Blood Link vs Chaos Bane for Arms

Classes Warrior
#1

Wonder if any of you might be able to help me with something regarding the domination shards.

When 9.1 came out, I initially leveled up the 3 Blood Shards, and got good results from that. According to the logs, Blood Link consistently added 10-12% to my dps in raids.

But then I heard from an Arms Warrior mentor as well as wowhead/the internet, that I should have leveled up Unholy. Well ok. So I spent time and effort doing that, and finally got to try it out this week in our raids. The results were underwhelming. Switching back and forth between the two sets last night, Chaos Bane added less than 1% to my dps according to the logs, whereas Blood Link added 10-12%. I realize that Unholy is also supposedly buffing my primary stat (strength), but when I look at the logs for my main warrior abilities (Mortal Strike, Overpower, etc), they are actually doing less dps with Unholy than with the Blood Set. Overall my dps is less with Unholy.

I feel like I must be doing something wrong; that I’m playing the class wrong or something, not to be seeing the benefits of the Unholy Shard set. Does anyone have any thoughts perchance?

#2

I’d guess you were reading into Unholy incorrectly, unless that set is much underleveled compared to your Blood set.

The steroid you get from Unholy is huge, and its value is further increased by Battle Shout somewhat. Chaos Bane itself doesn’t deal a lot of damage, and tends to proc inconveniently anyway. It’s the long and large strength steroid modifying all of your damage, as well as your Ignore Pain, that is so valuable. Blood is certainly a good alternative post-buff, and a better defensive option, but Unholy is the maximum DPS option. Why your damage would be lower on average in a pull could just be RNG–something Arms suffers immensely from.