I can relate to this, may not be the same issue you're experiencing, but similar. I'm getting some odd SS numbers. Previously my shadow portion always did the same or more damage than the physical portion. My gear hasn't really changed much, high AP, but the same ArP within a 1-2% difference. Lately my shadow portion is lower than my physical portion.

Lana'thel provides the easiest 'visual' on this one, where with the vampire buff the physical portion of SS does 1-3k more than the shadow portion for me. Example from recent logs: Average 18531 Physical, 16742 Shadow for the BQL fight. From a Saurfang kill where I performed particularly poorly: Phys Average - 8784, Shadow Average - 8305

Needless to say, it's been driving me nuts. Unless there's others experiencing something similar, I'm just going to chalk it up to bad RNG or someone else in my raid failing on buffs/debuffs. May be the same in your situation.

It's possible that something changed with the mechanics behind Scourge Strike when Blizzard hotfixed the bug that caused the shadow portion to be double-dipped by Resilience. This bug was around since they changed the shadow portion to be unable to crit a few days after 3.3, and was only fixed a week and a half ago. source. Maybe it's something else, but the timeline fits.

I just looked through 9 attempts of LK fights and did not see anything unusual at all taking place with the shadow portion of the strike. There are 1-2 1.5k resists, but they are outliers, not the norm. Most often there is no resist at all or a 4-500 resist.

Speaking of the Lich King fight, Glyph of Disease is a wonderful addition to the mix, however which particular glyph would we replace? The Glyph of the Ghoul, or the Glyph of Dark Death?

This is my first post, I would like to start off by saying thank you to the OP and thanks to all you other guys who discuss the original post, I have learned a lot from all of you, thanks.

I'm wondering, would it be better to use a priority system? or a straight up rotation? I'm kind of curious about what everyone else does. As of now I am using: Apply diseases (PS - IT), dump your RP if its capped (DC), burn your blood runes for Desolation and/or Death Runes (BS - BS), use your FU strike (SS), dump your RP (DC), use Horn if you have an extra gcd and are unable to do anything else (HoW). Ive also ran into a few problems using this priority system, example: I apply my diseases then BS once, then my RP is capped, do I BS then dump? or dump then use my other BS?

Also, in the OP, under enchants, it says that I should be using 15 strength, why not 44 ap?

Note: Thanks for taking the time to read my questions, im sorry if my questions have been answered before or seem a bit dumb.

Every DK system is a priority system; rotations are simply the prediction of the most beneficial sequence of abilities in priority order assuming no external event influences them.
UH is VERY predictable by DK standards and thus you get a fairly fixed rotation; this is due to having ample free cds and relatively low RP generation, leading to very little chances for the rotation to break. Should it break - and it will, on several fights - then you will need to adapt in terms of priority picking but always with the target of resetting your rune alignement and resume your rotation as per the OP post. Rune handling as UH is very simple, your goal for maximizing dps is making sure you squeeze in all the HoW casts and all the DC casts in the best opportunity window, and use your cooldowns at the right time.

On the issue of 15 str vs 44 ap, it's already been discussed, but here goes. 44 ap is, at the end of the day, just 44 ap. 15 str scales with Kings, with talents, with Fallen Crusader, with your pet; kings, FC and SoG alone would bring it close to the 20 str mark which would match the upgrade from 44 ap even before counting the ghoul.

I am Fairly certain Str statweights already take into account appropriate external and internal buffs such as kings, so 15 str is 15 str, just with a statvalue of 3 aep per str(approximately)

Since most of the top guilds have gotten a lot of T10 pieces and are now icecrown geared, I figured it was a good time to compare the DPS of all the melee classes and see where the unholy DKs stand at.

On the following table, the TOP 20 DPS of all active melee DPS specs on WoL are shown for Festergut 25 man (No Subtlety rogues at all):



Since most of the top assassination rogues got so high before the nerf a few weeks ago, the comparison of every other spec is made with the combat spec.

In all the melee classes, the rogue is the only "pure" dps class. While I don't know if the design that was wanted at the beginning of WotLK is still wanted now (5% more damage for pure dps classes compared to hybrids) it is still something decent to aim for when thinking of class balance.

As you can see in the table, Ferals are about 2% higher than where they should be.
Rets are at a good place.
Arms warriors, enhancement shamans and blood DKs are about 6% too low.
Fury warriors are pretty high (endless rage situation with ICC gear)
Frost DKs are by far the worst in terms of melee DPS output.

Unholy DKs are slightly behind where they should be. The thing is, I don't really see why since we should be scaling really well with the gear. Do you guys think these balance issues are mainly due to set bonuses being really great for some classes and just "good" for us ? Or is it mainly a design flaw of our SS hitting for less than what it should ?

I would guess that its the change to SS. Before the 3.3 SS change, ArP was useless for Unholy. Now ArP is a fantastic stat for Unholy. The difference is, unlike Ferals, Warriors, Combat Rogues, etc, most Unholy DKs had little or no ArP before 3.3. I wouldnt be surprised if all of those top Unholy parses had ArP ratings below 700.

I think the comparisons will become much more valid in a month or so when most of the top Unholy DKs are sporting 800-900+ ArP.

Then Blood DKs would be far better than Unholy DKs. It's only a matter of time until Blood spec catches up.

No, Unholy is fine. We're ok on single target bosses and very good at aoe damage or movement encounters. You also have to add the magic damage debuff and the excellent survivability.