Okay, I respecced blood.

Just so you know, if you summon your DRW then wait a half second and cast Hysteria, the DRW casts it on that target too. That's why people are getting doubled up Hysteria.

I went to Acherus and tried to test out getting my DRW to do this while fighting, but once it started swinging it apparently doesn't like to cast Hysteria. The only way I could get it to cast on me was to be out of combat, target myself, and cast it.

The bad news appears to be that the buffs don't stack. The damage sure does, you lose 40% of your HP, but your character's paper doll only reflects one 20% damage buff.

This makes me wonder if there is a way to cast Hysteria on two targets, one from you and one from your weapon. I know you can't control it, but perhaps there is a way to trick it in to casting it on another target.

Based on a blood/unholy spec like 51/0/20 Death Strike has absolutely no chance when compared to Obliterate

Obliterate deals 100%(120%) weapon damage vs Death Strike that deals 60% (+0-40% based on RP) of weapon damage
Obliterate has +292 damage vs Death Strike which has 178.2
Obliterate deals extra damage per disease (more DPS) vs Death Strike that heals % of dmg done per disease (mostly overhealing)
Obliterate has a crit multiplier of 2.45 vs Death Strike which has a crit multiplier of 2.3
Obliterate has 100% chance to give party/raid +10% attack power while Death Strike can't ever
Obliterate has excellent support from our T7 while Death Strike has none

Death Strike has 6% higher chance to crit, but I believe this is nullified by it's much lower damage output.
The only true gain from death strike over obliterate in a non-Annihilation spec is that it does not consume diseases.

So while you're death strike may crit for very impressive numbers (I don't buy it at all) it's very clear that even with your glyph (which should very rarely provide the full 40%) obliterate will always be better.
Now of course DS has it's great utility. I mean in a sticky situation a nice DS crit can really help your healer(s) out. And while solo questing/farming I never use OB just because DS garuntees 0% downtime. But for pure DPS Obliterate definitely wins.

As for 51/13/7 vs 51/0/20...
I believe the blood/unholy spec can be deceptive in it's quality. It obviously gives you slightly better scaling with Strength and haste (although still our worst stat by a big margin) but at what cost? Based on my own, although short lived, experience with 51/0/20 we lose one Obliterate per rotation because we have to refresh diseases. That's a very high damaging attack, two global cooldowns and 3% crit chance to our special attacks.
Also, I see some people spec into Virulence but this is spell hit only. Of course less misses on icy touch or death coil is nice but at melee hit cap the chance is low and with Annihilation that's less opportunities for IT to miss.
Necrosis and Blood-Caked Blade essentially increase your white damage out put but just looking at some of the data others have posted it's not by much. I can't say from tests or anything but I think the +30% damage on IT and frost fever from Black Ice covers that alone. Not to mention how many potential BCB procs are wasted on white attacks performed while diseases are not up because of they're poor uptime.

All in all, only time and testing will tell which is better. But I do believe that when all other factors are equal, 51/13/7 is the vastly superior spec.

You really should read the first line of my post, again. I am not comparing DS and OB up front, but its not enough of a difference to justify taking bad talents all the way to anihilation.

I am saying death strike IS a valid U/F dump with the glyph.

Maybe that was clearer?

I will wait to see my DK hitting level 80 and so ranking all the abilities to max.
But at level 63, blood/unholy produces 350 dps in standard blue DK set (the one you get from the Ebon Hold quests); while blood/frost with annihilation generates 380 dps with the same gear.

Rotations used:
B/U -> IT, PS, HS, HS, DS/OB, DC
B/F -> IT, PS, HS, HS, OB... move to another mob with 100 RP ready.

This ends up with the assumption that at the same level and at the same gear, speccing annihilation grants you rough +10% (brust) DPS.

Now I am level 65, sorry but got a main rogue to keep topped up and I play DK only on spare time, usually with the sole intention to test and practice rotations for blood speccs.

