Just a quick heads up from a Blue Post Mainly in our recent talks about Unholy Blight vs DC, if this goes through it won't even be an option.

Any lowering of that abilities Runic Cost will certainly increase it's usefulness extensively, I can't imagine they'd lower it too much though.

Yeah I will put that 1 point from outbreak into NoTD.....I guess I could spare to take one out of virulence. You know what I am going to hate losing....On a Pale Horse. That should be a talent we all get as a skill but meh.....that's just a personal observation that has no bearing here. Back on subject.. Army of the Dead....is it pretty good? I had read some earlier stuff that said it was so-so but I guess with points in NoTD it's a pretty good button to push now?

Well NoTD is mainly for your Ghoul, but Army of the dead is a good Oh shit button. You just can't use it on bosses that do a cone attack because the random taunting could cause a lot of raid damage obviously. Other than that it's good for absorbing damage for a short period of time.

Speaking of UB, can you maintain it and gargoyle at the same time or is that too much drain on runic power? I am getting better at using my gargoyle and keeping it up 100% of boss fights but I keep wanting to UB or Death Coil. Can we maintain that now?

We haven't come to a conclusion about Fallen Crusader vs. Cinderglacier rune, have we? I've done 2x 10 minutes of raiddummy practice. At lvl 80 with 2481 ap, echos of lorderon II buff (zone buff) and the Colossal Skull-Clad Cleaver. I did 1426 dps with the Fallen Crusader rune and 1475 dps with the Cinderglacier rune. The difference could be completely luck-based. At least it seems, like there is no huge difference between those two.

Do you have different evaluations?

Maintaining gargoyle and UB becomes fairly easy on static fights. It is fights where you end up moving too much that can create issues. I only cast UB with gargoyle up when I have 100 RP and SS is about to come of off cooldown. In Naxx 25 man run last night I was able to maintain Gargoyle and UB on almost all boss fights.

And to comment on Virulence. It is not worth points invested. Tedv and other number crunchers on these forums presented some really good math on the minimal dps boost it provides.

This is a loaded statement to make. While it's true that it's certainly not one of the highest DPS yielding talents out there, you have to look at your choices. In order to progress down the tree past a certain point, you need to spend some points in either Outbreak or Virulence. While outbreak is nice on fights where you can AOE with pestilence and bloodboil, on single targets the effect on plague strike is a joke. Ensuring that your death coils and UB ticks don't resist is worth far more than buffing PS. More importantly, when you start using the SS glyph (which comes highly recommended by every raider so far in this thread) the number PS's you actually use is neglible, making it a further waste. You need far more spell hit than melee hit to be capped (though there are raid buffs in place to reduce how much you need), and the offset that virulence provides may help cap you.

I did some rough testing on a dummy today, no buffs, no CDs used.

Tried one rotation starting with SS that went like this: SS->SS->BS->BS, subbing BSs for SSs when Death Runes were up, totally ignoring diseases on the target and repeated until Recount showed my average DPS staying constant.

Then did a rotation of: PS->IT->BS->BS->SS, watched diseases and kept them up as best I could, again using Death Runes for the extra SS when I could.

My results showed that there was a negligible difference in DPS (both hovered around 1440).

This was the spec I used.

So, from my rough tests it would seem that IF the debuff from the diseases are not necessary in any way, you can get away with being lazy and not have any major affect on your damage.

You had a theory and actuallly went and tested it. I respect that, so please don't think any of the following comments are designed to discredit your efforts in any way. The EJ community benefits from people such as yourself.

There are a few factors that cannot be modeled or tested on a practice dummy that make having your diseases up a critical part of effective dps.

1) Your raids overall dps and your obligation to contribute as much as possible. You are being brought as unholy dps for two reasons: Unholy Aura and Ebon Plaguebringer. If either of these is not applied, you can be replaced by another class or enchant. UA obviously has 100% uptime for those in range, EP on the other hand, is your responsibilty to maintain. Relying on RNG to determine it's uptime is just plain irresponsible from a raiding standpoint.

