Edited to fix rotations and added the mention of the Sigil scuttlebutt. I still can't believe I was typing BS instead of HS. Yea late night edits!

I'd love to know the following so I can add it to the FAQ:
Math on Sigils to use before Awareness.
Math on Corpse Explosion over Virulence for the Alternablood spec. I've steered clear of CE since beta and would love a reason to finally learn the spell.
A definitive answer for the best Meta for Blood dps. I've seen many extol the virtues of the Crit gem and others fight back with AP is better. The original stat weights calculated with terribad gear back in November would but the gems on equal footing.

Edit: Removed a totally redundant wws link. I shouldn't reply to things half way through a thread.

I changed from 51/13/7 to 51/0/20 diseaseless at the patch. Two weeks ago I was able to peak at 8500 dps on Patchwerk with the 51/0/20 diseaseless. The fight lasted just over 3 minutes which averaged my dps out to about 6000. So, I'm not really surprised to see Jmack's numbers. I use the same glyphs and rotation as he does. Our gear is about the same although he has a Betrayer and I an Armageddon. I love this playstyle and have seen it scale very well with my gear.

This week I went back to 51/13/7 and found it much less satisfying. Respecing to 51/20 after I post this...

I can only really echo this, the rotation is so much simplistic and with no need for Death Rune Mastery/Disease application you don't run the risk of tripping over Death Runes and coming out with BB/FF/DD when you need to reapply both disease and then hit an Obliterate.

Having multiple talents scaling with Strength increasing your overall AP and thus affecting your entire arsenal of abilities is lot better than the investment of points in Icy Touch improvements while trying to reach Annihilation, and the rotation itself doesn't seem to lack in damage that you would have had from disease bonuses on your Strikes, as you fit in an extra Obliterate to make up for the difference (which was critting between 10k and peaking at 12k with Hysteria on bosses)

Looking at the other talents the spec picks up, while BKB and Bloodworms only accounted for 1% of total DPS each, Necrosis was a 6% contribution and Corpse Explosion 4% (which really does make trash much more fun to be involved in than going "IT > Pest > Blood Bo... oh wait it's dead" as happens a lot in the Spider wing and in parts the Abomination and Plague wings.)


I don't see myself shifting out of this spec, while it does lean on a strength heavy build to make use of the talents and possibly SoA to get the maximum out of your Obliterates in a diseaseless rotation, it really does shine over 51/13/7.

I think with all the new changes in store fore blood with sudden doom and the blood gorged going to armor penetration I think this could help a diseasless rotation even further. Lets say armor penetration was about 10-15%, that plus all of the sudden doom procs you would get from doing a OBx2 and HSx6 rotation might make for some serious damage. I believe Ghost Crawler stated he wanted to beef up the value of armor penetration. Unless they beef up the scaling for our diseases this might become the def way to go for blood come 3.1.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Ebon Plague Fix

Given that GC has said this, I'm going to assume that this is doubly true for BOTH main diseases. I wouldn't be too surprised if we find a reason in 3.1 that diseaseless isn't the best anymore.

Here's hoping, anyway.

Hopefully its because our abilities do BETTER with diseases, and not that they nerf em down so we need the diseases.

I have been DW spec for some time now and wanted to try out the 51/0/20 Blood OB x2 HS x 2 spec. I sadly do not have the Sigil of Awareness so i was curious as to which other sigil i should use. I have every other one ingame besides the one i need.

Thanks

Assuming you didn't junk Dark Rider, you could take an alternate DRW spec that drops a point in imp RT and Blood Worms and take DRM, have a 2x Oblit 2x HS rotation followed by 6x HS.

As for GC's comments on diseases, with the current arena complaints about how hard Blood hits without diseases, and then further complaints about DRW it's going to be hard to see how they plan to make diseases more attractive without nerfs to other abilities.

That, and if they do make diseases more necessary then they need to make speccing into Annhilation a lot more attractive, or rework the talent so Obliterate doesn't remove diseases as a baseline and it offers the Frost tree something new.

Yes, it should definitely change in 3.1, even without changing diseases mechanisms.
Right now, available end-game stuff gives a huge bonus to obliterate (4pt7+sigil of awereness). Since our stuff will be upgraded in 3.1, and the bonus will be different, the "with-disease" rotation will be probably more interesting again.

