I have been a Unholy DPS for a while now and have alot of experience seeing all of the various talents of Unholy and how they stack up on DPS. It is well known that we tend to fall behind blood abit in single target and I am cool with that because we really do make up that ground in multitarget fights (which is balanced in turn via the tendency for 90% of meaningful DPS fights to be single target).

Been 80 for a while now and have been building up a decent set of gear with AP closing on 3200, crit over 25%, and my hit way over the melee cap and close to the spell cap. All this time playing as a Unholy DPS I have been logging all the various DPS I do and keeping track of where the damage comes from and wandering plague always ends up way near the bottom of the list doing about 2-3% damage over the course of a heroic, this is bumped up from the group pulls because breakdowns on bosses has WP at less then 2% normally.

So I figured "hey, it is simply not great on those small group pulls and sucks on bosses, fairly useless talent for the most part but at least it would shine in true AOE". Enter today and a Culling of Strat Heroic I go into. I decide to really push the DPS up via WP and thus every single fight starts off landing dots on a elite and then spreading them to the mass of mobs we have trained to an area of the instance. There were times we had 6 elites and dozens of non-elite mobs, the numbers from UB and D&D which I dropped after were nuts, but at the end of the instance I took a look at the overall damage that Wandering Plague did...

5.4% of my personal total DPS came from Wandering Plague. And when thinking about this keep in mind, this was on full out training huge amounts of mobs AOE bliss. Wandering plague is never going to get a better chance to DPS then in fights like this. Auto attacks on these fights targeted on a single mob at a time amounted to over 4 times as much DPS as Wandering Plague managed to do to the whole group of mobs all about.

My Gargoyle I popped on Malygos did over 1/3rd of the amount of damage on that single fight then Wandering Plague did in the entire freaking instance.

This is with me making sure that frost fever and blood plague are spread asap to maximize the WP DPS.

And this instance is not a fluke or bad luck, it is the best DPS I have ever seen by far out of WP, a seriously underpowered talent atm given the depth it requires in the Unholy tree and the 3 points you spend in it.

Perhaps the problem lies in the fix that supposedly exists in 3.0.8, some reset. I hope maybe the talent is somehow just broke atm, because if the supposed fix thing is not the main cause of this pitiful DPS from this talent the thing needs some serious looking at. Supposedly in Beta the talent was insanely good and overpowered, well now it seems to be on the complete other side of that coin and is usually competing with Blood Caked Strikes or the 3 points I have in Necrosis at the bottom of my DPS breakdown.

I could care less about BCB and Nec, I took them as filler and they are clearly aimed at Duel Wielding although they don't exist in the frost tree where the main DW talent is and fubar our mid tree talents forcing us to take then to simply get to the meat of the tree although if you use a 2 hander they flat out suck. I do care about wandering Plague though, this is a deep Unholy tree talent that really defines the type of playstyle and damage the tree is based upon and atm it is just weak, really really weak.

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Q u o t e:
I have been a Unholy DPS for a while now and have alot of experience seeing all of the various talents of Unholy and how they stack up on DPS. It is well known that we tend to fall behind blood abit in single target and I am cool with that because we really do make up that ground in multitarget fights (which is balanced in turn via the tendency for 90% of meaningful DPS fights to be single target).

Been 80 for a while now and have been building up a decent set of gear with AP closing on 3200, crit over 25%, and my hit way over the melee cap and close to the spell cap. All this time playing as a Unholy DPS I have been logging all the various DPS I do and keeping track of where the damage comes from and wandering plague always ends up way near the bottom of the list doing about 2-3% damage over the course of a heroic, this is bumped up from the group pulls because breakdowns on bosses has WP at less then 2% normally.

So I figured "hey, it is simply not great on those small group pulls and sucks on bosses, fairly useless talent for the most part but at least it would shine in true AOE". Enter today and a Culling of Strat Heroic I go into. I decide to really push the DPS up via WP and thus every single fight starts off landing dots on a elite and then spreading them to the mass of mobs we have trained to an area of the instance. There were times we had 6 elites and dozens of non-elite mobs, the numbers from UB and D&D which I dropped after were nuts, but at the end of the instance I took a look at the overall damage that Wandering Plague did...

