Don't trick yourself into thinking think blood aura is bad because it mostly overheals. It is a passive heal designed to reduce the healing needed for a raid. If it is mostly overhealing, it is doing it's job of keep everyone topped off. Ideally you never take damage, but when you do it's there for you.

Passive healing isn't wasted when it's not healing!

2 points in blood aura is a better investment than blood worms and blood tap.

My results tend to agree with your #s. I switched to disease-less this week for Naxx, and didn't notice any real change in DPS at all. But I think the important thing about the rotation is 4 pc T7(along with the Sigil, which we haven't seen in 12 Heigan kills, /sigh). I noticed with OBx2 HSx2 rotation I'd have a lot of free GCDs like you mentioned. Often times they'd be with 25-35 RP. I can easily see 4pc T7 filling that free GCD gap and pushing it a bit above using diseases. Just my experience with it. I'll probably try it again once I finally bother to pick up T7 legs to get my 4 pc.

Even without the t7 bonus i find i have plenty of RP to tide me over til runes refresh. The t7 bonus would be icing on the cake.

There is a detailed explaination on page 30, post number 730.

1) Actually, this really isn't the case. At worst, you're exchanging a total of 2 GCDs per 20 seconds (PS + IT) for 1 (OB). I rarely have an empty GCD, and I used [OB OB HS HS DC DC (DC) repeat] in this past week's 25-mans. The additional runic power from the t7 4-piece helps with this. And, for what it's worth, having free GCDs isn't a "problem" anyway, if you're expending all your resources and getting similar results-- it's actually pretty useful.

2) I don't think that anyone is suggesting that 1 OB hits harder than 2 HS, nor is that an assumption the rotation is based on. In fact, the opposite is widely recognized, and there was just a discussion in the last few pages about whether it was better to prioritize OB (as in OB OB HS HS repeat) or HS (as in OB OB HS HS, HSx6), for precisely the reason you bring up. The argument for the side of prioritizing OB is that it has a higher crit rate, generates more RP (T7 4pc), benefits more consistently from its +20% damage glyph, has the best Sigil, and uses fewer GCDs per rotation. (You can squeeze more damage into the duration of a trinket proc/DRW/etc, too.) At its simplest, it boils down to HS + HS > OB, but OB + DC > HS + HS.

For the most part, it seems like specs that prioritize 2-rune abilities perform better, in large part because they're somewhat easier and free up GCDs for runic power abilities. The issue with Blood specs is that OB with diseases needs Annihilation in order to prioritize it. You're absolutely right that, on paper, PS + IT + full duration diseases should do more damage than an OB for a UF use. But, to get full duration diseases, you have to either take Annihilation, which is a somewhat inferior spec now because of the Necrosis change in particular, or use a more inconvenient 51/0/20 rotation that doesn't prioritize OB since it removes diseases. So with 51/0/20 the current best spec, prioritizing OB means diseaseless.

In short, this is not to say that your rotation produces poor results. It's just that the diseaseless does produce just as good if not better results, and seems easier to execute consistently. I tried to compare my numbers to yours, but from your link it looks like you tanked Patchwerk. Thaddius isn't as stable of a measure, and mine's not worth looking at anyway because I missed the jump for the first time since level 60, haha.

For your reference though, here's 5510 dps on Patchwerk, trying out diseaseless OB OB HS HS for the first time this week: (link).

More:

I'm at work so writing this post is going slow-- a few more comments on your latest post. You're right that his math isn't using the optimal disease rotation for 51/0/20, but I don't think it's using the best diseaseless one, either. Your listed rotation is missing one set of UF as well.

The boss' armor doesn't really factor into the comparison, which is why it's not included in his math. Bonus damage to strikes from diseases is a flat amount, so the only change to the equation would be armor affecting the one OB vs. IT + PS + disease damage. With full raid armor debuffs and physical damage buffs, OB will still be competitive.

The length of the rotation is immaterial because they all last 20 seconds with rune cooldowns. It's all about the damage you do in those 20 seconds. If the fight has less than 20 seconds remaining, you should be changing up your abilities to squeeze in the maximum amount of damage anyway. The same goes for his Hysteria reasoning-- either rotation would benefit from prioritizing physical attacks while Hysteria is up, regardless of what your rotation normally is.

