Please help me tweak my dps.

[Bhudda]

My name is Mike and my char name is Bhudda. I am in <Dakine> on the Jube'Thos server
Armory Link
I usually use Winding Sheet as my cloak unless we are doing an encounter where I worry about parry hasting the boss as in Halion or Sindragosa then I would switch over to my expertise badge cloak. On Sindragosa my guild also requires belt and boots of frost resist so my dps ranking suffers on that fight.

Back in the day of the 5% buff I was blood spec and I ranked on at least one fight every week on WoL. Since then I have switched to UH and gotten my SM. I am usually within 95% of ranking but can't seem to get over that hump to actual rankings.

I would love some help figuring out what to tweak to pull out that extra little bit to get to my full potential. Mostly I have been concentrating on the DBS fights because there are so few extra variables like movement to deal with.

A few things I do that are not easily visible in the parses.
1. Pre-pot speed and army as the tank counts down before the pull. (at 5 seconds till combat on DBS)
2. Speed pot is also macro'd into my gargoyle so if the fight goes long enough to do a second gargoyle, or I didn't pre pot, he gets the buff
3. Blood Tap and Bone Shield are macro'd together so that if Bone Shield ever falls off I can instantly refresh it without messing up my rotation.
4. As an Orc my Blood Fury racial is macro'd into all my attacks so it has the maximum uptime.
5. I never get a Tricks of the Trade or Hysteria.
6. I use a Nostromo 52 speedpad instead of my keyboard. I have set it up to spam whatever button I am holding down at the speed of .01ms per tick. I hold down the next button in my rotation so that as soon as the gcd is off it ticks.
7. My ms is usually at about 140 sometimes up to 250 on a bad night.

Here are some recent logs. I believe I have all the dps raid buffs but we tend to go long on fights. Most ranked DBS fights for instance are about 1min to 1 1/2mins less than ours.

My most recent parse, last week.
WoL Sep 01 ICC clear
My cast sequence on DBS
I messed up my rotation alot on this fight but still pulled 16423 dps.
WMO for DBS on Sep 01

My highest 30% buff parse
WoL Aug 04 ICC clear
My cast sequence on DBS
My best recent DBS dps at 16544
WMO for DBS Aug 04


There are a few things I found that top ranking dk's do that I don't.
1. They have a strict rotation. Mostly its SS, BS, DC rinse repeat. I seem to play more of a priority with those 3 than a strict rotation. I do get RP capped though.
2. Most have engineering. I have Blacksmithing and Inscription. Inscription is mostly for money making but I am working on dropping it for Engineering. I have a hard time believing that Engineering is such a dps boost over as static profession buff like the shoulder enchant on Inscription.

Thanks for your time and any help would be greatly appreciated.

[zYN]

This is probably the best "help me out" sort of post I remember seeing on these forums. Easy to read and to extract relevant information out of, even at a glance.

I'll promise to take a look at everything you posted tomorrow. Right now I'm extremely tired and almost going to fall asleep already. Also a big thank you for presenting everything so well.

[Bhudda]

No problem. Get some sleep.

IF we do ICC tonight I will link it. We are supposed to do RS 25 HM all week to get server 2nd but we have been having issues with not enough of the right classes logging on.

[Bhudda]

this week's ICC 25.

WoL parse
My cast sequence on DBS
WMO parse

Noticing I had horrible dps on festergut, I looked and found I had my pet on passive up till that point. On the DBS fight I hit my pet attack hot key so he should have been attacking the boss the whole time.
We had just over a 3 min fight. I really think that fight length is what is bringing me down since a faster fight has more Blood Lust % of uptime.


Incase anyone wants to know how to get the cast sequence from WoL, here are the instructions.
1. on WoL change the "full report" drop down to whatever boss try or kill you want to see.
2. on the "dashboard" drop down go to expression editor
3. in the box type in - sourceName = "Bhudda" and fulltype = SPELL_CAST_SUCCESS

just make sure to change Bhudda to whatever name you want to see.

[Farnion]

Incase anyone wants to know how to get the cast sequence from WoL, here are the instructions.
1. on WoL change the "full report" drop down to whatever boss try or kill you want to see.
2. on the "dashboard" drop down go to expression editor
3. in the box type in - sourceName = "Bhudda" and fulltype = SPELL_CAST_SUCCESS

just make sure to change Bhudda to whatever name you want to see.

interesting. played a little bit around and created this expression:

Code: Select all

sourceName = "Bhudda" and ((type=TYPE_AURA and targetName = "Bhudda" and fullType != SPELL_AURA_REFRESH) or type=TYPE_CAST)

this will not only show the cast sequence but also all your proccs gained and faded (but not refreshed).

[masv]

6. I use a Nostromo 52 speedpad instead of my keyboard. I have set it up to spam whatever button I am holding down at the speed of .01ms per tick. I hold down the next button in my rotation so that as soon as the gcd is off it ticks.

Is this compliant with blizzard rules though?

"The G15 may have the ability to continually activate an ability as long as you keep the key pressed but that is not a function that is permitted by our policies." http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... ageNo=5#82

and

"...as well as automatic repetition would therefore be unacceptable." http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... ageNo=4#60

would suggest it's not, or have there been some change on this topic?

