Unholy Death Knight GCDs

[tuvarkz 0]

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/saurfang/Deathzkrav/simple

Question, I've been having issues in long fights where I end up having no abilities to use for one or two GCDs every so often (due to runes recharging/not enough RP to Death Coil), even while focusing on Haste whenever possible (I've only swapped out for items that didn't have haste when it was a 15+ ilvl increase) and having Runic Tattoos at 4/3. I think I've been trying to keep Festering Wounds stacks a bit too high (Outside of Apocalypse or Soul Reaper they normally are on the 4-6 range), or is Scourge of the Unbeliever that much better at (re)generating resources for me to spend?

Also, regarding the DPS rotation talent-outside of being at the very bottom of the priority, Epidemic is only brought up higher when mentioned to be used to avoid capping stacks-shouldn't it be spammed if enemies are stacked together?

EDIT: Also, is Army of the Dead still channeled? The tooltip seems to make me believe so, but the fact that it now appears as a buff and the Channeling bar is no longer appearing at the bottom have left me confused about it.

Edited September 6, 2016 by tuvarkz

[demonardvark 556]

11 hours ago, tuvarkz said:

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/saurfang/Deathzkrav/simple

Question, I've been having issues in long fights where I end up having no abilities to use for one or two GCDs every so often (due to runes recharging/not enough RP to Death Coil), even while focusing on Haste whenever possible (I've only swapped out for items that didn't have haste when it was a 15+ ilvl increase) and having Runic Tattoos at 4/3. I think I've been trying to keep Festering Wounds stacks a bit too high (Outside of Apocalypse or Soul Reaper they normally are on the 4-6 range), or is Scourge of the Unbeliever that much better at (re)generating resources for me to spend?

Also, regarding the DPS rotation talent-outside of being at the very bottom of the priority, Epidemic is only brought up higher when mentioned to be used to avoid capping stacks-shouldn't it be spammed if enemies are stacked together?

EDIT: Also, is Army of the Dead still channeled? The tooltip seems to make me believe so, but the fact that it now appears as a buff and the Channeling bar is no longer appearing at the bottom have left me confused about it.

army is still channeled as far as i can tell, the channel bar has moved to your buff bar, and you'll see a little icon with a count down timer, it says something akin to channeling, i think its 3 ish seconds. 

what your experiencing rune wise is fairly normal. what you need to do is spec into soul reaper, that additional haste helps a lot, however, there are times when there are no runes available, however, certain things delay this. such as immediately using sudden doom procs. also you don't want to festering strike too much because you risk getting a stack of wound that is wasted. however, for instance my opening burst window is a bit long, i'll pre cast army, run up to boss, cast outbreak, dark transformation, and two festering strikes, this leaves me empty on runes, so i'll summon my vry'kul at this point, dump a few death coils, once i can apply soul reaper i do and then apocalypse, bursting all 8 wounds, summoning zombies, and granting me the haste buff. from there the rotation flows relatively smoothly.

other things that help are taking pestulant pustules (spelling) and infected claws.  PP constantly provides you with good rune flow and has great synergy with both apocalypse and soul reaper. I like infected claws because my zombro pretty frequently applies wounds so i don't have to waste festering strikes. its very often in my opening i'll only get 7 wounds and zombro gets the 8th. also while im doing other things (dark transformation, outbreak, death coil dump, etc) zombro is applying stacks, so he is a fairly consistant wound generator.

also for epidemic that's really for heavy aoe fights, however, i find with bursting sores its rather redundant, its a good cleave attack but the damage is minor compared to your other sources, so its not a huge priority on the rotation list. think of it almost like an aoe death coil, you avoid resource capping and resort to it when other stronger abilities are not available

[Benhoof 3]

How does increasing haste result in less down time due to rune recharge?

Unless I am missing some core mechanic, GCD and rune recharge scale exactly the same way with haste (up until the 50% cap for GCD). So haste does not change the amount of time waiting for rune recharge during a fight.

[demonardvark 556]

3 hours ago, Benhoof said:

How does increasing haste result in less down time due to rune recharge?

Unless I am missing some core mechanic, GCD and rune recharge scale exactly the same way with haste (up until the 50% cap for GCD). So haste does not change the amount of time waiting for rune recharge during a fight.

