Unholy DPS, when to use BT?

[decyphier]

Hi all,

I am most likely rerolling of my ret of 7 years to Unholy DK. We'll see, but so far I like it a lot. I find ret terribly boring for mythic since a few support abilities were changed/removed, so I may as well just go full DPS at this point.

Runic Corruption is cool, but I'd like to actually micro the Blood Tap so I can get maximum performance. When exactly however do you use Blood Tap? Do you go through your rotation and use Blood Tap when you can't do anything anymore, do you use it on CD regardless of its # of stacks? When you use it, do you also mash it to consume all of the stacks, or do you only use a certain amount? It's confusing to a new DPS DK.

Thanks.

[cadoin]

Generally, from what I've seen, it gets macro'd into Frost Strike/Death Coil. First one of those abilities then BT to recover the rune if possible.

[Burningdark]

Generally, from what I've seen, it gets macro'd into Frost Strike/Death Coil. First one of those abilities then BT to recover the rune if possible.

This is correct. Since Blood Tap is off the GCD it can easily be macro'd to your FS/DC depending on if you're Frost or Unholy. This will naturally spend the charges whenever possible simply by using your standard rotation.

[Deleted]

I'm assuming you're going for complete control of it. I too don't like the random generation of runes when it's macro'd.

In general, when you're on 10 charges or higher. Wanna use blood tap when everything but 1 unholy runes is on CD, so a blood rune and frost rune will turn into death runes.

Or you can use 5 charges by having 1 frost and 1 blood rune up, but all unholy runes on CD. That way one of your unholy runes will turn into a death rune.

Best way is the first example. And ofc try and time it with Soul Reaper.

:::EDIT

Macro'd version and unmacro'd perform almost equally good. So it's a matter of preference.

[damescool]

as said above, but until you really figure out the class, i'd macro it

#showtooltip Death Coil
/cast Death Coil
/cast Blood Tap
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

not sure if you still need the uierror part so i'd try it without first, but if you keep getting an error message everytime you hit DC then add that line

[Astro9866]

Unmacro'd BT is good sub 35% to ensure Soul Reaper gets used on CD every time.

[Schizoide]

The unholy simcraft profile does do that. Still not worth micromanaging.

Unholy T16M micromanaged BT: 18,725 DPS
Unholy T16M macroed BT: 18,639 DPS (-0.5%)

Plague Leech is worth micromanaging-- the reward is worth the effort. Blood Tap isn't.

[Deleted]

The unholy simcraft profile does do that. Still not worth micromanaging.

Unholy T16M micromanaged BT: 18,725 DPS
Unholy T16M macroed BT: 18,639 DPS (-0.5%)

Plague Leech is worth micromanaging-- the reward is worth the effort. Blood Tap isn't.

What kind of fight would that be?

[Schizoide]

Standard simcraft patchwerk.

[Deleted]

Runic Corruption is now better than macro'd BT, but not quite as good as micromanaged BT.
I recommend going and finding an up to date simcraft APL and learning the conditionals and it's place in the priority. Once you know that, read up/find info about the subtleties or situational uses

[Schizoide]

They're all essentially identical to very tight tolerances.

[Skarssen]

Plague Leech is worth micromanaging-- the reward is worth the effort. Blood Tap isn't.

Virtually every skilled player who has actually taken the time to learn manual BT will disagree with you.

[Schizoide]

And yet, nobody has ever been able to prove it. Or even really support it.

People believe all kinds of wacky stuff that they think should be true. Tons of top-end players watch Killing Machine too. Every thread had some world progression top 50 doofus elitist player saying that anyone ignoring KM was a baddie. Being a top player doesn't make them right. The only true measure of progression in diku MMOs like WoW is time invested.

[Skarssen]

Because you think simcraft is the beginning and end of every argument, and this is a situation where simcraft isn't going to show the value. Qualitative vs quantitative. If you had actually played the game at a difficulty where skill matters you would know.

- belt duty on heroic Siegecrafter during early progression. Going on the belt with 12 stacks could be the difference between killing a weapon and wiping
- 1st intermission heroic Garrosh, full BT stacks can be the difference between killing adds before casts get off and wiping
- always having a rune to keep constant SR uptime
- D runes for DSi
- EVERYTHING in PVP

[Schizoide]

BT offers very limited burst-- you can store up to 2 runes. Perhaps more importantly, you can only store them for a very short time before you cap Blood Charges at 12 with a single Death Coil or Frost Strike.

So if there's a situation where a single Obliterate or two 1-rune attacks would make the difference, if like you say you're on early progression and don't have the gear so you're on a razor-thin margin, and there's a mob that needs to die right now, hey-- maybe. Only if that extremely small amount of burst is worth more than your sustained damage over the rest of the fight. Because if you mess up one time in that entire fight, if you ever go over the cap on Blood Charges, you just went to all that trouble and rewarded yourself with a DPS loss.

That's what I mean by not supporting the argument. I'm aware that you can craft extraordinary situations where you can make the argument even small burst matters more than anything. I just think they're contrivances, for the sake of argument, and reasonable informed people would choose not to do that.

PvP you got me, though. I don't have an opinion on PvP.

You brought up skill at the beginning there. That's really a misconception. PvE doesn't take much skill. WoW is a very complex game to understand with its 34 classes and incredible volume of content, but it's a simple one to play. It takes a great deal of time to optimize your play and minimize mistakes through repetition, and you definitely need to pay attention, but there's vanishingly little actual skill required. That's really the secret to diku MMOs' success in the mass-market. People don't like failing, and if you put in enough time in a diku MMO with an equally committed group of other players, you will end up a very powerful dude.

[decyphier]

So from what I am understanding from this thread, especially this reply:

Runic Corruption is now better than macro'd BT, but not quite as good as micromanaged BT.

The difference in DPS between RC>Macro BT>Micro BT is literally in the hundredths, and only something that will likely truly matter unless you're looking for cutting-edge sim ranks? If that's the case, I'll just stick with RC or Macro BT. How far behind is RC compared to Macro BT right now?

[Schizoide]

Like I said earlier, they're all identical to very small tolerances.

Unholy T16M RC: 18808 DPS
Unholy T16M manual BT: 18787 DPS (-0.1%)
Unholy T16M macroed BT: 18707 DPS (-0.5%)

[decyphier]

Thanks, I guess I'll just stick with RC then : )

I was under the impression originally that BT gave much higher DPS, and not a loss.

[Schizoide]

Don't think of it as a loss, think of them as essentially identical.

I actually suggest using macroed BT for Unholy. The Death runes from BT can mask orphan Frost runes when transitioning to and from AE. That doesn't show up in a sustained DPS patchwerk sim, but it is a noticeable improvement.

[decyphier]

Sounds good to me.