Not what Im getting at all. Every test Im doing places 4c T8 around 100 dps behind the 2c T8/extra ArP itemization. Even if the hit is too high, you can simply switch out a couple of items (notice the different rings I linked). Im not saying youre wrong, Im just not seeing how a ~3% bonus to 30% of our damage will outperform 100+ ArP for 60-70% of our damage. Also, keep in mind, Gauntlets of the Wretched are from 10 man Ulduar. Weve yet to discover a 25 man equivalent with ArP. Same for shoulders.

Im also not sure what hit numbers youre using...maybe my item stats are out of date. Im getting 265 hit for the entire set I linked with Bladebearer's and Sif's. Thats not very high.

In regards to the post commenting on the 51/2/18 spec and Runic Power generation (if T7/7.5 bonus or other RP inflation methods)...

At first I was worried about having a hard time capping out 130 RP for DRW every 90 seconds because I fall into the same boat that you do (no tier bonuses or RP generating glyphs, etc). However, in practice over the past few days I can attest to it not being as difficult as I had imagined. Using the standard rotation will generate an abundance of RP even when using 2 DC during each RP dump phase once you get the rotation rolling. Your first rune rotation will only allow 1 DC if you came into the battle with empty RP, but every dump after that should include two DC. If it looks like you may run a bit short on RP as your DRW cooldown is coming up, only use one DC in the RP dump phases instead of two. Doing that alone should cap out your RP quickly, and you can always use Horn of Winter to help out if you desperately fall short. As a last-ditch effort you can hold off on both DC entirely, but that is the point where your DPS can start to get adversely affected. Try to avoid that if you can help it. A full 130 RP + glyph DRW can definately help make up for that, but with enough RP planning you should never have to skip out on both DC in a dump phase to use DRW.


I'm still messing around with my points in Unholy. Necrosis and BCB clock in so close point for point that it really makes it tough. Personally I prefer the reliability of Necrosis in that it is guaranteed to go off on all white hits, but barring absolutely horrible luck BCB really isn't that RNGish. I would imagine that Morbidity will play a bigger role one people start to get the Death Coil Sigil, but for now it offers similar benefits to Necrosis / BCB.

For gloves there is Bladebreaker's Gauntlets which exchanges some hit for crit last I checked.

Are we talking about Kahorie's sim? Has the Sim been updated with a new ArP formula? Last I spoke with him/her she/he was going to but I don't see it in the latest version changes so I doubt it's in yet.

Also, yes a fair amount of items have been updated. From my list of gear I am getting 235 Hit while yours gets 311 on my charts with T8 shoulders. Who knows? Maybe a lot has changed again since I checked last week or I might have errors too.

Ok, I see what your talking about now. And yes, I have to agree that sounds like an extremely weak 4pc bonus. Maybe the poster a few posts earlier (cant rememer name and its on the previous page) is right about looking into the mechanics of that because if blizz seriously thought this was a good idea for a 4pc bonus the way you all have it mapped out then I think DK's got screwed. But thats a diff topic for a diff place.

Thanks for the clear up and I would be interested in seeing if someone decides to look into those mechanics and what they find. =)

It's a 1% damage bonus without taking away from the stats on the item. That's pretty much in the range of what set bonuses are supposed to be. They're not meant to be game-breaking. They're meant to be a nice little bonus which lets you benefit from getting T8 early (since more of it drops compared to random off-set items), but it's not meant to be so strong that there's no debate about breaking up the set. I'm probably going the off-set route until I can get 4 pieces, since there's a lot of other dps on the token that need it (not to mention tanks).

T7 set bonuses were a mistake, and they'll probably end up changing them since Frost and Unholy are talking about keeping T7 through ulduar. Coming from a druid, I'm not that surprised considering the T4 debacle.

And yes, Kahorie's sim is overvaluing ArP just a bit because the exact formula isn't implemented. My BiS list I made pretty much matches methods', though Lushen's looks viable too. Armor Pen is pretty damn amazing, and you really wouldn't go wrong stacking as much as possible. I'm sticking with gemming strength, though, since as methods mentioned, our AoE capabilities benefit as well.

One of the issues I have with the bonus is how unequal it is. It is a 3.33% buff to Heart strike but a 4% buff to Blood strike w/ 2 diseases, 4% buff to Obliterate w/ 2 diseases, about 4.96% buff to Scourge Strike w/ 3 diseases, and 5.4545% buff to blood strike w/ 3 diseases. So blood gets the least benefit from both of the set bonuses.

I added 2/2 epidemic to first build and took 1p away from necrosis. Instant 100dps gain. Build still did bit less dps than second build. Another difference is 2/5 necrosis vs. 5/5 necrosis which will favour second spec even more. Ghoul in raid might catch up in damage (?) but it needs stay alive pretty much whole duration...

Anyone else getting similar results??

Each point in Necrosis is very slightly less than 1% more total damage.

That point in epidemic is getting you 6 dot tics / min. (1 tic from each disease each 20s rotation). A moderate estimate for dot tics with crypt fever bonus is ~700, so that's getting you 4200 more damage every min. Over an average 6 min fight, that's 25,200 damage. In order for 25k to be a 1% increase in damage, you would need to do about 2.5 million damage(25k / 0.01 - Not exact but fair enough) in 6 min, or about 7000 sustained dps (2.5 million / 360sec). This is above the realistic estimates and actual data for blood spec on single targets (without gimmick IE XT-Decon). Its fairly close, but it appears that if your necrosis is not capped for whatever reason, go 1/2 epidemic and drop it into necrosis. Same goes for BcB as it is also showing to be a solid 1% increase per point.

