as far as rotations. I find them very difficult and once I enter into prolonged combat I just wing it after the opening runes are all used. I prioritize my attacks based on what runes are available. Its a little more complicated than that but I find that it works. I try to prolong my diseses and predict when i might need to use a pair of FU runes ( or death runes) to refresh the diseases. After the diseases are taken care of I use heartstrike until I do not have any death runes or blood runes available. Then I use obliterate to generate more. If or some reason I have one frost or unholy rune available with deathrunes coming up soon I just use rune dump till I can use obliterate to utilize that stray rune. Is this a good practice or should I heartstrike and just wait until I have an additional rune to pair with it? I make it a point not to use a pair of deathrunes on an obliterate. I am also in blood presence and my rune power constantly overflows. I find it impossible maintain my rune power whle using runes as soon as hey are available. I prioritize heartstrikes over deathcoils unless I have a sudden doom proc and then I use it immediately. Since I do not have a rotation I do not have a designated rune dump period, I usually just use rp to fill in the "deadzones" or to keep up the dps if I am only waiting a second or two for a crucial multi-rune ability. Maybe that is my problem and I need to learn to use a rotation.

I've been playing my DK in mostly 10 man Naxx and some 25 man Sarth and VOA and I have a different view on when to switch from 2x OB & 6x HS to 3x OB and 4x HS rotations.

While theorycraft shows that 2x HS does more damage than 1x OB without the Heigan25 Sigil, there is more to consider. Blood DKs are constrained by Runes, RP and GCDs. When i tried to do the HS spam rotation, I found myself running out of the GCD resource a lot, i simply didn't have the time to DC at all and spent most of the fight at 100 RP.

Because 1x OB and 1x DC is more damage than 2x HS, I have opted for going with the 3x OB rotation before even reaching that magical Heigan25 sigil. I have almost no latency and my raids tend to be stacked with melee buffs. I don't think I'm missing any 25-man specific synergy and thus I wonder if the advice to stick to the 6x HS rotation before you get the Heigan sigil is good advice.

IT PS OB HS HS - DC - OB OB HS HS - DC has structurally given me more DPS than the 6x HS rotation has, pretty much since I've started raiding.

My current spec is unholy because the other DK in my runs wanted to try blood, but I've been pretty easily pulling 3800-4000 DPS in my current gear as blood in 25 man VoA/Sarth PUGs.

Hi gang, I would like to get some input from the blood DK's here. I have played unholy since 55, recently I was looking into DW but with the incoming nerfs it's not looking as attractive. I'm a min/maxer so I like to go where the DPS is and I don't mind regearing/learning new rotations. I will admit my knowledge with blood is a bit lackluster which is why I'm here. From my understanding, Blood scales really well with gear. If that's the case, I think I'm at a point where moving from unholy to blood may be a good idea. Please check out my armory and let me know if you think I would see a DPS increase and what spec would best suit my gear.

From my understanding, please correct me if Im wrong, but the 51/0/20 is for starter blood, while the 51/13/7? is best for higher end gear with the heavy use of Oblit. I have also included some WWS parses of me as 2 hand unholy to give you an idea where I stand and figure out if going blood would be an increase for me.

Thanks for this topic and keep up the good work!

The World of Warcraft Armory

Wow Web Stats

I won the roll last night on [Fury of the Five Flights], as I can't find any list of trinkets for a dps DK on the internet (all lists have everything beside trinkets), can anyone confirm this is actually the best you can get for a DPS DK in the game right now (with arguably the darkmoon fair greatness deck).

That's lucky, but I am somewhat concerned this trinket would benefit more dual wielding dps due to the speed of stacking...

5k will definitly be possible, if not more.
Take a look at my gear (armory) and you will see that it is all but "best in slot" and i am already able to maintan 4-4,4k DPS sustained on a 25 men Patchwork kill.
So there is enough room for improvements with better gear.

Zurm has proven (i think in the unholy dps thread) that it's not best in slot because it takes too long to put 20 stacks up as 2H and falls off the mob too easily if you have to move (which a lot of bosses require).

I believe the best in slot ones currently are Greatness, Mirror of Truth and Bandit's Insignia, followed by yours

Edit: Typo in the number of stacks fixed

I'd say it's probably a good choice for 2H Frost because their RP dump will stack the buff, but for Blood it's probably in the same boat as Unholy. You'd probably get around 10 stacks per rune rotation. I'm guessing it's still one of the best in slot for fights where it has a guaranteed full uptime though, and still wouldn't be very far off for movement fights.