5.4% of my personal total DPS came from Wandering Plague. And when thinking about this keep in mind, this was on full out training huge amounts of mobs AOE bliss. Wandering plague is never going to get a better chance to DPS then in fights like this. Auto attacks on these fights targeted on a single mob at a time amounted to over 4 times as much DPS as Wandering Plague managed to do to the whole group of mobs all about.

My Gargoyle I popped on Malygos did over 1/3rd of the amount of damage on that single fight then Wandering Plague did in the entire freaking instance.

This is with me making sure that frost fever and blood plague are spread asap to maximize the WP DPS.

And this instance is not a fluke or bad luck, it is the best DPS I have ever seen by far out of WP, a seriously underpowered talent atm given the depth it requires in the Unholy tree and the 3 points you spend in it.

Perhaps the problem lies in the fix that supposedly exists in 3.0.8, some reset. I hope maybe the talent is somehow just broke atm, because if the supposed fix thing is not the main cause of this pitiful DPS from this talent the thing needs some serious looking at. Supposedly in Beta the talent was insanely good and overpowered, well now it seems to be on the complete other side of that coin and is usually competing with Blood Caked Strikes or the 3 points I have in Necrosis at the bottom of my DPS breakdown.

I could care less about BCB and Nec, I took them as filler and they are clearly aimed at Duel Wielding although they don't exist in the frost tree where the main DW talent is and fubar our mid tree talents forcing us to take then to simply get to the meat of the tree although if you use a 2 hander they flat out suck. I do care about wandering Plague though, this is a deep Unholy tree talent that really defines the type of playstyle and damage the tree is based upon and atm it is just weak, really really weak.

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Two words for you:

Lava Lash

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Q u o t e:
5.4% of my personal total DPS came from Wandering Plague

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So basically 5.5% of your damage is coming from a talent that is 3 talent points. GC said they try to budge dps talents at 1% damage per point. So it's fine...

I am a hunter, our 51 point talent allows us to catch more kinds of pokemon. You talent is working just fine.

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Q u o t e:

So basically 5.5% of your damage is coming from a talent that is 3 talent points. GC said they try to budge dps talents at 1% damage per point. So it's fine...

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Not exactly, it got 5.4% on a fight where we had up to 30 mobs at one time in the area. COS is pretty much the ideal situation where you can train a huge number of mobs, dot a elite with the two diseases, spread via pest, and give WP the best chance to shine.

Against a single target mob, the most important thing in the game really for a DPS, you are going to be lucky to get 2% from WP. Even in most heroics where you are pulling 4 packs of elites you are going to see less then 3% from WP as total damage over the entire heroic, and this is multimob fights where it should actually do something good.

If I am supposed to get 1% from my talents then Unholy Blight is broken I guess, I think it amounted to close to 20% of the total DPS I did in that same Culling of Strat and I only spent a single point on that.

I doubt GC said (or meant) that each talent point is supposed to add 1%, he as well as anyone else can see that deeper tree talents tend to give more then lower tree, and some are meant to give more then others.

Gonna tell me that Howling Blast is a 1% damage per a point for the frost tree?

I was under the impression that Unholy was supposed to be the best "aoe threat" spec for DK Tanks.

If that's the case (i may be wrong) then shouldnt other specs provide better or different single target dps or threat generation?

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Q u o t e:

Gargoyle is probably too good.

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Woah! Don't get excited now!

If you are seriously conserned about Gargoyle keep in mind that when Gargoyle is up a person must constantly build rune power through their strikes to keep the Gargoyle up that is constatly ticking off 8 RP per a second.

So Basically the Gargoyle is making the DK forgo alot of DPS they could be getting from Death Coils, Unholy Blight, and other RP attacks that they must avoid in order to make sure they dont get a tick of Gargoyle when they are at 7 or lower Runic Power.

Granted the Gargoyle is better DPS then the Death Coils and UB you forgo when it is up, but were it not it would be entirely pointless to ever use it or even spec into it sicne you could just get the DPS from the death coils and UB without keeping your RP high enough to keep garg up while runes are on cool down.

If you nerfed Gargoyle by much at all it would not be worth having over snapping off the 6 Death Coils and constant UB you could have going instead with that Runic Power.

