Need help finding the best slottable blue CP perks for stamDK

Sleeping_OwI · May 2021

My stamDK (wearing Deadly Strike + Leviathan + Slimcraw or Stormfist) uses this rotation: Endless hail, Barbed trap, Poison Injection for bosses under 50%, Noxious breath, Venomous claw, spam Bloodthirsty, Whirling Blades.

I'm currently using these blue slottables: Untamed Aggression (150 dmg), Wrathful Strikes (165 dmg), Thaumaturge (+10% DOT), Fighting Finesse (+10% crit dmg).

Questions:

1- With only 55%-60% crit chance, should I switch from Fighting Finesse (+10% crit dmg) to Deadly Aim (+10% single target dmg)? Considering that most skills in my rotation are single target.

2- is Flurry (Bloodthirsty) considered direct damage or DOT? In some older posts that I read, everyone confidently said it's a DOT, but now I'm told it's direct damage. Also, If it is DOT, then is it buffed by Deadly Strike?

fred4 · May 2021

Best thing is to go to your guild hall and test on a target skeleton. In my own testing I found that, for example, Thaumaturge and Deadly Aim BOTH buff Venomous Claw's DOT component by 10%. However, when you stack the two of them together, they only added up to 15% in total. Do not ask me why, just test, test, test. This is still better than Untamed Aggression or Wrathful Strikes, which I found useless at a measly 2.7% extra damage each. However that was my build against a target skeleton. Stacking weapon damage in a trial group may yield different results, especially when more % modifiers come into play. You do want to test with both Major and Minor Brutality, which you have as a DK, by the way.

At presumably over 50% crit, I would not give up Fighting Finesse. That should at least be 5% extra damage and the weapon damage stars yield less. Next patch you also have to consider Master-at-Arms.

As a PvPer I look at the PvP perspective. DK "suffers" from having all kinds of skills. Claw has a direct damage as well as a DOT component, as does Breath. Claw is single target, Breath is AOE. Take Flight is AOE, as is Dawnbreaker, but the latter is also a DOT. For my purposes (PvP) I concluded that the combination of Deadly Aim, Thaumaturge and Biting Aura (along with Fighting Finesse or Resilience) is best and that the weapon damage stars are worthless. The only thing that Untamed Aggression has going for it is that it also buffs healing. I believe that Wrathful Strikes doesn't even do that. With the proc changes, next patch, weapon damage will gain more relevance, but you're not using procs.

I swear that half the options in the game are only there to confuse you. Some of them are as useless as the trash items you accumulate in your inventory. This didn't stop YouTubers putting out videos recommending weapon damage on day one of Flames of Ambition, because it looked tasty to someone with knowledge of the previous patch or simply because it looked good on the stat sheet.

The game should be balanced, but I suppose if it was there would be even less point of having this many competing stars. At least when you test you will find some clear-cut answers. It's a sandbox. ZOS aren't fully in control, they let the players figure out the meta. In some cases the meta is decided on a knife edge. In others it appears pretty cut and dry, like here. That doesn't mean people in general are up to date nor that I am totally correct. I rarely do trials, for example. Best to test with your own build and use case.

MashmalloMan · May 2021

What I did, and what an add-on used to do called constellations or something like that is to do a parse without cp slotted, write down the total %dps of each damage you see in combat metrix in its specific category. Then add them up as a total to figure out where most of your damage lies..

Damage can either be aoe or single target.
Damage can either be dot or direct.
Damage can either be crittable or non crittable. (Combat metrix just tells you a total so this one is easy, don't go by your character sheet, because proc sets can't crit, the idea is to get the actual amount of crits you can do and a 4+ minute parse should kill any variance of RNG to provide a reliable number for you.)

So by the end, you should have notes that looks something like:

65% single target
35% aoe
35% dot
65% direct
60% crit (Base crit chance was 65%, but so much of the parse is Relequen so -5% to my average felt accurate)
40% non crit

This was roughly how my stam sorc parse looked and as a result the choices for CP were pretty obvious since all the modifiers are at at least 10%. I assume most builds in pve will have similar results.

Single Target, Direct, 15% crit flanking, 10% crit.

If you feel like you can't reliably proc the 15% crit flanking slottable, based on your results, the 10% dot then the 150 weapon damage might be a better versatile option, aoe is probably the least strong although it seems enticing, most of the hardest hitting dps skills are single target like relequen, light attacks, execute skills and most spammables accounting for 40-50% of your dps.

Sleeping_OwI wrote: »

Questions:

1- With only 55%-60% crit chance, should I switch from Fighting Finesse (+10% crit dmg) to Deadly Aim (+10% single target dmg)? Considering that most skills in my rotation are single target.

2- is Flurry (Bloodthirsty) considered direct damage or DOT? In some older posts that I read, everyone confidently said it's a DOT, but now I'm told it's direct damage. Also, If it is DOT, then is it buffed by Deadly Strike?

See my suggestion above.
Direct damage. Channeled spammables like Flurry and Templars Jabs were updated to be direct damage some time in 2019-2020. If you read Deadly Strikes set bonus, it does not just buff physical/bleed dots, it was also updated when they made the change for Flurry to include channeled skills since most people using Deadly Strike was actually using it on Templar or a Flurry build. Evidently ZOS liked that use case scenario for the set, so they added the exception for those attacks.

Oreyn_Bearclaw · May 2021

If you are trying to maximize single target DPS (which is almost always what you should build for in PVE), then the answer to Question One is, you should run both.

Fighting Finesse and Deadly aim are going to be your first two blue slottables on every class, stam and magic. If on a dummy or on fights where you can flank, the next obvious choice is backstabber. The last slot will usually be Thaumaturge for most specs, and on a DK, it should definitely be Thaumaturge. The only thing really to consider is what to replace Backstabber with when you can't flank, which may be content specific. It also probably doesnt matter that much as long as you pick something reasonable. Untamed Agression and Wrathful Strikes are fairly undertuned in PVE as a DPS.

If you dont want to swap slottables, I think the safest bet for almost all content is Fighting Finesse (crit), Deadly Aim (ST damage), Thaumaturge (DOT damage), Biting Aura (AOE Damage). I have enough CP that when I can flank (or on a dummy), I swap Biting Aura for Back Stabber.

It is accepted at this point to run Back Stabber on Dummies and turn them around if you are trying to compare your results to those you see on youtube or if your guild requires a dummy parse. A decent amount of trial bosses can be flanked, but if you dont want to mess with backstabber, just run AOE damage for the extra cleave.

Edit: this just got a like, dont want to necro a thread, but some of this stuff is a little dated. We now have master at arms, which is better than thaum on a lot of classes. Wrathful Strikes also seems to be a pretty decent option these days.