The problem is that even if you were to upgrade gear, diseases do not scale for Blood the level that Obliterate does. You factor in that you'll gain more Strength, higher weapon damage and more ARP the damage from applying diseases and the bonus damage your Obliterates recieve simply wont outdo just going diseasless and throwing another Obliterate in there.

While the obvious solution is to lower the base damage of Obliterate and then significantly increase the bonus having diseases grants (while possibly adding Obliterate to Bloody Strikes for further effect) you're then pigeonholing a 13 point spec into annhilation, which is about as attractive as my Grandmother's backside* for the little benefit it gives to one spell I'll use once every two rune bar rotations.

If the disease removal aspect was removed from Obliterate and Annihilation changed to something to benefit Frost better (and even moved or possibly removed in this shuffle) then I can see a change to the baseline damage and increase in the disease based damage. Might shut up the PvP cries about it too.


*For the record I have never actually seen my Grandmother's backside, I just can guess it won't be pretty. I hope no actual evidence is needed for this and I can get away with mere conjecture.

I don't use the 4pc T7 bonus myself, just Sigil of Awareness.

Even so without SoA the weapon damage will still scale to the point it will eclipse the disease bonus.

I agree with this, I think if they changed obliterate to where it doesn't cancel diseases, or made annihilation more appealing it would go a long way. Personally i think if they increased the damage bonus of the diseases to percentage based, instead of a flat base damage, scaling would no longer be an issue. One thing that makes blood clunky in my opinion is obliterate removing the diseases. You either hit it early and wipe off your diseases, or your holding out until the very last second in order to maximize disease damage. Diseasless just makes things a lot more simple and a lot more fun, which is kinda sad since we're supposed to be a disease based class.

Looks like I've gotten interested in Blood just when people are asking for numbers. Convenient, that.

My spreadsheet isn't quite perfect on the Blood side - no Hysteria, and DRM hits identically to the caster since I don't know how the heck its stats are derived - but it's probably pretty solid for a comparison.

One thing that worries me, though, is that I get haste being significantly more valuable than ArPen even for diseaseless. This doesn't particularly surprise me - haste has a very solid effect on the ghoul in addition to its personal effects, and ArPen is rather weak - but it flies in the face of what appears to be common knowledge, and makes me wonder if I have something wrong in the haste or ArPen calcs. Let me do a quick napkin verification first:

Let's say our damage breakdown is: 30% melee, 5% necrosis, 5% ghoul melee, 10% death coil, and 50% other stuff/strikes.

1% haste increases affected DPS by essentially 1% even. Melee, Necrosis, and ghoul melee are affected. So each percent haste should be about .4% dps.

1% ArPen reduces enemy armor by 1%. Skipping the detailed formula: a fully sundered/FFed boss has 21.38% damage reduction. Due to the way the armor formula works, ArPen will have increasing effects as more is stacked, but as an overall average it should be representable (and rather overestimated) by taking 1% of 21.38%, which is 0.2138%. Apply that as a DPS increase to the personal physical damage sources - melee and strikes (80%) - and you get 0.17% dps contribution from 1% ArPen.

Of course, 1% ArPen takes less rating than 1% haste. Normalizing for rating, I get that 1 haste is worth almost 1.1 ArPen. And that's without BCB and without the GCD reduction on Death Coils, which appears to actually be potentially significant. Let me napkin that one as well:

Let's say we're using a simple repeatable rotation of 4xHS-OB-Dump. That puts us on 5 GCDs or 7.5 seconds into our rotation. Hasteless, due to the way rune refresh works we can DC 3 times without pushing back rune refresh. This adds up to 19.5 seconds. Now, the question is, is it better to sit on our butts for the 0.5 sec delay, or push out another DC if we have the resources? (And since we generate 65 RP per 10s rotation with 4PT7, we'll have the resources if SD procs once.) My numbers say that an average DC hits for 3500 while a 1.0 sec delay in the full rotation costs us a bit over 2500, which means it's worth it. So assuming no haste and at least one SD proc every 8 HS, we're now on a 21 second rotation. Add 10% haste to the mix, though, and it reduces our DC to 1.36s GCD, shaving off 0.545 sec of our rotation, reducing the pushback cost from 2500 to 1136, which ends up being a 65DPS gain. At the numbers I'm looking at that's about a 1.2% increase - or .12% per haste percent - which brings us up to .52% dps gain per haste percent and a 1 haste rating to 1.5 ArPen rating ratio, which is finally close enough to my spreadsheet's numbers for me to be satisfied.

