I completely disregarded FeS extending disease duration, thus I agree that using FeS + 2xBB is superior to the currently proposed IT+BB spam if you get to use the BBs while the mobs are still alive. My point about Frost Presence still stands.

Here is a log from our HC Maloriak attempts: Log

You'll notice that the other DK in the raid is pretty much using your suggested rotation in Unholy Presence while I'm using IT+BB on Frost Presence. We have similar gear, yet I was outdpsing him by quite a large margin every single attempt unless I died or did something wrong. And this is with only 5 adds, any more and the difference would be bigger. Not only that, but on another day I did some attempts in Unholy Presence and I wasn't coming close to locks and mages in the meters, but when I switched to Frost Presence I was right up there.

In the OP, under "Basic Combat Mechanics" you have the melee 8% hit cap listed at 960 rating, with 1% hit being 120 rating per. It's actually closer to 120.11, as is verified by the 8% melee hitcap actually being 961 in-game and various measurements taken at various amounts of hit chances.

You also have the spellhit cap listed as 816, with 1% spellhit being 102 rating per. It's actually closer to 102.45, which is verified by the 8% spellhit cap (17% with Runic Focus) being attained at 820 hit rating in-game the same way as the 8% melee hitcap was verified, rather than 816 rating. (Not that the spellhit cap really matters as much - it's just this thread can have info. that can be extrapolated to more than just Unholy DPS. I use some of the information in here to extrapolate it to my tank spec., for example.)

Edit: I used control+f ("hit") to scan the first couple pages and the last five and didn't see anything touching this, is why I mentioned it.

What you forget is the fact that different abilities account for differing portions of our damage when aoeing, and by this I mostly mean DnD and diseases. Neither of these things scale with UP, but do scale with FP. Considering in moments of "real" aoe(by this I mean more than 2-3 mob trash pulls) DnD and diseases can EASILY count as a combined 50% of your damage. I highly doubt the perks of UP outweigh the sheer passive disease and DnD loss. I mean with very simple napkin math, losing 10% damage on half of your output would mean the other half would need to gain at least 10% to even break even, and I'm fairly certain the output by those attacks in FP and the output in UP would not even be a 5% difference.

I really don't know how our ghoul's aoe is affected by each presence, but unless it was SIGNIFICANTLY higher in UP(Which I don't believe it is. If they don't inherit the GCD reduction, I would think it would actually be higher in FP-but again I don't know so please excuse my ignorance) aoeing in UP doesn't seem like a possibility.

My pet still is underachieving and I've again got claw bound to my SS key. After paying very close attention to his claw tendencies due to not wanting to break cc on adds during Nef, I don't trust him to claw on his own. I would turn it on and off only to notice him sitting there attacking with a full energy bar at some later point in the fight.

I'm at work so I don't have access to any hard data, but I saw this behavior more than a few times. This week I'll see if I can get some real numbers.

Is anyone else having extreme cases of pet retardation in 4.0.6? Especially gargoyle in PvE. Ive tried everything from the gargoyle twisting mentioned in the OP to momentarily leaving melee range and summoning and still when looking at logs, the gargoyle has 40% of damage done as melee hits and 60% as garg strike. Also, during magmaw hc, it kept on hitting worms, skeleton adds and magmaws head seeminly randomly no matter what.

Also having some issues with getting pet stun off when I want to in pvp. Ended up actually turning claw auto cast off and macroing it back to every skill to make sure I get the pet stun off when needed, because for some reason the pet just kept on spamming claw even though I was manually attempting to mash gnaw.

I've never had the Gargoyle go retard but my ghoul just LOVES to go full retard (and you never go full retard! :P) during Magmaw and Al'akir.

During Magmaw fight, I just DnD the adds and send the pet to the adds only if he is transformed or near being able to transform. However, when I call it back to attack on the Boss again, he just stands slightly outside of the melee range and just sits there. I have to manually move him inside to melee range in this case.

During Al'akir, I noticed sometimes he would stand right outside of the melee range and just sits there. I had to either start the fight by moving him manually to the boss as close as he can get or I mount up and stand as close as to the boss I possibly can and start the fight.

I am guessing that this problem involves some kind of combination of:
a) The boss not really being on ground. (Magmaw being off the ground off the ledge and Al'akir having the magical wall that you can't go through)
b) using /petattack + /cast Claw macro'd into your attacks.

My main is a Demo Warlock and I use my Felguard for Magmaw for the adds, which he is really good at, but he resolutely refuses to attack magmaw's body. He'll attack the head just fine when it's chained down, but not the body.

If I use a ranged pet like the Imp or Succubus they're perfectly willing to attack the body, but there would appear to be some bug with melee pets that means they refuse to attack Magmaw's body: I think your suggestion that because the body is actually situated just off the edge of the cliff their AI believes that there is no path to it is the cause.

I don't have macros that include /petattack or spammable pet abilities so it's not that causing a problem. Incidentally, it would appear that they've changed the Ghoul's behaviour and he'll now use up his energy Clawing properly without our constant nagging ;-)

A possible solution would be to use the pet "go to" command to a position that is in range of the boss before asking it to attack and send them to manually attack the adds when they're up and the boss whe they're not. It's a pain and he'll waste time running around, but it may be worth trying until they fix it properly.

/petautocasttoggle Claw

Use this macro to toggle auto-claw on and off.

If you prefer to rather push buttons for on or off, you could use /petautocaston claw and /petautocastoff claw

Got this from a discussion on arenajunkies, in PvP there are now issues with the ghoul neglecting to gnaw, but instead just claws all the time.

With regards to Al'Akir, sometimes my pet doesn't even attack in melee range up close and doesn't listen to any of my attack commands, so I have to make my pet follow me. I guess this is the same as 'moving him into melee range'.

With regards to Gargoyle Twisting, the Gargoyle A.I. is fine if you twist, I messed it up on Chimaeron and got 40% melee damage but got 100% Gargoyle Strikes on Atramedes.

I'm not 100% sure on the hidden Gargoyle A.I. but I know you can control your Gargoyle's target whenever you do /petfollow /petattack but not if you just /petattack. I instinctively /petfollow and then /petattack so I couldn't tell you if the latter works although if you can control your Gargoyle like that it might be why it is hitting 'random' mobs.

If you're having some issues gnaw-ing in PvP, stop using SS or whatever ability you have bound to Claw for a second and then Gnaw. Whenever I look at my pet bar, it puts the entire action bar into a part-GCD while I'm spamming my Claw macro and that might be stopping the use of Gnaw. Not entirely sure if it's just a visual effect or not and I'm getting lucky but my success rate with Gnaw has gone up doing that.

Full retard here as well. I've gotten to the point now of just weaving in a random /petattack during a GCD, which usually springs him back to life. I haven't been able to figure out why he does this or what conditions may cause it.

I have no macro's for my pet at all, and it is acting wierd aswell, just standing there doing nothing.

Yesterday on Valiona it was standing there behind the boss, looking away from the boss even, then the boss got moved for some reason by the tank, the pet still looked away from the boss, but did charge/leap towards him, with his back first.. was really wierd.
But still, no melee attacks, just the charge.
I pressed the pet attack button and he was fine, for now..