoul synergizes with the unholy spec now. Not only is the Dark Transformation (DT) such a cool new toy, it's visually impressive and is very powerful combined with heroism or unholy frenzy.

Of course, the strength of pets is also a significant concern for any fights like Blood Queen Lanathel, where our pets don't get the same buffs we do, making unholy very weak for those fights. I really hope Blizz pulls their head out on this one and lets pets get the appropriate buffs for all their cool new fights.

Pet management will separate the women from the girls in Cataclysm (sure, rune/rp management will too, but pets will really differentiate the goods from the greats). You want to use your DT as often as possible, but there will be times when it will be a good idea to wait for a cleave opportunity for line it up with buffs. I had macroed it to several attacks, but am putting it on it's own keybinding for now so I can have more control over it. I've seen discussion of maximizing uptime by pooling runic power when the cooldown is up for DT, but that too has to be done with caution, because hitting Death Coil repeatedly is a dps loss due to losing Runic Empowerment uptime. Also we'll need to figure out when it's better to get gargoyle up as quickly as possible on boss fights vs getting DT going as quickly as possible (it's very difficult to try to do both). Interesting times.

3. New talent trees. To be honest, I'm not a big fan. Yes, I've read ad nauseum from Blues about how we 'didn't really have a choice' before because we always found the ideal cookie cutter spec anyway, but halving our talents still just feels like a ripoff to me, especially while leveling where each 'ding' meant new shinies to play with. Additionally, we don't have the opportunity to go as deeply into trees other than our designated specialty, which I think could potentially have added lots of good flavor to our specs. Ah well. I do like some of the new talents, just not particularly the way Blizz is giving them to us.
While I'm on talents, I've said that I LOVE Dark Transformation. I DO I DO indeed. :) It's almost as good as my favorite trinket (Deathbringer's Will for those of you who may have missed it). Additionally, I like how the talents interact with each other and allow greater synergy with pets. They certainly make Scourge Strike a beast, especially when coupled with the prime glyphs. However, I still have one major major disappointment; Unholy Blight. Like so many, I miss the old UB and wish they could do something cool/fun with it like it used to be. Shoot, I'd be happy with almost anything, just not the terribly weak, boring, passive and generally almost useless tiny dot it has been for the past year.

4. Single target dps: AKA, the epeen-measuring yardstick by which our 'goodness' or 'badness' is demonstrated for all to see: I think we'll be ok. I've already said the numbers don't matter right now. So, while unholy DKs are posting Saurfang parses well over 20k, I don't really care about that right now. What I do see is that unholy has a manageable way of approching such fights. It will be even better when we have outbreak, but even so, it's really not too bad. We start off with Icy Touch and Plague Strike for diseases, then alternate between SS, FS, and DC. While it's fairly simple - and not that different from before - for some reason I prefer it. It used to be that we'd dump runic power at the 'end' of a rotation, but now you want to space out death coils whenever possible. I'm still getting used to it, but you'll see how wonderful it can be to keep those rune refreshes going at a hugely accelerated rate. I do very much like that they changed the rune requirements for SS to be a single unholy rune, and FS to be blood/frost. It very much simplifies them so that we can line them up well. The nuances will come in time (fun stuff like how to use blood tap and all that jazz), but for now the basics are in place and working well.

This obviously is not a 'how to' for unholy dps - elitist jerks already has well-written guides on that - but an over all 'feel' for where unholy is. And overall I'm fairly pleased.

Now, if only I could name my ghoul!

DPS Scaling in ICC: The Numbers Are In

And it's not pretty!
I've crunched the numbers, and my primary question - how have DPS DKs scaled in relation to other classes - has been resoundingly answered. In addition, loads of additional findings and questions have been raised by my trip into Dataland.

THE METHOD:
I took the top ten dps of each class/spec for each boss fight on normal ICC25. I obtained an average dps for each spec on each fight. You can easily examine each boss to see which fights are 'melee-friendly,' 'ranged friendly,' and which classes do well on specific fights. While certain strange events occur and can skew the data, like Dusk's crazy speed kill of Lady Deathwhisper, there is enough data here to smooth out any bumps. Regarding the above, two marksmen hunters for the LDW fight did very well - doing more than 5k better than any other hunters. This made hunters look better overall, but averaged across all 120 data points (10 hunters for each of the 12 fights), hunters still were found to be about the 5th best dps class overall.
In the end, I hand-entered 4,200 points of data, giving a very good sample size from which to draw conclusions about how each class/spec is scaling as guilds continue to progress and gear up in ICC.
Remember, I chose the top ten dps because I'm interested in what the maximum dps potential is - so even if it's not realistic for every class to get power infusion, or tricks/hysteria all the time, or to have the luxury of staying on the boss the whole time, we're looking at what CAN be done under the right circumstances.

Destruction warlocks, survival hunters, and blood DKs did so poorly on examination of normal modes, that I saved myself the effort and didn't calculate their scores in heroic modes.

