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The two most important stats for Blood DKs are Strength and Armor Penetration. The general rule of thumb while gearing up is ALWAYS gem for STR, except to meet Meta gem requirements.

The following are the currently accepted stat weights for Blood DKs, thanks to Methods for his outstanding work with DK stat equivalencies!

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Stat - APE
Attack Power 1
Weapon DPS 9.89
Strength 2.89
Armor Penetration 2.75
Hit Rating (to cap) 2.51
Expertise Rating 2.47
Crit Rating 1.56
Haste Rating 1.5
Agility 1.37
Hit Rating (to spell hit cap) .52
Armor .03

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Hit and Expertise:
Theoretically both STR and ArP are more important stats then both Hit or Expertise, which means that even if you are not Hit Capped, or Expertise capped, you will always see the biggest DPS increase by gemming STR/ArP.

The melee hit cap is 8% or ~262 Hit rating, this should be fairly easy to obtain with the gear currently available from Ulduar. The challenge I have found is typically not overshooting the Hit Cap by too much, at one point sitting at a frustrating 383 Hit Rating!

The soft expertise cap is a little more tricky as there are so many variable that go into it. It is a little more straightforward now that the 5 expertise on Blood Gorged was converted to 10% ArP. You want to be aiming for 25 Expertise (note "25 Expertise" not "25 Expertise Rating").

The relative weights of these stats were calculated factoring in misses, etc. so let's please not turn this thread into another argument about sims.

The use of both sims and some great spreadsheet are being applied in the BiS thread, covering all specs of DKs. While new content continues to be bested, and new drops continue to be added I will for now refer you to that thread, as they are doing a great job keeping up with the changes. Once we reach a better statis I will update this post with what is determined to be the best set of gear.

Gear Lists will also be uploaded once the approximate weightings have been sorted out. For now, it is probably best to refer to the Optimal gearing: the BiS thread.

One of the current discussions is regarding an inflection point between STR and ArP. It has been currently theorized that once you exceed 6200 AP the APE for ArP will exceed that of STR. Making it proper at that point to start gemming for ArP. The math and sims behind this theory seem solid, and personally once I hit around 6300 AP raid buffed began switching some gems, with positive results thus far.

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