If you find yourself pressed for GCD's you can always skip the final blood rune in the rotation and just move on to dumping RP and starting over again with diseases. A GCD spent on a death coil is certainly better than one spent on a blood boil. (Assuming single target)

The unholy presence variant of the 3/15/55 spec is used only if your total haste is under 200 or so, they calculated the details in the other thread. Once your haste gets to a certain point its much better to use blood presence considering how many spells we are throwing out.

It's a general rule that proc rates are halved when on the offhand weapon, which most people just take for granted at this point. There are exceptions, though, such as talented procs specifically designed to only proc off offhand hits, but those are blatantly obvious and DKs don't have any. If you want a link, here's a rather outdated one from wowwiki on it: Proc - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft. No more reliable than the word of any player, but if someone else here wants to correct me on this, go ahead.

after switching from 3/51/17 to 3/13/55 I've noticed my dps increase substantially. And although I haven't xferred my DK to ptr (yet), I'm wondering with the UH changes (particularly SS) if the build will still be as potent as it is now (specially with T9 4pc being changed from what I saw). And would GoIT still be a preferred glyph for that build (extra dmg on a dot when diseases are at the top of my damage done seems like a good idea).

No matter how hard I tried with frost, I always seem to hit a wall in damage/dps in raids (I ran GoD) where as the unholy build seems to be scaling better (plus the rotation is much easier/and less demanding IMO).

The continued viability of any DW unholy build is contingent on the final changes to SS. As we stand now we know the 0/17/54 DC spam is out due to the icy touch glyph change, and depending on how much harder a 2handed SS will hit compared to a 1handed we might see the end of any viable unholy DW spec. Currently, 3/13/55 can compete because of how soft SS actually hits, in a nutshell the extra white damage and scaling via necrosis and BCB make up for the lower SS hits, making DW unholy on par or superior to 2H unholy.

As for a damage increase moving from a GoD spec to the 3/13/55 spec, remember that currently the 4 piece bonus is accounting for a massive chunk of damage when combined with wandering plague and crypt fever. This is probably why you are seeing such a gain with unholy, especially so if you don't have another Dk running unholy while you are frost. Basically, if no DK is bringing the 30% disease damage buff to the raid, you will pretty much always see a dps gain by going unholy, that bonus is just too good to miss.

Our best bet is to wait until we get solid data on SS and other changes, theorycraft how viable DW unholy will be, and go from there. There isn't much value in discussing how upcoming changes will effect our builds until we actually know what the changes are. If there are no viable DW unholy builds I'll remove that section from the OP and convert this thread into Frost only.

Perhaps I've missed this? A quick glance at the unholy OP shows that 15/0/56 is a 2handed spec. And to boot it states that 3/13/55 pulls ahead dps wise in BIS gear.

Did I miss something?

Nope, you haven't missed a thing. Going any further than 5 points into blood pretty much means that DPS spec will be 2H, since those talents don't scale well compared to Frost or Unholy talents for DW.

Now for some newer discussion: It appears that the new DPS sigil would be fully stacked during the first rotation as Frost, assuming it's 3 stacks of 73 strength and not 5 stacks of 44. However, the 2pT10 bonus gives OB some extra heft, so 0/53/18 Frost may very well still use Awareness for single target.

It really depends on the Encounter you are doing. On every encounter where there are multiple targets your 3/13/55 spec will be far better as the damage will increase exponential with the 4pT9 bonus. Frost still outnumbers Unholy on Singletarget Fights, especially when you have long uptimes on your target.

Just looking at the changes that come with 3.3 makes me believe that UH DW will fall behind the 2h Version as the new SS will be a big part of Unholy DPS again.

Sadly you guys are misinformed, 15/0/56 is a DW specc. The specc to which you are refering to is 16/0/55. So any answer from a person with any actual knowledge would be greatly apreciated.

http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t72364-u...9/#post1399169

Check DW specc A, and take a closer look at the conclusions made about the 4part t9. Yes, i know the difference in dps is miniscule, but it is there. Also from my own experience 15/0/56 pulls ahead way more than just a few dps. This is all single-target dps, i am not talking about multiple target dps as 3/13/55 clearly pulls ahead there. Also i've chosen to spend the extra talent point in 15/0/56 in Imp Unholy Presence (instead of Corpse Explosion) which i believe helps alot in most fights, since there arent many where you can just stand still and smash buttons.

Also if your gear is anything similar to mine (severely hit overcapped) then 15/0/56 will be even greater as the 3% extra hit from Nerves of Cold Steel wont boost your dps by alot as it will only help towards your melee white hits.

I believe you are mistaking Nyhmsi, you are basing this on the single simulation tests of one person? here is his conclusion:

"Coming to my final conclusion – Believe it or not:

Best DW Spec: DWSpec C (3-13-55) – Best 2H Spec: 2H Spec A (16-0-55)"

When you "take a close look" at the 4Piece T9 results you notice that 3/13/55 did a whoping 15dps less on sigle target, but almost 100 dps more on multi target. (Due to black ice interacting with blood plague) Considering that the current hard content contains multi target dps, there would be no reason to spec 16-0-55. A 15 dps difference on a simulator is pretty much no difference at all, but this build is obviously inferior on multi target since a 100 dps difference is harder to explain away via RNG.

Considering almost every ToC fight requires sustained DPS on more than one target why wouldn't you choose the 3/13/55 spec which wins when there is more than one target and only lags behind on single target by 14 dps?

I have 2 questions about Frost DW.

First : BCB is good enough to not taking it points to Killing Machine and Unbreakable armor?

Second: Necrosis and BCB offset the value that the AP and Critical that a build like 18/53/0 i give? and yet mentioning Death Rune Mastery.



Thanks from a brand new DK.