That was my point in an earlier post too, and seeing as some people said they don't aggro shit anymore, I think I'll try them tomorrow for naxx10 instead of blood aura. Blood aura is nice but we have like 4blood DKs online all the time, so it's really a waste of points, and one point in runetap+HS or potion seems enough. They might die all the time, and hit for 30, but it sure won't be worse than 3blood auras.

Another question that was left with pretty much contradictory answers, the badge Sigil, is it good? Does it proc often, not often, internal CD, none etc. I've seen some people say it never proced, others saying it was up all the time, I'd like to know cause it'd be a decent upgrade for a 51/0/20, but if it's not really any better than the base sigil, I guess I can wait until I get naxx one. Also wish blizzard had made more sigils, but well.

what Rune are people running in there weapons?

I'm curious to know if a 2% bonus weapon damage (4% vs undead) at all times is better then the Proc of Fallen Crusader.

Actually, I wonder. If you're going to use Death Strike exclusively as your FU dump, then it would make sense to get Epidemic, right? Probably drop two points in Ravenous Dead for it.

Also, I'm fairly certain the best enchant for Blood is Fallen Crusader, since the 30% strength is huge (and your passive +% strength is higher than other specs as well) and your damage comes from physical attacks. Plus, when it goes off, you can pop your trinkets to get a cranked up DRW (or Gargoyle).

I leveled with Bloodworms and dropped them once I hit 80. They had a nasty nasty habit of attacking things...like alliance in neutral towns or elites clear across the room. More then once death was attributed to them. So no...I do not think the issue is resolved.

Ive been raiding with the 50/0/21 build and I absolutely love it. Personally I dont find the lack of Obliterates to be a problem at all, and I dont Deathstrike that much either. Ive found that the most important part of the 50/0/21 rotation is the very first strike, and personally, my first strike is Obliterate.

My rotation: OB, IT, PS, HS, HS, DC, HS, HS, HS, HS, OB, DC, DC, repeat.

Heres a WWS from earlier this week. Unfortunately it doesnt have Patchwerk, where I was able to pull down 3011 dps. Wow Web Stats

Obviously the rotation doesnt always go that way and I adjust along the way, but Ive found thats what works best for me. The early OB isnt that much weaker than a diseased OB (I would personally rather do an undiseased OB than a Deathstrike), and it gets Death Runes on the timer early so that by the time HS is ready, I can do 2-4.

As much as I like 51/13/7, it seems like there are a number of factors that could put 50/0/21 (or 51/0/20) over the top in the long run. Firstly, we all know about the Str bonuses, which are gigantic (13% I think?). The other 3 things are Necrosis, BCB, and the Gargoyle (or DRW). It seems like haste is unavoidable in a lot of our gear. 2 of our set pieces have it, and plenty of melee dps plate/rings/necks out there have it. Whether we like it or not, it seems like were going to HAVE to run with between 1-4 pieces of haste gear. I could be wrong of course, but it seems that way.

The WWS doesnt specify it clearly, but Necrosis accounted for 3.6% of my damage (WWS just says 3%). And BCB in that WWS was only 2/3, not 3/3 BCB like I have in my build now. Overall, Necrosis and BCB were accounting for 6.5% of my dps. Maybe my assumption is wrong, but if we keep getting more and more haste on our gear that we cant avoid, that could make for some good Necrosis/BCB damage.

The other thing that really stood out at me was the amount of damage my gargoyle did. I was legitimately shocked that the gargoyle accounted for 7% of my dps. One of the tricks I use (and maybe other DKs do too) is to use Death and Decay before a boss fight. Death and Decay works like a warriors Enrage for us, and generates 20 Runic Power (obviously.) It takes a while, but Im able to start every boss fight now with full Runic Power. Which allows me to get my first rotation going, wait for a Mirror of Truth and/or Fallen Crusader proc, then use all my 'trinkets' (blood fury, loatheb's shadow, etc) and pop the gargoyle and go to town.

