As DW, having offhand Razorice will in most cases benefit your raid more than offhand FC/CG will. It doesn't look as pretty on the meters for you, but it's a great debuff if there's a FFB mage in your raid, and with an offhand you can stack it up without any DKs losing Fallen Crusader on their 2H/Mainhand.

For the people out there who raid DW as 0/20/51, please verify that UB consumes CG procs without receiving the +20% benefit, and then post your confirmation in the following bug thread:
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> [Bug] DK:Uholy Blight uses Cinderglacier proc
I would like them to get it fixed before 3.1 comes out and UB is moved lower in the tree where more people will have it.

Questions to you:

- Why Annihilation when the only yellow damage based attack you use is BS and PS?
- Why take 5% crit over Impurity which is the meat and potatoes of your spec?
- Why not spec to make the ghoul a perm pet, is it because it dies on most fights? if so that's understandable.
- I see gargoyle being more of a dps loss than a gain, but that's a personal opinion. I was interested in why you went this route.

I have not been able to find the % of benefit a 32/39 spec receives from speccing into bladed armor over crypt-fever and night of the dead. Can anyone apply some napkin math and throw it my direction?

It really depends on your gear, Bladed Armor should be ~440 AP in level 80 gear.
Assuming 7k average AP which isn't that hard to rach in a raid setting you're increasing your AP by 7%, so you'll probably get something like 5% total damage from it.

For those 10 points you otherwise get:
3-5% damage from Desecration (depending on encounter)
~1% damage from 5% Crit for IT and 5% additional chance to proc Rime
~1.5-2% damage from BS
~4% damage from Crypt Fever if there's no Unholy DK (around 3% damage from increased disease damage and around 1% damage from increased BCB damage)
or
up to ~8% damage from NotD allowing you to keep your ghoul alive when it would've otherwise died

Worst case you're doing the same DPS, best case you're doing up to 10% more damage.

The problem is that you don't just lose crypt fever and NotD, you lose Bone Armor (2% more damage) and Desecration (which even on fights like Grobbulus has about 77% uptime) all in exchange for about 500 AP fully raid buffed. All together, it's a net loss.

[e]: Updated, no impurity loss.

Thanks for the responses hidden & darkside

nvm

Are we sure this isn't a new bug? I used CG as 2h unholy all through beta and for the first month on live. Yeah, I know FC is better, I was working off some now-outdated DPS tests from beta. Anyway, I remember seeing the CG buff stay up for long stretches of time that would be hard to account for if Unholy Blight was eating it.

Back in the early beta nearly nothing was consuming the debuff, I'm not even sure if anything was consuming it. Hence I wouldn't base any conclusions on beta data.

32/39 is a great spec, but the resent killing Machine changes left me with a question. Is the spec still MH fast OH fast like before or has it changed to MH slow OH fast? For this spec would MH Hailstorm OH Hailstorm be the better bet or would you see higher dps output by changing the MH Hailstorm to say Angry Dread?

Thanks in advance.

Actually I would rather run the x2 Hailstorm's for cool factor but what myself and other raiders are trying to find is the top dps for DW spec. I've done testing and it seems the old fast/fast is better but this is not the case with other tests, many people are switching to a slow MH fast OH. Has anyone done some really solid testing to find the true answer behind which is in fact better dps?

This was answered back on page 73. The difference is very small, speed is almost a non factor now.

http://elitistjerks.com/1078116-post1818.html


Every 5 pages or so we seem to be getting repeat questions. Once the new frost tree comes out and all the changes are set in stone we need to work on a new OP for this thread.

Fargom thank you for the link! Sorry; at 80+ pages it's pretty easy to miss something while browsing through. It seems that the old fast/fast still trumps slow/fast but again use the best weapons you have. For the much used 32/39 I would say try to go for fast/fast, sense HB and IT are our main focus for dps, BS is the only ability in the rotation the gets more boost from MH dmg so it's not an issue.

Thanks much!

Whats the theory behind the 35/36 spec with Runic Power mastery 2/3

Giving you 120 energy so you can do 3 Deathcoils in the 2nd rotation I'm assuming. There are ways of getting it in the first rotation but then wont have the Death rune needed for it in the 2nd rotation.

This is also A spec that I was trying to see if it would work better with Unholy presence saying your runes will refresh before the 3rd Death Coil, and I can't really tell if the 3rd DC is worth it. In unholy pres. there is just to much filler time doing nothing. So I can only assume to use Blood pres.

Doing the Basic rotation of

PS-IT-HB-BS-BS- DC
PS-IT-HB-IT-IT- DC (3 DC's because 120 runic power)

I tried other rotations as well to get 120 Runic power on the first rotation using Blood tap and Horn of winter But in the end it doesnt matter because you cant get 120 runic power in both rotation even with Dirge

For example

HoW(horn) PS-IT-HB-BS-BS-BT-IT which results in 120 runic power on the first rotation but then the 2nd rotation I cant produce 120 runic obviously because I need that 2nd Death rune. So I am going to assume its just best to have the runic power for the 2nd rotation only.

My question I guess would be is having 3 DC's even worth it, not thinking about NotD in the basic 32/39 which is what my usually spec is. Even if the 3rd DC is a dps increase, It just doesnt seem worth it has anyone else tried this build?

Edit: though this doesnt matter to much but can obviously spec 34/37 for a point in NotD

I think that is the build that ztn used to get his top DPS score.

Armory

A large reason why his DPS was so high was due to a 3 healer quick kill. There are a lot of things that you have to take into consideration when you look at wws/wmo parses. Time / buffs / raid make up being some of them.

In my opinion, most of the competent specs out can be very competitive as long as they are played correctly.

Yeah, sorry for any confusion -- I didn't necessarily mean to put forward his build as the Holy Grail of DW DPS (I seem to remember he was getting spammed with Tricks of the Trade for one thing). I just mentioned it since Nachotank asked if anyone else has tried that particular build.

Personally I'm of the opinion that the 3 x DC that you can get from 2/3 RPM cannot possibly make up for the things you're missing (certainly no NotD is a big loss on stuff like Sarth, Sapph etc). Ztn's build might eke out a few more Patchwerk numbers but its utility and general usefulness are surely inferior to more 'standard' 0/32/38+1 builds.

I know this maybe off topic abit since its about dw.
however inspired by the insane amount of dps dw does, and with the recent changes to killing machine, i found that 2hr
0/44/27 seems to be fairly strong. I've been using it for sometime and manage to hit 4k with mainly 10man naxx gear.
just wondering what you guys think of this spec and maybe help me decide weather or not to drop master of gouls and put it else where, however gouls do give me a good 11% of my dps with the glyph.

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Death Knight -> Talent Calculator

Ok, I haven't been able to read through all those posts here (since I'm a 'new guy')...
Yet, I have a question about DW tanking. Rune strike does 150% weapon damage, would this mean a big TPS loss compared to a 2hander (which obviously has more weapon damage) or is it neglectable?

This thread is mainly about DW DPS builds, not DW tanking builds. Check the tanking thread for more info on DW Tanking builds.

By the same token of the previous post, please refer to the Frost DPS thread for advice.