Heya guys!!  Sometimes our talents can be misleading.  *Very Misleading*  So the question comes down in how to understand these numbers in a relatively uncomplicated method?  Well, that’s where I come in!! 

Pets

The first thing you have to understand about an Unholy Death Knight is that a great deal of their damage is coming from pets.  Generally speaking your pets Ghoul, Gargoyle, and Army of the Dead will contribute between 15-20% of your total damage.  Of course the type of encounter can alter this result, but that is the average.  So saying that 18% of your damage is comprised of pet damage is not unreasonable.

Damage Sources

Now you have several sources to examine for determining how much % of your damage is made up by any individual source.

• WMO DK Rankings is a great source (and I prefer it over WWS) to examine your raids (and your) dps, or to examine the top20 best ranked DK’s.
• Recount is also a great in game mod that tracks your damage.  No time at a boss fight to check numbers?  That’s why God made screenshots!!
• Simulators are great as well, such as Kathorie’s DK Sim over at EJ Forums.

Basically you can look at your self, the top 20 best DK’s out there for your spec, or simulations of performace and then see where all of your damage will be (or should be) coming from.  From there, the rest is pretty simple.

Desolation

Let’s take Desolation on the PTR for example.  On the surface this appears to be a 5% DPS increase correct?  No.  We already determined that we do about 18% of our damage with pets (whom do not benefit from this talent).  So realistically Desolation is only giving us 0.82% DPS per talent point.  Eyebrow raiser right?  I know.

Unholy Blight

Another odd example will be Unholy Blight.  Now UB will not be affected by multipliers or modifications (outside of the Glyph of Unholy Blight) in 3.2 release.  It does a % of DC damage (which already got all of those multipliers to begin with), so everything is already added in.  Were the multipliers to go into effect again, that would be called double dipping, and Blizzard is not a fan of that.  Wonder why?  *smirk*

So the Glyph will make UB actually do 28% of a DC’s damage instead of 20%.  So lets see how much damage that really is shall we?  DC, on average, does about 12% of your total damage in a full Black Ice (0/10/61) build.

So out of 100,000 damage (example only) our DC’s did 12,000 dmg (12%).  So the new UB will do 2,400 dmg (unglyphed) or 3,360 dmg (glyph).  So UB will in 3.2 release do 2.4% of our damage unglyphed, or 3.4% of our damage glyphed.  It’s an interesting play on numbers how this 1 point talent will do more than say Desolation (1 point investment).

Also an example like that gives you a great idea how valuable some glyphs *could* be.  For example, the new UB glyph will only add 1% dps.  Not too terribly impressive is it?  Especially when you read it and is says +40% damage!!  See what I mean about misleading?  40% bonus = 1% overall dps gain.

Other Talents

I could break everything down for you guys, but well…that’s time consuming.  And I don’t love you guys that much!  Heh.  But honestly, sometimes the best thing for you is to sit down and examine numbers yourself.  And I recommend you do it.

Don’t be worried, I’ll still give you talent specs, etc.  But don’t be shy about looking at a talent some time and then trying to break it down yourself.  You will learn something!

-Suffer Well Brothers and Sisters.

Tags: Things you didn't know about WoW