Comments

Comment by 251082

Placeholder broseph.

Comment by 166419

Wow that looks sick. Reminds me of a fantasy-version executioner axe.

Comment by batista84

This axe looks freaking sick, very good model

Comment by 203799

This only looks like an upgrade from normal Sulfuras for DKs, due to the weapons' secondary stats and how the different classes value them.

Frost/Unholy: Assuming crit-to-haste reforge on Sulfuras, you lose 31 Strength and 177 crit but gain 194 haste and 70 mastery.
Warrior/Ret: Assuming haste-to-crit reforge on H-SSGA, you lose 31 Strength and 170 crit and gain 187 haste and 70 mastery.

The numbers don't end up much different, but the value DPS DKs put on haste makes it a very good trade up for them and not nearly as compelling for the other classes. Sulfuras' slower speed almost makes up for its lower ilvl as its weapon damage is only 26-40 off, so yellow DPS would not be significantly lower.

This is also a bit better for Blood DKs due to its higher mastery and the extra runes from haste being better than crit, although in each weapon's case some of those stats would be reforged to a tank stat. Sulfuras has slightly more Stamina with x/Stamina gems, slightly less with parry/mastery (and even then it also still has less mastery).

I'm glad this got a very nice model. It takes the sting out of putting Sulfuras away if this works out to be better for you. :)

Comment by thebdc

Technically it's a horrible fury weapon. Both mastery and haste are stats sane Furies avoid like the plague. However, since Shannox is pretty easy on hard mode, there's a good chance to get it. It actually dropped both ids for us, so I'm now dual-wielding them.

Because of the crappy stats (from a Fury point of view) it's very valid to question if dual heroic Skullstealer Greataxe or dual normal Sulfuras, The Extinguished Hand is the better choice. Since we all know that thinking and believing is not of much use in a math heavy game like WoW I fired up SimCraft to churn out some more reliable numbers.

As a base I used my current gear, in the second simulation I used SimCraft's override function to replace the weapons with dual Sulfuras, gemmed with 2 Bold Inferno Rubies and reforged mastery to hit.
I left all SimCraft options on their default, but using 50000 iterations. For the fun of it I also made a run with heroic Zoid's Firelit Greatsowrd (gemmed Bold Inferno Ruby, reforged haste to hit). Heroic Sulfuras is not included. Considering that at the time of this writing the heroic Ragnaros encounter is "still" not beaten it will probably take most normal guilds a looong time to get in reach of this splendid weapon.

Anyways, here are the results, which are quite interesting:

Dual heroic Skullstealer Greataxe: 27765 dps
Dual normal Sulfuras, The Extinguished Hand: 27763 dps
Dual heroic Zoid's Firelit Greatsword: 28006 dps

Yes, a whopping 2 dps in favor of the heroic Skullstealer Greataxe. Even with 50000 iterations the dps can differ from run to run, so if you do enough repetitions you might actually end up with the same dps.

Damage per execute time was pretty much as expected, RB and melee doing more damage with Skullstealer Greataxe, everything else doing more damage with Sulfuras. The column to the very right indicated how much dps you'd gain when switching from heroic Skullstealer Greataxe to normal Sulfuras.

| Skullstealer | Sulfuras | Zoid's | Skullstealer => Sulfuras
---------------+--------------+----------+----------------------------------
Execute | 22306 | 22691 | 22577 | +1.725%
Raging Blow | 21274 | 20032 | 18784 | -5.838%
Bloodthirst | 17532 | 17775 | 17648 | +1.386%
Slam | 15125 | 15240 | 15221 | +0.760%
Colossus Smash | 9712 | 9760 | 9735 | +0.494%
Melee Main | 5188 | 5130 | 5369 | -1.117%
Melee Off | 3226 | 3207 | 3336 | -0.588%

The big differences in Raging Blow should be a result of the high amount of mastery on the Skullstealer Greataxe.

Conclusion: it doesn't seem to matter if you use the heroic Skullstealer Greataxe or the normal Sulfuras, The Extinguished Hand. While the former is better when it comes to Raging Blow and white hits, the latter outperforms with all other skills. Note that the tests did not consider racial skills of Orcs, Dwarves and Humans, so choosing one weapon type over the other will give you a slight advantage, since you can put the exta 3 expertise in some more useful stats.
An even better choice would be Zoid's Firelit Greatsword, but that seems to have an awfully low drop chance, although the relatively low count of heroic boss kills could disguise the real drop chance.

Comment by WuSage3

It has higher DPS (which is the highest stat value) and faster speed means more SD procs. This should be the best choice untill Sulfuras heroic.

This is not how Sudden Doom works. SD is ppm-based, meaning if you have any haste at all, you'll see more procs from a slower weapon than a fast weapon.

PPM-based procs work like this: The chance to proc a ppm-based proc is based on untalented, ungeared, unbuffed, base weapon speed so that, on average, it will proc the same amount of procs per minute from auto-attacking untalented, ungeared, and unbuffed regardless of weapon speed. This means it will have a higher chance to proc on slower weapons, and a smaller chance on faster weapons, to even out.

Now, with the way haste works - slower weapons produce MORE procs, on something like Sudden Doom or even Killing Machine which only proc off of auto-attacks, than faster weapons. This is because haste works as such: X% of haste increases the amount of attacks you get in any given time period by X%. So if you have 10% haste, you will get 10% more attacks in, say, a minute. 10% more attacks on a higher chance to proc (a slow weapon) yields more procs than 10% more attacks on a lower chance to proc (a fast weapon).

