I have a hard time justifying perma-pet with no NotD. I've seen what the Unholy in my raid goes through with his pet right now. The thing is more of burden than a help most of the time. If you were going to go into Unholy I'd probably do this: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft Garg, even post nerf, is still potent. The change to corpse explosion makes it a great AoE and combined with the HB cooldown removal would turn frost into a mean AoE machine when required.
I may be off base on Garg being a good substitute for frost strike for 30 seconds, and if so I'd just move that point into Deathchill.
It's a hard comparison to make easily for sure. It's not just moving some points and keeping everything the same. It's a rotation change, including adding plague strike back in.
I have a hard time justifying perma-pet with no NotD. I've seen what the Unholy in my raid goes through with his pet right now. The thing is more of burden than a help most of the time. If you were going to go into Unholy I'd probably do this: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft Garg, even post nerf, is still potent. The change to corpse explosion makes it a great AoE and combined with the HB cooldown removal would turn frost into a mean AoE machine when required.
I may be off base on Garg being a good substitute for frost strike for 30 seconds, and if so I'd just move that point into Deathchill.
It's a hard comparison to make easily for sure. It's not just moving some points and keeping everything the same. It's a rotation change, including adding plague strike back in.
Just let excel do the math for me and, while going 2/50/19 comes close, it doesn't pass 21/50 (Raidbuffed it falls about 100 dps short at my stats). With ghoul, it might tie 21/50 but then 21/50 could just use it's ghoul to keep ahead *shrug*. Unless its a perma ghoul, it really isn't worth talking about a ton though, IMO.
The only thing that could make it pull ahead right now would be Tundra Stalker affecting BCB and Necrosis as that would be a non-trivial increase.
I am not your personal Frost Deathknight knowledge base. If you have a simple question, ask in the simple questions thread; if you have a more esoteric, specific, or complicated question, ask in the spec-appropriate thread.
My PM, WoWmail, and, especially, chat boxes are NOT the appropriate places for these questions.
I haven't seen many posts in here from people with comparable gear to me (not saying that i have the BEST gear) that are *currently* frost spec.
I didn't even want to attempt frost with out Betrayer equipped, and now that I have it, and have read through this thread it seems that I wasn't well informed on frost.
I feel that frost will be getting a boost in 3.0.8 and would like to get into the spec to "practice". my question is: how weapon dependent are these specs? seems to me that oblit would be a pretty strong attack with a good 2h wep. and the 4pc T7 set bonus just makes it easier to gain RP for FS dumps.
I'd like to go deep frost, but after reading up I'm pretty hesitant, I don't want to drop DPS, but I am tired of fighting other unholy DK's for my ebon plaugue.
how much of a dps loss is there between 17/54/0 (or 21/50/0) and the standard 17/0/54 unholy build?
From the PTR, Killing Machine was changed to a PPM making it a more effective talent. I still think its heavily bloated and should be dropped to 3 points at the very least, but based on these changes it would be worthwhile to reexamine KM as a potential talent investment.
From GC:
Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler
Killing Machine is a "ppm" now or a proc per minute. That means it will proc 5 times a minute with 5 ranks, depending on your weapon speed. We generally use ppm when we do not want players to gravitate towards faster weapons with the sole purpose of improving proc rates.
Killing Machine now is based on autoattack hits, not crits. Overall the random element will decrease, but it won't greatly benefit faster weapons. It will still benefit dual wield, just not as much.
If you can list your base stats and link to your talent spec, I'd be happy to math them over to the "proper" frost values and give you a prediction via my new shiny updated spreadsheet (shameless plug ftw!). For better or worse, you have to do a bunch of converting to get near your real base stats and then tweak a little to get them aligned properly for any of the frost builds as I want numbers off of your character sheet rather than start from a naked lv80 and go from there (way simpler to do the former, lemme tell ya).