Gargoyle atm is one of the only things that keep Unholy a couple hundred DPS below the equally geared Blood DPS on single target raid bosses. Lose Gargoyle without putting that dps somewhere else in the UH tree and you are basically going to kill Unholy raid DPS and force every level 80 DPS DK into blood. That cannot be your goal...

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Q u o t e:


Woah! Don't get excited now!

If you are seriously conserned about Gargoyle keep in mind that when Gargoyle is up a person must constantly build rune power through their strikes to keep the Gargoyle up that is constatly ticking off 8 RP per a second.

So Basically the Gargoyle is making the DK forgo alot of DPS they could be getting from Death Coils, Unholy Blight, and other RP attacks that they must avoid in order to make sure they dont get a tick of Gargoyle when they are at 7 or lower Runic Power.

Granted the Gargoyle is better DPS then the Death Coils and UB you forgo when it is up, but were it not it would be entirely pointless to ever use it or even spec into it sicne you could just get the DPS from the death coils and UB without keeping your RP high enough to keep garg up while runes are on cool down.

If you nerfed Gargoyle by much at all it would not be worth having over snapping off the 6 Death Coils and constant UB you could have going instead with that Runic Power.

Gargoyle atm is one of the only things that keep Unholy a couple hundred DPS below the equally geared Blood DPS on single target raid bosses. Lose Gargoyle without putting that dps somewhere else in the UH tree and you are basically going to kill Unholy raid DPS and force every level 80 DPS DK into blood. That cannot be your goal...

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Gargoyle is 1 GCD, but several Death Coils are several GCDs.

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Q u o t e:
It's hard to take that 1% dps rule of thumb too far. For example, Howling Blast can do a lot of damage, but you have to consider how the DK would spend those runes if he or she had skipped that talent. Just because Howling Blast is 20% of your dps or whatever, does not mean the talent is a 20% dps incrase.

Wandering Plague is probably okay and Gargoyle is probably too good. Necrosis and Blood-Caked Blade are probably better candidates to buff for Unholy (though there are some DW builds that get a lot more out of them).

The DK talent tree is new and has't been subjected to anywhere near the scrutiny of the existing class talent trees. I'm a little surprised we haven't had to tweak it more than we have already, but I suspect more of that will be coming.

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you haven't had to tweak it more because it's a solid class with few flaws, except the ones that are about to come with the next patch. =)

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Q u o t e:
I was under the impression that Unholy was supposed to be the best "aoe threat" spec for DK Tanks.

If that's the case (i may be wrong) then shouldnt other specs provide better or different single target dps or threat generation?

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With the changes to Blood (which were in responce to their lack in AOE threat generation) Blood is going to likely be the best 2 target threat generation of any DK spec with Heartstrikes now hitting 2 targets. Given with Death Rune Mastery that a Blood specced DK can snap off 4 Heartstrikes in quick succession this is going to add ALOT more total DPS on multitarget pulls for Blood and alot more threat generation.

With the nerf to Boneshield and the buff to frost pressence Unholy tanking is going to take a major hit, it was considered neck and neck with frost spec but that was based entirely on the power of bone shield and at half of the power with little else in UH to affect tanking the age of the UH tank is at an end. They may be doing some tanking in heroics, but forget 25 man Naxx. And even if you overgear to manage to tank a raid encounter, you are going to do it poorly because when you don't actually have a tank spec and spread the prot talents around all over the various trees of a class you basically force them into being a hybrid compared to a class that can spec into a true tanking tree.

So AOE threat? Who would want it? Unholy is not a tanking focused tree, after the patch nerfs bone shield it will be the weakest tanking tree of the 3. AOE damage? Well, we will see where we fall there when a blood DPS starts snapping off multiple cleaving heart strikes for 6k crits on 2 mobs while I drop a 200 damage per a second dot onto the 4 mobs present and hit mobs half as often with scourge strikes that eat up twice as many runes per a strike.

Not sure where UH is even going atm, if you ever fought in Naxx you would know most fights are single target focus, and thats what the raid leaders are looking at when they parse damage and see where people fall in DPS. Fights like Gluth or Gothic are too few and far between to make AOE DPS importance be equal to single target DPS importance.

It's a new class, we will see where it goes, but things like WP are not exactly great, when you see it proc 3 times in a 2 minute fight on a single target boss for a total of 1800 damage, less then a single non-crit scourge strike. It is within reason when one sees results like that that they may expect it to at least shine on those rare AOE moments the talent seems made for.