So stop spreading mis-information when you clearly don't know what you're talking about. This is why weapon speed is also a factor in dps, not JUST weapon damage or weapon dps. Weapon dps is actually a worthless stat to value when it boils down to the nitty gritty as it's just a derivative of weapon damage and speed. It's a good eyeball, but that's it. Knowing the damage range and speed is what is actually important.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Math to prove:

Assumptions: Any proc, 1 ppm. All attacks land and are able to proc this proc. Haste values are equal between comparisons. (A 3.6 wep with haste can in fact produce more procs than a 3.8 wep without haste, if there is enough of it and all else equal.)

3.8 speed: 15.7894737 attacks per minute.

To calculate chance to proc: 1 proc per 15.7894737 attacks, yielding one ppm. (Source: http://www.wowpedia.org/Proc and scroll down to PPM.)
Chance to proc: 6.33333333% This value is always constant.

Chance to proc at least once in 15.7894737 attacks: 1 - ((1-0.0633333333)^15.7894737) = 64.4087587%

Let's add 10% haste: Ups the amount of attacks per minute by 10%. 17.3684211 attacks per minute (a 3.454545 weapon speed)

Chance to proc at least once in 17.3684211 many attacks: 1 - ((1-0.0633333333)^17.3684211) = 67.9020388%

Let's see how it scales with something more reasonable, around 30% haste or so:

20.5263158 attacks per minute, at least one proc: 73.8936549%

Let's go even further, to maybe 100% haste, something you might obtain if you accidentally get Frenzy and Bloodlust at the same time: At least one proc: 87.3326355%
------------

3.6 speed: 16.6666667 attacks per minute.

To calculate chance to proc: 1 proc per 16.6666667 attacks, yielding one ppm. (Source: http://www.wowpedia.org/Proc and scroll down to PPM.)
Chance to proc: 6.0% This value is always constant.

Chance to proc at least once in 16.6666667 attacks: 1 - ((1-0.06)^16.6666667) = 64.3441418%

Let's add 10% haste: Ups the amount of attacks per minute by 10%. 18.3333333 attacks per minute (a 3.272727 weapon speed)

Chance to proc at least once in 18.3333333 many attacks: 1 - ((1-0.06)^18.3333333) = 67.8379308%

Let's see how it scales with something more reasonable, around 30% haste or so:

21.6666667 attacks per minute, at least one proc: 73.8320223%

Let's go even further, to maybe 100% haste, something you might obtain if you accidentally get Frenzy and Bloodlust at the same time: At least one proc: 87.2865978%

------

The 3.8 is consistently higher, marginally, but still higher - to get at least one proc in a minute's worth of attacks. This can be extrapolated to say the average number of procs is also higher. The bigger the difference in weapon speed, the higher haste values are, and the higher the number of PPM the proc actually is - the larger this difference becomes. (If you have a ppm-based proc that also procs off of your non-autoattack attacks, like most proc enchants, the difference shoots WAY up in favor of the slower weapon simply because it has a higher chance to proc with relatively no change in the number of attacks due to rotation alone (factoring out autoattacks - which were proven above.) )

Edit: Typos and clarification.

Comment by 132272

Best in slot for Unholy Death Knights as well as Frost two-hand until heroic Sulfuras.

Comment by WuSage3

Maybe you should follow your own advice. Weapon speed was normalized years ago, there is literally no difference between 3.4 and 3.8 weapon speed. Of course slower weapons have higher weapon dps, but the speed itself is irrelevant.

Alas, that is not how PPM works. Weapon normalization is just for the weapon modifier. Weapons used to have a coefficient which was their weapon speed. Now that coefficient is 'normalized' - so that all 1Hers except Daggers have the same coefficient, Daggers have the same coefficient, 2Hers have the same coefficient, and Ranged weapons have the same coefficient. Back in EARLY vanilla, extremely slow weapons were amazing simply due to the fact they were slow, regardless of weapon damage, due to this very fact.

Also, a slower weapon won't inherently have different dps than a fast one. Unrelated variables. What determines DPS is simply damage-range (more specifically: average damage) and weapon speed, which are primarily influenced by ilvl and weapon role.

http://www.wowpedia.org/Normalization

Auto-attacks, and a few other abilities, aren't normalized, instant attacks based on weapon damage are.

Here's the general formula for weapon damage-based abilities: (Let's simply take an ability that only does a % of weapon damage + an arbitrary constant amount, nothing like Heart Strike, nor any buffs/talents/etc. that modify it any other way.)

Total_Damage = P/100 * (Base_Weapon_Damage + (X * Attack_Power / 14)) + C

Where:
P = % of weapon damage the ability uses
C = Arbitrary additional amount of damage
Attack_Power = Your total Attack Power
Total_Damage = The damage the ability does
Base_Weapon_Damage = The damage range of the weapon (Average Damage, or to compute a new min-max, do it for the min and max)
X =

1.7 for daggers
2.4 for other one-handed weapons
3.3 for two-handed weapons
2.8 for ranged weapons
weapon speed for non-normalized attacks (Auto-attack, instant attacks that don't use weapon damage, etc.)

The reason for normalization is because X was always weapon speed for all attacks, and slow weapons were ridiculously overpowered.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PPM is still heavily reliant on weapon speed.

Edit: Typos

Comment by flowa

outstanding weapon for blood dks

Comment by 871298

Not sure why flowa was downrated. It's high mastery puts it on par with normal Sulfuras and its secondary stats push it ahead (in my opinion). The increased Stamina, Strength, and reforgeable Haste are the reason I use this over normal Sulfuras, even well into 4.3

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Skullstealer Greataxe

Heroic
Item Level 391
Binds when picked up

Two-Hand	Axe

+460 Strength
+689 Stamina
+299 Mastery
Durability 120 / 120

Requires Level 85
Equip: Improves haste rating by 311.

Sell Price: 38 2 49

Skullstealer Greataxe

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