Blood DK Guide Horribly Misleading

[Jadawin 0]

Now I have long been a huge fan of this site and almost 100% of what I have seen here has been very accurate and I absolutely love coming here to research different aspects of class mechanics and spec/gearing strategy. I was however very confused as to how this statement made it on to the main Blood DK section.

Blood Tap Icon Blood Tap and Runic Corruption Icon Runic Corruption are the top choices here, with Runic Empowerment Icon Runic Empowerment being considerably less valuable.

Blood Tap provides you with a lot of control over your rune situation, and this is its main strength. It allows you to chain a number of Death Strikes (by using up your Blood Tap charges), and this is of particular benefit if you want to stack Mastery: Blood Shield Icon Mastery: Blood Shield on you before a damaging mechanic strikes.

Runic Corruption is more stable, and over the course of the fight will provide you with roughly the same amount of Death Strikes as Blood Tap. It also has the benefit of boosting your DPS somewhat.

Runic Empowerment is quite unreliable in the Death Strikes it provides, since you are relying on a 45% chance of it proccing each time you use Rune Strike Icon Rune Strike. The result of this is that you risk often finding yourself unable to get your extra Death Strikes when you need them, even if the number of Death Strikes it provides over the entire course of the fight may be comparable to the other two talents (although it lags slightly behind here as well).

Now this is so terribly wrong in all aspects of math and theorycrafting that it just astounds me. Lets start with the basic math of the situation.

Blood Tap=40 Death Runes per 100 Rune Strikes or 20 Deathstrikes that is 100% constant and never changes regardless of rotation and playstyle.

Runic Empowerment=45 Runes total in 100 Rune strikes. Now if played perfectly this could yield all DS runes and you could in theory run a perfect rotation never giving up any RP for RSs and get 22.5 Deathstrikes per 100 RS.

Runic Corruption=45 procs out of 100 rune strikes and the uptime of the buff is modified by the amount of haste you have. I run 0 haste on my DK currently so the buff uptime is 2.5 seconds which would yeild 112.5 seconds of 100% haste uptime on my rune regen. Standard Rune regen time is 8.33 seconds and 4.17 seconds with the buff procced. So if the buff is up for 112.5 seconds that yields 26.97 runes times 3 since all of the runes regen at once for 80.93 runes but the value is only half of that since we are already regening and we are just doubling our regen rate not saying that our regen rate is 0 while the buff is active thus yielding approx 40.46 runes per 100 Rune Strikes.

So you can see by the 3 Talents the rune regeneration is very similar per 100 Rune Strikes

Blood Tap 40

Runic Empowerment 45

Runic Corruption approx 41

Now while Blood tap will always give you death runes you can safely say that 100% of the time you will get 20 death strikes out of each 100 rune strikes thus making it the easiest and most stable talent choice.

Runic Empowerment can be gamed perfectly to always yield an UH/Frost rune thus giving you 22.5 Deathstrikes if played perfectly and offering the highest amount of dps and total rune regeneration overall.

Runic Corruption does give you approx 41 runes per 100 rune strikes. However you only get to use 66.66% of the talent as blood for survival considering it will also regen blood runes which are no use for death strikes and aside from dps are basically useless as blood so you lose 33.33% of the talent thus only giving you approx 13.66 Death strikes per 100 rune strikes.

So if you look at the Death Strike Generation of each talent per 100 rune strikes.

Blood Tap 20 Death Strikes

Runic Empowerment 22.5 Death Strikes

Runic Corruption 13.66 Death Strikes

Now I wont even get into the cyclical math of the fact that Empowerment yields the most runes thus actually generates more runic power thus letting you runes strike more actually making it even more powerful than the other two because it actually enables you to generate more of your resource.

However it is pretty safe to say that for a blood DK runic corruption is by far the worst pick of the tier.

Again I love the site and I only post this to fix an inaccurate guide on a great site.

Jadawin

Edited July 6, 2013 by Jadawin

[safcol 1]

Really misleading thread title, for starters.

However you only get to use 66.66% of the talent as blood for survival considering it will also regen blood runes which are no use for death strikes and aside from dps are basically useless as blood so you lose 33.33% of the talent

You're saying that if it only sped up UH/F rune regen, you'd be using 100% of the talent - ie, it would suddenly become good? Wrong.

If you're choosing between 100$ and 100$ + a condom that you don't need, the two choices are at best identical.

Edited July 7, 2013 by safcol

[Tengenstein 11]

DS per minute is a very misleading metric for DKs; Blood doesn't use DS on CD and being able to Death Strike more often does not equate to greater survivability outside of fights where survival is fait accompli. The fact that you've broken them down to just averages shows you've kinda missed the point about how they work, Blood Tap is gauranteed Death Runes, the other two aren't, RE may on average proc on average 45% of the time, but it may proc 0% of the time when you need extra D runes, and 100% of the time when you're sitting on your pairs waiting for a boss special. RC's main advantage is that it doens't need fully depleted runes in order to not go to waste, Which allows you to to hold an FU pair in resever for as long as you like. RE just doesn't do that, you need to keep both FU pairs on CD for RE to affect them, which means not having a DS there to react to potentially fatal damage spikes.

BT works best when you have predicatable timed damage bursts, likr Talon Rake or Snapping Bite, RE works best were you have continual unvoidable damage, like Lei Shi, and RC works best when theirs unpridicatable spikes that you just have to react to (akin to Baleroc)

[Jadawin 0]

Really misleading thread title, for starters.

You're saying that if it only sped up UH/F rune regen, you'd be using 100% of the talent - ie, it would suddenly become good? Wrong.

If you're choosing between 100$ and 100$ + a condom that you don't need, the two choices are at best identical.

You arent choosing between 100$ and 100$ + a condom you are choosing between

100 dollars and 66.66 dollars + a condom

Because I guess in your example the blood rune is the condom?

