Nicolai

Here are the basics of being a Frost specced DPS death knight, stolen from the DPS Compendium thread. For more a more thorough explanation of death knight DPS, I highly reccomend you read that thread. The end of this post has some questions on Frost DPS theorycraft that should make for interesting discussion.

The spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

For Frost DPS, use a two handed weapon. Period. The dual-wielding tri-spec is a different thread.

Why bring a Frost DPS DK to a raid?

Horn of Winter (Str and Agi buff)
20% melee haste to the raid (essentially brings enh shaman buffs)
Decent OT ability, even when DPS specced (Lichborne, Unbreakable Armor)

Numbers to know:

Hit cap: 9%/295.11 rating
Spell hit cap: 17%/445.91
Expertise cap:21 skill/172.15 rating

These to hit/expertise caps don't include talents like Virulence and Misery or racial abilities like Draenei's Heroic Presence or any of the various racial expertise skills. The expertise cap does include Tundra Stalker (since this is the Frost DPS thread).

Spells used by Frost:

IT = Icy Touch (causes Frost Fever)
PS = Plague Strike (causes Blood Plague)
BS = Blood Strike (used to convert blood runes to death runes with the talent Blood of the North)
OB = Obliterate
HB = Howling Blast
FS = Frost Strike (uses Runic Power)

Spells not used by Frost:

The Frost DPS rotation doesn't include Death Strike or Death Coil. That's not to say you should never Death Strike (to recover health if you know your healers can't help you) or Death Coil (for instance, if you're out of melee range for Frost Strikes), just that they aren't used if you're looking to maximize your DPS.

Presence:

When DPSing, use Blood Presence. The 15% boost to damage is better than Unholy's GCD reduction.

DPS Priority:

Don't die.
100% disease uptime
Highest damage rune attack (Obliterate)
Blood Strike to convert blood runes to death runes
Frost Strike!

Rotations:

PS -> IT -> BS -> BS -> OB -> FS
PS -> IT -> OB -> OB -> FS

OR

(Blood tap on the opening rotation for a death rune)
IT -> OB -> OB -> BS -> FS
IT -> OB -> BS -> OB -> FS

During the FS section, Frost Strike until out of Runic Power. Use Rime procs to cast HB during this time as well.

The second rotation still needs some testing, but the math suggests that dropping a PS and a BS from the rotation gets an extra OB and FS strike in.

Stat ranking:

Stat (rating) Frost
1 AP 1.0000
1STR 2.3650
1HIT 2.4046 (until capped)
1APR 0.7628
1EXP 1.2453 (until capped)
1CRT 1.1894
1HASTE 0.4978
1DPS (wpn) 10.3610
Spec 17/54/0
DPS TOTAL 3152.79

Major Glyphs:

Icy Touch: The damage loss hurts us more than other specs, but the extra Runic Power is too nice to pass up.
Obliterate: This one is a no brainer.
Plague Strike: A very minor DPS boost. Feel free to swap this out for something else you find more useful.

Minor Glyphs:

Pestilence: Great for AoE situations. Good for all PVE DKs.
Horn of Winter: Reduces the cost by 10 RP. Especially nice if you don't run with an enh shaman.
Third slot: Glyph to taste.

Open questions for this thread:

• Runeforging: Cinderglacier, Razorice, or Fallen Crusader? Has anyone done any modelling with these?
  
• Should we refresh diseases before they expire? Do we lose DPS from not allowing them to tick completely?
  
• Possible 0/50/21 or 3/47/21 Gargoyle build? You get a pet ghoul but lose out on 6% dmg to Frost Fever infected mobs and 3 expertise. Does the addition of pets and longer disease timers make up for this? (I suspect not.)
  
• Obliterate vs. Howling Blast: What's the weapon damage cutoff when Obliterate scales better than Howling Blast?
  
• Why PS before IT? Glacial Rot vs. Tundra Stalker. What's the exact difference? Is it big enough to overcome the fact that you can IT from range much sooner than you can PS?
  
• How important is being hit capped (especially spell hit capped)?
  
• When do you use Empower Rune Weapon, Death Chill, and trinkets?