Of course, if you'd like results faster... You could always do the prep work yourself and put the results into the sheet. The GoogleDocs version of the spreadsheet is in the dps spreadsheets thread and the prep would entail taking your character sheet and removing the effects of any blood talents that would automatically be calculated into your stats (Vot3W's str/stam/expertise is a good example) and then editing in any automatic increases from the new build you want to test. Yes, it's annoying to do but I'm going for accuracy over user friendliness (and am damn accurate at the moment).
And yes, there's a ton of bad vibes about frost "DPS" right now because frost is "the tanking spec" (translation: people are idiots and frost is shockingly competitive from what I've seen). It's tempting to tell people I'm Blood at times and have them figure out later that I'm Frost (or never figure out).
Last edited by Feorthas : 01/09/09 at 5:18 PM.
I am not your personal Frost Deathknight knowledge base. If you have a simple question, ask in the simple questions thread; if you have a more esoteric, specific, or complicated question, ask in the spec-appropriate thread.
My PM, WoWmail, and, especially, chat boxes are NOT the appropriate places for these questions.
I was hoping that I had finaly gotten the weapon to "go frost", but I'm currently one of the top dps in the guild and I like it that way, if you know what i mean .
Doh. Fail on my part: I need the base DPS / Speed of the weapon. I'll just wowhead it.
And I didn't hit armory b/c I post from an iphone from 9-5; it chokes on massive script pages like at
Armory/Talent sheets (but I live with the latter) :-/.
I am not your personal Frost Deathknight knowledge base. If you have a simple question, ask in the simple questions thread; if you have a more esoteric, specific, or complicated question, ask in the spec-appropriate thread.
My PM, WoWmail, and, especially, chat boxes are NOT the appropriate places for these questions.
Doh. Fail on my part: I need the base DPS / Speed of the weapon. I'll just wowhead it.
And I didn't hit armory b/c I post from an iphone from 9-5; it chokes on massive script pages like at
Armory/Talent sheets (but I live with the latter) :-/.
I thought all 2h dps knew this one
Betrayer of Humanity
Binds when picked up
AxeTwo Hand
606-910 DmgSpeed 3.40
(222.9 damage per second)
+66 Agility
+121 Stamina
Durability: 0 / 120
Requires Level 80
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 87
Equip: Improves haste rating by 57
Equip: Increases attack power by 226.
I am not your personal Frost Deathknight knowledge base. If you have a simple question, ask in the simple questions thread; if you have a more esoteric, specific, or complicated question, ask in the spec-appropriate thread.
My PM, WoWmail, and, especially, chat boxes are NOT the appropriate places for these questions.
I realize that 17/50/0 is the standard build, but just out of curiousity, is there any actual DPS gain from those last 4 points? I've been considering switching it to 21/50/0 and trying out rune tap + a point in Vo3W... any thoughts?
I realize that 17/50/0 is the standard build, but just out of curiousity, is there any actual DPS gain from those last 4 points? I've been considering switching it to 21/50/0 and trying out rune tap + a point in Vo3W... any thoughts?
Re-read pages 20 and 21. There are more than a few posts debating the value of TS vs. Vo3W. The answer is apparently 'depends on your gear'.
Re-read pages 20 and 21. There are more than a few posts debating the value of TS vs. Vo3W. The answer is apparently 'depends on your gear'.
The answer for almost everything is "Depends on your gear"; however, in my opinion, it will be very hard for 6% Str to overcome 10% Yellow Damage--the extra 0.25% Expertise is about a wash--considering that only about 20-25% of a Frost DK's damage output is white (30%, absolute maximum).
As I mentioned earlier, it's about a 24/pt : 28/pt dps increase for 1 point in Vot3W : TS at a middling gear level and that gap appears to increase as gear gets better.
I am not your personal Frost Deathknight knowledge base. If you have a simple question, ask in the simple questions thread; if you have a more esoteric, specific, or complicated question, ask in the spec-appropriate thread.
