Blood! Give me more of your blood!! Blood DK Talk

Blood chat goes here

I'm noticing the same issue with Blood that I noticed with Arms. It's going to take a LOT of crit to really make this build shine. Consider what the other two specs are putting us up against....

Runic Focus (Passive, Frost) - Unlike other casters, DKs do double damage on a crit. Couple this with Howling Blast's double damage to frozen targets, and Frost is putting out 4x damage crits on multiple mobs at once. Combine this with the amount of AoE Unholy offers and aongside the Desecrated Ground effect, and they've got a lot of damage flinging around. But our little spec, we gets none of that. We get our class-based AoEs, 45% extra crit damage on Blood Boil, and single-target dps abilities (i.e., instant weapon strikes).

To make up the difference, we have to be able to tear one guy apart in half the time another spec could. Easiest way to pull this off is to push for as much extra crit as possible. Let's take Plague Strike. It's a very weak attack (30% weapon damage). However, we need to set it up for the max output on Heart Strike and Obliterate (which I don't have yet but want). If we can crit on it, though, it's not such a weak ability, and feels like a better usage of a rune. Plus, if you talent for it in the first tier of Unholy, it'll do 30% more damage when it crits. Likewise, all of our bread-and-butter strikes are set up to do another 45% damage on crits (Death Strike benefits from both talents, getting a good 75% extra crit damage buff). To really, really capitalize on this, we're talking 35%+ crit strike eventually. Same expectation laid down for Arms warriors. (I'm going off Arms rather than Ret, because DKs aren't backing their strikes with unmittigatable spell damage on-swing).

In the one instance I ran with Zulrokkh, I found that I could rip an archer apart in the time it took my team to kill the main target (often because our tank didn't bother grabbing the ranged aggro and our healer kept getting mauled). However, in my experiences as a healer, the blood DKs have often been the lower tiers of the dps charts because they either didn't know what they were doing, or the amount of AoE being flung around overwhelmed their single-target style. With good crit and a good rotation, though, our output will be more noticeable.

I'll be respeccing and allocating my blood talents to further enhance this principal.

Gear modifications would be great but choosing between Crit and AP will be rough. Strength wins all but...you can't have it all.

Strength is definitely the trump card, affects our AP and our parry (the unspoken instant-attack). But AP is a good alternative if you can't find it, and yeah, crit your heart out

Ok now that I've got an 80 DK specced blood dps I needzzz the advicesss. (Lolcat meets Gollum talk?) He's dual specced frost tanking too but one thing at a time.

My spec is the EJ main blood dps spec and is 51/0/20.

My gear is great considering I've been 80 since friday night. Hit capped, and close to 4k AP with horn of winter. crit is low at around 22% wow-heroes.com has naxx yellow for me and creeping up on being green.

My dps numbers however have been varying quite a bit. And this is where I need help

I know they say you can't really judge dps outside a raid but the numbers are not even consistent in a single instance. Largely this is due to my inexperience and trying out new things. This has raised a few questions for me. First let me provide some examples.

Last instance I ran was h-Gundrak. Overall dps was about 2300. First boss was like 2500. Second boss was 3600. Other bosses were hovering around 2600. Except for the last boss which required a lot of movement and was slightly under 2k.

I'm using a couple different rotations and not sure what works.

For bosses it's pretty simple. PS, IT, HS, HS, DS, Hysteria, DRW, HS as much as you can now but use pestilence to refresh diseases before they wear off. That's the basic idea and is cookie cutter EJ rotation.

Trash is trickier. Especially since it dies so fast. If I use the boss rotation it feels solid but only one target is getting the diseases. Is this ok? Seems like I'm missing out if a mob isn't diseased.

So to spice things up a bit I"ve been doing something like PS, IT, Pestilence, HS, DS, keep up diseases with pestilence and spam HS when the death runes pop up.

Sometimes I'll blood boil but not that often. I've spammed it on packs of non elites after getting diseases on them because it seems like HS is just a waste.

Obliterate I hardly ever use. Doesn't seem worth it for a blood DK.

Oh and of course I dump runic power with Death Coil all the time unless I'm about to pop DRW.

So I guess the main questions are:
How important is it to maintain diseases on all mobs via pestilence for a blood DK?

Blood boil and obliterate, how does one incorporate this into a rotation or is it just not worth it for blood?

Is blood just always going to be low on trash and over all data?

Any and all tips are appreciated!

Hm, what I recall, the spec for utilizing Obliterate involved sinking 18 points into frost. Without the talents to keep diseases on after a hit, I'm not sure how effective it is. On trash, I think you're a always going to be a bit behind. At least, that's what I'm gathering from the people I know who are running Blood DKs. Excellent single-target, not so great on the groups.

Something else I was wondering about on the build. How much does DRW do overall? Would Unholy Blight's extra disease increase the damage my other abilities do enough to bypass it?

Ji'Kii wrote:

Something else I was wondering about on the build. How much does DRW do overall? Would Unholy Blight's extra disease increase the damage my other abilities do enough to bypass it?

EJ people say that especially after the nerf, Unholy Blight is pretty bad for blood. Better to put the points into blood caked blade.

But ya know, even if UB was better I'm not giving up my little pet weapon friend. There does have to come a point where style and fun matters a bit. Having a weapon fight along side you is awesome and reminds me of Elric so I love it.

Let's talk sigils. Am I dumb or something or do they all seem to suck for blood? I've been looking for upgrades and none of them look as good as the one you get from the DK starter quests.

I have no idea about sigils - wondering about that myself. What about the one that boosts AP by 200 or something? Nvm, thats for Frost.

Maybe the best for blood is: Sigil of Haunted Dreams, but then.. did I see somewhere that this was cancelled? Would it be better to get the deathcoil boost anyway?