THE RESULTS:

EDIT:
I just noticed my Sindragosa data for heroic got pasted over the Lich King info. I'll check this and repost if anything changes. As far as DKs go, though, this will only hurt. Their best fight in ICC relatively speaking was Sindragosa.

1. DKs are in a sorry state. Unfortunately, my hunch was borne out, conclusively. On examination of Normal modes, DKs started in the middle of the pack through Festergut's tank n spank, and faded fast to the end. By the end of the 12 fights, the BEST DK spec, unholy, was beaten out by at least one spec from EVERY class except poor, poor shammies. Unholy came in as the 11th-best dps spec in the game, and frost was 14th. The by-now-abandoned blood spec came in dead last - 19th - of the specs I looked at.

By the way, I did eyeball beast mastery, arms, and subtlety, but as expected they were so poor I didn't even put in the effort to add them to the chart. (well, arms did ok on some fights, but fury is so vastly superior that it wasn't worth it).

In any case, the expansion-long public perception that Death Knight are overpwered can be conclusively rejected at this point. THEY ARE THE SECOND-WORST (OR THIRD, MAYBE) DPS CLASS IN THE GAME right now.

Heroic modes wasn't much better. All of the 'Shadowmourne classes' (Warriors, Pallies, DKs) did see some improvement in heroic modes, but DKs once again scaled the poorest, by far. In fact, they still ended up the third-worst dps class in the game, barely passing priests, despite the fact that if you don't have a Shadowmourne, you can't even get on these charts. I didn't look at every fight, but on every one I did look at (Saurfang, Festergut, Sindragosa), EVERY Warrior, Paladin, and DK on the charts had the legendary. Do you scale an entire class around the assumption that they have the (very rare) weapon? Even so, DKs come out smelling putrescent.

2. The rich get richer. It's been well-known from vanilla and through two expansions that warriors scale well with gear. The proof is here. Blizzard has stated their goal for all dps classes to be as close as possible - within about 1-2% of each other, with the 'pure dps classes' on top.

The 'pures' didn't do too badly with the four classes filling the 2nd through 5th spots on the class charts, with the exception of warriors. Warriors finished 2% better than the second-best class (spanning the stated goal for all classes from their nearest competitor) and more than 17% better than the poor enhancement shammies. On heroic modes, they got even richer, finishing a full 6% better than second-best, and over 25% better than enhance shammies. As a hybrid class, that's hardly in line with Blizz' goals, and hardly fair to other classes. I'm not QQing here - just presenting the information. I like warriors, but clearly their dps is out of line with 'balance' in the game.

In heroic modes, Retribution used their Shadowmournes to leapfrog several 'pure' classes to finish in the third spot. Unholy did benefit from the legendary, but just not nearly as much as the other two classes.

And as has already been stated, the dps for shammies was much worse than any other class. Obviously, Blizz' announcement that there will be other heroism classes paves the way for shaman to get a big boost - and rightfully so.

3. Other observations: (some of this I'm sure many of you knew already; I'm no expert on every class):
    -I was surprised fire mages did so much better than arcane, particularly in better gear. They were convincingly the second best spec in the game. Arcane did quite poorly in heroic modes, dropping six spots.
    -Overall, the melee vs ranged divide was well-balanced. There was a fairly consistent split between ranged and melee overall, and there are several fights in ICC which favored one or the other. Decent balance.
    -Rogues can't complain too much overall. I've seen lots of concerns with how they've scaled. Obviously, combat is doing fine, so one can't complain too much. Of course, if one is referring to mutilate, then yes, rogues have a point, but at least they have ONE spec that  is doing well.
    -Balance isn't scaling well. Balance druids did fairly well in normal modes, but hardly saw any increase in dps in heroic modes, and saw their relative position on the charts drop significantly.
    -Shadow priests aren't as bad as their reputation. But, they could do better. They still ended up as the second or third worst class/spec, down there with DKs on the junk pile.
    -Demonology warlocks aren't doing too badly. Yes, affliction is the 'best' spec in most cases, but Demo is actually viable, and proved itself to be better than destro. Destruction - once the 'only' spec for raiding locks, has fallen on hard times.
    -Blizzard needs to allow pets to benefit from buffs. Fights like Blood Queen Lana'thel really hurt when your pet doesn't get any help from the buff you get.

