Should I consider swapping to Blood or Frost dps spec for the Yogg encounter? I've been primarily Unholy since Wrath was released, but on Yogg I feel like more "bursty" type damage is needed - or am I just doing it wrong?

Apologies if this isn't the correct forum for this question, but I figured Unholy DK's with experience on the encounter would be the best resource.

I have no problem on Yogg as Unholy. I usually top the meters as well, and it's not by cheating with lots of AE. Just straight up single target on phase 1 adds, phase 2 brain, and then phase 3 adds/yogg (depends how melee heavy we are).

If you find the tentacles in the brain phase die too fast, then run past the first or second one to the next one where you can stack diseases and get a rotation off before the other melee make them explode. This is more for the stormwind and wyrmrest rooms. For the shadow vault room, just drop DnD on the three of them in a pack, target the back one, stack diseases, and then pestilence and all that DPS jazz. We split up our melee into three groups (based on portal spawns) and we split dps the tentacles. You can easily divide all the rooms into three, tentacle wise (3 groups of three melee + healer = 10 portals).

Changing unholy blight doesn't seem like the right solution, but it does seem like the solution least likely to interfere with unholy's tanking or single-target damage.

If unholy has a problem with AoE, the problem is death and decay. DnD was intended as an AoE tanking ability, and blood and frost use it for AoE damage only situationally. For unholy, Impurity and lack of AoE strikes mean that DnD becomes an AoE dps staple. I doubt the class designers intended us to be dropping DnD for DPS on two targets, and an unholy DK who isn't using DnD looks a lot more in line with blood and frost.

The devs kind of backed themselves into a corner with the way DnD interacts with Impurity. DnD barely scales with crit, doesn't scale with haste, ArP, or weapon damage, and scales phenomenally well with AP, so the benefit it gets from impurity is out of proportion with our other abilities. That might not be a problem, except that unholy gears for AP/strength over all other stats. Past a certain gear level - around 8-9k raid buffed AP - glyphed DnD starts to compete with BS+SS for single-target damage. There's a possibility that we'll be using DnD on single targets before the end of this expansion, and they're going to have to change it eventually.

My guess is that they don't want to do it now, because straight-up nerfing DnD will kill DK threat generation. That leaves two options: change UB, or change blood boil and change the Bloody Strikes talent to compensate. UB seems like the better choice.

This is the key that invalidates everything else you have said. It's not that unholy is broken, it's that the people in your raid capable of doing AoE DPS aren't properly utilizing their abilities. You can't punish one group of people that DO utilize their abilities properly because other people can't. That's ridiculous.

I disagree here, I think DK's as a hero class should be just as competitive with the legacy pure DPS classes despite being Hybrid. Otherwise there's really nothing that special about having a "hero" class. It's just another blase FotM class. I know that's against blizzard's design intentions though. I just think it's stupid to insist that the so called Hero classes have to be on an exact even footing with their legacy counterparts. The whole point was that they're a step above the rest.

So when it comes right down to it, would the 17/51/3 spec be better than the 0/10/61 spec overall?

I have full T7.5, due to being a recruit in my guild even though we just downed Yogg, but I have the [Sigil of the Vengeful Heart]. Which would best suit the gear/future T8.5 gear?


I know the rotation for both and I would prefer 0/10/61 due to my playstyle, but since we don't have a Frost DK in the guild, lowering the overall DPS of the guild by having two Unholy, I need to know which is truly better.

They fixed EBP stacking problem with the Ulduar patch, theres no dps loss from taking multiple unholy DKs if thats what you were referring to. Unless your guild needed the haste buff from frost, but thats not what it sounds like you're saying...
I'm happy with how they equalized the specs pretty well, I recommend you play what you like.

Okay, i'm probably beating on a dead horse yet again, but - considering the t7 4piece bonus change goes live tomorrow (or today in the US), is it still worth it to keep it or we can now move to 2 t7 + 2 t8? So far the consensus was that until you have 4 pieces of t8 you should stick with t7 (at least according to Method's posts), but as of this moment I'm no longer sure what to do.

I have 2 t8 pieces - pants & shoulders (the 10man at the moment), and should have 2 more - chest & head (this time the 25man ones) by the end of the week if all goes as planned. Even if it's a small dps upgrade, I'll switch.

Can anyone please give me an advice on this?

I have just recently started in Ulduar with my guild, and I am trying to get the best DPS I can(running 12/0/59). I know my rotation is fine as I have been out DPSing the better geared DKs (can't touch the rogues yet), but I am looking to some of you more experienced DKs for some help. I have been using the Jawbone with the rings Circle of Death and Ruthlessness. I just recently switched out for Armageddon and changed CoD to Ring of Invincibility. I have been reading and reading the forums and I have been getting conflicting info about the best weapon and rings, so just wondering about any suggestions. I have been experimenting with DPS calculators and gear calculators and they are not helping, and from what I have seen on mobs, there is not much of a change in DPS. Just wondering if there will be a bigger difference on Ulduar bosses (haven't been back since changing the new gear). Anyway, thanks for any responses.

Both Circle of Death and Jawbone seem to be better items (based on the stat weights table in the OP), if you're expertise capped the Circle of Death should still be better, I don't know about the Jawbone though. 0.2 weapon speed against 58 crit, 1 haste and 0.1 DPS.
I just calculated the stat weights from the table, taking the average between the 12/0/59 and the Naxx gear number.

These differences are too small to be properly observed in a normal raid (escpecially considering RNG and the randomness of fights), but your old items should be better (definitely so if you're unter 26 expertise).

I find that the portal phases cause my ghoul to despawn randomly and frost/blood are nice and "self contained" allowing you turn your dps full bore on any target with little to no setup. I've tried it as frost (and vastly prefer it to unholy on this fight) and I think I'll give blood a shot next week and see how it compares.

I prefer doing Yogg as Blood, but even as Unholy I'm consistently in the top 3 for damage done during a fight. Heart Strike is quite nice for the Immortal Guardians in Phase 3, and DRW + Hysteria + non-perma ghoul makes for some excellent burst for being on the brain in Phase 2. However, we found that if our execution was good, we had no trouble getting the brain to 30% on the third portal phase, and would usually lay off DPS for about 15 seconds so the top group would have more time to clean up tentacles, so the extra burst in Blood was unneeded.

As Unholy, my Ghoul consistently despawned when taking portals into the brain and back out of the brain. My strategy was to make sure I summoned my Ghoul right after I got in the Ulduar entrance, and then mount up, thereby ensuring that Raise Dead would be off CD for Yogg. I'd then summon the Ghoul right after taking the portals down, and so I had nearly full Ghoul up-time on the portal phase (sans buffs, of course).

I've gone both as Blood and Unholy and had similar overall DPS numbers.