[Jadawin 0]

DS per minute is a very misleading metric for DKs; Blood doesn't use DS on CD and being able to Death Strike more often does not equate to greater survivability outside of fights where survival is fait accompli. The fact that you've broken them down to just averages shows you've kinda missed the point about how they work, Blood Tap is gauranteed Death Runes, the other two aren't, RE may on average proc on average 45% of the time, but it may proc 0% of the time when you need extra D runes, and 100% of the time when you're sitting on your pairs waiting for a boss special. RC's main advantage is that it doens't need fully depleted runes in order to not go to waste, Which allows you to to hold an FU pair in resever for as long as you like. RE just doesn't do that, you need to keep both FU pairs on CD for RE to affect them, which means not having a DS there to react to potentially fatal damage spikes.

BT works best when you have predicatable timed damage bursts, likr Talon Rake or Snapping Bite, RE works best were you have continual unvoidable damage, like Lei Shi, and RC works best when theirs unpridicatable spikes that you just have to react to (akin to Baleroc)

When did I say anything about Death Strikes per minute?

How can you say that RE has a 45% chance to proc but can proc 0% of the time and not use the same line of thinking for Runic Corruption?

Im not sure why i need to explain how to accomplish this but I guess for the peanut gallery I will.

Here is the rune setup UUFFBB obviously for Unholyx2 Frostx2 Bloodx2

So in your perfect world of DK tanking you pretty much run with xUxFxx most of the time spamming your blood runs as much as possible for Dps or aoe threat/dot management ect.

So in this situation you would runestrike pretty much whenever you had 30 RP and if you were at xUxFxx and got a RC proc you could safely use the banked DS pretty quickly because your next one would fill up in approx 4 seconds or less so you could wait until just before it filled to pop that DS to keep your banked DS for spike damage. And you say that being able to keep this constant state of 1 Death Strike on Deck basically makes you able to react to damage to heal yourself effectively. So basically you are mostly using this Death strike from the proc to not cap your resource as obviously that would be really bad because ultimately you want to have 1 of every rune regeneration at all times in almost all situations. And you contend that you cant do anything similar to this with RE because it requires you to have xxxxBx in order for the ability to work.

Ok so the scenario with RE. Ok so since you need xxxxBx for it to be effective everyone assumes that you need to spam your DS as fast as humanly possible and always be sitting there waiting for runes so that your RE can actually proc. However lets look at the real way to play this.

Lets say we are at UxFxBx and we are 4 seconds from the second UF filling up so in effect I have basically 1.5 UF runes currently. Now I pop a DS then Hit Runestrike 2 or 3 times before the rune fills up depending on my current level of RP and It will sometimes proc and sometimes it wont. Now the situation that would really kind of be crap would be the situation where you only got 1 rune to proc thus leaving you at something like UUFxBx, however lets look at how that would play out

Combat starts

DS to Start generates 20 RP UxFxBB 20 Total Rp

UxFxBB

Auto attack Generates 10 RP 30 Total Rp

Heartstrike Generates 10 RP UxFxBx 40 Total Rp

UxFxBx

Auto Attack Generates 10 RP 50 Total Rp

Pooling Resources

Auto Attacks x ~2 Generates 20 RP 70 Total Rp

DS to not cap Generates 20 RP 90 Total Rp

xxxxBx--------This is your money zone right before they fill up if timed correctly

Runestrike x 3 0 Total Rp Now there are only 3 different scenarios here which I will outline further down

Heartstrike to not cap 10 Total Rp

UxFxBx approx 2-3 Autos 30 total Rp

Ok so there are only a couple scenarios at this point as to what happened with your RE procs.

1. Received no procs at all the rng gods crapped on your head. Result? Nothing really you just line it up and try again and you still have a DS on deck ready to go for reactive healing.

2. Receive 2 procs out of 3 Rune Strikes. Yatzhee this will put you at pretty much UUFFxB letting you burn another Deathstrike while still keeping your banked Deathstrike thus increasing your current overhealing shield and even helping with that spike damage even more. Now getting 3 out of 3 procs also goes into this category however obviously if you proced on the first 2 you wouldnt hit the third and save it for the next time you were looking to execute this.

3. Receive 1 out of 3 procs thus putting you at something like UDFxBx (D for death run of course) Now in this situation which is the worst possible its still an amazing situation for us. Because in this situation you are forced into a DS leaving you at something like UxxxBx but leaving you with ~60-70 RP letting you rip off another couple Runestrikes. Now while im not statistical probability buff who knows how to crunch this equation i am pretty sure that the probability of getting 2 procs out of 5 runestrikes with a 45% chance is really really high.over a large portion of scenarios.

If we look at this basically what we are all saying is having a DS ready at just about all times is really important for us. However if you could always have that Deathstrike ready for that spike damage and be laying extra preemptive shields that are of course going to be overhealing with the DS and only put a 7% of your life shield up modified by your mastery of course so prob in the realm of 14% of max health with say a 522 IL blood dk will have around 800-900k Health depending on trinkets and gems so approx 120k ish per extra Deathstrike even if it is 100% overheal with just normal gear and maybe a bit more the hit/exp gear setup on Mr robot has approx 220% mastery in just 522 gear with the legendary cloak. Wouldnt those extra shields only serve to smooth out other damage while letting you keep the death strike on deck or really close 1-2 seconds in most scenarios.

Is it a vastly more complicated and involved way to play?....of course it is but lets be clear. If we are going to play this deathstrike on deck playstyle then most of this talent becomes about extra overhealing shields anyway with any talent because you dont want to resource cap so even with RC if you get a proc when you are at UxFxxx you are going to have to burn a DS regardless even if you dont see any damage spike so that you dont cap resources. Played correctly you can game RE to do almost the exact same thing only generate 50% more of these overhealing shields to further decrease the amount of spike damage we take in the first place while still having those Death strikes really close to put up the big shields and heals.

Also in any situation where every Death strike counts like in progression horridon in the last phase or fights with really heavy melee damage that is steady and basically every Deathstrike is a great one RE will vastly outshine RC in terms of survival.

Im not sure why anyone doesnt see this. Its really involved way to play and really requires a lot of practice and perfect play to make it work the right way but isnt that what we are looking for? As theory crafters and minmaxers I would think that we could be honest about the difference in the 2 abilities if they are played 100% to the maximum perfection.

