I'm at work, and can't double-check everything, but here's what jumped out at me.

1) Pestilence doesn't refresh diseases.
2) I believe 1-runes are 10, 2-runes are 15, and 3-runes are 20, assuming untalented. Please correct me if I'm misremembering; it's posted somewhere in this thread but I can't find it.
3) Rune abilities and Runic Power abilities both use the same GCD. Actually, all our abilities do, other than those that are off the GCD.
4) Mind Freeze is melee range only, which makes using on the pull pretty tricky.

Edit: Bah, a bit slow, but I'll add some more comments about your most recent post, since glyph discussion seems interesting.

I definitely agree with the Icebound Fortitude glyph. I've tried out the Frost Strike glyph and don't find it that useful, though. For tanking, I like the Death and Decay glyph that adds the old cower-in-fear functionality back in. It negates some damage on AoE pulls, both to you and to others, potentially. Third one for frost tanking, I'm a bit up in the air about. Obliterate maybe, since you'll only have 2 diseases? Unbreakable Armor for the extra parry? Dark Command, to ensure no taunt misses? Nice having multiple good options, when you think about it.

I think Pestilence only refreshes the diseases of other targets, not your current one. So I would say put it on a mouseover macro and use it on a second target to refresh everything.

1) I hope pestilence works as Caggy said, because I'd hate to have to drop out of the second two rotations to keep diseases up.
2) Thank you soo much. For those rp checks. As Deathknights work similarly to rogues Theory crafting for them could be very easy.
3) This makes me kinda sad. Deathknights could become slaves to the Global Cooldown much as rogues are slaves to the energy regen bar. In a long fight I could see Deathknights having to use Runic power abilities just to get rid of some of their rp leaving runes building up unused. In the long run this could be the trick of the class, balancing the use of two resources, something no other class must consider.

As for Glyphs, I completely agree with Icebound fortitude glyph, it seems like it will be a necessity for tanking. I wasn't sure about the Death and Decay glyph because I wasn't sure how I'd be using it in a tanking situation. I was hoping that Howling blast could be used to replace it. Before the recently released information about Dual specs I planned to pvp also in this form because it seemed incredibly survivable, the frost strike glyph was a reflection of that. It would largely be ignored if it procced while tanking. I suppose it could be useful if you use frost strikes exclusively on targets not being dps'd at that moment in time, but the proc rate is too low to be reliable. The obliterate one sounds nice, but I think it will depend on how powerful your mainhand weapon is, at somepoint one is surely to surpass the other. The same could be said for the Unbreakable armor glyph, at what point will 10% Strength overshadow 5% parry, and also at what point will parry be hard capped?

In the end, I agree, having plenty of options for glyphs is never a bad thing.

Guys i bow down to your ongoing tests and comitment to the class, for guys like me who are not in the beta its a little hard to comprehend who this all fits together with the limited resource we can use.

Could any of you post talent specs for what is now concidered the best DPS available please? 1 day its Unholy then next its deep frost then its deep blood 2h DW

A few of you guys seem really knowledgable on the specs and it would really help for me personally to start researching and imaganing who the talent will work just by reading the tooltips.

Thanks in advance

Just some quick math for whoever wanted to know the health given by Endurance (Tauren Racial)

My tauren shaman premade at level 80 with no gear on(also with no "% of hp" type talents) has 8009 health. Endurance gives you an additional 5% of your base health.

105 total % / 5 (largest common denomenator) = 21 (sets of 5%)

8009 health / 21 = 381.4 health given from Endurance.

Another little piece that probably has been discussed, but is certainly worth mentioning. Glyph of Scourge Strike is very worth your while, Unholy DK's. Just with some training dummy testing i went from ~590k(1940dps) for a 5 min test, up to 660k(2100dps) for the same type of 5 min duration test. Pretty epic, even if you skip on pestilence for a rotation or two. There is, of course, still the issue with Frost Fever not being refreshed properly due to fluxuations in AP. If that were fixed so many of my broken rotations would have been perfect...

Also, has anyone heard if there will be anything like dual-spec involving glyphs? That would be nice so we cant exactly reapply glyphs mid-raid. It would also save a whole bunch of money having to re-glyph each time we respec. Just food for thought.

