Both are quite situational. First you should be able to spend RP even with glyphed IT and 4xT7, second ask yourself how often you use IT (sometimes) on a boss fight and compare it to DnD (rarely). If you going for first Sarth + drakes kill or do loads of heroics I would go for DnD, otherwise I would stick to IT.

[Darkmoon Card: Greatness] is considered as best DK trinket in game. Now seeing your trinkets I see you have same problem as me having too many good trinkets. Is it worth 10-15k gold? If you aren't in top50 guild in the world I would say no, and even if you would be/are it is too late now anyway. I would chill until Ulduar PTR to see if [Darkmoon Card: Greatness] is still 1st/2nd trinket in the game, if yes buy it.

Hello,

I've done a few tests today and calculated about and I came to the conclusion...well... fear, that Blood Strikes only account for 1 == _one_ active disease at the moment even if 2 or 3 are on the mob. Can anyone support or refute that fear?

Thanks, regards

Indaril

Do you mean the damage from BS only acts as if there is 1 disease present even if 2 or 3 exist?

If that is the case, I haven't heard of any such bug. What were the tests you ran today and the results? Supplying your test data would help.

Pretty sure the base damage and the duration was the only thing changed. Another thing I have noticed from my wowmeter parses is that it has not crit one time since the patch was released. Either I am horribly unlucky or was this a change that I became completely oblivious to?

Long time reader, first time poster.

I'm curious if anyone has yet to analyze the new Blood and Unholy tools up at MaxDPS.com. I have to say I was a little surprised based on the information I've been reading here. I'm currently rocking a Darkmoon Card: Greatness and a Mirror of Truth as my trinkets. I'd planned on Bandit's Insignia based on numbers I'd seen posted both here and on the General WoW forums.

I'm a little shocked to see MaxDPS rate Fury of the Five Flights as second top DPS trinket beneath the Darkmoon Card. And every other trinket rated severely blow those two. Extract of Necromantic Power wasn't even listed.

It was always my impression that based on the number of movement fights versus stationary fights, and likely hood of keeping up a full stack of buffs, that "Fury" was not the ideal trinket for a Death Knight.

Any opinions?

MaxDPS.com - Unholy Death Knight DPS Gear Rankings

MaxDPS.com is awful. If you want a decent evaluation of a class then look on these forums. They probably model FotFF as having 100% uptime.

MaxDPS is good if you don't have much time and just want to quick check what stats/gear "around" you want to get - you need to treat it with gain of salt and do not take it 100% seriously. It is quite perfect for alts for example. If you looking for min-maxing you character then best way is carefully reading EJ forums.

As for trinkets it is obvious proc for Bandit is not implemented when you look at trinket value. It is not easy to find best trinkets because actually they are quite close, it is not TBC where you got clear choice (at least at beginning). Really it is all about preference, I myself would choose Bandit + Greatness, currently using Bandit + Fury/Truth (fight dependent).

Now back to MaxDPS I tried to put my stats and compare to EJ weights I am using:
- they still assume 9% miss
- they don't count Ghoul (but so does not many EJ weights I saw)
- hit pre-melee cap seems to be undervalued (1.75 vs 2.46)
- same for hit after-melee (0.6 vs 0.917)
- crit value is perfectly same (1.176 vs 1.176)
- STR seems to be fine if you ignore Ghoul, however it should count it (2.31 vs 2.79)
- AGI seems to be fine (0.95 vs 0.92)
- haste seems to be quite fine if you ignore Ghoul, however it should count it (0.5 vs 0.84)
- expertise pre-cap have huge difference but I cannot say who is wrong here (1.08 vs 2.34)
- armor crap is pretty close (0.61 vs 0.72)
- armor value is same (0.0278 vs 0.0278)

Now despite bad opinion most numbers were same as EJ, so I would assume accurate. STR and haste can be explained by not counting Ghoul but many EJ theorycrafters make that mistake too - you should count Ghoul for Unholy.

What is really interesting that expertise and hit numbers (I may have "ghoul" hit value tho). Given that other values were pretty similar it would be worth to double check value of those.

Thanks a lot for your answer, really made my decision clearer. I'm aiming for a [Bandit's Insignia] soon (actually as soon as it drops) and with 1 or 2 more gear changes I would say i'm happy as far as DPS set goes. For the time being, I believe it will be a nice & cheap alternative to Greatness. As for the DnD glyph, we've downed Sarhation with 2 drakes up, but I didn't see that much of a need for it. Come to think about it, there is really no other boss that I used DnD much to be worth it.

The problem I have though is with the Heigan Sigil. 10 weeks now it refuses to drop from both Heigan or Gluth.

Anyway, thanks again to all that answered me, really appreciate that.

Hey guys, I'm brand new to UH(just respecced from 17/54 2H frost last night), and something just isn't clicking right now. I'm not terribly geared, though most of it's from 10 man Naxx with a crap helm and rings from heroics. Picked up the SS sigil from venture bay(though at the time of DPS testing on the heroic dummy, I was using the IT sigil still), and I'm using the Death's Bite with FC runeforge.

I'm using the cookie cutter spec from the first post, I have all the glyphs suggested, and I have the rotation down. However, when I tested my dps on the heroic dummy, my dps was lower than when I was frost by about 400-500. Had HoW, Bone Shield and ghoul up, no garg. UB was up a few times, but I did forget to put it up once or twice. Is there something I'm missing? Or does the garg really make up that much dps? I've never played with this spec before, and only had a UH DK once in 25 man, so I'm really unfamiliar with this spec.