DISCUSSION:
I'm not going to try to cover nearly everything here.
In fact, I'm only going to talk briefly about DK scaling, so for additional discussion, please leave a comment, or link this post in a forum somewhere :)
Why are DKs scaling so poorly?
1. Pets scale poorly. As a pet class, we may benefit from increased crit or other buffs, but the pets don't.
2. Knee-jerk nerfs. I've written about this previously. Early in beta and to some extent in Tier 7 content, DKs were certifiably overpowered. Since then, throughout the expansion there has been a perception that DKs are too strong, and that doing good dps is 'facerolling.' More recently, two abilities that needed adjusting - Tier 9 set bonus, and Scourge Strike - gave the impression again of being overpowered, but were nerfed to the point that the class has fallen behind. Frost DW was nerfed during Tier 8 content and still hasn't recovered even with some 3.3 buffs.
3. Other melee classes get more benefit from gear. Because DKs are a hybrid melee and spell based class, improvements in gear do less for them than the other melee classes. There are several ways to potentially fix this, from buffing talents that increase spell damage more from attack power, to adjusting the percentage of physical damage on abilities like Scourge Strike even more. Increasing the coefficient on obliterate etc is also an option.
4. In any case, Blizzard has made a commitment to continue balancing the classes. I hope they're monitoring the data that's readily available, and can give a little help to the poor classes (which right now are shaman, DK, spriest, and balance druids) and bring warriors back in line with other hybrids. I know they're focused on Cataclysm at this point, but there's lots of time to improve the raiding experience in this expansion still, and I hope they don't abandon us to our plight.

Enjoy the data, all you nerds out there! :)

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Yes, the title of this post is shamelessly stolen both from David Bowie and Jim Butcher's latest Dresden Files installment. Butcher, by the way, is my favorite current fiction author, and he must be doing something right as his last several books have all topped the NYT bestseller list upon release.

However, the Changes referred to here, of course, are all about the the Cataclysm looming on our Wow horizon.

If you haven't seen some of the changes planned for the next expasion, start at MMO-Champion.com. For class-specific info, there's quite a bit at Elitist Jerks, as usual. Consider's unholy thread at EJ has links to his alpha involvement and the Cata EJ discussion threads.

What to think, what to think?

First, the obvious.

1) Rune changes. As I understand it, the primary difference is that it will allow us to 'pool' resources a bit more. As we all know, in the current system if you don't use a rune within 2 seconds of it being available, it's 'wasted' and a dps loss. In theory at least, we can use resources as soon as they're available, but not using them to a point may not hurt too much.
I've let this change marinate for a bit and I've decided I like it. It may keep us from being quite as gcd-bound as we have been (although some people disagree). It should allow us to better time combinations of moves for best effect (as a long-time combat rogue, I remember pooling energy as slice & dice ticks down, then reapplying it and going to town with several Sinister Strikes - especially when paired with adrenaline rush and blade flurry).
What remains to be seen is exactly how the mechanic will work - especially on live. Still, if it goes forward, it will dramtically change the way we play our class.

2) AOE is getting nerfed. Hard. For DKs, diseases spread by pestilence are doing half damage. Wandering plague has been halved. Of course, it looks like every other class is getting the same treatment as well.
I guess this is okay in theory. People often complain that as one overgears content in particular everything will devolve into aoe-fests.
Make no mistake, we'll still see heroics - and some raids - being pulled en masse and aoe'd down, but Blizz' move of nerfing aoe may slow that approach somewhat. The idea, of course, is to force us to use strategy and cc to get past trash and boss encounters. I get it, and I think it's a good thing. Still, I'll miss some of those eye-popping numbers like we saw on Onyxia's or Sindragosa's whelps *sigh* :)

3) Coefficient changes. This one you may not be as well aware of, but most abilities are getting a significant overhaul. So far on alpha we see:

Wandering Plague has had its damage halved.
Diseases spread from Pestilence deal half damage.
Scourge Strike has a base 140% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 70%.
Heart Strike has a base 100% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 50%.
Frost Strike has a base 110% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 55%.
Blood Strike has a base 80% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 40%.
Plague Strike has a base 100% weapon damage modifier, up from the current 50%.
Icy Touch has had its damage doubled.
Howling Blast only costs a Frost rune, has had its damage doubled, and now deals triple damage against targets affected by Hungering Cold.
Death Coil has had its damage doubled.
Frost Fever and Blood Plague have a base duration of 30 seconds, up from the current 15.
Ghoul Frenzy now last for 1 minute and heals your pet for 120% of its health over the duration of the buff, up from the current duration of 30 seconds and the current heal of 60%.
Rune Strike is now instant.
Ebon Plague now increases magical damage by 8%, down from 13%.
Death and Decay now costs a Blood Rune, down from a Blood, Unholy, and Frost rune.
Corpse Explosion now costs an Unholy Rune, changed from runic power.

Besides the aoe ramifications, one may think "whoa, DKs are getting hugely buffed!" Most of the single target abilities are seeing their damage doubled.
The short version is: no, we're not getting buffed. Sorry. The rune system changes - if interepreted correctly - mean that the coefficient increases will equate to roughly 'equal' sustained damage.
The difference is, we should see much improved burst. I can live with that. In fact, I rather like the idea.


Obviously, with all of this in development, I'm sure we'll see tons of tweaks in the numbers before live. In fact, it's fairly likely that one or more of these major changes will themselves see a major overhaul.
As opposed to my rather 'meh' response to the reported 'new' abilities, I'm positive about our mechanics changes and look forward to seeing them in action.

