1. Apparently Slow/Fast is better for the new Killing Machine procs but I don't have a good Slow MH [Only got [Titansteel Bonecrusher]] so hopefully someone gives a rundown on it.

2. But you state the dps is in fact WORSE? Does it make up for the KM procs?

Slow/Fast is working great for me. Currently running a [Angry Dread] and [Widow's Fury]. Rotation is about the same, and DPS is still good. I'm no longer canceling Rime Procs with the cool down change. I can't really post up any kind of rotation, because I usually end up going to a priority set up, refresh diseases if really low, HB on cool down, dump when RP is high; fairly simple.

Running 0/33/38, essentially 0/32/39 without Crypt Fever, and was still topping DPS on bosses (Patchwerk included, I believe?). I had two rogue talent points that I didn't know what to do with, since we already had Unholy Aura, so thus the one point in Icy Reach. We have a guy that typically will run a WWS, and I will try and get that up if anyone is interested. Damage percent was usually Melee, HB, IT.

I wanted to try out the 0/20/50 spec, but we had an unholy in raid so maybe another time.

I only did around 5700 dps on patchwerk today.
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WMO and WWS didnt parse my pets so its a little low there. KM nerf was pretty significant it seems. The bug where HB is not showing its CD was also a huge pain. I was using LL MH and hailstorm OH. Are other people getting similar numbers?

I was 0/32/39 by the way.

So are we still using our freezing fog macro's post patch (regardless of f/f s/f)?

To all the people posting numbers for patchwerk or whatever, you do realize those numbers are worthless unless you post before and after patch numbers since you can't very well compare numbers between different people and raid groups...
Anyway, I had to tank for the small portion of the raid that actually happened tonight, so I couldn't get any raid numbers. However, on a test dummy tonight I tested the 5 builds (mentioned earlier) with S/F, F/F, 2h; 5 minute tests. I found S/F to be about 50 dps better than F/F (roughly 2550 vs 2600, depending on build) on all the builds. The notable thing is that my best slow weapon is the titansteel bonecrusher, ilvl 200, whereas the F/F were both i213. So even with that handicap S/F was still better; I feel it would be even more noticeable with an Angry Dread. I found the 44/27 FS build, even with 2h and FS glyph, to be the worst, which was surprising because that is what I had wanted to switch to. The other 4 were reasonably close; too much of a pain to compare since some builds have EP, others don't, and some have +20% haste, others don't. In a raid however, there would be both. Things seem close enough to choose based on raid needs and personal preference.

I quote this for emphasis. If you talk about your new DPS value it is very important to tell what you did pre-patch. This is the only way to do a comparison and i'm really interested in those new numbers!

Just tested my dps on a test dummy with a 0/32/39 spec and I was pushing out 3k on it with slow fast, about 2-300 higher than fast/fast. My gear still needs some work namely getting expertise capped once that happens I expect to see my numbers rise also I ran it in my full raid gear make up so I did not have an extra 3% spell hit and I did have a few HB's/IT's miss because of it. Overall it is definitely nerfed damage but with slow fast I don't feel like it is as bad as was expected. I do notice haste does wonders from proccing KM and was wondering what peoples opinions on going for gear that has it over other options.

I'm not sure if deep unholy can boost IT more than deep frost... And with HB will be aoe dmg better too.

First time poster but I've been around for quite a while ...

I've extensively ran both 0/32/39 and 10/31/30 pre 3.08. I wasn't able to do much tonight (don't you hate it when work gets in the way with fun?) to compare but a few things that I've noticed in running the 2 specs ...

Many people don't place a lot of value in Bladed Armour due to a lack of scaling. In my current gear, it adds 379 AP ... approx a 12% increase in AP. While I realise that this is unbuffed, I'm not sure that bone shield (which more than likely will need to be re-applied in longer fights, costing a rune and a global cooldown each time) or desceration (which isn't great for mobile fights) makes up the difference. I realise that as we progress further we may reach a point where the lack of scaling will make BA undesirable but are we there yet? I'm not a huge fan of using Patch as the "be-all and end-all" of spec comparisons either, because he is the exception, not the norm (especially when considering desecration's weakness).

I think most of us have dropped CF in the 0/32/39 spec (so no loss there) and there are obvious advantages of having your ghoul stick around the entire time but without running the new numbers in a raid environment, I have little to compare it to. The only other major difference between the 2 specs is the loss of 5% IT crit in the 10/31/30 spec, which may be more significant now with the new sigil.