Runic Corruption - Faceroll basically save your Deathstrike spam runestrikes and blood runes get 50 extra shielding deathstrikes

Runic Empowerment - Hard to game correctly and play 100% perfectly have to watch your usage and timing of DS, RS, and BS/BB but if played 100% will yeild approx 75 extra shielding Deathstrikes to Runic Corruptions 50. While letting you maintain the DS ready to respond to damage spikes just like RC.

[nicarlitos 13]

Just use blood tap. It gives the most control.

[Storm 426]

I use runic corruption because on most fights there's magic damage which I mitigate with Anti-Magic Shell to get an instant 100 Runic Power, even if it means I need to purposely stand in something to use AMS. Runic corruption then allows me to dump all my RP without worrying about wasting the high rune regen I'm most likely about to proc.

Honestly though, you can't really argue that any one particular lvl 75 talent is better. There are situations where any of them can come out ahead of any other in some particular metric. the truth is just pick the one that fits your playstyle, because they're all the best choice as long as you use them the right way.

Blood Tap:

Pro's: Allows control of extra rune regen so you can "bank" a death strike

Con's: Lowest overall rune regen

My opinion: "banking" a death strike implies you're actually worried about dying. these days I can practically solo heal myself through Heroic Lei Shen, so I'm really not worried about banking anything. However if you are still worried about being as easy to heal as possible, and like to sit on death strikes, then this is the way to go.

Runic Empowerment:

Pro's: Highest overall rune regen

Con's: 1 full rune at a time won't always lead to an extra death strike, so sometimes you'll either sit on it, or use it for an extra bloodstrike/death siphon/etc.

My opinion: From a purely tank dps standpoint this is the best choice, for someone that wants to sit on a death strike at all times this is a terrible choice since you'll waste most of your procs on blood runes which won't help your survivability at all.

Runic Corruption:

Pro's: Takes less thinking than the others. It's pretty hard to waste RC procs unless you're spamming rune strike while sitting on a full set of runes.

cons: lower regen than Runic Empowerment, less predictable than Blood Tap, this talent is pretty much like the middle ground of the two.

My Opinion: I pretty much stated at the start, but when there is so little chance of dying that AMS becomes a dps cooldown, this talent is my top choice for dumping 100 runic power quickly without wasting procs.

Edited July 7, 2013 by Storm

[kainito 0]

I like Blood Tap. Just gives me a DS on call whenever I need it, makes me feel better knowing I can call upon trusty ol' DS when I need it.

[Reniat 23]

sorry I've been away for a while, but even if a few days late i thought i'd throw my 2 cents in there, since I'm the guy that does all the theorycrafting for said blood guide (in addition to my own guide).

If we chose our t5 based on DS/min RE would be the best choice, but remember that it's not not how often you DS, but WHEN you DS. Take two DK tanks. One has a decent amount more DS/min but doesn't place his DS as well, and the other has less DS/min but places EVERY death strike after burst damage. Assuming they are both on progression content where tank damage intake matters, the second DK will always be more STABLE. The first might have have a slightly higher hps at the end of the day, but who cares about overall numbers? your overall numbers can be great but you can still die if you burst hard enough for ~3-4 seconds out of a 12 minute fight.

In order to time death strike right, we need to have an FU pair at the ready. If it takes you ~2-3 global cooldowns to react to damage then you're going to have a bad time, and if you spike with no FU runes with RE, that's whats going to happen. You need to hit RS enough to proc two times with RE to get an FU pair back, which means there will be many times you will find yourself unable to death strike WHEN you need to, regardless how often you do end up death striking. You could try to minimize the danger by only putting FU runes down when you need to dump rp, but with a 45% chance to proc and only 100 RP max you have at BEST a .45*.45+.45*.55 = 45% (lol math is funny sometimes) chance to get both back. If you were to try and dump RP with <90 RP you would be looking at .45*.45 = 20.25% chance that you get both to proc. So in summation, even with a max RP bar you still have a 55% chance that you will end up with xBxDxx, which means you cannot react with death strike for the next ~5-7 seconds.

And even if you get lucky, you are going to need 2-3 global cooldowns to get those 2-3 rune strikes out, which means 2-3 seconds from when you put the FU runes down to when you can DS again. Remember this little RP dump has to happen a LOT and you have to put both FUs down every time you do it, and if you cap RP because you waited on an FU pair to place a DS right, you've lost throughput which is the only possible argument for RE. So even though it might have the best DS/min, look at how much time you have to be without FU pairs and unable to react to any dmg JUST to get your t5 to give you death strikes back.

Now look at RC and BT. neither of them have the theoretical overall DS/min of RE sure, but neither of them require you to put your FU pairs down to get the benefit. Meaning if you are running with BT or RC, the only reason you would ever need to be without an FU pair is if you actually needed to use them both for timing purposes. This incredible in terms of DK tank stability and consistency, because death strike timing is SO much more consistent with either of these talents.

RC has a 45% chance to proc, and even though it only procs for 30% of a DS it only needs to proc once. Compare this to RE which has to proc at least 2 times out of a maximum 3 chances every time you have an RP dump. Assuming you had 90 RP. With RE you'd have a 45% chance to get your FU pairs back and a 55% chance that you'll be left with no FU pair. With RC you have a .45+.45*55+.45*.6975 = 83.4% chance to get a rune cycle shortened, on top of the fact that you don't have to put your FU pairs down in the first place, meaning even if you don't proc any you should still have an FU pair available.

So it's the difference between theoretical maximum DS/min that puts you at risk every time you need to dump RP or an high chance at hastened rune regen that allows you to hang on to an FU pair for as long as you need to.

[Jadawin 0]

While we can theory craft the capabilities between RE vs BT/RC till we are blue in the face I would imagine that we both are about the same distance from the perfect idea just on different sides but that is fine.

I will however point out the one real false statement that you made in your guide that is very miss leading then explain why. Direct quote from your guide.