One thing is certain.

Everything changes. But that's another song. ;)

Sometimes, Elitist Jerks are Wrong!!! (*Shock*)

Or: Haste Is Actually Pretty Good Right Now.

Most of you know how often I reference Elitist Jerks. There's tons of valuable information there for every class and it's the first, middle, and last (with maybe a few peeks elsewhere) site I go to for information about min/maxing my role/class play. The thread 'managers' such as Consider generally do a fantastic job keeping the original post updated with the 'state of the union' information so you can just look at that post for a jumping off point for DK info.

However, EJ can be wrong, and Consider's unholy thread - the 'CANON' of accepted unholy dps - was wrong recently.

First, a brief story.

During Tier 9 (I know, hard to remember that far back), Scourge Strike was not that strong, even if it was our main ability (that was before the physical and shadow portions were split off). Other than that, unholy was as it had been for some time - good, but slightly behind blood for single target dps while being supreme on aoe fights. The accepted spec was something like 14/0/57 or 17/0/54. I ran the canonized spec and rotations (including the delicious glyph of disease) for quite some time, when on a lark I equipped two one-handed weapons. I didn't change my spec. I just used one-handers. I did more dps on dummies - about 300-400 more. Hmmm. I tried it on boss fights in TOC, again, not changing anything except one vs two weapons. Dual-wielding was 400-500 dps better. I very slightly modified my spec (dropping the two-handed blood talent), and away I went with DW. I did fantastic dps, blowing away everyone in the three guilds I spent time in during that period (yes, that was while I was trying to find a new guild). Elitist Jerks 'experts' never caught on to that trend. I didn't care - I found it to be better, so I used it. Then when ICC opened, Blizz 'fixed' Scourge Strike to be more powerful - favoring the big 2-hander, and they gave us more armor penetration on gear, improving physical strikes even more. I went back to the 'traditional' 2H weapons. But the moral of this story is, EJ can be wrong.

Back to the present.

Kudos to Dreddnaught from my guild in identifying the current problem early. He'd been /whispering me for several weeks about how he felt haste was much better than the theorycrafters were saying. He had been testing it via simulations and looking at different gear, and found that haste was much more valuable for frost and unholy/frost subspec than was being said at EJ. He even made several posts about it over at wow official forums.

Turns out, he was right. Recently, Consider's front page post alludes to stat changes that may affect gear and perhaps even gemming choices. For frost subpec, haste is actually better than armor penetration, especially as gear improves. He now has stat weights seperated for blood subspec and for frost subspec.

This isn't as aggregious an error as some might think. First, to err is human (cut us all some slack eh? :)). Second, going against armor penetration in favor of haste goes against accepted thinking about DKs since their inception. Haste has been a poor stat in part because big two-handed swings don't proportionally get a lot out of speeding up a bit, and haste hasn't affected all that many of our abilities. But with the changes to Icy Talons and with gear scaling in general, haste IS in fact a very strong stat for DKs that take it.

We DKs have loved to talk about armor penetration scaling - which is indeed very good - but we have forgotten how impressively haste can scale as well. Haste ultimately scales better than just about anything because of the way it stacks. Even with arpen, there is a limit - you can cap it in great gear. With haste, talents and buffs stack multiplicatively, and there's almost always more you can keep adding for more improvement. While casters may talk about haste capping (getting spells below the gcd in cast time), for melee that doesn't apply. So, ultimately we shouldn't have been too surprised when it turned out to be so good. I for one am happy about it. It gives us three really nice stats (strength of course, and arpen is still very solid), and options for using both 2H and DW weapons. Still, what will it change? Answer: very little. Herkumi's War Token from emblems becomes a very good trinket. A few items with haste on them are more attractive. Should you gem haste? NO. Strength is still better, and will be from now until Cataclysm.

Conclusion: EJ CAN be wrong, but fortunately they eventually seem to get most things right. Sometimes you have to do what works best for you rather than go with the cookie-cutter info, but it's a very good place to start.


p.s., I'm still thinking about trying frost DW dps, but haven't had the opportunity. One reason is we're doing mostly heroic content and any one-handers that drop go to rogues/enh first so I still only have crappy one-handers. Second, dps is demonstrably NOT better for frost. World of logs parses has them 500-1000 dps less than unholy on many (but not all) fights. That's no excuse to not try it, so I expect I eventually I will do it, but I'm not eager. Maybe next week.

Frost Delayed

I still plan to do a post on Frost dps for 3.3.3, but I'll have to wait a week to do it.

My raid is progressing into some of the more difficult heroic 25man bosses and needs me performing at my best, and we already have a frost DK for the buffs. On 10-man, I'm having to tank for now - although after reset I may be able to go back to dps. When that group has settled in a little more, I may be able to go frost for more than 5-man heroics.