Having 2/2 Epidemic covers poor latency, movement, or human error. You can, of course, overcome the latter but if you're playing with a high latency landing that last heart strike with diseases up can get tricky. Ulduar is absolutely brimming with melee un-friendly, and movement intensive fights so I believe the value of the second point in Epidemic extends beyond the hard and fast numbers in some cases.

Necrosis will do 0 dmg if the dummy have only 1hp left. That`s because Necrosis dont do overkill dmg.

For me necrosis is like 1%dmg for each point.

Yeah, I gotta go with the 1% per point argument on necrosis. It gets annoying as piss trying to get decent percentages on the dummy cause I can never catch it with any health. Other day I saw it at like 4 mil HP but it had 3 other DK's on it debuffing it up like crazy so I came back 30 mins later and sitting right back on 1HP lulz.

I dont have the ss of the recount details but in Sarth the other night on a 4.4k dps session I noticed that necrosis was 4.5% of my dps, and that was with 18% of my dps being cleave damage from heart strike on the fire adds so that conviced me that the 5% is about right. What im having a hard time deciding between now is morbidity and NotD.

51/0/20

Im trying the 2 points in morbidity currently instead of NotD because from what Im hearing in this thread there usually isnt more than 1 good chance per fight on most of the ulduar bosses to pop the ghoul making the reduced cd less valuable than the boost to DC especially since its already being buffed by the dark death glyph.

I know I left out some stuff in blood that a lot of ppl like to take like vampiric blood and improved blood arua but I am of the mindset that if I can use that blood tap to keep myself alive in a sticky situation thats 4k dps that keeps on ticking with me that wouldnt be if im dead. Feel free to dispute me on that though.

/end wall of text

I've been running 51/0/20 with maxed Morbidity, Necrosis and BCB as I couldn't justify taking RPM since they changed the DRW duration mechanics. I picked up [Sigil of the Vengeful Heart] this week as well and dropped points from NoTD to cap out Morbidity.

Before I got the Sigil I was 0/3 Morbidity, and since going 3/3 with the new Sigil I've Death Coil gain ~3% overall damage (from ~9% to ~12%). In the grand scheme of things though the difference I've seen between going 3/3 Morbidity and 0/2 NoTD and vice versa was very, very minor; too close to call either way really.

One thing to consider is that bad RNG can gib a ghoul making NOTD useless while Death Coil is always going to be used all the time.

Didnt have a recount to compare when you made this post, but thankfully, now I do.



Same fights as well, for the most part. About 8 attempts on Ignis, and 4 attempts on XT. 51/2/18 spec, DRW, Dark Death, DS glyphs.

I'm hoping for some helpful opinions on a gear question. I currently run with a Death's Bite. I'm curious about the comparison between a Betrayer and the new ilvl 219 2h mace that drops from Flame Leviathon on normal mode, Ironsoul. (Sorry, I'm not sure how to link gear into a post.)

The stats on Ironsoul are obviously superior, but I have a feeling that the weapon damage on the ilvl 226 Betrayer would make up for this difference. Unfortunately, I'm in a position where my guild is still running Naxx25 so I have both options available to me. Is this a case of take whichever one drops first or is one significantly better than the other for Blood DPS? Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.

Now armor pen is a great stat, when is it viable to break T7 bonuses for it? I can get around 240 ArP by breaking 4pc and wondered if it outweighed an extra DC every 2 full rotations.

Has anyone tested this at all? I would like to test it out this week and see if there is a positive outcome from it.

Where would [Insane Strength Potion] fall, though? That's 120 str for 15 seconds. Considering how valuable strength is to us, that's not too bad, is it?

Erm why are you comparing these potions against each others? You use indestructible potion right before pull so you can use potion of speed in middle of fight.

Yes, but then when your potion timer is up again in the middle of the fight which potion is better to use then was the main purpose of my comparison.

As far as [Insane Strength Potion] goes, it has potential if you stack it with Greatness / FC procs (all modified by talents and Kings) and then cooldowns are used appropriately. However, because you would have to time everything around those procs, you're playing the RNG game which you may never win. In theory Insane Strength may win out over Potion of Speed, however in actual practice you might have a rough time stacking everything perfectly. I would still probably use a Speed Potion because you can always count on Heroism (assuming you have a Shaman I guess). Insane Strength and Speed may be really close however, I'll look into it more later.

The reason Speed Potions hold so much value is in the way that Haste stacks (see my post above). Since we will almost always (99% of the time in serious 25 man raids) have a Heroism available, dropping a Speed Pot at the same time is a very reliable and fair DPS boost.

Is there a Glyph that reduces cooldown on Raise Dead?

No, you would have to spec into Night of the Dead to reduce the cooldown on Rraise Dead.

I think it was covered a while back but most of the value of RPM comes from being able to dump RP while keeping enough in the tank to fuel the DS glyph. For me it also comes down to a quality of life thing as I don't have to worry so much about over capping in the middle of rotations. For me it's similar to the reasoning for taking 2/2 epidemic, more a preference than a requirement.

On a separate note, it seems that DRW generates an inordinate amount of attacks when Blood Boil is used. Here's the WWS from our Auriaya kill last night, you can see that while I hit with Blood Boil 302 times for the entire with only 20% uptime my DRW hit with Blood Boil 392 times and accounted for 10% of my total damage. I've noticed this a few other times but this is the most obvious I've seen it in the numbers. This happened across multiple pulls so it should be easily reproducible if people want to test it, I assume it's a bug as I seriously doubt DRW is meant to have that much AoE burst.