Runic Corruption is more stable, and over the course of the fight will provide you with roughly the same amount of Death Strikes as Blood Tap. It also has the benefit of boosting your DPS somewhat.

Now I know we can agree on a few points so we will lay them out.

1. Rotation of the two talent choices is almost identical in terms of runes generated and pooled for Reactive healing always being able to bank at the very least 1 Deathstrike.

2. With the same amount of Runes being used/generated the RP gain will be almost completely equal ergo the amount of Runestrikes will be almost completely equal.

3. With both talents you can have UxFxxx 100% of the time always ready for a Death strike and even in the case of BT if you could have UxFxxx with 10-12 Charges hit the extra DS then since BT is off of the GCD have the on deck DS before the next GCD was finished. This difference could be compared the the GCD to use a DS prior to capping with RC with or without a proc since its still 1 GCD so again its completely the same thing in all facets of the execution of the two talents.

4. The way the playstyle works out

Runic Corruption

You are at UxFxxx at 90% of filling your second DS up and you take a spike and get a proc at exactly the same time(the rng gods love you) thus you are able to DSx2 very quickly for some great reactive healing and lay some HUGE shielding. Now with 1 proc it still takes approx 5.83 seconds to regen your next DS and you cant even use that one because you are trying to keep 1 DS on hand to respond to DS for another 8.33 seconds and if you were to get another proc you would still be waiting 11.66 seconds to be able to DS again without risking being at xxxxxx where you are in the RE situation you talk about being so terrible. You very correctly showed the chances of getting 2 out of 3 procs is only approx 45% So in the majority of scenarios you would be waiting 14.16 seconds to be able to use your next DS again or in the best case of 2 out of 3 procs 11.66 seconds to get back to your spot where you say this talent has its pure strength of sitting at UxFxxx without any resource loss to always respond to damage because we can both agree that once you are sitting at xxxxxx more than you are able to sit at UxFxxx then the entire point of taking the talent is mute. So you can see that in the vast majority of situation(the only other option of getting 3/3 procs which we can both agree is a tiny %)You will be sitting on your hands for at the very least 11.66 seconds after that spike to be able to do anything. You could say that you could use that first DS to react to damage but then wouldnt you just be playing RE at that point?

Blood tap you basically sit at UxFxxx and pool your blood charges until you are at 10 then you can burn the extra DS then burn your Blood charges to put you at DxDxxx right away. Now lets talk about how blood tap would play. Again we are going to go with the worlds best rng to illustrate a point. You are at UxFxxx with 8 Blood charges and 90% of your next DS filling up. You take a spike right when you hit your Runestrike putting you at UUFFxx with 10 blood charges. So you are able to DSx2 then burn Blood charges and be ready for your next spike right away letting you be at UxFxxx right away after burning 2 Deathstrikes making the best case scenario so much better. Now of course the worst case scenario is if by some crazy random rng and planning fail you burned your blood charges and your extra DS and you were at like UxFxxx and being at 1% of your next rune starting to fill it would really suck but in that situation you are actually completely equal to RC and maybe just a little bit ahead. Considering with your math you showed that getting procs of 45% isnt very reliable which Blood Tap is 100% after 5 rune strikes you will generate that extra DS or 2 Runes.

The thing that I find crazy is your statement that RC will produce as many Death Strikes as Blood Tap. You know this statement to be false if you played both specs at 100% capacity never capping resources and always having that 1 DS ready in any fight where RC generated x amount of Death strikes Blood Tap will generate ~46.41% more death strikes because again 33.3% of every proc of RC is filtered into Blood runes which can not be used for Death Strikes while every single resources gathered by blood tap goes directly into the Death strike pool.

If you can play both specs exactly the same and accomplish this reactive healing playstyle and actually respond to damage better with Blood Tap and generate ~46.41% more Death strikes resources than with RC how can you make a suggestion that RC is even a usable talent for Blood DKS?

There is no contention here the math is pretty simple in terms of the similarity of runes returned in total vs the amount of DS usable runes returned.

I could understand that saying playing RE over BT would be the hardest sell in the book and its a tactical and theorectical nightmare that yields very minimal results in the best of scenarios while giving up a ~% of survival reaction. But saying that RC is even close to BT in terms of survival just isnt true when you can accomplish the exact same play style from BT yet generate significantly more of your survival resources.

[Drafty53 17]

I'm going to trust the moderator who writes the guide and is 13/13H. It was a valiant effort though Jadawin...

"If we chose our t5 based on DS/min RE would be the best choice, but remember that it's not not how often you DS, but WHEN you DS. Take two DK tanks. One has a decent amount more DS/min but doesn't place his DS as well, and the other has less DS/min but places EVERY death strike after burst damage. Assuming they are both on progression content where tank damage intake matters, the second DK will always be more STABLE. The first might have have a slightly higher hps at the end of the day, but who cares about overall numbers? your overall numbers can be great but you can still die if you burst hard enough for ~3-4 seconds out of a 12 minute fight."

GG

[Jadawin 0]

I'm going to trust the moderator who writes the guide and is 13/13H. It was a valiant effort though Jadawin...

"If we chose our t5 based on DS/min RE would be the best choice, but remember that it's not not how often you DS, but WHEN you DS. Take two DK tanks. One has a decent amount more DS/min but doesn't place his DS as well, and the other has less DS/min but places EVERY death strike after burst damage. Assuming they are both on progression content where tank damage intake matters, the second DK will always be more STABLE. The first might have have a slightly higher hps at the end of the day, but who cares about overall numbers? your overall numbers can be great but you can still die if you burst hard enough for ~3-4 seconds out of a 12 minute fight."

GG

You do realize this has nothing to do with DS/min its all about resource returned per rune strike im not really sure why everyone thinks im talking about DS/min because im not. You should read the last post about the difference between Runic Corruption and Blood Tap to understand what I mean.

Now while I could make some historical references about the downfall of humans in general from blindly following the words of a respected or know figures that would be insulting to compare Reniat to those people when everything about him that I have read or interacted with him shows him to be a class act. I will however point out that blindly following orders or data without actually asking questions or theory crafting them yourself just makes you a lemming who is just regurgitating someone elses info and passing it off as though you actually understand something.

