Death Knight discussion

[Dìs]

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-shee ... n=D%C3%ACs

alright well i read the other post and i am having a similar problem.
my gears up to par and im not doing as much dps as i should be ):
i got GoD but i am wondering if there is a good rotation based off it
ive been at this target dummy all day
any help would be greatly appreciated :)

and grats on LK and GL in heroic

[choutofu]

Hey Zyn,

Im from maelstrom-US, and I was pretty impressed by your dps for saurfang. To my understanding from reading your previous post about Godisease is that with godisease + cinderglacial + TOTT procs needs to be timed together and also you must recast icy touch and plague strike to get its full benefits once both buff is active, correct?
So it looks like this: 2x1hander with cinderglacial , once CG procs, switch over to 2hander and get TOTT ..then It, Ps, and continue with rotation?
Also to me when I was comparing the two fights you did: one for saurfang and one for festergut, it seems like you pulled a good amt more dps for saurfang when you weren't trying to go for the cinderglacial proc, and just rolled TOTT. Do you think its worth it to delay our dps in the very begining to pray for a cinderglacial proc?

[zYN]

Hey. Yeah, I'll be replying to here at a later date and posting maybe some sort of guide (since so many keep asking for it). I'm just honestly so shit tired from all the raiding that I cba.

Just a quick reply on the Festergut thing: I don't know what's happening, but sometimes my runes "lock up" ever since the latest patch - they refresh, but aren't available for use. I don't know if it's the addon I use (MagicRunes) or what the hell is happening. It is extremely annoying to be losing diseases due to a some kind of bug.

Usually if the fight is stand-still (and long enough) or multi-target and I don't have ToTT up already, I try and fish for Cinderglacier procs. By far most of the time it's an overall DPS gain. If the fight is something like Sindragosa, there's little point in it. Something like Anub'arak is the perfect case scenario; you're guaranteed a cinderglacier proc by whacking on the little shitlings while saving the proc and you can get ToTT from rogues right as Anub pops back up.

[Humo]

I've had the rune locking for ages, since before this patch. From what I can tell it's a display / UI problem. I use the Deathknight.info addon myself. Happens most often when combining blood tap with an ability off a GCD, ex. Unbreakable Armor. Sometimes a run does not get shown as used and recharging even though I'm positive I did use it. Only way around it so far is as soon as you notice, identify which other rune has the longest CD and assume it becomes available after that one.

I know it's not ideal but that's the best I could think of. I tried other addons and they had the same problem so I suspect the standard blizzard UI might have it too.

[Dmntd]

On equick question, either in this post or another forget which somethign was said about AP benefits not rolling with GoD. So what procs are dire to have before rolling with pest?

Out of:
ToTT
Paragon - 450 str
unholy Str - 15% Str
Unholy might - 180 Str
Unholy Force - 200 Str
Bloodlust
CG - 20% frost / shadow
advantage - 3% dmg

not sure if these roll:
Icy rage - 1100 ap
Frostforged champion - 480 ap

Am I looking to deep into procs fishing, or should it just be CG, paagon, and ToTT.....

Thanks in advance

[Necross50]

First off, i'm going to say, this is the first time posting here.
Also, to Dmntd. The only ones of those proccs you mentioned that are important would be: CG, ToTT, Advantage, and also, though you didn't mention it, Desolation.

Anyways, what I came here to say is that, when fishing for proccs, and you get the procc, it does no matter if you accidentaly use a CG stack. Just PS first, it uses no stack, and still gets the extra shadow damage. I tried this out by proccing CG, spamming a few PSes to see, then stopped to see disease damage, then i used IT to get CG stacks off, before PSing again.

Knowing this made the procc fishing a whole lot easier, and I wanted to share it with all of you, I hope I helped. Also, thanks for the DKs that answered my whispers yesterday.

EDIT: Also, does your Gargoyle scale with cinderglacier?

[Karn]

Hi Syn,

This thread has been bookmarked as my go-to guide for info on making the most of GoD. I had dismissed the glyph awhile back when I first read about it, because it was written that it did not refresh/roll Ebon Plague. After reading your posts here and testing on a dummy, I can see the glyph does cause Pestilence to refresh/roll Ebon Plague, so now I am interested in making use of this glyph.

I'm trying to get the best of this play style and I have some points that I'm trying to understand fully.

1. The main idea is to roll a snapshot of the diseases which contain the best buffs. So the idea here is to monitor your buffs. When you have all possible buffs or procs, you then re-apply diseases, then keep those beefcake diseases rolling (by refreshing with Pestilence) the rest of the fight. I understand that % damage modifier buffs roll. But do all stats except AP roll? Meaning do hit, haste, crit, strength roll? If STR rolls, then that opens a can of worms that I would need to clear up. Since STR gives us AP, but AP does not roll, that means we should not worry about STR procs right? This is the big question, because if STR procs need to be monitored, then we need to watch for procs from 4 other sources (Deathbringer, Greatness, RoFC, Sigil).

2. Your info on the Cinderglacier proc was an eye opener, because I did not think the mechanics worked that way. I thought a tick would eat a counter. I did not know only the application of the disease would consume a counter and the respective ticks would all have the damage modifier. After testing this on a dummy, it looks like the application of Blood Plague does not even use a counter, but it gets the damage modifier. Is this correct? If so, another small bonus will be that the next (shadow portion) of SS will get a 20% damage buff, because only one of Cinderglaciers counters will be used when applying both diseases and the last counter will be used on the next frost or shadow attack.