I would agree with you up until you factor in [Sigil of Awareness] and the T7 2/4pc bonuses.

Well, I guess my major issue with the 51/13/7 spec is that DRW is only up for 10 seconds compared to gargoyle which is up for an entire minute easily... How can that possibly out damage gargoyle?

51/0/20 confuses me, since one only needs 19 in unholy to get all the worthwhile talents for that specc but nevermind I have some other questions or thoughts I would like to get input on.
Why do people get Epidemic in a 51/0/20 or 52/0/19 specc, when you use an un-talented Obliterate in your rotation which will kill off the diseases anyway.

And if DRW is as good as it starts to look like, why not go 51/20 or something, why spend 13 points in Frost and not get Runic Power Mastery which would add 30 maximum Rune Power which would increase your DRW duration by 30% if used at full RP.

I've been doing the exact same thing, and have even considered (but not tried due to the loss of Necrosis/BCB) a Blood/Frost spec with Runic Power Mastery to maximize the impact of this undervalued glyph. If we ever get tier bonuses to increase Runic Power (which I strongly feel we will), the scalability of DS could be second to none.

It has been my experience that, in a 51/0/20 spec, the loss of DPS due to losing disease ticks, as well as the GCD/Rune costs of having to reapply diseases more often, means it is always more efficient to manage your RP and use DS rather than OB. I tend to refresh diseases with Pestilence (of course this requires more than one mob in proximity) instead of IT/PS, so the whole concept of untalented Obliterate as an overall DPS increase in this build just doesn't do it for me. The fact that, gear aside, I haven't seen a DK build out-DPS mine in single-target situations might have something to do with it as well. But then again, I haven't grouped/raided with any decent blood DK's.

I haven't seen or run any numbers on this. Can someone out there with a maths degree take a look at the opportunity-cost of 5x-0-2x spec glyphed OB vs 100 RP glyphed DS, including lost disease ticks and lost GCD/Runes spent reapplying them? For arguments sake, we could assume 1 lost tick of each disease every 10 seconds, and one lost GCD/Rune every 30 seconds for early reapplications. This would stem from one extra re-application of each disease every 60 seconds, which means refreshing them 3 seconds earlier on average.

On the other hand, I've seen some rotations reapplying IT/PS as early as 9 seconds in due to the use of OB, despite the 18 second duration. In this scenario you are losing no less than 6 GCDs and 6 runes per minute to reapplying diseases, both of which would otherwise equate to higher DPS via DC and DS. Could this be why 5x/0/2x DK's are complaining about being GCD bound and RP capped while using OB?

What about instead of casting Hysteria in a macro, you self-cast it on yourself normally (with say ALT+<key>)? It would be interesting to see if the DRW gets Hysteria in that case.

I don't have any delusions that Obliterate deals more damage then DS, however, i believe the crit damage (where it counts) is considerably more closer then people realize when your RP caped (unless your pimping the epic gear that Zurm pointed out).

what I'm curious about is weather or not DS in conjunction with the rest of what Unholy offers you at 20 points, beats out Frost tree build.

it will take me about 4-6 weeks to be in the position to farm this data myself >.>

You need all 20 points in Unholy to max out Virulence, Ravenous Dead, Necrosis, Blood Caked Blade and Shadow of Death.

For those blowing off Virulence, please remember that melee hit cap is 9% and spell hit cap is 17%.

This is unnecessary because Hysteria cast upon yourself will affect your DRW. Remember that DRW is basically a clone of your weapon damage statistics upon summon. It will inherit your haste, AP and damage buffs like Bloody Vengeance and Hysteria (unsure as to whether it gets your hit/expertise/arpen but it looks like it misses a lot) at the time of creation.

I've personally been playing/raiding with 50/0/21 the past few days. I really like it and prefer the gargoyle at this point. Maybe thats because I have dreams of the old DRW still and the current feels lackluster at best.

