since searching for Death Coil didn't answer and DC is too broad, for Blood, I'm trying to follow the rotation (Which is anything but neat or tight thanks to dodges) and I'm hitting RP cap nonstop. Should I just ignore it and only DC when I have a free GCD, or, like Unholy, stop the rotation for a second to get uncapped?

Also does someone have the link to the math proving that blood is better than unholy (presences I mean) for the cookie cutter blood dps spec? I've been expirementing with Unholy, and thanks to better recovery from dodges, actually have better dps (testing on dummies, I haven't actually tried it on bosses), so I'd like to see the WWS etc actually proving it if someone knows where I can find it (glanced through blood thread but its all newer discussion). And on a related note, if Blood > Unholy, how certain are we on Expertise weights? I ask because I'm getting righteously fucked up in the rotation when I get a dodge and and in Blood presence the whole thing starts to get slightly off kilter, not the ezmoad that other people talk about.

In addition, what is the armor pen one should have before attempting to dps as Blood? I know Blood values Apn very highly, is 6% (without talent) enough?
Not asking for hand holding (but if someone wanted to armory me and point out any obvious mistakes in a PM I would'nt complain), I would just like to see the actual math proving some of these presences and weights, and an explanation of certain mechanics.

So - I borrowed the following macro from Erekose (posted in the frost dps thread of all places) for macroing rune strike into my attacks when tanking.
#showtooltip Obliterate
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE")
/cast Rune Strike
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE")
/cast Obliterate
/startattack

I also read somewhere in these forums that it's possible to toggle rune strike off if you hit the macro again before it casts. Does anyone know if that's true? Is there a way around that? (Something about adding ! to your macro statement...) The comments i read were up in the air on that one.

Thanks for any help!

You almost had it. Just put a "!" before Rune strike like "/cast !Rune Strike".

So I now have FotFF, Grim Toll, and the Greatness card. I'm running the 0/17/54 build with 379 hit rating (11.56%) so I was wondering which of the trinkets I should drop for the greatness card?

Hey guys - sorry to just bump in like this, and this might be a really stupid question, but it's my first post :P

But I'm curious about the Stat Weighting for Unholy,
where can I find what you factored into the equations?

My main question would be, how come haste became so much better than crit?
In my mind haste only affects;

Ghoul
Gargoyle
Auto-attack
Necrosis and BCB

and Crit affects alot more of our skills.

Drop Grim Toll. You have plenty of hit so that isn't an issue. Armor Penetration isn't that hot for that build either making Fury of the Five Flights the clear winner.

Remember a weapons PRIMARY job is to give you threat. I would use the furious gladiator sword plus it means if you were a little below the defense cap it wouldn't matter.

I trust your wisdom here, as I realize how great the T7 bonus is. However, it sucks to be getting new ulduar gear and be unable to use it. Is there a AEP value that effectively summarizes how much the t7 bonus contributes? As in, after a certain amount of stats gained does the bonus become obsolete, or is it simply waiting until the t8 bonus replaces the t7 one.

Does anyone know if HoW reset the swing timer? Is it a dps boost to use it whenever it is up?

I do not think that it resets the swing timer. Furthermore, you should only be using it if all your runes are on cooldown and if you have no RP available for any other abilities or if the buff is about fall off.

With the craptastic RP gain from our T8 I find that the HoW 10 RP is what is needed to just squeeze in 1 more DC. Not sure if it is a DPS increase or not though =/ The reason why I say it might not be is because it does cause a GCD which realistically slows down a fresh new UF rune that you can SS. Might slow down by about .5 GCD cause the rune isn't up when you use HoW but it would be up after about half your GCD is done. I don't know maybe I'm overthinking it but I'd rather like to see if it is a definitive DPS increase or should I just keep pressing SS as much as possible instead and only use it whenever my shamans are too lazy to redrop their freaking totems!

Picked up [Aesir's Edge] tonight off XT-hard mode. I'm curious if the extra weapon dps is enough to make up for the almost 100 hit rating I had on [Stormedge]. This drops me to about 68 hit rating which is abysmal. If I swap [Helm of the Faceless] our for my T8 helm I gain some hit back, but still not enough to make up the difference.

The more upgrades I get from 25-man Ulduar the more hit I keep losing.

