True answer, Crit vs. Haste Blood DK Parses?

[Lifire]

Hey!

Well I main a Prot Paladin and play every other tank except warrior as alt. I'm looking to optimise my Blood DPS and I've been through all the threads on this forum plus been through the majority of armories of top parsing 10man DK's on heroics.

I am trying to find out what is truly more valuable, Crit Gemming + Reforging or Haste? I have seen roughly a 60:40 ratio of DK's going Crit > Haste > Mastery for parsing.

I just want to maximise my Blood DK DPS throughput since I know I have plentiful mastery at the moment. Haste is obviously going to aid Rune Regen but it seems that when you push over a gear cap (i'd say 535) you will have enough Haste on your gear (if you have picked up the proper pieces) that Crit Gemming is going to simm higher for Blood DPS.

Can anyone give me an actual thoroughly explained answer? For all other tanks it's simple and straight forward how to maximise Tank DPS but for DK it's fairly unclear.

Some might now tell me "go haste until the comfort zone then gem/forge for crit" but I want to know the exact theory without any of this "feeling" bullshit.

On top and including of the above I have 3 questions:

Answered 1. Crit vs Haste and why, please be thorough for Blood DK DPS for parsing

Answered 2. Expertise Hard cap is useless correct? Since it will only cover white hits where Crit and Haste will overall simm higher.

Answered 3. Off topic, single-target do you ever use D&D or will you always prio Hearth Strike? What if you get a free D&D procc and/or the mob or boss is standstill for the whole duration of D&D

Answered 4. Does BB proccs refresh with previous vengeance or current vengeance? What about Pestilence? I think that is probably the highest key in properly managing Blood DPS (tried googling an answer but no luck)

Armory: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ifire/advanced

Most DK's that parse are running 80-90% mastery, how efficient is that and does that require any gameplay changes especially on Heroics like Lei Shen/Council/Primordius/Animus?

Thanks!

[Nyanmaru]

You want every parse to be high? Pick Haste.
You want that "when the stars allign omg I ranked first" parse? Go Crit.

Crit can give you bigger numbers, haste always gives you more numbers. Added benefit of haste is that you retain some survivability and don't throw it all away for DpS. Just from a basic numbers run, crit sims out better by less than 1% while offering no survivability benefit.

[Lifire]

You want every parse to be high? Pick Haste.
You want that "when the stars allign omg I ranked first" parse? Go Crit.

Crit can give you bigger numbers, haste always gives you more numbers. Added benefit of haste is that you retain some survivability and don't throw it all away for DpS. Just from a basic numbers run, crit sims out better by less than 1% while offering no survivability benefit.

Alright, that is what I thought! Thanks for the insight

[Tojara]

I just use pure DPS gear when I was doing progression and on every single boss. The only boss I didn't do this for was Heroic Horridon very early into progression, but that has changed. Basically reforge away mastery and go haste > crit.

Didn't bother with expertise hard cap, seems to do alright. I currently run with like 12k haste rating and 9k critical strike rating. Basically gives me slightly higher than 25% haste. There are times where I go pretty long periods without even being able to use blood runes as you will get RP pretty quickly, and with that amount of haste you're using DS a lot. If I really wanted to do more damage I'd change my red sockets from pure strength to strength/haste and change my yellows to pure haste from strength/haste. I DPS and I tank though, and I don't really feel like regemming all the time. Numbers show that on some encounters even for DPS DKs that a pure haste setup might be better, I don't really feel comfortable bumping my haste up because as I said I do DPS from time to time.

If you purely play blood though and you're only interested in DPS, I'd likely go haste in yellows and strength/haste in reds. Reforge everything to haste/crit and get hit/expertise cap (not hard).