I'll stay this spec until I have a Naxx Sigil or 4pc t7 to play with I think.

Here's my WWS info from Naxx 25 the other night, specifically Patchwerk. <3 Glyph'd Death Strike.

Wow Web Stats

This is great fun.

Another hallarious thing..... If you summon your deathcharger while DRW is up your weapon will mount its own deathcharger and ride around with you.

...good stuff

As far as the macros it was mentioned a few times about hysteria.....has anyone been able to confirm if DRW can cast hysteria on itself and or double stack it on yourself?

Yes I know. That's why I tried to make points on why Obliterate is always better, period. But I guess I failed.
And also tried to point out that based on what little data we have, if those frost talents are in fact bad, those grabbed in unholy don't do any better. Besides, every spec for every class is going to have 'filler' points thrown in somewhere, I just think that in Frost you reach a nice reward of more crit and more Obliterate. In Unholy all we really seem to gain is some Strength scaling and an improved form of dying.

You are kidding right?

Since the 51/0/20 build use Death Strike instead of Obliterate you gain:

Vicious Strike: Increase Crit Strike by 6% and crit strike damage bonus for 30% of Death Strike
I have a feeling with this talent in addition to the Glyph of Death Strike, this does close to the damage of Obliterate, I plan to some testing to verify this.

Morbidity: Increase damage of Death Coil by 15%
This talent goes well with Sudden Death so it can critical hit and do 15% more damage.

Ravenous Dead: Increase total Strength by 3%
Attack Power/Strength is arguably one of our, if not the best, attribute/ Ability we have which in turns equals more DPS.

Necrosis: Increase our auto attack damage by 10%
Again more DPS

Blood-Caked Blade: Auto attack has a 30% chance to case BCS (25% weapon damage plus 12.5% x Diseases)
Again more dps.

From there some get other talents, but those seem to be the core talents that are taken.

Now you want to trade all of that just to be able to cast Obliterate once possible twice every 20 sec rotation so it doesn’t eat your disease? That is some nice filler if you ask me. I am spec’ing 51/0/20.

If thats all you see in unholy, check out

Wow Web Stats

Both necrosis and bcb each accounted 4% of my damage, not to mention gargoyle and harder hitting death coils, plus percentage increased strenght. If you think a slightly stronger U/F dump and 3% crit increase are better than that, I certainly dont.

Changing the subject, do we have any advantage in slower weapons at all? Im getting conflicting answers depending who I ask...

I see people with Bloodworms in their spec, have they fixed the issue where they ran off to aggro random trash packs?

I've honestly NEVER had a problem with that. I've not been in a 25 man raid setting yet, but in heroics it's never been a problem.

AFAIK, they fixed that in one of the previous patches. I haven't experience any issues yet, but choice not to use Blood Worms any more in my build. They don't seem to proc as much as I would like and always seem to proc when the fight is almost over.

I keep seeing them dye in boss AoE's so I find them not worth it also.

Well, Blood Aura does absolutely nothing as well. And I don't find myself Rune Tapping all that much (or it being useful when I do) so I might as well pick Bloodworms for a little bit of DPS?

I'm currently running with the following build: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft (don't really go in for cookie-cutter specs, and I like the extra utility Lichborne and Bloodworms give me, even if I have to pay for it with a small amount of DPS lost) and am trying to nail down the rotation for maximum DPS in a PvE setting as I get ready to start raiding with this spec.

I tried the suggested PS -> IT -> HS -> HS -> OB -> DC -> OB -> HS -> HS -> HS -> HS -> OB but have been fairly underwhelmed with it so far.

At 77 hitting a 75 dummy in 3 average blues and the rest greens I was doing just under 1200 DPS sustained over about 3 minutes. This was unbuffed with no cooldowns used, and seemed a bit on the low side to me. Maybe DKs are just very gear dependent or I am just a terrible player; either way.

Any suggestions to a better rotation? I will be trying those also suggested earlier in this thread too.