Unoly DK Priority

[ryan11d7]

Good afternoon, I started playing my unholy DK, she is level 100 and is using BoS. Now I am a little stuck on if I should be prioritizing scourge or festering strike. Now I know if I have either 2 blood or 2 unholy runes I should always festering, but when I have death runes available, should I just use scourge for them, or festering? Which is more important/higher dps.

[nephzor]

Good afternoon, I started playing my unholy DK, she is level 100 and is using BoS. Now I am a little stuck on if I should be prioritizing scourge or festering strike. Now I know if I have either 2 blood or 2 unholy runes I should always festering, but when I have death runes available, should I just use scourge for them, or festering? Which is more important/higher dps.

festering costs 1 blood and 1 frost rune.

Unholy runes should be used on scourge strike or death and decay/defile or plague strike to reapply disease if outbreak is on CD.

Blood and Frost runes should be converted to death runes with festering strike.

Death runes should be used on scourge strike or blood boil if you're AoEing.

Now it gets a little more complicated than just using scourge strike when you have death runes available or festering strike to convert blood/frost to death runes, when playing either plague leech + BoS or unholy blight + necrotic plague(aka necroblight playstyle).

For the BoS playstyle you want to use scourge strike as much as possible but you might have to use festering strike on death runes to keep BoS up.

When playing necroblight you'll always need to do 1 or 2 death runes festering strike to keep necrotic plague up until unholy blight is back, you might also want to keep NP up longer than the CD on unholy blight because you know an AoE phase is coming soon(ie: xhul/mannoroth imps spawn) and wont be able to get necrotic plague back to 15 stacks before adds spawns.

[ryan11d7]

Does festering and scourge strike both generate the same amount of runic power? Like Festering generates exactly 2x scourge, and 2 gcd scourges generate the same RP as festering?

[nephzor]

Festering strike generates 20 rp and Scourge strike generates 10 so basicly yes it generates the same amount, its just that you only need 1 gcd to generate 20 rp with festering strike

[Deleted]

Even though fes generates twice as much rp, try to use as few if them as possible and more ss during bos to maximise dps. This can be trickier than it sounds at first

[Berri]

You should generally only use FeS to burn Frost and Blood runes. If you can avoid it, you should never consume a Death rune to cast it. Scourge Strike does far more damage / rune (also scales with mastery), and since it only costs 1 rune, it also triggers more Necrosis procs / rune than Festering Strike can. Both generate the same amount of RP / rune, although FeS generates more / GCD. Because of this, you /might/ sometimes use FeS during while BoS (and ring) is up. You should generally only do this if you're running low on RP and are afraid that you can't spam SS fast enough to keep the Breath going until the ring explodes.

[ryan11d7]

So basically, only use Festering if 2 blood or 2 unholy, or if BoS is about to drop off and 2 gcd scourges wont be enough to make it stay up.

[Niroe]

I try to scourage strike as much as possible while playing BoS except if i need to festering strike to keep BoS up or if i'm going to cap runes and need to spends them faster