I read in Suno's tanking thread that IBF glyph is ot listed, but "Feel free to substitute it in as you see fit."
As you know, the glyph provides at least 30% damage reduction regardless of you defense rating. I could not find the numbers I'm looking for in the thread, and I'm not good with theorycrafting math. My question is, how much defense rating do you need in order for IBF to reduce 30% of your damage if you do not have the glyph?

Aesir's Edge is a significant TPS boost through weapon dps alone, as well as the additional expertise from the human racial (depending on how much you already have you can only use the -parry, but still). It has more base stamina and two sockets and decreases probabilty of parry haste, so it's a no-brainer when it comes to survivabilty. Overall it's clearly an upgrade despite the hit-loss, but sooner or later you should probably look into that, although it's not necessarily a top-priority.

Less than the rating you need to become crit-immune (what you should be anyway). The last numbers I've read were 0.15% reduction per each defense skill above 400. When the changes were announce GC posted something on the lines of 35% at 540 defense (soft cap).

You get 0.15% damage reduction from 1 defense skill, up to 600 defense.

I've seen this macro in several posts but have yet to figure out what the following 2 lines are for
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE")
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE")

I just use the following to macro Rune Strike into most of my abilities when playing in frost presence
#showtooltip Obliterate
/cast Obliterate
/cast !Rune Strike

I take it I'm missing out on something but I cannot figure out what. Is it to prevent the message "Not Enough Runic Power" from displaying?

While on the topic of macros, I'm curious if anyone's tried using the following macro when tanking

/use Sigil of Unfaltering Knight
/cast Icy Touch
/use Sigil of Awareness (or Vengeful Heart if available)

I've noticed that swapping Sigils does not trigger a GCD, but seems to have a very short internal cooldown before allowing you to swap sigils again thus making it necessary to double tap the macro hotkey.
Also if i recall correctly (I dont have access to WoW atm) when I added "#showtooltip" to the macro it treated the hotkey as if it's the trinket not Icy Touch (creates a glow around the button, does not display IT's cooldown, etc.)
I also tried adding Rune Strike to the equation and it just got a little crazy so i ended up abandoning the whole macro but I'm wondering if anyone would know a way to get it to work properly

Another option would be to macro the UK sigil to IT and Awareness to Obliterate

Any suggestions?

I would suggest straying away from using a sigil swap while tanking especially if you are relying on the defense from Sigil of the Unfaltering Knight to stay capped. It's clunky, and will probably cause you more problems than it's worth. Swapping in Sigil of Awareness for tanking would be to generate more threat so I'd urge you to pursue other avenues to increase your threat first.

It looks like you could gain threat by swapping your Frost tanking glyphs. Glyph of Obliterate and Glyph of Frost strike would both be net TPS gains over Glyph of Unbreakable Armor and Glyph of Howling Blast. There's a bunch of ways you can increase your threat output without resorting to a Sigil swapping macro. Swapping will only cause you headaches.

Actualy this wasn't intended to resolve any issues. I'm pretty satisfied with my threat generation and my defense is above cap, avoidance is pretty decent. It's rather about taking advantage of the little extra avoidance you can get out of UK (it's there, why not use it) if it can be done without sacrificing anything else, like rotation. But you're absolutely right, as it is right now the macro is way too messy.

However I'm curious about your comment on the Sigils. Sounds like you disprove of both choices. What would you recommend as a pre-ulduar25 BiS for tanking Sigil?

Also it just occured to me this macro (if made to work properly) could be useful for DPS as well
Awareness for Scourge Strikes, Vengeful Heart for Death Coils. (or any primary/runedump ability depending on spec)

I assumed the opposite: that you used the defense sigil normally. For pre-ulduar25 I'd still go with Awareness. I use Deflection myself now. As for your DPS comments I think that a sigil swap macro would slow your rotations down so that anything you might have gained would be lost by the slower rotations. You also open yourself up to mistakes like Death Coiling with Awareness on, and Scourge Striking with Vengeful Heart on. All of the high TPS and DPS parses I've seen were from people that don't use such macros.

Does sigil swapping actually works? If you're frost you can fully take advantage of the OB increase from awareness and FS from vengeful assuming the sigil swapping actually works. Just have to macro all your attacks with the correct sigil and it "should" increase your dps if sigil swapping works.

I'm quite sure now that sigil swapping creates a GCD, thus making it not so viable to sigil twist nowadays