Isn't that reflected in the numbers from No Ghoul to Ghoul? It's ~0.4 total increase in value per Str point. My ghoul addition is very 'beta' still by the way.

Well, wouldn't it be DC, IT, Pest, BB, and DnD that get spell crit but not melee crit? After running through my WWS, DC and IT only combine for 5-10% of my damage, depending on the nature of the fight, and Pest and BB are negligible. DnD would be another ability that I believe uses only spell crit, but that only gets used on AOE encounters. So you have a point about agility.

I'm not entirely sure yet, and I do not actually use that stat weight. But some people may not think about it as much, and may blindly apply it. Just wanted to bring some awareness to limitations of the stat weights right now and make sure people put some thought into the numbers Method is providing us. I appreciate Method's work, but still want to understand the numbers thoroughly. Method's caveat is an important one to keep in mind. It's a work in progress.

What might be nice is a few different stat weights for different scenarios.

-Single target with ghoul and gargoyle (eg. Patchwerk). Gargoyle can exceed 20% of my total dps when it survives. It's dps is on the order of 1300 to 1400 with my gear.
-Single target with boss or encounter AOE that prevents significant use of pets, particularly gargoyle (eg. Grobbulus). This may be a non issue post patch.
-Single target plus AOE (eg. Gluth, Maexxna). I use DnD on these fights for the adds, and I assume others do as well. DnD is a top 3 damage ability in these encounters.

I find unholy dps to be so dependent on the nature of the encounter, making optimal gear setup potentially different for each encounter. If the new NotD increases survivability of both ghoul and gargoyle sufficiently, maybe this will be less of an issue. And maybe if we ran the numbers, it would turn out we really do want the same general gearing for all encounters.

I did forget to mention IT but of course the other AOE abilities use only spell crit. I guess I should have stated that anything I list as stat weighted assumes a single target.

I have done some weights for AOE rotations with 4 targets. Like you said, It's impossible to provide an overall stat weighting for all encounters. It's hard enough to do it for one! I'm glad you mentioned critical thinking (in so many words). I provide these numbers for nothing more than a tool in the critical thinking process. When was the last time you had a fight for 3 minutes exactly that involved no lag, no movement, no aoe to pets, no chance to aoe mobs, etcetera.

Here are more stat weights for fun and thought: AOE 4 targets, 20 seconds.

STAT	Unholy+Gh
1AP	1
1STR	2.6148
1CRT	1.3085
1HIT	1.6702
1Haste	0.3603
1Exp	0.8480
1AP-R	0.2345
1AGI	0.5913
1Armor	0.0278
1dps (wpn)	2.1065

Rotation: ps-it-pes-dnd-ub-wait-ss-bb-bb-ss-dc-dc (21 seconds)
Melee hit capped.

It seem like I am not being clear on my queestion. Givin the 1 str=2.85 ap and my ghoul also recieves 120% of my str bonus. wouldn't that make [Death's Bite] a better weapon choice for an unholy build considering over all dps than [Betrayer of Humanity] > ?

it would seem to me( and please correct me if I am wrong) that 101 str for me and 122 str form my ghoul would be greater over all dps then the 66 agi and 19 dps that just i would recieve (not sure if gargoyal scales with this also)

I think you are over-valuing str for your ghoul. 120 str for your ghoul is a very small DPS upgrade, mine is already sporting well over 2k str and barely breaks 600 dps. 120 str is probably (speculation, no math because I'm still sketchy on ghoul stuff) a <50 dps boost or so for him. 19 weapon dps is WAYYY more than 19 personal dps, I don't want to embarass myself by giving a totally wrong number so I'll let one of the napkin math professionals handle it. Also, for personal stats, the [Betrayer of Humanity] has 226 AP, so even after kings and talents you aren't loosing much AP at all (and gaining WAY more crit).

I would be extremely suprised if Death's Bite even came close in value to Betrayer.

I am struggling to stay on the more regimented BS, BS, SS, UB, SS, SS, SS, DC. After my diseases are placed, I'm alternating between BS and SS as fast as I can. Will there be a large discrepancy in DPS vs. the prescribed rotation? How much am I hurting myself not counting the actual algorithm vs going for the 1st one up? Are we talking slight improvements or several hundred DPS?

Also, given the nature of our Ebon Plaguebringer, Is the Shadow Priest one of the biggest benefactors of this debuff? Is the Shadow spec really that good at DPS now or am I causing his DPS to skyrocket? Am I doing something wrong (As in above) where I cannot seem to catch him? The more I have improved my DPS, the more he has. The percentage difference between our DPS has remained surprisingly constant.