[Bhudda]

if its not, its an easy fix. I just turn off the repeating and manually spam the button with my finger. the only diff is me pushing a button 100 times and me holding a button down.

its just a matter of button press speed.

Edit: to answer your question, I don't know if its allowed. with what you linked its prob not.

[zYN]

Forgot to reply. Was busy for a bit and haven't browsed the forums for roughly a week.

So, few pointers:
-You're significantly over the (spell) hit cap. A ton of stats is being wasted
-Your spec makes little sense to me. Specifically, the fact that you're skipping out on Dirge
-You're still using SoV. You must have badges for SotHM by now?

I really don't like the idea of macroing speed potions and blood fury into abilities. There's bound to be times when your trinkets are about to come off of ICD and you haven't yet used ERW - I'd atleast want to pop blood fury at that exact time.


I tried checking the logs also. Nothing really caught my eye especially much. However, you wrote that you get RP capped (and probably as a result overflow RP). How is that possible though? There's plenty of time to dump RP when playing Unholy. You must be doing something wrong if you keep hitting the cap even though you don't have any points in Dirge. I don't know what it is, but that definitely shouldn't be happening outside of situations where you soak stuff up with AMS or fire up ERW.

One thing to help you with it would be to utilize the rune grace period. If you're not familiar with it, it's a period of time after your runes have just become fully charged and ready to use. Easiest way to describe it is that you can just imagine the runes are able to pre-charge 25% of their next cycle. If you don't use it by the time they hit 25% then it's a DPS loss, as the runes are just sitting idle.

What that basically means is that even though your runes just came active and you could've hit SS or BS, you can still squeeze in a Death Coil without losing any sustained DPS as long as you use the readied up runes right away.


[edit:] And btw, I wouldn't really worry about using some sort of half-automated keyboard/pad whatever when playing normally. As long as you don't use it to keep yourself online beating on mobs/dummies and as long as the duration between repeats isn't like 1ms so that it floods the server by massive amounts.

[Bhudda]

Thanks for the reply.

Ok as for the hit cap. Up until wednesday night I was at 263 hit. I picked up Apocalypse's Advance (boots) from Halion that completely boosted my hit. I checked and don't really have anything to swap out that would drop my hit until I can upgrade my neck from LDW or wrists from Halion. I hope thats what you are seeing.

I do have SotHM and use it on DBW I just had SoV on because the last fights we did this week were Sindragosa and Dreamwalker.

I had blood fury macro'd to abilities because I figured it was better to have it up as much as possible rather than forget to use it. I guess I'll just have to get better at using it. Prob set up a power auras for it so I can remember. The speed pot is only macro'd to army and gargoyle. I think I'll undo that to make it more reactive too.

The reason I don't have dirge is because I get a ton of revitalize. We usually run with 2 resto druids who love to hit me with rejuv or wild growth. In the 3 dbw fights I linked I got 400rp, 384rp, and 368rp from revitalize on those fights. So I'm getting about 8 to 10 extra DC's in that fight over an avg of 3 1/2 mins. So an extra DC about every 20 seconds.


Now for some questions/clarification

I know about the rune grace period, but never really understood how to exploit it.

Lets say I have all my runes on cd and a F/U comes available while I have say 80rp. I should dc then ss? And if I do, then the next time the F/U combo comes up do I still have the grace period?

If so, then I should also be hitting dc right before my strikes instead of just using them to fill gaps. Is this right?
If I can do this then I can pick up dirge and do even more dc's. This should help with my capping rp too.

If I had dirge on my 16544 dps parse I would have had (9 ps + 29 ss) 38 dirge procs for 190 extra rp. vs the 10% extra dc damage.
dc damage on parse 322803 (21 crits/14 hits *10 of these came from revitalize*)
dc damage - 10% by specing out of morbidity 293457
293457 divided by 35 dc's (for avg dc damage) 8385
8385 times 5 dc from dirge rp (round up to 200rp divide by 40 for dc cost) 41922
41922 + 293457 = 335379.

If I can use my dc's then I gain 12576 damage or 64dps over the 194 sec fight. (If I don't round up its only 4191 extra damage or 21dps)


All and all you gave me something to work with, thank you.
Better use of Blood Fury and speed pots. Respec to dirge for dps boost. And most of all, a better use of grace period to be able to use every ounce of dps available. We already did DBS this week and had a mark die so it was a long fight again but I still pulled 16k dps. Gives me a week to practice.

[Farnion]

I know about the rune grace period, but never really understood how to exploit it.

Lets say I have all my runes on cd and a F/U comes available while I have say 80rp. I should dc then ss? And if I do, then the next time the F/U combo comes up do I still have the grace period?

Like in your example: FU comes up, you use it instantly, those runes need 10 seconds to recharge.
But: FU comes up, you use instead DC + one global cooldown and then use FU runes, they now will need less (8 as minimum if i'm right) seconds to recharge, so you could have used this DC without losing any time on rune recharging.

If you use your runes instantly -> 10 seconds to recharge (damage loss as long you could use other spells)
If you use your runes after 1 second -> 9 seconds to recharge
If you use your runes after 2 seconds -> 8 seconds to recharge
If you use your runes after more than 2 seconds -> still 8 seconds to recharge (damage loss)

You can just try it out if you have a decent rune monitor, just hit the puppet.