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Q u o t e:


Gargoyle is 1 GCD, but several Death Coils are several GCDs.

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No Death Coils aren't, they are pure runic power casts. Death Coil does not have a global cool down and it does not use runes. They use 40 runic power per a cast, that is all. Just as Gargoyle takes 50 Runic Power to cast and then a sustained 8 Runic Power per a tick to keep up.

If anything the 3 minute cool down on Gargoyle would make it seem the point for it to be prefferable to casting Death Coils and snapping off UB's instead. If DC's and UB did as much damage the cooldown on gargoyle might as well be 24 hours because once EJ break down the DPS and find out Garg falls behind DC and UB were it to be nerfed that woud be it for that talent's usefullness.

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Q u o t e:
Death Coil does not have a global cool down.

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that's completely wrong

As nice as it would be if Death Coil didn't use a gcd, it does use one. Blood DK's would probably shoot them out like a machine gun sometimes if they didn't.

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Q u o t e:
As nice as it would be if Death Coil didn't use a gcd, it does use one. Blood DK's would probably shoot them out like a machine gun sometimes if they didn't.

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At 40 runic pwer per a shot how would we manage that? Even with the Blood talent to get off runic power free Death Coils you are going to manage at most 3 Death Coils, or having Runic Power Mastery from Frost.

DK's dont machine gun off Death Coils because we cap at 100 runic power without a rarely taken frost talent so we can and do snap off 2 Death Coils during the RP dump phase of our rotations and we are then down to 20 runic power and cannot cast a third.

That said, you can snap off two death coils one after the other with at least 80 runic power, there is virtually no waiting time between casts. The fact you cannot get off a third is not a GCD, it is the DK equivalent of being out of mana.

necrosis and blood caked blade need to have more benefits for unholy death knight, teh dual wield specs are blowing everything out of the water.

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Q u o t e:
The fact you cannot get off a third is not a GCD, it is the DK equivalent of being out of mana.

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You obviously don't know what a GCD is. If there was no gcd, with runic power mastery and a free death coil from blood talents you could launch four death coils at once for a decent burst.

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Q u o t e:
Death Coil does not have a global cool down

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wut?

Gargoyle is obviously going to get nerfed and/or moved deeper into unholy, it does too much damage for a 21 point talent. The fact that people would rather get Gargoyle over DRW in a blood spec should of been a clear indication that there was something wrong.

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Q u o t e:
It's hard to take that 1% dps rule of thumb too far. For example, Howling Blast can do a lot of damage, but you have to consider how the DK would spend those runes if he or she had skipped that talent. Just because Howling Blast is 20% of your dps or whatever, does not mean the talent is a 20% dps incrase.

Wandering Plague is probably okay and Gargoyle is probably too good. Necrosis and Blood-Caked Blade are probably better candidates to buff for Unholy (though there are some DW builds that get a lot more out of them).

The DK talent tree is new and has't been subjected to anywhere near the scrutiny of the existing class talent trees. I'm a little surprised we haven't had to tweak it more than we have already, but I suspect more of that will be coming.

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TBH I really wish that blood caked strike was in the blood tree, it fits well in my opinion and gives blood some auto-attack based talents like Killing Machine / Necrosis.

I found a random Patchwerk parse of mine, although the entire naxx run is viewable in this parse. On Patchwerk, the epitome of a single target fight, Wandering Plague accounts for 4% of my damage. Over the entire run, it was 7% of my damage. Wandering Plague is definitely just fine.

Here's the parse if you require proof.

http://wowwebstats.com/xwf5t5d245svq?s=184700-221296&a=x2eb6bde

On the subject of Gargoyle, it obviously does way, way too much damage, although its survivability is at best problematic - on fights where my Gargoyle is present for its full minute, I feel like I'm doing huge damage, and when it dies off I feel borderline useless. A survivability buff would be nice when its damage gets nerfed. I'd be concerned about the damage of Unholy in general if it gets nerfed without compensation elsewhere, and Necrosis and Blood-caked Blade are definitely excellent candidates to do that. It would be nice if Impurity was more accessible too, the Unholy tree requires pretty significant investment in the later tree.