I had a chance to test the 53/18 yesterday in Ulduar 25 and I'm very satisfied with it. A few things I don't understand atm. I see a lot of ppl going for a 54/17 to pick up UA and drop a point in BCB. Wasn't it proven by math a few pages before that Killing Machine should be the talent of choice to drop a few points so resulting in a 53/18 with UA and 4/5 KM if I'm not mistaken.

Things I noticed during my raid: I will run with FC/FC and not FC/RI I can't maintain the stacks in fights with a bit movement involved. Did some1 else run into the same problem?
Aggro wasn't a real problem until we did General where I went for a respec after the first try to 3/53/15 and had no aggro issues. I was thinking about dropping back to 2/3 Subversion but seeing the math here regarding Subversion now I will stick to 3/3. It is also handy on fights where you have to switch to adds for a short time and an OB crit is handy (hodir flash freezes).

Regarding UA: Is it worth picking it up and drop a point from KM? I saw a few high wowmeter parses from ppl without UA and was wondering since I read that the main issue was that it isn't possible to sim UA so nobody knew if it was worth it or not.

Have we established exact stat weights for the new 3/52/16 +/- ? Not simply priority, (hit>str>crit) but exact weights?

raid leader is telling me his sim is showing +hit as being more beneficial then +str until 500 hit rating. Anyone have an opinion on this? I dont have a sim of my own to run.

There have been no exact stat weights released yet. Though a couple of posts back there are some rough napkin math weights. Here is a link to the page: DW Builds 3.2 -Revenge of the Offhand

The sim is inaccurate. The primary simulator available at the moment is not properly calculating values.

UA is a definite increase in DPS provided you are able to throw it into a rotation. I personally cannot find a way to throw it into my rotation routinely without messing up my standard dps rotation, so I choose to not include it in my builds.

I've been playing with sim and for me it shows that +str is always more beneficial than +hit. And +hit becomes much less beneficial after around 270-300 (basically, crit > hit at that point). But it is possible I'm doing something wrong as thats the first time I've been playing with sim.

Same, using the DK sim on this forum while increasing +hit the BCB and Necro dmg seem to stay exactly the same or actually go down with more hit. So i'm confused.

Regarding stat weights, T8, T9 weights have been released yet? Since OB is our top priority now, I think it would be similar to Unholy one.

I think I'll be switching to Subversion as well, I know I'll need it for Hodir at least. It's nice to see that the difference between it and BCB doesn't seem too big so you can make the choice without feeling like you gimp your dps.

as for UA; I use the following macro:

/cast Blood Tap
/cast Unbreakable Armor

and hammer it twice after I've spent my blood runes. This is, however, covered somewhere earlier in the thread.

I have the macro, my biggest issue is that Blood Tap's death rune will reset itself mid-rotation forcing me to do double BS instead of an OB which throws me off. I generally do IT PS OB BS >> Macro << BS and continue on my rotation as it was outlined to do so earlier in this thread by Darkside or Doc if I remember correctly. However nearly a full rotation later the death rune created via Blood Tap resets to a Blood Rune, even if it was used for BS, which means I need to double up a rotation and use more GCDs on extra rune abilities which then causes a RP build up and, again, screws with my rotation. I have simply found that not including it works well for me as I can easily keep track of the rotation and don't need to count on any weird rune refreshes. I have found that until I actually get used to having to double up on the BS after the death rune drops then my dps is higher when being able to maintain a fluid rotation without any hiccups.

3.2 DW Values would be closely related to 3.1 2h OB oriented frost specs (listed in the frost thread and I believe a direct link to the most accurate values is posted in the optimal gearing thread).

I will start looking into BCB when i have some time.

My guess is that we overrated it a bit with the sim since the statset used to have too much haste on it. A stat that i personally have very little off now that I swapped my gear around a bit.

From personal experience so far (which is still not too much, since I probably been offtanking 80% of all encounters i've done since 3.2), i found that aggro is insanely high. Even our fully ulduar geared warrior tank who is a great tank (i know subjective) is sometimes squeezing it, when i pull 5-6k TPS.

