Yeah as soon as I noticed the overkill problem I shagged on over to IF to find a dummy with quite a bit of HP just to compare. I was running 3/3 BCB with each spec so that didn't change. Necrosis did quite a bit more damage to say the least. Since the numbers between the two were so close I did finally decide that if threat is not an issue 0/10/61 has to pull ahead, just like posted above. Either way though 7/10/54 is a solid spec if people still want threat reduction.

Ive been palying around with various 2h specs in Kahorie's simulator, and I found one that seems to work for 2h Unholy in 3.2. Its a plague strike/icy touch spam build. Plague Strike actually hits decently hard if fully talented/glyphed, generates good RP for the rune cost, and with proper structure you can actually avoid rune clipping. With OB not getting a crit strike damage bonus in unholy, and Scourge Strike being hit pretty hard in 3.2, as well as having IUP avaible, this seemed like a way to use the best of what was left.

The talent build.

Basicly, you use the rotation of
PS>IT>DC>PS>IT>DC>BS>BS
PS>IT>DC>PS>IT>DC>PS>IT>DC

Basicly you structure the ability list so that your always refreshing a disease shortly after it ticks, so you dont actually have any real disease clipping problem, despite spamming application abilities.

With the statset2, only with a 245 dps, 3.6 speed weapon ( I rounded up), I was able to get 6968dps with 200ms delay. Sigil of the Vengeful Heart, Unholy Presence, Fallen Crusader enchant.

Not an expert with unholy by any means, so not sure if another 2h build could do better, but I thought the results interesting enough to share.

Edit: Got the simulation up to 7087 by taking 2 points out of IUP and putting them into Annihilation, then using the rotation:
PS>IT>DC>PS>IT>DC>BS>BS
PS>IT>DC>PS>IT>DC>DC>OB

Interesting, but remember that almost all fights require a lot of moving these days, especially in hard modes. When you're losing a second here and a half-second there, clipping will become much more prevelant and problematic for rotations such at these based on disease application abilities.

So a simulated result isn't necessarily translatable into real raid damage? Wouldn't be the first time that happened.

Worst, and I mean the absolutely worst not going to happen bad timing, case scenario is that you lose 1/3 of your disease ticks. Its going to be less then that, because any rotation that uses IT and PS to consistently apply diseases is likely to be wasteful of either disease ticks or runes. To really be wasteful of disease ticks, you need the second PS+IT to fall in the 4s to 6s window after the first PS, of which there are a couple of ways to avoid that.

Meanwhile the fact that it is using single rune abilities means that if you miss a GCD you can "catch up" by using a 2 rune obliterate, something a blood presence rotation cant do. So that alone could offset quite a bit of potential damage loss due to clipping caused by lots of movement.

So I dont think disease clipping in movement fights would be overly worrisome of a problem to cope with.

Does anyone know whether Glyph of Unholy Blight will replace Glyph of the Ghoul in 3.2? If you do the math, you're only getting an extra 8% damage out of ever DC, but given the SotVH and the amount of DCs flying out, it seems like it would be better than 40% str on your ghoul. I also think its best to keep as much dps under your control as possible, as you're much less likely to stand in flames and stuff on razorscale than your ghoul is. Has any testing been done to affirm my theory, and if not could someone please? It is currently not within my capabilities.

Well, the Ghoul is also less likely to die because of the 40% more stamina.
The DPS increase is also better with the Ghoul Glyph. I´d rather replace Glyph of Scourge Strike, which in my mind isn´t that great anyway because of disease clipping.
And when using Obliterate-Specc, Unholy Blight Glyph just is the worst of the 4 possible glyph choices.

@Mortak: It's been confirmed that the Glyph of Scourge Strike is a DPS-loss already, making ghoul/DD/UB being the superior way to go on live. I can't see how this will be different in 3.2, especially as Obliterate comes into the picture. Although as you say, you would want to use the Glyph of Obliterate, most probably leaving UB behind as you say.

On another note I'd love to see some simming of 12/0/59, 0/10/61 and one of the suggested Obliterate-speccs (i.e. Diabolos 3/13/55). What would really help this would be to use a set amount of stats for every spec (although letting the Obliterate-spec-stats be 20%+ ArP while losing out on some haste etc), I've seen this be done in the new 3.2-DW-thread and it really helps the comparing of specs.

Actually you should try to lose Crit in exchange for armor penetration, since its an even more terrible stat for unholy obliterate specc than the scourge strike builds (200% crits instead of 230%).

Losing Crit is not always easy, but there are definately some options, like clockwork leggings, kologarn bracers a couple of rings from 25 man as well as 10 man ulduar. And i also found some haste/ArP items in the new Raid Instance, those should be nice too.

Adding some more set to the package is a quick modification. I could use the dw ones with a 232 dps weapon instead. It could be a good base.

