I get this when a frost or unholy rune has been converted to a death rune by the Death Rune Mastery talent. If I'm not paying enough attention, I hit an additional Heart Strike which consumes the Death Rune and leaves you unable to refresh your diseases. I guess with Lag issues this could be a possible cause of your problem.

You can fix this problem by hitting Blood Tap or Empower Rune Weapon but it tends to be best just to restart and try to be very disciplined in your rotations. If you add an extra obliterate in error, then a restart is pretty much forced.

Contrary to most other classes I have played, the rotations used as a Death Knight do have quite a profound effect on overall DPS and losing your diseases before you're done with strikes, or consuming a rune needed to refresh them, can result in significant losses in overall DPS.

I've got some points I wanted to air for discussion also as I don't see much reference to them in the pages I've been reading through...

Healing Abilities

Based on my own experiences...

I found MoB to be the only talent worth consideration as while Vampiric Blood is very useful, it's extremely situational and comes across more of a tanking talent to me.

Bloodworms in contrast while adding "some" DPS are extremely likely to be killed off and the healing is of little value in a raid environment where no healer would watch you die so slowly that worms would make a difference. Add to that the option of just switching an obliterate for a death strike in rotation and it's a real loser imo.

Blood Aura is the worst of the bunch as far as I can see and is really unpopular on Patchwerk. I've done whole 25 man raids where the healing from this aura was so pathetic it cannot possibly be justified. To give an idea of this, I hit about 20k obliterate crits on Thaddius on occasion and that yields about 400 healing... awesome.

My own choice has been to abandon all of these talents, and simply max out Rune Tap, along with the Glyph. I now have a situational group heal that can make a difference, some examples...

Loatheb to ease the burden on the healers, Sapphiron (I tend to use it when behind ice cubes well out of melee range anyway)and sometimes on Kel'Thuzad, particularly when coming out of Ice Cubes to help my melee group back up to full hp.

Unholy/Blood Scaling

For a while now, I've been advising our guilds death knights to spec unholy for levelling and only to switch to blood once their gear is at a pretty high level, the only good reason I can see for being blood before quite high gear levels is the possibilty you just enjoy it more than unholy. Unholy seems to output significantly more DPS not just due to its AE nature but also due to it's Armor bypassing qualities (not to mention the hit boost) and this doesn't seem to drop until very late game when your gear is of a very high standard.

I raid with another Unholy Death Knight. He's similarly geared, if a little worse geared than I am, he's a very talented player and after 3 years I like to think I'm good enough to hold a solid rotation as well.

On the Thaddius fight, my Blood DPS absolutely annhiliated him, by about 1500 DPS.

In most other fights where you don't get a scaling boost, his DPS is extremely comparable to mine.

I am aware of a bug which prevents 2 Unholy DK's benefitting from the Ebon Plague boosts, that and the fact we need Abominations Might keeps me as Blood Spec. I love Blood and would not want to change, but it feels like a lot hard work compared to when I have specced Unholy, had no glyph and put out very comparable DPS with next to no practice.

I wanted to ask if any other Death Knights were finding it as difficult as I am to keep up with their Unholy counterparts.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft - cookie cutter basic starting kit spec

with the messed up rotation that people keep posting.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft - in Pet friendly content

Rotation - PS / IT / HS / HS / OB /DC**
PS / IT / HS / HS / HS / HS / OB / DC*** -- repeat this last line until mob is dead

Pop gargoyle then Hysteria and the rotation changes to:

PS / IT / HS / HS / HS / HS / OB -- wait sec -- Repeat this line until the pet has done its full duration

Note that there is no use of DC in this phase as it burns the RP that the pet uses to sustain itself after the initial time period it is supposed to be up for. Most people burn their RP during this phase and dont get full use of their pet and they loose dps as a result. If you stuff a rotation up then use Empower Rune weapon to reset the runes and start the rotation again from the 1st step.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft - in non pet friendly content

Rotation - PS / IT / HS / HS / OB / DC**
PS / IT / HS / HS / HS / HS / OB / DC*** -- repeat this last line until mob is dead

Pop DRW then Hysteria and the rotation changes to:

PS / IT / HS / HS / HS / HS / OB -- wait sec -- Repeat this line until the pet has done its full duration

With these 2 specs using Ghoul 4-5secs after the Gargoyle/DRW have expired (if no one in the raid is dead, which wont matter when the patch comes out) will enable about a 5-15secs time period (maybe a little more) when there are no pets up but the rotation maximizes the usage of the pets and keeps constant DPS on the target.