My PM, WoWmail, and, especially, chat boxes are NOT the appropriate places for these questions.
The answer for almost everything is "Depends on your gear"; however, in my opinion, it will be very hard for 6% Str to overcome 10% Yellow Damage--the extra 0.25% Expertise is about a wash--considering that only about 20-25% of a Frost DK's damage output is white (30%, absolute maximum).
As I mentioned earlier, it's about a 24/pt : 28/pt dps increase for 1 point in Vot3W : TS at a middling gear level and that gap appears to increase as gear gets better.
I think the comparison is not one of 5/5 Tundra vs 3/3 Vot3W but 5/5 Tundra + 1/3 Vet vs 3/3 Vet and 3/5 Tundra. It is gonna come out very close either way but if you have the expertise you should probably go 5/5 tundra, if you need the extra expertise go 3/3 vet.
Er, maybe to correct myself, my original build had 5/5 TS built into it, I just noticed after the standard points were dropped in, I had 4 "loose" points that didn't really boost my DPS, so the comparison at the time seemed to be Icy Reach + Lichborne + Deathchill vs. Rune Tap + 1/3 Vo3W. And just to check, does RPM really matter? I've been messing around with it, and I currently prefer 3/5 toughness over the 3/3 RPM in the cookie cutter on page one, a little bit of attack power and a tiny bit more versatility involved.
RPM lets you save up enough RP for three consecutive Frost Strikes, although this is only really an issue if you have the Icy Touch Glyph along with the four-piece T7 bonus that grants extra RP after using Obliterate. Even if you do have both of these you can get away with only putting 2 points in Runic Power Mastery assuming you're careful enough not to let your RP overflow.
but i think gargoyle is overall more DPS, plus maybe howling blasts with no cooldown, can replace those obliterates in the first build rotations.
The idea of casting 2 icy touchs with both death runes, its because it does more dmg per rune than OB or HB, thus maximazing your damage per rune will maximize your DPS but this is ONLY if you dont nerf your rune consumption by doing so (meaning delaying your rotations, example, you could take rune mastery and blood of the north, and on a OB OB BS BS rotation end up with 6 death runes, but if you cast 6 icy touchs + dump runic power or a rime proc, your runes will be up before your finish delaying your rotation and nerfing your dps)
i dunno if this spec will be competitive with the nerf to gargoyle without night of the dead, but i think its worth a try.
BTW there are another couple talents that play some sinergy like blood cake, with icy talons
but i think gargoyle is overall more DPS, plus maybe howling blasts with no cooldown, can replace those obliterates in the first build rotations.
The idea of casting 2 icy touchs with both death runes, its because it does more dmg per rune than OB or HB, thus maximazing your damage per rune will maximize your DPS but this is ONLY if you dont nerf your rune consumption by doing so (meaning delaying your rotations, example, you could take rune mastery and blood of the north, and on a OB OB BS BS rotation end up with 6 death runes, but if you cast 6 icy touchs + dump runic power or a rime proc, your runes will be up before your finish delaying your rotation and nerfing your dps)
i dunno if this spec will be competitive with the nerf to gargoyle without night of the dead, but i think its worth a try.
BTW there are another couple talents that play some sinergy like blood cake, with icy talons
Frost/Unholy with gargoyle was not competative pre 3.0.8 why should it be better when gargoyle-dps gets nurfed by about 60%? Especially now when the new FS Glyph will make FS even better the before?
I dont understand the whole Idea of making an OB-less deep frost built since OB is by far the strongest skill frost brings. I generally think blood supports the deep frost builts alot better then anything unholy can provide, change of necrosis doesnt change anything as far as ich can see.
Right now, DW dominates any possible 2H spec because of Killing Machine. The big difference I expected to see between 0/32/39 was incredibly high crit rates on IT and HB. The ridiculous crit rates are there, but the most striking difference is between non-crit attacks:
2Her's average non-crit Scourge Strike: 2880
DWer's average non-crit Howling Blast: 4786
For another comparison, check out these two. Based on autoattack damage I'd guess these two are in comparable gear, and the kill times are similar.