Honestly I completely forgot about gaze of the twins (just picked one up off rot this week) and might try it out next week granted that I have nothing left to even upgrade. It's pretty disgusting though. Sitting here with 18% crit unbuffed, it gets to 3 stacks (which is like 17.5% crit) and maintains three stacks for a decent chunk of time. Well, at least until 5.4. I imagine for blood it will drop in value a lot without RC/BP buffing it's proc rates.

You don't really change game play a whole lot. You still time your DS from time to time when it's obvious, but you basically just try to maximize as many DS/min as you possibly can.

[Deleted]

Just from a basic numbers run, crit sims out better by less than 1% while offering no survivability benefit.

I'd love to see some evidence of that. I just can't see haste being only a 1% DPS loss when you reach the point where you are frequently resource capped. How do you account for multiple targets in situations where crit is clearly superior as haste does nothing for diseases? And what about situations with periods of vengeance downtime, e.g. every tank swap fight, and refreshing diseases to take advantage of high vengeance periods?

For what it's worth, and this is basically going to be anecdotal evidence so take it with a grain of salt, what works for me is the following priority:

7.5% Hit/Expertise > Haste until you reach the point where you often cap resources > Crit > 15% Expertise > Strength.

Obviously this is purely for DPS, your mileage may vary and if you are worried at all about survivability then you are best off focusing mostly on haste. I've tried pure haste and, for me, it just didn't match up. For reference: http://www.worldoflogs.com/guilds/79...ayers/#tab-DPS & http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/eu/kazzak/auk/. You can clearly see that crit doesn't only appear to perform well when the stars align, so to say.

2. Expertise Hard cap is useless correct? Since it will only cover white hits where Crit and Haste will overall simm higher.

3. Off topic, single-target do you ever use D&D or will you always prio Hearth Strike? What if you get a free D&D procc and/or the mob or boss is standstill for the whole duration of D&D

Expertise hard cap is better than strength but it's still fairly low on your list of priorities.

Death and Decay is definitely a single target DPS increase if the target will be in it for the full duration, even more so when prioritising crit over haste. You don't want to use it when you don't have a proc though.

[Lifire]

I'd love to see some evidence of that. I just can't see haste being only a 1% DPS loss when you reach the point where you are frequently resource capped. How do you account for multiple targets in situations where crit is clearly superior as haste does nothing for diseases? And what about situations with periods of vengeance downtime, e.g. every tank swap fight, and refreshing diseases to take advantage of high vengeance periods?

For what it's worth, and this is basically going to be anecdotal evidence so take it with a grain of salt, what works for me is the following priority:

7.5% Hit/Expertise > Haste until you reach the point where you often cap resources > Crit > 15% Expertise > Strength.

Obviously this is purely for DPS, your mileage may vary and if you are worried at all about survivability then you are best off focusing mostly on haste. I've tried pure haste and, for me, it just didn't match up. For reference: http://www.worldoflogs.com/guilds/79...ayers/#tab-DPS & http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/eu/kazzak/auk/. You can clearly see that crit doesn't only appear to perform well when the stars align, so to say.



Expertise hard cap is better than strength but it's still fairly low on your list of priorities.

Death and Decay is definitely a single target DPS increase if the target will be in it for the full duration, even more so when prioritising crit over haste. You don't want to use it when you don't have a proc though.

I did eyeball your logs before I posted this which is why it seemed confusing, consistent parses with a full Crit build but then people getting similar parses with a full haste build in similar gear levels.

So what is the breakpoint for "when you cap on resources"? To be blunt does that mean when my rune regen is so fast then I don't have downtime to spam Rune Strike and most of my globals are spent on Rune abilities?

[Deleted]

I did eyeball your logs before I posted this which is why it seemed confusing, consistent parses with a full Crit build but then people getting similar parses with a full haste build in similar gear levels.

So what is the breakpoint for "when you cap on resources"? To be blunt does that mean when my rune regen is so fast then I don't have downtime to spam Rune Strike and most of my globals are spent on Rune abilities?

