[Compilation] DK Questions and Answers

[Mendenbarr]

Blog is 553 gear, EJ is 580 gear.
The fusion fire core is an interesting trinket, because it kinda sucks on single target, but has the potential to be kinda awesome for AE/cleave. The problem is, it's completely luck based, there isn't even any bad luck protection. Some fights it might do nothing, others it might double your dps. Give it a try and see if you like it.

I'd suggest rolling with HTF feather/ fire core, and swapping fire core for shadopan on the few ST fights.

[Deleted]

Awesome, thanks man.
They're more or less identical at the top end, will make it easier as weeks go by heh.

[Deleted]

Hi, just want to ask; the "waiting" statistic...

How should I view this?

Is it the closer to 0% the better?

I currently get around 0.49% when running my 2h frost dk through a scaling simc.

Cheers!

[Mendenbarr]

Hi, just want to ask; the "waiting" statistic...

How should I view this?

Is it the closer to 0% the better?

I currently get around 0.49% when running my 2h frost dk through a scaling simc.

Cheers!

"Waiting" in simC basically means time spent when you have the open GCD to cast an ability, but there are no abilities up. 0% means you are fully GCD locked, and should never have any downtime. The closer you get to 0, the less valuable haste becomes, and as frost is nearly at 0% with 0 haste, haste overall has been devalued quite a bit.
100% "waiting" would mean you never cast any abilities, while 50% waiting would be casting abilities during half of your GCDs.

[Mang]

Blog is 553 gear, EJ is 580 gear.
The fusion fire core is an interesting trinket, because it kinda sucks on single target, but has the potential to be kinda awesome for AE/cleave. The problem is, it's completely luck based, there isn't even any bad luck protection. Some fights it might do nothing, others it might double your dps. Give it a try and see if you like it.

I'd suggest rolling with HTF feather/ fire core, and swapping fire core for shadopan on the few ST fights.

On the topic of trinkets, what are your thoughts on [Thok's Tail Tip]

[ultimaa]

I tried to ask you a question on a different forum (elitestjerk) and then after visiting your blog I realized that this thread is the appropriate place to ask you questions. My question is (since people are so quick to write off festerblight) whether someone could use skeer's Blood-soaked talisman in combination of another strength proc trinket(evil eye, thok tail, ect) to festerblight. This reason i ask this is because with 20 stacks of talisman (20 stacks of 1511 crit=30220 crit/600crit per%crit= 50.37%crit) you get around a 50% crit chance increase on top of whatever your current crit is. This in combination with an opener with str pot, engy gloves, fallen crusader, and your other trinket proccing would lead to Dots that are around twice your current strength(70-80k) and around 80 to 85% crit(even more with thoks tail tip). I am wondering if a person could use this type of snapshot to viably play festerblight.

[Mendenbarr]

On the topic of trinkets, what are your thoughts on [Thok's Tail Tip]

It's OP, get one as soon as you can. It's not quite as OP as feather was, but it's still damn good.

I tried to ask you a question on a different forum (elitestjerk) and then after visiting your blog I realized that this thread is the appropriate place to ask you questions. My question is (since people are so quick to write off festerblight) whether someone could use skeer's Blood-soaked talisman in combination of another strength proc trinket(evil eye, thok tail, ect) to festerblight. This reason i ask this is because with 20 stacks of talisman (20 stacks of 1511 crit=30220 crit/600crit per%crit= 50.37%crit) you get around a 50% crit chance increase on top of whatever your current crit is. This in combination with an opener with str pot, engy gloves, fallen crusader, and your other trinket proccing would lead to Dots that are about twice your current strength(70-80k) and around 80 to 85% crit(even more with thoks tail tip). I am wondering if a person could use this type of snapshot to viably play festerblight.

Unfortunately, while the 30k crit rating is nice, you have to give up 15k str to get it, and your DoTs simply don't do enough damage to justify giving up SS for FeS. It works very nicely for disease gaming.
Tried to sim this and I could not even get skeers to reliably proc at the start of the fight.

[zuke8675309]

I'm wondering if someone (hopefully Mendenbarr) can explain a few things to me that I'm seeing from sims.

Link to my armory.

Last week I was fortunate enough to get the tier chest and 2hander off Sha of Pride. Last night I coined the 1hander off Norushen which led me to start running some sims to find out at what point I would want to go DW since all I've been reading is that DW is stronger than 2H.

I simmed my character as is with simcraft's Hectic Add Cleave setting and got 315,246.
I then simmed my char with Hectic Add Cleave using the DW prio list, 2x1h (from norushen) plus mastery reforges and got 309,663.