Wrong, there is ample discussion regarding trinkets check for example this page of the unholy thread

Unholy DPS Discussion

And this took me the huge amount of ~1 min to search... Might as well do the same next time, instead of cluttering these threads even more, reading them is getting to be frankly painful lately, with all the posts asking that kind of easy-to-search question.

Those discussions are what I was talking about in my post, but thanks for the presumption.

I wouldn't call a short, month old discussion about trinket choices buried in a mess of other gear chat an in-depth analysis. There's been some talk, but no one's really presented a complete analysis of all the top end trinkets in relation to one another. Zurm's done some great work with Unholy spec gear choices, but this is a Blood thread, and the talents may well alter that data.

Back to the topic... I'd really like to see a spec-specific comparison of the various 25-man trinkets, specifically Bandit's Insignia vs. Extract, in comparison to Mirror. It's hard to guess on my own without being able to run real tests, which would mandate having all three. I'm sure someone's in a position to have them on hand, but it isn't me.

I'd love to see that too.. after reading it might be 3rd best trinket, but in my case since it replaced a green i won't complain (that ilvl 174 green that was actually good)

I'll test it and see how much stacks I can get on regular bosses...

I'm curious how people are managing to pull off 4.5-5k DPS. I'm currently 51/13/7 with relatively decent gear, a few best-in-slot items, and I pull off 2.5-3k (3.5 if i'm really lucky) ... I use a 3x oblit rotation (it seemed higher than the 4x hs) ... I raid with between 90ms and 150ms latency ... I'm generally good about not falling out of my rotation.

Anybody have any WWS logs of 51/13/7 specs pulling off 5k DPS?

In my days as the cookie cutter 51/13/7 Blood spec i topped out at about 4500 dps on patchwerk. A new weapon and the last 1-2 upgrades i need, a flask/food as well as a tighter rotation MIGHT have pushed me over 5k, but i wouldn't count on it. As blood i use basically the same gear i have now with Death's Bite. My stats are ~3750 AP, EXP and hit capped, 33% crit.

Here's one @ 4230 dps...and 11th place overall on patchwerk. What convinced me to switch to 32/39

Don't have a WWS of my 4500 on patches, guess our WWS guy wasn't there that night.

Frankly, I've given up on blood. 4500 dps when i work my butt off with the vague possibility of 5k in the future isn't worth it when you can just spec unholy or a 31/39+1 build and easy-mode cruise to 4500 dps, and if you actually TRY you can break 6000 or even 7000 dps....for now.

First fight i ever did as 32/39 and that was with some severe frame rate issues. +300 dps with a respec and crap performance.

It's a shame. I really love the 2H play style, it's one of the main reasons i rolled a DK over continuing my DPS warrior (I love my 2 handers :P). I WANT blood to be good, i really do, but it just tops out at a lower number then the other specs. It only seems good to satisfy your desire to see big numbers. I really DO love 12500 damage oblits.

Can try 50/0/21 or 51/0/20

Wow Web Stats

Unfortunately, no. The first week I tried the 3x OB rotation, I did 4600 dps on Patchwerk, and that was just over a month ago, so the WWS is gone. I've gotten quite a few upgrades, but our 25man runs are hindered by crippling server-side lag no matter which night we go. Our Patchwerk this past Tuesday had every single person in the raid doing about 2000 less dps than normal because of the latency. So, all I can say is I should be doing 5k dps now, especially since I've improved my use of DRW (it, too, can do 2k dps, move over gargoyle), but I've never gotten a clean shot at it.

As for "working your butt off" to do blood dps as opposed to another spec, I don't really understand that. All the specs follow similar styles of rotation, and have all felt about the same to me in terms of single target, stationary dps. The closest one to "easy" that I've played is 2h unholy, and that's mainly because of the SS glyph-- it's a bit more flexible and relaxed. You hit SS when available, BS occasionally, DC in between, and refresh your diseases every once and a while. Blood 2h dps follows a more rigid rotation, which to me seems easier in some ways because you always know what attack is coming next. Ren has demonstrated over in the DW thread that max DW dps is possible with a fixed rotation, too.

Returning to the topic at hand (i.e. blood dps): All I can suggest if you feel like you're lagging behind, make sure you're hit and expertise capped so you hit every attack, and never neglect dumping your runic power. Lately I've used the Sudden Doom procs like bonus RP that I dump at the end of the rotation-- you have enough time after PS IT OB HS HS to do up to 3 death coils. Yes, in Blood Presence. It's all thanks to the magic of latency coding-- your DC hits at 7.5 sec, 9, and 10.5, meaning your OB comes in at 12 seconds which is exactly on schedule to trigger the 8 second cooldown.

