Preliminary WoD stat weights & DK WoD Simcraft updates

[Rothulean1]

The devs arent buffing NP likely because of pvp. Im sure they can see the same numbers we do and how incredibly strong Defile is compared to NP. The real issue with Defile vs NP is Plague Leech. Plague Leech just doesnt work together with NP at all. So the real comparison isnt Defile vs NP.

Its Defile/Plague Leech vs NP/Unholy Blight.

So even if Defile doesnt smoke NP on a particular fight, PL ALWAYS destroys Unholy Blight. ST/AoE...Plague Leech always wins.

[Schizoide]

Plague Leech doesn't work with NP at all for Festerblight Unholy. But Festerblight Unholy is a DPS loss from normal Unholy with NPlague, so that doesn't really matter. PLeech works OK with normal Unholy with NPlague, but Plaguebearer is comparable, and Unholy Blight is nice AE burst. Not nice compared to just plain taking Defile, but nicer than PLeech.

The devs are fully aware that Defile is dominant. God knows we've told them often enough. They simply are not responsive to feedback. They didn't listen to beta testers, and they certainly aren't listening now. Hopefully when the current crop of devs quits and moves to Riot or wherever, the next generation will be more receptive. Beyond that, we can sit n' spin. Nothing you care about will be fixed. Reroll or deal with it. Hard truths.

[Rothulean1]

So basically, if Defile doesnt beat NP in the situation, PL almost always beats the alternatives. Sad reality.

[Raikh]

Plague Leech doesn't work with NP at all for Festerblight Unholy. But Festerblight Unholy is a DPS loss from normal Unholy with NPlague, so that doesn't really matter. PLeech works OK with normal Unholy with NPlague, but Plaguebearer is comparable, and Unholy Blight is nice AE burst. Not nice compared to just plain taking Defile, but nicer than PLeech.

The devs are fully aware that Defile is dominant. God knows we've told them often enough. They simply are not responsive to feedback. They didn't listen to beta testers, and they certainly aren't listening now. Hopefully when the current crop of devs quits and moves to Riot or wherever, the next generation will be more receptive. Beyond that, we can sit n' spin. Nothing you care about will be fixed. Reroll or deal with it. Hard truths.

I've gathered by now some pretty interesting data on BoS and wouldn't call defile the best talent for anything below 4 targets but its definitely kind of a design failure to have the easiest talent to manage to be the overall winner and doesn't even leave niches for the other talents. Its flat dmg reduce, which is practical, its flat and easy dmg and its also considerably strong on AoE a thing BoS can't do at all and NP lacks in almost every situation, way too niche if it finds one at all.

The only realistic buffs I could see is on NP. Breath is if used correctly already quite strong, would love to see it buffed, but I would be quite sure to go through the roof if a considerable BoS buff happens and also it would be quite problematic in terms of blood dps if that should matter.

[Tojara]

Breath is still quite strong, I'm sure they are reluctant to buff it too much considering it being up all the time in certain scenarios is on the horizon. I've had times as blood where I've had it up slightly over a minute. A bit more haste, MS and a favorable encounter is all it really needs.

[Schizoide]

I've gathered by now some pretty interesting data on BoS

Would love to hear it.

Agree that Blood will be able to get very high uptime later in the expansion, for sure. Doesn't do much for DPS specs, though.

[Raikh]

Would love to hear it.

Agree that Blood will be able to get very high uptime later in the expansion, for sure. Doesn't do much for DPS specs, though.

Most logs are still private, but got one normal highmaul run from an alt run where I had no special duties like AoEing on Kargath/Ko'ragh/Mar'gok just a normal dpsing and doing encounter related stuff.
Far from stellar performance on my side but still gives a good image on how BoS can be used, also showing considerable differences in % dmg of overall dmg and also uptime in that conjunction.
Still testing and optimizing BoS usage but aside from bosses where you are on AoE duty/Tectus I can't really imagine defile outperforming breath with those results.