The early Runic Power, early OB for Death Runes, and pumped up Gargoyle/DRW really puts me at an advantage over other classes.

Heres my armory: The World of Warcraft Armory

Did some testing tonight.

Same gear, same buffs (HoW) and same macros used (those listed earlier in this thread).

PS - IT - HS - HS - OB - DC - OB - HS - HS - HS - HS - DC produced ~1244 DPS (bad gear, don't laugh).

PS - IT - HS - HS - OB - DC produced ~1320 DPS under identical circumstances.

I also tested whether or not it was better to do full dump of Runic Power when it was time for Death Coil in the rotation and the answer came out (for me) to be no. You (or at least, me) are better off using a single DC only when the rotation calls for it.

Again, I have a non-cookie-cutter spec so this may not be true for everyone or indeed anyone except myself, but just posting it here to add to the information.

Are you considering the presence of raid buffs like Misery, Draenei auras, Imp. Faerie Fire, etc. in conjuction with Virulence bringing the hit chances down to 9%?

The "missed" column in WWS that you're looking at includes misses, dodges, and parries for melee attacks.

Im not, no. Thanks for pointing that out. But in a 25 man, those buffs are likely going to be inevitable to have in most cases. This isnt to say Virulence is useless, but Id say diminished.

I was wondering if someone had the dps gain per hit point below the special hit cap then below the spell hit and anything above that. From what i gather hit rating is more desirable before the yellow hit cap however there is no number given of its value after hit cap. After 9%, considering that im specced into virulence, does hit rating fall completely off?

If you have 9% hit, specced for Virulence, have a Draenei aura and the target you are hitting has Misery/Imp. Faerie Fire you are hitcapped with spells.

Assuming all of the above buffs and a 9% hit rating from gear, that would put the value of hit to 0. 9% hit with a twohander equals to no misses on yellows or white attacks.

Ahhhh see i came from a rogue background so i forgot about the cap for 2 handers. Thanks

Mine definitely don't do that. When out of combat they just follow me around like most Guardian-type minions, or pets on defensive.

As for them as a DPS boost, I'm currently in all blues and they account for about 3% in fights with no AoE damage (And they were about 2.5% when I did Archavon this week). They also seem to scale with stats, though I'm not sure we've modeled or tested that yet. I'll do some tests after I finish up these dailies.

Edit: This is going to take longer than I expected. Especially since I forgot to spec out of Bloody Vengeance, and it takes a relatively long time to get a solid number of hits from the worms. As a preliminary conclusion, though, they definitely scale with stats. It looks to be predominantly Strength (or maybe Attack Power). Plus they also seem to inherit your Crit Rating and your Hit Rating. Dropping my 8% hit took the worms from around 1% misses to about 10%. Crit Rating seems to scale but I wasn't specifically recording this, so I'm not sure. And their crit chance is low.

No, the badge sigil is terrible because haste is terrible for DKs, well I could see how DW would make use of it, but that's about it. You're better off waiting for the Sigil out of Naxx-25 and buying the badge trinket or saving them for the tier pieces.

Checking a few Blood-DK Patchwerk logs here and on WWS, you'll consistently find that people are lagging behind with regard to rune refreshes (e.g. earlier in this thread with 50/0/21, or on WWS with 51/13/8), and in most cases severely enough to make Unholy Presence a clear DPS upgrade.

The first example (fight time 4:02 = 242 seconds = 12 cycles of IT-PS-HS-HS-OB - IT-PS-HS-HS-HS-HS) features

- 61/72 HSs (actual/theoretical)
- 11/12 OBs
- 20/24 PSs
- 21/24 ITs.