 

tedv

Mathematically I'm certain that Blood Strike should be a higher priority than Frost Strike unless you're Runic Power capped. That's because deferring a Frost Strike won't cause a DPS loss-- you aren't losing runic power. But deferring a blood strike does, as all future activations of that blood rune will now refresh later. This effectively costs you fractions of future blood strikes.

For example, suppose you have 80 runic power and 2 blood runes active.

Option A: 2x Frost Strike then 2x Blood Strike
Blood runes refresh in 10 and 11.5 seconds.

Option B: 2x Frost Strike then 2x Blood Strike
Blood runes refresh in 13 and 14.5 seconds.

Note that both options deal the exact same damage in the short term, but each pair of your blood strikes for the rest of the fight will be .3 seconds later. This is equivalent to losing the damage from 0.6 blood strikes, or 60% of one blood strike. Don't do that. Use your runes when they are active and only rune power dump if you would otherwise cap your runic power.

 

Hraka

A few other questions I'd like to add to the pot:

Are 3 points actually needed in Runic Power Mastery? Our main RP dump being 40rp would we actually need a situation where we can spam it 3 times in a row and still end up with 10rp at the end? For that matter would FSing 3 times in a row ever really be warranted and if not why any points in RPM?

With a lot of global cooldowns being crammed into such a short time, if Rime procs is it actually beneficial to use a gcd on it? Each time its cast it sets back the next rotation by about 1 second, if you're swimming in RP already and FSing as much as possible to dump the RP are there times when you will have too many FSs in your rotation that adding a HB into the rotation would cause diseases to lapse? Would this be a noticeable dps loss? What strike would we drop for the HB?

 

Feorthas

Well, freezing fog / rime procs last 15 seconds so there's ample time to wait until you're at the RP dump phase of your rotation before using it (AoE situations nonwithstanding). Even better, wait until Deathchill is back up before using it if that's an option (again, during AoE) and use the time beforehand to set up a 'perfect' HB (perfect being FF on every mob, deathchill up, any controlable AP buffs up).

Clarification: Frost tends to use a large number of double rune abilities so there tend to be a number of points in a rotation where you can dump either RP or procs like rime.

 

Nicolai

I've updated the DPS priority list in the OP to reflect this (which is a change from the list in the DPS compendium, but not the standard rotation).

My two biggest questions at the moment have to be about the effectiveness of Cinderglacier and Razorice and whether we should let diseases tick completely before refreshing. If we should let diseases tick all the way, then I can see there being more time for 3 FSs or 2 FSs and a HB during the rune dump portion of the rotation.

 

Septus

I'm curious about the decision not to take epidemic. Obviously it gets you more blood talents like dark conviction but epidemic gets you one more obliterate per two rotations, and obliterate seems particularly important to this spec, more so than scourge strike or maybe heart strike. Obviously with how good icy touch becomes, that half of the disease re-application isn't so distasteful anymore, but plaguestrike still seems like you'd really want to avoid it.

 

Nicolai

I think it comes down to Icy Touch being pretty damn good all on it's own. It also does double damage when it crits. IT+PS, even at the cost of two GCDs, seems to be more DPS than one extra OB is. I could be wrong there though.

 

kurokaze

Has anyone else been playing around with a build that takes Abomination's Might? I've been having great results with variations of it. It's obviously not the right choice if enhancement shamans are often around, but that's not the case for me. The personal DPS seems comparable and the raid contribution and tanking ability skyrocket (the latter depending on specific choices, but to me Blade Barrier vs. random filler or Toughness vs. Killing Machine/RPM are no-brainers).

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft is my current build but I'm playing around with Blood of the North vs. UA/Icy Reach/Merciless Combat and Butchery vs. Bloody Strikes. It's definitely significantly tankier than it has to be, but thats how I like to play it. Depending on enhancement shamans I might even keep this build once I'm geared enough to tank.

 

Feorthas

Icy Touch is quite good when your talent spec supports it--I've seen >2k crits with after swapping to full Black Ice--but Plague Strike is... not as good and maybe worth a 400 crit at my current gear level. Now, with that said, I've definitely recorded multiple 4k+ Obliterate crits (same instance group as the previous numbers) and I'm probably wearing 'average' gear for a 73 so YMMV but probably not enough for IT/PS to outweigh OB.

