This may belong under simple Q/A, but I think that the answer either way will be beneficial to those reading this thread.

Does pillar of frost multiply your strength every second? Or does it take a snapshot of your stats and multiply them throughout its duration?

So do we wait for the heart of rage trinket to proc before using it or just blow it earlier to increase the chances that we'll be able to use another one before the fight ends.

In full 359 gear I have 4546 strength, unbuffed.
4546 + (10x38) (Licence to Slay)= 4926
+ 549 (horn of winter) = 5475
x 1.05 (Kings / Mark of the Wild) = 5748 (approximately)

Basically with just buffs and no proc effects you would get (5748x0.2) or roughly 1149 strength in my gear (359 BiS).

Now if I were to line it up with cool downs I would get:
5748 x 1.15 (Fallen Crusader) = 6610.2
+ [1926 (Heart of Rage) x 1.05 (kings/mark) x 1.15 (fallen crusader)) = 6610.2 + 2325.465 = roughly 8935

Now, using PoF with these cool downs grants (8935 x 0.2) 1787.

1787 - 1149 = 638
Therefore by lining it up with cool downs you get (1149 / 1787) 64.2% more strength out of your cool down by lining it up with all of your cool downs, more if your an engineer (which I am, although I did not include that in these calculations, that having been said non-engineers base strength would be about 80 points higher so these numbers might be -slightly- off).

This isn't applicable all the time because your cool downs wont always line up, but at the very least you should wait for fallen crusader since it has such a high up time.

As far as the cool down updating to new values of strength, just tested it on a dummy using JUST fallen crusader and PoF as procs and I can confirm that the cool down does NOT update when you lose buffs - pillar of frost uses your strength value at the time of casting through out the whole duration. EDIT: NEED TO DOUBLE CHECK THIS INFO.

Has anyone ever modeled using 2x howling blast with death runes instead of 1x obliterate since the blood of the north change? Just looking at my average obliterates versus howling blasts, I fail to see how an oblit does more than 2 howlings. KM procs would have to go to frost strikes more often granted, but still. Anyone have thoughts on this?

Obliterate gives you a free howling blast 45% of the time. With enough mastery that method could become dominant but with current gear it's suboptimal.

From what i can see shadow frost is still behind the normal frost spec, i would see no reason in using the spec/priority as of now.

Please forgive me for the newb question, but I can't seem to find a definitive answer.

When you speak of "Yellow Hit to Cap," that means getting level 88/raid boss to 0% for SPECIAL ability, correct? It doesn't mean our Normal attacks.

I ask because my normal attack is 16.07% miss chance for a level 88/raid boss, but 0% for the special ability. That sure seems awfully high.

Thanks in advance for clearing this up.

So, I've been playing around with the Shadowfrost spec, both in-game and in simcraft. The sims indicate I should come in about 6% under DW Frost, given identical gear levels. However, one thing I did notice is that if for some reason you end up on a single-target fight as Shadowfrost, it's a slight (~0.3%) DPS gain to use the rune of razorice over the rune of the fallen crusader. This gain increases as melee uptime on the boss drops. I'm curious whether or not the advantages of shadowfrost (better damage from ranged, better AoE) are enough to make it worth using as something besides a gimmick spec.

Barring any hotfixes, I'm going to raid as shadowfrost next week and post back findings here.

For things like "better damage from ranged" and "better damage on adds" etc, you can just use a standard frost spec and use HB instead of OB. The only real differences between shadowfrost and the conventional spec are

A.) The use of glyph of icy touch
B.) IBT instead of epidemic
C.) Will stack mastery over haste

B and C can be done with a conventional spec with a minimal impact on single target DPS; it is largely a matter of preference whether to take IBT or Epidemic to begin with, and the stat weight delta between haste and mastery is only ~0.1 or 0.2 such that completely reforging for one or the other is less than a couple hundred DPS change.

