Wednesday, February 11, 2009 Diseaseless Blood & Armor Penetration

The DPS spec that I have decided upon is the 51/0/20 2H build that focuses on a diseaseless rotation. The reasoning? - I like that it scales with gear as my guild is clearing all content and because I didn't pick up Annihilation + Epidemic so reapplying diseases became a tedious chore. Don't get me wrong, I believe that Deathknights should use their diseases to do their damage and when/if that gets changed in 3.1 I will change my rotation/spec to reflect that.

A few things about my spec choices:
I. I picked up Improved Rune Tap and Glyphed for it. Reasoning - I'm finding that healing DPS is a last priority even for the healers who's duty it is to heal the raid. And that they don't start healing DPS until they drop below 50% and as a spec that does an additional damage based on health I then need to make sure I stay above 75%. Also, after going through wws reports the mage that raids 98% of the time doesn't use Frostfire Bolt so glyphing for Blood Strike would be a waste of a major.
II. I don't have Death Rune Mastery as my rotation is the standard OBx2, HSx2
III. I picked up Vampiric Blood for the reasons stated in I.
IV. I do like the concept of Blood Worms - The passive heal that does damage (abit they do minimal damage it's still damage) and they don't waste a Blood Rune that I could have used on a HS nor do they consume a GCD. The problem I have with them is that they can soak up AoE Heals (when they are finally cast) and I've heard reports on Thaddius that they can consume a charge and wipe a raid.

So, where does Armor Penetration come in?

There was a glimpse of 3.1 changes posted in the general section of the WoW live forums. Blood Gorged is getting its expertise changed with ArP (Note ArP = Armor Penetration and AP = Attack Power). There were no details on if it was going to be a base number with each rank or a percentage gained that would scale with gear. I would hope for the latter as Blood itself seems like the build that scales the best with higher end gear.

At the moment there are no solid numbers for soft or hard caps for ArP, however there is a lot of interest in finding it. My concern is that there is a limited amount of gear in the current raid content that has ArP on it, this of course can change with 3.1. On a non-raid night I really want to test out gemming and gearing for straight ArP and spending a few hours in front of the raid dummy in Ironforge.

Some early thoughts on ArP on WoW gaming forums is that it doubles in value as you gain it. So with 1% ArP it is on the same value table with haste for 2H builds. But unlike haste once you're at 2% it will be of a larger DPS increase, and the value keeps doubling until it reaches the point of DR. Now - at what is the target percentage that is the "sweet spot" to reach is unknown - what the point of DR on ArP is unknown. Basically, a lot of unknowns but it's exciting to have a once thought useless stat become rather attractive with a Blood build.

On another note, I got Khaeli and I the Belkin N52TE Gaming Keypad. We're both keyboard turning clickers and have been for years. We're looking for something that can really help maximize our game play and simplify things and once we get use to this thing, it looks like the way to go...we'll see though.