The stat weights were updated for 359 and 372 ilvls with the introduction of Dreadblade. It is my understanding that unless you are GCD capped, expertise would not be preferred over mastery as Unholy spec. A lot of folks in the 359+ bracket tend to sit halfway to the expertise soft cap (i.e. 13-17) with appreciable results.

Yes, I definitely appreciate the ability to auto attack with my casts as well! I included a 'Revised Attacks' macro in the guide with a placeholder for whatever spells and strikes people care to use. It has some extra frills with it, but it should do the trick.

These stat weights were updated after 4.06 but prior to the subsequent hot fixes which ended up shifting damage out of death coil and into our strikes (lowering the value of mastery and upping the damage of strikes).

When you start hitting around 2200 haste (easilly obtainable in 359) bad dodge rng becomes pretty noticeable.

Sadly, there's no sim I would trust at this point to give me accurate numbers so I can't back that up.

The reason most unholy DKs aren't at expertise cap is because until high levels of gear it is very difficult to do without sacrificing haste or hit rating.

The glyphs of Pestilence and Blood Boil are decent, but nothing outstanding. I recommend Dark Succor for fights where your survival is questionable. A good example of appropriate Death Strike use would be on Chimaeron during the recurring phase 1 (when Finkle's sprayer is active). 15% instant healing right after massacre helps both raid healing and preventing death via caustic slime. Death Striking outside of critical health needs would certainly be a DPS loss, but in matters of life and death, a temporary reduction is totally acceptable if it means your character is still kicking come Phase 3.

The minors I included are simply examples. If you prefer Horn of Winter, etc. then feel free to select what is most convenient to you.

was unsure,
do you only use SS or DnD when you have 2 unholy or 2 death runes or 1 of each or more up?

Very nice guide, 1 quick correction.
For the Survival section, you wrote
"Firstly, AMS is a powerful defensive ability that absorbs 75% of the damage dealt by harmful spells up to 50% (58%/66%/75% Magic Suppression) of your total health and prevents the application of harmful magical effects.", while
Firstly, AMS is a powerful defensive ability that absorbs 75% (83%/91%/100% Magic Suppression) of the damage dealt by harmful spells up to 50% of your total health and prevents the application of harmful magical effects. would be more accurate.
Also, in the Survival section, The elemental monstrosity is the name of the boss in phase 3, and you only need to worry about being grounded or levitated in phase 2, when you are fighting Arion and Terrastra.

Also, you mention Alchemy, inscription, leather working, and Blacksmithing to be on par for professions, but don't mention enchanting, which gives the same 80 strength as those 4.

Also, @ kaxkaja905
DnD/SS is your top priority for your normal rotation, if your diseases and DT are up, and you are not BB/II or runiccapped, about to be runiccapped, or SD.

I have all of my expertised reforged away, don't have one of the 3 out of 4 dk weapons that give expertise, don't gem or enchant for it, and don't get 3 from using an axe, and I still have 20 I can't lower. I was having an issue being stuck at 32 expertise with the axe of cho'gall, before I switched to nef's sword, which NEVER drops. Most dks in medium to hardcore guilds will have the BiS trinket of chim, which gives a LARGE amount of expertise, however I've found reforging away potential mastery or haste to hit the expertise cap is a dps loss.

I have updated the guide accordingly. The former was a goof on my part having added the talent % gain to the health absorb cap rather than the actual absorption potential. The latter was an error of omission, so I thank you for your eagle eyes!

First, I was not aware of the bug and appreciate you pointing it out. However, I fail to see how that would be a dps increase. Plague strike is often 0% of my total damage done, considering you only use outbreak on single targets now, and PS is only used once, every time you switch targets. Beyond that, it hits for a very small amount. I prefer glyph of blood boil, which actually increases aoe damage when targets are at 10-15 yards by a considerable amount.

Since swapping from frost DPS I've noticed a tendency to not be able to spend resources fast enough in some cases, generally under one or more of heroism, a few runic corruption procs in a row (after pooling RP at the end of dark transformation), unholy frenzy, and the crushing weight proc. I try to avoid lining up the haste effects as best as I can but it isn't always under my control. In this situation I can end up with multiple full rune sets up (especially frost-death runes, since scourge strike always uses a blood-death before frost-death even if 2 frost-deaths are still full).

My strategy has been to use at least 1 festering strike (even if it uses 2 death runes) just to get more runes on cooldown quickly. My reasoning is that especially if I'm still going to have the haste bonus, the runes will recharge fast enough to give me more overall damage than burning away runes one at a time with scourge strike, but I don't have a solid basis for that priority.

Can anyone think of a good way to simulate these effects? The optimal solution is probably going to be subjective based on just how fast runes are charging and how long you'll be in that state, but it would be nice to have some idea of whether I'm better off getting more scourge strikes or getting more runes on cooldown in a highly GCD-capped situation.

Well, Kahorie's isn't quite up to date to current patches, but a way to test it would be to give yourself a ton of haste (figure out your haste when lusted and plug in numbers accordingly). You would then play around with the ability priority until you find something that makes sense and maximizes your DPS output in that state.

I haven't run sims on this, but I would suppose that it would just be your highest DPS abilities while ignoring their costs (since we are in a state where cost isn't a factor). That will vary by mastery etc, but for me, I found that to be DnD > SS > DC > FeS. Therefore, when I am in a state of serious haste (Sinestra buff, Lust with excess RC procs), that is the priority I use excluding diseases.

I can't see how using a FeS with DRs will be helpful to you as it feels to be a waste of runes/GCDs. I understand your urgency to use them and to also not waste the RP you could be storing up, but I would expect that letting RP rot is better than letting runes rot. You are using your RP in order to get RC procs; however, in this temporary super haste state, you really don't need a ton of RC procs to continue using rune abilities. Your rune abilities (DnD/SS) will likely do way more damage than DC, so let that RP rot. And using as many runes as you can for the sake of seeing them recharge doesn't seem logical either.

This isn't quite true. For one, 1 Festering Strike is the same RP generation as 2 Scourge Strikes (which is really the comparison, given that scourge strike is only one rune).

Additionally taken from my parses last night: Festering Strike out-damages Scourge Strike on a 1 for 1 basis.
From last nights Chimaeron Fight:
Average Scourge Strike: 7.3k
Average Festering Strike: 9.7k

The thing is: We really have three resources here, we have to make optimal use of all of them in order to maximize our DPS.

Runes.
Runic Power.
Time.

Primarily, we're using our best damage per rune / runic power ability because it gives us more damage overall - we're not capped on time, generally speaking so we can stretch our rotation out over more of it. In a situation where you're capping resources you can afford to make better use of your damage per time abilities rather than your damage per rune abilities.

When badly capping it's best to switch to festering strike because per gcd it does more damage per gcd, even though under normal circumstances we want to make best use of our runes because we're not GCD capped.

Having just hit 2400 haste, I can tell you that I am over capping resources frequently even without heroism (a few Runic Corruption procs is all it takes), I can admit some of this might be my latency which isn't the greatest these days, but I'm often finding I have to swap to Festering Strike on death runes (hardly all the time, but anywhere between 1-3 times a fight depending on RNG, outside of hero), on the flip side, depending on RNG I do still have dead periods too.