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.

You can see my rough napkin math above. Even if BCB is *perfect* and performs a solid 3% dps, it is only about .3% dps better than Subversion on average, not even factoring in the threat reduction (which is huge, almost 1500 tps in most cases). On another note... with an armor pen oriented DW setup in my simulator I have *never* seen BCB over 2% of my dps in a 1,000 hour sim, where Subversion nearly always makes my OB go up 3-5% overall dps. I am currently running a 5,000 EP run for some base stat weights to post up here in an effort to help out people who keep asking for weights or I would post the results of my sims.
You know... I never thought about a cancelaura line in my macro, I will definitely have to try this out when I wake up.

That should work appropriately, correct?

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.

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.

Not entirely sure if this has been discussed yet but I haven't seen it anywhere yet. Many of you have been talking about having more RP than you can spend while in blood presence. Wouldn't dropping points from Chill of the Grave and putting them in Subversion or NotD alleviate some of the RP flooding and give you extra dps from actually being able to take advantage of the other talents?

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.

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.