So the only remaining question is if Shadowfrost's use of GoIT allows it to boost our (already very marginal) disease damage while maintaining very similar performance to an OB spec otherwise. Since disease damage is so minimal to begin with my personal answer to this is "who cares?", but I think its pretty clear that a Shadowfrost spec using the HB/PS-DnD rotation will not differ substantially from a conventional frost spec doing the same. The fact that shadowfrost is at a *clear* disadvantage in single target situations (HB/PS-DnD is categorically inferior to OB on 1 target) should put the nail in this idea as far as I'm concerned.

4 piece tier 12 would also seem to render this argument a moot point with the additional damage being done by obliterate.

I just reforged everything to haste primary and mastery secondary, am hit and exp capped but i cannot seem to get any more dps from unholy presence as the first page says. I never seem to go above 70RP and have large gaps in my rotation where im sitting on runes/cd's. Do I not have enough haste for this (14.10%)?

Thanks for any insight.

I have tried to figure this out for hours now and am just stumped. How can I figure out the formula for haste cap? I have looked at a lot of DK's armorys and have yet to see anyone with as much as haste as I do (19.16%, 2453 rating). I feel like I am gimping myself for having to much of it but no matter what formula I try it's off.

I am not asking for any hand holding or anything, I just need help figuring out what the haste cap is and how to calculate it.

Just tested it and it DOES seem to scale every second.

First test : got every procs before activating PoF.
base strength : 5540
with 10 stacks of Licence to Slay : 5950
with Unholy Strength (Fallen Crusader) : 6849
with PoF : 8218

Second test : used PoF first and then hit the dummy to get all procs.
base strength : 5540
with PoF : 6648
with all : 8218

I did both tests 3 times on dummy.

I would say that you shouldn't wait for your procs, except if you know that your Heart of Rage (or anything else) is going to proc in less than a few seconds. (Edit : to maximise PoF)

According to MMO-Champion the 4.2 patch notes have been updated and it appears that the nerf to Annihilation has been removed.
Patch 4.2 Public Test Realm Guide - [Updated 5/31] - World of Warcraft

Looking at the proposed change to Glyph of Dark Succor, does that mean that with the next patch, it becomes less likely for us to use it as Frost? Change is below:

Glyph of Dark Succor
The next Death Strike within 15 seconds after killing a foe that yields experience or Honor heals you for at least 20% of your maximum health while in Frost or Unholy Presence.

The largest problem I see is that it takes away from your Obit/DPS cooldowns. However, the larger heal is definitely interesting.

Since most likely it'll only proc when you land the killing blow it's really only interesting for farming/grinding or PvP to a lesser extend. Not that a DK would need better healing tools for farming anyways...

I think it would be handy to have links to chardev profiles of the BiS sets in the OP.

Here's one I made for the 2H No Restrictions set: profile=142973

Being out of runes and rp is obviously a haste thing, but the real culprit is the RNG of rime and runic empowerment procs. The less haste you have though the more you will have to rely on that RNG, and seeing how unlikely it is to be get rp capped or have idle, non-recharging runes with current haste from T11 gear in unholy presence (without using Empower Runic Weapon), I'd say the more haste you have the better you can deal with waiting for runes to come out of cooldown.

New chardev link for the OP: DK Frost DW T11 372 EJ

I also changed DK Frost 2H T11 372 EJ from BS/JC to Engi/JC.

Engi is going to suck in 4.2, because at least 1 of our 2 trinkets will be "click on use", so you won't be able to chain your Synapse Spring with all of your cooldowns at the same time.

It's not going to suck, it's still 480 strength * 10 seconds uptime / 60 seconds cooldown = 80 strength passive.
Yes, it's going to be less powerfull then it is now, but it's not going to suck.

Compared to a passive 80 str, yes, it's going to suck. With Engi you won't be able to get the best out from your cooldowns, because you can't use it with your on use trinket.

If youre going to count synapse as 80 passive alone thats fine, but the other passive 80 str professions dont give you tinker buffs.