Not to mention, Icy Touch is also a spell and therefore subject so spell hit/miss/resist mechanics, which are inherently worse than a melee attack's...

 

Dnarnya

I don't think its just a matter or OB > PT/IT or IT/PT > OB. IT does nice damage when talented. IT can also cause Rime to proc. That combined with the "wasted" 5 talent points you have to spend on Morbidity and Vicious Strikes makes Epidemic a less attractive choice for frost DPS.

IT/PT + Blood DPS talents > OB + Epidemic is what I think it comes down to.


Something that has been confusing me since the DPS Compendium thread. According to the DPS priority shouldn't the rotation be something more like:

PS -> IT -> OB -> BS -> BS -> FS
PS -> IT -> OB -> OB -> FS

 

Hraka

With AE situations the cast sequence would already be using a IT, PS, Pest, HB, BB type of rotation anyways so the rime procs would just mean you'd get a "free" OB in there. At this point the question would become is Obliterate a good use of global cooldowns. Or are we simply limited by pestilence cooldown?

Can someone point me to w/e thread involves standard raid boss armor damage reduction is involved at lvl 80 for these sorts of calculations or has that not been done yet with the new LK stuff?

As for the PS then IT or IT then PS debate, from a standpoint of just the diseases you will net a larger dps increase from casting PS before IT due to Black Ice.

Assuming really low stats of 2k AP and 150 dps 3.5 weapon you'll see numbers like (without glacier rot or tundra stalker):
Icy Touch: (227+2000x0.1)(1.3)(1.3)= 721.63 dmg before CoE/EP
Plague Strike: [(150x3.5)+(2000/14)(3.3)](0.3)+113= 411.92 dmg before armor DR

Assuming good stats for in a raid of 4k AP and 200dps 3.5 weapon:
Icy Touch: (227+4000x0.1)(1.3)(1.3)=1059.63 dmg before CoE/EP
Plague Strike: [(200x3.5)+(4000/14)(3.3)](0.3)+113= 605.85 dmg before mobs armor

So for crud stats IT>PS by a factor of 1.75. With good stats IT>PS by a factor of 1.74. Now when you factor in that killing machine might proc right before casting either PS or IT, then IT beats out PS even more. So it seems like at any gear in the foreseeable future it will be better to cast PS before IT when starting off a rotation. This of course isnt a factor if it turns out that we are always going to be refreshing diseases before they expire for max dps.

btw: both of these still apply if you are using Glyph of IT which leads us to even another discussion of: Is it possible to spec/glyph for too much RP generation?

 

Applejuiced

I'm curious about a Frost / Blood hybrid spec that kurokaze touched on, although I played with it a bit and this one seems to be the most dps oriented I could find

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

although the points in DRM could lead to wasted death runes if such a thing is possible

 

Alvira

I am curious about such a hybrid frost/blood build also. I think it would scale better and should actually be higher DPS than a pure frost build.

The reasons being that the entire build focuses on upping the damage of its most frequently used strikes - blood strike, frost strike, IT and Obliterates. So, the majority of its strikes are well supported by talents with this build. It neglects plague strike, but since that is the weakest strike for frost anyway, no amount of talents boosting it is going to make any difference.

Because it has AP and Str modifiers from the sub in blood tree. Hence, I think it will eventually scale better than a pure frost tree that goes all the way down to hungering cold. Only change I would make is the 3 points in death rune mastery. I would put them elsewhere. Maybe blade barrier so that there is a higher chance of rune strikes from parried attacks.

Oh, and one other change that can further boost blood strikes. Shift 3 points from killing machine into 2/2 endless winter and 1 pt into chilblains. This then applies a snared effect to mobs and allows gylph of bloodstrike to do 20% more damage with bloodstrikes. (Only thing is if we are talking about strictly for raiding, then I am not sure if this would work on raid bosses).

Because this build would stick to using IT, Obliterates, and blood strikes and frost strikes each 10 second rotation. There is no neccesity to have a two cycle rotation for this build because its blood strikes are well supported by talents and every bit as powerful on their own, same for the obliterates and ITs.