Very interesting. I've compared several specs with the sim. 51/20/0, OB heavy 0/53/18 and your Unholy spam build 0/11/60. Each with more or less BiS items. The result was Unholy>Frost>Blood, about 400dps difference total.

@Mortak: You're totally missing the point though. I'm not talking about what stats would be best for you, I'm talking about what stats you realistically would loose when gearing for ArP with the gear that is in the game atm (and in 3.2). There will be about the same amount of crit on the ArP gear as on the non-ArP, SS-favoring, pieces but less haste. Therefore the switch in the supposed stat-set we could use to compare specs for 3.2.

@Afabar: I'm not sure what you mean by the first sentence but I guess the 3 DW-ones with a 232 dpser would be a good start. Do any of those 3 favor ArP? Since what we mostly need is a ArP vs a haste-setup with equal amount of ilvl etc, you get the point.

Well my point ist, that you shouldn´t gear for ArP.
Strength is still by far the best stat and Haste only a little bit worse than ArP (my APE Calculations show 1.7 for ArP and 1.55 for haste). So you dont really have to sacrifice haste for ArP or vice versa.
If you can grab some ArP to replace Crit then do it, but when you sacrifice other stats, dont...

Obliterate is better than Scourge Strike Unholy even without big amounts of ArP (even without any ArP at all), at least according to Kahories DK-Simulator.

Of course strength is still by far the best stat, but I had no idea ArP was as low as 1.7. This would obviously still mean the BiS-list from ulduar might change slightly but it also means we can use the second statset in the simulator without any problems I guess, making it easy to compare competetiveness between builds.

I wish there would be more testing of new, and old, specs in the 3.2-simulator (like Odii's), but I can't really ask for this without first trying to be a part of it myself I guess.

Im curious what best in slot you used for Frost was, since the stat weights will have completely changed for 3.2, and it should look much more like Blood's BiS.

What Odii said. When comparing his spec's simmed dps using statset2 (~7080) with the numbers from the 3.2-dw-thread where extensive simming has been going on they seem really close (some superior frost specs are coming up to 7200+).

Could argue that we should sim with 1 ilvl higher than 244 since the DW sims are being run with 200 dpsers afaik though.

Well, it's 3.1 BiS. You can find my sets here Zippyshare.com - DK_DPS_v16_PTR.zip . Scroll down a bit for the sim char generator.

How come I get better results with Vengeful Heart over Awareness in every simulator I've tried out so far?
I thought Awareness is > all?


And how come I get a huuuuuge dps difference on docs spreadsheet between blood and unholy? I mean its like 1300 dps less for unholy than blood...

Because of the changes to the way Deathcoil and Unholy Blight works Vengeful will become more competative for unholy. Put simply, the more dmg you do with Deathcoil the higher the Unholy Blight dot..

So, patch should hit live servers next week.

Is blood the only 2H spec competitive in high end raiding dps ?

Will we really be forced to drop haste for ArmPen like every physical dps in the game ?

As I understand it, we should even drop SS for OB ?


Darkness awaits for the unholy knights :/

2H UH is not dead, that is if you have faith in Kahorie's simulator, which I do. The somewhat sad part is that you have to use Obliterate as your main attack instead of Scourge Strike. Anyways, the numbers I got on the sim:

12-0-59 = 6534 DPS
3-13-55 (Oblit) = 6888 DPS
0-10-61 = inferior

0-17-54 = 7034 DPS

I tried to move points between Morbidity, Necrosis, BCB, and Desolation in as many ways as I could think of, and this proved to be the best. However, moving 2 points from Desolation and maxing Necrosis was only a 9 DPS loss which, in the end, might be the way to go since it works better for dynamic encounters as opposed to static Patchwerk types, of which there are few these days. The only thing I didn't check was Outbreak due to lack of time. I'll do that later, but I doubt it will change anything.

The tests were 250 hours on the simulator at 200ms latency using 2H StatSet2. Sigil of Awareness and Sigil of the Vengeful Heart were both used, and Vengeful Heart won out every time. I think the interplay with UB and DC is what puts it above Awareness for the Sigil of choice. Priority is Blood Plague>Frost Fever>Obliterate>Blood Strike>Death Coil.

edit - For reference, I also simmed 51-0-20 and it checked in at 6544, pretty much exactly the same as the traditional Scourge Strike UH builds.

@vank: What ilvl weapon are you using, 232 or 239, aka 232.6 dps or 244.6 dps? Adding to that list is Odiis 0/13/58 disease spamming-build that you can find a few posts up, which i simmed to 6850 with a 244 dpser, and he got up to 7000. Going to try to resim your results to confirm it!

I used StatSet2 which I believe uses the 232.6 weapon. Unable to verify from this computer.