With the blood/unholy dps spec, yes you are going to be re applying the DOTs and maybe loosing a few ticks (1-4secs between OB and the next application of PS) but you are not at a loss as you have NO wasted white DMG, each white dmg is doing more DMG and chance to DO even more dmg, and since Blood is heavily dependent on max dmg weapons the Necrosis and Blood-cake blade fit in perfectly as a nice compliment. The only throw away talent in the spec i would say is the Corpse Explode, but since Blood has limited AOE application i threw it in to add some.

The limited people i have helped on my server with specs, gear and rotation, and even you guys (as you are using specs i developed and posted) have come back with mind boggling results. Ive had DK's in Green/Blues out dps people in full Valorous / 25man content gear. These people then come to me for advice and even helped out some of their guild DK's out with spec and re gearing advice.

The guy that posted his Recount details, with the gear that you have you should be pulling 3k+ sustained dps for the full duration of the Heroic Test dummies HP (yes 10mil HP), its the spec and the rotation of the spec that are failing you there. Make sure you are also attacking from Behind on them to get the better idea as you are most always attacking from that position.

Kheranax i tryed both and yes it´s easy to make the same amount of damage at allmost every Boss, i think with enough armor ignore it will change.



Akuja, please tell why should this be better if u use PS Glyph (i assume):


How does that works if u dont use OB u cant use HS times 4

I totally support that HS is more powerfull then OB without OB Glyph and Sigil of Awareness

Can someone tell me, whats the use of HS before OB in my eyes it makes no change exept having runes cooled down in an other circle and having Problems watching not to hit HS once to much.

To answer the first question, he does use OB in his first run through the rotation. That's the first line. The second time through he doesn't. That's the second line with the four HS. This is the standard notation for how DK rotations are displayed, as almost all of them have two alternating sub rotations.

As for the second, 51/0/20 builds do not have Annihilation and as such will consume diseases when using OB. While not the bulk of your damage, diseases do tick as DoTs and it is better to give them as much time to do so as possible.

Blood Aura is at least getting a tad better next patch, but even so I know what you mean about Rune Tap. Early on I didn't bother taking it, but now that I've tried it having the ability to heal myself in a clinch (and my group) is just great. I still take Vampiric Blood as well, if only because it's so useful on heavy damage fights or when we're light on healers. When it gets the last stand effect added, it will be a no brainer.

I know it's supposed to be a tight rotation, but honestly Blood has never felt as starved for cooldowns as people make it sound. I've always played casters, where if we weren't using our gcd we weren't doing our job, so it feels natural to me that I've got something to do every second, and it just doesn't feel that hard to keep up. Granted, I use the 4HS/3OB rotation rather than the 6HS one, since I seem to post better numbers that way. Still, once the rotation becomes reflex, it's not difficult to keep up. I routinely beat our other raiding DKs (a mix of unholy and dw frost), and am usually competing with our two fury warriors for the top spot.

I think you're absolutely right on every point. The problem is educating everyone else in the raid... They think "cool, blood aura. Nobody else gives me that buff. I like buffs." I literally have people tell me "aww, why didnt you spec blood aura tonight" and disagree when I say it's a gimmick and waste of points even after 3.0.8. The same goes for mark of blood, to a lesser extent. It's neat, acting as a ghetto hot in fights like Maexxna and again it "brings something to the raid". But in both cases, neither instance of "bringing to the raid" comes close to, say, bringing Dalaran Brilliance or Mind Control.

Yes... Now that our unholy DK got some decent gear and practice on his rotations, he's outdpsing me on pulls AND single-target fights (Naxx 25). You have to get *everything* right or you fall behind.

If you want to wait for Mirror of truth (and you should) before popping drw, you waste a good deal of time with drw just sitting there ready and waiting to be used. If you want to keep cooldowns stacke, then your cooldowns spend too long waiting to be used. For example, you can do:

0 min: DRW, Ghoul
3 min: DRW
5 min: Ghoul
6 min: DRW
9 min: DRW
10 min: Ghoul
12 min: DRW
(finally it repeats)

Or you can do:

0 min: DRW, Ghoul
3 min: DRW
6 min: DRW, Ghoul
9 min: DRW
(etc)

Resulting in 1 minute out of every 6 of lost ghoulage. Which is better? How about when you throw a 2 minute trinket in there, do you do

0 min: Trink, DRW
2 min: Trink
3 min: DRW
4 min: Trink
6 min: Trink, DRW
(etc)

or

0 min: Trink, DRW
3 min: Trink, DRW
6 min: Trink, DRW?

