My quarrals are not about wether its easy to keep up, or worried about 1% crit... My worries are that for me (and possibly others) Bone Shield is used up so fast due to splash AoE from the bosses in ICC that I dont benifit from the 2% damage long enough to outweigh the extra 1% crit I would have otherwise. Depending on uptime 1% crit would be more than 2% damage...

I quite agree, however splash AoE is typically just small amounts of random damage flying about. If your suggesting we need Bone Shield to survive this then I think something is going wrong.

If Bone Shield is up 60% of the time, there is no way at all it could be outweighed by a single percentage of crit. 1% crit is at best a 0.5% damage increase (and will go down as crit rates continue to increase) while a 2% overall increase in damage is actually more than 2% more damage done, thanks to SS/WP double dipping modifiers. BS would have to have an average uptime of around 12-15s in order for Dark Conviction to actually become a better talent choice, something that I do not think is true and any of the current content encounters.

Sorry for misunderstanding. Given the situation when bone shield is consumed quite fast (like on Deathwhisper) 1% crit is better. However i personally prefer some survivability, even for 3-6 hits per fight.

Dark Conviction is a 0.5% increase (per point) because crit doesn't affect all damage.

Bone Shield is a 2% increase (while up). With 15s uptime, you do 15/60 *2 and get 0.5, so it equals Dark Conviction. Remember you can (when no runes are up) Blood Tap, /cancelaura blood tap, Bone Shield to get shield back.

I'm playing DW Unholy because I like the play style better than frost or 2H. I'm aware that I am therefore already suboptimal. Bear with me.

My spec is already splashing into Frost to pick up Nerves of Cold Steel. Would I be better off putting three points in Annihilation (and two in Black Ice to get enough points to get that far) and a suitable glyph and using Obliterate, or would I be better off putting three points in Outbreak and taking Scourge Strike (which would also leave one talent point and one glyph free)?

On the surface it appears that Obliterate is a more powerful attack:
Oblit: (80% + 467.2) * 1.375 * 1.2 = 132% + 770.88
SS: (50% + 400) * 1.75 * 1.2 = 105% + 840.0

So unless I'm missing something about how these attacks scale, it doesn't take much weapon damage to tip Obliterate better than Scourge Strike on base damage alone.

Critical hits, then... SS has 3% better crit chance on its own, and 3% better crit chance on PS, but Annihilation is 3% better crit chance on Blood Strike and (via Wandering Plague) Frost Fever and Blood Plague. Critical strike damage (with these spec options) is 30% higher on SS (PS is equal because I'm taking Virulence either way) according to the talent trees, but Scourge Strike only crits on the physical damage (unless I'm mistaken?). So I'm looking at this:

Crit damage:
Oblit: (132% + 770.88) * 2.0 = 264% + 1541.76
SS (only physical): (50% + 400) * 1.2 * (2.3 crit bonus + .75 shadow) = 183% + 1464

Let's assume 20% crit on melee attacks, which means 23% for Scourge Strike, so weighting damages...
Oblit: (132% + 770.88) * .8 + (264% + 1541.76) * .2 = 158.4% + 925.06
SS: (105% + 840.0) * .77 + (183% + 1464.0) * .23 = 122.94% + 983.52

So if I'm right any MH weapon that has an average damage of 165 or higher will deal more damage with Obliterate than Scourge Strike. I don't know the statistics on how mitigation affects this, and I don't know if I'm missing anything, and I haven't put TOO much work into looking at what the effect on the other attacks is (but briefly it seems the SS build has a stronger PS but the Oblit build has stronger BS and diseases).

So tell me... It's obvious that SS is superior for 2H because of the talent point investment into Frost, but since I'm already there, is Oblit really better than SS for me? Am I overlooking some feature of SS that makes it advantageous? Or should I be looking at a different offensive mechanic altogether if I'm going to be running DW?

Edit: It occurs to me that my estimate on the crit chance may be low, especially in the face of three points in Subversion. More crit chance, though, shifts the weighting even further toward Obliterate.

Edit #2: I've crunched a few more numbers, and unless one attack has a higher coefficient on attack power Obliterate scales about 3.08% better with AP than Scourge Strike does using the crit figures above; again, more crit appears to make Obliterate even better.

I don't see any gain in macroing /cancelaura into bloodtap. Canceling bloodtap only works to your advantage immediately after spending two death runes.

If you scourgestrike off death runes then bloodtap-boneshield, you will have one blood rune, one death rune. The next rune refresh you'll BSx2 for two death runes. After two rune refreshes bloodtap falls, leaving you with one death rune, one blood rune, forcing you to BSx2 again. In this case you would have gained by canceling bloodtap immediately after boneshield.

If you BSx2 then immediately blood tap-boneshield, you have two death runes. This is what you want. If you canceled bloodtap you'd have one blood rune, one death.

Always canceling bloodtap is no better than never canceling it. Either way, you have two equally-frequent cases: one where your "cycle" proceeds as normal and one where bloodtap breaks a pair of death runes. The ideal solution is to macro the /cancelaura elsewhere so you can cancel only when needed.

Yeah. I macro cancelaura blood tap after my boneshield macro so it doesnt mess up my rotation. Pretty helpful. I have a separate binding for just BT for emergencies (Eg. pest with GoD, BT+vamp blood) but I use it much less frequently

Could you perhaps post your Bone Shield macro? Atm I use this one (from what Im reading Im doing it wrong);

#showtooltip Bone Shield
/cast Blood Tap
/stopcasting
/cast Bone Shield

I then cancel the aura manually using another macro;

/cancelaura Blood Tap

Does anyone else noticed after using the above macro that your blood rune takes even longer to come back up? Before patch i could have a bone tap/shield macro and it would keep my rotation fluid but now when i use it, it seems like it resets the blood rune cd where as before it didn't.

Something I read on the WoW boards was quite interesting. It was a thread about pet dps and was mainly focused on mages and warlocks, but it could also benefit our ghouls. It basically was focused on how pets do not use there auto cast on cool down.

So they macro'ed in a /petability command to all of their abilities to gain an ability increase of about 27%.

Apparently it was also an issue in TBC with hunter pets.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Pet latency costing 3.5% - 5% DPS

Sorry if this was posted before, I double checked the OP and did not see any mention.