Corpse Explosion - note that Corpse Explosion on your summoned Ghoul, and that you can summon a Ghoul even in a corpse-less situation via Corpse Dust, making it a non-zero DPS talent even in a single-target raid boss environment.

Gargoyle vs. Dancing Rune Weapon - as was noted in the Compendium, this is currently a wash. DRW has the advantage of being fire-and-forget, while the Gargoyle requires constant Runic Power production to get the full 1 minute duration. Apparently, the Gargoyle does better base damage, while DRW scales well with weapon upgrades, although it is unclear whether a point of inflection will be reached at any gear level.

Until we know more, if you want guaranteed damage, I would recommend DRW. Go with the Gargoyle once you're confident you can put out enough RP to maintain it.

Bloody Vengeance - this is a straight-up 9% DPS increase and is almost certainly superior to Might of Mograine and Abomination's Might's 2% STR increase. I do recommend finding room in your spec to get all three, though.

Just a quick question about tanking stats, I've browsed this thread(I'm fairly certain I didn't miss it being discussed) and I've also read the other thread referenced here giving the DK breakdown.

If you wish to tank as a DK what are our stat weights going to be? The few set items I've had a chance to look at had none of the traditional tank stats IE: def, parry rating, dodge rating etc, they all seem to be more or less purely DPS sets, or is this right along with the theme of being a "caster tank" where dodge parry and defense really wouldn't matter?

I was talking to a friend about dual wielding tanking. He was saying that he heard that if you dual wield that you parry more often since you have two weapons to parry with. I'm not sure about that, so I wanted to verify here.

Definitely not true.

if money is no problem, i'd suggest inscription and JC. inscription can make it's own shoulder enchants (have also herd rumors of head ones but no proof as of yet), also eliminating your need to grind aldor/scryer rep. JC get lovely gems called "prismatic gems", they match any color slot, are limited to 3 equipped at any one time, but give much higher stats then the wotlk epic boe ones, making it not only easier to meet socket bonuses, but providing a much higher overall stat boost. some good examples are:

tank shoulder enchant
trinket
tanking gem 1
tanking gem 2

those are ones i had bookmarked, but comparable items can be assumed for dps, believe the shoulder dps is 41 ap and 15 crit, and i've seen a 40ish ap gem, as well as a 27 str gem.


a question i had, any thoughts on thisbuild for tanking? was assuming the extra damage from necrosis and BCB would be a nice extra boost of threat, without taking any of your runes or RP.

also, has anyone done any number crunching on the duel wield itemization? do we want fast offhand and slow mainhand, or two slow weapons, maybe even two fast weapons?

There is no reason at all for a Death Knight to use fast weapons. None. The "smoothing" logic that was true to some extent for Fury warriors does not apply; runic power is driven by burning abilities and talents, not hitting the mob. On top of this, a death knight puts a warrior to shame in terms of the number of "weapon damage" attacks they drop. Using fast weapons only reduces the damage of these; none of them function like Bloodthirst.

Rune Strike functions somewhat like a Heroic Strike, but it has such a huge weapon damage multiplier that I can't see any argument at all for trading down weapon damage for a slightly faster "next melee."

Fast DK weapons for DPS fall in the same catagory as warriors using DW Mortal Strike (ignoring the Deep Wounds/Sudden Death abuse). There's nothing stopping you from doing it, but it is just flat-out ineffective compared to the alternatives because it isn't what the abilities are designed for.

DW tanking, on the other hand, is just dumb and dangerous, as well as ineffective. You're not only being sub optimal at this point. You are dramatically increasing the chances you could die, in addition to all the problems of DW'ing against a boss mob without wearing ideal DPS gear.

More to the point, you have two weapons that the target can parry against (unless you're expertise capped). And you do not want that to happen.
Also, there's no possible way to hit cap your dual wielding white attacks without gimping tanking stats. Basically, you'd be losing threat every time you miss. Short story is, Dual Wield tanking is not a good idea.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Using a Dual Wield trispec of this sort (and I've done some rather extensive testing it does far more dps than a 15/37/19 trispec just with the extra crit damage on howling blast alone).

I was wondering what I ought to use when my Deathrunes where up. I tried different things and settled for Icy touch hoping for it to proc rime allowing me to use obliterate.

If someone has a couple ideas... feel free to help.

Which runes would work best? I am currently using Razorice on MH, considering that my heaviest attacks (HB and OB) are Frost-based, and Cinderglacier on OH since it is what generates procs. If anyone sees a flaw with this logic and has a suggestion, I'd appreciate it.

What is the optimal Unholy AoE rotation as far as both solo grinding and instancing (non-tanking) are concerned? I'm well aware of the single target rotation, but I was curious as to what I should be doing in AoE situations, especially considering CC is pretty much nonexistent in 5mans these days.

Right now soloing after gathering up mobs I'm doing:
DND > IT > PS > Pest > UB if I have the RP, else wait on runes > BB > DS if I need healing, else CE if there is a body and I know it will kill something to activate the glyph. I realize CE kind of sucks, but I love the skill. Also occasionally I'll CE my pet during this AoEing if I'm killing humanoids, and since I'm "experimenting" I picked up Night of the Dead anyways so my Raise Dead is almost always off cooldown anyways.

Occasionally I toss in Icebound Fort after Pestilence if I feel I'm taking too much damage; I generally don't bother refreshing Bone Shield since it'll die so fast (unless Bone Shield has a "cooldown" between losing charges that I'm unaware of, much like Lighting Shield/etc, still giving you the -40% damage in the meantime).

As far as instancing I assume it'll be the normal rotation except with Pestilence and BB instead of two Blood Strikes; this would cause you to only get one Death Rune though. Also it's obvious that DND is much better DPS than BB, but it's high threat, however doing either Pestilence or DND removes the option of doing Scourge Strikes.

I guess I'm just wondering if there is a point where BB AoE will outweigh single target BS, or a magical number of mobs I need to make DND worth more than all the Scourge Strikes I'll miss out on, and whether using DND is a bad idea because of threat.

This has never been true for instant attacks. "Weapon damage" attacks still uses the damage range of your weapon (base weapon damage) even after weapon speed normalization. At a given DPS, there is every reason to use the slowest brick you can find for something that says "weapon damage +X" or "% of weapon damage".

The formula is, and has always been since 1.8:

normalized_damage = base_weapon_damage + (X * Attack Power / 14)

This is even more important for a death knight than a MS warrior, as the death knight uses far more instant attacks than any MS warrior could dream of absent Unrelenting Assault against something he's tanking with his face. They also have a weapon-damage dependent "Heroic OverRevenge" as Blizzard called Rune Strike.

I don't know what you're expecting in terms of "huge difference." At comporable DPS and sanely designed weapons, it's not going to be immediately apparent to the naked eye. That doesn't mean leaking damage on every one of your instant attacks isn't suboptimal or doesn't add up.