The current accepted 50/0/21 rotation is
PS->IT->HS->HS->OB
PS->IT->HS->HS->HS->HS

This gives you, per minute
Plague Strikes: 6
Icy Touches: 6
Obliterate: 3
Heart Strike: 18

The very nature of the rotation suggests that 2 Heart Strikes > 1 Obliterate.

As such I present this rotation, a 30 second rotation:

OB->PS->IT->HS->HS
HS->HS->DS->HS->HS
PS->IT->HS->HS->HS->HS

Which gives you, per minute
Plague Strikes: 4
Icy Touches: 4
Obliterate: 2
Heart Strike: 20
Death Strike: 2

This trades 2 PS->ITs for 2 Death Strikes, and 1 Obliterate for 2 Heart Strikes.

It does, however, also require epidemic, and the initial OB is undiseased, but only the very first time, each other time through the rotation it is diseased.

Upon looking further, if you waited ~1.5s after the initial oblit before doing the PS, i believe its possible to get through the HS's before the 2nd PSIT application within 15 seconds, requiring only 1/2 epidemic, but I suppose this would require ~perfect latency and 2 is simply much safer.

Anyway, Just food for thought.

Since this is a Compendium for DPS, it might be useful to include links for various specs with stat weights on Wowhead. It was posted for Unholy in the 160+ page thread, but it might be useful for this thread to include the unholy one and expand it for the Blood and Frost specs.

Thanks to Methods and Zurm for the stat weights and the majority of the work done for these comparisons.

I've done the Blood (except for AGI and Armor weights, so I just used the weight they had on the Unholy weight): Wowhead - Blood spec stat weight

And here is the one posted on the other thread for Unholy: Wowhead - Unholy spec stat weight

Here is the Frost spec weight, again I had to use the AGI and armor weight value from Unholy as I don't know those weights. Maybe Methods could provide those and I would be willing to update these. Anyways, here is the link for the stat weight: Wowhead - Frost spec stat weight

As always, if anything is wrong, please correct them.

Concerning DW tri-spec weapon selection:

Are we looking into a Slow / Fast or Slow / Slow weapon selection.

Runeforging selection: Obviously if we end up running 2 slow weapons the order doesnt matter, but if Slow / Fast ends up being better would it be more benificial to run fallen Crusader or Cinderglacier on the fast OH?

I would really like to see the weight numbers for Agility for each spec, because it should change as crit changes. However as was pointed out eariler, agility doesn't apply for all crits only melee crits so the question is how do we capture that number?

Armor should be the same because it is a straight conversion from Bladed Armor, 5 / 180 = .02778, techincally it is repeating 7s at the end but you get the point.

The other things that I would love to put a number to is the value of meta gems. We all agree that Chaotic Skyflare Diamond is the best meta gem, but I am currently using Swift Skyflare Diamond as my placeholder because I need a value for the meta gem slot.

Another hole is that I am missing set bonuses for the tier sets. Anyone have numbers for these?

Are these weightings for the 50/0/21 spec, the 51/13/7 spec, or are they valid for both?

I seem to recall that BCB doesn't proc the mainhand from offhand hits anymore - confirm/deny?
If that's the case, fast-fast is definitely better. Of it still does, Slow/Fast would be better, ala BC combat-sword rogues.

edit:
Oh, our strikes aren't normalized? I had been spreadsheeting with the assumption they were.

I'd like confirmation on this as well.

Why do people often not understand that attacks are normalized so that they benefit from attack power equally (i.e. treated as though they're all the same speed for AP calculation purposes) but having a slower weapon (all else being equal, specifically DPS) means you have a higher damage per hit (from the higher base damage) and thus you want slow weapons for instant attacks. So even for normalized instant attacks it makes a lot of sense to always the slowest weapon.

If it were purely a question of strike damage, that would be true. But one of the major damage sources for a DW build is the Killing Machine proc, which goes off significantly more often with fast-fast than with slow-fast. As it stands, I'm confident that slow-fast is more damage for a BCB build and fast-fast is better for a build without it (if a DW build can be worthwhile without BCB).

Actually, you didn't. Slow weapons *will* have increased strike damage, but not simply because of weapon speed. It's because slower weapons have higher average damage.

I know I'm picking at nits, but just thought I'd clarify....

Excuse my lack of knowledge, I do not understand why crit rating has such a low value for death knights?
I understand that crit is a powerhouse for us compared to enhancement shamans for example, but for 1 crit rating to be almost equal to 1 AP is dramatically low.