Credit where credit is due. Libretto made reference to a suggestion he had found in another forum for gaming unholy runes. The method he was using (it's on page 3 of this thread) was proven by Azhe to be impossible to be more dps than the normal rotation, and that was in fact true. It's simply a matter of being resource capped too often.

It was my work that came up with the linked rotation.

You can't just game unholy runes and follow shadowfrost priority and expect more dps. It will be much less. You need the following extra:

*Switch to OBL priority when having high resources due to fortunate procs
* currently regulated by prioritising OBL when you can't benefit from an RE proc, or prioritising OBl when you have 80 or more RP but would benefit from an RE proc. The balance is very hard to get, even in the sim.
*Use KMs on OBL. it's way more dps than FS or wasting a rune on a HB
* Keep frost runes around to use on an OBL so you don't waste time capped with 2 unholy runes

It's very different to shadowfrost (which isn't even an accurate name since DnD is out of it). Obliterate damage drops only to about 15%, from 30%. It's still regularly used.

I forget who it was, but several threads back someone discovered using HB to fill in with the normal priority was a dps gain. This is really an extension of that.

So it's not so much a discovery, but combined work of several people. I just did the hard hards at the end to get it all working and fine tune the priority. It's really a mashup of shadow frost and standard obl priority.

But the bottom line is it's extremely fault intolerant and requires a lot of focus. I think it would be silly to play that priority or reforge entirely into mastery. But 2000 haste is quite comfortable to play this way.

What it does do is emphasize the importance of using HB as a filler when low in resources due to bad RNG. It is a fantastic way to pull through those lulls. HB priority generates more resources, OBL priority uses resources faster. The more focus you have spare, the more you can use that mechanism.

For the BiS list, why wouldn't you take the tier shoulders too? Since haste is our best stat and the current gloves or shoulders have that secondary stat on them.

Syk, It's not really shadow frost. It just only uses obliterate for unholy runes, or if having high resources as HB priority takes more GCDs, or for KM procs. OBL is still highly used at around 15% damage contribution, down from 30% in a more normal priority. Rime is still useful.

I don't think anyone will be capable of putting out more dps on a pure mastery build with this priority. It's too error prone and requires too much focus. However, when resource starved in a more normal rotation you can very easily fill with HB and even game some unholy runes. And that alone is a significant dps increase. And in doing that you can easily get by with around 2000 haste.

Unspoonybard, because they are ilvl 416 and have more str which outweighs the secondary stat difference. Also at the top end of gear haste rounds off to be no more valuable than mastery.

No doubt more tweaks can be made. I stopped once it beat unholy simming because that seemed like a good benchmark to reach. Feel free to do them and submit proof of a dps increase.

BIS should mention[Souldrinker]. If the datamined proc rate is correct (15%) they are about a 1500 dps increase over [Hand of Morchok]. They shouldn't be ignored just because it has a healing proc in addition to a damage proc.

Having logged in on patch day I got a few gear upgrades in the new content. Might be related to those upgrades and a new haste level, but I felt like my frost DK had significantly better dps, much more than I expected. Maybe it was just a really lucky string of procs but I felt as if there was more room for error in the rotation.

With the way RE works and the internal delay on Rime procs, I couldn't immediately discount my experience. Was there a bug fix that I didn't hear about?

EDIT: I went and checked on the dummy. As it turns out, this was related to a new level of haste. I was getting more obliterates into the rotation as my runes were regenerating faster during unlucky periods. The difference was about 200 haste, which apparently made a big difference.

Did you submit a bug ticket for your 10k dps loss findings? Can you provide the profile you used to get such terrible results?

I ask because in my own tests it seems to be working as expected (using the development build), as you can see here:



Personally I don't really care to test 2h frost. It's a dead spec. But if you want accurate results on the OP and claim the sim is at fault please provide the profile you used to test either here or as an issue ticket so it can be verified and fixed if necessary.

@armsaun Well all melee got a 10% AP buff, I was experiencing the same thing, I saw my numbers jump from low 30s to high 30s-low 40s.

One very tiny change I've noticed - Dark Command no longer procs runeforges when used (at least Razorice). This isn't very significant other than no longer being able to use this ability to complete very low level quests which required you to damage a mob below a certain health percentage to capture/do something to it, since said mob usually had so little health that any rune ability would one-shot it.

However, this does mean no more taunting things like Arm Tentacles or Spiderlings to stack Razorice that tiny bit faster, or maintaining your RI stack from a distance.

After running a couple sims, i discovered that at least in BiS armor, the Normal Souldrinker, is superior to the Heroic Hand of Morchok.

Now my skills with simming are somewhat basic when it comes to doing small comparisons like this, but i was wondering if anyone could confirm or crush the finding that Normal Souldrinker is a better choice than heroic Hand of Morchok.

In my tests also, in T12H bis gear normal [Souldrinker] is ever so slightly better than heroic [Hand of Morchok]. And the raidfinder [Souldrinker] is better than the normal [Hand of Morchok]. (i took care to maintain hit cap, and put an epic 50 str gem in the Morchoks)

And given the proc is based on your health pool and T13 gear gives a gradual health pool upgrade (about 20k T12H bis to T13H bis) that gap will widen the more T13 gear you have.