Haste directly impacts DK rune regen rate. Now there is a point where you get diminishing returns and/or you generate runes faster than you can spend them, but haste many times has been a strong stat for death knights. So runes have a default recharge time of about 10 seconds and haste reduces that time. It's just how the stat works, ex for rogues and feral druids haste impacts rate of energy gain. So while for casters haste is more for spell time for melee haste is more for resource gathering (general comment).

[Benhoof 3]

I am aware of that.

But since now Unholy also has 1.5s GCD which also is reduced by haste, you are also able to deplete your runes faster.

As both GCD and rune regeneration are affected by Haste in the same way (20% Haste = 20% GCD reduction + 20% Faster Rune Regeneration), the amount of down time due to Runes not being ready is exactly the same.

Eg:

0% Haste: 10s Rune Recharge, 1.5s GCD, Rune Recharge/GCD 6,67

20% Haste: 8,33s Rune Recharge, 1,25s GCD, Rune Recharge/GCD 6,67

I.e., Rune Regeneration to GCD Ratio does not change with haste. Since you also do not generate more Runic Power per skill activation with increased Haste, I do not see how more Haste leads to less down time over the course of the fight. Sure each individual down time is shorter due to haste, but it also occurs more often which cancels each other out.

In WoD Unholy already had a 1s GCD. As a consequence, haste indeed resulted in less down time due to rune starvation as Rune Regeneration was faster but GCD was still at 1s.

Edited September 13, 2016 by Benhoof

[Zulgh 2]

On 7.9.2016 at 1:28 AM, tuvarkz said:

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/saurfang/Deathzkrav/simple

Question, I've been having issues in long fights where I end up having no abilities to use for one or two GCDs every so often (due to runes recharging/not enough RP to Death Coil), even while focusing on Haste whenever possible (I've only swapped out for items that didn't have haste when it was a 15+ ilvl increase) and having Runic Tattoos at 4/3. I think I've been trying to keep Festering Wounds stacks a bit too high (Outside of Apocalypse or Soul Reaper they normally are on the 4-6 range), or is Scourge of the Unbeliever that much better at (re)generating resources for me to spend?

Also, regarding the DPS rotation talent-outside of being at the very bottom of the priority, Epidemic is only brought up higher when mentioned to be used to avoid capping stacks-shouldn't it be spammed if enemies are stacked together?

EDIT: Also, is Army of the Dead still channeled? The tooltip seems to make me believe so, but the fact that it now appears as a buff and the Channeling bar is no longer appearing at the bottom have left me confused about it.

I've played a DK as main since wotlk, and the small downtimes with no resources have always seemed to be there. It usually gets less noticable or less frequent with better gear. It don't really matter for DK DPS that we get small downtimes, since our DPS is heavily tied to our rune regen. If you manage to use all your runes (Never have both runes in a pair off cooldown) and never cap runic power, you are at max DPS given that your skill priorities and cooldowns is spot on. 

[demonardvark 556]

On 9/13/2016 at 10:39 AM, Benhoof said:

I am aware of that.

But since now Unholy also has 1.5s GCD which also is reduced by haste, you are also able to deplete your runes faster.

As both GCD and rune regeneration are affected by Haste in the same way (20% Haste = 20% GCD reduction + 20% Faster Rune Regeneration), the amount of down time due to Runes not being ready is exactly the same.

Eg:

0% Haste: 10s Rune Recharge, 1.5s GCD, Rune Recharge/GCD 6,67

20% Haste: 8,33s Rune Recharge, 1,25s GCD, Rune Recharge/GCD 6,67

I.e., Rune Regeneration to GCD Ratio does not change with haste. Since you also do not generate more Runic Power per skill activation with increased Haste, I do not see how more Haste leads to less down time over the course of the fight. Sure each individual down time is shorter due to haste, but it also occurs more often which cancels each other out.

In WoD Unholy already had a 1s GCD. As a consequence, haste indeed resulted in less down time due to rune starvation as Rune Regeneration was faster but GCD was still at 1s.

The GCD reduction has a hard max that you can hit where no matter how much more haste you drop it won't be reduced further (1s i believe). So while the ratio may not change the rune reduction to my knowledge does not have a reduction cap. So, you reach a point where the recovery rate would exceed your GCD rate. We also must keep in mind we have 6 runes. So, you must factor that into the equation. In addition, death coil dumps are frequent and lead to points where there is time where you aren't needing to use runes which help recovery, and even if one chooses to sit on higher rp amounts, its still behooves one to fish for scourge of the world procs. Even then, in the time we are casting something, the recharge is still happening on the other runes. So, that's an extra tick on the clock.

