Assuming your multipliers are correct it doesn't offset the loss, even at 100% crit that's 2.45 * .975 = 2.38875 vs. oblit at 2 * 1.2 = 2.4 However the true comparison lies in the talent adjustments anyway.

According to mmo-champion, the 75% to 60% nerf was invalid, they've since crossed that part out and has returned it back to 75%, just that the healing returned was lowered by 20%.
That would change your .975 value to 1.219, just over Obliterate.

How DS receives 2.45 crit modifier I'll never know, MoM was changed to 30% for HS/DS/BB. DS as of the previous PTR was bugged and got the bonus from MoM and Vicious Strikes, so it was doing 2.6x crit damage. It also was receiving the 6% crit from VS. So, if they do put DS back on the VS tooltip, then assuming 25% base crit, OB has a crit chance of 39% (5 from Dark Con and 9 from Sub) and DS has a crit chance of 42% (5 Dark Con, 6 Imp DS, 6 Vicious Strike). OB comes out to 166.8% (assuming 120% wpn dmg) and DS is 162.2% (assuming 97.5% wpn dmg and bugged VS) average weapon damage, which is comparable.

[edited]
When was MoM changed back to 45% crit multiplier? My bad on the math.

[edit #2]
So, has anyone checked to see if DS has the correct crit% and crit dmg since the newest ptr patch? Or is it still getting too much crit and too much crit dmg from Vicious Strikes?

Which is bloody silly, and hard to expect to stay ingame for long. I can hardly see a strike hitting harder than Obliterate and healing you for 1500 (assuming no cooldown in action) in pvp and up to what, 5k in Pve Ulduar loot?

Something will happen for sure, and sadly the last minute nerfs are always the worse.

Remember... DS doesnt scale as good with gear.

OB is 80% base, 100% glyphed. but an additional 12.5% per disease.

DS does not get that extra 12.5%... Every time i tested, OB still did more damage

No, the nerf was intended. Ingame its again 60% (like before the buff from 60 to 75%).

On MMO, they simply erased the part where it said, that the damage was increased from 60 to 75% weapon damage (which means nothing else but reverting the PTR DS buff a few weeks ago; on live we have all the time this 60%).


I tried 51/13/7, glyphs were Obliterate, dark death, dancing rune weapon.

My sustained dps with 4pt7 was about 2780 over 8 minutes. I used the standard rotation. Every cooldown incl. ghoul was used.

So i tried again 51/1/19 (with the only glyph change being OB<->DS), was slightly above 3050 DPS in 10 minutes testing.

I do not see any reason why OB speccs should be better scaling in raids, so going back to ob heavy builds isnt still an option.

The last built brought for blood dks:
1) -20% death strike damage (well, too much self heal? they could have simply nerfed the healing component)
2) -50% drw uptime (pretty hard pve nerf)
3) no perma ghoul anymore (okay, i didnt want it anyway)
4) -20% heart strike damage (because the glyph of bs doesnt affect heart strike anymore)

Obviously, blood dks have a better scaling with melee buffs and ulduar plate items/stats (crit and armor penetration contribute much better). But overall that wont make up that much difference. Comparing our t8 pieces or the few non set pieces (not weapons), i do not see the big upgrades to what we have now. It certainly wont make up 500 DPS if blood is 500 DPS behind unholy (what we yet dont know, but thats what i estimate from some ptr loggs).
Id love to see a few raid parses after the patch but ulduar wasnt opened yet (and probably wont be anymore).

Well, looks like the DS revert was reverted! I was honestly hoping for a little DRW love here, but unless something is undocumented or unfound yet, boo.

At least we got our UF strike back.

Weve still got one or two patch builds left most likely. 11 second uptime for an untalented/unglyphed 51 point talent ability going live would be very surprising.

It would be very surprising if DRW's uptime wasnt given a slight boost (to 15-20 seconds).

Just to add onto the latest changes list.

Death Strike is on the t7 set bonuses, both of them.


EDIT: After pondering, with them doing awesome small changes to set bonuses, is there anyone who knows if they've changed the T8 set? Either dumping blue sockets for Red/Yellow, reverting the "Dump everything for a small Strength gain" change or putting crit instead of haste back on the shoulders?

its 19 seconds glyphed with rpm at 130 rp

10sec = start

9 sec = 90rpm /10

5sec of glyph missing - so i think glyph is bugged

new DS doesnt hit as hard diseaseless ob on live - but hits harder then ob on ptr. bloodspec
but still no high numbers with blood spec, max was like 6,4k ds crit on boss dummy

Bit too much doom & gloom talk about OB vs. DS. Regardless you will be only using 2xDS or OB every third rune rotation and using OB requires quite many wasted talents from frost tree + OB glyph is mandatory while DS might not be. Unfortunately DS healing will be the issue thanks to pvp for upping DS damage.

I don't expect the baseline dmg advantage of OB pulling it ahead of DS in dps usage, expecially when DS doesn't consume diseases and doesn't get extra crit dmg.

The real bugger is Death Rune Mastery. Since DS doesn't benefit from diseases, it's clear that HS spamm is the way to go... and you need to weave in OB for that. They should add DS to DRM at this point, if that's how they want Blood to play as.

