You should never gem for hit. Ever. It's readily available on plenty of gear to make gemming for it unnecessary.

However, if people don't have that gear sometimes they have to gem for hit.
Case in point with me right now- I'm saving up emblems for the hit trinket, but until then to stay capped I need to stack it.

No. Gem for Hit if you're under cap and don't have gearing alternatives. Gems are cheap.

Just make sure to place your hit gems in items like the t9 helm (Yellow socket for 8 strength.) Gems are your flexibility; make them work for you. It is more important to get stats to the levels that are needed than to gem all one color.

Given any gear, you should always try to get to Hit and expertise cap.

Gemming hit and expertise is an option as long as you are below the (melee)hit/expertise cap. It should be preferred.

BIS gear already has some STR/HIT gems in it - to get the socket bonuses with yellow sockets.

this is true, with the new gears available, you should not have to gem for hit/expertise...

if you are low on hit, ask your raid leader to put a dranei in your group to get 1%+ hit that mean you only need to have about 230 hit rating or 7% hit.. and if you are doing heroic or unable to get dranei in your group.. there is +40 hit rating food you and consume.

I disagree. You should gem in a manner that provides the biggest DPS increase considering all your available items and socket bonuses. This means getting as close to 263 hit rating as possible (any more hit rating is nerfing your DPS), soft-capping your expertise and then focusing on the stat that has the highest APE value for you.

Patch notes historically forget some changes, this is another example of that. Feel free to buy the Sigil no matter your dps DK spec, since it is now the best one.

Alright that's enough. Five posters have quoted and responded to Defyapathy on the issue of hit/expertise gemming, 4 with more or less word for word copies of one another. We're all clear on the differences in gemming practices let's move on please.

Not sure on the wording from the patch notes but will this have something to do with it?

•Relics: All buffs provided by relics (idols, librams, totems and sigils) now share an exclusive category such that gaining a buff from one of these items will remove all other buffs gained from items in this category.

I guess this is to avoid item swapping to try to get different buffs from different items up at the same time.

so in theory then it wont effect Darkmoon card greatness/ 2pce proc or any other strength proc buff. therefore allowing of those buffs stacking. Its just worded funny i guess

That specific change was aimed more towards Paladins.

One of our Librams grants a block value increasing buff whenever we cast Judgement, while another Libram grants a different BV buff whenever we cast Holy Shield.

Some enterprising Paladins managed to come up with a rotation that would allow them to use benefit from both buffs at the same time, at the cost of some weapon swing damage, since Relic-swaps incur a swing timer reset.

I remember there was similar theorycrafting very early on with regards to using the PvP Sigil with the Icy Touch-Defense Sigil at the same time, except the cost of missing white swings was considered too high.

In any case, this change isn't related to the Sigil of Virulence, and they probably just forgot to make a patch note for it when releasing today,

The same was already going on for DK tanks which could use one sigil that granted 53 def rating for 30 seconds on icy touch and wear another sigil which resultet in +dodge for almost all the time and permanent 53 deff. I suppose SoV would be otherwise also a little exploitable (not that much that it would be worth it) by simply using SotVH and SoV only to get the 200strength for 20 seconds, gaining the bonuses from both siigils.

Well if you have read the patch notes then you know.. Heart strike now takes half damage on its secondary target. Should I consider going to unholy dps, or will this nerf not be that big of an impact? I was very upset when I first read this, but now i'm starting to think that it isn't all that bad.

The HS nerf won't affect single-target DPS in any meaningful way. In ToC/TotGC there's no fights except for Jaraxxus and Anub (or valks if using a specific strat) where HS's cleave even makes a significant difference in DPS, and Unholy was supreme on Anub already so this patch won't make any difference there. Barring Onyxia's fight being radically changed from 60 I can't see it being a huge factor there either.

The arpen nerf on the other hand, might make speccing unholy more viable for you on an individual basis.

The proc names for our set 2-piece bonus was changed to Unholy Might and Sigil of Virulence was changed to Unholy Force.

Not Blood specific, but still. This will make timing easier for when we want to pop DRW or refresh diseases for anyone using GoD.

I don't see it in the notes, however SOV now includes DS.

By using the Sigil of Virulence, does this change our typical rotation to weave in more DS?

No, SoV has a high proc chance 80%, so don't worry about using extra DS normally, however if it didn't proc, using another DS may be a good idea.

The proc chance is 80% with a duration of 20s. It's unlikely that you'll ever need to alter your rotation in order to keep it up.

Quick question about arpen. Since arpen got a 12% nerf, do we just get the new stat weighings by 2.75* (1-0.88)=2.42?