Quick question. Would it be a better DPS increase to replace my Melancholy Sabatons with Boots of the Underdweller?

Currently with the Melancholy Sabatons I have to gem twice with +10 str/hit and enchant icewalker/precision and even with that I still fall short of the 8% hit cap by about 10 hit. When I switch to Underdweller I lose all the arm pen from the Melancholy Sabatons and get to replace the two gems with +20 str and replace precision with Crusher and also gain the stat bonuses from these boots.

Sorry I just really want to know what the best way to go would be or any further information ontop of this would be much appreciated.

Two questions:

Which of the spreadsheets posted in the last two pages are correct, the one that values hit/exp below Str/ArP or the one that values them higher?

Also, where is a good list of trinket APE values for Blood?

Right now im lacking both of the soft cap trinks, I was wondering if it was better to shoot for the soft cap or the hard cap Armor pen I have a 255 dps weapon, hit capped, and am siting on 74% armor Pen and 2T9. Raid buffed im over the magic 6200 AP. If I were to Soft cap I could get higher crit and attack power. So im curious is Soft cap the way to go or is 100% armor pen 100% of the time far better.

If i have GoD, will it refresh 2 extra diseases from DRW?

No it will not. However, letting the DRW cast diseases (as you do) will increase DRW's dps.

another related simple question. Does my strikes get the benefit from the 2 extra diseases when I use IT/PS during DRW? I'm assuming no, but I'm not 100% sure. Thanks in advance.

Obviously 100% ArP all the time is much better than 100% ArP only when a trinket procs.

Looking at your armory though I notice you don't have any Expertise aside from the Expertise you get from talents. Once you fix that (because you're losing alot of DPS that way) I'd assume your ArP will drop significantly. If you have access to the GT or RS and sit around 440 while maintaining your other stats I'd go that way. If you can pick up more Expertise without affecting your current ArP levels too much try and stack for the cap, just don't ignore hit/expertise.

So this basically means that I should cast DRW after my diseases expired and then re-cast them while DRW is active?

Please Correct me if im wrong but due to this being straight raid dps, considering that most of the time you are hitting the target in the back the soft 26 expertice cap (~213.07, dodge proof) that expertice is not really that useful. I have to do some checks with recount but I didnt think that I was getting dodged. So for clarifacation for all DKs.. it is better to have the soft cap in order to achive the 26 expertice cap than straight strength and Armor Pen. Ill report my finding on the lack of expertice after some testing. Looks like I will need to get either Grim Toll or Mjolnir Runestone for further testing.

And to Answer the question above 6200 Raid buffed AP is the magic number that Armor Penetration over takes strength...... dont take my word for it though.. test, test, test.

I might have missed something in the last few pages, but is Vengeful Heart still best in slot for Blood DK's? The OP doesn't even mention Virulence and I haven't seen any math on it for Blood.

Virulence only procs off of Obliterate and Scourge Strike and, as such, is utterly useless for Blood. It's also not worth trying to use Obliterate instead of DS just to take advantage of the sigil - all math, simulations, and parses have shown such attempts to be a dps loss.

So, yeah, Vengeful Heart is still BiS for Blood.

Also, to a few posts above, Necrosis has been shown to be higher raw dps than Night of the Dead.

If you do want to take NotD, I believe the points that you would take out are points in Morbidity.

It may be worth reporting on the official blizzard bug forums about the Sigil. Since Unholy doesn't use SS, in PvE only one ability can trigger the Sigil. Also Awareness did not originally have Death Strike on it (it was added with Blood moved to using Death Strike).

It is possible the sigil's designers forget that Unholy doesn't use SS and Blood doesn't use Oblit anymore.

Let's assume for a moment that Glyph of Disease is worth taking. This means we lose Glyph of DD and 1 in Morbidity into Epidemic. My question is, does this make Sigil of Awareness now the choice of sigil over Sigil of Vengeful Heart?

Second question...would it be better, in the case of using GoD...that we take NOTD over BCB and move 1 from BCB to retain 3/3 Morbidity?

I'm not sure about this patch, but since very little has changed for blood in 3.2, I know that Necrosis was worth a little bit under 1% dps per point and that BCB was worth a little bit over 1% dps per point, making them two of the best scaling talents we have. Neither NotD or Morbidity can compare to those two and trying to shuffle points from them to maintain 3/3 morbidity or get a little bit of extra ghoul time is not likely a good move.


@ Klo8: I believe that's more or less what the OP is saying. However, I don't know if I wouldn't just go ahead and use DRW when my diseases have a few seconds left rather than wait for them to expire, just to try and maximize my own disease up time. Either way, I the point seems to be that with the buff to diseases in 3.2, it's worth using them with DRW. What I'm curious about is if 4p t9 will let my DRW's diseases crit.


@ Planezwalker: Mobs can dodge from behind. Melee dps needs expertise to push dodge off the table. Anything higher is only useful when you attack from the front of a mob that doesn't have parry disabled (in other words, it's only useful for tanks).