Curious to see if anyone has any information with the changes.

Considering your ghoul can be anywhere between 2-300 dps easy if not more I dont see how quaranteeing it can be up is a bad thing. Not to mention the imp AOTD cooldown means you can pop it on pretty much every fight where there will be no issues with bad add taunts or what not. Personally with the change to NOTD I find it to be one of the best talents we get point for point.

armiq:

How is Frost better for IT? Let's break it down by comparing relative gains and losses:

Tundra Stalker vs. Impurity:
Say you get 50% of your spells' damage from your AP. Impurity thus boosts all your spells by 12.5%. Tundra Stalker is 10%.

Rime vs. Rage of Rivendare:
Say you get Killing Machine on 50% of ITs, and have a 20% spell crit rate. Rime affects half your ITs, so it raises your actual crit chance by 7.5% (from 60% to 67.5%). 7.5% is 4.7% of 160%, so the actual boost to your IT from Rime is 4.7%, compared to RoR's 10%.

Killing Machine vs. Bladed Armor:
With the stats from above, KM adds 40% crit (from 20% to 60%). 40% is 33% of 120%, so you get a 33% boost from 5/5 KM. Let's call BA 400 ap on top of 4000 ap. Your IT AP damage goes from 500 to 550 for a 10% increase; we previously estimated that half of IT damage came from AP, so that puts it down to 5%.


Obviously, these are somewhat ass-derived numbers, but the conclusions derived from the numbers had very clear winners, so as long as the assumptions are in the ballpark, they should be in the right area - specifically, showing that 0/20/50+1 provides by far the greatest boost to Icy Touch.

That doesn't mean it's better than 0/31/27+x, but considering that Icy Touch provides our best damage per rune and RP per rune, it means it's worth looking at, rather than saying LOL ICY TOUCH IS FROST IT MUST BE BEST IN FROST TREE. Personally, I'm running for the hills to get away from Howling Blast because the lack of a visible indicator for its cooldown drives me nuts.

I gave the Bladed Armor variant a shot and found it massively inferior to the Killing Machine variant, if perhaps a bit easier to play. Napkin math (above) and spreadsheets (see spreadsheet thread) agree.

Imo it just procs way lesser then before with DW.

My version of dr_Allcom3's spreadsheet appears to be saying 10/10 instead of 0/20 gives the best dps results. Any ideas why our spreadsheets are both giving different answers to this question?

You don't seem to understand how impurity works even though IT would benefit more from impurity then fromTundra stalker.

With Tundra Stalker and 5k ap IT would be dealing

((((((5000*0.1)+236)*1.3)*1.3)*1.1)*1.1)*1.13 = 1700.70 damage

With Impurity and 5k ap IT would be dealing

(((((5000*0.125)+236)*1.3)*1.3)*1.1)*1.13 = 1808.67 damage

Impurity increases by 5% per rank (25% total) the benefit our spells receive from Ap.
It isn't equal on all spells.

IT has a base 0.1 modifier. So 0.1*1.25 = 0.125

for DC it would be 0.15*1.25 = 0.1875

A Dk build that has focus around spells suffers quite the loss from not having impurity.

I agree that having your ghoul contribute near 100% is an awesome and much needed change. However, when you look at a fight like Patch (which I hate when used as a baseline for testing specs but seems to be the norm), there's no change from pre 3.08 to now unless you happened to wipe on a previous attempt and AOTD is on cooldown.

AOTD is situational as well ... using Naxx as a guideline, the bosses seem to be divided into rough "thirds" when it comes to the effectiveness of AOTD; excellent, not bad and near worthless.

In my experience, BA vs. the 7% you get out of unholy seemed relatively even at my gear level in static fights. With 10/31/30, I don't have to worry about re-applying Bone Shield every time it fades or losing out on some of the uptime of desecration due to a moving fight.

Either way, I guess I have some testing to do.

Thats all nice but what about:
Guile of gorefiend - realy nice boost for IT crits
unbrakable armor - VERY good alternative for bladed armor, its almost same AP boost like BA for 20 seconds each minute...and its only 1 scaling talent not crazy 10 nonscaling or low scaling!
and merciless combat.
It's 6 frost talents vs 3 unholy

Thanks for the clarification. I'm glad this hasn't been nerfed to the ground.

