Problem is, Blood Gorged is a 10% dmg increase. Even assuming it's up 90% of the time, it's a 1% overall dmg reduction. In more realistical environments you'll be looking at something more, and since it's not like Blood is 5 or 10% ahead of UH even when in BiS gear, you will see that its theorycal advantage will hardly become a practical one.

At present I hardly see a reason to be Blood; the only real utility is Hysteria, which isn't bad, but if you look at Paragon's LK setup, a Frost DK offers harder to get utility (hunters are always available, by taking an Enh shaman you can gimp your raid to a point) with better single target and better AoE. Frost AoE is much closer to UH AoE than Blood is, and since none of the two speccs need to pursue full ArP, you can have people having both speccs as offspeccs to always have access to the best setup possible.

If you look at parses for Festergut HM, you will see that the entire post patch UH top 10 is over 12k dps (there's 2 Shadowmourne users, tho) and the entire Frost top 10 is too, and with probably even more solid numbers, while aside from the very first Blood, Blood dpsers fall sensibly behind.

We're roughly talking about Frost DW having a 100-150 dps lead on UH subfrost, and UH subfrost having a 500ish dps lead on Blood dks.

A 500 dps gap will be hard to fill even in BiS gear (most of these people ARE in BiS gear, anyways), and 500-700 dps on the single best fight for Blood in the instance do show something.
And that's Festergut. On fights like Sindra HM, Blood loses by about 700-1000 to frost and over 2k to UH. Almost 1k to UH on Deathwhisper, 200-600 dps to both other speccs on Rotface, it's even lagging slightly behind on Saurfang (where HS is actually a better dps inflation than UH's disease spread or HB); even the fight that would be theorycally stacked up for Blood (PP) is actually won by UH (there's almost a 4k dps gap between the very top blood reports and the second half of the top 10, while UH is very solid around 10k+).

No Hunter talent will be worth the dps difference between Blood and Frost or Blood and UH, so I'd be hard pressed to consider taking a Blood DK an optimal choice. Maybe once some reports from Shadowmourne Blood Dks will fall in we'll see some unexpected scaling miracle, but right now the cold hard truth is that Blood has the worst utility, worst AoE and worst single target with the highest utility cost (gemming for ArP gimps your AoE and offspeccing potential), and shouldn't be suggested as a specc on an optimization board.

What applied to pre-3.3.3 Frost probably applies to Blood now; there's nothing the specc offers unless your guild is desperate for 10% AP.

When simmimg, both Kahorie's and Rawr DKDPS are giving haste EP values far above what the OP suggests. This is when simming with actual gear for a strictly 10 man raider who has not yet moved to heroic modes (10/12), with approximately 7.5k single target dps.


I have simmed all 3 specs presented in the OP. Haste is valued above crit in all 3 specs, both reapingless sub-blood, frost, and surprisingly, sub-blood with reaping.


Rawr goes as far as recommending replacing str/crit gems with str/haste, and replacing the meta with the haste meta.


There have been a number of reports that the current Rawr is not giving accurate values for unholy DKs. However, double checking with Kahories still yielded higher values for haste than for crit.

Are these sims presenting accurate results? It seems reasonable for a GCD constrained DK to value haste over crit. With the extra RP soaked up from AMS and replenishment, I find myself hitting the GCD wall even with a reaping build.

If the sims are accurate, it would make sense for other GCD-constrained unholy dk's to value haste more highly than suggested in the OP, especially with regard to the gemming recommendations.

All the top Blood parses for PP Heroic are Abom drivers so we can't count those anyway.

I believe this to not be good practice. Assuming you're not getting catered to with rejuv/wg spam for RP, the rotation I found consistently allowed me to spend all my rp while keeping my runes on cooldown. Occasionally, i could fit in a blood tap maybe even a HoW.

Spending RP as a priority is a bad thing because it will eventually catch up to you and the end result will be a lower number of blood strikes but the same amount of death coils( as long as you don't cap rp)



also on the note of Blood being arp capped, it's fairly easy to do even with-out heroic loot. The majority of the DK's parsing that high are either arp capped or close to it.(arp food and double elixir is better at a certain point and you get 10% arp from talents)

Not sure I agree on never spending RP instead of a BS. You have 130 max RP and very few dump GCD's in a frost subspec. Combine that with the likelihood of not being expertise capped making you even more GCD constrained and the random RP boosters like AMS and ERW and I can go an entire fight without ever expending all my RP. Its the same idea that supports 1/3 Subversion over 2/2 Dirge.