Adding to that that my BCB dps flucutates heavily, and I think i'm gonna drop BCB altogether. I'll probably put a 5th point in KM, because i find that i often have rime up without KM, so the extra proc might be useful there. And the other 2 in Subversion.

Dispite what everyone claims, it is STILL not a hugely good talent though. It keeps amazing me how shortsighted some people are by just seeing 9% crit.

Maybe i'll take a point out of UA as well. I use it, but I find its use (even WITH the macro) to be rather hard. If i use it, the UA will use a frost rune and a death rune will be generated. That gives problems sometimes, because that means I can not use it on the second part of my rotation (where I'm already having death runes) unless i use up my frost runes first.

So: BT>Ob>Ob>Ob doesnt work (you lose a frost rune and replace an active deathrune with an active deathrune); Ob>Ob>BT>Ob does work (UA uses a deathrune and refreshes it right after).

So i can NOT always use it on demand, i can only use it in the first part of the rotation (where i replace a Blood rune with a deathrune so i can still toss my obliterate out), or at the end of the second part.

And if i do so in the first part there is another hinderance, namely that i mess up the refresh on my runes a bit. Say i do this sequence:
PS>IT>UA macro>Ob>BS

Technically that works, UA uses your 2nd frost rune, Obliterate uses your 2nd Unholy rune and a death rune (which also refreshes as deathrune), and 1 Bloodrune left for BS.

However that also gives a problem, you seperate the GCDs on your U and F rune. That means that in the second half of the rotation you have to wait for your U rune to come up while your F rune is already up. Sure you can toss a FS in that gap, but you still push back your rotation by 1.5 second.

I find UA to be somewhat gimmicky. I also have to focus too much on keeping my rotation steady, so i lose some focus on pumping out as much dps as possible in that timeframe, which in the end might actually lead to lower dps. Although that might be a case of still being new with the spec.

This is just what i noticed so far.

EDIT: I also have the problem Asphyxia has that my deathrune turns back into a bloodrune halfway.

/cancelaura Blood Tap

Will help you after you use Unbreakable Armor. Had the same problem before.

This is strange because when I use the macro, blood tap keeps me the death rune perfectly. I can do OB which uses the deathrune, than a BS and I have 2 deathrunes in the second cycle and can therefore pull 3x OB without any problem.

I also think we overrated BCB a bit, if you look up the 2 screenshots I posted up on the page, you can see a good increase in OB, Crit and DPS just with 3 points in Subversion.

This is what I advocated a lot earlier in this thread ("Frost is supposed to be strike heavy yada yada") but the sims showed BCB as a better investment.

As foxx said, it may be because the sim stat settings aren't representing what we would normally use, giving BCB too much fuel to be realistic. BCB scales with hit and haste whereas Obliterate and Blood Strike (Subversion) do not, at least past soft hit cap.

This could mean that you can choose between two different gearsets completely, if you want BCB you gear for haste and hit, if you want Subversion you gear more ArP oriented.

Yes, it should, but only in 50% of cases if you really want to use it on demand. Why? In practice, I found just mashing the macro 2 times didn't always use UA (don't know if that was because of latency or some other factor), so in the end I just started mashing the macro until I saw that UA went on CD.

Now, your macro is fine when you have 2 death runes and use them for OB > "BT-UA-cancelaura" so you have 2 blood runes refreshing for your next rotation, and that's ok.

But if you want to use it for burst in a rotation where you have 2 blood runes, it's BS > BS > "BT-UA-cancelaura" and you end up with 1 death rune and 1 blood rune in next rotation cycle.

Again, someone might say that you can only tap the macro twice in that case, but I found it really hard to do in practice and usually babysitting it made me lose a lot of time and taking too much attention and was in the end a dps loss.

The only solution I can see here is have two macros probably keybinded with a modifier, so in the first case you would use for example R key for "BT-UA-cancelaura" and shift-R for "BT>UA". And that would still demand a lot of attention as to when to use which macro that I find really frustrating.

I suppose the two macros below would suffice...

#showtooltip Unbreakable Armor
/cast Blood Tap
/cast Unbreakable Armor

#showtooltip Blood Strike
/cancelaura Blood Tap
/cast [mod:alt] Pestilence; Blood Strike
/cast !Rune Strike

Considering UA lasts 20 seconds it should be used during an OB > Dump > OB OB OB > Dump phase to generate the best amount of burst, so with that in mind...

