Magdalena

Recently a poster on MMO-Champion made a discovery on the PTR: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1325282-So-that-s-why-UH-is-so-much-better-than-frost

For those that aren't familiar with Death Knight mechanics, the Runic Corruption talent differs from both Blood Tap and Runic Empowerment in that it speeds up Rune Regen greatly when it procs, rather than fully activating a depleted rune.
This find however, seemed to imply that a bug was also causing Runic Corruption to affect RPPM rates: Trinkets such as Feather and Rage, the Capacitative Meta and even our Tier 15 2P.

We discussed this in #Acherus and were unsure if this was a bug solely restricted to the PTR or one that had been present since 5.2 (anecdotal evidence suggested it had, but we wanted more proof).
It also stands to reason that if Runic Corruption is behaving in this way, then Improved Blood Presence and Unholy Presence are likely doing so as well.

Mione (Mioneechan on Kazzak-EU) was kind enough to assemble some parses for us, so full credit to her:

The following are roughly 30 minutes logs of pure autoattacking on training dummies, as Blood spec, one of them being done in Blood Presence and the other in Frost Presence. 30 minutes is obviously not enough to remove the luck factor entirely, but all RPPM effects being significantly lower is more than enough to draw a conclusion.

PTR Blood Presence: 13.5M Fallen Zandalari, 5.3M Flurry of Xuen (13.7% uptime), 25.6% Feathers of Fury, 23.3% Cruelty - http://worldoflogs.com/reports/wxh5sb3mn4vmvoj6/

PTR Frost Presence: 8.5M Fallen Zandalari, 4.5M Flurry of Xuen (11.5% uptime), 23.2% Feathers of Fury, 15.5% Cruel - http://worldoflogs.com/reports/jo5gs17kh43tusj3/

Live Blood Presence: 29.8% Feathers of Fury, 72.7% Rampage - http://worldoflogs.com/reports/4wy99cwu6cap8dco/

Live Frost Presence: 19.4% Feathers of Fury, 66.9% Rampage - http://worldoflogs.com/reports/r93ydzfhq5d27sqf/

This pretty much confirmed what we suspected: The bug is not only real on Live, but has been affecting us from the start.

The implications of this are obvious: Runic Corruption becomes the default talent for any DPS DK since it now also carries a sizeable numbers boost. It's also been a definite contributing factor towards the gap between Unholy and Frost, given that Frost tends to default towards Blood Tap whilst Unholy (Festerblight especially) functions well with Runic Corruption's smoothness.
Mendenbarr's cooked up the exact numbers on Elitist Jerks if anyone is interested.
In addition, once the bug gets fixed in 5.4 (I am assuming you won't hotfix it since the tier is largely over), we'll likely need slight compensation for the DPS drop.

It would be great to get some information on what exactly causes the bug and how it will be resolved. Thanks!

With 5.3 on the horizon, ilvl upgrades are back. I've been wondering about the effect of these upgrades on certain RPPM trinkets, and hope to get some clarification:

-If I upgrade a trinket which doesn't have an increasing proc value (Rune or UVLS, for instance) with VP, does the RPPM proc rate scale instead?

As many of you may know, our beloved Matron Heartless was at Blizzcon this year, and had the opportunity to ask about the state of Unholy DKs during the Q&A panel

Watch it, and their subsequent response here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_GZ7TJxpgM#t=1m10s

The relevant part of the question, to this thread, is where she points out that our minions don’t benefit from Crit (an obvious bug), nor do they benefit from our Mastery.

Blizzard’s rationale: The Crit bug will not be fixed till 5.0 because it might disrupt secondary stat weights for Unholy DKs right now. Disruption is bad, etc, etc.

While discussing this in the Acherus IRC, we were forced to acknowledge one point: If the Crit bug were indeed to be fixed, Crit would be valued ahead of Mastery. This wouldn’t be something Blizzard would want to introduce, would it?

I was curious: What if minions began benefitting from Mastery instead (by this, I mean doing additional damage as shadow damage)? Would it then eclipse Haste and upset stat weights?
As it turns out, nope. Letting our minions benefit from Mastery would be a decent DPS gain and wouldn’t affect the priority in the slightest.

At this point, we became a little more daring: What if minions began benefitting from Mastery and had the Crit bug fixed?

The answer is pretty hilarious, if not astonishing: The Unholy stat priority would not be affected in the slightest by these two changes. While they’d be closer in value to each other, we’d still value Haste > Mastery > Crit.
No disruption to speak of!

It’s been acknowledged that Unholy hasn’t been a popular or in demand spec since the advent of 4.1. We already know that the 5% Unholy Might buff won’t end up doing anything to affect this.

We’re also discussing how the 10% AP buff to Blessing of Might, etc, doesn’t even uniformly affect the spec because of our minions: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3424684660

Allowing our minions to benefit from these two stats doesn’t just buff our DPS, but brings the exact same secondary stat “parity” that you mentioned as desiring for the spec.

What say you?