"This week has just been killing me, and I promise some in-depth writing/math this weekend, but to answer some of the questions I’m seeing asked a lot, I figured I would throw up this quick post. I hate making statements without support, but I do promise I’m fully confident of all the following, and simply don’t have the time to get into the “why’s” now, although, as said, Saturday and/or Sunday, it will definitely be done:
-DW Unholy is undoubtedly dead. No question, and hopefully no explanation needed.
-DnD is still a fundamental part of our Unholy single target rotation; in fact, it’s a larger dps gain than ever. Mastery and Rage of Rivendare see to it. Speaking of…
-Unholy mastery is still bad. As bad as it was? No, of course not, but worse than crit/expertise, which is all that matters – it means we’ll avoid it as much as ever. The core issue is the ghoul; if, theoretically, it affected him, or if, theoretically, our ghoul didn’t exist, the stat would be perfectly desirable. As is, it isn’t… not to mention the DC/RoR nerfs coinciding at the same time don’t really help.
-Our Frost AoE dps got nerfed, precisely how it needed to be done – with no affect on single target performance. A+.
-Our 2H Frost single-target dps got a huge buff; enough to make it worth looking into, although I think it should still fall a percent or two behind the other specs… a minor gap, in the scheme of things, but enough for min-maxers to ignore it all the same.
-Our Unholy AoE dps is more or less unchanged. The new mastery plus Virulence basically balance out the loss of the old mastery and the reduction in ghoul dps.
-Our Unholy single-target DPS got hit, and rather hard at that. DC nerfed by 10%, SI/DT nerfed by 20%, RoR nerfed by 20%, Unholy Might nerfed by 50%, disease damage nerfed by ~10%, the Magic Suppression nerf, and so on… yeah. The new mastery and the Runic Corruption buff don’t even begin to outweigh all of that. There’s much to be said about this, but I would argue Blizzard slightly overdid it, and will support that position with some maths, as promised, later. Did we need a slight nerf? Yeah, definitely. UM, SI, and DT would have probably been sufficient on their own. The DC and RoR changes on top of it was just unnecessary, and pushes the pendulum of balance to the other end of the spectrum.
-Magic Suppression 3/3 is essentially a must now… which really, really sucks, since with the RC change, we would actually like a point in RPM. Perhaps it will be worth drawing from IBT, but I’m not certain yet. Whatever else, say hello to 0 choice in our spec once again, beyond that one point floating in t1/2! Would have loved to see the PvE applications of Death’s Advance as well. Alas.
Anyways, off to crash, but just some minor things I wished to address."