You can get more damage out of Blood with a better spec. Again, you're using 10 points to buff IT to 4.8% of your damage (by your own test results) for the arguable benefit of Annihilation. I think you'll find 5% strength, 10% bonus white damage, and BCB are better, especially when raid-buffed with haste, etc.

This build is my preferred blood dps spec, not counting the possible gargoyle option.

Yes, I've really been considering that as my lvl 80 raid build. Seeing some of the above dps parses showing massive amounts of melee dmg made me consider other options and see what to do with those extra points that Frost allows (Blood and Unholy both have plenty of dps talents in them). I'm debating on something like this: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...00000000000000

I'm assuming 2 Points in 2H Specialization is more beneficial than maxing out Dark Conviction. Frost seems rather crit based but 2H Weapon Specialization has good synergies with everything else a DK does.

About Lichbourne - you're right, it's a great dps time-on-target ability, but is highly situational. I'm presuming that I'm DPSing in a raid environment. Chances are I will never get hit and if the mob doesn't have fear, then it really does nothing for me. But I imagine it's possible I could pull aggro and do like a rogue does and pop Evasion. It'd be more useful in a 5-man or heroic, I imagine... when it's more likely that you could be targetted by a mob. On top of that I'm sure it shares a cooldown with Every Man For Himself (I plan on going Human).

From my dmg meters in 10 and 25 man raids 51/13/7 is better. Having obliterate in your second rotation > than reapply icy touch and plague strike. Getting 7-8k crit with OB is generally higher than what I would get out of BCB and necrosis.

Looking at some dmg meters going from an none annihilation build to one with it my OB goes from 8% of my total dmg to 16%+. Necrosis and BCB don't make up that much total dmg.

On his results, Oblit does 10% of his damage with Annihilation. That doesn't even address overall damage, which the talents you're forgoing would affect. Anecdotal damage reports from your different fights and situations doesn't really tell us much.

I'll concede that the better Oblit gets (i.e. the better your weapon gets), the crit from Annihilation is going to be a big factor in how the two subspecs add up. But the comparison is more than 1 Oblit > IT + PS. We're comparing 1 Oblit + 3% crit to IT + PS + 10% wpn damage + 30% chance of 50% weapon damage + 5% bonus strength.

There's also the matter of rotations and playstyle-- refreshing diseases allows for more leeway in the longer second half of the rotation. That part's harder to model, of course.

Ok we have seen many rotations talent builds and calculations, but noone wrote about weapon swing timer, i know DK's physikal dps part is around 20% so not "too" significant but still does it worth to keep an eye on the swing timer and for example wait for the normal strike and only push death coil/ frost strike after it?

I will test it and see what we get, only I will use this build because rune tap, in yours, dont add anything to dmg and bloodworms do.

Will post results in a few minutes.

Remember that if you were testing on one of the training dummies that's stuck at 1 health (Which is basically all the non-boss training dummies), Necrosis will never do more than 1 damage per hit due to it's mechanics.

Since it procs on auto-attacks it should actually be on about the level of damage your Icy Touch and Blood-Caked Strike did.

Your test seem flawed. Why is the necrosis dmg not equal to 10% or close to 10% o your melee dmg. My necrosis dmg comes out to a little less dmg than BCB. Also the second unholy sub spec doing more dmg then one containing necrosis seem off also. I'm sure the +3 hit to spells helps, but i rarely get any spell resist. Seems the test were done on the boss target dummy. Doesn't it have 1 hp? I can't add anymore. Beta realms have been like a ghost town lately for raids. Try an unholy sub spec with necrosis and virulance. See how that comes out. I can't get in game currently.

Yes yes, all the test are on boss dummy. Maybe the dummy was at 1%, cant remember, and thats why the poor result on Necrosis.

Will try to do the test again when I get the time.

Could you try Blood/Unholy with a gargoyle this time?

Here it is, full HP boss dummy, Blood spec with gargoyle

Lichborne does not share a cooldown with Every Man for Himself.

