With the stand they took on disease-less Blood, it doesn't seem as though they would say that dual-wielding Unholy is something that would ruin the idea of the spec. As with disease-less, its more of a playstyle than a game changer.

The reason they destroyed shadowfrost last time for PvE was because it did not use SS, it was just disease applicators for runic power and then death coils. (if you remember back when they nerfed SS so it hit like a wet noodle). Blizzard wants us to use our core ability for DPS. For PvP it was nerfed because they did not want DKs to become a ranged dps class.

"The DK that runs around and does nothing but Icy Touch or Howling Blast or Death Coil feels like a rogue who forgoes combo points and openers and everything just to spam Fan of Knives and nothing else." -Ghostcrawler

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Design Intentions for DKs in Arena?

The OP says that DW Unholy runeforge is still out for debate, but dual FC is likely to be the way to go.

Would the cinderglacier proc be worth anything? Sadly it could get eaten up by the SS shadow damage versus Death Coils, but isn't dual FC largely redundant with the uptime being so high as is?

The question that I don't recall ever seeing answered is what is the difference in uptime between dual v. single FC? I might have missed it in one of the old threads though. Only discussions I remember about it was that dual FC wasn't better than RI for frost (though that was argued both ways) and that the uptime was so variable on a 3-5 min boss fight due to RNG, that someone with luckily high FC uptime from only one high and something else on the other would win.

As to the issue of "how does Blizzard feel about DW unholy":
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Simple DK Questions and Concerns
And I don't think that's the "oh it wasn't what we intended but hey we'll let it slide" kind of intended. Shortly after that they took out Necrosis and reworked the tree; if only they had changed SD too like everyone said...

Will they, or more accurately, when will they nerf it? Who knows. Could be in the balancing patch that comes a few weeks after release or could be delayed a few months till the next tier of content.

Am sorry, where or when was it discovered that your Ghoul only increases with strengh and not AP again? Its something I have only read recently and not seen any testing in reguards to this.

Just to clarify, it's longest cooldown silence in game.

1) At the moment using DW will increase the Sudden Doom procs you get, therefore increasing the amount of overall damage Death Coil will output, ideally (and since Death Coil is a hard-hitting ability for us, this is actually better), and it will ALSO increase the Shadow Infusion ramp-up time like you said for faster Dark Transformation pops and a higher uptime. White damage is also a lot higher since there aren't really any fast weapons.

2) As far as DnD goes, I'm not sure if you realize it only costs ONE Unholy or Death rune now, so you would place your DnD where you would normally place a Scourge Strike. And you always want your diseases up. Optimally no gaps. Scourge Strike will still be our main ability because of the cooldown of DnD, just no longer at the top of our output list, percentage-wise.

Either the sim is off by a looot again, or 2h unholy is doing better in near BiS to BiS gear for tier 11. I used the gear list in OP for both tests, and obviously changed the priority to what did most damage for both specs individually. From what I've seen, if DW is to be better, we need a must faster offhand. For the OP gear list, we would need a same tier 2.0 speed off-hand or faster to match up to 2h. Can someone explain if maybe it's a known issue, or if something is off or whatever?

Nightmares – They Do Come True « Consider This…
ctrl+f the word "dagger."

There are no fast OHs that we can use. D=

There are a few issues with the simulator at the moment which will skew your results: it's not accounting for DnD's 11th/16th tick, it's still lacking the 40str gems, it's lacking a gem slot in the relic, it's lacking trinket procs, it's lacking the new consumables, and some other minor odds-and-ends. The DnD issue shouldn't need explanation as to what effect it would have, and everything else simply means higher stats (primarily strength), which inevitably favors DW.

One can manually account for all of these factors, and at the end of the day, DW still appears to win out. Admittedly, it's only once one is in full BiS, and the gap isn't quite as large as initial math suggested, but ahead is ahead. I will be doing some various edits and such this weekend, and will change how I refer to DW; no question of its superiority in full BiS, but before then, 2H is ahead, and it will be a while before anyone is in full BiS. The big issue is that from t12 onward, DW will unquestionably be the go-to spec, but something is likely to change before then.

If fast weapons were actually available to us, the difference between the two would be much larger, yes, and would show in DW's favor much earlier, but yeah: the itemization simply isn't there or, rather, isn't usable.

Noticed something wonderful, the Ghoul is double dipping from Heroism! Anyone else noticed it? Normally when I pop my cooldowns my ghoul goes down to 1.0 attackspeed from 1.34. After got lusted today in a random instance i noticed my ghoul had a way lower attack speed then it should. Its attack speed should been 0.74 but it had its attack speed at 0.54 in the pet sheet.

This has been rendered obsolete a couple of patches ago. Horn of Winter will now just grand the RP when a stronger buff is present.

So if I am reading this correctly entry level raid with blue gear and some boe epics, should be attempted as 2h Unholy? When about do we need to make that switch? Also if this is true, could you perhaps change the BiS pre heroics and pre raid to reflect BiS as 2h?

One twohand and two onehands are in every BiS list mentioned. Dw uh is ~5% ahead of 2hand uh. So my guess: If your twohand weapon has got a higher itemlevel, you will go twohandunholy, and vice versa. Correct me please, if i'm wrong.

Consider said that at top gear level DW UH was optimal. That doesn't mean that it always is. An easy way that I've found (just throwing this out there) to compare specs at different gear levels is to add up their stat weights at the gear level. This is made possibly by the (requested) provision of stat weights as DPS values.

----THIS IS WHERE I STOP MAKING SENSE---------
The remainder of this post is for thread continuity. It's sort of fuzzily true but....... better not to say it is actually true or else the world might explode...

Basically just add up all of the stat weights at a given gear level. The spec that's the highest is the one that will most benefit from gear of the iLevel. Since right now the only iLevel he has up (understandably) is 359, you can't really compare yourself.... Also, the fact that weights between the two specs are slightly different (otherwise their DPS would be identical as gear progresses, which is clearly not the case) means that we'd also need those numbers.

Of course, ~5% is a small enough difference that the mere fact that you wouldn't be used to the rhythm of dropping that DnD would probably offset it, so changing mid-tier without a lot of practice could easily throw people off. Also there's compensating for fights where the boss has to move, in which the DnD would be more-or-less useless.

I mean.... Maloriak, Chimaeron and the two bosses of Throne of the Four Winds seem to be the only bosses where you're guaranteed the full effect of the DnD. All of the others require a good deal of movement due to fire-type mechanics.

With the discovery and confirmation of DnD's 11th tick, both variations of the spec will use the spell in their single target rotations, so that's not too relevant.

Your method of adding up stat weights is an interesting one, but it doesn't quite work that way! Stat weights are how valuable additional X of a stat is, not how valuable your pre-existing stats are, if that makes sense. Adding them up may tell you which will scale better (even then, it's a bit fuzzy), but it won't tell you which is actually better for the gear those stat weights are assuming you're already using, if that makes sense.

There is, unfortunately, no short-cut to comparing dps cross-spec beyond testing/simming/parses/etcetera.

Not sure if this is worth mentioning in the OP as it's probably obvious for most, though I don't believe I've seen it mentioned before.

Casting Death Coil during Dark Transformation does not stack Shadow Infusion, so this is a good time to slow down on your DC casts and aim to have 10O runic power at the end of DT so you can bring it back up again faster