DK DPS on WoW Patch 5.4 … again

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I shouldn’t look at DPS Rankings, as they are skewed in ways that mean they are one source of input for performance and are nothing like a perfect. That said, the recent updates from SimCraft are giving me deja vu.

I wrote about the 5.3 Dps rankings in August this year, and this post could use many of the same words. Meaning the upward geared DKs will be fighting harder to get the same dps as some other classes. Ref: http://www.noxxic.com/wow/dps-rankings/realistic#553. 

This is the Ranking for ilevel 553-ish gear, and I’m uninspired by how the ilevels scale.

5-4-dps-rank-553-gearWhat do we have here for Patch 5.4?

  • Approx 70k dps difference in the table, with the best DK spec 34k behind the best. Overall that still sucks, but it sucks slightly less than it did before.
  • A Death Knight using one handed Frost will be 10k stronger than a two handed frost, which is a big difference, and 20k in front of the Unholy Death Knights.
  • The spread of Dps all within the top 10% of each other is much wider in patch 5.4, with #13 specs within the top 10%. But the split across all the specs is roughly the same.
  • I didn’t pick the BiS list as it is too early in the patch for players to have all their BiS items. It did change the ranks slightly, but not significantly.
  • At the low end (meaning ilevel 489 to 522) the ranks are much difference which means that your class will shift as your gear improves. For DKs it means they are doing OK at the low to mid range, but they really suffer at the high end. Mages are good dps at all gear ranks, lucky sods.
  • We have Druids in a better place, and Mages and Hunters still being darn healthy performers. Elemental Shamans are darn handy, and Rogues and Warlocks are well placed. Most of the pure Dps classes might need to spec change to get the optimal performance.
  • From the previous screenie (below for 5.3) we can see a shift for Dps Paladins which will hurt them a lot.
  • The Warriors are slight adjusted but essentially similar, and Monks got a very slight increase.
  • We can also see that Shadow Priests and Death Knights are poorly served again. Nothing is going to assist the DKs and SPRs in climbing the tables, especially the poor SPRs who are at the bottom by a large margin across all gear levels <496 regardless.

Previous patch 5.3 in darn healthy raid gear (i think it was 520+ ilevel):

dpsRanking5-3

If you want a far more detailed breakdown of Dps for DKs including relative stat weightings and the value of trinkets and such according to Heroic gear vs Normal gear, with the Set bonuses then check out Destiny Softworks. The posts make a lot of sense and are a boon for DKs, e.g.:

My suggestion for going into 5.4 would be DW frost, if you have the appropriate weapons, or unholy if you have access to a significantly better 2Hder. Unholy will do quite fine, and most likely beat 2H frost, until we start getting tier items. I’ll be charging in as DW…

Have a play with the Noxxic link, and see where your class/spec is. And take it with a grain of salt as nothing makes a bigger difference than they person on the keyboard.

Happy Killing, TyphoonAndrew

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3 thoughts on “DK DPS on WoW Patch 5.4 … again”

  1. I’m pretty sure everything about this chart is wrong. None of these numbers look based in reality and they majorly conflict with what I see in raids as well as what you see from compiled logs on something like DPS bot.

  2. I get that, its why I’m suss on the automated systems. I took a look at the Dps parses through H mode to Normals for 10s and 25s and there are some key differences.
    That said we are also not at the point where the current raiders are 553-ish geared, so I am interested to see how the parses match for lower gear levels.

  3. I never use a Noxxic DPS chart for any basis of comparison because it’s never going to accurately portray lag, player skill or fight mechanics. Multi-target fights are going to favor DoT and cleave specs, single targets will favor the nuke and burst specs, etc., but that doesn’t erase the fact that DK’s are not scaling well with the higher gear levels. I’ve been playing Moonkin for most of this expansion and we’ve been awful until recently. We have scaled with gear extremely well, especially for multi-target encounters like Norushen, mostly due in part to our 2nd haste break point being much easier to reach while still having enough crit to fish for Starsurge procs by keeping dots up on multiple targets. We’ve been bad and have finally gone up, but DK’s either seem to be sky high or rock bottom. Not sure why or where the scaling is failing.

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