Loot Rank for WotLK

that is a sample lootrank page using the stats listed in the unholy dps thread. They list the stats weights of blood and frost specs aswell. Accordding to the data listed there expertise is actualy worth more than strength even after it is capped. I did some digging and came up with why a rotation seems so diffacult to maintain for me. I have not reached the expertise cap to completely eliminate dodges. I have a total of 20 expertise ( 5%) but I need just a little bit more. After I cap expertise I was wondering if I should utilize expertise gems instead of strength gems because they are weighted higher. I have a few questions to ask.
Is the relentless earthsiege diamond or the chaotic skyflare diamond better for dps? Chaotic may seem like it is easier to fulfill the requirments for but I didnt see much dps gear with blue sockets on them. That rings me to my last question. If you utilize the prismatic JC gems do they have to be socketed into the sockets of the required color to count for the meta requirements? As an example say I have a gearset that has no blue sockets but I use 3 prismatic gems in other sockets. Will the chaotic skylare diamond be usable?

That item list is correct to a certain extent. It places much higher value on items with expertise and hit so that you don't have to gem for it, but once you have a few of those heavy hit/expertise items, you want to look for the upgrades with the biggest chances for STR increase. Generally you want to aim for 4-piece for the set bonus, then have one off-piece. I believe the best slots to have this off-piece are the head and chest (head because Obsidian Greathelm is ridiculous and chest because the haste stat is generally wasted for 2H DPS on the tier set piece).

To answer your question, the amount of strength on pieces with sockets will generally exceed even the highest STR items w/o sockets. If possible you want to cap out on expertise and hit without gems and then gem everything for STR (examples of this would be stuff like Undiminished Battleplate, Girdle of Razuvious, Iron-Spring Jumpers for hit/expertise heavy items). For your meta question, Chaotic Skyflare Diamond is considered better anyways because AGI does not affect your spells and crit rating does. I believe prismatic gems will count for one instance of the color requirement for your metagem (don't quote me on that).

I've been using it for awhile and [Grim Toll] needs to be in the discussion. The proc is very nice, and because of the same internal CD and similar proc rate, the proc of it and the Darkmoon card sync up quite often. Then there's the huge amount of hit rating on it, which allows for a LOT of gear flexibility. It's definitely not absolutely the 2nd best trinket, but if you have the non-hit gear to plug in other slots after getting it, I think it has to match up very well with Mirror & Extract/Bandit.

Yeah I'm using that atm, it procs very quickly once the internal cooldown is up... if you take the stat weightings from DPS compendium thread (APR = 1.04ish AP for blood) and assume a proc every 50 seconds or so, then it works equivalent to roughly 128 static AP, on top of the 83 hit rating.

I've read from some guys, who tested it on raid bosses, that it indeed works against raidbosses. They just have to have a debuff that somehow says slow.

I use Extract and it accounts for 1.5-1.8% of my DPS on standing fights, but scales upward in fights which require movement (it was 3% of my DPS on Grobbulus the other night) , and downward on AOE fights (1%ish on Sarth 2D). A few notes on the trinket: It is affected by Ebon Plague, so you can raise the listed values by 13%. It is also affected by your spell crit chance. The only other thing which affects it are fight-specific blanket damage increase buffs like the Power Sparks on Maly and Polarity Shifts on Thaddius.

My armory, for the curious.

Just thought I would throw this out here for those unable to test on the ptr. I wanted to get a feel for how three different builds compared to one another after the nerfs and buffs so far on the current patch. I tested 0/32/39, 17/0/51, 15/13/07, and 51/0/20. I just started doing heroics so my gear is no where near best in slot but it gives me decent look at how things are shaping up thus far. The results are as follows.

0/32/39
2232- 20 min duration, level 80 test dummy using standard rotation and the rep swords from wyrmrest, self buffed.

17/0/54
2032- Same duration, standard rotation, and glyphs. I used the rep sword from Ebon Blade.

51/13/7
2397- 3x oblit rotation, using standard glyphs. Also using the rep sword from Ebon Blade.

51/0/20
2251- Standard rotation, Ebon blade sword.

While I realize that the patch still isn't out yet, I think this should give us some decent evidence that blood is starting to gain momentum with the buffs to drw. This combined with the nerfs to gargoyle and killing machine seems to conclude that things are starting to balance out more. Blood looks like it could produce more competitive dps.

Just a question because I have yet to see much talk about it. Grim toll helped to bring it to my mind but has anyone done extensive testing with Armor Penetration for blood DKs. I know its not rated too high for stats on gear but if you go by the fact that almost all of our dmg is physical based, stacking armor pen could very well work as long as it doesnt cause too much of a hit to other stats. Im working on a set to test it out but wondered if anyone had tried before me.