I know that DRW and Gargoyle both now require you to have an enemy target selected in order to cast it.

I haven't had Ghoul bug on me after a AotD cast, but I have had it bug on me once in a while on it's own. With Master of Ghouls, I'll attempt to cast Raise Dead without actually getting a ghoul. It will put RD on perma-cooldown as if the ghoul had been summoned, but since it wasn't, the only way to solve the problem that I found was to change zones or switch specs. Raise Dead will then go on cooldown and be able to be used afterward. It doesn't happen often. I think it's only happened once to me in the past two months, and maybe three times total.

I have read through these forums and two things have been sort of bothering me lately.

1. Is it better to pre-cast Army of the Dead and then run in for the fight, or cast after your first rotation?

2. Do you refresh diseases with 1-2 seconds left, or let them fall off and then re-apply? Issue I encounter with letting them fall off is a lot of downtime.

I have browsed combat logs for both of these things, and I see both done. I have played with both, but don't see a dps gain or loss.

I just want to get an opinion going here.

Here is a Festergut parse from last night if you want to look at my log: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

The "All currently known loot, sans 25m heroic loot and Shadowmourne"-list has a small error / is slightly outdated.

The list suggests [Legplates of Painful Death] although [Legplates of Aetheric Strife] (heroic) are a little better (trading 16 crit rating for 16 arp rating and arp has a higher AEP than crit at that gear level)

As the combination of all items also lacks a good chunck of hit rating on them (which I assume will be gotten via socketing 10str/10hit gems in the plenty yellow sockets) it seems superior to change [Coldwraith Links] (non heroic, dont know how to link it properly, sorry) for [Flesh-Shaper's Gurney Strap] (heroic) (and change some 10str/10hit gems to 10str/10crit to not overcap hit)

Pre-casting AotD has several things going for it: Firstly it provides you with RP which when combined with DnD contributes towards being able to use your first death coil straight after summoning Gargoyle assuming you summon it straight away. It also allows you to save ERW for a more advantageous moment for a better DPS gain or for when runes come off cooldown in bad pairs.

As for diseases I am generally not worried about clipping the last tick personally. I tend to artificially extend my rotation in a lot of ways such as casting Blood Tap and Bone Shield at the end of a rotation's second rune cooldown set and hitting Horn of Winter before RP dump. This generally allows for diseases to drop off but if it doesn't it isn't the end of the world. It is better to get your runes onto their cooldowns than wait for disease to drop off if you have no RP to spend or no other maintenance ( bone shield, ghoul commands etc ) to do.

Quite recently another DK in my guild has switched to unholy after seeing me in action and at first i thought this would be a good thing but the first time we raided together i noticed that whenever we attacked the same target my ebon plague would refresh itself roughly 3-4 seconds into its tick(down?) and fromwhat i've read it's not recommended to have more than one unholy DK in a raid at a time but i was wondering if ebon plague getting refreshed so often was normal? because of two unholies in the group or it was a fault on the other DK's part seeing as though ebon plague acts normally when i'm the only unholy DK in the group.

Ideally if you're not clipping you'd only gain 10% from rivendare(since you'd be reapplying blood plague before frost fever fell off) The argument for clipping I believe was so your runes never got delayed. The bonus to blood plague dmg was merely a bonus?

This is a result of the way that they changed Ebon Plague interaction with more than 1 unholy DK in a group. It now refreshes for each DK when any of them apply or refresh a disease. So what you're seeing is normal for your current raid makeup.

All the tables are going to be outdated with the coming of the minor content patch on Feb 2nd, and the introduction of the STR Ashen Verdict Ring. While I could re-sim BiS tables now, I'd rather wait until the Lich King loot is revealed as well (likely in the near future), as anything simmed with the new ring will be just as inaccurate as the current information in just another week.

I have had it happen to me with my ghoul in a few heroics and a raid once, i had to log off my Death Knight for 5 minutes before it was fixed, it was very weird. The most recent time was yesterday during a H-Nexus run for my frost badges and after killing the first pull and starting to fight the dogs i sacrificed my ghoul, healer had d/ced and tank had lagged out, so i had aggro, and after the fight i noticed my Button wasn't starting to fill up, it was acting like i had a ghoul out already, i tried using /reloadui and nothing worked, so i just finished the instance without my ghoul, I was able to summon my gargoyle and use AoTD with no issues, I even was able to use Raise Ally (healer d/ced again and the mage got destroyed) and it worked fine, but i wasn't able to use my ghoul for the rest of the instance.

I have no idea for the reasoning behind why i couldn't summon my ghoul, but I've had it happen to me occasionally since 3.1,Ulduar came out.

This has been happening to me since 3.3 and I have not been able to find the cause of it. Sometimes the cast will go off, other times it is instantly interrupted (more times than not it is interrupted). At first I thought it only happened when a boss started to cast a spell while I was casting AOTD as this was when I mainly noticed it happening, however after using it on more bosses I found that my cast could still go off when the target was casting. I then thought it was due to taking damage, however I have been able to get the full cast off on Marrowgar during his whirl wind, and been able to get the cast off on Putricide during phase 3 with all of the raid damage going on. I have talked to every DK in my guild, and people who have DK alts and none have experienced this problem. The only thing I can think of is that some addon might be stopping it, or that there is an actual bug in the game and it only seems to be affecting some people (I'm not a retard, I would know if I was moving or pressing buttons to stop the cast after I used it).

I know someone posted before that it is better to cast it pre pull, however some fights it's better to wait to use it (Gunship) and others you can use it twice if you use it right at the begining and towards the end (Putricide) so I wouldn't say "Just cast it pre pull" is always a viable solution.

The reason for pre-casting AotD is that it takes 4s to cast, so that's 4s you're not DPSing the boss. A reason to DPS the boss and then summon the army is to get buffs/procs up before summoning..

So if you're trying to decide between summoning them pre-fight and summoning them mid-fight with your procs up, the question is which is more damage: 4s of damage from you + 30s of damage from an unbuffed army, or 30s of damage from a buffed army.

I found a random World of Logs report with a couple of Unholy DKs who use AotD on Festergut:

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

One DK does 8k personal DPS on average, and his army does 32329 damage total. Another Unholy DK in the same raid does also does 8k personal DPS on average and his army does 34145 damage total. Given that, it seems impossible that stopping DPS for 4s to summon your army will do more overall damage than pre-summoning it. Assuming these guys both pre-summoned, so the damage an unbuffed army does is roughly 32,000. For it to be worth not pre-summoning and instead waiting until your trinkets/sigils/weapon rune procs, they would have to do roughly double their damage when buffed vs unbuffed to make up for the DK losing 4s he could otherwise be attacking the boss.

In fact, it may mean that it's questionable if you have the opportunity to summon AotD a second time in the fight, it is worth stopping DPS for the 4s it takes to summon them, since the damage done by the AotD over its duration is roughly the same as the the damage a DK would do in that same time (4s).