Theoretical RP generation would be (72 + 24 + 24) x 10 + (12) x 15 = 1380 from strikes, 240 from the IT glyph, 96 from Butchery, and (72 x 40 x 20%) = 576 from Sudden Doom, totalling 1380 + 240 + 96 + 576 = 2292 RP; gargoyle was up twice, using up to 900 RP, which would leave enough RP for

- 17/34 DCs

Assuming Unholy Presence leaves white damage untouched, and lowers yellow damage by 15%, all you need is getting 15% more abilities off to make up for it - in this case, that's trivially true:

- 18% more HSs
- 9% more OBs
- 20% more PSs
- 14% more ITs

- 100% more DCs

Overall you'd look at a 5-6% damage upgrade. For orientation: the example was using roughly 135 GCDs, about 200 seconds - stretched by 20% via latency and reaction times. The same cycle in Unholy Presence should yield about 170 GCDs (170 seconds), which offers a lot more leeway even with maximum possible latency (300 ms here) - so it should be entirely possible to pull off.

For the sample WWS, using the same approach yields a 4-5% damage increase - this is while using the more forgiving OB/DS cycle, and better connection or player.

Even theoretically, a fit-into-20-seconds cycle can only use 2 or 3 DCs (depending on whether it's using an U/F-dump once or twice), while RP generation allows for more than 4 (or more than 4.5 with IT glyph) - that's losing out on more than 10% damage right there, and already more than 15% adding 100 ms latency (connection + player).

I highly doubt that. The rotation would have to make over 300dps more.

It certainly needs some testing, it is very difficult for me to make sure I hit all my HS and OB before diseases wear off.

What do you mean by "the rotation would have to make over 300 dps more"? Why does unholy presence need to have more damage? Even a slight decrease of about 100-300 dps from a potential number based on a controlled rotation and latency can be worth it just to leave some room for error. I like unholy presence because I can fit in other things much easier, like summoning a ghoul or even an emergency mark of blood without destroying my current rotation. I'll try to get a WWS with unholy presence next time my guild does 25man Naxx.

If you don't make errors the +15% dmg beats Unholy Presence by a lot. Sure, Unholy is easier to play. It leaves you some room to breathe and think, but if you are beyond that the Blood Presence is superior.
Unholy Presence is great for PvP or learning to play a DK.

Well, yes and no. Haste isn't terrible--it's just our least valuable stat. It does still increase dps. Blood spec (particularly the 50/0/21 variety) would also make the best use of it, next to a dual-wield spec. Doing quick napkin math based on some Naxx-25 fights, the [Sigil of Haunted Dreams] would be about 2x as good as the [Sigil of the Dark Rider] if the uptime on the buff were 100%.

The problem is that the buff from the badge sigil is definitely not up 100%. In fact, it doesn't seem to proc very often at all, and rather evenly spaced, suggesting to me it has some kind of internal cooldown. In any case, it certainly doesn't hit the 50% uptime it would need to match the starter zone sigil. So the issue isn't that the sigil has haste on it-- it's that it doesn't proc nearly enough to make it useful.

Incidentally, the Naxx-25 [Sigil of Awareness] isn't as good as the starter zone sigil for my 50/0/21 spec, either. When you consider how many Heart Strikes you're using compared to Obliterates, it makes sense.

I quickly read through the thread and some things came into my mind that people haven't spoken about.

Firstly: Mostly people have only been comparing annihilation with OB vs necrosis, BCB with DS etc. Have you noticed that how much your icy touch and frost fever damage gets buffed when you spec into 51/13/7? Just did 25man naxx today and with that spec my icy touch was critting for 4-5k (actually doing about the same damage as HS), not to mention that my frost fever ticks for 30% more. I don't have any raw numbers (atleast not yet) but how does stand out vs necrosis and bcb. As we all know, icy touch becomes just a debuffer ability if you spec something like 50/0/21, but with 51/13/7 its a kickass damage ability.

EDIT: Actually got WWS, too bad i died on most of the tank and spank fights :P
Wow Web Stats

51/0/20 would scale better with haste since DRW gets it (1:1 ratio) as well and I'm fairly certain that Gargoyle doesn't.