So, the impact of haste is not quite as dramatic as it was (for unholy) in WoD, that's why its not the primary focused stat. From there, getting 1 or 2 percent haste won't lead to any dramatically noticeable differences. However, haste trinkets like chrono shard, do have noticeable effects. Even then simply running with soul reaper it should be fairly noticeable. Now, as the xpac progresses, by default we will see higher and higher amounts of haste on gear, which will further normalize unholy rotation. So, unholy will end up scaling (currently) fairly well. 

[Benhoof 3]

15 hours ago, demonardvark said:

The GCD reduction has a hard max that you can hit where no matter how much more haste you drop it won't be reduced further (1s i believe). So while the ratio may not change the rune reduction to my knowledge does not have a reduction cap. So, you reach a point where the recovery rate would exceed your GCD rate. We also must keep in mind we have 6 runes. So, you must factor that into the equation. In addition, death coil dumps are frequent and lead to points where there is time where you aren't needing to use runes which help recovery, and even if one chooses to sit on higher rp amounts, its still behooves one to fish for scourge of the world procs. Even then, in the time we are casting something, the recharge is still happening on the other runes. So, that's an extra tick on the clock.

So, the impact of haste is not quite as dramatic as it was (for unholy) in WoD, that's why its not the primary focused stat. From there, getting 1 or 2 percent haste won't lead to any dramatically noticeable differences. However, haste trinkets like chrono shard, do have noticeable effects. Even then simply running with soul reaper it should be fairly noticeable. Now, as the xpac progresses, by default we will see higher and higher amounts of haste on gear, which will further normalize unholy rotation. So, unholy will end up scaling (currently) fairly well. 

I totally agree. Afaik to reach a GCD of 1s you need about 16262 Haste Rating at Lvl 110.

I read  somewhere that the GCD cap was changed to 0.75s in Legion. I don't know if that change went live. Can someone confirm this?

That would mean to reach cap you would need about 32524 Haste Rating.

My point was not that Unholy has a scaling problem. Just that for current gear levels, Haste has very little impact on down time due to Runes recharging.

My suspicion is, that down time is related to a bad Festering Strike to Scourge strike ratio. With festering strike, you just need 3 GCDs to completely spend your recharging runes. With Scourge strike you need 6 GCDs. So the more you have to use Festering Strike, the more likely you run into situations where all your runes are regenerating. As there is RNG involved in how much Festering Wounds Festering Strike generates, there is always the possibility to run into situations where you have no resources to spend.

I will stress that this is not necessarely a problem for our damage output and scaling. It's just a gameplay problem for people who can't stand having no buttons to press for 1-2 seconds.

[demonardvark 556]

3 hours ago, Benhoof said:

My suspicion is, that down time is related to a bad Festering Strike to Scourge strike ratio. With festering strike, you just need 3 GCDs to completely spend your recharging runes. With Scourge strike you need 6 GCDs. So the more you have to use Festering Strike, the more likely you run into situations where all your runes are regenerating. As there is RNG involved in how much Festering Wounds Festering Strike generates, there is always the possibility to run into situations where you have no resources to spend.

This honestly is the nail in the coffin. Festering strike ratio will be what divides the good unholy dks from the great. Now, it's ugly, talents, legendaries, etc, all change the optimum ratio, but the short of it is unholy is about balancing wounds to runes. There is no need to cast anymore festering strikes than we need to. With castigator i think the max you want to hit is 6, and from there, you only cast festering when you don't have runes, or if you need more for synergy like with soul reaper. It also goes to the other abilities. I freely admit I smash outbreak way more often then I need to. I'm the guy who invented necroblight, I have years conditioned where unholy needs those diseases up. So because I have 14 casts in a 3 cast fight, i'm lower on runes. It's something to work with.

So, right now, it is more about proper rotation and following it carefully than just raw stat stacking. Even then the first tier is kinda mehhh when it comes to stats. So, come nighthold I think we may see more dramatic and noticeable changes. Until then, just, careful prioritization (or a really good weak aura string) would solve a lot of peoples problems.