I played a blood deathknight in 3.2 3.1 and 3.0, and your spot on that the death-strikes as of now aren't as good as 6 Heart strikes. I believe that the 6 heart strikes if possible to pull off in the rotation allow you to do more dps, each time hitting for of a percentage of weapon damage. Additionally, Deathstrike isn't really useful as it only deals a maximum of 100% damage, and with the Abom might as a passive it doesn't really do much. If you are just heading into ICC, most of your trinkets are on a 2 minute cooldown(for DPS), which means at the start of a boss fight you do as many rotations until the passive 9% buff comesa up(3 crits). You are then going to want to pop DRW, assuming your sigil and Tier 9 buffs are up. If these all pop you punch histeria and DRW. next DRW, is 1.5 minutes later, but depending on the boss, you pop your CD trinets with DRW, this allows for more consistent DPS pulling as opposed to incredibly elevated every 3 minutes.Consistency is always better because it means you can better serve the raid if a DPS dies. The Alternative strategy of holding all your CDs for the Hysteria is good but because of the afore mentioned 2 minutes on most melee trinkets, your trinets are going to be sitting doing nothing. Thats just my 2 cents

Just wondering about your thoughts on Pestilence and Glyph of Disease over refreshing them manually with Plague Strike and Icy touch. Which will give you the better overall dps? Also wanted to hear your ideas on Armor Penetration compared to Strength... Which should be stacked for gems? Sofiia -- Kael'Thas

That's a pretty good analysis. I would also question wether or not your being consistent on your rotation. Check out my guidelines for using DRW, and make sure you're lining up as many modifiers for DRW as you can (i.e. RP, Hysteria, Trinkets, Speed Potion, Death Runes, etc).

Cappy: Note that as of 3.3.3, Abom's Might and Icy Talons will both be Passive, which throws rotation modifications for AM out the window.

Deadlycute, first off, your hit rating is through the damn roof. Cap is 9% for 2h. Your expertise is about 10 points off. Should be 25, 26 is soft cap I believe. I would ditch the Meta-gem in your helm, but that is just me. You have no shoulder enchant. No chest enchant. The bracers, are well - PvP oriented. I would recommend the Titanium Spikeguards, and an enchant. I am jealous of your boots, but totally wrong enchant. Talent Points. Get rid of the 3 points in blood worms. There are better uses for these points. You can find them on this site. Other then that. I would recommend that you use the rotation listed here on this site. Feel free to look at my character. Cappadocian - Icecrown.

So, I tried something interesting. On a boss fight, I normally will get to the second rotation, and spam HS until all runes are spent. Normally this can make 6 HSs in a row. After an out conversation Xeeon, I started keeping track of my HSs. Stopping at four on the second rotation, and starting over after that. Doing this allowed my DPS to hit damn near 6k. 5,723 to be exact. Which accounted for 47.3% of the total DPS. So definitely keeping Abominations Might up, is a huge help.

ok i need major help this is my alt toon but i love her and playing her is fun but i am sucking really bad at dps. i have mostley t9 gear and heroic icc dungeon drops i have tried frost dw dps and unholy, blood seems to give me the most dps but it is still only at high 2k, look me up on wow armory deadlycute-ghostland server any advice will help i am about to give up on one of my fav toons

Hey Cappy, put the blame where it belongs. The "They" you refer to is "Me". It's a personal preference. The reason why I like to do that is because of Abom's Might. Heart Strike has a 50% chance to proc AM, while Death Strike has a 100% chance to proc AM. At the tail end of the first rotation, you end up doing a Death Strike, and then a RP Dump, which I follow up with 2x HS and then another DS. I guess I'm just trying to make sure that AM is up again at the top of the rotation. Assuming you do a DS at the beginning of second round of your rotation. If there's enough lag and whatnot, AM could potentially not be up after HS x4 and another RP Dump. Is it clunkier, possibly, but I'll take it. I assume you mean 4x HS on the end there, not x6???

It is interesting that they are placing death strike after two heart strikes. It seems clunky. Death Strike on CD, while you use 2x Heart Strike, and then dump your rune magic. Followed up by another Death Strike, then clean house with 6x Heart Strike. Seems a bit smoother. This also allows for the diseases to time out from the mob, just in time for them to be replaced with fresh ones, from all your runes reverting from Death Runes. Thoughts?

I end up using my Hysteria a lot more consistantly than DRW. The later doesn't really perform well on trash imho; unless they're all just standing still. I try to make sure I'm using it as much as possible. If I'm being as consistent as possible with my rotations, I try to make sure that the third DRW is used with Hysteria. I always make sure that both are ready to go for boss fights. I try to throw down Hysteria+DRW as soon as possible durring the fight. I definitely wait about a rotation to make sure that my buffs are good. If I know the fight will be long enough for a second Hysteria, I try to coordinate that with my rotation. If not, I'll use DRW when all other conditions look good. It's good to throw down the DRW when conditions are right, but I wouldn't delay it so long that you end up pushing rotations off too far. I wish they were on the same cooldown, but Blizzard changed then when they cut down on cooldown length due to Arena burst damage.

I'm curious as to how you decide when to use DRW and Hysteria. Since DRW is on a 1.5 min CD and Hysteria is 3 min CD. I try to pop both at the same time but I also don't want to have them on CD when a boss fight starts. Ideally, I'll be using DRW 2x as much because of the shorter CD but is it better to wait for Hysteria or just keep it on CD constantly except when a boss fight is imminent.