Warning for Zorben: 2. All opinions should be stated as succinctly as possible.

♦ Carebare · 09/28/11, 8:10 PM

Post: Frost DPS | 4.2 Against All Odds
User: Zorben
Infraction: 2. All opinions should be stated as succinctly as possible.
Points: 0

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

Try to be a tad more succinct. Your point is valid, but you got a bit flowery here which can make it difficult to stay awake the whole way through. Thanks a bunch.

Original Post:

DK 2P bonus Rime has a 60% chance to grant 2 charges when triggered.

Lets make the following assumptions. It is a single target fight like Heroic Baelroc. You only use Howling Blast when rime has procced. Assume you aren’t overwriting any unused rime charges with procs from new obliterates. Assume you have the free GCDs to make use of the additional rime procs. Assume you never cap runic power. Then the additional damage is 60% of the damage done by Howling Blast plus the damage from additional frost strikes available from the extra runic power. Each rime proc generates 10 runic power and frost strikes costs 32 runic power. So the additional damage would be (# rime procs x 0.6) x(10/32)x (1/ # frost strikes) x (% Frost strike damage)

In a recent H Baelroc fight, howling blast was 10.1% of my damage, I had 32 freezing fog (rime) procs, I did 83 frost strikes, and frost strikes (including off hands) were 34.3% of my damage. So the additional rime procs could theoretically increase my damage 6% from additional howling blasts and (32 x.6) x (1/3.2) x (34.3/83) = 2.48% from additional frost strikes. So a total of roughly 8.5%. This relies on the assumption that you don’t waste any resources at all and is based on my particular H Baelroc fight. My dps on that fight was 31.5k so we are talking an increase of around 2.6k dps. Other top parses I checked had similar numbers.

So where do assumptions break down? It could be a multi add fight like Beth’tilac. If you are doing an AoE rotation, then you are obliterating less, resulting a fewer rime procs, but your howling blasts are hitting more targets making the rime procs you get more valuable. You could be resource capping. Either with no free GCDs to use rime procs, obliterates overriding rime procs, or runic power capping wasting potential frost strikes. All of these things will reduce the value of the bonus. By how much is entirely dependent on the resources you end up wasting. The increase in ilvl from T13 gear could change the relative damage and frequency of various attacks. Additional frost strikes would have 2nd order interactions on increasing mastery with the 4pc bonus, more mastery increases the value of howling blast and frost strike.

For the DK 4pc bonus Runic Empowerment has a 25% chance to grant 710 mastery rating for 12 secs.

I assume that this effect doesn’t stack. So there are 2 components to evaluating this bonus, what is the benefit of 710 mastery and what is the uptime on the buff. Current sims put the Ep of mastery around 1.4-1.5, so 710 mastery would be around 1000dps when its up. Not world breaking. Lets check that against current parses. 179.28 mastery rating grants 1 mastery so 710 mastery rating is about 4 mastery. Each point of Mastery increases frost damage by 2%, so we are talking an 8% increase in all frost damage. Frost damage makes up about 50% of a DW frost Dks damage. So we are talking roughly a 4% increase in damage. At around 32k dps, that is 1.25k dps, so very much in the ballpark of the sim values.

So the benefit of the 4pc really depends on its uptime, if it is up 50% of the time it’s a 2% damage increase, certainly not on the scale of the 2pcs, but respectable. Since the buff procs off frost strikes, the number of frost strikes is really the determining factor in its uptime. Each frost strike has a 45% x 25% = 11.25% chance to proc the buff. Lets say you do 20 frost strikes per minute (top parses do higher, most parses do lower), that’s 0.33 frost strikes per second. If the frost strikes were distributed perfectly evenly (not likely) then the down time on the buff would be (1- 0.1125)^(12*0.33) = 62.3%, making the uptime 37.7%.* When I used the actual frost strike time stamps from my H Baelroc parse and simulated the proc chance I saw up times ranging from 20% to 50% with an average around 30-35%. Note this parse had approximately 20 frost strikes per minute, but they weren’t distributed one every 3 secs like in an idealized world. I would roughly estimate a 33% uptime. Now the value of mastery will almost certainly go up but I wouldn’t expect the value of the 4 pc to be more than around 1.5% damage when all is said and done.

* edited to correct mistake, had the uptime and downtime inverted