On trash, hysteria is almost always wasted, most pulls are finished in 15 seconds. Your ghoul will be around for 2 pulls maybe 3, and will otherwise be standing around waiting to expire. No, trash doesn't matter, but it does to me when another spec holds the edge over me on both trash AND bosses.

On bosses, I'm still trying to get comfortable with cooldown timing. Do I use hysteria now or do I wait a little bit longer for bloodlust.. when is bloodlust coming, anyways? When is my Mirror of truth going to proc? Will I have any runes and runic power available when it does? What I usually wind up doing, since there are many other factors to consider, is just watching my overall AP, and blowing my wad whenever i see it spike over 7k.

I also am curious what a rotation should be when drw is out, because I think I'm crippling drw's dps by obliterating it's diseases off. Then I find myself refreshing my diseases too early just to get my drw's diseases back up, which is probably worse still for overall dps. Is it better just to use death strikes for the duration, with OB only used at the end of the disease cycle?

By the way, I *JUST* noticed the new title of the thread.. sad, but funny, and most of all, true.

Morbidity is in the first tier of Unholy... it's not as if you have to go deep to get it.

I've read through this post, and the standard DK discussion post, and as I am halfway through the Frost DPS thread a few things cross my mind that haven't been mentioned here, and they relate to the extra OB in a rotation vs spamming HS.

Has anyone tried the rotation that skips the PS, and uses the extra runes to sneak in an extra OB. In Frost spec you can use your rune mastery to turn the blood runes into death runes, but with Rune tap this ability becomes available to us at least as often as the 1 min cooldown. If we have already decided to consider the extra OB vs a HS then we should also consider sacrificing one more HS along with a PS to sneak in yet another OB.
Some of the common rotations seem to be IT, OB, HS, HS, Bloodtap(it releases the Bloodrune to a Deathrune and skips the GCD)allowing-OB. I will try to work with the rotation once I am able to log on, but think that an unbiased opinion may be helpful.
THis should leave you with just enough time to finish the new, semi-standard, part of the rotation - HS, OB, OB, HS.
If there isnt some way to keep this rotation up over a period of time, you can mix the standart PS, IT rotation back in until Bloodtap comes back off of cooldown. In the frost spec discussion, some of the runes began popping back up eraticaly, and this was solved by switching the second set to HS, OB, HS, OB.

As far as Bloodaura and Runetap/vampiric blood are concerned, I dont look at these as wasted talent points (namely because you need to spend them to get to DRW anyway) but tools that are available to us to keep our health over the 75% mark so that we can benifit from the effects of Bloodgorged.

I also have seen very little discussion of the viability of a 53/18/0 spec. I find this to be a very enjoyable spec to use, but havent seen anyone discuss its viability as a DPS Raid spec. My original intention was to spec deep enough into Frost to grab Improved Icy Talons (No enhance Shammy in my guild) but have decided that the 10% flat rate DPS from Bloodgorged (in addition to the +hit) and the mentioned possibilities of DRW, too good to pass up. Many Blood are already specing far enough down to get Annihalation anyway so I would think that it has at least been tried before, but no one seems to be discussing it.

Haste has pretty much been determined to be one of the least desired effects of a DK, but 20% Haste is nothing to scoff at, and with as high of a percentage of our DPS belonging to melee anyway (combined with all of the chance on hit/crit abilities that we use) this is something that maybe we have overlooked. Not to mention the fact that our oversized, slow, and extremely powerful weapons will benifit from this as well. Would i gem for +Haste, probably not, but 20% is 20%, and we are still getting all of the benifits from +str in Blood spec anyway. In the run and gun boss fights that have been described, where many are switching to Unholy aura just to keep up, the 20% increase to Haste will only be further buffed by the 5% provided from the Aura. Like it or not, we are going to get a decent amount of Haste shoved down our throats anyway on all the epic gear, so maybe this will make it seem more worthwhile as well.

Im not saying that I have it all figured out, but half of the fun of this class is formulating and refining the different theories behind min/maxing, and I think that this is the next logical step (considering it, and testing it) not just immediately accepting or denying its potential.

I would be interested to see what kind of numbers we could produce with these results, and maybe it will help to aleviate the overal negative attitude that seems to be assosiated with what was once considered the go-to single target DPS spec.

Dark, I'm pretty sure Icy Talons doesn't stack with Windfury.

It doesn't.

However, any raid buff available to us is not going to stack with somethingnelse already out there. It would just depend on your standard raid composition. Personaly, I don't have an enh sham in my guild. It would be nice if it would scale to the fact that it's not a raid buff in my case, but a 5 point talent (doesn't seem worth the extra points to get down to improved Icy talons) but I doubt that it would work that way.