Whenever you hit with Death Strike or Obliterate there is a 100% chance that the Frost and Unholy Runes will become Death Runes when they activate.

And it's like that on Live too!

I never noticed, my bad. Probably because I never specc DRM anyways - even as frost, IT spamm isn't my thing.

Ignore the stupid remark, but then the situation is clear - having smooth disease handling and selfhealing will certainly beat having to specc Frost to get some extra dmg on a 1-per-20-seconds strike.

No its working as intended.

5 seconds base + 5seconds glyph = 10 seconds base
90 RP = 9 seconds, so the maximum stays 19 seconds. And it lasts the full 19 seconds.

So DRW is working the way its supposed to be. But right now its simply supposed to be weak.

An up coming problem i see with Death Strike and Blizzard is Blizz re-nerfing DS because it's too good at healing you in PvP. Although thinking about it. If they limited the amount it can heal for then this problem would be solved.
For example: It can heal upto a maximum of 25% of your total health.

On Live, DRW is too strong - on the PTR it's too weak.

However, trying to get a middleground isn't always easy. The point is, Blood dps is already quite good without DRW - you could run bosses without using it, and you would of course lose dps, but you wouldn't drop to the bottom of the charts. It's not as relevant as Garg was for UH before the nerfs. The problem is that DRW is such a dps increase that Blood does need it to stay competive, but the way it is it will scale too much and too well in a burst dps (pvp?) perspective.

Balacing our DRW is a very hard task because if it's too strong, it shoots an already strong specc into the stratosfere. If it's too weak, it's lackluster as a 51 pointer. Probably if Blizzard doesn't want it to be an excessive damage increase they could work on adding some extra, not-damage related effect to spice it up. But having played blood extensively, I think it can't stay this way for long.
A week ago I had over 6700 dps on Malygos from the pull till I landed from the first vortex - I don't think that's working as intended.

Has anyone on the PTR tried this 44/0/27 build that I saw mentioned on WoW Insider? I saw a similar build mentioned a few pages ago, but there were no comparisons run with it that I could find. My DK alt just hit 80, so I probably couldn't run a decent test yet myself. Blood is my preferred style of play, but this hybrid build does intrigue me if DRW remains nerfed.

Right now, blood has a very good burst, thats all. This has been changed anyways by lowering damage und uptime by 50% at the same RP-costs.

Your example is pointless. The problem of blood dk on live is: if you fight only 1minute - yeah, blood is really our best specc. But thats just for short fights. The longer a fight takes, the more you lose with blood and the more you gain with frost and unholy. Considering that Uluduar has only much longer fights - well, blood in its current form would have performed very bad. So lowering burst and raising sustained dps obvioulsy is the right way.

But that doesnt mean that they had to nerf DRW that strong. Its still a dps increase, but only a small one. On dummy, one DRW brings about 20k damage für 130 RP. Assuming DC averages for 2500 (without the glyph), its gain from about 130 DPS over using no DRW(also sacrificing a major glyph slot, but we dont have another interesting glyph anyways).

Any spec that can deal with a 250K HP elite solo is going to be effective in cycle-based lengthy PvP. By definition you're doing something that makes you impossible to kill. However, even with the whole 3.1 rebuild, Blizzard has done nothing to really address this despite Death Strike and Imp. Rune Tap being widely reputed in videos of killing everything from Durn on up to Icecrown. If anything, they *want* Blood to use Death Strike more, and left the healing more or less intact when you account for the adjustment and the damage buff.

Take them at their word on not balancing for 1v1 PvP.

This is what I disagree with - Blood being a weak specc without DRW. It NEEDS DRW to stay competitive, but for example last night I averaged 4600ish dps over one night of Sarth 3D 10 men attempts (with pugs for awesomeness). That's an average over about 15 million damage, of a fight that lasts longs enough to use 3 DRW (which I never did because we had all sort of incidents after during Vesperon takedowns - Sartharion at some point decided he was periodically deaggroing the tank and breath on the raid).
I was holding 4500-4800 dps over a 6-7 minute fight, with MINIMAL DRW uptime. A very mobile fight, where you have to slow down dps for the damage shield, never doing any form of AOE aside from one DnD during the Tenebron/Shadron shift... I wouldn't say the specc is weak without DRW. I was playing with a capable Fury DW warrior (using 2 Betrayers) and I was over him often by ridicolous margins.
Blood is pretty sick in live. I don't see a DRW nerf making it "gimp". I agree the nerf is excessive, but the good thing about DRW is that it theorycally scales so well that we probably will still see quite a bit of damage increase. And it's gonna be up twice as often. Which will make procc uptime (expecially when bosses aren't Patchwerk and you need to use your burst without waiting for the stars to align) a lot higher, thanks to the guardian mechanics.

I wouldn't go all doom and gloom to be honest. In my opinion when you account for everything Blood may even come out stronger from 3.1. With Obliterate out of the way, you'll have buffed HS spamm (with extra benefit from diseases) that proccs Death Coil without hurting your GCD. I'd wait and see. 3.1 Blood seems awesome to me.

I agree perfectly, but you need to consider that all that you need to kill the supposedly immoral Blood DK 1vs1 is a prot warrior. What goes around comes around. DS doesn't heal you if it doesn't do damage.