How important is expertise for a DPS'er?

[Leetbeartank]

I can't stand NOT being spell hit capped and expertise soft capped. Missing Pestilence sucks a hard one. Having melee skills dodged really messes up my rotation... Especially since I'm usually refreshing my diseases with a second left on them, so I essentially have to skip a rune or two to keep my diseases up if this happens.

It's pretty important.

[Albert the fish]

it depends on spec, however it's not particular difficult to cap out without gemming so. imo. go ahead and get some

[Pieterman]

Hit , Strength , Crit are more important

lol

[Mordockk]

Expertise is unimportant for unholy.... if your "personal perference" is to be expertise capped as unholy, than you prefer to be bad.
Expertise is most important for blood spec. No real free GCD's with glyph of disease spec so a parry/dodge could result in a large loss of dps as ur diseases needing to be reapplied. shoot for 26. anything more is useless(if u always attack from behind)
Expertise for frost. I haven't played the new frost(3.3) so I won't comment on its importance as to not give false information. I would assume its improtant to reach 26.

[azuremyst]

lol, this exact thing happened to me yesterday.

saw a dk with shadowmourne, like 3/5 heroic gear, and t10 legs. he was 5/5 for tier armor. legit retard...

told him to ditch the t10 legs and get painful death, as expertise cap while unholy is not necessary and he would still benefit from the 4 set bonus, considering he was using all other pieces of the set.

"im getting all my expertise from these legs here"

"too bad if you go painful death and gemmed like 2 expertise gems you would be fine"

he proceeded to tell me expertise is most valuble stat for unholy next to hit and that i was bad... "so bad"

i lol'd hard, told him to l2read, and then come back and see me.

why do the people with the best gear fail at itemization? its like...3/5 heroic gear and you are using t10 legs?

epic fail.

[DarkenedPaladin]

As many have mentioned, expertise is less valued than strength for unholy.

However, no one mentioned how your latency takes effect on expertises value.
Depending on your latency, the value of expertise increases almost exponentially for all DKs, maybe all classes.

At around 10-130 ms, expertise is valued as shown in the previous linked graph
Around 131-200 ish, expertise is still under strength, but higher than most of the other stats.
At 201 and up, expertise passes strength and grow higher and higher depending on ping.

So, if you have a decent connection, but not great, gemming expertise IS a dps increase.
If you have an excellent connection, gemming expertise IS NOT an increase.

[Deleted]

From scale 1 to 2. It is 2

[Gulo]

By level of expertise importance: Blood, frost dw, then unholy
Gem it? I wouldn't say so.. As for Blood, I'd care to gem it if I'm under dps cap.