This would mean that it would look like IT (BBUUFf) PS (BBUuFf) BS (BdUuFf) BS (ddUuFf) UA MACRO (ddUuFf) OB (dduuff) > Dump > OB x3 > IT PS BS (which would cancel the aura before casting BS, making it so it is BB instead of BD), and then you have a smooth transition through UA without any hiccups. In theory I don't see why that wouldn't work. I am definitely looking forward to trying this out tomorrow.

I think the unholy tree in general is a bit overrated. Blood seems to perform equally good - for me at least. I'm using 2 T1 furious weapons (that's what I could get my hands on) and full T8.5. I'm running with around 400 hit rating.

Choosing blood over unholy might not appear as good on paper as unholy but I've found that I actually do slightly better damage using it. 15 points into blood (yes, I chose Dark Conviction).

I run using Howling Blast as my disease apply mechanism. I skip Blood Plague / Plague Strike entirely.

Cycle 1: OB-BS-BS-OB-Dump
Cycle 2: OB-OB-OB-Dumb

Replace any of the Obliterate with Howling Blast if Frost Fever isn't up. This rotation is incredibly easy and I have no problem doing damage equal to or better than that of my fellow DKs choosing unholy over blood and the second tree.

I wouldn't want to do that because the rotation doesn't stay self sustaining when you have long streaks of no KM-Rime procs and you would end up RP starved

Actually, most of that is purely RNG.

You can not lie against solid math. And i can pull it out again here.

People are totally deluded by the numbers on Subversion.

I can do the math again, but if you have 70% crit with subversion, that means you have 61% without. With a 45% crit modifier on obliterate that means the dps increase from that 9% crit is:

( 1 + ( 0.70 * 1.45)) / (1 + ( 0.61 * 1.45)) = 1.07

That means 7% obliterate damage increase for 3 points. Obliterate is 32.5% of your total damage thus 2.275% dps increase for 3 points. Factoring in BS brings this to about 2.5%. That still means only 0.83% dps per point invested.

Can we please stop posting gut feelings that are way off.
"Look at how my obliterate damage increased!" ; "I'm doing tons more dps"
That is either biased, false or simply due to RNG.

Don't get me wrong, I will probably spec subversion too, because i think its better than BCB. But don't glorify things here because you happen to see more enlarged numbers on your screen.


Same for the blood tree subspec. If you do more dps, good for you. Facts stay facts:
- Subversion is decent, but again overestimated by a lot of people because they only see 9% crit = 9% more dps or something.
- Bladed Armor is great, but HARDLY scales. So only good for undergeared people (basically).
- Dark Conviction is 5% crit on a build that with KM procs / 70% obliterate crit rate and high FS crit rate gets VERY little out of more crit.
I probably wouldn't be far off saying that Dark Conviction in a raid is about 2% more dps for 5 (!!!) talent points. Compare that to necrosis which is almost 5% dps per 5 talent points.

Question; I might be late on this but, since the OH strikes from ToT come seperately from the MH strikes, does Rime get twice the chance? It seems that Rime will not prob on the MH sometimes, but once the OH Oblit goes off, it does.

For some reason using the rotation of: IT>PS>OB>BS>BS>UB Macro leaves me with the following runes / strike.

BBUUFf > BBUuFf > BBuuff >Bduuff > dduuff > bduuff

Using Blood Tap to turn a Death Rune into a Death Rune after it's use even with Blood Tap still active changes that rune into a Blood Rune after being spent on Unbreakable Armor.

You can only really use UA when you have no runes available and no converted blood runes on cooldown. That's mostly why so many skip UA.

That is exactly the problem.

The whole point of UA is that i want to pop it whenever i want. When my procs are up and BL goes up i sometimes only have mere seconds to pop UA and raise a ghoul. If that is made impossible because I happen to be in the wrong part of my rotation that is extremely annoying.

When i have some time this afternoon I think i'm gonna play around a bit with an UA macro and see when it does and does not mess up my rotation.

I've had the problem RADRyanD adresses as well where I for no reason get a blood rune back whenever i use blood tap like that.