I thought, "hmm, that's odd". Reading Mendenbarr's blog, even in T15 gear, DW is ahead AND I have simcraft on the hectic add cleave setting which should favor DW.

Wondering if the t16 2p would make a difference I ran (with hectic add cleave)
My armor adding in gloves so I had t16 2p (2h prio list) and got 326,200
My armor, gloves for t16 2p and 2 x 1h (mastery reforges & DW prio list) and got 321,371

First reaction is wow, t16 2p is a huge upgrade!

Second reaction is why am I seeing 2H simming higher than DW in an add cleave situation?

[Mendenbarr]

The first thing I check when I get a result that doesn't make sense is whether or not I've put any errors into the profile. For example, perhaps your DW reforges are suboptimal, or you didn't change over gems to full mastery, or used an outdated priority list. Perhaps your version of simC is outdated? (latest is 540-1)

To be fair, it might just be something to do with the hectic add cleave setting. It's been downright broken in the past, and I'm not as confident in the results from our "raid events" system as I am from single target or AE results.

Or, for you, perhaps 2H frost is just better. The fun part of simming is interpreting your results.

[zuke8675309]

Running 540-1 simc
Ran some more sims using the default profiles that I downloaded from the "Everything you wanted to know about 5.4 dks" post and I was able to duplicate those results - that was my control.

Then I ran more 1 target sims using my current gear, then with 2 x1h using the same priority lists I got similar results to what I first received - ie, that for the gear I have (mix of upgraded t15 normal/heroic plus upgraded 553 weapon & chest) 2H still sims higher.

Very interesting to me. Bottom line that I see, DW may not be better depending on your gear mix even if you have all 553 weapons.

[Deleted]

ahoi - currently running with a fairly crit/mastery-heavy Unholy build:

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...magik/advanced

Question is, if I were to have a 2H frost offspec I'd want the 2set bonus to stack haste (for now, I use a fairly low haste value of about 6k) and so I'd swap between a reforged primordius' talisman and spark to push either haste or mastery higher.

Does the 2set take your buffs into account when deciding which stat to stack or is it based on your unbuffed state?

Kind regards.

[Mendenbarr]

Running 540-1 simc
Ran some more sims using the default profiles that I downloaded from the "Everything you wanted to know about 5.4 dks" post and I was able to duplicate those results - that was my control.

Then I ran more 1 target sims using my current gear, then with 2 x1h using the same priority lists I got similar results to what I first received - ie, that for the gear I have (mix of upgraded t15 normal/heroic plus upgraded 553 weapon & chest) 2H still sims higher.

Very interesting to me. Bottom line that I see, DW may not be better depending on your gear mix even if you have all 553 weapons.

Good for you, simming yourself!
I'm curious though, you say you used the same priority list, did you use the 2H priority list for DW?

ahoi - currently running with a fairly crit/mastery-heavy Unholy build:

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...magik/advanced

Question is, if I were to have a 2H frost offspec I'd want the 2set bonus to stack haste (for now, I use a fairly low haste value of about 6k) and so I'd swap between a reforged primordius' talisman and spark to push either haste or mastery higher.

Does the 2set take your buffs into account when deciding which stat to stack or is it based on your unbuffed state?

Kind regards.

It does take the 3000 mastery buff(and any other buffs for the rating) into account. When you say you want it to stack haste, do you mean as 2H frost or as unholy, or both?

[Deleted]

It does take the 3000 mastery buff(and any other buffs for the rating) into account. When you say you want it to stack haste, do you mean as 2H frost or as unholy, or both?

I was going to stack more crit and keep my mastery/haste around the same sort of level (possibly 6kish) so that, by swapping a trinket I could game the 2set to proc mastery as Unholy and haste as 2H frost. If the 2set takes the 3k mastery buff into account it makes that idea a bit more difficult ;-) Ta for your help.

[Mendenbarr]

I was going to stack more crit and keep my mastery/haste around the same sort of level (possibly 6kish) so that, by swapping a trinket I could game the 2set to proc mastery as Unholy and haste as 2H frost. If the 2set takes the 3k mastery buff into account it makes that idea a bit more difficult ;-) Ta for your help.

All of the stat weights I've done for 5.4 2H frost show haste below mastery, at all gear levels I've checked. Have you found a setup of gear where haste is above mastery?

[zuke8675309]

I'm curious though, you say you used the same priority list, did you use the 2H priority list for DW?

I don't believe so. Admittedly, I'm new to using some of the more advanced ways of running sims (ie, beyond just loading one character in and letting it auto-figure out the spec and such).