Alright Test ran, zero expertice except for the 6 from talents. Sarth 3D zerg, not the greatest, fast fight but heres the take. BCB 1/10 dodged ~2k net loss, Melee 2/29 dodged 6.9% ~8k net loss, Heart Strike 3/42 7.1% ~12k net loss. Total loss ~22k Total damage for fight = 661666 So as im sure you can see even though my attacks didnt get dodged much thats still a rather large amount of damage to be tossing away. Im now expertice capped at the loss of, 14% Armor Penatration and nothing else. percent wise, correct me if im wrong but I was losing .033% of my damage. I didnt factor in Crits for the dodged attacks and I took the middle of what I hit for in those attacks.

Just wanted to clarify for other Dks how expericance factors in, I had thought it was entirely useless.

This ''Raid buffed AP'' Would it be with or without the 10% AP in combat , with or without trinket procs?

Ive searched all over and couldn't find the answer. As mine seems quite low with kings might pink paw flask and buff food.

10% AP is considered a static raid buff.

Decaying, I couldn't disagree with you anymore. I found gemming ArP to my soft cap to be much more than just a marginal gain in single target DPS. Whats truly marginal however, is the loss of AOE DPS. Your guild kills Alg 25, so you know better than to insinuate we often spam blood boil (You didn't say that directly, but that is what you imply when you say we lose AOE DPS). Blood boil is rarely ever a DPS upgrade to heart strike. Literally the single only scenerio where gemming ArP hurts your AOE DPS in current endgame is Freya lasher phase. Almost ALL other AOE groups are too small to effectively Blood Boil (And do more than potentially 20k heartstrikes) therefor the only "loss" is the disease damage in an AOE group, which is very effectively made up for through stronger heart strikes durring those AOE pulls. No loss.

So lets not spread falsehoods. You will not notice the lower AOE DPS gemming ArP unless you're fighting an extremely large group of at LEAST 7-8 mobs which simply isn't common durring any relevant content. It exists yes, but it is easily insignificant enough to completely ignore any sort of impact to AOE DPS when considering gemming ArP.

And don't be so quick to write off the ArP trinkets. I agree your optimal set will probably do without them, but it is worth noting that the APE value of Grim Tol is STILL the highest in game currently and is only truly upgraded by the 258 version of Death's Verdict. Granted, as I said, at optimal gear, you'll have so much ArP available that a slightly worse trinket will still result in more DPS as it opens up 600+ ArP from gear, but there will still be very viable top end Blood DPS in full 245-258 gear that uses a Grim Tol/Mjolnir. They should remain very relevant since both are quite a bit ahead of Greatness and any other trinket in the game except Death Verdict.

The results listed elsewhere on this forum suggest that hit and expertise are the most important stats for Blood.

Where? EVERYTHING I've seen has listed Strength/Armor Pen above Hit/Expertise, except 1 spreadsheet posted a few pages back that quite simply looks wrong.

Regardless, Expertise is almost always a loss to gem because very rarely do you actually use all the expertise you've gemmed towards your actual rating. Any expertise beyond your listed rating is wasted itemization.

Hit is only worth gemming as +10 str/10 hit when all 10 hit can be used towards your cap and theres a yellow socket bonus to be gained (Theres really no socket bonus bad enough to make 20 str > 10 str/10 hit+socket so this is basically universal).

Link? It must be in a thread I don't frequent, last I checked str/arp were still ahead of both hit and expertise. I still haven't seen any "final" stat weights for 3.2. I've seen some estimates and some testing, but nothing looks nailed down yet.

I wasn't referring to bloodboil really, more so death and decay and pestilenced diseases. And figuring out HS vs BB really isn't that difficult. If you have an idea what your average Heart Strike is and what your average BB is, just find out what multiplier for BB is needed to surpass two HS (main target + cleave). And of course I wasn't saying to spam blood boil, aside from certain encountes like Freya lasher phase, and say, Yogg 0 Keeper to help keep Immortal Guardians low so the tank doesn't get in any danger. So in that sense, it all boils down to how much of a benefit you see from armor pen.

It was easy enough to get enough armor pen to stop using GT/Mjolnir before coliseum came out - the APE on GT is great sure, but its negated by the easy to get to hit cap for two handers, and the plethora of armor pen gear available towards the end of Uld10/25 hard modes. I'd really like to see where you are getting your numbers from, since I question a lot of the numbers that are thrown around on this board. For instance - from everything I've read/seen in game, DRW doesn't transfer over armor penetration - so using a armor pen trinket/gemming for ARP is also an indirect nerf to DRW as well. Since blood dps is so reliant on stacking trinket procs/cooldowns. Just something to think about - I haven't seen a reliable simulator/spreadsheet that captures this. In my opinion its the difference between an "educated" blood DK and an exceptional one.


This is droning on - but the bottom line is that from everything I've seen, armor pen is a marginal increase over strength for single target - and changing a few gems won't give you the boost you need to really push armor penetration where it needs to be. Not worth regemming for in my opinion - blood's strength is single target, and has comparitively weak AOE compared to some of the other DK specs. Is dropping 200 strength for 200 armor pen and seeing a 2% increase on SOME fights worth when its a substantial loss on AOE? Something also worth thinking about - those armor pen gems may not be doing you any big favors if you swap specs around sometimes and use some of the same gear for them.

The answer to someones question of "which is better ArP or Str"? is really pretty much this - stop looking at it as an "either/or" situation and get as much of both as possible, since more ArP makes your Str more effective and vice versa.

What, exactly, is meant by this?