The only place to take points from is Dark Conviction.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Thats the new build as far as I can see.

[e] Its not a buff, but I doubt it makes much difference.

Whether the bonuses are better or not, the stats on T8 will be (unless something is wrong).

And you have to admit that the bonuses on T7 are pretty insane. They set the bar way too high. The 4-piece bonus adds 150-200 dps for example, thats quite insane.

While I agree you're going to need to leech points from Dark Conviction, I don't think you need to null them out.

I'd be looking more toward something like the following:
Wowhead Talent Calc

As you can see I've taken 2 of the points from Dark Conviction, but have opted to steal 1 of the points from Epidemic and the two out of Improved Unholy Presence. I don't see a reason to extend the duration of my diseases out past 18 seconds. Though purely anecdotal, I never experienced problems when epidemic was a full investment for 3 seconds largely due to my Scourge Strike glyph. After you cross that 18 second point you only 2 GCDs worth of time to get extra Scourge Strikes out to give the glyph extra chances, and since it's the tail end of your rotation you don't really have the glyphs to do it in the 20 second cycle. It just seems very diminished in value to me.

The Improved Unholy Presence is something I'm not completely convinced was a good leech of 2 points. You're only really gaining half the talent benefit in PvE since we do it in Blood Presence. And the 15% movement speed is good for you, but doesn't benefit the raid anymore (diminishing its value to group). I'm not sure if a 2% crit is outweighed by the added time on the boss from quick retreats and recoveries with Unholy Aura. I'll have to read more about the Ulduar encounters and see how much movement is moving out of range and then back in range, distances, etc before I can cement that decision.

Using 3 those three freed points from UH and two from Dark Conviction looks like a better build to me.

Two points for 15% movement is a good investment. My gut says greater that 2% crit. Even if you aren't getting the full benefit.

I think this is more pertinent : Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

My reasonning for this is that the only points you can put in UH comes from Dark Conviction, so basically :
- Impurity : I wish i could use Impurity, but 5% extra crits seems superior.
- UB : 1% crit on all looks better to me, since UB is situationnal and barely noticeable anyway.
- Imp UHP : the choice comes down to (+15% damage & +2% crit) vs (+15% extra speed/haste & -1s on Rune CD).

Also, trading 2% crit for 15% speed in Blood Presence doesn't seems right, the fight area are not so big that it really matters, the extra speed is about survivability for those lacking reactions time .

UH tree is a bit bloated right now, and the Morbidty/Virulence swap doesn't help.

You're overestimating the SS bonus of 4T8:
No 4T8: 27% bonus damage, 127% of diseaseless damage total
4T8: 32.4% bonus damage, 132.4% of diseaseless damage total
Total damage difference: 132.4%/127%=1.0425=104.25%

So it's an increase of only 4.25% total SS damage.

From your conclusion you can see that it's a large DPS nerf even with the SS bonus overerstimated.

UB is being used in the default rotation so it's really not situational. And "not noticeable". Well, it does about 4% of my damage on a single target fight, that's quite noticeable and it only gets better when fighting multiple mobs.

It isn't, it's been changed to Glyph of Dark Death

Glyph of Death coil is now +15% damage and there's no reason to not use UB und DC, it's not like UB drains all your RP plus UB is definitly not optional if you wanna max out DPS

Edit: Damn beaten

Speccing unholy from blood in preperation for 3.1. I was testing ont raining dummy last night and ran into something that perplexed me with current gargoyle.

I would utilize gargoyle at 100 rp and the flying poo flinging monkey would appear. Ten seconds later I would get the gargoyle buff timing how long he had left. Then he would die withoin ~10 seconds instead of lasting for the 30 seconds indicated in the tooltip.

Is this something that changed when they nerfed gargoyle? Am I imagining things. The first time it happened I was trying to test out how much rp I could use while gargoyle was up, so I thought I must have screwed the pooch and let him die via rp draining. So I tested it 3 more times without using any rp abilities during it's duration.

You aren't using it like DRW are you (having come from a Blood build, as you say)?
It costs 50 RP to summon. You get 10 free seconds of uptime. Then it starts to drain 8 RP per second. As long as you don't run out of RP, it will then last up to 30 seconds. If, however, you are simply expending your RP per you normal rotation, you will find your Gargoyle to quickly die after the free 10 seconds, since you're likely to drop to 0 RP.

On a related note...I haven't actually paid much attention to this, but does the drain actually tick every second (as per the tool tip), or does it have a different interval? Anecdotally, it seems like it ticks off slower, in larger chunks. Could (very likely) just be me not paying attention though.

Mmmm no, summoning him with full rp, and then staying as close to max rp as possible and still having him die early. I saw a bug report for this on the ptr, I didn't know if there were issues like this on live as well?

