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Need help with DK DPS

Post by Zethzar

So I am main Spec blood, 2nd Frost,(for pvp) Now it seems that during dungeons/PVP, i end up pulling more DPS blood, although I have no DPS PVE armor, or mostly none, in my PVP gear Blood i pulled around, which is not good in general, but in frost i pull around 27ishK, i went off Icy Veins suggestion about talents and rotation, am I doing something wrong?, how should i set up my bars, talents, gylphs, and such and such
so if you could please help, thanks

Post by Wumbo105

27k dps at lvl 90? You can almost do that by autoattacking nowadays lol, so there's definitely something wrong there.
Much of what you need to know depends on whether you're DW or 2H frost though.

Post by Wirxaw

A good start will be armory link.

Then the understanding that Blood has vengeance, and judging by your skill of the class, it must be high.(The more damage you take, the more vengeance you get...)

Frost dps is indeed very unstable, but at the same time simple. Unlike other classes, the minmaxing gap revolves around Killing Machine alone, provided you fulfill at least the simple rotation. This rotation alone, which is the priority, should get you close to normal dps values of 50-60k(again based on your gear).

If you have "really" read Icy-veins, you should know the rotation, polishing or understanding it is a personal matter. If I just reword it, I doubt it will help you.

So go ahead, show us your character, then we can talk.

Post by Zakkhar

Then the understanding that Blood has vengeance, and judging by your skill of the class, it must be high.(The more damage you take, the more vengeance you get...)

Not any more. Atm you can take very little damage and still get decent vengeance.

Frost dps is indeed very unstable, but at the same time simple.

Not true. Double time. Masterfrost is simple, 2h aint.

Unlike other classes, the minmaxing gap revolves around Killing Machine alone,

Not alone and looking at his 27k number he doesnt have min-maxing problems. He has some elementary problems.

I found his armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/gnomeregan/Zethzar/advanced
My eyes bleed from his gemming and reforges...but thats not what he asked for.

Blood tanking consist of very high "free" damage abilities (two diseases, blood boil spam, undogable and unparryable rune strike) powered by increased Attack Power from vengeance. DK tanks have both very good aoe and single target damage (much better than for example warriors), while Frost 2h DKs have ok aoe, but only ok.
Possible other reasons:

Blue pvp gear is lower ilvl than blue pve heroic gear, hass less STR and not very ideal secondary stats - you may also have reforged/gemmed it wrong seeing you blood reforges. You dont have any enchants i pressume.
You dont utilise your cooldowns or mismanage your runes/runic power, doing priority wrong (eg. utilise raid bosses rotation on 5man dungeon trash or bosses, typical example of such behaviour is picking plague leech and/or misusing it).
you use tanking weapon runeforge and pvp trinkets (one of which is only half useful, other is completley useless).
you are nowhere near hit/exp cap for 5man dungeons and/or you attack from front

Post by Zethzar

As I said previously, Im not good at DPS, and my main spec is blood, so take that into consideration when looking at my gear.
But still,
-your saying i should hit/exp cap
-Get better DPS gear(this is obv.)
-wrong gems/wrong reforges/ im assuming if I had enchants theyd be wrong too
-for frost duel-wield is better
-stand behind trash/boss (which I do)
but, on another note, the Icy Viens told me WHAT is should use, but is there anything like; placement of the attacks on my action bar, addons that you guys would suggest, gems, enchants?

Im just really bad at DKs, arnt I?

EDIT
I will give a screenshot if you guys need to see one/ a video of what im trying to do as a DPS, compared/ criticized on what i SHOULD do?

Post by Wirxaw

Not any more. Atm you can take very little damage and still get decent vengeance.

Bull*!@#. Damage absorbed by blood shield does not increase vengeance, or does so very slightly. Know this first-hand. Example:
500ilvl tank with 2\\2 Shinka gemmed with Crusader, do less or equal damage to 465ish ilvl DK with 463 weapon(gargoyle I think). All because he took !@#$loads of damage and relied on healers and 1-2 death strikes.

Frost dps is indeed very unstable, but at the same time simple.

Not true. Double time. Masterfrost is simple, 2h aint.
Masterfrost is actually not so simple, as it requires strict rune play even outside of AoE situation. It is simple solely because your whole rotation is the same, regardless of situation. For top-end minmaxers, yes, DW is the choice, but for simplicity and basic gameplay - TH is still easier, as you don't give a damn about unholy rune play. For AoE you do need to change rotation to masterfrost, but let's ignore AoE and think just that on single target he has to follow rotation without watching which runes are up and not.