I would be interested to see how the rest of my suggestions would pan out, with or without that spec.

Coincedentaly, I have had time to finish the frost thread now, and the general concensus is that OB is our ultimate trump card. Maybe we should look at HS as a way to buff a mediocre strike into an improved strike, but still pay homage to the ace up our sleeve (OB) and try to pull it out as often as possible. At least until they give HS a serious buff.

From the new PTR patch notes.

Dancing Rune Blade: The weapon no longer echoes the Raise Dead and Army of the Dead spells. In addition it will now more closely match the master?s damage and will cast Rune Strike when its master does.

Ouch.

It's definitely a buff. I don't spec DRW just because it's damage is horrible. A second ghoul does nothing to make it do more damage. Gargoyle does about DOUBLE my DRW's DPS even after I got Betrayer. That's not right.

I actually have the opposite experience, after respeccing from unholy to blood I saw my DPS increase by alot. I wasn't that bad at keeping our pets up, and threat was never really a problem. I believe I used a fairly standard 20/0/51 Unholy build, vs 51/13/7 Blood, and used all appropriate glyphs. Speccing into Blood gained me about 300 dps in raids.

I'm starting to wonder if I did something wrong as Unholy before

Edit: Thinking in hindsight, the few weeks I did 20/0/51 I did play with an unholy tank bugging Ebon plague for me, which might have caused it. Has anyone done some napkin math on the possible dps loss while playing with another (or several more) Unholy DKs in a raid?

It's impossible to say for sure without knowing exactly your rotation as Unholy. However, 20/0/51 is not fairly standard, it's strictly inferior to 17/0/54. There are no dps talents in blood to take with those 3 extra points, and to lose 3 points in Unholy you lose some combination of Wandering Plague, UB, NotD, or RoR.

Just want to throw this out there, [Darkmoon Card: Greatness] is amazing. Last night was my first raid with it and I am in love.

16'57'' of DPS time on boss fights, Greatness proced 24 times. Overall, 43 minutes of DPS it proced 68 times. I spent about 12-14k on the cards but it was WELL worth it.

Here is the WWS if your interested: Wow Web Stats

I searched a few times and found next to nothing about this trinket so figured I'd post this for anyone interested in it.

You're right I was a bit in a hurry when I posted that and indeed I did max out WP, RoR and took UB, mistake on my side. My point was that I did see a dps increase speccing to blood, and as an ex-rogue I found maintaining rotations not too hard so that couldn't have been my problem. Anyways I'm a loner here as far as I can see on matters of who actually gained dps so it must have been something on my department somehow still

I found nothing about how often it procs, obviously you can tell it's the best trinket just from looking at it. I just thought I'd share that information for anyone that was curious.

I apologize if this spec has already been discussed elsewhere as well, but I have to say I use a spec very similiar to this and I've had it be the best dps for my playstyle. I also have to note I'm not in end game and don't do raiding, so I unfortunately dont have a raider's point of view on things in addition to my gear being of a somewhat low level for lv.80 (lots of quest gear etc).

I use [51/18/2] Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I took the blood aura because I dps in unholy presence and the 2% healing (at least for me) is nice since I do quite a bit of soloing. I took imp rune tap (glyphed as well) for similiar reasons as well as the glyph being useful in the group situations I find myself in. Otherwise I think my blood talents are fairly cookie cutter.

I've found that with a combination of unholy presence + icy talons, I seem to get a lot of benefits. Everything I've read has stated how worthless haste is for us, and I dont really try to gear for it (what I get from talents is enough).

I use the following rotation:

PS > IT > OB > HS > HS > DC
PS > IT > HS > HS > HS > HS > DC

I think for a blood spec, that haste talentry seems to synergize very well with a lot of things.

- my faster swings seem to increase the value of Abominations Might and Bloody vengence for my melee swings, which is always in my top 2 overall dps according to recount
- Rune of the fallen crusader doesn't appear to have an internal cooldown, and 35% melee haste (15% unholy presence + 20% icy talons) seems to help its uptime
- the global cooldown reduction from unholy presence for me is HUGE, and I can more efficiently get out my strikes in my rotations and it seems to offset the 15% damage loss from not using blood presence. Because of this, I never have the problem of sitting on top of my runic power, I can efficiently use it quickly and not miss a beat in my rotation even without epidemic (unless I screw up my rotation, which happens). I might also be getting a small damage boost from never having to sit on runic power; I'm not wasting it by leaving it capped
- I seem to get more Rune Strike procs because as I'm attacking 35% faster I'm giving myself 35% faster opportunities to be parried or dodged (sounds bad I know but Rune Strike hits hard)

My other options for points don't seem to offer as much overall dps potential as the 5 points in icy talons.

