When i said that the overall dps is actually higher for DW i was also considering your point of lower 'yellow' specials.

The thing is that extra damage lost on Strikes becomes a non-issue the more AP you gain as long as BCB is in the equation. Your white damage starts to jump up significantly and your contribution from necrosis and especially BCB start to heavily overshadow 2H strike damage. I'll try to throw together some numbers.

Spec
Rotation: PS->IT->SS->BS->BS->UB->Wait->PS->IT->SS->DC->SS->DC->repeat
Glyphs: Plague strike, Icy Touch
Ap 4353
Crit 37.8%
hit 5.37%
exp 2%
Haste: 4.5% (+30% Bloodlust/Heroism per 5mins and Ret haste -Note: didn't include WF)
Wpn: 180dps 2h (3.3) and 138.6 dw (2.4/1.5)


Strike DPS:
2h total: 1233.22
dw total: 1029.09
Difference: 204.14
Strike dps loss: 16.6%

White Dps:
2h total: 758.34
dw total: 892.52
Difference: 134.19
White dps gain: 5.65%

Total difference: 69.95 dps loss from DW

Including BCB (assuming OH procs use MH dmg):
BCB Dps 2H: 109.43
BCB Dps DW: MH 96.35 dps --- OH 181.36 dps
BCB Difference: 168.28 dps gain on DW

Including Necrosis:
2H Necrosis DPS: 60.45
DW Necrosis DPS: MH 53.23 dps --- OH 26.61 dps
Necrosis Difference: 19.39 dps gain on DW
Total Gains on DW: 117.72 dps (19.39+168.28-69.95)

Did not include disease/unholy blight because they are not effected either way (besides the change in weapon stats).

I am curious if your numbers are taking in to account lower hit rate with dual wielding, as well as BCB's true proc rate being like 11%, and uptime of less than 100% for 4 diseases. I think you should be taking all raid buffs in to account as well, unless your intention is to theorycraft pvp damage. Haste will benefit DW more, crit will benefit strikes/yellow damage more.

I came up with a 15/56/0 spec with emphasis on DW. That being said, the unholy nerf was less than a 20% hit to just our disease damage (probably more like 15% with all raid multipliers taken into account). I don't recall what % of my damage was from diseases in the runs I've done, but I dont' see the change being THAT crippling. What worries me is how retardedly strong frost will be with these changes... Blood and Unholy won't have a spot for tanking, DPS, or PvP at this rate.

It's still early enough however, there is plenty of time for things to even out and so far blizzard has been pretty good about working us out. I was under the impression, however, that the current version of WOTLK on the beta servers now was pretty balanced among all the DK builds... maybe blood could have used a little love but definitely not frost. I hope blizzard isn't basing their changes on the number of DKs in a given spec...

Yes, I factored in the 17% Miss + Hit and 6.5% dodge + Exp. With the rotation listed, Disease and UB time is up 100% (with possible tick lost on early reapply).

Raid buffs included:
Ebon plague, 10% ap, Ret Haste/dmg, Heroism/bloodlust, Battle shout, Horn of Winter, LOTP, Totem of Wrath, 5% spell crit, Sunders, Faerie fire

Raid buffs skipped:
WF, Hemo, *Insert random forgotten buff*

Hemo and WF would increase the gap between DW and 2H even more. Assumed a real proc rate of 30% for BCB (if they intend it to work at its full potential) Also, has anyone tried to find an internal cooldown for BCB?

Not considered: Edit: does not factor into DPS
Rune Strike procs increase with DW but damage lowered (assuming expertise not maxed).

I think Crit should scale equally for both DW and 2H. Just for fun I input a 100% crit rate on all abilities and white hits and DW is still keeping an equal distance assuming all else stays the same.

I was thinking a similar build but dropped your 4 pts in toughness, 2 vicious strikes, and 1 in deathchill for frost aura, lichborne, rune tap, and runic mastery. Technically, vicious strikes is a dps gain over lichborne/rune tap but they are useful talents. Frost plague strikes are very weak. Deathchill I found to be a very limited skill because my crit percentages seem so high. I'm critting over 30% of the time with most of my abilities even though my stats are about 15% crit before horn (only level 69 right now). Runic mastery I like because it lets me save up and then drop 3 frost strikes in a row rather than interjecting them into my rotation. This is more noticeable when farming do to continuously getting 20 rp after a kill. I'd imagine your cycles look something like this:
IT -> PS -> Obl -> BS -> BS -> FS -> (HB) -> IT -> PS -> Obl -> Obl -> FS -> FS
(HB if it procs for free)

I can see your reasoning for doing that, depending on my role in raids I would pick those up. The main reason I think toughness might be a useful talent to dump filler points into is not only will it help you tank better when you need to OT but it will make bladed armor more effective.

Frost with Blood as the sub seems to be the way to go, you gain a solid amount of crit from specing sub blood and that plays well with guile of gorefiend.