Anyway, back to the original point of this post: the requested numbers on sigils and metagems.

Baseline: 51/0/20, 4HS1OB rotation, Ghoul/Obliterate/Blood Strike glyphs. Standard raid buffs. All gems Bold Scarlet Ruby. Gear:
Valorous Scourgeborne Helmet (Chaotic Skyflare)
Favor of the Dragon Queen
Valorous Scourgeborne Shoulderplates
Drape of the Deadly Foe
Undiminished Battleplate
Bracers of Unrelenting Attack
Valorous Scourgeborne Gauntlets
Girdle of Chivalry
Valorous Scourgeborne Legplates
Melancholy Sabatons
Ruthlessness
Circle of Death
Bandit's Insignia (proc not modeled)
Darkmoon Card: Greatness (proc not modeled)
Betrayer of Humanity
Sigil of Awareness (assuming 210 base and 105 per disease)

Note that DPS numbers don't take into account many in-raid factors such as flat damage buffs (ToTT, Ferocious Inspiration), haste potions, bloodlust, AotD, or optimal use of cooldowns and are by no means a maximum theoretical DPS - more of a faceroll rotation-bot estimate that should nonetheless be good enough to choose gear by.

Baseline DPS	5168.65	-0%
Swift Skyflare Diamond	5119.34	-0.95%
Sigil of the Dark Rider (assuming 45 base and 22.5 per disease)	5171.37	+0.05%
Sigil of the Wild Buck	5168.35	-0.01%
Sigil of Haunted Dreams (15%, no ICD)	5191.27	+0.44%
Sigil of Haunted Dreams (5%, no ICD)	5153.76	-0.29%
Rotation: HS HS OB OB Dump	4992.38	-3.41%
Rotation: HSx2 OBx2 Dump HSx4 OB Dump	5087.8	-1.56%

Let me know if any of my assumptions were off, et cetera, please. It's hard to find reliable information when there's so much conflicting info out there.

I decided to do some testing today on Sartharion with the Glyph of Blood strike and see what snares could actually be applied to the boss and which ones the glyph took advantage of. I went in with full tank gear with no weapon enchant, all my trinkets removed, no buffs and no talents. Yes the druid even clicked off LotP. I realize the sample sizes are very small but there's only so many repair bills my druid accomplice and I are willing to pay for this.

Each table is the average strike damage for that trial and how many strikes I got in the trial. The number under the dotted line is the ave strike damage for all trials and the total number of strikes.

ave Raw BS damage:	#strikes	ave BS dmg w/ CoI	#strikes	ave BS dmg w/ Infected Wounds	#strikes
410	3	499	3	459	2
429	4	501	2	448	4
438	2	536	2	464	4
461	5	512	5	----	-
---------
434	14	512	12	457	10

I tried to test what effect chillblains had on Sartharion but he was Immune to Icy Clutch. So I think it's safe to say that CoI does work on bosses, is applyable to bosses and procs the glyph of blood strike. It doesn't look like Infected Wounds works with the glyph though, which makes me a sad panda. Especially with a lot of mages going arcane and losing the FFB debuff. Be nice to see someone test the Slow debuff on Sarth and see if it works. I'm beginning to wonder if the only snares that will effect bosses are ones that come direct from a spell as part of its base component and are not talented into. Honestly, I should have gotten an immune when I cast CoI on Sarth but it applied and the glyph worked. Why would CoI be able to be applied but not Icy Clutch? Why does the FFB debuff work with the glyph but not Infected Wounds?

Tested 51/0/20 with the OBOBHSHS rotation tonight in nax10 and pulled 4,3k on patch (duration was between 3 and 4 minutes, pulled drw 2 times). I was really impressed and think thats a valuable number for an 10 man raid.
Pulled 5,03k on loatheb before too

Seems this is getting really competetive.

With the upcoming changes to Sudden Doom, will OBx2 HSx2 be nearly as effective as the HS heavy rotation? (assuming w/o disease)

What I'm pulling from this...and planning to stick in the FAQ is:
-Chaotic>Swift and other 42AP metas
-Awareness>Haunted Dreams>Dark Rider
-HSx2>OBx2>HSX6 top disease free rotation
-And surprisingly, Haste>ArmPen?

