Frost DPS | Winter of Discontent [4.3] - Page 11

huntcaudata · 09/22/11, 10:08 AM

Relative stat values can change by very large margins based on gear. My stat values are also very different than the OP's (though mine are all lower). If you end up with a different stat priority, then I would worry. For instance, if crit were to be above haste, than something is likely to be wrong.

If you want to double check, make sure your buffs and debuffs are set correctly and that the rotation isn't doing anything weird. If not, it's likely your gear set just puts you in a unique spot. Remember that doesn't mean you should reforge all your haste into mastery now that mastery is higher, you're likely near an inflection point and if you had a hundred less haste it would be worth more per point than mastery.

Oh... also you appear to not be expertise capped, which would raise the relative value of mastery due to howling blast and frost fever being unaffected. If you're an Orc and actually are capped, ignore this...

Dfargesh · 09/22/11, 6:34 PM

Recently me and another frost DK in my guild had been noticing rather low uptime on Unholy Strength (among other facets of RNG) and during a raid tonight he had decided to put his weapon with Fallen Crusader in his mainhand, this being for the last attempt of the night,
He commented that he had a much higher uptime on fallen crusader for that attempt and in fact almost had twice as many procs as I had
My buffs cast
The other Dk's buffs cast
For that attempt I had ran out of melee range to res somebody who had fallen off the ledge (who somebody ressed before I managed to) so my uptime was somewhat lower on top of me having terrible luck with RE and Rime but probably not to a degree to put me so much lower on FC uptime.

Because I was curious as to this and those parses weren't the most reliable due to other mishaps I did a quick test on training dummies only doing melee hits from plague strike and frost strike, 100 casts each, while I'm aware this isn't the most accurate test, it's a start and it was all I had time for.

While these results are obviously in favour of mainhand FC having a higher proc rate, I'll need to do further tests.
Mostly posting this here to see if anybody has ideas as to what may cause this besides sheer luck and to see if others would be willing to test for a wider sample.

09/22/11, 8:13 PM

As a reply to Dfargesh, I went to a dummy and tested it out myself.
I only did white melee swings though, 200 each. Will the fact that I did not PS / FS make this test wrong? I don't know, please tell me if it does. However, this is my result:

FC MH / Razor OH - 10 procs on 200 melee swings
FC OH / Razor MH - 2 procs on 201 melee swings

I did, however, miss 4 more swings on the FC OH test. That shouldn't matter though as the difference is so big. So if my test was done correctly, would it be an idea to look more into this?

saboya · 09/22/11, 8:40 PM

There's nothing to look into. It obvious FC will proc more on the MH, DW white hit cap is 27%. The only thing that may be up for discussion is if Unholy Strength uptime is more important than Razorice damage on the MH, which probably all the sims and tests proved wrong, given the recommendation on the OP.

CortDK · 09/22/11, 10:02 PM

slant · 09/22/11, 11:08 PM

Some misinformation here.

Offhand hits from specials can't miss or be dodged/parried if the mainhand hits. Therefore, there's no advantage to putting any enchant or runeforge on the offhand.

The only reason DW frost uses razorice mainhand is that the runeforge also deals 2% of each hit as frost damage. When dualwielding, your offhand only deals 50% damage. Nerves of cold steel increases that to 62.5%. The mainhand of course deals 100% damage. It's a very small amount of damage, but still worth doing.

Edit: Thank you for the correction, obviously I was going by old information.

CortDK · 09/22/11, 11:29 PM

Varbos · 09/23/11, 2:13 AM

Originally Posted by slant

Offhand hits from specials can't miss or be dodged/parried if the mainhand hits. Therefore, there's no advantage to putting any enchant or runeforge on the offhand.

Yeah, that's not correct... if the main hand gets parried, the off-hand will still hit... most definitely confirmed by me, for the fact you attack Ragnaros from the front the whole damn fight, and my Killing Machine procs would get parried on the main hand and only do OH crit damage.

Your off-hand attacks can never be parried, at the least, dodge and blocked I'm not sure but for parry - they will always hit. Off-hand attacks have a 100% chance to hit, I can find all sorts of in game data to prove this.

CortDK · 09/23/11, 2:56 AM

Thalastor · 09/23/11, 3:57 AM

Best "current" example is Chimaeron. Obliterate offhand won't miss when you have caustic slime up. First time I noticed it was after hitting a flask on Heroic Putricide. 100% miss penalty, but I could still spam Obliterate for the offhand hits.

Assuming you're expertise and hit capped while behind a target, and there are no debuffs to reduce your hit chance, there is no difference. But, if you figure RI mh/FC oh has an advantage in some scenarios and is dead even in all others, it seems like the logical way to runeforge.

Krab� t · 09/24/11, 3:48 AM

Originally Posted by Krab� t

Cause the update is still missing.
BiS for Orcs
chardev 8 - WoW Cataclysm
BiS for any other race
chardev 8 - WoW Cataclysm

The BiS-discussion ended with some thoughts about picking up [Mandible of Beth'tilac] for Humans.

Just read the first page of the thread............
This are the results from the old thread and we had a long discussion about bis in there.

Gicks · 09/24/11, 9:42 PM

DPS DK T13 Set Bonuses (As of 9/24/11)

2P -- Sudden Doom has a 30% chance and Rime has a 60% chance to grant 2 charges when triggered instead of 1.
4P -- Runic Empowerment has a 25% chance and Runic Corruption has a 40% chance to also grant 710 mastery rating for 12 sec when activated.

Charybdis · 09/25/11, 7:53 AM

The bonuses may seem less than stellar, but there are some potentially interesting interactions between them.

In Frost's case, 60% is a significant chance to proc 2 charges of Rime, meaning we may very well start going into more of a Shadowfrost system. The 4pc supports this somewhat with the Mastery bonus.

Even if we only assume a 50% uptime on the 4pc, we're still looking at an effective 355 mastery. That's a 4% boost to our Frost damage.

CortDK · 09/25/11, 8:20 AM

Rennadrel · 09/25/11, 12:39 PM

Originally Posted by CortDK

It's not shadow frost when you need an obliterate priority to proc rime. It's just another nail in the coffin, and even more reason to use the optimal OBL priority.

All it does is increase the relative weight of mastery, since a little more of our damage will be from frost. That will effectively lower the haste soft cap -- the point at which haste falls below mastery. And if this "extra charge of rime" requires a GCD, that will also lower the haste soft cap.

Given the lacklustre 4pc, I do wonder if they have more changes in store that will effectively boost mastery's value. No point guessing though. So far it looks promising, but 4pc looks very weak.

I could see the 4 set being very useful if we got more Mastery out of it but I can't see Blizzard changing the set bonuses until they get player feedback on the test realms. I would hope that the developers see the faults in these set bonuses and changes them before the test realms even come up. With basically a 1 in 2 chance of gaining 710 Mastery rating (which is not that much in the grand scheme of things), however having two free Howling Blast uses in a row would be huge for Runic Power generation, giving us more Frost Strike uses. In the long run I think Mastery is going to start having a higher stat weight come 4.3 and new gear, maybe Frost won't need the 4 piece, giving us options for different gear.

People don't look at the grand scheme of things with these bonuses and what value they have, a double Howling Blast use would give you around 50% of your RP bar filled. I said it on a couple of other forums earlier, but the two piece is going to be good for Unholy and Frost, while the four piece will be more reliable for Unholy and far too RNG for Frost.