2) Your spec has 5/5 Necrosis. If I remember correctly, Necrosis will not "overkill" on target dummies resulting in hits of 1 damage. Necrosis has been proven to benefit from any effect that improves our shadow damage (i.e. EP amongst others). The fact that those 5 talents are being muted in addition to any gains from talent synergy they are involved with could skew your dps numbers.

3) The interaction EP has with pestilence and the ability to use it with a fair bit of predictability. This will, in turn, also effect total raid dps. The unpredictability of relying on RNG to put up your diseases for you coupled with the question of "Do I have a Blood/Death rune available to spend on Pest?" makes it very difficult to maintain the example rotation you are using on the dummy.

There are probably more factors that I am overlooking right now but basically what I'm saying is this: While it's entirely possible that your numbers are comparable when using IT/PS or not, the impact you have as an unholy DK in a raid far outweights and loss/gain you may incur from drastically altering our established rotation. Not only does PS/IT set us up with guaranteed diseases from the moment we are able to dps, but it sets the stage for maintaining a predictable (as can be anyway) rune and RP availablity for the duration of the fight.

Thats right & wrong. Necrosis doesn't overkill thats right. But the raid dummies in ebon hold, have way over 1 mio hp most of the time, so the damage numbers could be ok. On thing that factors the numbers is the "echoes of lorderon" buff gained from the PvP towers in EPL.

I did the testing in IF, so the Echoes buff wouldn't matter (not that it would anyways if I had it up during both tests).

I definitely realize the importance of providing an overall raid benefit vs personal gains. It was more of an idle thought that resulted from a misread of the way the glyph worked. I'm actually surprised it was as close as it was, though you did point out some things I missed. If nothing else it helps me worry a little less about optimum rotations on trash or what have you.

While Ebon Plaguebringer may indeed be provided by another class, Crypt Fever cannot. If there is a non-unholy DK in the raid, or any other diseases (uh, devouring plague? idk) and they truly do equal dps, then keeping crypt fever up will always be "optimal"

Also For AOE fights Ebon plague is trivially easy to apply to multiple targets, wheras no Moonkin or Warlock with even try to do the same with their abilities

WHen someone says, "I was able to maintain Gargoyle all fight," are they referring to keeping it up for the full 1 minute duration in the tooltip? Just wanted to clarify I wasn't missing something with the tooltip being bugged.

Just out of curiosity... Has anyone looked into putting a point from master of ghouls into night of the dead (assuming a normal build with one point already in it). It seems like in an aoe heavy fight, this might actually lead to more uptime since the ghoul dies so quickly anyways.

Actually we discussed 2 points in NotD some pages ago. The ghoul is a large portion of your dps and keeping it up, will keep your dps up. On the other hand I've no points in unholy aura which really starts to hurt. So I need two more talentpoints. I don't know if I shoulld drop NotD or 2 points from Bladed Armor. The ghoul offers more dps than 2 points of Bladed Armor, but if the ghoul survives or dies after the cooldown, I just wasted important AP.

My point was more along the lines of whether you need perma-ghoul at all when raid damage is almost certain to kill your ghoul anyways.

There's a large number of fights where your ghoul won't die to AoE provided you keep an eye on it (and remind it not to stand in cleave / tailwhip from time to time). Taking ghoul control away from the player and leaving it in the hands of the AI makes this even more likely... I'm trying to find a place to get my second point for NotD too tho, and was toying with the same idea, let us know how it goes if you do decide to try it out.

Heya guys!! Managed to get some time to get back over here. And thanks Zurm. I appreciated the compliment.

Some people mentioned that they felt that IT Glyph was probably the best 3rd major to choose...