Well, given the my former roll on my raid team (DPS warrior) and our roster going forward, it'll be rare that I have to tank. However, I'll likely be the only frost DK in the raid so a free 80 resist to the raid is fairly helpful. Lichborne/rune tap are situationally useful. My spec right now actually includes HC as a means of soloing while leveling. Getting off a full bandage and a full set of runes built up is nice. Your build would have a slight edge on mine. I had not thought of the toughness/bladed armor synergy. I wonder about unbreakable armor. It costs a frost rune which would mean I would have to give up an oblit to use it.

Yeah I think your point on frost aura is very valid, I will most likely use something like this. About unbreakable armor, my thought on it was that the 10% strength for 20 seconds isn't that bad plus when your OTing it will be very useful.

That's what I thought as well.

Hmm that may be the case for unholy, I think a frost or blood dual wielding spec with BCB would have crit benefiting the 2H version more however (assuming they actually at some point make obliterate better than Howling Blast for frost)

Well, killing machine should work quite well with high crit DWing giving you a higher crit percent on your frost attacks. Personally, I'm sticking with 2hand as it vastly simplifies gearing. I might rethink DW once I'm looking at a decent number of epics.

Question: I generally have been using obliterate over HB as a deep frost build. I have a lot of talents that increase the crit strike chance of obliterate - namely rime. I see in some places where people use HB a lot more. I only use it on Rime procs. I could see going HB > Oblit on DW builds. Whats the AP contribution on HB? I think Icy Touch is 10%.

This is correct, however the guaranteed free crit DC from 20% of your Blood/Heart Strikes triggers/refreshes your Vengeance stack quite well, which is what I referred to.

So far on the beta I'm liking frost. This is the spec that I'm working towards and will use for end-game raiding. What do you think?

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...00000000000000

That's hardly something to worry about. not getting a crit for 30 seconds, with the number of attacks we have, would indicate a broken RNG.

I think if your thinking about going sub unholy with a frost build your better off going with a DW set up, BCB and Necrosis both scale much better with DW then they do with 2H. Also I think your points in Ravenous Dead could be better spent in Virulence since your not going deep enough into unholy to get the ghoul pet.

The question i'm asking myself currently, still loving the way that unholy plays, is if it will still be useful to spec into for raid wide buffs. Given the extra diseases and the 13% to spell damage (unless they plan on taking that away too), will that make up for the nerfs we've reieved. Crypt Blood nerf seems a bit harsh.

And since the frost DW spec came up, i whipped this up.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...00000000000000

As Zurm said earlier, the crypt fever nerf isn't as terrible as people are making it out to be, I think the 13% spell dmg debuff will be a very big reason for bring at least one unholy DK, your other warlocks will get to use CoA and the unholy DK keeps it up for 'free' where the warlock has to use mana and GCDs to keep

The other aspect of unholy is they do considerably more aoe dps plus the fact that we wear plate and have a handful of skills that let us take a respectable amount of damage makes unholy DKs an extermely viable aoe dps score if not on par with mages and warlocks.

I also love the unholy play style and will attempt the play unholy at 80 but I'm going to try for the next few days to see the viability of a frost spec, the one problem I see with frost is they really don't bring much to the table besides being able to tank better then unholy and more likely then not doing more single target dps, and even that is debatable since unholy can be very effective AE tanks.

They all benefit all schools now.

Ah your right, sorry I have not kept up on a lot of the other classes, I'll edit my post in a few seconds. But warlocks will still have to spec into affliction for CoE to be on par with CF.

Yea, but its easier for DKs to keep the debuff up than anyone else. In addition, I have to agree that I simply love the Unholy playstyle. I feel there might have been some overreaction (myself included) regarding the changes... my main concern is the buff to frost, not the nerf to unholy. We don't know exact numbers yet, so there isn't much point in getting riled (sp?) up.

I was really liking the idea of DPSing with a 2her however, and some of the numbers methods has been providing is a little depressing (not bad for the class, just a personal preference thing). Look like we will be competing with rogues and enh shaman for 1h swords/axes/maces.

While I've certainly made the mistake myself, I think it's extremely important that until the balancing is done we shouldn't sweat over every update. Blizzard has been pretty good so far, and they openly said Ret Pallies and Unholy DKs could expect nerfs... we are seeing that now (for us, the ret pallies get to have their bit soon).

True, I wouldn't suggest it as something specifically to go for, but in the context of "is DC and/or Death Trance useful to burn a GCD on", it's at the least not a harm. If a GCD can trip a couple thousand damage and refresh a buff for free, I'd be inclined to consider those points well spent, especially at a tier when there's not a whole heck of a lot else to grab.

I don't really think that is accurate, it is just as easy for a moonkin to keep it up with 0 personal dps loss. The only real advantage of it in my opinion is the ability to apply it in aoe quickly with pestilence.

Currently the balance tree is bloated, so if the Moonkin could skip their %spell damage talent for other talents it would be a dps increase. Plus, Pestilence adding that dps buff to the huge packs of trash mobs is a very nice touch.