I might not say anything new, although I do read class forums and EJ from time to time. I have never seen anyone else with this spec. Even if this isn't new, this could at least serve as a guide.

So, I present you what I like calling the Icy Touch spec.

To get you interested, I'll say I've went up to 4500 DPS on Patchwerk with very much sub-par gear. I'm running with 3 blues and 1 green item. I have 2900 AP and 25.5% crit chance.

I will show you a WWS parse from the raid I initially tested it in: http://wowwebstats.com/mwowzsutzd3f3?a=x183376d&s=183081-220829

Now I don't know what the f is up with WWS not including my ghoul in my sources of damage, even though it has perfectly parsed it's actions and identified as my minion: http://wowwebstats.com/mwowzsutzd3f3?a=xf140414ffc00005c&s=183081-220829#break

Those 106k damage make quite a difference. I was at 4500 on recount in the raid itself (recount did count my ghoul in), I don't have screenshots or any proof of it but I see no reason why you wouldn't believe me. I must say also that the raid setup was far from ideal, and I'm sure I could get a bit higher results with a moonkin, a ele shaman around; I also noticed that I have 0 gains of Ferocious Inspiration although we were running with 2 BM hunters, weird. I have not used a flask in this fight either, the only consumeable I had up was from the Great Feast.

I hope you like stories, because I like storytelling. A little background of how this spec was created will help you understand how and why it works.

After dinging 80 I went to elitistjerks.com forums and read the DPS Compendium thread. It was suggested that Blood will produce the highest single target DPS, and the talent layout generally suggested me that as well. I was under the impression that blood = single target DPS, unholy = AoE, frost = burst.

A couple of weeks later I noticed how, for some reason, Unholy DKs are dominating the DPS charts, that all DKs in top guilds are specced Unholy, and so on. At this point I've specced Unholy myself to try it out, and indeed it produced better results. But that made me wonder - why? A lot of people say that it's because Scourge Strike is magic damage, it ignores armor, or because Unholy simply has stronger talents, and so on. The whole "magic melee strike" thing made me think of this.

Try to remember all the major caster and melee raid buffs. Have you ever noticed that all the caster buffs are debuffs applied to the target - 13% increase debuff, scorch debuff, and so on; on the contrary, all the melee buffs are buffs applied to players - BoK, Shout/BoM, 10% AP. I've always thought that Scourge Strike, being magical damage, would take advantage of all of them together. But, being a melee strike, it doesn't (or maybe it does, I don't actually know). That's when I suddenly remembered about Icy Touch.

Icy Touch is a proper spell. Yet, it also scales with AP. You see where I'm going? Icy Touch takes benefit from all that AP and/or other stats you have on you, and when it hits the boss, it also takes advantage of all that 13% increase, scorch crit increase, and everything. There aren't many - if any - other abilities in the game that work like that. So I had the crazy idea of trying to boost up IT damage to the max, "for the lulz". I started clicking talents, and at that point I noticed the Killing Machine talent.

I ended up taking all the damage increasing talents from Unholy because they were more "+to everything" unlike Blood which was all about physical, as well as there were some nice pure spell talents (Impurity). I then take frost down to Killing Machine. I also DW (and pick up Nerves of Cold Steel of course), and use Fast/Fast weapons. The reasons for Fast/Fast are that you will only use Blood Strikes for your Blood Runes which get converted into Death Runes once every two cooldowns, and Plague Strikes just for the disease, so the main-hand speed is really not important at all. However with two Fast weapons you will be getting a lot more crits during a period of time (it doesn't matter if they will hit for more or less, the only point is to proc KM - more crits, more KM, equals better). I used Fallen Crusader and Razorice enchants.

