Both sequences generate the same RP because as Sani says, you aren't trading IT+PS for a DS, you're trading it for a PT+HS.

However I'm still not convinced it's going to be better in the end. The cost is steeper than you realize, even if 1 HS will outdamage PS+IT you're still giving up a major glyph and a talent point (since you can't do it without 2/2 epidemic), and if I'm reading it right you'll only have a 1 second window to refresh pestilence before diseases fall off, which is pretty risky. Every time they drop you're going to be sacrificing a lot of damage.

In situations where you have at least two targets, wouldn't Glyph of Disease (and accompanying spec change) be superior because Pestilence is already part of the rotation and your Heart Strike would hit full strength on both targets (or does it base damage of primary target only?)?

While that wouldn't be helpful single target (most bosses), it's worthwhile to consider for increasing damage on packs somewhat.

There are very few situations where enough AoE opportunities arise for Pestilence to be better but not enough AoE opportunities arise to make simply switching to an alternate unholy spec.

I'm not sure the indictment of 2/2 epidemic for the Pest glyph is a good one either, plenty are already running 2/2 because in movement heavy fights it buys them greater numbers of HSs with disease bonuses. Still, I'd be surprised if HS and incidental PT damage outstrips the damage of PS + IT + some other major glyph. Then there's the slower buildup time for a PT rotation that's non-conducive to burst DPS on a new target.

Blood's weakness is less AoE than other specs. Respec Frost/Unholy if you wish to do better damage on trash packs.

Gains/Losses of Glyph of Disease(Single target only; multi target it should obviously win)
All Calculations done based on my current build switching the point in Morbidity to Epidemic and Glyph of Dark Death for Glyph of Disease

-17.2% DC damage
Offset somewhat by .15 extra DC per rotation. Using An estimate of 2.75 DC per rotation this is a 5.5% DC damage increase

Final DC change
-12.7% DC damage

Gain of 1 HS per rotation
+ 16.7% HS damage

Loss of IT and PS
-100% IT damage
-100% PS damage

Removal of tick clipping
+11.1% Frost Fever Damage
+11.1% Blood Plague Damage

Apply those modifiers to your parses and this should show whether or not the switch is worth it for you.
Doing a quick Sim and applying these values I ended up with a loss roughly 0.05% dps.

This could be overcome by slightly higher DRW damage that may be possible with such a rotation, by switching out the Sigil of the Vengeful Heart or even just small gear differences.

Well, that's certainly a glib response, but as a tank primarily, I have one DPS spec. As most bosses I end up as DPS on are single target and I have decent gear for it, blood is my chosen offspec. Asking the raid to wait for specific fights or trash as I respec and reglyph (and incurring the gold costs), is simply not viable. I was attempting to evaluate whether a glyph change would give better performance overall.

I notice that DRW has it's own diseases while up. Could someone tell me if it would put out more dps to use IT+PS when DRW is up so it's HS/DS is affected by disease bonuses.

In response to the above conversation, I use Glyphs of Disease, Darkdeath, and Death Strike and put out dps in the 5-6.5k range in 25mans(higher if there's a dmg modifier or multiple target boss). I don't see me doing that much without glyph of disease and every other dk i've seen who follows the initial post to the T does lower dps then me so far. You can armory Circu(zul'jin) to see his spec/gear. Just my 2 cents.

Glyph of Disease is the best use of a major glyph slot in almost any situation where you're using pestilence. If you want to use it, carry a stack of disease glyphs and a stack of whatever glyph they replace. (DRW? Don't quote me on that.) I realize swapping glyphs on a per-fight basis isn't commonplace but if you're willing to spend gold on consumables anyway there's no reason not to do it.

Mimiron is a prime example: you probably don't gain anything by respeccing, but you do gain by hitting pestilence. Last I checked blood parses better than unholy on Mim hardmode, but P4 has you on two targets the whole time and P3 has lots of little adds.

Respeccing isn't an option without holding up the raid if you run a tanking offpsec, and unless you have actual unholy gear (read: can drop 400 ArPen without wearing a ton of Naxx gear) you may do better DPS as blood anyway. Just because unholy/frost have better AoE doesn't mean you shouldn't try to maximize your damage on AoE fights.

I'll confess that my mainspec is Unholy, I honestly don't know how Heartstrike works on Kologarn. My post was just a response to the question on Pestilence.

To try to explain a little more about why putting up IT+PS with your DRW is a bad idea, consider the end of a boss fight. If you dont get the full benefit of your diseases, you aren't going to bother putting them up, you'll just use strikes till a boss is down. Even though the DRW's diseases stay on after its dead, you don't get the full benefit from them, b/c you cannot HS for the full duration of the disease. It's not an identical situation, but similar enough to make the point. You use too much of your DRW's uptime to cast diseases you won't get the full benefit of.

Normally I wouldn't make this comment, but since the discussion is going on about GoDisease which in most cases is inferior, I think it needs to be said. Don't post anecdotal evidence that you are not prepared to back up. The fights that you have experience on (excluding XT and Ignis) 6.5k DPS would put you among the top ~ 10% of Blood DKs, and if you figured out how to do that with your gear (considering no 25 man progression past Auriya) well, that would be something I think we'd all like to see. I don't know you're raiding situation, but the other DKs in your guild all have complete trash gear, so beating them doesn't tell us anything.

Moral of the story, if you are going to tell everyone else that they are doing it wrong, you better be prepared to show us some proof. Log your next 25 man, personally I prefer WMO. If you can pull 6.5k on Assembly, you should be the one writing the guide.