Comments on this blog and elsewhere have certainly been positive, and my guildies going frost have done well. I've seen claims that it may beat out unholy for dps but I haven't seen that quite yet, while it's apparent that it is competitive.

I look forward to giving frost dps a try, it'll just have to wait a week.

Also, thanks for the comments on the Cataclysm preview. I'll try to remember to address them this evening. I was out of town over the weekend.

Heroic ICC: Week One

Thursday's raid (as you know) culminated in a rather joyous celebration of my guild's first 25-man kill. Suh-weeeet!!!

My ten-man run has also made some changes. I had discussed with the other 'leaders' of my Friday night ICC10 regarding our lack of ability to clear the whole instance and still have time remaining to kill Arthas. We'd also been plagued by inconsistent attendance, leading to weekly pugging and raid starts at 10pm. Thus, we made the decision to move to Sun/Monday nights, parallel to our other two guild 10-man groups. This also meant that three of our group members would be unable to attend, since they had mains/alts in those other groups. A difficult decision, but we went with it, and saw a lot of interest in the two day run. This Friday we decided on a last hurrah, and decided to extend the lockout, giving us a full night to work on Arthas. Once again we didn't start until 10pm due to difficulty in filling the group. We had several alts, plus a few newer guildies who'd never seen the fight before. We re-learned it together and killed Arthas for the first time on 10-man, 24 hours after our 25-man kill! Very nice. Now, both my 10- and 25-man raids will be in heroic ICC. OOOh, can't wait.

In any case, this week I'll be raiding as blood. I bit the bullet and installed armor pen gems in every slot that had previously held strength. About 2400g later, I'm ready to go. I might have to tweak things just a little more to hit the armor pen cap, but I should be ready for raids tomorrow. Blood spec clearly will lose out on overall damage meters, as the aoe from blood on trash can't compete with unholy or frost, but I do want to see how it does on boss fights. The biggest problem with blood is that I can't just switch to unholy for trash as my gem slots are all arpen - unless I get a complete armor set for strength and one for arpen - but that's not happening soon as I'm still working on tank gear.

So, hopefully by the end of the week we'll have installment #2 of dps DKs in 3.3.3! Let There Be Blood!

Unholy spec comparison for 3.3.3

So, I've done a full raid (ICC25 Marrowgar - Sindragosa, some VOA or TOGC) with the two 'cookie-cutter' specs for unholy derived from Elitist Jerks' theory/simcrafting:
blood subspec 14/0/57 (with reaping)
frost subspec 0/17/54 (no reaping)
How did it look?
I've already talked about the blood subspec. It was very solid! I was able to put in a top-10 World of Logs parse worldwide, and generally had both solid single-target and aoe dps. As you can see from the Festergut screenie, I did well, and helping me was very solid raid dps (including the top-10 fury warrior and excellent lock). Overall, I'm both comfortable and happy with the spec.

Recount dps actually lower than the WOL parse (unusual!)

How about the frost subspec? I didn't practice with it much. The only 'major' difference with the spec is the absence of reaping, which means two more blood strikes, and one less scourge strike - and therefore a tiny bit more gcd constraint. So, I was surpised and dismayed when my dps seemed quite a bit lower - especially given the 5% increase in the ICC buff! The other DK was solidly beating me on most fights.... and I was actually much lower on Festergut and Rotface than the previous week. I was about to give up in disgust when I discovered my own absolutely foolish mistake! NO FREAKING BLOOD PRESENCE! So, I have to laugh at myself. I don't have a good comparison on the tank and spank fights. :( However, once I made the correction, I was able to see frost subspec in action, and it seems quite comparable - as reports have said. You can see from my parse below, it wasn't bad even though I spent 80% of the night without a presence (add about 15% to my total and I'd have been at a more respectable ~10,600 overall). I also did one tank and spank - Toravon - and I was pleased. My recount dps was 12,229, good enough for top-20 worldwide on WOL (sorry, no screenie, but you can look me up on WOL).

So, which spec is better?
From my very limited sample size, and my tremendously flawed execution, I'm still reasonably comfortable concluding Elitist Jerks are right on the money. There is very very little difference between the two specs. EJ folks are arguing that for a non-proc weapon such as Cryptmaker or my Shadow's Edge, the blood subspec is better, and with a proc-based weapon such as Bryntoll or Shadowmourne (I don't have either), frost subspec is better.

Personally, I'm going to run with the frost subspec the rest of the week, and see how comfortable I get.

But in general, you may decide to subspec either of the above. Follow the EJ suggestions, or subspec into blood simply because the additional threat reduction is handy (I did notice I was tanking more trash than usual last night - but more careful target-switching should help with that).

Either way, Unholy is looking good!

Next week I plan to go blood: I'll probably put in 5-10 armor pen gems and give it a try!

The Day After Tomorrow (3.3.3)

(note, I wrote this yesterday, but for some reason wordpress and blogspot sites were all blocked on my interwebs).

