I don't think having to refresh will be a problem. In any case, your next runes up are either a UF or a BB (or death runes, but for all intents and purposes, those are UF)

At work atm (slow day ftw), so I can't run the numbers, but the only time you have to manually refresh before expiry is when you have FU-BB as your next two rune pairs up. The only scenario this would happen with is if the SS right before the BS pair proc'd the glyph, and then the next 4 don't -- which is an 8% chance every rotation. (25% chance of the particular SS proccing, *32% chance of 0/4 procs). In any other scenario, you can probably just refresh on expiry.

edit: and don't forget, as unholy, your diseases aren't there just for the sake of buffing your scourge-strike. They also do significant damage and should be kept up. It's not like a feral druids or rogues where overlapping buffs/debuffs is bad and waiting a few seconds to maximize uptime is good -- you can continuously fit your next 5 attacks during disease uptime, and nothing more.

Quite often when I cast Obliterate, I notice that I have initiated a 10s CD on one type of rune, but only 8s on another. These are not the same runes that I used to cast IT/PS.

Also, I'm having some trouble with TPS. I have rune strike macroed into my several of my RP generating abilities button, which is are spammed often (I understand micromanaging Rune Strike is the better option, though I've never not the RP for abilities when I needed it). I use this rotation for rune abilities: IT-PS-BS-BS-OB OB-OB-OB /repeat. I almost never have the RP to Frost Strike due to the increase of RP cost for Rune Strike. I've even considered speccing out of FS. What is the comparison data we have to separate FS and RS, and which is the best use? Is one situationally better than the other (aside from the obvious 'one use on-next-swing and one isn't' fact) I have the relic for +~420 to Obliterate but I otherwise use heavy tank gear nearly 100% of the time. I'm fully Naxx 10/25 geared and I'm defense capped at 541. Should I stop using RS or FS? Is there a reason (other than not having RP when needed) to not macro it in? Has the increased cost rendered it useless? Situational? At best?

On encounters such as Patch, since we're discussing him, I do okay to stay ahead of threat on DPS, but not by huge margins. Often times they ride about 80%+ which is obviously dangerous. If the RNG doesn't help me out with some crits, it seems quite difficult to separate myself. Particularly, the early stages of an encounter are challenging to hang on. If IT AND PS miss, or even just one of them, things can get out of hand. It seems as though if any of my first 4 strikes miss or are parried/dodged, I can't get the jump. My last kill on Patch25, the warrior hateful-absorber pulled aggro in the first 30 seconds despite all my attacks landing, and held it throughout the kill. It feels like our TPS is just low, or too vulnerable to attacks not landing. FYI, you CAN lose threat on Patch, unlike his first incarnation. Engage order has nothing to do with which tank role you'll be handling.

My dps is around 1800 on single target fights.

My spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Thank you for your comments.

You forgot the case where you are using (one death rune) AND (one frost rune) OR (one death rune) AND (one undead rune).
Which makes the whole statement:

Basically this means: Use Obliterate whenever possible.
But perhaps it's better to use a rune ability a this point, or some other strike/ability that does more damage.
All I'm saying is: Using as many obliterates as possible is one possible rule to arrange rotations.
If this rule leads to the best dps has yet to be proven. And it has to be proven for every (major) spec variant.

I tend to see runes as pairs. I doesn't make sense to use one death rune, you'll always have two.

Yes, that's true most of the time.
I just wanted to help.

This was my warped creation so I feel the responsibility to follow through with your idea. Still working on getting the spreadsheets to work right so I did all this by hand. I used this build and this gear for calculation. I also based this on the KT/D model so all dps is calculated for the duration of the first applied disease.

Ability: PS IT BS BS OB Space Space OB OB OB GARG space
Damage: 632 1014 1098 1098 2074 2074 2074 2074
RP: 20 20 15 15 30 30 30 30
RP Total: 0 20 40 55 70 100 130 130

DPS Abilities: 674
DPS BCB: 104
DPS Autoattack: 502
DPS Total: 1280

Ability: PS IT BS BS OB Space Space DS DS DS GARG space
Damage: 632 1014 1098 1098 2074 1064 1064 1064
RP: 20 20 15 15 30 25 25 25
RP Total: 0 20 40 55 70 100 125 130
Healing: 3723 3989 4041

DPS Abilities: 506
DPS BCB: 104
DPS Autoattack: 502
DPS Total: 1112
Healing Total: 11753

DPS Loss : Healing Gain = 1:4

I calculated most of this as being in blood presence. I wasn't sure how exactly to place gargoyle in but once the first KT/D set is up the gargoyle is trivial to maintain for the full duration. I tried to include bonuses from talents and diseases, but did not include criticals in the calculations. Also misses were left out under the KT assumption but as you can see from the spaces their is a standard room for error. Healing also does not include from blood presence.