Also tested breath with frost 2h and it is really strong there, too. The dmg/RP rate is smaller than for unholy but the duration is longer due to higher rp generation in frost presence and especially features great synergy with BL pulls while unholy would increase BoS opportunity cost by using FeS on death runes to extent BoS duration and isn't always the best solution either since I found myself without runes after using FeS on drunes with breath expiring like 3 sec later where I basically could've better spammed SS instead, very situational for unholy and highly dependant on RC proccs. Have still to gather data for BT though.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...D#type=summary

Want to get more data with better timed breaths since boss fights were rather short and I did some miscalculations on fight lengths and stuff and therefore had some rather horrible breaths or missed one entirely.
BoS is also highly punishing if messed up by comparison, on some mythic bosses I had immense differences in BoS output simply due to mismanagement of resources or timing on bosses, delaying too much/ not enough and so on but on the other hand it felt incredibly rewarding if done right.

Personal highlight was probably a ~1 million opener breath on twin ogron mythic this week as frost 2h.

[Schizoide]

Mar'gok is kinda the perfect storm for BoS, because it has predictable periods where you can make use of very strong 2-target melee cleave on high-health targets.

BoS was 11.5% of your total damage, which sounds great... but Defile sims at 9.4% of damage on a single target. We know that BoS only beats Defile by 5% in burst AE, but that burst was tested at 3 targets; 2 is perfect for BoS (which splits damage meteor-style after 1 target).

I betcha you did get some juice out of BoS in that fight. If you timed it perfectly, in such an ideal situation, maybe as much as 10%. But it required a bunch of setup, while with Defile you would just need to hold it back ~30s before big adds pop out. It's one of those situations where high skill offers real rewards, but I would argue that the amount of attention required for BoS to consistently beat Defile isn't worthwhile for most people, and certainly most fights.

[dr_AllCOM3]

The devs arent buffing NP likely because of pvp.

NP is a PvP talent anyway. Why should they buff it for PvE? It's not that weak, just slightly worse.

[Rothulean1]

It is not a pvp talent.

[Deleted]

I can't help but feel that if BoS was put down to a 1.30 cooldown instead of it's 2 min cooldown I would like it alot more... but a 2 min cooldown is pretty bloody extreme for what it is.

[scabobos]

I can't help but feel that if BoS was put down to a 1.30 cooldown instead of it's 2 min cooldown I would like it alot more... but a 2 min cooldown is pretty bloody extreme for what it is.

My thoughts exactly. I think it would be a nice ability at 1.5 minutes. As of now, its not good enough to warrant the 2 minute CD, and losing out on defile's dps increase.

In PVP BoS can be a lot of fun though, provides some incredible burst opportunities. But then again, NP with PL is pretty sick too for the easy extra obliterate it provides. Defile is the only talent in pvp that sucks, which is probably fine since its so good in pve.

[Maxweii]

They put BoS at 2 mins because when it was down at 1 min, it was so rotational and affected the rotation so much that it was very unpleasant to use. This way it lessens the pooling/spam attack nature that it causes, making you still do it but not doing it for say 70% of your rotation. Increasing the CD from 1-2 mins they also did a 2.5x damage increase, so it's actually really good damage for what it does, it's just below Defile

[Deleted]

Is there any chance then that making BoS proc killing machine or shadow infusion? That would be a great help imo!

[Maxweii]

Is there any chance then that making BoS proc killing machine or shadow infusion? That would be a great help imo!

Every two ticks of BoS gives a SI stack

[Deleted]

NP is a PvP talent anyway. Why should they buff it for PvE? It's not that weak, just slightly worse.

It's only a "PvP talent" because it's the least horrible out of three bad options. It's pretty hard to find a muppet willing to stand in Defile or Breath of Sindragosa for any duration. You pick NP for PvP because you can actually use it.

[Raikh]

Mar'gok is kinda the perfect storm for BoS, because it has predictable periods where you can make use of very strong 2-target melee cleave on high-health targets.

