Hi, I'm by no means a proper hardcore raider, but I just need some info regarding rotations.
Currently I've been running the oldschool rotation.
IT-->PS-->BS-->BS-->OB-->FS
IT-->PS-->FS-->OB-->OB-->FS
I've been weaving the second frost strike into the rotation because it strikes me as illogical that we don't use the global cooldown from our first BS to do anything when it's converted to a death rune. This means I've been getting 3 FS hits as opposed to the two suggested on the front page. Using the boss training dummy I was getting around 1650dps or so from this rotation entirely unbuffed, no horn of the winter etc. (Yes it's pitiful, my gear isn't up to par yet)
Upon reading this thread I switched to the alternate rotation.
IT-->BS-->OB-->OB-->FS-->FS
For some reason though, despite all the claims from everyone here that this rotation is better following about 5 test periods of 5 minutes each or so I could only eke out a max of 1550dps.
Does this rotation scale better in the long run with gear, am I doing it wrong or does my extra frost strike actually add something?
mmo-champion reporting in on the new PTR build showed something really, really interesting for Frost builds:
Frost * Howling Blast had its cooldown removed.
Glyph
* Glyph of Blood Boil - Causes your Blood Boil to slow affected targets for 5 sec. (Old - Also reduced damage of Blood Boil by 20%)
* Glyph of Death and Decay - Targets of your Death and Decay have a 10% chance to cower in fear for 2 sec. (Down from 20%)
* Glyph of Icy Touch - Your Icy Touch generates 10 additional runic power. (Old - Also reduced damage of Icy Touch by 10%)
* Glyph of Death Strike - Increases your Death Strike's damage by 20%. (No longer increases healing)
At this point, then, do we always use HB for our FUs if there's more than 1 target nearby?
The rune cost of FU prevents howling blast from being spammed anyway even if it has no cooldowns. Plus you always have to set it up with a IT for the frost fever, else the damage is lousy. Given such constraints, you would only run into a situation of wanting to use it while it was on cooldown when rime procs for you.
So, now when rime procs after your IT, you can fire off two consecutive HB instead of just one because the cooldown is no longer a constraint. But if you were using OB most of the time instead for DPS, then it wouldn't matter.
It takes a long time before really good gear starts to make OB better than HB, so for many DKs who aren't quite at that gear level yet, they would be happy because HB is actually a big part of their rotation.
Nope, you're not the only one, check over in the Dual Wield thread. The changes to the sigil and to the IT glyph make it fairly advantageous to simply start your diseases with IT and PS and simply spam HB, IT and whatever you want to dump your rune power into. Speaking of Pestilence, however, I see lots of rotations posted, but very few seem to say where they'd actually like to use Pestilence. I seem to do as above and hit it just after my diseases are posted, but I was curious as to when others ended up using it.
The example I posted was just designed to get the bloods into deaths asap for more hb spam. Since pestilence makes a death and bloodboil doesn't, you could probably just use it every time it's up, pest tab pest, and never have to worry about diseases again. This is assuming talent+only ae packs, of course. You could probably stagger the pests further for an ideal rotation, but you rarely need sustained ae for much longer than 2-3 rotations.
I am really curious to see if this change makes frost better at ae than unholy. I play tank and my HB already hits for 2k, so I can only imagine what a frosty dpser would do with no cooldown.
Nope, you're not the only one, check over in the Dual Wield thread. The changes to the sigil and to the IT glyph make it fairly advantageous to simply start your diseases with IT and PS and simply spam HB, IT and whatever you want to dump your rune power into. Speaking of Pestilence, however, I see lots of rotations posted, but very few seem to say where they'd actually like to use Pestilence. I seem to do as above and hit it just after my diseases are posted, but I was curious as to when others ended up using it.
--Jed
Pestilence is a 1 blood ability and procs death runes, so use it wherever you'd use BS in that rotation.
Firstly, PS hits for 0.3 weapon damage whereas OB hits for 1.2. Secondly, OB's disease bonus is (only) 146/disease and the strike itself hits VERY hard (146 <= .1 Weapon). So, best case, you lose 80% weapon damage in exchange for an extra 146 per oblit & 95.5 per BS, and you orphan the frost rune (if it wasn't already for IT). The end result will be "pick up epidemic and go back to the old king, IT PS OB BS BS FS | OB OB OB FS DUMP, and that's inferior to skipping the PS.
Firstly, PS hits for 0.3 weapon damage whereas OB hits for 1.2. Secondly, OB's disease bonus is (only) 146/disease and the strike itself hits VERY hard (146 <= .1 Weapon). So, best case, you lose 80% weapon damage in exchange for an extra 146 per oblit & 95.5 per BS, and you orphan the frost rune (if it wasn't already for IT). The end result will be "pick up epidemic and go back to the old king, IT PS OB BS BS FS | OB OB OB FS DUMP, and that's inferior to skipping the PS.
Are you sure? My quick (possibly flawed) spreadsheet math seems to indicate otherwise. Using your +PS rotation example:
IT-PS-OB-BS-BS-FS + OB-OB-OB-FS-FS vs. IT-OB-OB-BS-FS + IT-OB-OB-BS-FS-FS
I abstracted the weapon values and ignored all talent mods which shouldn't matter because both rotations end with the same overall number of Obliterates and Frost Strikes. I've also ignored the GCD as a factor since both rotation have the same number of strikes per cycle (11).