Hmmm? Couple things, my human dk has like 9.7k hp naked, I wasn't aware there was such a large gap between classes. So they decided not to give Tauren 5% in greens and actually gave them 5% of base?

They said at blizzcon that you would have two sets of glyphs one tied to each spec.

Sweet, i didnt catch the "glyph/keybindings being saved" part from mmo.

As far as endurance, yea it's probably just a class difference. I notice all the time that shaman, rogues, etc have around 2k less hp than my DK. Anyways, use that formula with your own HP to figure out about how much you get from endurance if you're tauren.

If you're not tauren, just change the 21 to a 20 and then add the answer to your current HP to see how much you would have if you were tauren. It's nice to see college algebra coming in handy for once haha.

Deathknights are entirely gcd-limited in blood presence - in unholy. we're close to it, but we have a free gcd every 10s or so (depending on spec). Where you see 'optimal' rotations in the thread, that's what we're trying to balance - attempting to use as much of the rune/rp as we can over time, sacrificing low damage abilities for higher.

And yes, I'd call it the 'trick of the class' - DK rotations are surprisingly complicated to theorycraft, and I suspect the difference between a properly designed rotation and an 'on-the-fly' system will be rather large.

Your method is flawed though because Endurance is not 5% of base HP, it's 5% of green-geared HP.

If you have 10k base, 15k in greens, Endurance should give 750 HP and so your numbers would be 10,750 base. If you then applied your method, you would think Endurance is giving 511 HP.

Our problem is no one has any idea of what Ghostcrawler meant by "green geared HP".

The reason is that blizzard's goal, and how things are starting to play out, is all three deep specs can do about the same dps. You can dps in Blood, Frost, or Unholy. You can tank in Frost or Unholy; Blood is considered a bit weaker in this regard, mainly because the tanking talents in the Bood tree aren't comparably useful to those in the other two trees.

We've been debating which is the best way to go for dps specs, including the deep spec and sub-spec for each, because it's not readily obvious which is the best. They're close enough that it may simply come down to whichever dps spec you're better at consistently executing, which is nice for playing the game, though harder for spreadsheets etc to model.

Some one post the base health, with no gear, of a non Tauren Shaman and you would have the exact number for endurance.

I looked over what i had missed over the past few days on this thread and i even checked mmo incase i missed anything but i couldnt find anything about endurance being changed from what it says on wowhead right now, and that's "Base Health increasesd by 5%". It even says that on the spell book list on beta. Unless base means "in greens" now and not "with nothing on" like it has before. Maybe i did miss the post somewhere a couple weeks ago, and if i can see an actual link it'd help greatly.

This "5% in greens" thing may have been a way that GC was attempting to give you a way to show you that it wont scale with gear, which is exactly what base means. That's why devs use "Base Mana" for spell cost percentages, because your spells shouldnt get more expensive as you gain more mana. It makes sense for endurance to work the same way.

Also worth mentioning, since i saw this and found it kind of cool.

From mmo-champion.com

woot!

DPS Unholly

Since the modification on black ice and scourge strike, i did again my math, and i was surprise to end at the conclusion, 2* Blood Strike > 1 Scourge Strike. Even more surprise, Plague Strike + Scourge Strike > 1 Scourge Strike.

The perfect rotation would be PS-IT-BS-BS-PS-IT-UB.

Someone else end with same conclusion as me and the last nerf made this skill useless or i have miss something ?

And also i wonder about Blood Boil, does it scale with amount of diseases on the target ? 2 diseases make twice more damage ?

It's the first time i post and i am not english, i hope you won't mind about my poor english.

Each class and race starts with and gets different stam points when you level up AND different amounts of HP added to your "base" (look at that yellow text when you level up). That's why there's no set amount for how much Endurance adds. It varies both by race and class. Someone would just have to look at a naked Tauren DK. This is something Blizz has to balance so perhaps they need to look at it... if naked human DKs have more HP than naked Tauren DKs, I would think that's a bug of some sort. Either the bonus from each level is not enough, or scaled back to compensate for Endurance too much. The difference should only be a couple hundred HP, not a big deal, but it would make Endurance VERY misleading. Endurance is kind of an overblown racial IMO. Over here on alliance it's pretty cut and dry... end-game pve, I want to be human. Hands down. Maybe Night Elf for tanking, but I wouldn't go that direction because of personal preference.