 

Hraka

Concerning BS, OB and FS for comparisons against other moves:
Using the two situations I used before along with two diseases on target:

Low lvl gear (2k AP, 20crit, 525 avg dmg):
BS: {[525+(2000/14)(3.3)](0.5)+191+(95.5x2)}(1.15)= 1012.25+ 0.32(1012.25x1.45)= 1481.93 dmg
OB: {525+(2000/14)(3.3)+292+(146x2)}=1580.43+ 0.47(1580.43x1.45)= 2657.49 dmg
Glyphed OB: {[525+(2000/14)(3.3)](1.2)+292+146}= 1633.71+ 0.47(1633.71x1.45)= 2747.08 dmg
FS: {[525+(2000/14)(3.3)](0.6)+150}(1.1)(1.3)(1.03)= 1069.44+ 0.32(1069.44x1.45)= 1565.66 dmg

High lvl gear (4k AP, 33crit, 700 avg dmg):
BS: {[700+(4000/14)(3.3)](0.5)+191+(95.5x2)}(1.15)= 1378.68+ 0.45(1378.68x1.45)= 2278.27 dmg
OB: {700+(4000/14)(3.3)+292+146x2}= 2226.86+ 0.60(2226.86x1.45)= 4164.23 dmg
Glyphed OB: {[700+(4000/14)(3.3)](1.2)+292+146}= 2409.43+ 0.60(2409.43x1.45)= 4505.63 dmg
FS: {[700+(4000/14)(3.3)](0.6)+150}(1.1)(1.3)= 1624.07+ 0.45(1624.07x1.45)= 2683.78 dmg
HB: [270+(4000x0.1)](1.1)(1.3)(2)=1916.2+ 0.33(1916.2x1.45)= 2833.10 dmg

All these numbers are before mob armor or EP are factored in.

If it came down to it and you had to drop one of these out of your rotations blood strike looks to be the obvious choice.

Edit: these were all calculated without Tundra Stalker factored in, so a good comparison of the specs can be had by comparing +8% str and the bonus to blood strikes to +10% on all abilities.

 

Aten

I'm also in doubt why we should even specc into icy talons and imp. icy talons, my guild always takes a Enhanc. Shaman, always, so i dont see the point on spend 6 points, cause as i understand Haste isn't reallythat good for a death knight anyways.

What i really would like to know with the following specc, is how much dps loss would it be if instead of 5/5 Thundra Stalker, i only use 3/5 so i can reach 3/3 in Vot3W, will the extra 4 points of expertise and 6% of str compensate for the loss of 4% damage.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Edit: some typos.

 

Applejuiced

well there shouldnt be much use of rune strike in a raid, I was considering shifting two points from icy reach into RPM just to see if the extra RP would be useful to dump out three frost strikes in arow, but I'll need to test. I'll try the one I linked when we go to finish naxx and try to provide a wws parse for it.

 

Nicolai

If your raid has an enh shaman, the buffs are much less valuable. Once you're capped, the extra expertise and str isn't going to scale as well as the damage from Tundra Stalker.

 

Nefertiri

So if I understand this correctly, DK fevers unlike spriest dots can and should be refreshed before they run out. I had some trouble retraining myself to refresh these before they were finished after playing a spriest through tbc. As you probably know you don't refresh spriest dots till they've dropped off or you clip dps. Fevers apparently should be viewed as effects with initial DPS rather than damage over time.

I've been using the following rotation:

FS->PS->BS->BS->OB-> and then DC to dump RP

but after reading through this thread I will be switching to:

PS -> IT -> BS -> BS -> OB -> FS
PS -> IT -> OB -> OB -> FS

Thanks to you guys for providing good reference material.

 

Nicolai

Has there been some math done or an argument made as to why that is? I haven't seen one yet.

 

imabearlol

I think this has been asked before, but with the Annihilation talent where Obliterate doesn't consume diseases, is there any advantage of using Blood Strikes before Obliterate? Isn't it easier to manage Rime procs using Ob first, as you can immediately replace Obliterate with Howling Blast as soon as you use Icy Touch to proc it, making sure the cooldown of Howling Blast is up as soon as possible, in case you need to use it before the next Icy Touch (say an AoE situation)?

