EDIT: Also, I'm frosting it up, and KM pops. Obliterate is on CD, and won't be up for several seconds. All my other runes are on CD. What do I do? Wait, or use KM on FS?
I'm glad you asked this question because I was wondering the same thing myself.
A lot of people whinge about frost's mastery not effecting oblit.
Way I see it, oblit is the "sometimes" food, whereas you will pop howling blast and frost strike a lot more often. These things having a 100% crit is a LOT of damage.
People say to stack haste as frost, but Im thinking mastery might just top it.
With regards to DK changes for Cataclysm, the class is pretty much the same on the surface, but the alteration to how runes regenerate and the changes to all of the rune costs of abilities changed how the class plays quite a bit. Your abilities have the same names but how you use them is pretty different. For example, Unholy's priority system feels a lot like the old Blood, where you use your 2 rune strike so you can blow through an entire sequence of 1 rune abilities. Just not having fixed rotations is a pretty big difference.
And speaking of which, I feel like my Unholy DPS is not as competitive as it should be. Granted, I don't have the best gear, but there is no reason I should ever be falling below 5k DPS in a heroic, regardless of dps spec. My general strategy is for 3 pulls, do single target priority with pestilence and death and decay (since it is ~even damage with plague strike) and for 5+ pulls, do AOE. For whatever reason, I am only averaging about 5.3-5.5k dps on boss dummies and much lower in heroics, as stuff tends to die before my DPS can ramp up.
I've tracked my damage reports from Recount, and my damage priorities are exactly where they should be, with expected returns from Scourge Strike, Death Coil, Ghoul Damage, and I am reasonably certain my priority is fine (if not flawless 99% of the time). So why is my damage sucking so bad? Should I not be using pestilence/dnd on 3 pulls? I dunno.
Here is my armory btw (dps spec changes between frost/unholy near constantly): http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/ravenholdt/andurewns/
Aside from reforging/gear optimization issues (LOL OVER HIT CAP, UNSOCKETED STUFF, cataclysm laziness is my excuse) what could be the problem? My unholy spec is the same optimized spec in the OP, if its not on my armory atm.
Have you tried going dual wield, swapping ss glyph for death and decay, and picking up nerves of cold steel? Seems to work better than 2h unholy for me, and EJ says it's about 5% better. The rotation has a nice mix of feel between Frost and unholy. Glyph of D&D just makes everything flow better, and with dual wield works out to be better than SS glyph even for single target.
I'll give it a whirl. I think my problem is mostly improper gearing (my DPS on a friend's DK was epic). I've shelved my DK for now while I get my alt army up to 80, though I'm always down for an excuse to once again SEW DISEASE AND DESPAIR.
With regards to DK changes for Cataclysm, the class is pretty much the same on the surface, but the alteration to how runes regenerate and the changes to all of the rune costs of abilities changed how the class plays quite a bit. Your abilities have the same names but how you use them is pretty different. For example, Unholy's priority system feels a lot like the old Blood, where you use your 2 rune strike so you can blow through an entire sequence of 1 rune abilities. Just not having fixed rotations is a pretty big difference.
And speaking of which, I feel like my Unholy DPS is not as competitive as it should be. Granted, I don't have the best gear, but there is no reason I should ever be falling below 5k DPS in a heroic, regardless of dps spec. My general strategy is for 3 pulls, do single target priority with pestilence and death and decay (since it is ~even damage with plague strike) and for 5+ pulls, do AOE. For whatever reason, I am only averaging about 5.3-5.5k dps on boss dummies and much lower in heroics, as stuff tends to die before my DPS can ramp up.
I've tracked my damage reports from Recount, and my damage priorities are exactly where they should be, with expected returns from Scourge Strike, Death Coil, Ghoul Damage, and I am reasonably certain my priority is fine (if not flawless 99% of the time). So why is my damage sucking so bad? Should I not be using pestilence/dnd on 3 pulls? I dunno.
Here is my armory btw (dps spec changes between frost/unholy near constantly): http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/ravenholdt/andurewns/
Aside from reforging/gear optimization issues (LOL OVER HIT CAP, UNSOCKETED STUFF, cataclysm laziness is my excuse) what could be the problem? My unholy spec is the same optimized spec in the OP, if its not on my armory atm.
