After a bit more experience, I'm disliking the low time on Desolation. I'm currently at work and can't extensively test this, but just looking at my parse from last night's TotC/Ulduar I'm seeing a rough average of 2000/4000 Blood Strike hit/crits and 5000/10000 Obliterate hit/crits. I'm curious about switching to Blood Strike on every rune refresh and moving the three points from Reaping elsewhere (maxing Necrosis mainly).

I can only assume at this point that it would still be a DPS loss on fights where movement/intervals are non-existent. But if that loss is small enough compared to the gain of additional Necrosis damage and a more stable Desolation buff, then I might stick with it. I'm honestly thinking this won't be a DPS increase at all, but I want to test it nonetheless.

Even if the points in Necrosis would make up fpr the dps hit from using 2 BSes instead of an Obliterate), you're ignoring the other aspects - namely, runic power and gcds. An Obliterate is generating 25 RP, while two BS only generate 20, so you are losing 1/8th a DC per 20 seconds. What more, you are also spending an extra GCD with the BSes - an extra GCD which, if nothing else, can be used to generate a 10 RP from HoW, or in the best case scenario another Death Coil. Those are the true losses and what would have to be calculated, not the difference between Blood Strike/Obliterate.

Besides, you could max Necrosis without sacrificing Reaping. Simply ditch a couple of those points you have in Desolation which, as you said, doesn't have a perfect uptime in any actual encounter (Patchwerk aside) anyways. Even with more BSes, the Desolation buff would still drop off plenty often - phase changes where you, when you resume, you have to reapply diseases before you can BS, for example.

I agree with the low uptime for Desolation. It seems that once you're into your rotation and you get your Pestilence/Blood strikes down (thereby giving you the Desolation buff), by the time your death runes are refreshed, your Desolation buff is almost up. You end up using one of the death runes again for your blood strike - desolation - and then use the Blood tap to refresh the death rune. Seems too inefficient at the moment.

Thus far, it seems that 5/5 Necrosis (3/5 Desolation) is the way to go as opposed to 3/5 Necrosis (5/5 Desolation). So then are we changing this spec from a few pages ago Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft to reflect the 5/5 Necrosis?

Ah, yes. Seems I completely forgot the reason I went down so far into Frost. I originally thought the extra GCD wouldn't be an issue, but then I realized it would probably become a real problem during the situations this change was meant to help with. It'll just add to the potentially lost Death Coils. I'll probably just end up going the 3/5 Desolation and 5/5 Necrosis route if Frost DW doesn't excite me enough this weekend.

I'm kind of hoping Blizzard buffs the duration or puts it on something like Horn of Winter. This combined with the new Sigil seem to be a leftover of their original Blood Strike buffs and now just seem outdated.

Soooo my UB ticks for like ~250 at max. It doesn't seem to roll at all, just refreshes. Known bug?

I thought at first it was bugged and not stacking but I believe it is working correctly.

Say your avg dc dmg is 6000. 20% would be 1200. over 10seconds thats 120 per second. so you get two stacked up itll be 240. three would be 360 and I have had some ticks over 300-400.

Once a deathcoil has done its ub damage though it drops off...

like if you death coil after your first set of runes once... then say theres 3seconds left of that UB dot left when you dc again it does not reset the entire duration of your first dc back to 10seconds... it will finish ticking the last three seconds then your latest dc damage still exists... I think im wording that oddly hope it isnt too confusing.

if it reset the duration and the damage kept stacking indefinitely though it would be a lil overpowered.

and actually its much lower than half. my avg disease ticks are 1100-1200 raid buffed and avg ub dot ends up being around 200-300 or so

I don't get why they had to nerf the original new UB to 20% - It wasn't op in any way and now its just seriously underpowered.

I dunno... if you could keep it stacked at 2, and it's constantly ticking for 250 dps... that's > 5% of your damage for 1 talent point. Still seems pretty good to me

The better way of looking at unholy blight is to simply find the percentage of damage done by your death coil, and then multiply it by 1.2 (20%). Unholy blight simply adds 20% of every death coil as a DoT over 9 seconds. However much or little it ticks for depends on how many times your DCs will roll over to the next unholy blight, etc...; but the actual tick number is irrelevant. The one talent point in UB is simply a ~20% damage extension on your Death Coil.

Actually, as Consider has pointed out below me, UB is slightly less than 20% due to partial resists. If, for example, your initial death coil is partially resisted, only the unresisted portion will go through to become the UB DoT. The actual DoT itself can also be resisted, leading to a possibility of the damage to be 'double' resisted. Regardless, UB is approximately a 20% damage increase on your death coil.

UB is just a flat +20% (actually like 19.5% thanks to partial resists, but regardless) damage to your Death Coil. It doesn't matter if you DC every 9 seconds so the dot never falls off or you DC every 11 seconds so the dot always falls off.

How it works:
0 Seconds - Death Coil hits for 5000
1 Second - UB ticks for 100
2 Seconds - UB ticks for 100
3 Seconds - UB ticks for 100
4 Seconds - UB ticks for 100
4.5 Seconds - Death Coil hits for 5000
5 Seconds - UB Ticks for 160
6 Seconds - UB Ticks for 160
7 Seconds - UB Ticks for 160
8 Seconds - UB Ticks for 160
9 Seconds - UB Ticks for 160
10 Seconds - UB Ticks for 160
11 Seconds - UB Ticks for 160
12 Seconds - UB Ticks for 160
13 Seconds - UB Ticks for 160
14 Seconds - UB Ticks for 160 and falls off.