I'm really curious to see a parse from one of your 25 mans, because the DPS you claim is very high based upon your gear, and considering your glyphs/sigil it seems highly suspect.

Your claims go against all the theorycrafting done in this thread, and if, in fact, you are pulling these numbers we really need to rethink what we are doing wrong in this thread because we're way off. However like I said this is very suspect.

I guess my point really is claims at large DPS numbers that go against theorycrafting and simulation backed up by raid-tested proof should really be backed up with solid proof (like a raid parse), so we as a community can move forward in the right direction.

Well, I can try to prove myself useful and capitalize on the fact that since the release of Ulduar we never saw a single SotVH drop and try to test the GoDisease rotation in raids a bit.

Following the standard rotation format, I would also at this point drop DC in the priority list to make sure I'm RP capped for extra DS damage.

This is also something to consider: the glyph of Death Strike is one of the hardest to evaluate. I suspect that its dps benefits are extremely limited for the majority of people who doesn't really pay attention to synching DS to DC usage, and in that case, it may be the first glyph to drop to get Disease.

I realized after posting that, the major flaw I forgot in my excitement. Until 3.2 GoDisease is not a viable choice. This is because of the issue with BP dropping early. The only testing that could be done right now is on the PTR.

In the DW thread, someone mentioned how when using GoDisease if you apply the diseases in blood but switch to unholy the damage remains the same. After a few tests I'm certain that diseases deal damage based on what you have when you apply them. Refreshing the diseases does not update their damage

This has several interesting results.
First is the down side. When you typically apply diseases you may not have 10% AP or FC. This means if we go about this incorrectly the diseases will deal damage as if these buffs aren't on us.

Although on the reverse, temporary AP buffs can be made permanent disease damage buffs. Applying your diseases with FC Greatness, another AP trinket, and Bloodfury(if you are an orc) can give you large permanent bonuses to your diseases if you don't let them fall off.

This may be relatively useless for Blood tho, as our most favourable trinkets are ArP based in terms of proccs.

You could delay at the beginning of the rotation till you get FC + Greatness, the proc rate is so high anyways.
Open with HS HS, and see if something proccs, if not DS, but at this point you need to start applying them.

I think this is 90% bad news and 10% good ones in all honesty, as one single missed procc can royally screw you over the whole fight.

Using DS first gets 20% ap buff up, and I could also see poping Insane strenght potion before the pull to set up diseases. Or wait for FC and trinkets, then pop insane strength.
An even bigger benefit of this would get frost with UA.

The bonus is 10% and most hunters are MM these days, so the timer on applying DS is irrelevant - actually you want to push it further in the rotation for glyph optimization.

If you factor in movement, target switches and DRW, Pestilence becomes a lot less attractive. Simulators aren't good for such complex tasks. It's a far too fragile rotation anyway.

It's important to remember that using glyph of disease does not obviate the ability to apply diseases manually. Furthermore target switches, assuming they're close enough together, might be even easier with the glyph. Simulators are still the best source we have for long term DPS and if they put glyph of disease ahead in a single target scenario then factoring in movement and target switches really comes down to playstyle more than anything else. With the changes coming in 3.2 it's looking more and more like the third glyph slot will be a matter of preference more than optimization.

I made a napkin calc on that in Suno's endgame tanking thread. Granted, it was for tanking; the balance will be tipped even more for HS since Arp will just keep increasing HS damage and do nothing for IT.

RE: rolling diseases, assume you get your diseases up with Fallen Crusader and a Greatness proc, and you're throwing up diseases at probably +1400 AP. After Ebon Plague that's +87 damage per disease tick, or 52.2 DPS assuming each disease ticks exactly 6 times per 20 seconds. Looking at Taizu's math and plugging in numbers from a few well-geared blood parses, getting one HS over IT+PS per 20 seconds comes out to another 50 DPS gain at least.

Rolling buffed diseases would probably only become a DPS gain after about 1 minute on target. Assume you get no benefit for the first 20 seconds (you're waiting on procs) and then lose DPS from 20s to 40s (from using IT+PS over HS, and getting no benefit from one of your major glyphs). In the from 40s to 60s or 40s or 80s you're making up the DPS you lost from 20s-40s. Only after 60-80s do you gain DPS from rolling buffed diseases.

The conventional benefit of GoDisease (using HS over IT+PS) also has a rampup time. The glyph is a DPS loss for the first 20 seconds (again, you're not rolling diseases for the first 20 seconds and you have a useless glyph) and from 20s-40s you're at best making up the DPS you lost in the first 20 seconds.

Once the benefit of rolling diseases kicks in, Glyph of Disease might become better than Glyph of DRW. In fights with a lot of time on target (XT hard, Vezax) it might be better overall; on fights where you swap targets more often than once every 2 minutes or so (XT normal, Iron Council), Glyph of Disease is still the weaker glyph.

I don't trust any simmed value for GoDisease because in a sim you DPS for hours without swapping targets, which reduces the lost DPS while it ramps up to almost zero. There aren't many Ulduar bosses that give you more than 2-3 minutes on a target if that, which makes the rampup time a lot more meaningful.


If any of this GoDisease discussion ever comes to anything I don't think it'll ever be that GoDisease is hands-down better than GoDRW. GoDisease isn't ever going to be better for every fight if it's better at all. At best it might be worth swapping in and out from boss to boss.

I cannot speak for the existing sims, having not seen their code, but it is entirely possible for a sim to run DPS for hours by rerunning the first 2-3 mins of a fight over and over and over again. DPS need not be continuous for hours of combat to be simulated and meaningful values derived from the results that include the effects of ramp up time.