[Drafty53 17]

You do realize this has nothing to do with DS/min its all about resource returned per rune strike im not really sure why everyone thinks im talking about DS/min because im not. You should read the last post about the difference between Runic Corruption and Blood Tap to understand what I mean.

Now while I could make some historical references about the downfall of humans in general from blindly following the words of a respected or know figures that would be insulting to compare Reniat to those people when everything about him that I have read or interacted with him shows him to be a class act. I will however point out that blindly following orders or data without actually asking questions or theory crafting them yourself just makes you a lemming who is just regurgitating someone elses info and passing it off as though you actually understand something.

Or its called saving time and trust for someone who I know has put in the work and plays the specific class at a very high level.

Edited July 8, 2013 by Drafty53

[Reniat 23]

Resources gained per rune strike over the course of the fight is exactly the same as DS/min. With a bit of dimensional analysis you can directly convert resources/RS to DS/min (spoiler alert, multiplying Resources/RS by RS/min and DS/resources gets you DS/min). that is why we are all talking about DS/min even though you are talking about resources/RS. We are all talking about the same thing: throughput.

You shouldn't take my word for it just because i am 13/13H or because I wrote a guide. Your math isn't quite right Jadawin (well your arithemetic is but your approach to the problem is a bit off) but there's no reason to not at least bring discussion to the table. You thought there was a place where the guide could be improved, and while it wasn't exactly correct the attempt should be appreciated. That said, a civil approach will usually give you credibility as opposed to leading off with calling someones work "horribly missleading". You want to think of post like these as invitations for theorycrafting discussion where the end result may change the current held belief/standard, not an accusatory post where you are proving someone wrong for the sake of being right. I know that's not what you intended, but the proper etiquette can go a long way to making sure your opinions are justly read/considered.

[Shine 144]

I have not read everything, cmon TLDR.

I do want to say that I personally switch and alternate between these, and found none really better than the others. Runic Corruption is always perfect. I found that no matter the encounter, Runic Corruption always works.

For some fights where I get high burst damage, I like to take Blood Tap, since it gives me more control over the timing.

I must say I favour Runic Empowerment a bit less, but this talent also comes with nice surprises (I found that in my general rotation, I sometimes need that one rune for an ability that in turn makes the reload for Death Strike take longer. In this case Runic Empowerment is perfect.)

Truth is, it doesent really matter if you get 45 or 41 or 42 or 40 or maybe even 58 fcking Death Strike per 100 Rune Strikes. I just look at what feels right and switch them in places where I think it's needed.

I hope I'm not repeating anyone.

[Jadawin 0]

Resources gained per rune strike over the course of the fight is exactly the same as DS/min. With a bit of dimensional analysis you can directly convert resources/RS to DS/min (spoiler alert, multiplying Resources/RS by RS/min and DS/resources gets you DS/min). that is why we are all talking about DS/min even though you are talking about resources/RS. We are all talking about the same thing: throughput.

You shouldn't take my word for it just because i am 13/13H or because I wrote a guide. Your math isn't quite right Jadawin (well your arithemetic is but your approach to the problem is a bit off) but there's no reason to not at least bring discussion to the table. You thought there was a place where the guide could be improved, and while it wasn't exactly correct the attempt should be appreciated. That said, a civil approach will usually give you credibility as opposed to leading off with calling someones work "horribly missleading". You want to think of post like these as invitations for theorycrafting discussion where the end result may change the current held belief/standard, not an accusatory post where you are proving someone wrong for the sake of being right. I know that's not what you intended, but the proper etiquette can go a long way to making sure your opinions are justly read/considered.

As far as you thinking im being accusatory that I apologize for I am overzealous in my most mild state =-) I in now way meant it to be that way.

That being said while my RE vs BT/RC statements again can be argued all day long and we will never agree thats fine I see the point of the other play style and the benefits of it I just think that 1 could in a vacuum of perfection play it similarly but that is neither here nor there. The statement that you made in your guide that was verbatim:

Runic Corruption is more stable, and over the course of the fight will provide you with roughly the same amount of Death Strikes as Blood Tap. It also has the benefit of boosting your DPS somewhat

Now you say my math is right but my approach to the problem is a bit off and im curious as to how so. My logic on how to play both talents in the manner that always lets you have a Death strike ready and still never cap resources is quite fluid in its execution and you are not going to generate RP faster with RC over BT are you?. I think that people are thinking that just because it speeds up your rune regeneration rate that its going to make you generate RP faster? That doesnt really make any sense to me at all. For RC to be as effective as BT in terms of generating Death strikes it would have to generate a significant amount more RP to yield a ton more RS which in turn could be more procs due the fact that again only 66.66% of any RC proc can be used for a DS while 100% of all rune strikes is 100% death strike usable.

I have listened to people talk and talk and talk about why I'm wrong but I have yet to see someone bring some math to the table that would prove otherwise in the logic that regardless of the throughput of runes that are returned from RC only 66.66% of any proc can be used for Death Strikes while 100% of BT returns can be used for Death Strikes while achieving the exact same playstyle.

If you just look at the basic math of it 1 proc of RC makes your rune speed 4.17 for 2.5 seconds instead of being 8.33 seconds.(This is with 0 haste however the talent scales to generate a close % of the rune based upon your current haste)

So that means that with 1 proc it would takes 5.835995 seconds to regen a completely depleted rune.so basically you are looking at each proc giving you about .2994 runes x 3 of course because you were looking at getting that in all 3 runes so about .8982 runes per proc or if you were looking at it in terms of a large group about 40.419 Runes per 100 Rune strikes which of course you could only use 66.66% for death strikes so 26.945 death strike runes or 13.472 Death strikes.

Now in the same duration of attempts 100 rune strikes you will generate 200 blood charges thus 40 Death Strike Runes or 20 Death strikes.