The spec I used is this: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=jZG0e0bxZfMohxckxcaMcshx

The playstyle/rotation isn't very hard and I adapted to it pretty fast. I'm actually quite enjoying it too, because you will be using a priority system with this build, rather than set rotation. The procs just add a bit of fun here and there too, I'll explain a bit lower. Priorities are pretty obvious:

1. Icy Touch
2. Blood Strikes - to get those Death Runes faster for more IT
3. RP dump
4. Plague Strike (this becomes 3rd if you have a Gargoyle up)

But there are a few things you should always keep an eye out for. First is is Blood Plague. You should keep your diseases up constantly, even though Icy Touch doesn't increase per-disease-on-target like most of the "normal" DK strikes, it's still worth keeping for the DoT. Another thing is, remember that a major part of this spec is Killing Machine. I often adapt my cast sequence to try and get more crit IT's. An example: if I have 2 Blood Runes and 2 Frost Runes and a KM proc, I will cast only one IT first, then start using up the Blood Runes hoping that KM will proc more during that, and only after this I will use my 2nd Frost Rune. There are a lot of situations where you can "help" KM to proc.

So, this is it. Now I want to say why I'm actually posting this. Of course, I enjoy this kind of "research" and publishing good results (read: bragging) is always fun, but there's also another reason. As you see, this isn't really "theorycraft", this is just a result of some logical thinking, assumptions and a test. I don't think I'm very good with math, but I'm sure there are people here who are good with it and enjoy WoW calc.

There are a lot of things to be calculated for this spec. Mainly EP values. I am honestly clueless how to gear up for this. I realize things like hit after spellhit cap and expertise aren't going to be very useful, but I have no idea about crit for example. I think the value of crit will be quite diminished when your main strike is often guaranteed to crit thanks to a buff, but that buff also procs from a crit itself. I believe haste would be a bit better for this spec than any other DK spec as well, more hits, more dice rolls for crits, hence KM...

Things like these, they need to be calculated. Anyone? :p

Also, I wonder if Cinderglacier could be good for a runeforge enchant. Of course, Razorice is nice to buff your mages, but being selfish is also needed sometimes.

P.S.
I initially wanted to post this on EJ, but I've never posted there and they have a requirement of 10 posts before I can create threads. Doh...

link me a spec of it please

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Q u o t e:
link me a spec of it please

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Being illiterate playing this game must be hard..

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Q u o t e:
link me a spec of it please

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He did.

Also, to OP, how is it for soloing, tanking etc?

Also: Annihilation? Why not Icy talons?

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Q u o t e:


He did.

Also, to OP, how is it for soloing, tanking etc?

Also: Annihilation? Why not Icy talons?

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Because there will most likely be a 20% haste buff available in the raid from another class.

Annihilation adds 2% crit chance on specials (blood strike and PS). It's very little, but it's better than nothing you'd get from Talons.

And about soloing and tanking, I wouldn't suggest this. Not for tanking 100%, and soloing I don't really know as I haven't done any while I was specced like that. I can imagine it being not very good though, as one of the reasons this produces high DPS is the scaling with both caster and melee raid buffs.

Looks interesting.
Have you compared its dps with 32/39 spec ?
Hmm, I guess you're at full RP nearly all the time, when there's CD on gargoyle ?

Nope I haven't got a chance to compare it with generic 32/39. DW came in as a tool to maximize IT's potential, I didn't have DW in mind before. And I've never tested the 32/39 because I only had semi-decent one-handers from the last lockout.

And yeah I did find myself with 100/100 RP quite a few times.

Also, some more knowledgeable on the subject people have linked me something very interesting. It appears I wasn't the first one to attempt this spec...

http://wowwebstats.com/zoeua5kwvmrrg?s=155151-189104&a=x1a8409e

6128 DPS. Amazing.

Just goes to show how "badly" designed the trees are when a mostly unholy spec is spamming a frost ability to do most of its damage and not even using 2 rune abilities. You may say whatever you want but these results just proves it, there's too much synergy between unholy and frost for very weird specs and rotations that end up doing more dps than any class/spec out there (and with "crap" gear).

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Just goes to show how "badly" designed the trees are when a mostly unholy spec is spamming a frost ability to do most of its damage and not even using 2 rune abilities. You may say whatever you want but these results just proves it, there's too much synergy between unholy and frost for very weird specs and rotations that end up doing more dps than any class/spec out there (and with "crap" gear).