Vicious strikes is nice but I dont use death strike often and the boost to plague strike is minimal overall since its such a weak skill to begin with.

Epidemic is debatable and because I dont take it I cant (or wont?) use Obliterate more then once in a 20 second rotation. However, with the frost talents I have picked up Icy Touch recieves a whopping 70% damage boost, the combination of Plague Strike + Icy Touch is only about 100-200 dmg less then Obliterate for me (I use the glyphed oblit).

I take 2/3 Morbidity which is an awesome talent, but from my recount data on the boss dummy in the Ebon Hold, I've roughly calculated that the 4% damage boost to white damage from Icy talons gives more overall damage then 5% boost to death coil. Death coil is still easily in my top 5 dps moves though.

I'm not a math whiz and I definitely don't think of myself as the best player by any means, but I've been following this thread a long time and it's really helped me. In fact, my spec/rotation/etc might not be the most efficient at all, but its what I'm most comfortable playing. I just wanted to add my contribution and what I "felt" worked best for me. Like I said, I'm not good with theorycraft and only base my thoughts on personal experience.

I want to echo the fears many seem to have that Blood simply can't hold its own to other specs. Not just 2H Unholy but any dual-wield spec. Right now, while a little un-balanced, the strength brought by DW specs and HB and the simplicity of their rotation makes them far superior. Any melee that can DW should, for obvious reasons (throw a good 2H on and then compare that to two 154 dps 1-handers), and DW simply doesn't seem to work for Blood. The strengths that blood showcases (high physical dps, high-end scalability) are also the strengths that the DW track exhibits, but Blood doesn't mesh with DWing. Its complete reliance on weapon-based strikes makes it an unworthy candidate for a quality DW build.

While I'm sure some top-end Blood DKs are competitive, I'd be willing to bet that they will already be able to increase their dps by going DW this early in the expansion and it stands to reason that will continue through the next couple tiers. Personally I struggled to keep up, even having Death's Bite, but I saw my dps shoot up 20% by picking a DW build with 2 blue weapons.

DW was always the future for DKs, but I didn't think it would get here this quick. I would challenge hardcore Blood DKs to compare their parses with a 44/27 build or a 32/39 build and see if it holds up. I don't see it happening. And while they are buffing HS in the next patch, they are also taking HB off its 6 sec cooldown.

Regarding the 51/13/7 build as being inferior because DRW isn't as hot-to-trot as we all hoped and dreamed it would be (not a majority consensus by any stretch, but I've seen the opinion out there), I disagree. While DRW is unimpressive, it isn't bad. Moreover, the bigger benefit I've found is that I can use the OB heavy rotation PS-IT-OB-HSx2-Dump OB-OB-HS-HS-Dump or thereabouts, I think there's a third round of OBx2-HSx2, but I'm tired and I forget, to great effect. I've been raiding without 4piece T7 and have found a second long gap every few rotations where I could spend another DC, but otherwise it feels much tighter and less wasteful than the HS heavy rotations.

More importantly, it seems (I say seems because I was frost last week and I'm basing the two rotations' comparision on training dummy numbers) to be a substantial DPS increase as well. With reasonably good gear (the shoulders and boots are new, upgraded from ilvl 200 purples), and lacking the Heigan sigil, I've been quite happy with my numbers. Patch tonight saw me sitting at a bit over 4700 (it didn't track my ghoul, so I'm going by Recount's numbers). Is the 50/21 doing significantly more than that at comparable gear levels? If so, I'll consider giving it a go, though my dislike for pets borders on the pathological.

just make a normal search on wowhead, examine the proc and its clear as day..

90 passive str
15 sec duration 300 str proc
45 sec ICD
35% procrate on attacks makes it go off almost instantly once ICD is up
Unlike most other trinkets it scales with BoK and Str talents making this trinket OP for its ilvl

This has been my experience as well. DRW isn't as nice as we'd like, but its supposedly getting better about mirroring our damage next patch, and it will also last longer so we'll get another GCD or two out of it. In all it's a good 51 pointer. I had the same problem with a wasted GCD until I got 4pT7. The extra runic power provides me enough to squeeze out an extra DC every time the pause comes up, which is quite nice. It also lets me cap my RP faster for getting DRW out the door.