Now we can agree that the RP generation from SoB melee attacks and Horn hits ect is completely static and any benefit they have on RP generation would be exactly the same for both talent choices.

So if literally the Rune and thus RP gain from RC over BT is ~1.0475% greater how is that going to generate enough RP over the course of a fight to make a difference so great to bridge the gap in the ~48.456% increase in DS runes returned.

When I was thinking about this I also thought of this caveat to the issue which is interesting to think about due to the way it works in conjunction with multiple procs. Lets say for argument sake you had 2 procs in a row. What is interesting about this is that actually raises the value of RC slightly here is why.

2 procs = 5 seconds of 4.17 rune time instead of 8.33 second rune time.

So what this means is that you would fill 1 rune completely in 4.17 seconds and have .83 seconds left of RC time to start filling your next rune which would at the 4.17 rune time be ~19.9% of a rune leaving you with ~80.1% of a rune to regen at 8.33 seconds which would be 6.67 seconds. So your return on 2 procs over 2 full runes would be 2 runes in 10.84 seconds instead of 16.66 seconds. This would mean your regen rate for the two runes would be ~5.42 seconds which is better than the 5.83 seconds from 1 proc for 1 rune however at 5.42 seconds you would still be at ~1.048 runes per proc or 47.16 total runes per 100 strikes or 15.72 Death strikes. Now this is only in the happenstance that you get 2 procs in a row which will happen from time to time but the fact remains that over the course of many many RS the math evens out and this wont happen that often and you can see even if it happened regularly you would still be generating ~27.22% more DS resources with BT.

The worst thing here is you cant really even compare logs from 1 person to another to say decisively due to play style RP and Rune capping ect this is just a discussion in a vacuum however I still have yet to see any math in contention to mine that can prove decisively that RC is going to generate enough RP more than BT to give it enough procs to catch up to the large disparity between DS runes returned via the talent.

I guess the really interesting thing here is that to play RC correctly you would never want to RS with 30 RP since the possibility of getting 2 procs in a row or even 3 would increase the talents viability so if you just spammed your RS at 30-50 RP all the time you would miss out on the opportunity to actually get those double procs which only have a small % chance of happening and if you almost never pool the RP to try it you will almost never see it happen.

That is an interesting thing to think about really however I dont think it really changes the math behind it all. I am curious if you think that by playing RC you actually speed up the process of going through the generation process by which the return per RS is the same but you are somehow getting to your rune strikes faster and filling the runes up faster with RC over BT?

If that is what you are saying I suppose im going to have to do a linear timeline of GCDs with a proc variable that will show how RC is generating this RP in less time because that is the only way I can see RC being even close to as viable as BT in terms of resource generation. It would be kind of annoying to model out due to melee runic power gain and HoW RP gain. I suppose you could even add in AMS if you wanted to but I wouldn't think that would be necessary. Is this something you have already done? If so I would love to see the data as in my mind that is the only possible way that what you are saying is achievable. If not perhaps I should work on that. Maybe I could do BT and you could do RC and we could compare notes?

[Reniat 23]

When I say your approach is a bit off I mean that you are trying to make a purely mathematical approach to something that is a bit too abstract for basic algebra. The only thing you can math out with t75 is the throughput, or DS/min (or Resources/RS if you prefer). That isn't the end of the story, however, since DS/min isn't really that impactful when comparing them all. The idea of consistency and stability is something you won't be able to math out cleanly, so you're not going to get any math that's going to prove you wrong because it doesn't exist. Here is an example of where highest throughput isn't the best choice even though the math would say otherwise:

 

Once upon a time there was a impoverished theorycrafter named Sveniat. Sveniat lived in an apartment and paid for it with financial aid money from school, and during the school year he was a happy boy. However, one summer the money ran out, and he was scared because the months rent of $1,000 was fast approaching. Then, out of the blue the I-can't-believe-it's-not-tooth fairy appeared and said "dear Sveniat, I will grant you the money you need. you may choose two payment plans. I can either give you $1,500 now, or $500 per month over 6 months for a total of $3,000. Which will you take Sveniat?" Obviously the $500 would be more at the end of the day, and Sveniat could really use that $3,000, but the first $500 monthly payment wouldn't be enough to cover the months rent, and he'd still be out on the street with a broken spirit and a broken credit score.

 

"I-can't-believe-it's-not-tooth fairy! I've picked!" Sveniat said, "I will take the $1,500 to make sure I can pay this months rent!" he said beaming with relief. "Oh you stupid boy" said the fairy "fairies don't exist, and even if they did why on earth would they be using the US dollar for currency in this fantasy universe you've created?" And there was much rejoicing.

 

 

That's a very old fairy tale from the early 21st century, but it shows what i'm talking about perfectly. Even though Sveniat would have gotten more money with the $500 payments, he needed enough to pay rent, so the lesser choice of $1,500 lump sum was the optimal choice for him, even though on paper it was less. You can't put the "rent is in a month" clause into an algebraic equation and have it work for general situations., so you just have to put the math in a non-math context to get what's optimal. That said the guide should probably read "the same survivability as BT" not "the same amount of DS". I'll look into getting that re-worded.

[Mendenbarr 7]

Sveniat is my new hero.

[Tarazet 144]

When you have a hard-hitting ability that lands every 15 seconds and does more damage every time (Horridon) - or simply does a high amount of damage every time (Tortos) - you can't get caught out without that Death Strike. And trying to "game" a random proc is always risky because it's random. The likelihood may be enough that it works most of the time, but it's never going to be as good as something that will give the desired result every time.

[Shine 144]

When you have a hard-hitting ability that lands every 15 seconds and does more damage every time (Horridon) - or simply does a high amount of damage every time (Tortos) - you can't get caught out without that Death Strike. And trying to "game" a random proc is always risky because it's random. The likelihood may be enough that it works most of the time, but it's never going to be as good as something that will give the desired result every time.

exactly my thought, thats why I said: "For some fights where I get high burst damage, I like to take Blood Tap, since it gives me more control over the timing."

This is the most controlable talent of the three since the other two are indeed too 'random' to be effective in such situations.

