Engineering glove enchants have put on use trinkets on a cooldown for the duration of the glove's buff since WotLK, as far as I know this has never changed in Cataclysm or Mists.

The OP lists the 2H stat weights as follows:

Strength > Yellow Hit to Cap = Expertise to Cap > Haste > Crit > Mastery

Even if your specific gearing puts expertise slightly higher then hit, nothing changes in your reforge priority. Not capping hit/expertise really isn't a option, so whether expertise or hit comes out ahead means nothing.

I would be interested to see if your value for Haste/Crit/Mastery changes, then we would have a topic of conversation. Otherwise, the stat weights will remain as they are in the OP.

After playing DW Frost with Blood Tap (as per Magdalena's suggetion in Acherus) I did some playing around on simcraft. I made a priority that was more fitting to how DW plays with Blood Tap.

Starting from the BiS T14H profile on version 5.0.5-2 I was able to get it to sim at 117.6k which is higher than the BiS profile. When I looked at the differences of the results what it boiled down to was a larger portion of Obliterates vs Plague Strike, and less wasted runic power along with fewer wasted rune regen (though that could be because I left out the default of using ERW when the fight is near over).

I'm sure there's other improvements that can be made to this especially because I was swapping it over from the default profile instead of building it fresh. But this does lead towards some possible merit to the smoothness of using BT.

I have a question about the stat weights listed in the original post. It has that strength is weighted at 1 and that haste is at .597 for 2h. Does this mean that the default gem for 2h should be [Quick Sun's Radiance] since it has 2x the rating than the primary stat gems? This would put it at 214.92 damage versus the [Bold Primordial Ruby]'s 160. This would be for 2h only as none of the secondary stats for DW measure up that well.

I have a similair question; when i simmed having strength gems gemmed, simulationcraft valued haste at 0.58 wich means i should gem haste instead of strength.

Allthough after changing all my gems according to theses stat weights i did a new sim, and now it told me that haste was valued at 0.40 wich means strength was again more valuable.

Is this just a matter of finding the golden balance between strength and haste? And can you calculate that "golden balance" somehow?

Instead of running a sim with stat weights, you can run one with plots. Then it will show you a graph with the exact cutoff where the one stat becomes more valuable than the other one. It takes a long time to run though, so start it when you are going to be away from your computer for a while.

That and make sure your processor has a really good cooling system and airflow. Running plots really gets it cooking.

Also worth noting that glyph of dark succor is amazing on gara'jal, should you join the downstairs crew. 80k DS heals for every add killed, combined with death pact and a health stone, and you don't even need a healer to come back up.



Edit: Not needing a healer is not the same as not having a healer. In a perfect world, you will always time healers and dps going down perfectly, but unfortunately rng sometimes decides to place voodoo doll on healer going down half a second before the totem is killed. Sometimes, the healer going down mismanages their mana, and doesn't have enough to heal you. Stuff happens.

Dark succor makes the death strikes free, and we all have enough GCDs to spare, especially downstairs, that's it's a dps gain, healing potential aside. Most definitely worth a glyph slot, what else would you use on gara'jal?

If you can afford to not have a healer go in, then you can afford to run with 2 healers instead of 3. Not having a healer go in is a waste of mana regen for the benefit of doing 50% more DPS inside. Using Death Strike instead of Howling Blast or Obliterate is a DPS loss and the other players that go in with you without a healer might end up spending so much time regenerating their health on their own that the total damage your group outputs isn't ultimately worth it.

As a melee dps, you want to take a healer with you since they'll heal you faster than you would on your own. You don't want to spend all your time in the spirit realm running from mob to mob. Just get in there, drop a Death and Decay at a far away mob, kill any mobs close to you, then get out and get back on the boss.

One trick for Stone Guard: the global petrification effect counts as a snare, constantly proccing the 2-piece pvp set bonus (eg [Dreadful Gladiator's Dreadplate Chestpiece].) This works in both normal and heroic, and produces a lot of runic power (listed as runic return.)

Has anyone done the math on exactly how long you should wait if KM procs and OB is on cooldown for 2H spec? OB hits so hard, I find myself waiting 4-6 seconds for OB to come off cooldown, but I'm thinking this may be a DPS loss. I feel like I'm not supposed to wait and just use KM on frost strike that hits for half the damage. Am I right in waiting?