That is assuming the proc rate is indeed 15% (which is should be, that was datamined from the in game spell data),and has no ITC (which similar items in the past have not had). -confirmed by Taiyoken.


I suspect you left something major out. Maybe the talent line change?

I ran a very quick test and get the following:



As for haste, 2h generates a lot of extra RP and depending on the action priority haste caps out very early. You can see that indicated broadly in the waiting time line in the output, and more specifically in the resources section with wasted RP and rune regeneration. If you run with a single iteration you can see it in the RP timeline. In fact even with a heavy mastery reforge (1300 haste) waiting time was only at around 3%. The T13 2pc bonus would have further devalued haste for 2h (and 1h for that matter).

That may or may not be a bug; it has been a very long time since I tested 2h in game. But with the current action priority list for maximum dps RP capping is avoided most of the time, which increased dps but reduced the point at which haste becomes less valuable than mastery.

These are the timelines for RP for 1h and 2h (1 iteration). The 2h has only 1300 haste. This is why your haste values for 2h are coming out so low.

I just picked up Souldrinker and it is indeed around 15%, 3.46 PPM at 2.6 weapon speed. The proc seems to be incapable of critting as I tried it with melee crit/no spell crit and no melee crit/spell crit.

The proc is around 1-1.5% of your total damage from dummy tests. I'll post some more results when we do FL later in the week.

e: There is also no ITC because I've seen it proc right after itself.

hi, so u mean that shadowfrost is better than dw frost?
do the same rotation but if u have low resources spam 2 hb and fs instead of obliterate?

It's not shadowfrost. Needs a different name. The priority I detailed is better dps, yes.

And yes, Even if you just do it a little bit when resource starved it is a dps increase. Just don't let your unholy runes cap, or waste too many KM procs.

Since there is no shadow component to this priority system's credit, and you spot its users by their reforging to mastery instead of haste, I hereby propose "masterfrost" as its shorthand.

This isn't quite theory, but it's very relevant to the thread's aims: How does one go about breaking bad habits of play? I catch myself Obliterating past Rime procs, doing a bunch of FS in a row and not stopping when I hit Obliterate runes, overcapping my runic when I'm not supposed to... it's sloppy. I've tried spending some time on the dummy, but the details of the priority system I should be following (I try to follow the haste/obliterate with hb filler priority system, as found in the simcraft playstyle comparison) just fly out of my head and I revert to reflex pretty quickly, which is the opposite of what I'm trying to accomplish. Given that we hope to be pushing into heroics without farming normal mode, anything I can do to improve my performance without acquiring gear is to be treasured. What have you folks done to retrain yourself, either to learn a new rotation or to perfect an old one?

Considering how strong Souldrinkers proc seems to be somebody should consider including Stamina in the stat weights.
The value should be rather low (around 0.035 if I am not mistaken) and a Str/Sta shouldn't be above a Str/Hit gem but it could be interesting to check.

simulationcraft won't do stamina yet for stat weights. I'm getting it added in, but the maths should be very easy from the sim output for the ability.

Can you post a combat log or something similar? No one I know has one yet, but if you are only getting 3.46ppm Souldrinker shouldn't beat Hand of Morchok. My math suggested 6ppm was required to beat Morchok, 7ppm would put it significantly ahead, but with a 15% proc rate I would expect it to have much more than ~3.5ppm.

@ Cortdk do you have any logs or parses that we could see the difference in dps of masterfrost? Just curious on how big of a difference it is to play this harder spec, I'm simming at 34300ish in a 4/31/6 regular frost dw build.

Got souldrinker tonight. Here are logs on a dummy. Just went for 200 obliterates.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

139.7k health.

Proc rate is about 15% of all main hand attacks (a little higher, but relatively low sample rate explains that), including FS, OBL, PS, and of course melee swings. So the sim numbers should be pretty accurate.

Unspoonybard I don't have any pure masterfrost logs. But if you look at my logs for Madness of Deathwing tonight I did a 50/50, using HB a lot for filler and gaming unholy runes quite a bit.

If you want to sim yourself using the masterfrost priority, download the latest version of the sim and copy the action priority list from the profile listed here Simulationcraft Results called hb_obl_mastery. But also keep in mind the default sim priority already fills idle time with HBs, giving about 800 extra dps over the EJ priority (which is also listed on that page).

I wasn't terribly concerned with the stat priorities for 2H but rather that with such a low dps they wouldn't be as accurate. I was seeing ~1.5% waiting time with the 2H haste heavy build rather than the ~6% for DW which Might of the Frozen Wastes and T13 2pc can mostly accounts for. I might argue that 3% is still a little low on waiting time but I haven't seen that in action yet.

My testing was done completely naked with only the Souldrinker in the MH with only autoattacks.

Math is (60sec/2.6 weapon speed) * 0.15 proc chance = 3.46 PPM.

e: I'll do some autoattacking now and upload a recount for you.

11 minutes, unspecced, no presence, no buffs, naked only autoattacking with 1 souldrinker.