 

Andread

I've been working on the scaling between HB and OB to see at what point, if any, AP and armor work together to make HB better for single target dps. Without boss armor values it's difficult to figure out what kind of mitigation naxx bosses actually have, so instead I imagined a hypothetical frost DK with a 3.4 speed, 203.7 dps 2Her with 4000 AP buffed to see how much armor a boss would need to make HB do more dps:

for HB I used:

(270 + 4000 * 0.1) * 2 * 1.1 * 1.3
1916.2

where 270 is the avg base dmg, 0.1 is the coeficient from the compendium thread, * 2 is double damage from disease, 1.1 is glacier rot and 1.3 is black ice

for OB I used:

(692.5 + (4000 * 3.3 / 14) * 1.2 + 292 + 146)
2261.9

where 692.5 is avg weapon dmg, 3.3 is normalized weapon speed, 1.2 is from the glyph and 146 is disease damage (146 * 2 / 2).

Obviously this is before crit is factored, which is once place OB shines, and also where I expect my napkin math falls apart. I went with an assumed crit of 30%, both with an extra 45% crit damage from guile of gorefiend. OB gets and extra 15% crit from rime, 9% from subversion and 3% from annihilation, for 57% crit.

I calculated the avg hit considering crit like this:

1916 + .3 * (1916 * 1.45) for HB
2749.5

2261.9 + .57 * (2261.9 * 1.45) for OB
4131.4

Finally, my conclusion would then be that

1 - 2749.5 / 4131.4 = mitigation would be needed, or about 33.4%, which seems to be about 7653.8 armor. Depending on what naxx armor values turn out to be, this *could* be less than a debuffed boss has, meaning HB would hit harder (if my math is correct, the big caveat).

Feedback and criticism would be appreciated.

[edit] Adjusted crit to 30% and added the 292 dmg, thanks to Hraka. Also fixed my mitigation calculation and added an armor estimate. I'm not considering miss rates at this point since they're more difficult to predict with simplistic math like this. I'm just hoping to get an idea of how close they may even be as noted in the OP.

 

Feorthas

Regarding Obliterate vs Howling Blast:

Your math is probably sound but you need to remember to account for yellow attack miss/hit/crit vs magic attack miss/resist/hit/crit. Even when taking only the additional 8% miss into account, magic attacks tend to fall nicely behind melée swings; additionally, obliterate tends to have an outragious crit rate--40%+--whereas HB will have a few % less than the 'expected' crit rate because your base int & magic crit are simply lower than your agi & physical crit.

Edit: hmm... Looks like you did handle crit but may have neglected miss; try seeing what that does.

 

Mild Confusion

I see two ways you can go with doing BSx2 first or OB first.

On one hand, you may want to do two BS so that they can come around as death runes sooner into the next rotation,

However, 2 blood strikes will have 2 chances for your target to dodge prolonging your rotation and possibly having your diseases tick off before you can oblit.

So after you oblit, you can BSx2 and the runes will come back as death runes into the next rotation assuming they are not dodged.

In the end it is probably near equal enough that it is up to personal preferance, but I personally prefer making sure my big hit lands while and not risk diseases running out.

 

◊ Eej

Int does not affect DK spell crit.

 

Nefertiri

->1.5-> 1.5-> 1.5-> 1.5-> 1.5-> 1.5-> 1.5-> 1.5 (GCD)
PS -> IT -> BS -> BS -> OB -> FS -> FS -> (assuming RP for 2FS)
12 seconds- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - >PS 1.5 IT -> BS

From this it appears IT would be refreshed at 12 seconds (8xGCD) into the rotation if you FS twice on the end of the rotation (stepping on 2 seconds of the duration of frost fever). If you specced Runic Power Mastery and can do FS 3 times the fever has expired already so it's not an issue although whether 2xFS or 3xFS is better still isn't clear to me. I have RPM but haven't been using FS much at all so I can't say whether it's hitting harder than IT but if IT is hitting harder then FS a third FS for the sake of a RP dump isn't necessary when your runes are ready. Or so it seems to me anyway.