By resource capping I mean having enough resources, both runes and runic power, to fill every GCD. Once you reach that point haste is mostly just providing you with more Death Strikes so it loses its effectiveness. It does vary a lot from fight to fight depending on how often you will have RP from AMS which is one of the main reasons that I prefer crit as I feel it's more consistent, especially with diseases benefiting from it. That's a huge bonus on fights like Council, or Lei Shen, when you're able to spread diseases to additional targets but you're not able to constantly attack them.

The problem with comparing logs is that the most important factor for tank DPS is vengeance and aside from looking at damage taken it's not easily discernible. I'm not sure if any improvements have been made to SimCraft lately but the last time I had a look at it, it didn't seem to be taking vengeance into account when calculating stat weights and the default priority leaves a lot to be desired as well. Unfortunately for the moment I'm mostly going off of personal experience and a bit of logic.

[Uglytoes]

Does a 25m Blood DK benefit from a similar crit>haste philosophy? I am primarily Unholy, but I tank a massive on Animus 25H. I have a full dps blood set with 549 Feather/Primordius trinkets plus DPS 2 set, DPS meta, DPS legendary cloak and several dps off pieces. I am optimized for Haste and have about 12k haste/10k mastery at the moment. I understand that vengeance is a major component to blood dps but is crit primarily effective only in a 10m setting or is there potential in a 25m setting?

[solid77]

i use crit > haste for 10m, i think i'm around 30% crit 12% haste in my dps gear which is around 423ilvl.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/g...=10969&e=11470

[Trubo]

If at any point you don't have the runic power to use Rune Strike and lack the runes for Death Strike then, on average, Haste should beat Crit since it increases Scent of Blood procs and Rune Regeneration. After that point then I guess Crit would be better from a pure DPS perspective. I'm not accounting for Heart Strikes to generate Runic Power because Heart Strike hits like a wet noodle relative to Rune Strike and Death Strike.

[Whiteout]

I'll have to second auk here, the only 1's he doesn't have in 10h ToT belong to me and I gem/reforge straight crit after haste til 8-9kish (roughly 20%). I just got a gaze of the twins heroic last week going to test it out this week but as of now id rate the dps trinkets feather(if you can fit most of the hit) > primo > spark , I want to try gaze for a week before I pass judgement. As for haste, I current run 8.9k and I still hit the effective resource cap (unable to use procs and blood runes) so I couldn't imagine how often that would happen with 18+k haste.

Tldr : crit > haste all day any day for pure dps gains

[Lifire]

Alright, another question, how about the dots? Do you reapply them with high vengeance?

Does BB proccs refresh with previous vengeance or current vengeance? What about Pestilence? I think that is probably the highest key in properly managing Blood DPS

If this has been explained elsewhere let me know, i'm trying to google it, not much luck

[zer0xfr]

Blood boil works in a way that directly refreshes debuffs as if you cast icy touch yourself. Therefore the current stat levels will be applied. You can use a addon simular to what Warlocks use to track dot strenghts, Dkdots. As far as I know pestilence just transfers current dots to all targets in range, without touching the main ones - However when using Roiling Blood, it works the same way as Blood boil always does and refreshes your debuffs. Hope this is of any use. If you wanna know more about how the debuffs work and such, checking out Dk's Festerblight is probaly the best. There has been alot of details and information in that regard.

[Nyanmaru]

Blood boil works in a way that directly refreshes debuffs as if you cast icy touch yourself. Therefore the current stat levels will be applied. You can use a addon simular to what Warlocks use to track dot strenghts, Dkdots. As far as I know pestilence just transfers current dots to all targets in range, without touching the main ones - However when using Roiling Blood, it works the same way as Blood boil always does and refreshes your debuffs. Hope this is of any use. If you wanna know more about how the debuffs work and such, checking out Dk's Festerblight is probaly the best. There has been alot of details and information in that regard.

Correct.

