Try as I might, I don't see any strategic changes to unholy DKs coming from this patch (in contrast to, say, DW DKs, who will find their itemization priorities changing as a result of Killing Machine's move from straight chance to PPM). Necrosis was a 5 point talent before now, and will remain so. Gargoyle was at its strongest when used on a trinket/fallen crusader proc, double proc, or (!) triple proc, and is still so. This will be a buff for us on fights with heavy environmental damage like Sapphiron, because of how worthless our pets are on that fight (though, given the reports I've heard that NotD gives AoE avoidance to the gargoyle as well as the ghoul, not as big a buff as it could have been), yes, but our actual play will not be affected, though haste and crit might now be slightly better than they were before.

Honestly, the biggest change relevant to our play that I see out of this patch is the Glyph of Raise Dead. I get to free up bag space!

I don't know why people believe haste is a bad Unholy DK stat, scourge strike works like a spell, not a strike (silly innit?) and is affecting the GCD, it lowers it with quite some haste.

I tend to not think about the Gargoyle changes, do remember that UB is now 40RP iso 60, also the Necrosis buff is welcome, and our pets will actually be worth something.

Nevertheless, I did some dps on dummies today after I picked up my sigil last raid, I did parses with and without Gargoyle, the difference isn't that big, I could sit at about 3k DPS on the target dummy and I really wasn't doing my best because I had quite some whispers and I was finding myself in an overflow of RP because I just started using 4 set as well.
Short version; boohoo we won't see our 3k dps gargoyle when everything was aligned and he got heroism, on the other side we'll have more deathcoils, more necrosis damage and more pet damage from the ghoul on all the fights excluding patchwerk.

Only question is when does Blood surpass Unholy, I keep seeing that apparently Unholy doesn't scale well and Blood should, I picked up the last few pieces I needed for some proper blood raping, will need to do a raid as Unholy and one as Blood to check out the figures, what I could tell last time I was blood is that bosses without very heavy armor get dominated by blood, hopefully grim toll changes that.

When this page change color to red it will be that time. So far Blood is somewhat behind and small buffs next patch aren't enough.

I doubt blood will ever really catch-up, if supposedly Frost is the best with gear, it will jump from unholy to frost, but I could be gravely mistaken, personally I don't care that much cuz all specs are fun to play as long as its not DW - if DW was my cupcake, I wouldnt have quit rogue in vanilla :[

This happens to me every raid at least 5-10 times, with my current spec (2H). Also I've noticed that BS refreshes DeathRune rather then used unused BloodRune. If I wait 1-2 seconds between BS I get 2 DeathRunes always. So this looks like lag related issue for the first part and unsure why it would refresh death rune over blood conversion.

So, with these glyph changes, Glyph of raise dead will no longer be a glyph of choice for min/maxing, so what will replace it? Sure it's nice if you're poor, but it adds no extra DPS (directly or indirectly as was the case of the old glyph). Will people be using glyph of DnD or will that be strictly a tanking glpyh?

Hrmmmmm.

It's not silly, it's wrong. Just because something does magical damage doesn't turn it into a spell. Scourge Strike is a melee attack like any other strike and is not affected by haste. You can easily test it with this macro (from the DW Thread):

This is incorrect. Scourge Strike is a melee strike that deals shadow damage. Its GCD is unaffected by haste rating. I haven't actually seen conclusive evidence that our spells' GCDs are affected by haste rating, either.

Haste does contribute to your dps, but for most specs (i.e. all but DW) nearly every other melee stat is superior, point-for-point.

Just to reiterate my last post, in this post on the DW DPS Thread some guy wrote a macro that tests for spell cds and as I've tested it myself, I can confirm his results. So all our spells seem to be affected by haste, while the strikes are naturally not.

Can anyone provide some insight as to changes in my rotation vis a vis rune power abilities while gargoyle is active? I am having a tough time figuring out how much, if any at all, rune power to use while gargoyle is up. I've tried just using no rune power during gargoyle, but was hoping there might be a way to get in a death coil here or there.

I'm just looking for some guiding rules on the subject.

Get bloodlusted. There's all the proof you need that the GCDs on IT, HB, DC and any other spells you might use are indeed greatly shortened by haste effects.

This post illustrates the effect Haste has on our GCD (from the DW thread): http://elitistjerks.com/1037125-post787.html

Haste does affect our spell GCDs, but not our Melee Strike GCDs.

I have seen several questions and some speculation regarding what Sigil to use if you don't have the wonderfull Sigil of Awareness.
So what sigil should we use when the next patch comes our?

Should we use the improved Sigil of Haunted Dreams or the new Sigil of Arthritic Binding which seem to be a lite version of Sigil of Awareness?

Amroo, then we are getting completely different results, My SS sits at 1.385GCD as do my spells.

hence why I said funny, innit, as its probably a bug.

I don't know anymore, I dont really care that much either

In what ways have you tested this I'm curious?

using the script he pasted, prints out SS at 1.385 just like it prints out the other spells

While the rest of your points are correct, you can in fact SS through a BoPed target.

As I recall, Bloodlust was specifically changed quite a while back to lower the GCD so that all classes got similar benefit from it.

In any case-- thanks for all the answers on spells. As for Scourge Strike-- it was blue-confirmed back in beta (sorry, I have no idea where to find that anymore) that all our strikes followed the rules of melee special attacks, and not spells, even if they deal magic-based damage. It's pretty logical when you think about it-- any DK attack that uses a weapon is a melee strike, anything that doesn't is a spell.

@Malcophant: Yes, because SS isn't physical damage. BoP might be vaguely worded, but it's observable to negate attacks/debuffs etc that cause physical damage.

Huh. I will go out and do this again. But I have had my target BoP'ed in arenas several times and found myself looking at immune messages for SS. It's not that I don't believe you, but I will double check this.

to further add something: SS is affected by impurity and by Ebon Plague at the moment, again double dipping into stuff (like impurity) that specifically says non-strike.

SS is not affected by Impurity, and Ebon Plague affects magical damage, which is not the same thing as spells. Magic damage is any damage other than physical.

Have you tried using SS with and without impurity? I personally have not, and am going off of some theory running around Mal'ganis. If you have, cudos.

Has there been any test on the PTR as to whether Ebon Plague can be applied/used by multiple Unholy DKs (ie."stackable"). Or if they are taking away the "double dipping" of Crypt Fever and Ebon Plague? Somewhere about 10-15 pages back someone mentioned this being changed so having two Unholy DKs in a raid wouldn't fight for the Ebon Plague debuff.