As you can see the self healing while attacking is pretty fantastic. The dps that I calculated seems incredibly low, however I left a good deal out my calculations, including all buffs but Icy Talons and it used older premade gear. The greater problem though is probably human in nature. So, does this info look right and does this seem to be a viable build for dps purposes?

*Edit: All those numbers were nice and lined up. Can't seem to get them to align so just imagine it looks neat.

It is possible to sustain a 15-second rotation without Epidemic (so, 12-second diseases) while keeping all strikes within the disease durations. I cooked this up messing around with my rotations spreadsheet that takes into account the rune recharge grace period. This is a very tight rotation, and it pretty much doesn't work well at all without attacking from behind, expertise/hit capped, and minimal lag. I have no trouble maintaining it on lower level target dummies, which mimics these assumptions. I think this would be most applicable to a Frost major with Blood minor spec and in Blood Presence, so here's an example with that:

PS - IT - BS - OB - BS - FS - OB - BS - FS
PS - IT - OB - FS - OB - FS - OB - BS - FS

Each line, above, is a 15-second rotation, with two variations for making use of death runes extending this to a 30-second meta rotation. Key to making this rotation work is the fact that you must pause for approximately 0.5 seconds after each 15-second rotation. This allows runes to recharge a bit for a fast burst within the disease durations. Otherwise, just spam abilities when they're up in the order listed.

I've been trying out a somewhat onorthodox Blood spec for an hour or so now on beta.

The build: 44/00/27
Pro's: Master of Ghouls (!), Summon Gargoyle, Epidemic, etc
Cons: No Blood Gorged (if that's even considered a con... pain in the ass to stay above 75% hp on a lot of fights)
Stats (paperdoll in blood presence): 3.4s attack speed (5.79% haste), 1418-1711 Damage, 221 Hitrating, 23.60% Crit, 15 Expertise. 3 pieces of 10man tier 7.
Weapon used: Savage Gladiator's Greatsword with Rune of the Fallen Crusader.

Results:

I was pleasanty surprised of the potential of this build. Looked to me to be about a 100 dps increase over the standard build. The results were better in Unholy Presence, which is not very unexpected. I was pushing out a lot of abilities in quick succession, the lower GCD was very helpful. No specific rotation used, I would only Obliterate when my diseases were about to fall off, keep my BP & FF up and Heart Strike away of course. DC most of the time when I had Sudden Doom procs or when I had Gargoyle CD which wasn't coming up anytime soon. Obviously I only used Gargoyle at 100 RP. I kept Horn of Winter up and kept Hysteria, Blood Tap and Empower Rune Weapon on cooldown. The tests were exactly 10 minutes long everytime.

Recount breakdowns:

Unholy Presence: ~2250 DPS




Blood Presence: ~2150 DPS




TBD:

Is Necrosis better than maxing out Ravenous Dead and Outbreak (I'm too tired to do the maths now ;()?
Is this going to be a viable spec really? Keeping up enough RP for Gargoyle isn't always easy.
Is Unholy Presence going to be better than Blood Presence or not?


I thought I'd throw this out there, as I'm intrigued .

For single target DPS, outbreak only affects plague strike, right? Since recount isn't showing that as one of your damage abilities, it was less than 3% of damage, so outbreak was less than 30% of 3% = 0.9% of a damage increase. With melee hits around 25% of your damage, each point of necrosis would be 2% of 25% = 0.5%, for a total of 1.5% for 3 points, which would be better than outbreak. Ravenous dead is probably a higher return per point than necrosis though if you're actually using a ghoul.

I have a question about your rotation though - Given that you're only using oblit right before you refresh your dots, and only have to do that every other rotation, it seems like you have 3 options on the rotations where you have death runes up (and diseases not in need of refreshing) - oblit and refresh anyway, use the death runes for heart strikes and either death strike or IT/PS with the FU runes, or use the death runes for heart strikes and not use the FU runes that rotation. Assuming you weren't using every GCD in unholy presence, that last option doesn't sound likely to be optimal, and I don't see death strike in your recount numbers. Is there any reason not to add death strike in there for minor damage/healing/RP, drop epidemic for 2 more points in necrosis and refresh every rune rotation for more RP and damage, or drop the death rune mastery (for non-dps talents admittedly) and oblit and refresh every rotation?

On the same token, as well as the point of it not always being easy to keep your gargoyle up, dropping 2 points from impurity for dirge may be a dps increase from the extra RP generation... for that matter, what glyphs did you use? Especially if you were refreshing diseases every rune rotation, glyph of IT could be a significant amount of RP.

I still used my rotation PS-IT-SS-BS-UB-BS-(DC if RP>42)-PS-IT-SS-DC-BS-BS-DC, i simulate on spreedsheet, a boss lvl 83 with 10900 armor, capped spell hit ( 17% ), haste for the rotation ( 11.12% ) and i upped strengh by step of 200.

I kept the same template (17/0/54) with juste the difference of using outbreack and virulance at 3/3 when i not take 2 hand spec. And i tried with gladiator weapon ( suppose to be equal ), first two hand then slow MH and fast OH.

