I've been using filters with OpenRDX to show me large timers for self buffs (Horn of Winter, trinkets, IBF, etc), my two diseases (anything else like Ebon Plague, Stroke, Death Grip, etc, seems really unnecessary), and self debuffs, all in the same area. For triggers I've been using MSBT.

Your proposed Deathboard has some interesting things to it. I really like the trigger system you have there, although I don't particularly like the typeface (but that's easily changed).

I think it would be useful to have an "on/off light" for Rune Strike, as putting it in text would be way spammy for tanks, but looking at your action bars to light up doesn't work well either (assuming you're not just macro'ing it into every attack, which I've found can seriously screw you at times).

The disease timers seem pretty nice, only providing a number at three seconds, but I don't think they look very good graphically. The red and blue outline seems like too much, the Blood Plague/Frost Fever icons are distinctive enough in my eyes.

Some kind of indication for Horn of Winter would be nice. I currently have my OpenRDX icon timer and an MSBT trigger when HoW fades, but it's kind of sloppy. The trigger will launch if another DK uses HoW, and there's not much to tell me it's about to be down before it goes down.


If you want to go further, you could include indicators for things like Blood Tap, Empower Rune Weapon, Howling Blast, etc. If displayed intelligently it could be very nice, though you run the risk of it simply becoming too much clutter with the more you add.

I'm also using IceHUD's Rune display. It was easy to enlarge it and place it directly beneath my character's feat so I can easily see when they're on CD.

I personally find that graphical elements like scrolling runes, while neat, tend to be distracting. My goal is to be able to see which runes are available and remaining time until used runes become active. That's the information that's relevant to us from a play perspective. Fading/flashing runes with numbers on them meet this need perfectly for me.

As for tracking Plague timers, I use NeedToKnow. I highly recommend it. It's very clean and simple to use.

Ebon Plaguebringer has two effects:

When this is on a mob it increases disease damage taken and magic damage taken. All players receive this benefit.

Ebon Plague counts as a third disease (just like crypt fever). When your application is on the mob it increases the damage of your strikes and other abilities whose power is boosted by the number of your diseases on the mob. If there are two Unholy DKs in the raid, one will have their Scourge Strike's power boosted by Blood Plague, Frost Fever, and Ebon Plague, the other will have their Scourge Strike's damage boosted only by Blood Plague and Frostfever.

This gives a passive 3% crit and anyone who specs for the talent receives its benefit regardless of the number of other Unholy DKs.

The 3% is valid for whoever spec'd the talent. The part that gets missed by one person is the bonus damage applied to scourge strike and blood strike, as well as the DoT damage itself.

Ebon Plague does not have it's own DoT damage that I can find.

When thinking about what sort of rune display we need to very quickly and effectively gather the information we need to make decisions during combat, I still haven't found one that really meets that criteria. All these rune bar graphs, moving/flying runes all over the place, and guitar hero style displays are all well and good for soloing when we can stare at the UI and not really care what's happening but I find when I need to actually pay more attention to the fight than the UI (tanking and PvP), that UI design really doesn't work out well at all.

Ultimately what do we need? We need to know what rune is available now, and when the next rune will be up. So I think instead of building rune displays around showing 6 runes, build a rune display that only shows 3.

So 3 runes, nice and clear, simple rotating OmniCC style cooldowns, showing only the cooldown of when the next available rune of that type will be up. We don't really need to know in the heat of battle the cooldown of every rune as we just spend too much time looking at the UI, we need to know what's there, what's next, and how long, that's it.

Death runes will replace their respective runes as they come. And for example when you have a rune set that has both a death rune and regular rune active, it will show whichever has the shortest cooldown, and in the event both have the same cooldown, the death rune takes priority on the display.

Basically how the UI would look would be very similar to LynRune, which is just the default rune UI scaled bigger in the center of the screen with OmniCC cooldowns, except there would be only 3 runes instead of 6. Add a clean runic power bar and clear disease tracker and I think it would be perfect.

I'm using magicrunes with a sound ('bell') attached to a rune being ready. After only a week or so, I don't really have to look at the runes to know what I have available, unless I've been interrupted by something - you tend to know what you have ready, as long as you have audible indicators to tell you when runes come up (and assuming you don't have 2/5 in BotN or the like). The sorting behavior is wonderful - I can tell at a glance what ability I should use (and where I am in a rotation).

The bottom line is that you shouldn't tell people what they need, the best you can say is what works for you. And there is no 'perfect'.

This isn't directly related to rune displays, but it's close enough.

As anyone who's played the class knows, when you've used up all of a rune type, all abilities that use that rune type go on cooldown. It's been mentioned that this type of thing can be buggy with abilities that have an actual cooldown (rune tap, DnD, etc) appearing as not on cooldown when the runes come back up.

It also poses another huge, hairpulling problem for me. Any cooldown mod (I've tried a few different things, trying the one from the Forte package right now) will pick up EVERY single rune based ability when you use your runes. Some addons have options like "don't show cooldowns less than x seconds", but if you do that, you're excluding things like Mind Freeze that I would much rather have in the centralized cooldown display than on my action bars.

Does anyone have some kind of work around for this? It seems impossible, and I'm really frustrated that Blizzard set it up this way. Now that I'm using an actual rune tracker, it's a distracting waste of resources to constantly display more than half my abilities as on cooldown.

Sadly I think that someone is going to have to write a DK specific cooldown tracking mod that only tracks IBF, Bone Shield, DnD, etc..

Even if all of the other cooldowns didn't show up, there are too many bugs with rune cooldowns for other mods to really deal with. As an example, watch yoour Bone Shield button during a fight. If it's on cooldown, it will seem to become available multiple times as Unholy runes refresh, even though the actual ability is nowhere near ready. Instead of using the cooldown provided by the client, the mod would have to determine the cooldown itself based on when you used it.

I can't speak to the cooldown bug, but I'm pretty sure some cooldown mods allow you to blacklist, whitelist, or both. I believe the cooldown mod that comes with DoTimer does this.

I don't know a way that would work with 'most cooldown mods' (and I doubt one exists), but TellMeWhen handles DK cooldowns very well, though it takes some configuration each time you change specs (since there are some new cooldowns in each tree).

I've also noticed that my action bar cooldowns sometimes don't light up when the ability can only be cast with use of a death rune. I think this only happens with abilities that take more than one rune.