Dual Wield unholy: am I just bad or is the scripting different to classic

[DmND]

Hey everyone, first time poster here.

I played on this server on and off for about 2 years now.
Recently I got interested in going for the dual wield route for my unholy dk, since the spec has the lowest prio on SM. I thought I'd give this a try seeing how good it was performing on classic, nearly as good as the 2H spec with SM.

I don't have the best pieces, but it's only a matter of time until I'll get most of them. Here's my armory:
https://armory.warmane.com/character...daeron/summary

I'll go for full offset pieces as Sarthe's guide recommended in his guide, until I'll have full heroic t10. Weapons should be correct, slow MH, fast OH.
Missing the 277 haste legs + 277 shoulders from rotface. I simmed my weapon combo against Sarthe's realistic bis and it's equal in damage.

I also went to a sim website to compare my 2h spec vs this... dual wield comes out 500 dps ahead consistently.

Now I beleieve I got the opener + the overall rotation pretty well in place... again checked Sarthe's guide + I also analysed the sim timeline to see how that goes about it.

Disappointment hit when I started testing the spec on dummy. I followed the sim rotation down to a T, had only self buffs(horn)... the result? 2h spec was ahead by 400 dps ?!?! WHAT?

In raids I had the same situation, just felt like doing lower damage than 2H. I tested it specifically on festergut, braindead fight where I just concentrate on the rotation and nothing else. Had all the buffs in both instances, prepot, snapshotted everything with gargoyle and aotd(trinkets, eng gloves, haste pre-pot, racial, sigil, flask). I cant seem to get there, with dual wield, but maybe I'm just bad. Really hoped that I could main this as the 2H rotation is insanely boring and repetitive, at least dual wield is more dynamic.

Another thing that seems insane to me is the dps the guys were pulling in wotlk classic. They had toc gear and on fights like Festergut, they are just peaking at insane numbers in their opener, 20-21k. I cant even get close to that here on Lordareon. I'm barely peaking at like 16k in my opener while following their rotation.

Could you guys enlighten me? It's probably just me being bad at the game or is the scripting different on wotlk classic? is snapshotting working in the same way here?

Maybe someone else tested dual wield unholy on here and can share their opinion on it or some tips?

[Disktrasa]

Unholy with 2, one handed weapons are the 2nd best dps and even very close to shadowmourne wielding unholys as far as I heard from some guild mates who plays it, I personally never tried it allthough being an oldschool DK player https://armory.warmane.com/character...ecrown/summary thats my DK, but anyhow arent you supposed to have 2 slow speed weapons as unholy if your gonna play the 1hand style? That might explain a lot why your dps falls short.

[DmND]

That's good news, I gotta improve my gameplay then.
As for the slow vs fast off hand, from what I've read the important thing is to have a slow main hand to help with the crusader procs.

Yeah, slow off hands are a bit better, but not by much. For example: replacing scourgebane with bvb heroic in my case, gives me about +20 dps in the sim... that's pretty much nothing.

My problem is that even on dummy where you can't really mess up the rotation, the dps seems quite a bit lower than 2h with similar gear. But yeah, will try to get better at it.

I did 13.2k dps on Saurfang, which is a really easy and static fight, for example with dual wield at 6.2k gs(I'm on lorda so 0% buff) that seems kind of low no?

[Disktrasa]

Yeah that is a little low, but remember, did you have the optimal raid comp for you? RNG is a big factor in this game aswell, not only in forms of getting a lot of crits or bad luck with crits but your weapons also have a min and max amount of dmg (the actual damage numbers on wep stats, like Havoc Heroic Axe have 481 - 895 Damage) so if your super unlucky you melee swings and abilities you use will not only not crit but also get the lower end of the damage for that swing / ability, Shadowmourne is notorious for that, Damage on Shadowmourne is 954-1592, so you can hit super hard with a melee swing and ability or do 2-3K dmg less just from having bad luck with the RNG of what damage it will go with.

WoW just LOVES it's RNG system.

Anyway every single Unholy DK who uses 1 hand weps have allways gone for 2 slow weps as far as I have seen here on Warmane, maybe it was a little different on classic wotlk and since they use a lower raid tier and items, Retail guides I wouldn't trust that much tbh, classic wotlk is a compleately different game from the original wotlk, its been simplified and changed by a ridicules amount.
I would advice to check out Gnimos guides here on warmane, his guide has 621,447 views and is up to date and very in depth.
https://forum.warmane.com/showthread.php?t=349829

[Allylilith]

on wow classic, unholy is much better than here, because the gargoyle scales very differently with haste. 13.2k on dbs with 6.2 isnt bad, assuming a not very fast kill, I doubt 2hand at 6.2 is likely to outperform that.
the only guy I am aware of who plays dualwield on lordaeron is galthran. you can check his logs on uwu logs and see if you find differences between his dmg distributions and your own

[DmND]

on wow classic, unholy is much better than here, because the gargoyle scales very differently with haste. 13.2k on dbs with 6.2 isnt bad, assuming a not very fast kill, I doubt 2hand at 6.2 is likely to outperform that.
the only guy I am aware of who plays dualwield on lordaeron is galthran. you can check his logs on uwu logs and see if you find differences between his dmg distributions and your own

Ah, that makes sense, always heard that gargoyle works in a weird way here. That might be a factor. Thanks for sharing another player that uses this spec. Also happy to see that fast off hand is not a problem, so the sims are correct after all and scourgebane is pretty good. One weird thing I see in Galthran's logs is that he tries to have 100% uptime on Ghoul Frenzy. From my testing, keeping up sigil(+200 str proc) with scourge strike and only using Ghoul Frenzy together with blood tap results in more DPS on my end. I'm still messing up my rotation quite a bit, I feel like... still getting the old 2h rotation habits, so that definitely contributes to lower dps.

Speaking of snapshotting and scaling, AotD might not work the same as on Classic WotLK, because the damage seems pretty small when casting it inside the opener with all the haste, sigil, etc. (only for the cases that you can do it, e.g.: Marrowgar, Festergut).

I'll keep at it though, I can only improve I guess :P. Even though I can also afk dps with the 2h spec, dual wield seems more interesting and engaging.

[Obnoxious]

might not work the same as on Classic WotLK

None of the servers we host are "Classic." We use the original expansion.

[Disktrasa]

Ah, that makes sense, always heard that gargoyle works in a weird way here.

Note, It works in a wierd way on "classic"
Warmane is much closer to the actual original wrath of the lich king then blizzard desperate relaunch of wotlk.
Thats why Warmane gained several thousands of player during mid (ulduar) wotlk expansion, the most loved patch of the most loved expansion of the most loved mmorpg in the world lol, while people asked constantly "will warmane die out?"