It's the Day After The Release of patch 3.3.3, which was a 'minor' patch.
So, how do we feel about it?

As I suggested it might be, it's looking like a big boon to raiding DKs!

Last night, our raid ran ICC25 through Blood Queen Lanathel and did the weekly raid and VOA. We had the infusion of a couple more ranged dps, allowing us to better arrange our comp to the fights.

We one-shot all the bosses (except for BQL when on the first attempt our first bitee d/c'd), but wiped on trash. A little lack of focus, but I still left the night both very happy and optimistic going forward.
Reasons:

1) Mangle lasting one minute. We didn't really have a 'mangle bot' as our kitty struggled to keep it up and dps, letting it drop frequently prior to 3.3.3. With the change, we had it the whole fight.

2) Icy Talons. We'd lost our enhancement shaman a few weeks back, and weren't getting the haste buff. Now we are.

I ran unholy last night (pre 3.3.3 spec as I didn't have time to change it), and as far as I can tell, unholy really hasn't been buffed. I did benefit from the above changes however, and it showed in our WOL parse.
In fact, it was surprising how well we did!
Granted, World Of Logs only ranks parses that guilds post, we have the (fairly recent) 5% buff, and many/most of the top guilds are exclusively in heroic now, but we had raiders ranked in the top 200 worldwide for their class over 20 times. Our Boomkin was #4 on Koralon, our Arms Warrior was 6th and 8th on Rotface and Festergut, and I was 9th and 53rd on Festergut and Rotface, respectively.
That 'perfect storm' of hitting the rotation/priority spot on, good group comp, overall high raid dps, and solid gear came together to deliver VERY solid and pleasing results.

Our somewhat undergeared frost DK did see a big improvement in his performance as well.

I did some live dummy-testing (I know, I know, dummies suck) of frost main spec/unholy subspec with my unholy gear and a fast OH almost matched my unholy dps output. Very promising. I think I'll hold off trying this in a full raid until I have a decent offhand weapon, though.
Now, if we can only put it together on Lich King (normal), we can join the heroic cool kids club. :)

All in all, I'm pleased with what I've seen from 3.3.3, and I hope going forward DKs of all specs will find success in Icecrown and beyond!

State of the DPS Union, 3.3 Version

So, where will we DPS DKs be in 3.3?

Happy, I hope!

For single target DPS, we've fallen a bit behind other classes. No longer are we the face-roller class - although I expect it will be time before the community accepts that. The link above is to my response to discussions of melee dps in which the only class behind DKs on Saurfang and Festergut is enhancement shammy. And frost DKs just weren't even in the picture.

So why would we be happy again?

Front-burner DPS DK issues in 3.3

This isn't meant to be a be-all end-all of the state of DPS DKs in 3.3, just a mention of a few topics that have been floating around on EJ and in my guild forums.

1. Blood vs Unholy for DPS. Note that I didn't mention frost. That's because frost still sucks as we can see in this thread at EJ. If you look at the tables compiled by Shrakz (a poster), you can see how DKs stack up by spec, but also against other melee classes. Somewhat ironically given our facerolling reputation, we're in the bottom half of the group, but it seems Blizzard has done a pretty good job of balancing overall.

Anyway, if you've read my blog for a while, you may recall I predicted blood would eventually overtake unhholy for single target dps. It's getting very close now. I'd bet when we see enough guilds with 2-4 pieces of 277 tier pieces blood will start to creep ahead. For single target low movement fights, blood should end up as king. For aoe and movement fights, however, unholy is likely to still come out ahead, and both provide very useful buffs. Take your pick.

The jury's still out on my other prediction that dual wield will become viable again towards the end of Icecrown.

2. Gargoyle is bugged. There has long been some odd behavior on the part of our favorite winged pet. More recently, however, the poor guy has developed the bad habit of staying close to the boss when summoned and meleeing, which is a big dps loss. It seems the gargoyle flies straight ahead of you when summoned. If the boss is there, it melees. So, remember to turn 90-180 degrees away from the boss before summoning - this should allow the gargoyle to fly away from the boss, turn, and start casting for crispy fried awesomeness. Hopefully Blizz fixes this soon.

3. Should we use Unholy Presence (UHP) on movement fights? This comes up every time a new boss with heavy movement requirements is released. The logic goes that more time on target = more dps. However, it's becoming more and more clear to me that the answer remains in every case: NO NO NO!!!! Don't do it! Blood and Unholy dps specs currently don't suffer from being gcd bound, so the rune cooldown decrease isn't helpful. Time on target is not increased by much even on high movement fights, and if you're really desperate you can either enchant speed to boots or take the talent improved unholy presence.
How do we compensate for any excessive dps losses on movement fights?

a) good positioning. In my guild, we tank Putricide right there volatile ooze spawns so we can immediately dps it down. In addition, we're tanking most of the adds at the top of the key on Valithria - less movement (only need to run to suppressors). Lich King movement is minimal when the Lich King is kited properly during phase changes, and Valkyr should be properly slowed.


b) proper anticipation and crisp target switching. I do well on Putri in part because I've noticed I'm often the first person on oozes, and know when to break off and run back to Putri, and use little tricks like position myself to be knocked back towards Putri by the volatile ooze just before it dies.

