Has anybody noticed their DRW is no longer dropping D&D? I've tried multiple times in multiple instances and it seems to no longer want to do it. It still death coils and everything though.

It's likely the major increase you see is less an issue with the compendium and more that the [Betrayer of Humanity] takes advantage of your Orc Expertise Racial while [tem]Demise[/item] does not, in addition to what the others before me have stated.

...no, it really doesn't. Not in 2-handed specs. Our damage come from:
1) diseases
2) white attacks
3) special strikes
4) RP dumps

Only 1 of those sources is remotely affected by Haste if we're using a 2-hander. Unlike Warriors and rogues who dual wield, haste does not scale with us or our mechanics. For them, haste helps them build rage, apply poisons, and white damage is a huge chunk of their dps. It's more like 20-30% for us and that's all that haste does - increase white hits. Even our talents that scale with haste are marginal talents and not critical ones. If we had a big time ability that was based on crits (like hunters and warriors) then haste/crit stacking might help more. But that's simply not how we're built. Moreover, the item budgeting on haste doesn't make it overly attractive over Atk Pwr.

Could more research be done on haste? Certainly. Does it help our dps? Certainly. Are we giving it short shrift? Definitely not. It's great in DW specs...

If you have some numbers to share, please do. But there's just no support either qualitatively or quantitatively to make us think that haste is worth anymore than it is when not dual wielding.

A lot of people are seeing low dmg due to lack of gear. One of the biggest upgrades you can get for Blood spec and really any DK spec is the weapon. Though I see a lot of DKs not hit capped 1. and then not EXP capped 2nd. With so many options from badges, heroics loot, how easy 10 man and 25 man NAXX are and the 2 dragons there should no reason you aren't hit capped.

Also I think 50/0/021 is a better spec for starter DKs and as you get better gear, more AP, better weapon and get comfortable with DKs then swap to 51/13/7.

Well, just doing quick math in my head (maybe not a good idea this early in the morning) looking at my average HS, Oblit and DC damage, assuming you always have enough RP to cast the extra DC you can fit in the second rune order, Oblit + DC should actually do more damage than HS + HS. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think that rotation is superior to 4xHS on the second set assuming Oblit is glyphed (for this spec, that is)?

Has anyone gotten to any definite results while testing 50/0/21 vs 51/13/7? Whats the gear breakpoint at which one is better than the other?

On a different note, I'm somewhat disappointed with the amount of DPS I manage to dish out. I cant break 3k in either spec, and on patchwerk I had about 2.7k using 50/0/21. I've seen WWS parses where DKs with my stats/spec do around 4.5k DPS, I just cant figure out what it is I'm doing wrong.

My rotation for 50/0/21 is
OB - PS - IT - HS - HS
HS - HS - HS - HS - OB
IT - PS - HS - HS and so on. I DC whenever SD is up, or when my runes are on CD.

My rotation for 51/13/7 is
PS - IT - HS - HS - OB
HS - HS - HS -HS - OB
PS - IT - HS - HS and so on. Again, I DC whenever SD is up, or when my runes are on CD. Basically every time I have FU up I use OB, and whenever its blood/death I use HS. I always refresh my IT/PS just before they fall off.

Armory:
The World of Warcraft Armory
(Just in case its not updated yet, I use the meteorite trinket from Ymiron instead of the pvp trinket when raiding)

What am I doing wrong? Any insights?

EDIT: I know I'm way above hit cap, I plan on regemming all those +hit gems to +str gems as soon as I find someone to cut me a Chaotic Skyflare Diamond.

Not to mention sigil of awareness gets more work with that rotation

The sigil probably makes a difference, but due to GCD capping in blood presence, it seems obvious to me that your rotation would do more than the full HS one. Obvious, but didn't think about it before however ^^. Would that mean that Death runes are useless? I don't see much to spend the points on sadly, but still, sounds pretty good, I'll try it next time I spec blood DPS.

I think the Death Runes would still be useful for flexibility in terms of throwing stuff like Pestilence or Mark of Blood without needing to blow Blood Tap (though that will be down often to throw an extra HS anyway) should it come up in a weird spot in your rotation. Doesn't seem like it would be a factor in a purely single-target fight, though.

I'm using the 51/13/7 spec from the original DPS Compendium with a little bit of a change, instead of the three points in Annihilation, I put them into Imp Rune Tap. The only reason I switched it up is my rotation goes

PS - IT - HS - HS - OB - DC - DC, then PS - IT - HSx4 - DC - DC, and restart. Obviously open to Sudden Death procs, but that's the basic idea. Annihilation is kind of pointless because I'm reapplying diseases after the first round, right?

And I went with Imp Rune Tap because if things go to shit and the healer is busy elsewhere, a Death Strike and Rune Tap and I'm getting back 6k health at a moment's notice.

Am I just doing it wrong and should just go back to my priest?

VV Where am I going in the Unholy tree, then? It looks kind of messy unless I'm going 50 points deep, especially around Tier 2.

Here are my thoughts to the whole Unholy vs blood presence debate.

First of all, I use the 51/13/7 build, cause it's easier to play and I believe it scales better with gear. I use Claymore of ancient power as weapon and in total I have (completely unbuffed) 3320 AP and 27.5% crit. I also use glyph of Icy Touch and Obliterate cause those are must-haves if you're gonna play with unholy presence.

Anyway, when I first started hitting the training dummies I got around 2000 dps (single target) in both blood and unholy without popping any cooldowns except for Blood Tap. But I felt that 2000 dps was way under what I expected. So I started concentrating more and trying different rotations. So after maybe an hour of practicing and alot of focusing I was able to do 2300 dps with Blood Presence under 4 minutes. Pretty good, I told myself and then I tried Unholy presence. Of course, this required an almost completely different rotation than with blood presence so after like 30 minutes of practicing, I managed to do 2600 dps (no exaggeration). Again, I was completely unbuffed and used no cooldowns such as Hysteria and DRW. No, I used only blood tap cause the rotation kinda requires it.

I already knew that Unholy could compete with Blood Presence but I didn't know it could do it this well. Anyway, the thought behind the theory is that while in blood, you can't use every ability and have cooldown on everything and 0 runic power all the time while still having no "downtime" between your special attacks. And that is all because of the long GCD. BUT! That is actually very much possible in Unholy presence if you do everything correctly and keep focus on procs, runes and runic power.

So, what does my rotation look like? Well as I said, it kinda depends on procs and everything, but this is what it looks like

Obliterate > Plague Strike > Icy Touch > Heart Strike > Death Coil/HS (depending on sudden doom) > HS/DC > Blood Tap > HS > DC > DC/HS > HS/DC > Plague strike/DC > Icy Touch > DC and then after that it gets too complicated and you'll have to improvise.

Anyway, the general idea here is to use DC whenever you can. If you get a sudden doom proc - USE IT ASAP. Otherwise, your next HS won't have any chance on proccing (well it'll refresh the duration) and you've not only lost a crit and a free Death Coil, but you'll also have alot more "downtime" (that's what I call it when everything's on cooldown and you can only do auto-attacks).

In Unholy presence using this rotation, DC is 22% of my damage while 28% is Heart Strike and 27% is melee. About 10% is Obliterate and the rest is just dots, icy touch and plague strike (+ bloodworms).


And one more thing, the difference between focusing and not focusing while DPSing is HUGE.