BoS was 11.5% of your total damage, which sounds great... but Defile sims at 9.4% of damage on a single target. We know that BoS only beats Defile by 5% in burst AE, but that burst was tested at 3 targets; 2 is perfect for BoS (which splits damage meteor-style after 1 target).

I betcha you did get some juice out of BoS in that fight. If you timed it perfectly, in such an ideal situation, maybe as much as 10%. But it required a bunch of setup, while with Defile you would just need to hold it back ~30s before big adds pop out. It's one of those situations where high skill offers real rewards, but I would argue that the amount of attention required for BoS to consistently beat Defile isn't worthwhile for most people, and certainly most fights.

Have you looked at the whole log or only Mar'gok? Its a whole highmaul log and I used breath on every fight, simply to get some data and practice from it.

Note on Mar'gok, as you may have noticed almost 90% of breath dmg was purely ST on Mar'gok or the gorian war mage. Cleave dmg made only up a very small porttion of breath dmg and uf you look at the graphs you can see that one breath also "failed". If I remember correctly we were quite faster dpsing him down and I puled a breath very shortly vefore transmission start which obviously gimped that breath and lost me easily 100k breath dmg +.

On the note of defile, defile sims for me in my current gear for 6,7% of my ST dmg and 6,9% in the ilvl695 simcraft profile, not 9,4%. I get around 10% for permanent 2 targets. The only boss that gets close to permanent 2 targets is twin ogron. Twin ogron lists my breath at a bit other 10%, okay, but now you can see that my planning of its usage was BS and I missed one one whole breath other the whole encounter. If I did that right just from a planning perspective it could've been around 14%.
Brackenspore on a side note, only 15% of breaths dmg was on the add. Breath is sitting at ~12,5% of my dmg. Even on butcher I got 11,33% breath dmg.

Breath gets weaker in comparison the more targets you get. I can imagine defile taking over at 3 targets for unholy and possibly 4 for frost. Still need some data on that for confirmation, also need to look at opportunity cost for both in the long run.

I agree that BoS is a lot more work than defile and that alone will put defile still first for many and thats fine. Still doesn't change the fact that you can breath on every situation WAY better than current sims does and thats also no insult on the sim. Its a spell you have to plan, prepare and manage. Preparing is easy, its setup works like hoarding for DT, common known practice for a long time and works basically without loss as long as we have natural down time.
Planning is a matter of knowing the fight, especially a rough fight length, no problem in progress, if you kill everything first try without really knowing if that fight last 3,4 or 5 min is actually annoying as using breath on cd is not always optimal.
Managing it actively is simply practice and if I look at how inconsistent I started out with breath performance and how solid it got lately its nothing more than that. It is simply a matter of experimentation and predicition of reosurce gains.
I really enjoy using breath as it is a change of pace, with festerblicht etc gone, playing dps dk is rather simple, which is nothing bad in particular, but I simply enjoy being rewarded for managing things correctly over empowering a button I push every 30 sec anyway. Also great fan of burst CDs as our burst is rather disappointing currently without.

[ploob]

Breath is still quite strong, I'm sure they are reluctant to buff it too much considering it being up all the time in certain scenarios is on the horizon. I've had times as blood where I've had it up slightly over a minute. A bit more haste, MS and a favorable encounter is all it really needs.

Same. Breath is pretty good imo. I definitely underestimated it until I actually used it a bit in raid.

[Deleted]

Schizoide;I betcha you did get some juice out of BoS in that fight. If you timed it perfectly, in such an ideal situation, maybe as much as 10%. But it required a bunch of setup, while with Defile you would just need to hold it back ~30s before big adds pop out

Is it a Dps loss to hold back Defile and not use it on CD if you know that an add will be joining the fight in the next 15 secs or so

[Schizoide]

Probably not. 15s is half its cooldown! I'm not sure how I would sim that to tell for sure, though.

Holding back BoS for a second target is definitely worthwhile. But again, difficult to quantitatively say how long you should hold it.