I however don't see how a case can be made that diseases are NOT a core mechanic of the class. Whether or not a blood DK can do more DPS without using them isn't up for question, but the fact remains that they are a core mechanic of the class.

Heart Strike: Does more damage with diseases on the target.
Blood Strike: Does more damage with diseases on the target.
Obliterate: Does more damage with diseases on the target.
Scourge Strike: Does more damage with diseases on the target.
Howling Blast: Does double damage to targets with frost fever on them.
Death Strike: Damages / Heals more with diseases on the target.

It: Applies a disease
PS: Applies a disease

If I'm not mistaken, those are all the main attacks that any death knight spec uses (Ignoring attacks that use runic power due to the fact that they don't do more or less damage regardless of whether or not a disease is on the target). Given that each of the main attacks either applies or gets stronger with a disease on the target, I don't see how you can say that diseases aren't at least meant to be a core mechanic of the class, regardless of whether or not they currently reign supreme.


I believe you're missing the point that each of these specs has their own situation where they can pull ahead. Personally I have raided multiple times through Naxx / OS / VoA (I exclude Maly because I'm on spark duty, and therefore cannot compare my dps). As you said there are major differences between each of the spec, but they all have their use. Blood pulls ahead clearly on short fights like Patchwerk if you're going for the 3 minute kill, or say VoA (it doesn't really matter but its a short fight), or Grand Widow or other such very short fights.

Unholy is great when you have a lot of adds forming like on Sarth +3D. Even though their primary target may be doing DPS on the adds instead of the boss, getting the adds down and stopping them from attacking / wiping the raid in my opinion is just as important as getting any of the drakes themselves down.

Finally as you said frost is all built around long steady output DPS. This can actually pull ahead in fights that last longer than multiple cool downs for many classes. An example might be KT depending on your raid (it does take us a little while to down him), or Loatheb without killing any spores. Any sort of long fight benefits from having a high steady output of damage.


I suppose. However, if you're argument is that disease less blood does the most damage, then you are correct. But I believe that saying diseases aren't a core mechanic is a pointless argument, I would love solid reasons otherwise as too how they are not.

I think you need to look carefully at how Blizzard may be defining competitive as well. I don't believe there are many classes out there where if you spec into DPS different ways, they would all do the same damage on the same fight. However regardless of the situation one may pull ahead of the other, and vice versa in a different situation. Also, do you consider things like survivability to be factored into whether or not a spec is competitive. Who cares if you can do 10k DPS if you die in the first 30 seconds. The ability to stay alive at the sacrifice for a bit of damage I'd say certainly makes a spec more competitive over another. As well as the ability to do different types of damage. Ulduar may have a boss with extremely high armor, Frost / Unholy will pull ahead. Or a boss that has incredibly high spell resistance, blood will reign supreme. It all depends on the situation that makes spec competitive against each other, not how they all do on the 1 benchmark fight.

EDIT: Added howling blast and fixed a bit of wording.

In regards to the Diseaseless Blood build or the other 2 Blood builds, is there a benchmark number for AP/CRIT that is needed to spec into this to be competitive in 25man raids? I know in the first post it mentions "nice gear" but I was just wondering what would be a pretty deadset number that needed to be attained unbuffed before specing into Blood

I have tried both Diseaseless and Regular rotations using two builds 51/0/20 and 51/13/7.
Standard Rotation with disease: IT PS OB HS HS DC DC OB OB HS HS DC DC repeat and diseaseless being the same as the other but starting out with 2x OBs.
On Heroic Nemises Training Dummy is did look it may perform about the same. But after trying it out in Naxx it was a defenate DPS loss. On average there was about 200DPS loss depending on the boss.

It is to my conclusion that running Blood 51/13/7 using the Standard Disease 3x OB rotation is the best single target DPS build for the DK that I have tested.

Please provide some additional info when making such statements; do you happen to have a WWS to share with us?

Edit: Fixed punctuation failure.

The optimal Blood rotation for 51/0/20: OB IT PS HS HS DC DC HS HS etc. etc. It seems you are trying to use the 51/13/7 rotation for the 51/0/20 build. For 51/0/20 you don't have annihilation which allows you to use OB freely without consuming diseases so opening with OB is more optimal to allow your diseases to tick throughout the rotation. Try reading in this thread about opening with OB. It should be somewhere in the other pages. That could be why you are not getting good numbers because from my own experience and i'm sure others would agree that 51/0/20>51/13/7.

1) The advantage of Blood is that the focus on physical damage makes good use of melee-oriented buffs and armor debuffs. Blood does competitive dps even without DRW.

