51/0/20

Admin Numero di messaggi : 25 Data d'iscrizione : 29.11.08

Number 1 Blood Spec in 3.0.8 and 3.0.9: Blood Disease-less Spec
Posted by: Skeleton Jack in Rotations, Specs

Heya guys!! So it’s finally that time for the best Blood spec available. At the moment there are 2 specs proven to sustain over 7000 dps on Patchwerk. And this is one of them!! You guys ready to rock out with your… You know.

This is the infamous disease-less spec for Death Knights that even has Blizzard’s knickers in a twist. There is no Icy Touch. There is no Plague Strike. Those lil bad boys are out!! Frost Fever and Blood Plague do not exist to you in this world. Be prepared!!

There is a lot of debate as to whether this spec will survive the 3.1 patch release, but atm I think it very likely will. We’ll see how that develops, and get back to ya!! Wink

51/0/20
Now you have some options with this spec. It is not 100% set in stone. But I do highly recommend the talent point allocation that I list in the 51/0/20 spec. If however you wish to see what options are available…

Rune Tap and Imp Rune Tap instead of Death Rune Mastery: DRM is not needed for a boss really. The main purpose is to generate Death Runes so that you can HS more often in AoE situations. And when you consider that a RT could save your life on a boss encounter, it is a solid choice. However I personally love to pwn face in AoE packs. If your healers are spot on, you can really skip RT for added dps on Adds and Trash mobs.
Anticipation instead of Viscious Strikes: You will basically never get any advantage out of VS excepting if you lay some diseases’s down for healing with Death Strike. But you will also never get any advantage from Anticipation either (if you are doing your job right and keeping under on threat) since you should never be dodging anything. You can spend these however you like. It just doesn’t matter.
Bloodworms instead of Blood Aura: Bloodworms capped out 3/3 is equal to 1% of your overall DPS on average. 1% of 5000 DPS is 50 DPS. Inorite?!!? Or, you could help out with keeping the raid topped out on health with Blood Aura. Especially with toons like Shadow Priests, Blood Death Knights, or Warlocks who will damage themselves to do more damage.
Virulence instead of Corpse Explosion: Technically you should get Virulence if you’re not spell hit capped in a raid. But it’s CORPSE EXPLOSION!!!! HELLO!??! I don’t know about you guys, but blowing up !@#$ is just PURE WIN!!! It’s only 1 point. And totally worth it for fun factor, I’m sorry. Especially when your friends die… BOOM!!! Muahahahahaha!!!

Rotation
OB -> HS -> DC -> OB -> HS -> DC

Yup, that simple. Now sometimes, depending on latency and the Rune CD thingymabob (where if you activate a Rune just after it came off of CD and it’ll start it’s CD at 8 or 9 seconds if used within 1-2 seconds of coming back) you can work in a 3rd DC at the end as well. YMMV.

You will end up hitting 100 RP at various points and be unable to dump all of it. That’s just a part of the spec. Get used to it. Always break up the HS/DC’s to take advantage of Sudden Doom procs. Making sure the HS’s are broken up so that no procs are over written by a new one is invaluable for your DPS. The very first rotation will not be able to fire off the first DC if you did not get a SD proc, but that’s fine. Just skip it. It’ll be there for the next one. Losing one DC to ensure that every single SD proc is used instead of wasted will net a DPS gain for you.

AoE
This is where that Death Rune Mastery comes into play. Always lead off with a Death and Decay like normal. Now the “sweet spot” for DnD is where things get tricky. Generally speaking, if there are 5+ mobs you always want to DnD over anything else possible. But if you have 3-4 mobs, your gear becomes the determining factor. My personal suggestion is to use Recount and see how you do on trash mobs. Compare your HS’s against your DnD, and remember to multiply the DnD damage by the number of ticks (1 per second for 10 seconds) and to also account for crit % rate. Not crit damage only, but the % chance as well.

Generally speaking you will want to be spamming HS as much as possible. 1 HS on 2 mobs = WIN. Remeber that. Now as far as what to do when you start getting to 6+ mobs? That is when I do suggest pulling out the diseases. Icy Touch and Plague Strike a mob up, then fire off a Pestilence. Once you get to 2 groups at a time, or some of the big spider packs, nothing will beat out a group of Pest’d diseases. But that is not the common rule of thumb.

A standard AoE run is generally:

DnD -> HS -> OB -> DC

HS -> OB -> HSx3 -> DC

Work in Corpse Explosion any time there are 2+ mobs if you have no runes available. If there are 3+ mobs, use CE every CD there is a corpse available.

Necessities
These are the basics you’re going for here:

Sigil of Awareness
Sigil of the Dark Rider (if you don’t have a SoA)
Blood Presence
2H Weapon
8% Hit (melee hit cap)
26 Expertise (cap)

Personal Notes
Now, as much fun as this spec can be…I just don’t think it’s me. I did ok with it, and I can live with that. Considering I only spent about a week running it (aka not a lot of practice or experience), I am content in a lot of the numbers I was able to sustain. I stayed in the 5k+ bracket at Patchwerk even though I totally borked up the fight, and managed to pull 4k+ on Sartharion 3 Drake and some other very very solid numbers.

But in the end…I just don’t fancy this spec that much. While I hate dealing with diseases in PvP (Cleanse anyone? /sigh), in PvE I pretty much hate living without them. It makes me sad in the pants. Sad

I am going to be trying out DW spec next, just need to go back and do some reading on it. Maybe I’ll like that one more? Dunno. But I still find myself wanting to go back to old school Unholy. It may not destroy like DW or Disease-less, but I likes it!!

That being said however, the big time winners for this spec are as follows:

Heart Strike - Who doesn’t love free auto cleaves?!?!
Corpse Explosion - BOOM!!! Nuff said.
10k+ Obliterates - Ohhhhhhh!! /drool
Hysteria - 13k+ Obliterates… Ohhhhhh!!! /swoon
7k+ potential DPS - WoW!!!

Current Bugs or Problems
Dancing Rune Weapon is borked on Thaddius. Do NOT use it if you are trying for the Shocking! or Heroic: Shocking! Achievement. It will pick up a charge and then blast the ever living hell out of everyone. I am sure this will be fixed in the future. But as of 3.0.9 this is a problem.

Blizzard posted earlier the following:

“We’re okay with ignoring diseases on very easy targets but you should never feel like you can build a valid spec or rotation around ignoring Icy Touch or Plague Strike. Some of the 3.1 changes should support this a bit more.” (Source)

Now they also made bellowing noises about how they were going to nerf DW to the ground. And look now. DW is a 7k+ DPS spec. So I am not really 100% convinced that this spec will be changed significantly in any way come 3.1 release. However as it looks like the majority of the DW nerfs will actually unleash in 3.1, it is possible this spec will become moot in a few months. We will see.

Finale!!
So yeah, that’s it!! Enjoy!!