The reason why you perform two BS first, is so that you can convert your blood runes into death runes, and allow for 3 SS to happen in the second part of the standard rotation. If you alternate between BS and SS (in the first part only i'm assuming) you'll create an additional 1.5second delay of when your death rune becomes available. Personally (i'm not expertise capped) i've found that unless i'm spot on with my strikes, the last SS in the second part of the rotation tends to hit without any diseases existing on the target...which of course is a DPS loss. Can I perhaps ask why you are having a problem with the standard rotation? I doubt its something that a little practice on a target dummy won't fix.

Ebon Plague is a 13% buff to all magical damage. You are in effect increasing your s.priest's dps by ~13% of what it would normally be. However, this number is static. You don't provide a bigger dps boost to him as your gear/skill gets better. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that he's probably gearing up at the same pace that you are, and hence your observation. I have not yet rolled with a s-priest, so i'm not sure how we stack up against them. How far off his DPS are you, and is this discrepancy consistent across all fights?

The bolded line is the "line" in most people's math that I'm trying to say makes no sense. You can't assume 121 str (its actually 1.2 x 101) is in any way worth that much DPS to a ghoul, as a ghoul has much fewer attacks (and probaby smaller multipliers on all non-white dps). In addition, that was an AP equivalence chart, if I'm not mistaken. Meaning all it says is 1 str = 2.4847 AP, *NOT* DPS.

This

But is there a resource available that really breaks down the Rune system? I thought I had a grasp of it but it seems I'm still sketchy

2-3%

IN Naxx 10, I'm pulling sustained 2200-2300.

Methods already had a line showing the AP value of 1 strength including ghoul. His table on page 26 shows 1 str = 2.4847 AP without ghoul and 2.7920 AP with ghoul factored in (both as Unholy spec). Death's Bite is still clearly inferior to Betrayer.

@Dread

I'm not really sure what you mean by "break down the rune system". If you are referring to a mod, I believe Magic Rune is one of the more popular ones, and it is the one that I use. Have a look at the thread in the UI section where there is a discussion on DK Rune Mods. You might find something else that is more to your liking.

2-3% isn't really a whole lot. What is your group composition like? Do you have an ehancement shaman/blood DK for the AP buff? Even having ur ghoul and/or gargoyle die due to an unfortunate AoE could explain away a difference of that magnitude.

really huge thing you're overlooking is the fact that for unholy a large % of our dps is also based off of weapon damage,
even if the stats are marginally close to each other, or even possibly that the stats of [Death's Bite] are a little more attractive, the extra 90dmg on the top-end of
[Betrayer of Humanity] make it clearly superior imo regarding our number of SS's and BS's.

Think of a death rune like a wild card in poker. Death runes can be used as Frost/Blood/Unholy. Any one of the 3 depending on what ability you use.

Basically looking for a sanity check on my DPS/Rotation/gear choices. Armory may show me in PvP gear so I'll give unbuffed stats: 3650AP, 8.36% Hit, 34.23% Crit, 18 Exp. Running IT, SS, Goul majors and Pest, Raise Dead and Death's Embrace minors. 17/0/54, 2/3 Virulence, 0/5 Desecration, 2/2 NotD.

5291 DPS on patchwork w/ no sigil of awareness.
http://www.wowmeteronline.com/combat/1027006#damageout

Basically I'd like to know from those that know more than I do whether my amounts of skills used are correct/near correct and what I should be trying to change if not.

Also, aside from the 2 pieces of heroes and badge trinket I'd like to upgrade to valorous I'd like to use [Bracers of Unrelenting Attack] over [Bracers of the Tyrant] and swap [Spiked Titansteel Helm] to [Obsidian Greathelm]. Does that seem correct or are there other gear swaps I should consider?

I've discovered that Death Runes are really the only Runes I need to watch, and so they're all I have showing (well, Blood too of course) on Magic Runes. That way I always know if I'll be able to get an extra SS, or if my rotation gets messed up somehow. Generally mistakes won't/can't really happen in relation to Frost/Unholy Runes.

If you're pulling 5200 on patch without the sigil then you're doing just about everything right that you can. I hit 5200 last night as well, but after I scored the sigil (finally!). That said, I'm still being too lazy and not timing gargolye off a trinket proc (mostly because I keep forgetting to).

Some general comments - Gargoyle seems to be such a major part of our single target DPS that if he dies early, we can't keep up. Has anyone else found this? He is overly fragile at the moment in my opinion.