Not quite.

Dark Rider ~= Awareness on this rotation, though I guess Awareness would pull ahead on more oblit-heavy rotations.

Haunted Dreams is superior to either if Wowhead's claim of a 15% procrate is true AND there is no ICD.

Tests indicate that Haunted Dreams' procrate is closer to 5-6%, in which case it is inferior to any other relevant sigil.

The disease-free rotation I would advise is not HSx2 OBx2 / HSx6, but rather HSx4 OBx1 repeat. It requires one HSx2 OBx2 at the beginning to get started, though. This version gives more leeway to dump RP at the end of both sides of the rotation rather than concentrating lots of GCDs on one half.

So I would like to present this build I've finally had the chance of testing this weekend to you all. I think it was mentioned some where in the early pages but here's the idea 44/0/27 which is Blood with pet. Here is the 25man Patch WMO. This was done without a BoH and Sigil of Awareness fyi. The fight was a slow start due to some tank threat gen issues, so I do believe I could have broken 1m dmg done. I'm flasked, and also used indestructible potion when Gargoyle was up. Rotations used was OB, OB, HS, HS, RP dump (repeat) NO DISEASES.

I'm really liking this build, and it's going to break my heart if the Gargoyle change goes through, since it might completely destroy what this build can do.

I was the UnHoly DK in my guild untill the end of this raid week, now I am trying out blood. I did a few things with my spec that could just be flat out wrong, and I am looking for some insight with some of the choices I made. More wanting to know if anyone had tried this and seen that it was not worth it, or maybe recount and SCT are reporting damage wrong.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=131214020504

Is the build I am using at the moment, so a few things then I'll go into my rotation.

First no aura, has anyone seen where the aura is actually helpful as far as legit raid healing? I saw it going like 1% more on our WWS then my Unholy spec did (granted my unholy spec was ALL self healing), so just a thought.

Worms, I stood in front of a heroic 80 dummy for a while and saw that the worms (and BCB) were doing a lot more damage from both recount and from watching SCT then Necrosis.

No shadow of death - I can easly take 2/3 BCB and go into that, more STR is good...

CE I took it because it is fun, and give me a little exrtra DPS on trash, nothing more then that. I am currently hit capped atm.

Rotation

OB/IT/PS/HS/HS (DC) HS/HS/HS/HS/OB

IT/PS/HS/HS/HS/HS/HS/OB

Reset (holding Sudden Dooms till the natural pauses in GCD's)

Armory

The World of Warcraft Armory

Any insight is welcome and helpful. Thanks in advance.

Edit for content

I understand that you are trying to increase the damage of your lower damage parts of your rotation, but you're going about it in an awkward and sub-optimal way.

I suppose an easy way to think about it is like this (primarily in reference to your lack of shadow of death and necrosis).

Regular white melee strikes can be on the order of 30% of your overall damage on a given encounter, whereas plague strike (the actual strike) tends to hover around 2-3%. You're opting to increase 2-3% overall damage by 45% instead of increasing 30% damage by 10%. These aren't the exact numbers and I'm leaving out so many different scaling figures (necrosis scaling off percentage modifiers and other places where it shows up, etc). Same goes for your glacier rot talent choice. The typical 51/13/7 builds include black ice, improved icy touch, and glacier rot building up to annihilation and are not considered complete wastes since IT is a typical (albeit small and nigh insignificant) part of the rotation. You get buffed IT and FF damage. You, however, opt to increase a small insignificant portion of your rotation through glacier rot instead of dumping those into unholy where you could build up to shadow of death for 2% more STR all-around. While that's not a completely unreasonable alternative, you could have just as easily picked up 2 points in improved icy touch for double the effectiveness of your current frost points.

Basically the idea is to improve on significant portions of our damage that scale incredibly well in raid situations. The strength of blood comes from our ability to sync with raid buffs and blow cooldowns in order to deliver significant damage over a short period with decent damage otherwise. Standing in front of a dummy and looking at recount is not an intelligent way to come up with talent distributions as has been discussed countless times on these boards, since it is completely impractical to get a raid together for a target dummy with health points. In practice, necrosis outscales BCB heavily for blood/unholy oriented builds with both fully talented, and both are typically worthwhile.