Saurfang: a DPS DK Perspective

Tonight we get our second Icecrown Wing and woot! am I ever excited about it!
On the eve of seeing some down and dirty plagues, I'll post my 4th Icecrown Boss review for DPS DKs.
Saurfang is the first 'real' gear check boss. Your guild may have had a little trouble with Lady Deathwhisper, but if you got her, I'm sure you're past the Gunship and on to Saurfang! You need to get him dead before you can go back inside the Citadel, so let's get to it! There are some strict dps requirements to get him down, so do your part and soon enough you'll be running from slimes. :)



Saurfang is for the most part a tank and spank fight, so let's get to it!

Gunship: a DPS DK Perspective

Time to talk about that fun fun fight known as the Gunship!


On normal 10- and 25-man mode, this fight is extremely easy for most raid groups. There is some execution required though, and lazy play can still result in a wipe.

Make sure you have your rocket equipped, especially if you switch specs. I've seen too many players not be able to cross to the other ship because they forgot. Now might be a good time to remind you to always ensure you have a presence selected - when you switch specs it disables any presences.


Pull/Phase One: This is done several ways. I won't try to cover them all, but just keep in mind the way I describe it might not be the way your guild does it.
Our melee stay on our ship for the first part, killing the boarders. The first boarder is usually a small elite; I PS>IT to get diseases going, then wait for the Sergeant to spawn. Once he does, I pestilence and Death & Decay. Then just dps on the Sgt. Be wary of his whirlwind - it can hit pretty hard, so I tend to run out when he does it. Since it's an aoe fight, remember your aoe rotation is pretty simple: keep spreading diseases, then make sure to use D&D on cooldown. If unholy, keep desolation up with one blood rune, and you should be able to blood boil at least once. Frost and Blood can probably blood boil twice. The boarders should be dead about the time the Mage comes out, if not before if you're melee heavy. Don't forget to watch the deck for where rockets are going to land. I try to stay out of them to make it easier on the healers. You can take the occasional rocket, but for the most part it's not a dps race.

Phase Two: I get asked to kill the mage, so I jump across and hit her a couple times, then pop my gargoyle (for unholy, my ghoul is up on boarders) and/or other cds. On my second trip I jump and summon my army. DPS burst is important here - getting the mage down FAST is your most important goal. After that, as I run back to my ship, I hit the axe throwers and pestilence to help kill them - or target them with my army. It's not essential, but assisting in getting them down before they become elite is helpful.


DPS per se doesn't really matter on this fight. Just controlling the adds is most important. High dps helps, but execution and timing is what counts. Most WMO/WOL parses don't even include Gunship in their numbers, so don't trouble your e-peen over it. Just get the job done.

Lady Deathwhisper: a DPS DK Perspective

The second installment of Icecrown Citadel for DPS DKs is here!
While I've cleared the 10 man version weekly, it was just this week that I found a group to clear the 25 man version, so I'm sure I'll be finding further ways to optimize my play as we go. If anything major comes up later, I can always add a post.

The second fight in Icecrown Citadel is Lady Deathwhisper, a lich. As I'm sure you know by now, my goal is not to cover the fight in general as there is plenty of available info elsewhere. You're here for some thoughts on how to maximize your performance as a DK.

Lord Marrowgar: a dps DK Perspective

Icecrown is here! If you're a raiding DK, you've been inside to see what the fuss is about. If you're lucky, you've been able to clear the first wing, and are eagerly awaiting the second wing, coming soonTM!
In my guild limbo situation, I've managed to clear the first ICC10 wing on my DK and shaman, but not having a full raid means I've only managed to pug 25 man and only get past Lord Marrowgar.

In any case, it's time for the first ICC dps DK perspective!

The first fight in Icecrown Citadel is Lord Marrowgar, a nasty bone lord. I'm sure you know the fight in general, and there's lots of info out there now, so I won't review it. You're here for some thoughts on how to maximize your performance as a DK. I've got a few thoughts, and as we repeat the fight some more, I'm sure I'll think of a few more things. I'll probably revisist everything once heroic modes are unlocked. Feel free to chime in with ideas!

The Short Reason Nerfs are Good

Within 20 minutes of logging onto my DK post 3.3 patch, I knew Scourge Strike was going to be hit with the nerf bat. Forum threads and Elitist Jerks ballyhoo ("DKs are sooooo OP") confirmed it, and the nerf hit fast, taking only slightly longer to address than the bug dropping Frost Orbs from all random pugs.

And it's a good thing Scourge Strike got nerfed. It's fun to be overpowered (as a blue recently posted regarding the nerf), but I'm relieved Scourge Strike got hit as quickly as it did.