It's almost to the stage where I'd like Garg to be shorter duration (30s?) and get some of the single target DPS back on ScS.

Yes, Gargoyle is pretty stupid at the moment. It can make up something like 20% of your damage for a fight like Patchwerk. But when your AERIAL Gargoyle dies to unpreventable boss AoEs like STOMP, you get screwed. Look at a parse of fights like Patchwerk, then look at a fight that completely screws pets or even just gargoyle. Heigan, Loatheb, Thaddius, Sapphiron, Archavon, Razuvious, etc. There's often quite a gap, unless you get lucky on a few of them. They've made no mention of fixing it, and I'm tired of having my DPS being balanced around something that is so fragile and uncontrollable.

Since the PTRs actually let me use my Death Knight now, I went to check out the new Corpse Explosion, and I'm fairly underwhelmed. Even with 3.4k AP it does less than 900 damage, and it doesn't seem to benefit from higher ranks. I guess it's nice to have an AoE RP dump but...eh. I don't even think it'll be useful for Jihad'ing the ghoul, unless it somehow retains raid buffs after getting CE'd and re raised. Even then, with the cost of two GCDs and the five second spawn animation on the ghoul, I'm not convinced. For PvP it might provide some nice burst (granted, the Ghoul takes time to cast Explode when you cast it on him), but for PvE it seems largely useless.

Yes and I am sure we all hope NotD aoe reduction will work for gargoyle too. Honestly I would love to see garg and ghoul removed and our dps increased in other ways. Oh and ghoul + dismount "bug" is still not fixed - makes me really sad.

I was on something of a crusade during beta to have Unholy be less pet-centric but GC basically said that they want to preserve that aspect of Unholy as its flavor, so it's unlikely we'll see damage shifted away from Gargoyle and Ghoul. That being said, the durability of the Gargoyle is definitely something that needs to be addressed. It doesn't even heal to full after spawning, currently, so I suspect it's at least partially bugged.

Honestly I'd even be happy if the other trees could put out competitive damage so that there was a choice between Unholy and not-Unholy, but right now even on pet unfriendly fights Unholy can generally pull higher DPS. I don't really see the changes being made in this upcoming patch changing that, either.

I have been reading this thread for a long time and it has helped me a great deal to become a good death knight. I am still having some trouble though putting out as much DPS as some of you guys. On Patchwerk this week I only did 4200 dps. Now I am wondering if its my "bad" weapon or the not so perfect raid setup that is hindering my dps output.

The World of Warcraft Armory

I have some nice parts, but obviously not everything is perfect yet. Should I be putting out more DPS with that gear?

Not sure if this is relevant...but timing gargoyle used to be more of an issue for me since I generally don't like staring at my buffs and I can miss procs/events from SCT/Parrot/whatever.

Lately, I've been using classtimers to monitor pretty much everything I care about (i.e. self buffs). I'm sure people use it to monitor diseases, UB, BS,HoW, etc...but I've added certain procs as well- mainly Fallen Crusader ("Unholy Strength") and Mirror of Truth procs ("Reflection of Torment"). If I ever see those two go off, I try to pop bloodfury and summon the gargoyle. I've even added "Summon Gargoyle" to show when the gargoyle starts to drain my RP and when it's gone/dead, so I can resume using RP for UB/DC. I keep it next to my runes and my timers on diseases, because that's generally what I'm looking at when DPSing (aside from the generic glowy pieces of terrain that need to be moved away from).

Hey, been reading this for a while, had a couple of questions.

Zurm: In one of your posts you mentioned that you sacrificed personal DPS to ensure that diseases always stayed up, including ebon plague because it buffs the raid so much etc etc. My issue with this is ebon plague has an extra 6-second duration over IT/PS, so it'd have to be a HUGE gap if you didnt get diseases back up and let that fall off. Forgive me if I'm missing something important here, just thought that was an important distinction.

Secondly
I've seen many people state the standard rotation as: IT --> PS --> BS --> BS --> SS. Then scourge strike and refresh diseases BSx2 every other cycle etc.
However, it seems to me that IT --> PS --> SS --> BS --> BS Gets you the exact same effect in later circles but you get a scourge strike in first, and those runes up earlier rather than doing the inferior blood strikes and then having to wait for those to come up together before you can SS again. Very minor difference, but hey, we're all about min-maxing here.
Is it merely my perception of the "standard rotation" that is wrong, or is blood strike x2 actually supposed to be hit before scourge strike for some reason I'm not understanding?

Thanks :-D