Have you tried going dual wield, swapping ss glyph for death and decay, and picking up nerves of cold steel? Seems to work better than 2h unholy for me, and EJ says it's about 5% better. The rotation has a nice mix of feel between Frost and unholy. Glyph of D&D just makes everything flow better, and with dual wield works out to be better than SS glyph even for single target.
DW unholy is doing better than 2H? I'm confused. If unholy needs to equip two weapons and use frost pres on single targets to improve their damage, something is wrong.
The reason is that the white damage bonus from taking Nerves of Cold Steel is greater than the loss of damage contribution from Scourge Strike. It's not really a horrible abomination like Shadowfrost, so I don't know that it'd be a huge priority for getting rid of.
EDIT: Also as expected regemming fixed my DPS. Even with terrible green strength gems it was a pretty enormous increase.
Walt on
0
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
edited November 2010
I push out pretty insane numbers right now as frost using a little thought put into rotation.
Open: Use rune tap to create a death rune, activate the +str cooldown, Set up the two diseases, Oblit, Frost strike, bloodstrike
Then I use oblit if there are ever UF pairs up, FS if there aren't, and bloodstrike only if I am done with the FS dump. I toss in HB procs as they come and refresh PS when it falls off. My theory is that you want to be at zero RP due to possible procs to cause your UF runes to pop up
Munkus Beaver on
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
I push out pretty insane numbers right now as frost using a little thought put into rotation.
Open: Use rune tap to create a death rune, activate the +str cooldown, Set up the two diseases, Oblit, Frost strike, bloodstrike
Then I use oblit if there are ever UF pairs up, FS if there aren't, and bloodstrike only if I am done with the FS dump. I toss in HB procs as they come and refresh PS when it falls off. My theory is that you want to be at zero RP due to possible procs to cause your UF runes to pop up
What you just described is how Frost Priority works in practice, though in addition it's best to use BS over FS if you have BB up.
God knows I don't want the frost rotation to be any tighter than it is, through stacking haste.
If you're DW i think it's tighter, 2H isn't so bad. But I want a 1 second GCD
Don't you get 1second GCD with unholy pres?
Apparently i should be. Whatever, I use Blood Presence. Generally I'm not able to DPS anything beyond VoA. Which is why my DPS spec has the mount speed talent.
God knows I don't want the frost rotation to be any tighter than it is, through stacking haste.
If you're DW i think it's tighter, 2H isn't so bad. But I want a 1 second GCD
Don't you get 1second GCD with unholy pres?
Apparently i should be. Whatever, I use Blood Presence. Generally I'm not able to DPS anything beyond VoA. Which is why my DPS spec has the mount speed talent.
I hope you mean Frost Presence, since they swapped places and Blood is now the tanking presence. :?
God knows I don't want the frost rotation to be any tighter than it is, through stacking haste.
If you're DW i think it's tighter, 2H isn't so bad. But I want a 1 second GCD
Don't you get 1second GCD with unholy pres?
Apparently i should be. Whatever, I use Blood Presence. Generally I'm not able to DPS anything beyond VoA. Which is why my DPS spec has the mount speed talent.
I hope you mean Frost Presence, since they swapped places and Blood is now the tanking presence. :?
I do mean blood presence, as I am a tank Which is why i never get to DPS anything other than heroics and VoA.
God knows I don't want the frost rotation to be any tighter than it is, through stacking haste.
If you're DW i think it's tighter, 2H isn't so bad. But I want a 1 second GCD
Don't you get 1second GCD with unholy pres?
Apparently i should be. Whatever, I use Blood Presence. Generally I'm not able to DPS anything beyond VoA. Which is why my DPS spec has the mount speed talent.
I hope you mean Frost Presence, since they swapped places and Blood is now the tanking presence. :?
I do mean blood presence, as I am a tank Which is why i never get to DPS anything other than heroics and VoA.
Are you tanking trash in Frost DPS spec? How does that work out?
God knows I don't want the frost rotation to be any tighter than it is, through stacking haste.
If you're DW i think it's tighter, 2H isn't so bad. But I want a 1 second GCD
Don't you get 1second GCD with unholy pres?