You see, when Unholy Blight is already on the mob it will calculate how much damage is 'left' in the dot (in this case, 600, since it would have done a total damage of 1000 and 400 had already been dealt), add to that how much damage the new dot would deal (in this case, 1000), and take that total damage (1600) and deal it over ten seconds.

~4% dps for one talent point is pretty good, really, even if you don't see these amazing numbers because of it. Besides, it's actually almost the same exact dps the old Unholy Blight did on a single target when you account for the fact that you get an extra Death Coil every 20 seconds since you aren't spending 40 RP to refresh UB. It does, of course, fall behind on AoE, but such was the intention, and is rather understandable (even though UB isn't/wasn't what made our AoE so strong).

[Edit]: Also, just a quick note, but UB will not tick "overkill" - similar to Necrosis, meaning dummy testing is inaccurate (well, more inaccurate).

Consider nicely summarized the math behind Necrosis vs. Desolation here, The DPS difference between the two is almost negligible. Considering that you need 3 GCDs to have desolation active, any fights in which there is a lapse in DPS uptime (eg. Yogg Brain Room, Mimiron), Necrosis will have a slight advantage compared to desolation, which makes the already negligible DPS difference even more so. As stated, it's really more of a personal preference thing.

So what is the optimal rotation for 0-17-54? I've seen a few different ones posted here. I only did 6k dps on hard mode XT last night and I'm guessing it's because I did the rotation slightly wrong. Based on what I'm reading here there is a lot of reapplication of diseases before they are done.

rotation was posted earlier

I actually had a similar result when we hit XT last night. Was excited to try the spec that is supposed to be better than the SS spec and ended up doing 1k less damage than I normally do. Was wondering if I was doing the wrong rotation or if maybe the spec is not as good as we originally thought.

I see a lot about the 0/17/54 build and am actually working on getting it right still, but while i read more i was wondering if anyone is using a good unholy AoE spec I used to be big about overall damage done and having decent dps at the same time, but was not sure how these types of specs may have changed since SS isnt as powerful or just over all patch changes,?! Hopefully that makes sense
thanks

To those saying they've lost dps with that spec, post parses or something. Otherwise it's just anecdotal tidbits which may or may not be true, but don't actually show anything. Besides, if you post a parse, others can point out what you did wrong.

Mathmatically speaking though, 3.2 0/17/54 Obliterate > 3.1 0/10/61 Scourge Strike. Simulations and theorycrafting both support this. If you aren't seeing that in your personal performance, it is most likely something you are doing incorrectly (I don't mean that meanly, just as a matter of fact).

0/17/54 already has all of the Unholy aoe-relevant talents. Impurity, Black Ice, Morbidity, Rage of Rivendare, Desolation, Bone Shield, Wandering Plague, etc... it's all there. The only other talents which would affect your AoE are deep in Blood or Frost, and thus unreachable. The sole exception is Bladed Armor - but you can't get that without sacrificing from Black Ice, so it's close to a wash anyways.

From a pure dps perspective, yes, Ghoul Frenzy is not worth it. That said, it isn't a bad talent to spec in to. If you find your pet dying, then GF becomes invaluable due to the heal. If that's not the case, however, then yeah, don't bother.

Switching from a 0/10/61 in 3.1 to a 0/17/54 spec in 3.2 has net me around a 500dps increase on no-movement single target fights, which is roughly 8%. After fighting the Northrend Beasts though, the benefit of iUP really came through in my eyes. While fighting the Jormungar Duo and Icehowl, which both knock melee back, I found myself constantly aching for the run speed increase as I tried to get back to the boss. To balance it all, I spec'd 3/5 Necrosis, 3/5 desolation, and 2/2 iUP, which seems to be a decent spread between benefiting non movement fights and movement fights.

No worries on my end at least. I've never seen bad info given, so I"m pretty sure it's something to do with me or my rotation. Unfortunately I did not log it last night but I will in a couple weeks when I raid again *going on vaca*

My rotation is: PS-IT-BS-BS-OB-DC-Horn-Pest-OB-DC-OB-DC-OB-DC-OB-DC... then repeat

I am noticing tonight while raiding that I dont think I was using pest yesterday trying to get used to the main rotation and didnt' even realize it. With my top dps gear I am at 13% ArPen but if I read correctly it should be over the SS build even with that but goes up even more the more ArPen you have. I have swapped out better dps pieces for two ArPen pieces that puts me at 26% tonight, we'll see how that goes

Is there a ArP minimum one needs to reach before oblitbuild overtakes ss? or is it always better, and more ArP just makes it even better?

And what about Subversion? The crit% to oblit seems good.

Just wondering,have there been any threat issues with 0/17/54?I'm currently using 3/13/55(Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft and I havent encountered any threat issues yet on the bosses of ToC.

Uh, can you explain how you're using pestilence in your rotation? I must be missing something because for the life of me I can't figure how out you're using pestilence after using both blood runes, and why it would even make sense to use. There must be something I'm not getting.