Scourge Strike vs. Death Siphon: my Facts

[Neave]

That is some interesting news, and I will certainly keep that in mind, given that there are quite a few bosses that I could see a ranged rune spender for unholy to be quite a benefit. Thank you for testing this and sharing the information.

welcome

[Powell]

I don't think the OP was making the point that this should be a regularly used rotation, rather that, should unholy deekays find themselves sitting on runes while out of melee range, they can still maintain some good DPS for a short while if they spec into death siphon. ^^

I can see plenty of situations where this has the potential to be useful, particularly for min/maxers who want to squeeze everything out of their spec in every phase of a fight. It's neat to know that the damage overall isn't much lower than scourge strike.

Thats a no-brainer. But how is it relevant to compare it to Scourge Strike then?
In any situation where you're capable of melee hitting, you use SS. If you're out of range with death runes to spare, you use Death Siphon.

There is no reason to compare damage between them when they're used in different situations and don't impact with one another during those situations.
From that particular tier of talents, Death Siphon is clearly the best choice for damage. As it increases your damage uptime if you're not capable to reach melee range, wich happens quite often in MoP.

[Schizoide]

Technically, yes. In practice, you need to setup death runes before you can use death siphon. Frost doesn't, but frost has howling blast anyway. My feeling is that death siphon probably won't make a significant difference even on ranged-friendly fights, but I guess we'll see.

To clarify-- obviously people min/maxing will switch to death siphon for ranged-friendly fights. I just don't think it'll be a big deal if you don't bother.