In other encounters, where I experience amore steady flow of damage, I find the randomness oft very effective. Either I'm lucky or it seems to sense when I need it. Cuz they're always there when I need em.

One small sidenote, when you take Runic Empowerment or Runic Corruption. and you find yourself in a situation where it doesent proc, yet you do need it to. Keep in mind that Empower Rune Weapon is excellent for quick reactions. (This is if its off cd ofc)

[Jadawin 0]

When I say your approach is a bit off I mean that you are trying to make a purely mathematical approach to something that is a bit too abstract for basic algebra.

The only thing you can math out with t75 is the throughput, or DS/min (or Resources/RS if you prefer). That isn't the end of the story, however, since DS/min isn't really that impactful when comparing them all. The idea of consistency and stability is something you won't be able to math out cleanly, so you're not going to get any math that's going to prove you wrong because it doesn't exist.

Here is an example of where highest throughput isn't the best choice even though the math would say otherwise:

Once upon a time there was a impoverished theorycrafter named Sveniat. Sveniat lived in an apartment and paid for it with financial aid money from school, and during the school year he was a happy boy. However, one summer the money ran out, and he was scared because the months rent of $1,000 was fast approaching. Then, out of the blue the I-can't-believe-it's-not-tooth fairy appeared and said "dear Sveniat, I will grant you the money you need. you may choose two payment plans. I can either give you $1,500 now, or $500 per month over 6 months for a total of $3,000. Which will you take Sveniat?"

Obviously the $500 would be more at the end of the day, and Sveniat could really use that $3,000, but the first $500 monthly payment wouldn't be enough to cover the months rent, and he'd still be out on the street with a broken spirit and a broken credit score.

"I-can't-believe-it's-not-tooth fairy! I've picked." Sveniat said, "I will take the $1,500 to make sure I can pay this months rent!" he said beaming with relief. "Oh you stupid boy" said the fairy "fairys don't exist, and even if they did why on earth would they be using the US dollar for currency in this fantasy universe you've created?"

And there was much rejoicing.

That's a very old fairy tale from the early 21st century, but it shows what i'm talking about perfectly. Even though Sveniat would have gotten more money with the $500 payments, he needed enough to pay rent, so the lesser choice of $1,500 lump sum was the optimal choice for him, even though on paper it was less. You can't put the "rent is in a month" clause into an algebraic equation and have it work for general situations., so you just have to put the math in a non-math context to get what's optimal.

That said the guide should probably read "the same survivability as BT" not "the same amount of DS". I'll look into getting that re-worded.

Your analogy is flawed because your are using the premise that 1 RC is 100% proc chance and will pay your rent(give you a DS) in full right away when 1 proc doesnt actually give you 100% of a DS it just moves you close to your next DS. However I do understand your analogy.

Here is the largest problem with your logic.......1 RC proc doesnt give you a DS right away. If you say all things are equal with both talents lets just say in this situation you were at UxFxxx and you took a spike and had to burn your banked DS and you were in theory at 0% of all Unholy and Frost runes.

Now lets just use the absolute averages in my example here to say that on average out of 12 charges during a fight we will say you are going to be at 6 on the average and you will be at approx 55 RP throughout the encounter now these are just to give the example of how a situation would work out.

So in this situation we had to respond to some damage right away with our banked DS and in theory we were actually at 0% of all UH and Frost runes. So in this situation I could RSx2 and get 100% chance at my next DS and you with RC well even if you had 2 procs in a row guess what you are still 2.17 seconds away from filling up that DS after the 2 globals and ive already done it with BT. In the situation where you only get 1 Proc guess what you are still 3.83 seconds until your next DS is ready to go. If you happen to get zero procs you are waiting 8.33 seconds.

Now of course as resource amounts change the scale will tip in different directions but I made this situation to illustrate that its not so cut and dry that RC will always get you closer to your next Death strike faster.

So I think we can agree that out of the literally millions of iterations you can show how that RC or BT will at times get you your next DS faster. I would also say that the two are very close in value in these situations where you are trying to generate that next DS depending on the resource count.

Now my opinion is that BT will actually give you faster DS in a majority of situations, not a vast majority just a majority remember 50.5% is still a majority. I believe this for this reason.

1. You will have Blood charges most of the fight you can look up any WoL report and you will see very high uptimes on Blood Charge

worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-zmozcm0u71jpgv2u/details/66/?s=4588&e=4848

Here is an example of you actually where you used BT and had a 77.6% uptime on Blood charges so for a huge majority of the fight you had some of those charges ready to go. So if you have those ready to go or at least a few of them then you are not on the average going to be more than 3 Runestrikes away from your next DS and Ive just shown that even with back to back RC procs you are still waiting 4.17 seconds to get the next one off.

Again this is just 1 iteration to show how its not as cut and dry as you make it out to be with consistency. Because a 45% chance to proc is only consistently 45%.

So we can agree I hope that out of the millions of possible iterations that there are going to be almost equal in the situations where BT will actually provide you with your next DS faster than RC and conversely there will be iterations where RC will yield that next DS before BT. These two will probably split very close to the middle and while obviously its impossible to do all the iterations I think we can both agree the difference is probably very slim.

Thats not really the point though. The point is that when we are not reacting to spikes with BT I am going to be able to lay down more extra shields than you will be able to due to me generating more DSs than you are. So lets say again all things being equal that im generating my DS runes the way its possible to with BT and you are doing the same with RC.

I am throughout the fight going to be able to lay down more of these extra shields then you are and while the survival gain isnt game breaking at 200% mastery you are going to be laying down shields of 14% of your life even if they are 100% overhealing a 522 DK tank is prob in the realm of 800k health thats 112k shields which while not a huge shield will still make me get hit for 282 when you get hit for 400k then we both react to damage in the same manner with thus im an on top of being able to react to damage spikes as well as you I am actually able to smooth out the damage spikes better than you are as well over the course of a fight.