Agreed, I guess I was responding to the more recent posts suggesting a 10 second OB OB HS HS rotation.


This I can almost agree with. I do think that diseaseless is very, very close (which is probably why it's getting nerfed in 3.1 according to GC). In cases of high connection or FPS lag diseaseless probably pulls out ahead.

Yep :/ Haven't been able to dps patch for the last couple weeks. Itching to try out my rotation with the shiny upgrades i got recently (especially greatness and betrayer).


This is correct, but the physical damage reduction of even fully debuffed bosses is still around 30-35%, compared to ~4% spell damage reduction from the level difference resistance for spells, not to mention the spell damage increasing debuffs. I really doubt that it is possible to accurately compare one Obliterate with Icy Touch + Plague Strike + Diseases without looking at armor when one has a multiplier of .7 and the other ~1.1 (without an unholy dk).

Competitive is a subjective term. Is the damage close? Yes, yes it is. Is it higher or lower though?

Rune cooldown times in either rotation are not static. They are reduced, seemingly magically, so that disease-based rotation does in fact take only ~18 seconds. I have not however been able to lower the duration of a diseaseless rotation to below 20 seconds, even while i was not using GCDs for anything other than oblit and hs. I was looking at the time between Obliterates in the disease rotation and the time between OB1 and OB 3 in a diseaseless rotation. This is somewhat difficult to show via a combat log screenshot, but anyone with timestamps enabled can go and check it out for themselves. So yes, rotation duration does matter, unless I'm doing something wrong.

Hello people.Im loving the diseaseless spec, but reading blizzard's comments i believe that in 3.1 they will pretty much f*ck up those excluding diseases specializations >_<

Actually, they could achieve the same goal with far less effort. Simply change the requirement from Blood-Gorged to be active. Instead of having 75%+ health you need to have both diseases up to get the 10% bonus - or give a 5% bonus for each active disease. The DPS of the diseased rotation would stay the same (it might actually go up in fights with large amounts of raid damage) while the diseaseless rotation would suffer. As a side benefit no larger scale retuning is necessary.

That said I personally would like the diseaseless rotation to stay competitive. I find it a very fitting playstyle for the physical-centered Blood. This way the Death Knight would offer varying playstyles - from the very disease-heavy Unholy over the half-diseased Frost to the diseaseless Blood - to suit everyones taste, which I consider a good thing. The only danger that this of course implies is that in particular with the hinted changes to Sudden Doom diseaseless Blood may become the new 0/21/40 destruction warlock.

However there is no right and wrong in this argument, just individual preferences. And since Bizzards preference seems to be to make diseases mandatory this is what most likely will happen.

I don't believe that disease less styles of play should stay competitive with similar play styles that use diseases. The core mechanic of a Death Knight is that they put diseases on the target and get stronger by having them there. Allowing a spec that doesn't use diseases to remain as the top DPS spec would be like allowing druids to do the most dps/healing in human form or Warriors tanking best with no board. It ruins the fun of the class and ignores its core mechanics. If you really want to play a disease less blood DK, go roll a Retadin, they're basically the same at that point.

ATM, using 0 diseases is a decent spec. If in the future if that changes, then people will use Diseases. People just want to use what is "best", i.e. the most damage they can do.

Even ignoring the disease issue, DKs are very different from Ret, with the noticeable difference being not having as much of a hybrid dps tax.

Hey, I'm new to playing DK, rerolled from shadowpriest as i seemed to be capped at about 5k dps. Now, with a 2h frost spec (21/50) I was hitting around 5.2-5.5k on patch but then the following week i respecced blood diseaseless spec (51/0/20) and my dps dropped way down on patch to 3.7. I am wondering from reading the first post it says to start with either IT or PS.

I was under the impression that you simply start by doing OB OB HS HS then HSx6 and repeat.

Is this wrong? I had a browse through but with so many pages I may have missed something.

Thanks in advance.