Unlike other classes, the minmaxing gap revolves around Killing Machine alone,

Not alone and looking at his 27k number he doesnt have min-maxing problems. He has some elementary problems.
I was talking about DK class, not him. Once you follow rotation, minmaxing is the control of KM(for TH). Excluding army and pre-pot, of course...

As for the character...:

1. Change weapon runeforge to Crusader. No clue what are you doing in such low-grade PvP with SSH. It's either arenas or high-end tanking.

2. Talents:
-remove Plague Leech. A nuisance that hardcore minmaxers might give a damn to utilize to rank on WoL. Pick Unholy Blight and save yourself a truckload of runes with proper usage.
-Desecrated Ground is a bit useless. Maybe in tight PvP situations, but in anything PvE it's waste. For Blood you must pick Remorseless winter, invaluable CC. Same applies for Frost PvP, used it happily in bgs.

3. Gear:
I suppose your current gear is tanking "set", as I do not see PvP gear. For frost you should go haste>crit>mastery, assuming you use the same TH sword.
For Blood: mastery>hit\\exp>avoidance. Gem stamina for starters...

It seems that Zakkhar managed to take a look at your pvp set, so if he cares to stay here, listen to him. Otherwise Icy Veins has all other details, read better.

Post by Zethzar

Ok, thanks

Post by Zakkhar

Not any more. Atm you can take very little damage and still get decent vengeance.

We changed how Vengeance works.

Vengeance is intended to let tanks generate additional damage and threat as content levels rise, despite not gearing for it (or at least not primarily). We're changing the design to let Vengeance play better with active mitigation, but the new design has some other advantages many of you will like.

As most all of you know by now, the idea of active mitigation is that the buttons a tank presses directly contribute to mitigation and survival. In some cases, this is timing-centric, such as Death Strike. In others, it's both timing-centric and also involves balancing how you spend your resources among multiple abilities, such as Savage Defense vs. Frenzied Regeneration or Shield Block vs. Shield Barrier. In the latter case, it's important that both abilities are compelling and compete well with each other. We are changing Vengeance to let those abilities be balanced.

I'm going to use Savage Defense (a short duration large dodge buff) and Frenzied Regen (a large instant heal) as examples. Getting the balance between SD and FR right is challenging. We want SD to win on average, but you're limited on how often you can use it, and it's not necessarily reliable -- sometimes you really need a heal NOW, and so FR is the right button. SD should win, but FR shouldn't be too far behind, and they should scale similarly.

SD scales with the incoming damage: if BossA hits you for 60k, and BossB hits you for 120k, then SD is twice as valuable (in absolute terms) on BossB than on BossA. FR scales with your attack power: even a few 5man trash mobs will cap out your Vengeance, so your AP will be the same on BossA as on BossB. FR isn't any stronger on BossB than BossA.

On top of that, AP and boss damage scales differently as ilevel rises. We tried a solution to that problem where FR scaled exponentially with AP in the last build. That has worked fairly well, but still failed at keeping SD and FR balanced when boss damage was significantly different from the baseline we used as a tuning point. For example, 25-player raid bosses hit twice as hard as 10-player raid bosses, which makes SD twice as valuable.

But wasn't this post supposed to be about Vengeance? Currently, Vengeance increases your AP by 5% of the damage taken, stacking up to the cap, which happens quickly. We are changing Vengeance to increase AP equal to 5% of the damage you take for 20 sec. This buff will "roll" so that as it gets refreshed the unused part is added to the new buff, similar to how Ignite or Stagger work. The net result will be that Vengeance stacks by the amount of DPS being thrown at you over 20 sec. There is no cap.

Additional nuances:
-- Avoidance will not count against you. Avoiding an attack will extend the current Vengeance stack back to 20 sec (as if you were hit again for the same DPS).
-- Blocks, absorbs, Stagger and Shield of the Righteous will also not count against you. The damage before these effects is used for the Vengeance calculation.
-- To reduce ramp up time, we bump you up to halfway to whatever your average Vengeance level would be based on each individual hit. Essentially, we skip the first 10 sec of ramping.
-- Tank damage in 5-player groups will decrease. We think this is a good chance because it is weird and demoralizing when tanks consistently top damage meters in dungeons.
-- Tank damage in 25-player groups will increase. We think this is a good change because it makes tank DPS as relevant in 25-player raids as it is in 10-player raids.
-- With this change, Brewmaster damage will be extremely overpowered. We will fix it, but you may get a build where they are ludicrously good.

