Recently noticed something which may or may not be a bug, just checking if anyone else is experiencing the same or can explain it. Tthere's something very simple you can do which makes it so that blood runes turned into death runes by Festering Strike remain death runes permanently. Does not work on frost runes, so basically you have the same runes as a frost DK. Anyone familiar with this?

This bug has been in effect since 4.3 came out. When switching from Frost spec to UH spec, Blood of the North remains active, and any Blood Runes transformed to Death Runes via Festering Strike, Pestilence or Blood Strike will remain Death Runes until you die or logout, no matter how many times you use them and for what. In addition, Blood Tap seems to "fix" the problem for the one rune it converts. This is not just a display bug, the runes are in fact Death Runes.
If you are looking to exploit this in PvE somehow, the potential gain in dps is very small, seeing as the usual FS+SS+SS is better than the newly available SS+IT+SS+IT. The only way to gain dps is when you want to use IT, for example in a fight where you often switch targets. For every IT cast, this bug will leave you with an unused Death rune – much better than the unused Blood rune you would otherwise have. However, playing with this bug means you will need to use a Frost rune and a Death rune to cast FS – which is not intuitive for UH players. You will have to work against your instincts (which are likely telling you to use SS whenever a Death Rune is active). Instead, whenever a Frost rune is active, you will need to wait for a Death rune to become active, and cast FS.

Actually, the class which gets the most out of Gurthalak (and in fact most procs which have no ICD) are Retribution paladins. Their "Seal of Truth" is able to proc the tentacles, thus effectively doubles each of their attacks' chance to proc. this puts them well above all other classes in terms of procs per fight.
for the rest of the classes, it's fairly balanced:
Arms warriors can get procs from practically anything they do, plus their mastery also adds many attacks that can proc ; 2H-DW Fury warriors have alot of extra melee attacks simply from being DW; 2H Frost DKs have a majority of melee attacks and a 1sec GCD ; and UH DKs, with our relatively low number of melee attacks and low number of procs, make up for it with our Mastery, which increases shadow dmg done, including the tentacle's Mind Flay.


Lastly, please stop stating that expertise is all of a sudden a viable stat for UH DKs just because it increases Gurthalak's proc chance. It isnt. The math doesnt allow it to be.

Can anyone explain to me how the OP rates non-DW heroic trinkets? I'd assume that the regular Eye of Unmaking should evaluate out higher than either heroic Creche or heroic Fetish, but it's not listed there and I'm wondering why that is.

I'll be trying the Heroic Experimental Specimen Slicer for my part 2 raid this week to contrast with normal Gurthalak, should be interesting. I'm wondering if the dps on Heroic ESS will be worth losing the Gurthalak proc. Good to hear that apparently the proc rate on Gurth has not been significantly affected.

While it can be a bit tricky to evaluate, given the solid uptime with Eye of Unmaking, many folks will make the argument that normal Eye is better than having both heroic trinkets (or the less common assertion that heroic HoR should be retained). Even if you have 100% uptime of 10 stacks with normal eye, that only gives an epr rating of around 3088 (str typically comes out to 3.5 in most gearsets). I have heroic creche at just about 3k in my gear, but it's probably slightly better on an ultra style fight since you won't have perfect eye uptime. It's close though.

One thing hasn't been discussed much is just how powerful the other trinket is - Bone-link Fetish is 'imba' in the way that Gurthalak is. The OP got it right, BLF should be used whenever possible. Looking over my last few logs, BLF has been between 2.5-4.5% damage on single target fights, and 6-8% on aoe fights. As has been repeated numerous times in these pages, pure stats like on HoR or Creche simply can't make up for the power of the Whirling Maw. I'm thinking I wouldn't take the heroic creche at this point (spending priority) unless I'd been unlucky enough to not get a normal or heroic BLF/Eye.