Apparently i should be. Whatever, I use Blood Presence. Generally I'm not able to DPS anything beyond VoA. Which is why my DPS spec has the mount speed talent.
I hope you mean Frost Presence, since they swapped places and Blood is now the tanking presence. :?
I do mean blood presence, as I am a tank Which is why i never get to DPS anything other than heroics and VoA.
Are you tanking trash in Frost DPS spec? How does that work out?
LoL no, I'm a tank flat out. I have an Unholy DPS spec, which was frost for a bit, but i never get to use it, as I am ALWAYS tanking. New Blood Boil, Glyphed DnD and new Heart Strike are awesome at keeping AOE threat. And do crazy AoE dps, i've hit 22-23k on the whelps before Sindy. In Heroics i can hit 5k on trash in blood spec, I really don't see a reason to mess around in frost or UH while trying to tank.
I was being clever with my wording but I guess it was just confusing
After playing a couple levels in Cata with my unholy DK, I can definitely say that the Death Strike nerf sucks. My self-healing capability feels like total shit now, and it's even more awful that it happened in an expansion where rogues picked up decent self-healing with a relatively low opportunity cost and warriors get ridiculous self-healing while soloing (as long as they're killing things).
I thought runestrike was going to be made a rp dump? It's still a goddamn procc :v:
In blood presence its a RP dump. For Unholy spec its death coil and for frost its frost strike. Pretty much exactly how they wanted it I imagine. I don't htink rune strike is meant to a RP dump for either of the non-tank specs.
I do have a blood alt spec available, I just haven't bothered with it yet since I like my ghoul buddy.
I'd definitely switch over to it if I were trying to solo a group quest or some tough elite. Maybe I should have tried that when I attempted to solo Gnash, since he raped me in unholy spec. Of course, the second time, I tested it out and found that he is snareable, so I just CoI kited him without a problem.
They really should take Dark Simulacrum off the GCD (the application not the spell return effect) so that I can use it like an interrupt. It sucks having to either guess what a mobs AI is going to do or hope the opposing player isn't smart enough to just cast a useless spell to block the spell.
Ok. In pve, does it just absorb the damage of a spell? The tooltip is worded poorly, so I don't know if it does that, or the tooltip means that for some spells, it only absorbs, and for other spells, it functions as it does against players.
There is usually a couple mobs per dungeon that it is more than worth using DSim on, and the ability is glorious in PvP. Since it has a 1 minute CD there's not much risk in just throwing it out there to see what you get. The risk/reward favors using it on CD because you can. It is a little buggy though, and spells that do flat damage (rather than a damage range) seem like they do almost no damage.
I wish it was off the GCD so that I could tag mobs with it when I see them casting a spell I want and not have to just throw it on them and hope they start casting. Not all caster mobs just chain cast spells and a lot of them don't even do it more than once every 12 seconds or so, so a lot of the time Dark Simulacrum will just fall off, and other times I don't have the GCD handy to push it on the target and get my free damage or whatever.
Anyone know of a macro to cast death coil if the target is out of frost strike range? Or something similar with strangulate and mind freeze?
Not possible. Anyone know if DS not being usable in macros is something they've acknowledged and have said they're trying to fixed? Or are we hosed on that?
Edit: So I was considering dropping one minor DPS talent point to be able to pick up AMZ in my unholy spec to give my DK a bit of much-needed utility (gotta love being one of the two classes without a CC), and I noticed the numbers for it are absolutely awful, as is the scaling. With some of the best gear and raid buffs, I think it would still absorb less than 40k damage -- on a 2-minute cooldown at the cost of an unholy rune. I was hoping it would be something worth throwing down in a raid in preparation for some sort of "oh shit AoE" moment, but eating, say, 8k damage off of 5 people in the bubble just sounds like too tiny of a drop in the bucket to trouble myself over.
Posts
I'm glad you asked this question because I was wondering the same thing myself.
A lot of people whinge about frost's mastery not effecting oblit.
Way I see it, oblit is the "sometimes" food, whereas you will pop howling blast and frost strike a lot more often. These things having a 100% crit is a LOT of damage.
People say to stack haste as frost, but Im thinking mastery might just top it.
