One thing he forget to mention is that the Runemaster puts down runes that increase damage by 50% while you stand in them. That type of buff can skew any DPS data.

No offense to you, but I think PS spam is stupid for a deep unholy build and I hope blizzard ensures SS is better than 2xPS before it goes live.

Also, the official patchnotes have an important clarification, Rune of FC has been changed to 15% but its proc chance has doubled. Still a nerf but not as bad.

SS should already be better, as long as they remove the 20% bug - or update the tooltip so we can bench SS for a few patches - it's fine :>

undocumented change off mmo champion:
Ghoul Frenzy cooldown has been removed.

imo still not worth it being that it costs an unholy rune. Would like to see or do some experiments with this though

Useful is a big word.

Its still only 2% dps for 3 points, one of the weaker talents we have. I probably still wont invest points in it, unless i really have the points to spare.
Although maybe Dark Conviction is worse.

[e]:
Just to add, i think the change to glyph of deathcoil is awesome. Yes it IS dps wise a loss. But it will keep unholy in a more controlled rotation.

Also, this change just head shotted Improved Unholy Aura (Although the movement speed is still decent), for 2H unholy.

Thats nice dps, but still i'm fairly sure that doing a full SS rotation is higher dps.

Assuming your rotation was perfect recount seems to agree as 2x SS is better than 4x PS. Thus 1x SS > 2x PS.

On another note...

Is anyone a bit disappointed with the loot that so far seems to drop in Ulduar. From what ive seen 90% of the plate dps items contains armor penetration.
With only about 25-30% of our damage coming from attacks that are affected by armor, i fear we will be looking at a slim selection of gear.

It seems all gear either has haste or armor penetration. Although the former might be worth more now that it got buffed, we still don't get any solid benefit from it.

Yes, very disappointed Same with the new badge gear also

Well, the new blade is absolutely fantastic :P

Most of the new gear has been terrible; overloaded on stamina, a minimal increase in strength, and a lot of armor pen. They seem to be pushing ArP heavily to correct the low opinions of it formed during this tier of raiding.
The new bracers from kologarn are actually inferior to the ones in Naxx from gothik.

Also, "absolutely fantastic" seems a bit strong for the sword. I'd like hit instead of the ArP, and 3.6 or slower, but hey strength instead AP is great, and two sockets is great so that you can stack 2 str gems and not get the ibudget penalty for it.

It still has armor penetration, useless for 75%+ of our attacks.

I'll probably take it because it guess its one of the best weapons dropping in ulduar, but the blade is far from absolutely fantastic. Unless you're blood that is, then it is.

Death's Bite was an absolutely fantastic weapon for its ilevel. If only the armor penetration was hit, than this sword would be worshiped.
I know my guild mate who's retri is also rather disappointed with all the armor penetration.

Look at Treytreyex's numbers again. Assuming his PS and SS average hits held up over a larger sample size, he actually lost DPS on those deathrune PS's. His scourge strikes are hitting for slightly more damage than two plague strikes. The advantage of PSx2 is that PS's put down desecration, and with no epidemic he wouldn't have needed to do that anyway.

His spec looks like an experimental PS-spam build, and the experiment seems to show that SS > PSx2 even in a spec that favors PS as much as possible. Given that, he'd probably also gain DPS by shifting some talent points a little closer to traditional unholy. His spec skips Epidemic and Dirge to take Morbidity and full Desecration.

Fake edit: I'm playing around with this spec a bit, and some of the choices in the new unholy tree are really harsh. PS being better has the side effect of making Desecration worthwhile. Even if PSx2 is slightly worse than SS, throwing PSx2 to keep up desecration is still a net DPS gain. If we can't comfortably ignore desecration anymore, those points have to come out of somewhere, which means NotD and unholy aura. Between that and trying to justify 3/3 Morbidity for AoE and offtanking, the new max-DPS unholy will likely give up a lot of utility. I'm especially not happy about maybe giving up NotD, which was designed on the assumption that every unholy build would take it without a second thought.

Yea unfortunately the only thing that does is make classes/specs which benefitted from it benefit more from it and specs that dont benefit from it are unchanged.

Warriors Rogues (combat) and blood DK benefit a lot from it with a high portion of their damage being physical. Rogues (assassination) / Shamans and Retridins benefit less from it with poison / magic and holy damage. Unholy probably benefits the least from armor penetration.

Not saying the sword isnt good, because it is.

But it's once again having to coop with a weapon that doesnt seem optimal at first glance ( yes BoH im looking at you !). Who knows though, there might be a weapon a la Death's Bite in there somewhere.
If not I'll gladly settle with such a sword, i just feel like part of it is so wasted

Yes, seeing how 70% of our damage comes from spells, I just can't see apr being worth taking.

And BoH is a mixed bag. Sure, it's the best in slot weapon but all those wasted stats. If only that haste was hit. And that agility strength And... But that's the case with rings, necklaces and cloaks too.

I would be happy if they add some properly itemized gear for plate DPS this time. +Strength DPS rings, cloaks, necklaces, one hand weapons for dw. Any word on these? Or will we end up with a 1h tank axe being the best dw weapon again?

Read through the last posts over at MMO Champion, there are several new rings/amulets with tons of strength on them.

Not going to happen. The last I heard it was a 30% buff coming to ArP. In order for ArP to be good for Unholy they would have to buff it so much that Blood and other Melee DPS classes would get way too much out of it. We just don't have a good enough physical to magic ratio to make it even remotely viable.

I'd expect some changes to some of those items before 3.1 is complete just due to the carbon copy nature of some of them. Here's hoping it's not JUST axes this time (<3 Orcs but Humans need love too...)

Why would you not use DC, Ghoul, SS?

Using a rotation like that, the best spec I could come up with is one that skips Epidemic, since Blood Plague is being refreshed every cycle anyway. That does have the problem of very RNG-dependent Frost Fever uptime, though. Alternatively, you could drop points out of Blood. Theorycrafters, any math on which of lower FF uptime, no 2h spec, or only 3/5 dark conviction is the least loss, and if it's worth it for the tradeoff to a Desecration-using rotation?

Another question is whether it'll be worth considering BCB again now that the ICD's been reverted.

Because I was still thinking of the old "absurd" 60% extra damage PS glyph. In theory the new 15% DC glyph should out punch the new (old old) PS. I guess.

PS. The other advantage of this spec is that it keeps you to a solid 12 GCD rotation.

I think we've already forgotten the fact that diseases being down is worse for dps more than ever before.

When not considering the loss of damage for SS and BS when a disease is down my spreadsheets show a dps loss even with 2 extra talent points and a rough 25% proc chance on FF from SS. After factoring in the damage loss from occasionally having FF down and having SS + BS hit at a reduced rate there is pretty much no contest. You still want 100% uptime on both diseases and I doubt that will ever change.

Desecration, at least for myself, remains benched for anything but PvP.

The SS glyph alone can not guarantee a 100% uptime of FF. You'd occasionally lose the FF dot damage, 9% from SS and 12,5% from BS. And it can't be taken for granted that you will always receive the 5% from Desecration. There is to much uncertainty involved for this build to be viable.

Coming back to the Scourge Strike discussion, has there been any new information on that front?

Ghostcrawler mentioned "toning down" scourge strike (source), and I'm kind of wondering if we're seeing the result of that in the 20% reduction over expected values.