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Part of the problem is, they designed frost at first to be the tanking tree, that meant it had some very deficient talents in regards to DPS. So when they buffed it to be good all-around they forgot to buff its DPS output and ended up making band-aid changes to it: significantly buffing the most used abilities and talents with very round numbers (kinda like the 5% buff warlocks got, but more significant in this case).

What they got in the end was a spec that did more damage on Icy Touch than on any of its other spells (iirc, they had a talent that made Icy Touch do 90% more damage). So they nerfed Icy Touch. Apparently, they didn't nerf it enough and one spec still relies on it, as we can see.

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Q u o t e:
Part of the problem is, they designed frost at first to be the tanking tree, that meant it had some very deficient talents in regards to DPS. So when they buffed it to be good all-around they forgot to buff its DPS output and ended up making band-aid changes to it: significantly buffing the most used abilities and talents with very round numbers (kinda like the 5% buff warlocks got, but more significant in this case).

What they got in the end was a spec that did more damage on Icy Touch than on any of its other spells (iirc, they had a talent that made Icy Touch do 90% more damage). So they nerfed Icy Touch. Apparently, they didn't nerf it enough and one spec still relies on it, as we can see.

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They don't need to nerf IT anymore as that would just result in a un-needed dps loss to deep frost builds.

What they need to do is make deep unholy talents only increase the damage done by abilities that only unholy DK's are using. Desecration, bone shield, rage of rivendare, maybe even impurity, although that is not so deep in unholy but it's in the path of going to a permanent pet which is too high in the unholy tree and as such is too powerfull of a talent to be left out on many hybrid builds. Because someone somewhere thought that pets are cool and should do "high" damage.

Why no Unholy Blight? It ticks every second, and it lasts for quite a while, making every tick transfer into raw dps, so if it ticks for 160, you gain 160 dps which is quite a lot (i was getting 160/s ticks with tanking gear, dps specced DKs should get even higher ticks, and it improves with gear).
It uses RP and the only skill you have to dump RP with that spec is the gargoyle, which is on a long cd, so not taking Unholy Blight doesn't seem logical to me.

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Q u o t e:
Why no Unholy Blight? It ticks every second, and it lasts for quite a while, making every tick transfer into raw dps, so if it ticks for 160, you gain 160 dps which is quite a lot (i was getting 160/s ticks with tanking gear, dps specced DKs should get even higher ticks, and it improves with gear).
It uses RP and the only skill you have to dump RP with that spec is the gargoyle, which is on a long cd, so not taking Unholy Blight doesn't seem logical to me.

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I was posting the spec which I used in the raid the WWS parse is from.

I wanted to see it's maximum potential single target DPS. It was a test. Of course I suggest picking up UB if you want to raid in this spec, UB is invaluable on all trash pulls.

And Death Coil is available regardless of spec. That's the RP dump.

To the OP: what presence did you use when playing with that specc?

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To the OP: what presence did you use when playing with that specc?

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Blood.

Ok, but isnt unholy presence better so you can get more KM proccs + more shadowdmg from auto attacks.

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Q u o t e:
Ok, but isnt unholy presence better so you can get more KM proccs + more shadowdmg from auto attacks.

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BP and UP will do exactly the same amount of damage from Necrosis. With UP you deal that damage 15% faster but with BP you deal 15% more of it.

Yeah but dont forget the KM proccs, if you do attack faster, more KM proccs you get. :)

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Q u o t e:
Yeah but dont forget the KM proccs, if you do attack faster, more KM proccs you get. :)

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And what if you use all those procs already even with BP? With a faster attack speed you'd have more procs but no F/D runes to make use of it to cast IT.

KM only consummes when IT, HB, or FS is casted, and with this spec, u only have IT.

Using up all your runes isn't a problem with this spec at all.

You'd get more KM procs indeed, but you your Icy Touch will do less damage per cast, and crit, too.