Having seen a few mentions of it: Bloodworms is very much NOT viable in a raid environment, due to the unpleasant way it interacts with CoH/AE heal targetting. That is to say, all the heals heal the bloodworms first. Unless this is fixed, assume that any Blood build will not be putting those 3 points in that talent, as the impact to raid healing is substantial.

Yeah, I opted to pass on Bloodworms for a raid spec for this reason, and also because they're not controllable-- they occasionally run off on their own and attack other mobs. Their damage is fixed, from what I've observed, so while they would technically contribute a tiny amount to your damage, they're more of a liability in other ways. A glyphed Rune Tap, on the other hand, could come in handy in a raid environment.

Don't think any raid leader is gonna let you go deep unholy and not get anti-magic zone though.

I kinda doubt that, AMZ isn't that good and it is a huge loss in dps using those 6 talents.

What are you talking about? In the Naxxramas raids I've been doing myself (Blood DK) and our Unholy DK are regulary topping the meters...

Or instead of going the dumb gimmicky route, we could try and get the op classes (hunters, rogues, mages, maybe warriors still) nerfed and get our dps buffed. Our tanking ability is very good overall at the moment, for some fights it blows the other classes out of the water(like faerlina) and other fights it sucks pretty badly (like hateful strike tanking on patchwerk).

Remember, dmg done to trash has always been a non-factor.

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Patchwerk DPS Leaderboards (9061)

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Current DPS Rankings

Dps loss true, but it has many potential uses. You could drop it on the main tank right before a big magic attack and save your healers some mana. Or the opposite, condense your healers and drop it on them for some protection. Both raiding and pvp are about movement and coordination as much as they are about dps. The ability to give your raid or team some time to drop abilities that require cast time could mean the difference between a wipe and a clear. My opinion is that my dps is second to the raid's dps/healing and if AMZ can help that it's not really a choice.

Let's look over some of these parses (note: these parses are the same 3 raids over and over):

Patchwerk : Vandry
We have Vandry, who is still using Blood Boil over Blood Strike despite the large nerf it received several patches again. He also manages to get off 2 death coils in 2 and a half minutes. That's some stellar work right there. I'd excuse it if I saw gargoyle damage in there, but for some reason its notably absent.

Patchwerk : Embar
Ember, a blood dk. Much better on the damage spread, except he's not spec'd into the top dps spec (you can tell he's deep frost because of the high icy touches). Also, Hysteria is used on a Hunter (the same hunter who gets 1st on dps, who would have thought).

WOW Meter Online - More logs!!!!!!
Chaotix. You see immediately from his parses why gargoyle is so important to unholy. While he has managed to find Blood Strike in his spell book, he unfortunately brought along Death Strike and Obliterate. Here is a surprise: A DK using sub-optimal abilities does less damage....

You're right, DK are worthless for dps... if you don't know how to play them.


I'd really like to provide some nice tanking examples for you to combat that point too, but sadly tanking isn't as easily judged on the meters. I can tell you that I've MT'd all of Naxx on 10 man, with little or no trouble, but these days that's not saying much.

Honestly, I'd wait a little longer before I started screaming that the sky is falling.

I'm not seeing any logs that are showing DKs anywhere near those other classes dps numbers, probably my unfamiliarity with the website, can you show me some please?

Oh wait, i found some, patchwerk is probably the best benchmark so lets see what we got:
WOW Meter Online - More logs!!!!!! - DK doing 3494 dps, about 2,000 less damage per second then the other top dps classes (Yeah I think I would still be probably trying to bank on that utility card for getting into a raid)
WOW Meter Online - More logs!!!!!! - DK doing 3471 dps.
WOW Meter Online - More logs!!!!!! - DK doing 3385 dps.
WOW Meter Online - More logs!!!!!! - DK doing 3772 dps.
WOW Meter Online - More logs!!!!!! - DK doing 3894 dps, bit better.

Even druids out dpsing them in a lot of these. I'm going to keep looking at these and post my results if i find something different.