Kyrre: I can't seem to download Doc's sheet so I have no idea, but the first thing that comes to mind is that you may be looking at a much lower gear level than I am, which I think favors BA more - BA scales from gear ilvl while KM scales from crit size (AP), and I'd guess that AP would scale up higher at higher gear levels, though I haven't checked. The second thing that comes to mind is that I have no idea how Doc implemented KM - it might be significantly less in-depth/accurate/detailed than my modeling. The third thing that comes to mind is that I have an error somewhere. Since my spreadsheet is a halted project at the moment, I'm not too worried about finding out which.

armiq: Guile of Gorefiend is completely irrelevant to statements regarding Icy Touch. Unbreakable Armor compares infavorably to Bone Shield: assume 50% damage contribution from attack power and perfect uptime for both. UA is up 33% and increases AP by 10% which increases damage by 5% when it's up or 1.67% overall. (Yeah, it's actually strength. The differences between STR and AP are too complex for this particular napkin.) Merciless Combat - I admit that I'd forgotten that this affected Icy Touch, but it compares approximately with Desecration if you'd like. Call their uptimes equal and then Merciless wins by a hair.

Again, I'm not arguing "This spec is better overall" - that comes down to way too many factors and the balance is way too close. All I'm saying is that the 50+ unholy variants are unquestionably the build that gets the most out of the Icy Touch spell. The implications of accepting this are few, but the implications of denying it, as you did, are that the build becomes useless, since it is entirely focused on maximizing Icy Touch, and if something else could do that better, what's the point? But nothing else can do it better.

Thought I'd give my two cents on how I've experienced the changes:

I respecced to a 0/31/40 spec, getting NoTD, full virulence, desecration etc. and only spending 1 point in MC and also doing 1 point in epedemic to push out an extra HB before reapplying diseases. I did not experience a significant dps loss in regards to what damage I usually do:

Using a F/F setup, more specifically Split Greathammer(FC), Widow's Fury(Cinderglacier) and IT sigil using a rotation of PS,IT,HB,BS,BS,RPD -> HB,PS,IT,HB,RPD.

I found that the above spec, with 1 in epedemic followed nicely with the timing on my KM procs in regards to using it on HB(might just have been lucky) and I was able to push out 2941.7 dps on heroic dummy, using no cooldowns whatsoever.

It seems to me that the nerf hammer hit us in regards to KM, but not so much that we can't still do pretty damn good dps. Gonna run a 25-man raid test tonight to see if my numbers follow what they were before. But I do think the Ghoul upgrade on a large scale will compensate for the KM nerf.

My thoughts and questions are the following: Anyone else experiencing KM overriding itself due to rune cooldowns? In other words, it procs 2 times before my runes are ready. And also, with the IT sigil has anyone run numbers on the 20/51 spec in regards to going all IT, it seems to me that my IT crits for rougly(very rougly) the same amount as my HB and actually might even outdps it in some areas.

Also, in regards to my rotation and my spec I can see a problem in pushing out the extra HB instead of IT's when using the IT sigil. Will probably do some 20/51 testing later on today to see if it might outdps 31/40. I'm new to theorycrafting and elitistjerks, so please feel free to comment on my spec/rotation/gear, I'm here to learn


UPDATE: Did a 0/20/51 test just now and found that same setup with rotation PS,IT,IT,BS,BS,RPD -> PS,IT,IT,IT,IT,IT,RPD actually reached about 100 dps more than 0/31/40.

btw how is it now with ebon plague? In pre-patch was a problem when more unholy DKs with this talent while attacking the same target. Is it fixed already?

stayed 32/39 last night for naxx, was pulling consistantly extremely high dps(was surprised myself)

pulled 5671 on patchwerk, without recount taking into account ghoul dps or gargoyle, also no army of the dead

still using 2x fast, razorice offhand, and blood strike sigil

edit: on a side note, /cower @ ghoul...lol.

It actually only got worse with this patch, as has been stated oh so many times before in this thread. Not only can EP only be applied once, now Crypt Fever no longer stacks with EP (which was a bug pre-patch).

Blizz stated that they are aware of this problem, but that fixing it is rather difficult. It remains bugged, meaning that every Unholy DK after the first loses any benefit from a 3rd Disease (both CF and EP).