How and when to AoE (Unholy PvE, 5m Heroics)

[Mitsuro]

At what number of mobs will my DPS be higher if I use AoE attacks?

I'd like to figure out the optimal approach for the following number of mobs:

1: Pure single target DPS -- Unholy/Death runes are used for Defile, Soul Reaper, and Scourge Strike. No Blood Boil whatsoever.

2: Pure single target but toss in a Blood Boil after every time you reapply disesase?

3: ??? Full AoE rotation or some hybrid?

4+: Full AoE rotation:
Open with Outbreak on the biggest mob
Defile
Blood Boil to spread diseases
Festering Strike to turn your blood and frost runes into death runes
Icy Touch to turn your remaining frost rune into a death rune
Unholy/Death runes are used for Defile and Blood Boil. No Scourge Strike whatsoever. (Maybe toss in a Soul Reaper if your main target is < 35%?)


How much does it depend on how long things will be alive? Anything I got wrong?

[Maxweii]

At two targets is when you start using BB. You would use all Death runes on BB and use Unholy on Defile/SR/SS. To put it very simply that's the answer, you just have to base it on your fight at hand if you should aoe or not (>5% HP for example, don't bother, all new mobs, go wild).

[Mitsuro]

At two targets is when you start using BB. You would use all Death runes on BB and use Unholy on Defile/SR/SS. To put it very simply that's the answer, you just have to base it on your fight at hand if you should aoe or not (>5% HP for example, don't bother, all new mobs, go wild).

My tooltip for Blood Boil says 4273, so with two targets an average BB should do 8546 Shadow damage while a single Scourge Strike will average 6172 Physical + 4077 Shadow = 10249 damage.

Does anybody have a link describing how to model this mathematically?

Never really done any theorycrafting before. Does the in-game tooltip show expected damage averaging in crit and shadow damage increases and stuff? What's the formula for that number?

[Maxweii]

The tooltip alone math doesn't really show when you should or shouldn't, someone else brought it up recently in this thread http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...nd-When-to-Not

The tooltip from my understanding shows it's raw damage (ie before crits) and updates as you gain dynamic AP buffs/shadow damage buffs. To make it super simple, let's say BB does 100% of you AP as damage, and you have 1000 AP. Before mastery it would show on the tooltip as "Does 1000 damage". Then you add in mastery, let's say 50% more shadow damage. So it would then say (unless I am thinking of this completely wrong) "Does 1500 damage".

The exact formula for it can be found here:
http://www.wowhead.com/spell=50842

But if you want a quick quote of it this is it

Deals (60% of Attack power) Shadow damage to all enemies within 10 yards, and spreads your existing diseases from your target to all other enemies hit

[Schizoide]

Scourge Strike uses Unholy runes, Blood Boil uses Blood runes. They don't compete. You replace Festering Strike with BB+Icy Touch with >1 target in range. You continue to Scourge Strike (and Defile, obviously).

Now if the question is whether you should spend Death runes on BB or Scourge Strike, the answer is that there's a threshold where you do. Looking at sims now.

Edit: That threshold is also 2. You should spend death runes on BB also with >1 target. With 2 targets, ScS DPET is 20132. BB is 23611. So this makes sense. I realize this is what Max said in the thread earlier, just wanted to verify for myself and thought others might find it interesting.

Unholy T17H 2 targets, Death runes on ScS: 39235
Unholy T17H 2 targets, Death runes on BB: 44032

[Deleted]

The more mastery you have the less mobs you need to begin to go on a rampage on your BB button.
For myself I know that with 3 mobs BB is better and for 2 mobs it's more or less even.

[Schizoide]

Nope, even in ilvl630 gear sims say you definitely should spend death runes on BB with >1 target. 11% is close enough that it may appear basically even steven when you eyeball it in-game, but actually that's a substantial difference.

Unholy T17Preraid (ilvl 630) 2 targets, Death runes on ScS: 24867
Unholy T17P 2 targets, Death runes on BB: 27536

[Deleted]

That's not how it works with death runes. Blood Boil refreshes the death runes as death runes while Scourge Strike refreshes them as frost / blood runes.

Even if Scourge Strike dealt more dmg to 1 target than Blood Boil to 2, the Blood Boil refreshes itself as a death rune while the Scourge Strike most of the time ends up being a Frost rune.

[Schizoide]

Who were you responding to?

Doesn't matter anyway, because at 2 targets BB does more damage than ScS.