As for all of those ArP capped Bloods, no they aren't and it isn't fairly easy to do without heroic loot and I'm fairly certain its impossible to do without DBW. It also comes at the expense of things like gem bonuses that you can achieve if you arent having to gem yellow slots with arp. They also are not all expertise capped and its the combination of arp and exp cap that makes it worthwhile. I'm guessing you didn't even bother checking because I did match parses to armories and none of the DK's I saw were Arp capped even if they had Elixir and Food. And yes, I know ArP cap for Blood is 1260 so don't think I'm not accounting for that.

Blood gorged will make blood a very big detriment on LK due to infest/P&S casts that have you below 75% health frequently, With the buffs to WotN for tanking, a blood DK tank for arthas may be viable now and that person would bring the 10% AP buff with them.

Ghoul AOE on LK is meaningless. I stopped AOEing P1 on that encounter now because necrotic plague 1-shots the adds for you, and I would rather push out of P1 faster than screw around padding meters for top WoL parses and e-peen. On heroic pushing DPS on the boss in P1 is going to be much much more important with the amount of HP he has. P2 and P3 AOE will still be important, but P1 AOE screws up the plague mechanic - plague gains stacks when it kills a target, so if your AOE kills ghouls, shambling horrors take longer to down with it.

However, I am uncertain as to whether ebon plaguebringer increases the plague's damage or not, and I replace one BS in a rotation with a pest to keep the FF attack speed debuff up on everything. So one unholy DK in a raid could pestilence once per cycle to keep those effects up, but the rest should tunnel the boss.

@rh84
I find a bunch of the adds tend to stick close to LK, and Ebon Plaguebringer will hit LK at that point doing more damage cause BS does shit damage.

Haste and ArP seem to have taken a lead over crit. As a side note, Blood Sub w/ Reaping is simming higher.

Unholy w/ Frost Sub
EP AttackPower | 1 (0.69 DPS/per AP)
EP Strength | 3.19
EP Agility | 1.3
EP CritRating | 1.88
EP HasteEstimated | 1.74
EP HasteRating1 | 2.17
EP ArmorPenetrationRating | 2.17
EP ExpertiseRating | 2.14
Personal Expertise value | 0
BeforeMeleeHitCap<8% | 3.57
EP SpellHitRating | 0.38
EP WeaponDPS | 7.1
EP WeaponSpeed | 275.36
EP 2T9 | 164.18
EP 4T9 | 379.1
EP 2T10 | 211.94
EP 4T10 | 379.1

Unholy w/ Blood Sub & Reaping
EP AttackPower | 1 (0.69 DPS/per AP)
EP Strength | 2.96
EP Agility | 1.33
EP CritRating | 1.88
EP HasteEstimated | 1.8
EP HasteRating1 | 2.64
EP ArmorPenetrationRating | 2.29
EP ExpertiseRating | 1.19
Personal Expertise value | 0
BeforeMeleeHitCap<8% | 2.56
EP SpellHitRating | 0.32
EP WeaponDPS | 7.39
EP WeaponSpeed | 275.36
EP 2T9 | 116.92
EP 4T9 | 380
EP 2T10 | 321.54
EP 4T10 | 404.62

I'd assume either you're getting an absurd amount of RP from revitalize like Liha did in his parse, or your not utilizing all your GCD's. I haven't had a problem with RP capping or delaying blood runes. The rotation isn't even GCD demanding, sure if you're going to RP cap or your UF runes are about to come up spam death coil. DCing at 60 rp when blood runes are up is just bad play usually. I quite comfortable with the globals I have even in heavy movement fights.

I was stating this based off of the blood dk in my guild(Decaying) being armor pen cap for quite sometime now. It's not relatively hard with DBW though if you don't have that, there could be problems. A quick armory search shows either the DKs being close to armor pen cap or using heroic bryntroll for some of these parses.

Is it really worthwhile bothering with the frost subspec and giving up the threat reduction for about 1% of your single target dps ?

I mean it might work out on single target fights but for people who do not have the freedom to use both specs for damage (and therefore use the same spec for single target and AE fights) I wonder how to NOT pull threat on AE fights, especially with the increased threat comming from D&D.
I am mostly in non-heroic BiS and will finish my shadowmourne in some weeks but I really dont see any reason to change my good old 17/0/54 (with 2/3 morb & 3/3 reaping & 0/5 necrosis) spec - Threat reduction & D&D every second runeset is for me just superior to <100 singletarget dps and constantly minding threatmeters / dying in every AE situation.

Min-maxing is fine for sure, but the strengths of unholy the OP mentions (superior AE dmg, unique raid support, superior survivability) should be reflected in the recommended specs (atleast on a sidenote).

What is fairly certain is that Paragon didn't bring any Blood Dks and probably with good reason; once Frost is higher single target damage than Blood, then the utility side of HB amply overtakes HS on LK.