Were you, by chance, attacking a target dummy while another DK was around who was applying ebon plague, which would overwrite your crypt fever--thus giving you only 2 diseases? Just want to clarify.

Just want to toss in on the Bandit's Insignia and Necromatic trinkets, that at 5k dps JUST the procs on these guys represent a consistant 4% of my total damage between them (not counting the passive bonueses) and I'm sitting on the upper end of the gear spectrum (Betrayer/sigil/4pt7). They will of course have scaling problems, which is fine to mention, but they hold their own right now with a good chunk of gear I cannot upgrade till Ulduar.

I think they are being sorely undervalued in certain posts.

On most boss fights, no. With any boss fight with over one mob in the same area, then DnD becomes more useful (looking at past posts on this thread, DnD is worth using with anything more then one). And from what I know the first thing you should do as Unholy is DnD when AOEing, the IT->PS->Pest takes far too long to be an effective aoe opener, I personally always went for DnD and/or UB(while moving towards the area and if RP was available)->IT->PS->Pest (from there is SS, BB, then DnD again, etc). Maybe its just my Australian ping, but I personally run into GCD problems like the guy you quoted when trying to use up RP, you use a set of abilities and your RP is already full again and you have to make time to use it. As a DK you are forced into using a set of abilities to set yourself up and to use certain runes right away in a specific order otherwise you will lose DPS even if you are losing the DPS from your RP (e.g. using SS straight up is more beneficially then using DC before SS, from what I know anyway, unsure whether SS is better used before UB tho, but UB isn't much of a RP dump compared with DC), and much of the time that will force you to waste RP because you are already at 100 (even if you did just use it up before the cycle).

From my POV, you are mostly going to be using IT with other abilities (without giving way to any RP abilities a part from maybe UB), the most common being PS. So a lot of the times that you do use IT you won't be able to use your RP for a certain amount of time because you are taking advantage of your runes. And even then, the SS glyph will be resetting Frost Fever much of the time anyway, removing the need for IT (which makes the glyph give only a tiny amount of RP). For me, on anything with more then one mob within the same area the DnD glyph wins hands down (from my experience and from looking on this thread), just have to ask yourself if that is worth 10RP on IT.

Just to qualify DnD usefulness:
every trash pull
Anub'Rekhan (if your guild groups the three up and zergs)
Faerlina (if your guild groups them up and zergs)
Noth
Gothik (depending how fast adds die)
Gluth
Sarth w/ drakes

thats 6 out of 18 bosses available in 25mans.

About gear concern.
It is generally admited that the best armor combo at the moment is head/gloves/legs/shoulders + Breastplate of Frozen Pain. I was wondering how concurrencial would be chest/gloves/legs/shoulders + Obsidian Greathelm.
My point being I am having problems to cap up expertise with an axe wearing dwarf (oh sad sad BoH) an geming for hit leaves the red slots for str.

Being curious about exp value I went to check Doc spreadsheet and decided that it is time to update my numbers. So I grabbed Doc numbers, maxdps numbers and my old numbers (found on EJ some time ago) and tried to make consensus with 2h Unholy stat weights.

Stat	Weight
AP	1.00
STR	3.00
AGI	0.85
Hit	1.90 (0.60)
Crit	1.10
Haste	0.70
Exp	1.10
Arp	0.70
Armor	0.027

Please note that those numbers do include pet scaling.

I don't have an answer for your gear selection, but in regards to your gems why don't you just socket [Accurate Monarch Topaz] until you reach your expertise cap? That fits a yellow or a red slot. If that still isn't enough to get you to the cap, just put expertise gems in any slot. Reaching the expertise cap is much more important than getting that socket bonus, and you don't have to aquire any new peices of gear to do it. Plus, you can always change sockets down the line if you get more expertise.

Maxdps is most likely pure crap. Their warrior implementation was and I'm sure they didn't take that much time for the DK one. Everyone relying on it will end up with the wrong items. Well, maybe not that wrong since DK's are all about Str.

There are no other sources. There is your sheet, their site and I haven't found anything else. Also actually both your and their numbers are pretty close for both Unholy and Blood in most cases. Obviously I trusted your sheet more but it is always nice to have some other source to confirm numbers.

As you see hit have two numbers, one is before melee cap (higher one), second is above melee cap up to spell cap (lower one). Exp value after cap is obviously 0.

Sorry I missed that! I think I was half asleep when I look at the table.

Another quick question: I notice your numbers (for example, Strength) are higher than what I've seen in the past on this thread (3.0 vs. 2.4 form the top post). Do you have a theory why that is?

My point was. Considering Expertise is Red gem and Hit is yellow, woulnd it be better to try to gear up for the more expertise you can while puting Hit gems into yellow slots instead of caping hit with gear and having to use red slots for expertise?

So much end game gear has expertise that I think you're better off gearing expertise and gemming STR. The only reason I ever gem anything other than str is to make sure my meta gem gets activated.

On the topic of AP equivalence values for stats: where do these numbers come from? I have seen 3 or 4 different values, and I have never seen an explanation of how people derive them.

I feel a little uncomfortable trying to rank gear based on numbers that I don't fully understand.