2) Sure, unless the Blood DK uses the same AoE abilities available to all DK specs, and ends up with similar damage. Sarth3D is the only fight resembling a progression fight, but that doesn't mean that it's somehow the perfect benchmark for determining the one and only good DK spec.

@Everyone: Really, all the vague generalizations about "scaling" need to stop. All the specs scale with gear, and gain benefits from different aspects of it. The strength of the DK isn't in a single optimal spec, but in the fact that you can choose a spec that benefits your raid or is more suited to a particular fight, and still do dps on par with or better than most other dps classes. Min-maxing is one thing, but this sort of spec-fanboyism is annoying. Try actually playing other specs in a raid situation. If you can't do dps somewhere in the neighborhood of what you could in another spec, you're probably doing it wrong.

@Muadibz and Kobal: The short answer is that Blizzard has already said they expect using diseases to be a core mechanic of playing a DK. Part of the upcoming 3.1 changes will include some way of making using diseases better than not using them. Until then, diseaseless is being used because it's a good spec and it's easy.

@Graabthar: "Double-dipping" usually refers to abilities that get a benefit from two different types of buff/debuffs that are intended to boost two separate dpsers equivalently. DK strikes in any spec are affected by weapon damage and AP-- that's not double-dipping. Scourge Strike benefiting from melee buffs and spell damage buffs is.

Hi i'm new to the forums and I have read most of this thread but I still haven't seen a good 51/0/20 diseaseless AOE/Trash Mob rotation...

Are there any good ones for this kind of spec?

Also looking at my spec would you guys recommend any changes in talent points?

The World of Warcraft Armory

Thank you

I tired disease less blood this past week and for trash id start with obliterates then hs till everything is dead. Another thing I tried was start with an obliterate, apply and spread diseases then spam blood boil. Regardless, trash is easy, I wouldn't worry about it to much.

Been playing as 51/0/20 using diseases the past few weeks since our other DK is always Unholy and decided to try out the diseaseless OBx2 HSx2 rotation. Was pretty pleased with the results. My dps didn't jump by a huge number or anything, but the fact that diseaseless is so faceroll to play it makes it a little more attractive lol.

Here's a WMO for PW, army + raise dead on the pull. Diseaseless PW

No. What you're saying is actually a common misconception repeated frequently on these forums.

If you are to accept the fact that "raid buffs" are exactly what the words mean, then it's merely a single parameter when scaling is considered. You would never consider "raid buffs" to exclude a particular buff or debuff, why would you care who brings what buff? The only thing here that you should take into consideration is how much the total raid buff benefits each spec, i.e. whether blood simply scales less effectively with it compared to unholy. Which, contrary to your explanation, is a lot more complicated. I'd argue that unholy in fact scales less with the buffs you receive from raid because a larger portion of its damage comes from things that don't really scale well with crit, but that's an entirely different debate from what you portrayed.

The reason blood is benefiting more from diseaseless rotation is rather simple: the added dps diseases offer scales extremely poorly compared to the alternative. Upon reaching a certain gear level, the alternative simply does more, and that gear level is already reached. To "fix" this, they can either A) increase the scaling of the dps diseases add, such that it beats the alternative at all gear levels, or B) increase the amount of dps diseases add while keeping the current scaling, such that the alternative loses to it despite better scaling in the next few tiers of raids.

It's not hard to fathom why a tree (Blood) which only includes the word "disease" in a single talent in the entire tree (Bloody Strikes) would benefit more from a diseaseless rotation while they have two talents that give you a combined 10% & 6% bonus to physical damage. The Blood tree also has 9% crit for major physical abilities (Subversion, none of those are disease abilities). They also do guaranteed crits with DC (which doesn't benefit from diseases). Oh yeah, and Hysteria only increases physical damage by 20%... sure doesn't include diseases. Luckily enough, there's a lot of synergy with Necrosis because we have such huge physical damage increases but unfortunately Necrosis doesn't benefit from diseases.

I'll compare how many times the word disease or a specific disease is mentioned in each tree (max 1 per talent). Blood 1 Frost 7 (most of them reference FF) Unholy 8 (1 references BP exclusively)

Long story short, if they want us to use diseases they at least need to add some talents that have the word "disease" somewhere in the talent tree.

*edited for error in counting, bad at math

They got dead talents already, Vendetta and Spell Deflection. One of the common gripe about using PS is that it hits for trash while IT hits for monster truck force (hence ITx6 rotations and 0/20/51 DW). If you make PS into an actual strike instead of a joke then it'll get used. Replace those trash talents with something useful like Imp PS does 33%/66%/100% more weapon damage (making it at least 60% weapon damage) would probably make it usable (especially with the synergy from Vicious Strikes and physical dmg talents).