If you're DW i think it's tighter, 2H isn't so bad. But I want a 1 second GCD
Have you tried going dual wield, swapping ss glyph for death and decay, and picking up nerves of cold steel? Seems to work better than 2h unholy for me, and EJ says it's about 5% better. The rotation has a nice mix of feel between Frost and unholy. Glyph of D&D just makes everything flow better, and with dual wield works out to be better than SS glyph even for single target.
Don't you get 1second GCD with unholy pres?
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
paddin teh deeps
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
DW unholy is doing better than 2H? I'm confused. If unholy needs to equip two weapons and use frost pres on single targets to improve their damage, something is wrong.
EDIT: Also as expected regemming fixed my DPS. Even with terrible green strength gems it was a pretty enormous increase.
Open: Use rune tap to create a death rune, activate the +str cooldown, Set up the two diseases, Oblit, Frost strike, bloodstrike
Then I use oblit if there are ever UF pairs up, FS if there aren't, and bloodstrike only if I am done with the FS dump. I toss in HB procs as they come and refresh PS when it falls off. My theory is that you want to be at zero RP due to possible procs to cause your UF runes to pop up
What you just described is how Frost Priority works in practice, though in addition it's best to use BS over FS if you have BB up.
Apparently i should be. Whatever, I use Blood Presence. Generally I'm not able to DPS anything beyond VoA. Which is why my DPS spec has the mount speed talent.
I hit 26k dps tanknig the whelps, lol.
I hope you mean Frost Presence, since they swapped places and Blood is now the tanking presence. :?
I do mean blood presence, as I am a tank
LoL no, I'm a tank flat out. I have an Unholy DPS spec, which was frost for a bit, but i never get to use it, as I am ALWAYS tanking. New Blood Boil, Glyphed DnD and new Heart Strike are awesome at keeping AOE threat. And do crazy AoE dps, i've hit 22-23k on the whelps before Sindy. In Heroics i can hit 5k on trash in blood spec, I really don't see a reason to mess around in frost or UH while trying to tank.
I was being clever with my wording but I guess it was just confusing
Anyway, hurry up already, stupid xpac!
Steam: YOU FACE JARAXXUS| Twitch.tv: CainLoveless
In blood presence its a RP dump. For Unholy spec its death coil and for frost its frost strike. Pretty much exactly how they wanted it I imagine. I don't htink rune strike is meant to a RP dump for either of the non-tank specs.
isn't the condition "you're in blood presence" ?
They removed the need for parry/dodge.
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
They only condition required if you are in blood presence is "have 30 runic power." You do not need to dodge/parry when in blood presence.
I'd definitely switch over to it if I were trying to solo a group quest or some tough elite. Maybe I should have tried that when I attempted to solo Gnash, since he raped me in unholy spec. Of course, the second time, I tested it out and found that he is snareable, so I just CoI kited him without a problem.
Between that and the "spell is not ready yet" nonsense on Raise Dead, my DK is frustrating me.
No, not really.
A lot of abilities its not even worth casting on.
Except throne of tides heroic. On the naga boss you can use the adds chain lightning and it hits for 30-50k.
I save it for the boss :P
I wish it was off the GCD so that I could tag mobs with it when I see them casting a spell I want and not have to just throw it on them and hope they start casting. Not all caster mobs just chain cast spells and a lot of them don't even do it more than once every 12 seconds or so, so a lot of the time Dark Simulacrum will just fall off, and other times I don't have the GCD handy to push it on the target and get my free damage or whatever.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Edit: So I was considering dropping one minor DPS talent point to be able to pick up AMZ in my unholy spec to give my DK a bit of much-needed utility (gotta love being one of the two classes without a CC), and I noticed the numbers for it are absolutely awful, as is the scaling. With some of the best gear and raid buffs, I think it would still absorb less than 40k damage -- on a 2-minute cooldown at the cost of an unholy rune. I was hoping it would be something worth throwing down in a raid in preparation for some sort of "oh shit AoE" moment, but eating, say, 8k damage off of 5 people in the bubble just sounds like too tiny of a drop in the bucket to trouble myself over.
Frost = DPS
Unholy = PvP
Yes, No?