At the end, once i hade above 2000 strengh full buff, DW have better dps than 2 hands.

When I originally specced the build, I assumed that I would have the plague strike glyph, helping out the single target dps on this ability, hoping to bring it above necrosis. However, on a side note, You can safely assume that you will be using pestilence on each of the AoE pulls in instances, as well as blood boil, Possibly making the talent better overall.
However, as a single target build, you are correct, it is less.

Honestly, I don't see the ghoul pet really out damaging blood gorged without this talent. 60% more of your strength is a decent size buff with the amount of strength they seem to get from us already. On original design i also assumed I would have the Glyph of the ghoul, adding an extra 20% strength, as the ghoul is obviously a major factor in the build.

The rotations seem to clean up quite a bit in blood presence, and the RP gets a lot easier to keep up than in Unholy. Though, as you have pointed out you take a dps hit on the regular prior to all raid buffs, My question on the subject of presences is When we get into a raid atmosphere, with WF and other minor hastes, will unholy still stand up to blood?
Granted, it does let you push out quite a bit of abilities in the same time frame that blood does, Changing the rotation up just a bit and using OB at the end of every rotation Just before your FU runes come back up (popping a few DCs while you wait and only if gargoyle is on cool down) gives your next rotation 4 to 6 Heart strikes, which come in handy quit a bit. i honestly think at higher haste levels that blood is going to out preform unholy.

Can you explain this statement a bit deeper in detail? I don't see the point of dropping DRM, when it gives you 2 extra Heart strikes on your next rotation, which is, a HUGE damage increase?

Once again, thank you Illundai for testing this build for me, I look forward to seeing how it turns out in an actual raid atmosphere.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Seems to be the prefered 51/13/7, but wouldn't the increase in attack power you get from Toughness (I take it the increase in armor value works with Bladed Armor) be better than buffing Icy Touch which you only use once every 20 sec?
If you get 15000 armor value from your items (is this an reasonable amount?) I make that out to be an increase of 62,5 AP.

I was thinking along the lines of
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft


And how much damage difference is there between Gargoyle and DRW? More precisely how much difference is there between a 1 min Gargoyle (450 RP) and a 20 sec DRW with 8 DC (420 RP)?

I don't have access to the beta so I can't find out myself
Thanks in advance

Would a Death strike before your Obliterates be detrimental? I have also been trying a Blood/UH subspecc and I find myself using Death strke as filler before the Obliterate, as diseases are about to fall off, just for the sake of using those runes.

This cycle has me greatly confused. Do you not have Reaping and Epidemic? That deep into unholy, your cycles should look more like:

PS -> IT -> BS -> BS -> SS -> UB -> SS -> SS -> SS -> DC

...at a cycle duration of 17.5 seconds (assuming 8 second rune CDs).

Not sure how many raids you've done, but from my experience there are VERY few fights that a ghoul will live any significant duration on in WOTLK raiding. While it's nice on paper to work out ghoul DPS, it's not something you can really rely on for fights other than patchwerk. Even then, I found it more useful (yes, as unholy) to save my raise dead for a dead melee dps raid member... at least they will be able to dance on heigan or do saphiron properly.

Very interesting build. Hoping to give this a shot when I get home. Be interested to see what happens with the 5 points in Impurity going into Necrosis instead.

Perhaps, but in every fight that that Ghoul might die on, you will most likely drop below 75% HP a lot... I just really don't like Blood Gorged's idea. It might be cool and all, but in practice it's horrid.

I don't really agree with this. For starters players actually get heals both direct heals and hots will not be cast on the pet all they will get are the smart heals, additionally players avoid aoe better than pets. In a fight with constant aoe I might agree that blood gorged would not be good, but on a fight with spikes, spikes big enough to kill the ghoul, players are going back to full seconds later and the pet would just stay dead.

I can think of many fights in BC where a hunters pet will die but the hunter will almost be full health the entire fight, and hunter pets have infinitely more survivability than the ghoul.

True, but at that point I would imagine something along the lines of a Tri-spec hybrid would be superior... something like 15/37/19. Just as a disclaimer, this is a quick build I threw together... and I don't know much outside of unholy. But for what I think you're trying to go for, a build along the lines of this (while dual-wielding) would be more optimal.

Blood Gorged is in my opinion mostly a solo talent where blood can easily keep itself above 75% hp. As for the hp levls in raids i would say 75% gives enough of a buffer but i havnt raided much since 3.0 nor on beta so i might be wrong

Not to be rude, but from my experience at least, you're wrong :P

Bloody Strikes
Increases the damage by 18% and the bonus damage from diseases by 60% of your Blood Strike and Heart strike.

Does the damage increase cover the disease bonus, too?

Sudden Doom
Your Blood Strikes and Heart Strikes have a 20% chance to make your next Death Coil consume no runic power and critically hit if cast within 15 sec.

It doesn't guarantee a hit and is just +100% crit?