It's even easier to explain: Only Festering Strike lengthens diseases keeping their "original AP". All other skills/talents use "current AP".

[Deleted]

@Auk, how do you rate trinkets for pure dps purpose?
Obviously Primordius talisman is the best, but what trinket should be second [Gaze; Feather; Spark; ...] ?
Is there clear situation as for 1st trinket or this depends on fights requirement?

edit
Iam curious because people saying we should go for Gaze, but this is not constant crit stat. Do You prefer Feather for this 700+ crit ? Or anything better just didnt dropped for You ?

[JGWentworth]

go haste till you can't keep up with the rune regen then dump it into crit

[Whiteout]

@Auk, how do you rate trinkets for pure dps purpose?
Obviously Primordius talisman is the best, but what trinket should be second [Gaze; Feather; Spark; ...] ?
Is there clear situation as for 1st trinket or this depends on fights requirement?

edit
Iam curious because people saying we should go for Gaze, but this is not constant crit stat. Do You prefer Feather for this 700+ crit ? Or anything better just didnt dropped for You ?

Did a run with gaze this past week and on anything AoE (council/tortos/primo etc.) its really nice. I run about 9k haste and it runs 70% uptime, with a 3 stack proc i have around 55% crit. On Aoe fights id def say Gaze + primo, on strictly single target its debatable as to whether feather or gaze but in high vengeance situations gaze will surely win as the increase in crit rapidly outscales strength.

[Lifire]

I just recently saw Auk change his entire gearing for 17k Haste? Any reason why ?

Also got the tanking cloak so I presume its just prepping for 5.4 ?

[Trubo]

I just recently saw Auk change his entire gearing for 17k Haste? Any reason why ?

Also got the tanking cloak so I presume its just prepping for 5.4 ?

Haste versus Crit in terms of maximizing damage is debatable. Haste versus Crit in terms of maximizing survivability is a pretty obvious no contest.

As for the tanking cloak thing I have no idea why they'd change the currently Unique cloak for another considering in 5.4 you'll be able to have as many of the epic and legendary cloaks as you'd like.

[Deleted]

I just recently saw Auk change his entire gearing for 17k Haste? Any reason why ?

Also got the tanking cloak so I presume its just prepping for 5.4 ?

Yep, I was just preparing for patch 5.4 and playing around with haste a little more. Haven't decided yet what the plan is with gearing but no doubt you'll be able to get away with anything for normal modes and the first few heroic bosses. Haste will lose some value for DPS next patch as we'll be replacing our DPS 2-set eventually and because of the changes, or fixes, they're making to RPPM.

Haste versus Crit in terms of maximizing damage is debatable. Haste versus Crit in terms of maximizing survivability is a pretty obvious no contest.

As for the tanking cloak thing I have no idea why they'd change the currently Unique cloak for another considering in 5.4 you'll be able to have as many of the epic and legendary cloaks as you'd like.

Pretty much just so I can go into next patch valor capped in case I get lucky with drops. The cost of buying another cloak isn't really a concern and I won't spend the valor on upgrading a second cloak until the first week of raiding is over, just in case. Still not entirely sure which cloak I'll run with but it'll definitely be nice to be able to have an alternative to purgatory for when or if AMZ is needed.

@Auk, how do you rate trinkets for pure dps purpose?
Obviously Primordius talisman is the best, but what trinket should be second [Gaze; Feather; Spark; ...] ?
Is there clear situation as for 1st trinket or this depends on fights requirement?

edit
Iam curious because people saying we should go for Gaze, but this is not constant crit stat. Do You prefer Feather for this 700+ crit ? Or anything better just didnt dropped for You ?

Really late reply but I'd rate the trinkets as follows:

Gaze > Feather if you need the hit > Primordius > Feather > Spark.

Gaze is definitely the best for DPS, then it's a toss up between Feather and Primordius but personally I prefer Primordius. Sadly we haven't had a single Gaze drop yet though.