I think you've got a solid point about how it allows you to fire off Death Coils more easily at ranged combat, however how much damage is that in the long run? Realistically does it even account for 2% of your total dmg done (aka the Bone Shield bonus, which yes I understand that 1 extra charge does not neccesarily equal a flat 2% bonus)? Probably not even 1%. And, while that added ranged dps is nice for those few fights where you can't be in melee range. From a survivor's perspective I'd rather have Anti-Magic or Bone Shield glyphs.

I'll ask you to do a test for one run if you feel like blowing some gold. Go buy the Anti-Magic Shell glyph and do a full 2 raids in Naxx (10, 25, or any combination). And make a point of using Anti-Magic Shell to allow yourself to get somewhere or dps when you shouldn't be able to. I've been staying in Blizzards on Sapphiron, run through plague bombs at Grobbulus, and more just because of that one glyph. At Malygos when we get whirled into the air I pop Anti-Magic Shell with Bone Shield up and only take 600 dmg per tick. Healers never have to worry about me, which helps the raid a lot. Then since IBF is a 12 sec duration, and my AMS is 10 seconds glyphed, I never even have a chance of dying or eating up healing mana there. Add in how many times I've been all out dps'ing while eating magic damage...plus the bonus RP's for DC's...I think you'll be very surprised at how effective that glyph is.

As to that tanking dps spec. That's a playstyle question I think. For some it's fine. For me, I'll pass. If I need to tank, I'll just go respec personally. However, I can see the strengths of using that spec for players who find they need to tank and dps frequently and don't wish to respec often. That's a question of time, resources, playstle, and gold more than effectiveness in a raid. If your raid is having you tank often, then your needs will obviously change.

But I do have one question... "This is nearly the same build I've settled on for now in regards to 17/0/54. The only difference is I have OaPH over Virulence" WTF is "OaPH"? I must sound like a newb asking...but I don't know.

Does NotD only affect 10 PS/SS after you summon a ghoul, or does every PS/SS affect it? I'm confused by the tooltip.

If every PS/SS lowered cooldown by 15 second at 1 point and 30 seconds at points, then lets figure out how many attacks it would take to bring it off of cooldown:

Normal rotation (assuming Glyph of SS and glyph procing, so no refreshing PS/IT):
IT -> PS -> BS -> BS -> SS -> RPD
[SS -> SS -> SS -> RPD
SS -> BS -> BS -> SS -> RPD]xN

(at least I assume this is how the runes will come back considering the order in the first part, perhaps I am mistaken, regardless 2 SS and 2 BS in this part)

So in a normal rotation over about 30 seconds we have 1 PS and 6 SS. With 1 point in NotD that's 105 seconds off of the cooldown from PS/SS, and 30 seconds from time itself, or half of the cooldown. Assuming we follow the section in brackets and never have to IT/PS again, we'll get 8 SS in during the next 30 seconds, giving us 120 off of the cooldown from attacks, and an additional 30 seconds from time normally passing as well. So over a minute at a normal rotation we've knocked off 225 seconds from PS/SS alone, and another 60 seconds from time passing, giving us 280 seconds removed from a 300 second cooldown in 60 seconds.

Should you not have the SS glyph and you refresh diseases as normal, you'll do the same amount of PS/SS over the same time period.

With 2 points in NotD after 30 seconds of combat you've knocked off 210 seconds from the cooldown, for a combined 240 seconds, and after another PS/SS or two you're back on your feet.

Basically, if you have 1 point in NotD your Raise Dead cooldown should be back up in just over a minute. If you have two points, it's more like 35 seconds. If you pop Runic Weapon Mastery after you use your first set of Death Runes you could have your ghoul back in a matter of seconds.

This changes, of course, if only 10 strikes are affected. I personally have 1 point in NotD and it's never on cooldown for more than a minute or so in any given instance, so I'll assume there is no 10 strike limit. I'll give it a whirl and test before I say that is a fact though.

On a Pale Horse

You could drop one point from necrosis