Here's what I did, you can tell me if I'm correct or not:

I set all the options I wanted according to number of iterations, threads, patchwerk, 1 target, etc.
Then on the Simulate tab, I pasted in the text from "Spec Balance 1T" - link found on the "Everything you wanted to know about 5.4 DK" post.
Ran that, got comparable results.
I then went back to the simulate tab and deleted everything but the 1h t16N and 2h t16N sections. I changed the race from tauren to human on both.
I fired up Ask Mr. Robot, loaded in my character and clicked export to SimC. I copied ONLY the gear portion of the data over the only gear portion of the 2H section back in SimC on the simulate page.
I then went back to Ask Mr. Robot, changed spec from 2h frost to DW frost and added 2 1h weapons, upgraded with the correct runeforges. I then pressed Optimize so it would do it's default mastery reforges and then clicked export to SimC, copied the gear info to SimC, replacing the gear for 1h_t16N.
Ran the sim.

My understanding is that the line: deathknight="Death_Knight_Frost_2h_T16N" pulls rotation information from the file of the same name in simc directory.

Checking the action priority list in the results section confirms that different rotations are being used for each gearset.

Sorry for being so verbose in listing the steps - hopefully my methodology helps someone else learn about simming different gearsets with their character.

Bottom line:
When I do the steps I just listed, I get 249,535 for my current gear which is 542 ilevel, with the 2hander from normal Sha of Pride.
If I switch out the 2hander with 2 x 1handers from Norushen, change the reforges and use DW action list, I get 245,960.

Obviously these results aren't consistent with "DW is better than 2H."

One thing that is going on is this: (Comments appreciated)

A double upgraded Greatsword of Pride's Fall has 2161 str, 1367 crit, and 1496 haste.
A double upgraded Xifeng, Longblade of the Titanic Guardian has 881 str, 647 hit, and 522 mastery.
2 x Xifeng gives you 1762 strength, 1294 hit, and 1044 mastery.

So with this situation, the 2H has 399 more strength than the DW setup.

Not only is 2 x Xifeng significantly underbudget in stats compared to a single Greatsword of Pride's Fall, but the 2 x Xifeng has 1294 hit and while you can reforge 258hit into crit per weapon, that's STILL 778 wasted hit because both gearsets are over the hitcap.

While typing this out and thinking about it, I decided to switch out the 2 x Xifeng weapons for 2 x Siegecrafter's Forge Hammer and rerun the sim (again, my own gearset, proper reforges, and priority list for DW). These maces have haste/mastery instead of hit/mastery.
Result was 246,839. An increase of almost 900 but nowhere near the 249,535 of 2H.

[Mendenbarr]

Sounds like you did everything right to me.

It's close enough that it's believable, and these kind of results are why it's so important to sim yourself and get your own information. Still, keep in mind that this is ST only, perhaps you'll want to try 5 targets for AE spamming, or even 2-3 targets for passive cleave to see how they compare. Would you mind copying and pasting your entire profile into a pastebin so I can take a look?

[Deleted]

All of the stat weights I've done for 5.4 2H frost show haste below mastery, at all gear levels I've checked. Have you found a setup of gear where haste is above mastery?

All my research had been unholy or DW based... Didn't put any thought into the possibility of haste not being as good for 2h frost any more, serves me right for not looking!

seems I can use the same gear then.

Ta

[zuke8675309]

Sounds like you did everything right to me.

It's close enough that it's believable, and these kind of results are why it's so important to sim yourself and get your own information. Still, keep in mind that this is ST only, perhaps you'll want to try 5 targets for AE spamming, or even 2-3 targets for passive cleave to see how they compare. Would you mind copying and pasting your entire profile into a pastebin so I can take a look?

http://pastebin.com/Wz2wpHUL

That's the pastebin for the profile I used most recently.

Single target, it shows with 561 weapons that:
2h beats DW with ToT trinkets and t15-4p
2h beats DW with Evil Eye & Thoks tail and t15-4p (but the gap is less, about 4k)
DW beats 2h with Evil Eye & Thoks tail and t16-2p (10k gap)


If you run the same profile for 3 target cleave then DW beats 2H by a large margin in all 3 of the gear levels. This is what you would obviously expect.

Like you said, simming your own gear is important.

My sims show that for single target only, 2H beats DW until you get several pieces of SoO gear (the 2piece being pretty important).
However, for the cleave fights (of which there are several) DW is king as soon as you get 2 SoO 1handers.

[Mendenbarr]

Try using PL in the sim Zuke.

Replace the talent line at the top of each profile with
talents=222311

[Darkfriend]

Fight like Dark Shaman

Worth switching back/forth every ~15 seconds to keep up razorice stacks on both? Assuming both are tanked together and you can OFC.