The reactive survival potential of both talents is very similar I will again say that BT is going to be better a small percentage of the time because there will be in fact many situations where in 0-3 GCDs with my blood charges I will already have the next one ready. But the simple fact of the matter is that spike mitigation is spike mitigation and if I am able to react to the spikes as well as RC and smooth out my spikes more consistently than RC how is that not going to make me a more survivable tank.

People always say that DS per minute isnt the end all be all of DK tanking because you need to be timing your DS to react to Damage. Let me make this completely and totally clear

I AGREE 100%

The only thing is people arent understanding is if I can play with the same banked resources and I have shown that you can react to damage just as well with BT yet still be able to add extra DS on top why would extra DS/Min not be the number 1 priority of your gearing strategy. If you could in theory stay at UxFxxx 100% of the time and spam extra death strikes constantly while still keeping one in the bank wouldnt that make you a better tank because you would be able to keep applying extra shields even if you werent taking damage to get huge shields up? Of course it would because any extra mitigation you get prior to the burst only serves to mitigate said burst that you have to react to in the first place.

I am really confused as to why people argue this fact that can we at least say that while DS/min isnt important that DS/min while having UxFxxx saved will 100% increase your survival? If the reply to this is yes which it is btw because the more DS you execute while at UxFxxx will only give you more spike mitigation. Then there is almost no situations where RC is more viable than BT.

[Drafty53 17]

Go read the guide again...

"Blood Tap provides you with a lot of control over your rune situation, and this is its main strength. It allows you to chain a number of Death Strikes (by using up your Blood Tap charges), and this is of particular benefit if you want to stack Mastery: Blood Shield on you before a damaging mechanic strikes.

Runic Corruption is more stable, and over the course of the fight will provide you with roughly the same amount of Death Strikes as Blood Tap. It also has the benefit of boosting your DPS somewhat."

RC will provide you with ROUGHLY the same amount as DS's. ROUGHLY. He also mentions that BT gives you the most control. Also...your original argument was about RE being the best and now you have switched to BT. Just let it go. You like to play different than the guide says...you think you are right and the moderator is wrong. It's fine.

Also, maybe you should post your own logs to back up what you think is right...might be more convincing than posting the moderators.

Edited July 9, 2013 by Drafty53

[Jadawin 0]

Go read the guide again...

"Blood Tap provides you with a lot of control over your rune situation, and this is its main strength. It allows you to chain a number of Death Strikes (by using up your Blood Tap charges), and this is of particular benefit if you want to stack Mastery: Blood Shield on you before a damaging mechanic strikes.

Runic Corruption is more stable, and over the course of the fight will provide you with roughly the same amount of Death Strikes as Blood Tap. It also has the benefit of boosting your DPS somewhat."

RC will provide you with ROUGHLY the same amount as DS's. ROUGHLY. He also mentions that BT gives you the most control. Also...your original argument was about RE being the best and now you have switched to BT. Just let it go. You like to play different than the guide says...you think you are right and the moderator is wrong. It's fine.

Also, maybe you should post your own logs to back up what you think is right...might be more convincing than posting the moderators.

Always love when the peanut gallery chimes in with absolutely nothing substantial about theory crafting what so ever. It always adds a nice continuity to the conversation, cant go more than 3 posts before some ignorant person posts another opinion that is neither understood or back up by math.

Just to make my point even more for you if RC generated 100 Death strikes BT would generate ~148 conversely 10 from RC would yeild ~14.8 from BT thats not as you so wonderfully put "roughly" thats not even close thats a difference of 48% over the course of a fight.

I didnt post his logs to prove anything i just posted his logs to show a % uptime on Blood Tap you can do this with any DKs logs and im sure they are going to be reasonably close.

I suppose if you were actually following the entire conversation you would have seen my thought process on the entire RE/BT/RC conversation and at its very core its the fact that RC only yields 66% of the Death Strike resource runes while BT/RE both yield 100%, and while I conceded that considering the playstyle that had a DS ready to go 100% of possible time would in fact be preferable over the RE playstyle the fact still remained that by playing BT you could maintain the RC playstyle and still generate ~48% more DS runes. Those are facts backed up by math they arent opinions that I am just stating. Instead of coming here with some intelligent feedback on why my logic is wrong you just come again and spew someone elses thoughts. Good job on being able to repeat what you have read and not actually have a mind to think about things yourself.

Are you actually trying to make a point here? Oh no I forgot you are here again to regurgitate someone elses work and make it seem as though you have even a modicum of understanding on the subject at hand. Please if you are just going to come here and lash out instead of try to discuss the issue of the min/max math and theory crafting of the blood DK perhaps you should just um digress?

Edited July 9, 2013 by Jadawin

[nicarlitos 13]

who else is sick of this guy?

[Reniat 23]

Just because I had 77% or whatever blood charge uptime doesn't mean that i had 77% of the fight with an FU pair. How much of that 77% was i below 10 charges? (hint: alot).

"Your analogy is flawed because your are using the premise that 1 RC is 100% proc chance and will pay your rent(give you a DS) in full right away when 1 proc doesnt actually give you 100% of a DS it just moves you close to your next DS. However I do understand your analogy."

if you think the analogy is flawed, then you misunderstand completely. I was not making a 1 to 1 and onto comparison between the $1,500 lump sum and runic corruptions proc rate, or a 1 to 1 and onto comparison between the $500 monthly payment and BT or RE. I was simply showing a mathematical model where you couldn't find the optimal choice through algebra alone. Now, just to see if you really get what i'm saying, I want you to tell me what is the optimal choice in that story I told, then I want you to try and prove that with math. You don't have to succeed, but I want you to try.

Also, tone down the "everyone is a sheep" attitude a bit. Just because people read a guide doesn't mean they can't think for themselves. I am one of the top DK tanks in the world, and guess what? I first learned how to play reading guides. Did I do all the math to back up the guide I was following? nope. Back then I wasn't theorycrafting so I couldn't have been bothered. So please tone down the high and mighty "I think for myself" attitude. I respect your attempt at thoerycrafting but that doesn't make you any more entitled to post than anyone else.

Anyway, please answer the question I presented at the top of this post before making another wall of text.