Your math is off; PS-less is (8.05W + k) and with PS is (7.9W + k).
Admittedly, in the second rotation, K is much bigger; however, you need an extra talent point to keep your RP generation up (need 1/2 CotG to make sure you always get 3FS and you also need 2/2 Epidemic) and the first has better scaling talents and works better with Black Ice (so much better that the second's better KM scaling is more than negated). Not to mention that the first also scales better with Bladed Armor.
I really think we're at an optimal point here; I could code up some sort of sim that could brute force the best frost rotatio basee on given statsn but I'd really, really like to avoid doing so ^^;;.
Your math is off; PS-less is (8.05W + k) and with PS is (7.9W + k).
Admittedly, in the second rotation, K is much bigger; however, you need an extra talent point to keep your RP generation up (need 1/2 CotG to make sure you always get 3FS and you also need 2/2 Epidemic) and the first has better scaling talents and works better with Black Ice (so much better that the second's better KM scaling is more than negated). Not to mention that the first also scales better with Bladed Armor.
I really think we're at an optimal point here; I could code up some sort of sim that could brute force the best frost rotatio basee on given statsn but I'd really, really like to avoid doing so ^^;;.
This is in line with all the practical testing I've done on a poorly geared death knight at the top of this page. To paraphrase my results I was unable to reproduce a higher level of dps using the PS-less rotation at a lower gear level. If other people's results at higher gear levels are correct then there it is incredibly likely that there is an optimal point somewhere hovering around the 1700 dps unbuffed mark or so.
Thirdly,the math was shown that due to the frost damage increase of cinderglacier it should be used over fallen crusader.Why is this you ask?Alright now lets pull out a napkin,cinderglacier is 20% increase of whatever frost or shadow damage ability is used next.So,say my frost strikes crit a level 80 mob for 5200 unbuffed completely.5200*.20 = 104 added so now I have a 5304.Now,remember cinderglacier allows the use of two procs',which is excellent for RP dump.
I have been eyeing Fury of the Five Flights for some time. The 320 AP buff obviously is nice! However I am unsure whether or not it would take too long to reach the appropriate # of stacks with using slower 2h.
guess im just basically asking.. what does the frosty dps area here think about the trinket? Good, Bad, just ok?
That trinket is very good for fights like Patch where you're primary job is to stand still and beat the tar out of something, but on movement fights its not as great. Personally I won't be picking it up because I am of the opinion that there will be less Patch style fights come Ulduar, but thats just me I have nothing to back that up.
My ideal trinket setup is Darkmoon Card: Greatness (str obviously) and the Bandit's Insiginia. All-around awesome for everything.
Hello, sorry to intrude but I've decided to try out frost spec for the first time today and after testing for a while (granted, only on dummies in org, will test in raid tomorrow) I realised that my howling blast is outperforming obliterate by a large margin. Yet when checking wws logs of raids, I see other dk's oblit is superior in damage output to howling blast. I know that at the moment, HB is still on a cooldown, but I've been thinking and don't see why it's hitting harder (I am using IT, oblit and ghoul glyphs at the moment, my armory is here.
I hope I haven't missed something important, as I only skimmed over the previous pages of this discussion.
Hello, sorry to intrude but I've decided to try out frost spec for the first time today and after testing for a while (granted, only on dummies in org, will test in raid tomorrow) I realised that my howling blast is outperforming obliterate by a large margin. Yet when checking wws logs of raids, I see other dk's oblit is superior in damage output to howling blast. I know that at the moment, HB is still on a cooldown, but I've been thinking and don't see why it's hitting harder (I am using IT, oblit and ghoul glyphs at the moment, my armory is here.
I hope I haven't missed something important, as I only skimmed over the previous pages of this discussion.
The problem with death rune mastery is that you use frost/unholy runes for oblit. These would be turned into death runes...which you use for oblit. In the end, it doesn't really get you anything
So I've been raiding and dancing along happily with the common 17/54 frost build and I love it. But then, I wanted more. After some playing around, I found that by removing some 'oh crap' talents and tundra stalker I could get this build:
Now, I know. 'No tundra stalker??' This frightened me too. But I thought maybe the increased strength (8%) Attack power (10%) and expertise (6 instead of 5) would even it out along with giving the raid another crazy buff. I imagined my melee hits would probably improve at the cost of my spells (which becomes problematic against high armor targets)
So I tested it out and found myself sitting at 1859dps on a lvl 80 dummy. Not bad I thought, but I could definitely feel TS's absence. My big numbers just weren't as big as they used to be. And after some chat on the WoW forums, I decided to go back. So I go back to 17/54 and have at it on the dummy.
1804...
Confused, I decided to come here. Was this just a fluke? I've never really ran number tests like this and I'm sure I probably screwed something up (I picked the two reports that were closest in damage dealt and time).
But my skewed numbers or not I wanted to know what you all thought about this talent choice. Thanks!
That's not a bad talent tree. I might switch my DPS-spec to that. Mark of blood could help the tank on top of my physical heavy raid not having an enhancement shaman in it. I'll be able to provide both 20% haste and 10% attack power to the entire raid.
12/19/08, 1:00 AM
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