Don't kill me just yet, I haven't really tested this spec. I fully intend to however.

Main target: IT, PS, HT, HT, OB, spam DC and repeat

Trash I have two options I need to test:
D&D, IT, PS, Pest -> IT, PS, HS, HS, OB, spam DC and repeat
or
D&D, IT, PS, Pest -> IT, PS, HS, HS, IT, PS, DC, DC, HS, HS, IT, PS, DC, DC, HS, (and repeat start then continue)

Here is my build:
wowarmory
Please remember I am just trying this and I'm sure there will be many things I've not bought into that would have been better. I also wanted to see if multiple pets were a bonus so I may go back in and get the Gargoyle again.

I wouldn't pronounce Spell Deflection dead just yet. We'll have to see encounter design going forward to know for sure, but I definitely see room for it in Frost/Vet builds, or in full anti-magic UH builds of the kind people are employing for 3D. Vendetta will hopefully be seeing something, anything, change in 3.1.

IT hitting like a truck is, to me, a problem, not a model to emulate. ITx6 and the IT-spam based DW builds are as 'broken' as diseaseless Blood in terms of mismatch with the designer vision. I doubt when they were designing the IT skill they intended for it to be a primary nuke. It applies a useful debuff, and is a stopgap ranged ability in high-movement phases (P2 Heigan for example), but it shouldn't be a go-to nuke. I'm all for diferent builds feeling different, but IT Spam seems to me nearly as counter-intuitive as spamstring/WF synergy in classic.

Tree flavor should come from something the tree adds, not something the tree encourages you to drop. I think the culprit here is in the HS/FS/ScS implementation. ScS doesn't feel different from Oblit, HS doesn't feel different from BS, and FS isn't really doing the job in Frost. I'm not sure what the answer for Blood and UH is (though pets go a long way to making UH DPS unique), but it looks like in Frost the right answer is going to be to de-emphasize buffing frost damage in general (read: IT), and place more emphasis on FS. Make RP the more valuable resource for Frost rather than Runes. This makes RPM and the IT Glyph make more sense, and with the demise of BoSanc likely it won't suffer too badly from balance issues centered around a Prot Pally being present or absent.

Im pushing near 1700 str buffed in raids atm as 51/20 is there some point were 50 str pot beats 180 ap flask, my maths is really terrible sorry. With kings/huge + to str i thought it maybe possible quite soon? not to mention buff to fallen crusader the pot gives.

It never will, but perhaps if there was a guardian elixir worth using that would change. Also, the flask lasting 2 hours + through death is very nice.

The calculation for strength is actually really simple, you just slap all the multipliers together. For Blood spec, (51/0/20) assuming BoK and a 50% uptime on Unholy Strength, it works out to:

1 Str = 2*1.06*1.03*1.1*(1+.5*.3) = 2.76 AP

So 50 strength is worth about 138 AP. Use the flask.

It should be slightly higher assuming you summon your Ghoul, since ghouls benefit from strength but not AP. You might even want to give the option to model the player popping Ghoul during Greatness/FC. This is less significant than it is for UH with 100% uptime on Ghoul, but it's worth something.

The point stands, though, that it's not enough higher to justify elixirs.

Have there been any stat weights for Diseaseless Blood posted anywhere? I know the Unholy thread has weights for a traditional Blood build, but I can see them being slightly different without any diseases (I'd imagine ArP might be higher or something like that).

Check out Doc's spreadsheet in the spreadsheet thread.

Hi, im playing 51/0/20 deseasless for a while now and was wondering how good my [Grim Toll] compared to the Darkmoon Greatness card and the Mirror is. Which 2 of the three trinkets would you use?

I usually tank Naxx, so having the opportunity to DPS for once is a treat.

Sorry if this is a repeat question, but I couldn't find it in any of the replies and this thread is pretty long.

Re: Disease-Less build Active Presence

My DPS numbers from testing each presence was pretty close. "Heart Strike" was the main source of DPS while in Blood , and "Melee" was higher when using Unholy. I get to DPS this week for Naxx 10 and was wondering which is prefered for Patchwerk?

Toon - The World of Warcraft Armory

For trinkets I have "Mirror of Truth", but I could stack better gear by swapping in "Sphere of Red Dragon's Blood". I'll be at 269 hit rating once I eat my food, but wasn't sure if I should stack more hit and then eat the expertise food instead?

I deleted my starting Sigil a while back, so I don't have that as an option and am stuck with Haunted Dreams.

The disease-less rotation looks pretty simple to follow for a button spammer, so any tips would be appreciated.