Apparently there was a [bug reported] a few days back on the PTR forums.

He stated that it died with 10 sec remaining though, indicating that it should have lasted about 20 sec after the free 10 sec, not died within 10 seconds after said duration.

One interesting comment in the report though was that he had a full 130 RP. Perhaps some sort of odd bug as a result of having RPM (he didn't say if he got RPM just to test this out or not)? Did you have any points in RPM?

Yep, even switched to 4/5 t7 for more rp generation. That or the buff timer is just wrong. It may be lasting for 30 seconds but the buff isn't appearing for quite awhile after I summon the gargoyle.

I'm probably just screwing up the timing in my head.

Also, what do people use for tracking Unholy Blight? Mod wise?


EDIT: Gargoyle didn't fly away. It died

No, 17/0/54 on live.

I completely misunderstood you. No, I've never seen this happen on Live. I thought you were referring to the PTR.
I'm at a loss.

The timer starts 10 seconds after you summon the gargoyle since thats when it starts draining RP.

The timer starts at 50 seconds, and the gargoyle disappears when the timer has 30 seconds left (after 20 seconds of starting it), in total thats 30 seconds.

I personally am not 100% sure on the Improved Unholy Aura, but I can still see 15% movement speed being of importance.
I dont know the ulduar fights so I can't tell if they involve a lot of movement.

Pulling 1 point out of Epidemic wouldn't be my choice. You say: "Its just 2 seconds at the end of your rotation" that is false.

If you refresh diseases halfway in your rotation (which happens all the time due to SS glyph), that means they will end somewhere halfway in a rotation too.
In that case the 1 point in epidemic can be the difference in getting 1 or 2 extra SS's in or not.


Impurity is better, by quite a bit I'm sure. It affects 30% of my dps (DC / Diseases / IT / UB / Gargoyle too i think)
Raid buffed (without trinkets etc) i usually run with about 5000 AP, impurity has the effect of giving all those attacks 6250 AP.

Unholy Blight is like 5 times better than 1% crit. I'm not sure how you fight as unholy, but for me Unholy Blight has an uptime as close as 100% as possible (usually 85-90% in practice).
For me Unholy Blight is around 5% of my dps.

Imp UHP, the choice does not include +15% damage / 15% haste and -1s on Rune CD, because the benefit is the 15% speed boost, which you still get in BP.
Whether that's worth more than 2% crit depends on what kind of fights ulduar involve. Most of the naxx fights don't require you to have boot speed. However i can see that being totally different in ulduar.

ClassTimer - Addons - Curse

TellMeWhen - Addons - Curse

NeedToKnow - Addons - Curse

I personally use TellMeWhen, mainly because its highly customizable and very easy in setting up and using.

However when a fight gets busy, I notice that I pay too little attention to the timers. So for that reason I'm also using: "Power Auras Classic" (you can find it both at Curse and other sites as well iirc).

It basically gives a big glowy symbol in the middle of your screen, its pretty hard to miss.
I use it for procs and stuff that needs to be up all the time, but usually have a cooldown or longer duration.

A few examples:
- Killing Machine proc (when im frost), shows a big light blue circle right in the middle of my interface
- Rime proc
- Bone Shield
- Unholy Blight
- Horn of Winter
- Sudden Death proc

I don't do it on diseases because as unholy i need to track those constantly anyway, to anticipate my rotation. But pretty much anything that is "must have 100% uptime"-fire-and-forget-buff or a proc i have on Power Auras.

Life would be easier with Virulence on Tier 2 again... (EDIT: I posted Tier 1 by accident) 12/0/59 looks like the most dps I can squeeze out of my spreadsheets. The effect that 2 points in morbidity would have on trash packs is hard to determine.

Our best glyphs are SS, Ghoul and DC so far.

Looks like in a 3 minute fight Blood with 51/1/19 (assuming 50% ghoul uptime) and Unholy with 12/0/59 will be neck and neck. Blood, however, is looking to be the best new boss attempt spec due to over ~1000 heals per second from DS and Blood Pres. I'm glad that something besides Unholy is starting to look fun and unique (loaded statement I know).

No, Life would be easier if Morbidity were back in Tier 1. I'd love to see BOTH of these talents as Tier 1, but Blizzard designers seem obsessed with maintaining symmetry in their first tier talents. Right now, I would trim Virulence from every Unholy build if I could.

The irony of the new Desecration is that the Live version (each point being 20% chance to trigger the 5% effect) would be better than the PTR version if it included Scourge Strike. Then, I could put only 2-3 points into it and still get the full effect.

Read what I mean not what I type! Edited above.

For the reasons of PVP builds alone being force fed all 3 points does seem a bit strange. Bloat, however is no new problem for Unholy builds.