3.) The big buffs that make this work are Tricks of the Trade (15% all damage) and Cinderglacier (20% to diseases). TotT requires the existance of a rogue and their willingness to cast it on you when needed, which may be troublesome. However, Cinderglacier's proc is more beneficial anyway, so wouldn't we rather have Cinderglacier proc? Edit: I now realize my mindset was which of these buffs is better, so which should I maintain, but now I see these two buffs probably stack and we're optimally look to get and maintain both. Then I wonder is this play style still the best damage output, if we can can't get a TotT and can only consistently get the Cinderglacier buff?

Thanks for all your input in this thread, Syn.

Edit:
#1: Now that I think more about it, stats like hit and haste do not affect diseases, so those stats do not need to be optimized. But I am still wondering about STR procs. I am thinking since STR only affects disease damage through STR's modification of AP, we should treat STR as AP and realize it is not something to watch when maintaining a buffed-up disease roll.

#2: The previous post was new as I posted this, and I see he points out the same behavior I mention in #2.

[Nightriser]

Hey synti

i would be interested in your rota because i'm useing atm 14/0/57 with the dark death glyph an running PS->IT->BS->BS->SS->DC->HoW->SS->DC->SS->SS->DC (in every 2nd run of the rotation i use here a 2nd DC cause of high Runepower and enough time for it)
at the start of a fight I'm waiting for the most procs to use Gargoyle before the fight start a armor potion for the 90 Ap arround, but the hastepot i safe for the BL

here a log of a Festergut fight maybe u can find a critical fail of me
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/mvxxf4h56njdgshv/sum/damageDone/?s=5968&e=6229

And I saw that you are useing the Glyph of Disease and i tried few rotations for this glyph but i cant find one for max dps

Atm i wear 2 t10 and 2 t9 parts but next week i got the 4 t10
Here the armory link http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Blackhand&cn=Nightriser

sry for my worst english^^

Nightriser of Blackhand

[dr_AllCOM3]

The CG proc is very, very unreliable. In every third fight it's up in the first 10 seconds. I don't see how this is any good.

[zYN]

Like said I'll just write a quick guide with the general idea on what the hell to exactly do with the GoD glyph. I've been somewhat busy, but mostly just lazy as well, so I'll just answer some stuff quick.

Karn:

1. AP (and STR) used to roll, which made the glyph get a spot in Hall of Fame for the Most Ridiculously Overpowered Things. Crit and +dmg do still roll. I suppose haste technically rolls as well, but as it doesn't hasten the ticks, it's useless (plus it'd screw up the rune cooldowns up, unless haste was made to affect those as well - this isn't going to happen until 4.0).

2. Yes, it is correct. Scourge strike, death coil, icy touch etc all use a charge, because they do physical damage - PS can be applied without using one. And yes, Blood Plague's damage is boosted as well. Do note that this "boost" rolls only on the target you apply it on - using Pestilence to spread it to multiple targets doesn't have the +20% damage in other targets.

3. Yes, ToTT and Cinderglacier stack. It's not usually realistic getting those two up at the same time without sacrificing a lot of DPS. It's also practically never worth it to fish for Cinderglacier procs if you already have diseases rolling with ToTT on the base. Getting only a 5% increase to diseases at that point while potentially sacrificing Unholy Strength uptime makes little sense.

If your rogues aren't co-operating, feel free to slap them senseless. Only an Affliction lock gets consistently more out of ToTT (preferably at the start of the fight) as they can roll Corruption throughout the fight and it's a significant part of their damage. Second target would be GoD glyphed, UH spec DK.

Just looking at today's Rotface on heroic version, I gained roughly 60k damage on diseases alone from one single ToTT. You can add the ~14k initial from strikes during ToTT to that - it'll be very hard to make a case for not giving it to DKs once per fight. I suppose you could match it with some rogue/feral/whatever who's already under Hysteria, popping Killing Spree and whatnot. Most of the time that's not going to be happening, though, and that's when an unholy DK is an excellent target of choice.



Some other random questions I get asked: I don't use a set to stone rotation, well, ever. It's a strict priority system - so much changes in a lot fights. Especially in the ones that aren't completely facerolled. Keep your (buffed up) diseases up, keep smashing scourge strike, try not to overflow on RP too much. It's really as simple as that. I'll write about some finer points in some specific encounters at a later time.



For professions (for some reason, this gets asked a lot too), I'll just say this:

GET ENGINEERING.

If you play a melee DPS character, that point can not be emphasized enough. It is, first of all, the DPS profession to have. Second of all, it will increase your own survivability (and the survivability of rest of the raid) by a ton. No other profession will come anywhere close to matching this. This isn't "just an opinion" - the difference is really that huge. It might not be so obvious at first glance, but right now I can't be bothered to discuss professions in-depth.



For the guy complaining about how Cinderglacier sucks - you're just probably doing it wrong if you can't see how it's any good at all. If you have a weapon that's ~equivalent with your current weapon in DPS, there's very little for you to do anyway at some points of your rotation. Considering it's a +20% increase to disease damage, it's a pretty hefty DPS increase for the rest of the fight. By far most of the time, unless you mess up otherwise while trying to get it up, this is worth it - as long as you don't completely destroy the uptime of Unholy Strength.