The rest of this post is nitty gritty details for theorycrafters. You do NOT need to read or understand this in order to effectively play a tank.
-- Whenever you get hit, Vengeance is added based on the damage of the hit before block, crit block, absorbs, stagger, and Shield of the Righteous.
-- Whenever you avoid an attack from a mob where MobLevel>=TankLevel-3, your existing Vengeance is extended to 20sec remaining.
-- Based on how hard you're hit, we estimate how high Vengeance's equilibrium point will be: DamageTaken / 1.5.
-- If you're not at least half that high on Vengeance, we bump you up to that amount
-- The new Vengeance value is calculated as: 0.05 * DamageTaken + OldVengeance * OldVengeanceSecondsRemaining / 20
-- Frenzied Regeneration and Shield Barrier's formulae have changed to:
Frenzied Regeneration at 60 rage: max(2*(AP-Agi*2), Sta*2.5)
Shield Barrier at 60 rage: max(2*(AP-Str*2), Sta*2.5)
-- Yes, these do mean that it uses your AP without base AP from Str/Agi (but does still slightly include AP from Agi/Str when you've got the 10% AP raid buff or other +%AP buffs).
-- Please feel free to ask any questions you have about the mechanical details of this.

They changed the % from 5 to 2 since beta, but the mechanics stayed about the same.

As I said previously, Im not good at DPS, and my main spec is blood, so take that into consideration when looking at my gear.

Looking at your gear is seems like your main spec is slack. :)

-your saying i should hit/exp cap

You are.
Yes, capping hit and exp will net you biggest dps increase in dps spec (gearwise). Thats 6% of each for a 5man dungeon (pvp hit cap is only 3% - players cant dodge from behind so exp cap is zero).

For tank spec however hit is much better than exp (a big chunk of your attacks cant get dodged or parried - rune strike, diseases, outbreak, death and decay etc, also even when your Death strike fails to hit (parried, dodged, miss) it will still heal you). This is also big factor for why tank do so much dps.

-wrong gems/wrong reforges/ im assuming if I had enchants theyd be wrong too

Cant be any more wrong than none tbh. Icy veins kinda says everything about those.

-for frost duel-wield is better

Not really. Depends what you like more/what you have better weapons for. On end game pve the difference between two is very slight, in 5mans dungeon there should be none.

but, on another note, the Icy Viens told me WHAT is should use, but is there anything like; placement of the attacks on my action bar, addons that you guys would suggest, gems, enchants?

Placement on your bar? It doesnt matter - you shouldnt be using 5+ with your left hand anyway. What matter is keybinds. You want to have most used spells easily accesible by your left hand - `12345QERTGF shift, some similar spells may be on same bind but with a modifier, some should be macroed together for better use. For addons DK related i am currently using power auras (you should go with weak auras though), Stay focused (its for hunters, but it provides runic power bar as well), mik scrolling battle text, OmniCC, Blood shield tracker (for tanking), Tidy plates/threat plates (for tanking mainly), vengeance status (again for tanking) and reforge lite (for everything).
Gems/enchants are covered by icy-veins.
Some of my macros include:
#showtooltip death strike
/startattack
/petassist
/use bone shield
/use 13
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/use death strike

It will maximise the uptime of bone shield and top trinket and make sure your MCed pet is attacking proper targets (in Scholomance you can cast Control Undead on the big elite skeleton),

#showtooltip
/startattack
/petassist
/cast blood boil
/cast heart strike
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
Two similar ttacks macroed together. Use Blood boil most of the time (on 4+ targets and on procs), heart strike only on 1-3 targets or boss.

#showtooltip
/use lichborne
/use death coil
Lichborne healing macro.

/cast icy touch;howling blast
/startattack
Dispel macro for frost (there is no reason to use icy touch as frost beside dispel) - the abilities consume same rune and work about the same so i macroed them together.

#showtooltip pillar of frost
/use pillar of frost
/use 13
/use raise dead
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
Top trinket, raise dead and pillar of frost macroed together, because why not.

I will give a screenshot if you guys need to see one/ a video of what im trying to do as a DPS, compared/ criticized on what i SHOULD do?

There is nothing to compare really, if you do what Icy veins tells you to do when it tells you to do it you should be fine. There is no strict rotation, your moves will vary depending on present debuffs, available procs and recources.

As for tanking. You shouldnt try to balance your parry and dodge any more. Just use reforgelite imo. You should gem mastery, not parry.

Need help with DK DPS

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