Why?

Short answer:
When facerollers - UNSKILLED PLAYERS - can top the charts, then it's time for a change.

Elaboration:
I like to top the meters. I haven't been second on overall damage for a full raid in quite some time (I have, however, been lower on individual fights many times). Sure, I know I've posted that DKs aren't overpowered any more. And the evidence remained throughout TOC/T9. Until 3.3, DKs were still only about the 5th best dps class on WMO and WOR parses. For the past two days, only mutilate rogues have topped them. I LIKE having to work hard for top spot. I LIKE competing with the rogues, mages, warriors and what have you. So when an untalented player can come in and be second to myself on their lousy, poorly played DK (this happened Tuesday in Archavon), it chaps my hide. Because then players start attributing my success and the success of my class to being overpowered, instead of to my skill. When one tree is so overpowered (in this case, unholy) that DKs from the other trees start jumping ship, then it's clear something needs to be done.

Thank you Blizz for stepping in quickly. I'll sleep better tonight knowing I'll have to actually play well to be on top, and not just sit there and bang 4 keys in succession.

The 'New' GoD in 3.3

Just prior to 3.3 going live, the theorycrafters were suggesting the glyphs best used by Unholy dps DKs would be Icy Touch, Dark Death, and Ghoul.
Once live hit, it became apparent just how powerful the new Scourge Strike is (unfortunately, this has lead to rampant speculation that a nerf is incoming). As such, Consider's wonderful thread on unholy dps has concluded that we DO need to use Glyph of Disease instead of Dark Death.

I previously mentioned that it's no longer possible to 'roll diseases.' In 3.2, pestilence refreshed your diseases at your original attack power - for me this was typically around 11-12k. This was too powerful, so in 3.3 Blizzard changed it. Glyph of Disease now allows you to refresh your diseases on your primary target (saving you a frost and unholy rune), but at your current attack power. Nonetheless, on live GOD is still worth using apparently. This is because saving the FU runes allows one more Scourge Strike in the rotation, which is tremendously powerful right now.

3.3 PVE specs

3.3 specs
With the likely introduction of Icecrown Citadel next week, we'll be asking the question of what spec will be the most effective once again. Since I'm new in my guild, I'll have to be careful about my experimentation, but I do plan to examine each of the major raid specs in a raid situation once 3.3 goes live.

Next week you can expect to see me running the Elitist Jerks cookie-cutter Unholy spec. You can review Consider's excellent description of the spec here. If there's too much info there, the biggest change is that Scourge Strike has been hugely buffed and the mechanics of the attack have been changed. In addition, glyph of disease will no longer refresh at the original attack power, rather, it will refresh at the current attack power, making it a much weaker glyph for non-aoe fights. As a result, I'll be going back to a 2-hander spec to get the most benefit from huge Scourge Strike crits. At any rate, over the next few weeks, stay posted, and I'll be reviewing the various 3.3 specs on live servers in 'real' raids soon.

DPS Chain Update #2

The Chain post has been pushed to the second page of my blog here, so I'm putting up a quick update.

Since Wow.com gave out the link love, we've had a plethora of responses!

The update post with all the links to people I'm aware of that have responded to the questionnaire/survey/meme/whatever is here. Including my own responses, we have 35 completed questionnaires and counting!

So far we've seen responses (some bloggers did it for more than one class) from:

Anub'arak: A dps DK perspective

The final fight in Trial of the Crusader is the Traitor King, Anub'arak. We've all fallen through the floor by now. How do we DKs provide the pwnage? It's actually one of the more straightforward fights:




Pull: Just run in. Be a bit behind the tank so you don't get cleaved while the tank is turning him. Icy Touch while running in. Plague Strike. Regular dps rotation blah blah (we got it Hine). Get proc-buffed pets out and diseases rolling as per normal. IF you are on hard mode, you have to be stingy with your permafrost, so you'll likely be asked to Death Grip an orb to Anub's hip. The adds will be tanked here to allow aoe/cleave damage to take the adds down. When you get two adds, pestilence and Death and Decay to hit both them and the boss (or just pest and howling blast as frost). If adds are tanked seperately, usually just the ranged will dps them and melee stays on boss.


If you're not completely foolish with aggro on Anub, the biggest risk of dying here is not paying attention and getting hit by spikes in P2 or going totally nuts on adds in P2 and getting too many stacks of their acid drenched mandibles debuff.

Twin Val'kyr: A dps DK perspective

The fourth and second-last fight in Trial of the Crusader is the Twin Val'kyr. The Twin Eredar are magic-based mobs who love to buff you with their orbs. :)




Pull: One needs two tanks. You can tank them seperately, but there's no reason not to tank them on top of each other. They don't cleave or anything. And all of your raid's cleave effects will hit both Twins. Just mark them both to assist with target switching. As DK, park behind your selected Twin and bang away.