Just a minor note on your evaluations of race: Dwarven Stoneform also gives 10 percent armor for 8 seconds. Especially depending on how high armor values are in Cataclysm (which I admittedly don't know as I'm not on beta), the boost from Bladed Armor causes Dwarves to be a better passive choice than humans as EMFH is situational, where you can stoneform for a slight AP boost on any fight.

Granted, humans' expertise buff is more versatile than the dwarves (though not as beneficial assuming a mace, obviously) but its not as if expertise is exactly that important for Unholy anyway.

Just as with the discovery as Leather working becoming our BiS Prof, I am wondering if Alchemy may be our second BiS considering that we do not use the STR Flask, but that was used in the OP, and even the inferior flask tied for 3rd BiS, and 1 STR behind being 2nd BiS, but Mixology would increase the stat gain to 338 Haste/Exp from our Elixirs, assuming Mixology grants them both 50% increase in stat gain.

Yes, as it currently stands, it's pretty much worth getting every single socket bonus possible, stam and the like aside, and reforging around any extra hit. Such isn't the case at 85, although that's another matter.

We actually do use the strength flask, based on 85 weights. The initial debate over using a haste+expertise elixir came about long before said weights were known, and thus was based off of level 80 ones, which are quite different.

Besides, although the expertise elixir was guardian earlier in beta, it's now battle, as is only logical, thus there's no doubt about the flask reigning supreme.

About necrotic strike, there are 2 bosses in cataclysm it is worth using. The first is Anshal, the nature guy from Conclave of Wind, right before he casts soothing breeze. The second one is Maloriak, who may not heal and consume the debuff, but the debuff doubles as a cast speed reduction for both Arcane Storm and Unleash Abberations.

Pretty new to the forum here read almost this entire post and I was wondering where some good macro guides are for especially for our pets looking for something that will attack on my focus, use claw and then if I have no target then won't go blazing off. Any suggestions? I tried looking at some Hunter macros and didn't seem to work out for me.

Arena junkies has an awesome thread full of dk macros, Amigo is the author.

Amigo's Death Knight Pro-tips - Arena Junkies Forums

Looks like its being updated.

I don't have a full list of the talents/ect that effect Scourge Strike to get a fully accurate picture at the moment but one thing I can cleanly say has to do with how they scale.

SS does something in the neighborhood of 200% weapon damage (between physical and shadow portions) modified by attack power, plus some flat damage.

Necrotic Strike does 100% weapon damage + 75% of AP as the absorb shield.

75% of AP is a pretty amazing coefficient when you look at the other abilities out there. IIRC most of them are in the 20-40% of AP range, so if your gear 'luck' is poor early on and you have a bad weapon but otherwise good gear it will shift things in favor of NS (more emphasis on AP less on Weapon damage).

This kinda makes me wish we had one of those coefficient tables in the OP where we cache data about how each attack scales with AP / weapon damage since that would make solving this super easy.

Don't forget that the absorb shield will also ignore armor completely. As such the 75% AP factor will most likely pose a uge scaling problem, as currently 9k shields are easily possible raidbuffed. And that's only t11.

Oh, and the absorb part of the strike cannot crit, it's always a flat value. At least it never did when I tested it on a target dummy.

Initial edit to the first post complete. Due to the last minute realization of DW's viability, I wasn't able to accomplish nearly as much as I would have liked. As such, I still have a lot of finer details to go through - more stat weights, finishing trinket section, finally doing macro/mod section, reworking reforging section, and general formatting edits - and I should be able to get most of it out of the way tomorrow by the end of the weekend, although the holidays make it a bit difficult.

As I've said elsewhere, but since I've had questions on the subject: yes, I do plan to do a FAQ. For various reasons, however, it's likely to become a separate post. It will be finished by the release of Cataclysm.

Anyways, as always, if there's any issues, let me know.

Correct me if I am wrong but wouldnt It be a dps gain for a lvl 80 starter to go IT/PS, BS BT(the BT bug would give you an extra Death Rune for another SS with the rune recharging from BS) then SS SS FS DC etc?

It should work out to be BIS. We'll anyways take our T11 chest, so we will gem in epic gear anyways one item with 1 blue gem. Perhaps there will be a second item with a red/blue 20str bonus, then it's no questtion at all. More likely is another item with a blue socket and 10 STR bonus (it's at least in every raid BIS set the case). So it would come down down to the choice:

10 STR vs 20 Hit+3%increased critical strike damage. And thats a clear win for the CSD.