Blood Strike is better than it was before, especially when glyphed, but Scourge Strike should still beat it. I think in my blue/green gear I see Blood Strikes critting for a max of 1700ish, with Scourge Strikes critting for over 4k. Scourge Strike is shadow damage, ignores armor, and is affected by debuffs like Ebon Plague, so perhaps that's what you're missing.

Blood Boil does not scale with diseases.

The part I bolded implies that DRW can put its own diseases up (well, disease, as it only mimics your actual strike attacks, right?). If that's the case, have the DRW tests so far used this to get an extra blood plague (not insignificant) or tried to avoid plague strike and IT and used more damaging attacks? If the latter, the extra disease seems like it might affect the DRW/gargoyle debates. Regardless, on AoE packs, it seems like pestilence could be used repeatedly, targeting a different mob each time, to keep up the DRW's disease on the entire AoE pack even long after the DRW has ended.

Don't know what else to say without seeing your math.

You're right that they're definitely close, now-- I did a quick test of unholy rotations to see how they'd add up. Two BSes hit for about the same as one SS. SS can crit for significantly more, though. It also uses 1 GCD, instead of two. In practical terms, you might really be comparing 2 BSes to 1 SS + 1 DC, in which case SS wins.

I put out the "extra" DC from the math for this reason : if BS-BS > or even equal SS, you won't have to put point into reaping, meaning 3 extra talent point to put in something like Bladed armor or maybe black ice depending if you go for PS-IT-SS-BS-BS or PS-IT-PS-IT-BS-BS.

I wonder, the fact you only use one GCD with SS is really an up ? For that it would consider you have enough RP for "use" all waiting time. With unholly presence, if you go for PS-IT-SS-BS-BS-UB-SS-SS-SS, it mean over 16 secondes you have 7 secondes waiting at 6*40+60 RP, would mean you genere : 300 RP over 16 secondes (105 RP from strikes so left 195 RP from white damage, 12,1875 RP/Sec).

I guess you will waste some wait time with just nothing to do, so we won't really matter of taking one spot more for extra BS, rewarded by 3 free talent point.

With a rotation like PS-IT-SS-BS-BS-UB-PS-IT-SS-BS-BS, you have 4 secondes at 3*40+60 RP, 180 over 16 secondes (120 from strikes so left 60 RP from white damage, 3.75 RP/sec need).

Also it make bat easier to maintien, generate 5 more RP by BS-BS than SS and you save 4 seconds desecration.

Very hard to find wich one is the best, too much thing enter as variable.

Anyone can test both rotation in DW/Unholly Presence, and put reaping point on another boost dps talent ? I don't think we can just look at BS and SS damage to see wich one can be better.

Note : i calcul with DW, not 2 hands, making BS closer to SS.

Why would a 41+ point Unholy DK ever spec into Dual Wielding talents? It would take significantly more attack power than we currently have available, and the spec would not even be 41 + unholy for max DPS. Dual Wielding will always use Unholy as a subspec, and will probably instead use Deep frost to buff blood strikes, and attack speed by 40%.

This is why maths alone are basically useless. You need to exactly dilineate your spec used, attack rotation (you did that at least), and whether or not you are Dual wielding, that is SO clutch. Of course Scourgestirke doesn't do as much in DW spec. Yeesh.

Exactly. This is a mistake I see a lot of people making. You cannot straight up compare two one-rune attacks to a single double-rune attack. Death Knights actually have three resources they have to manage: Runes and Runic Power are obvious, but a lot of people overlook how GCD-bound we are. You can have all the runes and RP in the world but if your GCD is still cycling you're gonna sit and spin.

EDIT: It's even more important for DW, because your Death Coil is going to be as much damage as your two Blood Strikes combined.

DW unholy is pretty damn good beleive it or not. Without black ice SS doesnt exactly scale like mad from weapon damage. It might not be as good as frost DW but its still viable.

Eh, you may think that with the fewer weapon scaling moves down unholy, but in the end BS, PS, and SS/Oblit are still staples in your rotation, which all still benefit more from 2h than DW. DW frost is mostly viable because of KM and haste.