2Her's average non-crit Obliterate: 3173
DWer's average non-crit HB: 3861
Less pronounced difference, but the DWer is still getting 20% more base damage on his primary FU attack. The pattern seems to be that Impurity + HB gives you the most powerful, best scaling FU attack available to any spec. You see similar gains between the DW and 2H unholy DKs at the beginning of the post, comparing their Icy Touch damage. We'd expect the DWer to do ~60% bigger average Icy Touch hits, because of Black Ice and Glacier Rot. Instead he's doing double. He's getting about 500 damage on every Icy Touch from Impurity.
I suspect the power of 0/32/39 has as much to do with how Impurity interacts with the multipliers on IT and HB as it does with DW+Killing Machine. Right now if you're going for Impurity+HB there's no reason not to DW for ridiculous Killing Machine uptime, but Ghostcrawler has implied that DW KM is getting nerfed again. If DW loses its Killing Machine advantage, but the IT glyph change, the IT sigil, and the Howling Blast change all go live, frost/unholy specs are still worth looking at. I'm very interested in seeing how a 0/44/27 2H spec would stack up vs 2H unholy or nerfed dualwield.
Right now, DW dominates any possible 2H spec because of Killing Machine. The big difference I expected to see between 0/32/39 was incredibly high crit rates on IT and HB. The ridiculous crit rates are there, but the most striking difference is between non-crit attacks:
2Her's average non-crit Scourge Strike: 2880
DWer's average non-crit Howling Blast: 4786
For another comparison, check out these two. Based on autoattack damage I'd guess these two are in comparable gear, and the kill times are similar.
2Her's average non-crit Obliterate: 3173
DWer's average non-crit HB: 3861
Less pronounced difference, but the DWer is still getting 20% more base damage on his primary FU attack. The pattern seems to be that Impurity + HB gives you the most powerful, best scaling FU attack available to any spec. You see similar gains between the DW and 2H unholy DKs at the beginning of the post, comparing their Icy Touch damage. We'd expect the DWer to do ~60% bigger average Icy Touch hits, because of Black Ice and Glacier Rot. Instead he's doing double. He's getting about 500 damage on every Icy Touch from Impurity.
I suspect the power of 0/32/39 has as much to do with how Impurity interacts with the multipliers on IT and HB as it does with DW+Killing Machine. Right now if you're going for Impurity+HB there's no reason not to DW for ridiculous Killing Machine uptime, but Ghostcrawler has implied that DW KM is getting nerfed again. If DW loses its Killing Machine advantage, but the IT glyph change, the IT sigil, and the Howling Blast change all go live, frost/unholy specs are still worth looking at. I'm very interested in seeing how a 0/44/27 2H spec would stack up vs 2H unholy or nerfed dualwield.
I am a couple hundred DPS lower against the raid dummy as 44/27 2h right now compared with the normal blood subspec. I think the numbers will be even worse once gargoyle gets nerfed.
I've been trying to figure out how to work Unbreakable Armor into my rotation and was hoping for some advice along those lines. What I usually do know is BT-IT-OB then UA (ensuring that it is not a frost rune used) BS- RP dump and I end up with an unused unholy rune for a rotation. This then happens almost every time I use BT (unless I get lucky and it works out that its up when I already have one death rune in blood, giving me two and making the rotation work again - I end up using a deathrune to BS but then I get a deathrune back so it works). Any suggestions or do most people only use the ability during the "pop all CD's and burn phase" of fights?
What you do is do a normal rune rotation first: IT, BS, OB, OB. Right after that last OB, spam that macro. What will happen is that one of your blood runes that is currently on cooldown will immediatly repop as a death rune. It will then use that death to cast UA.
This macro works well because both abilities are not on the global cooldown. It is also important to do this immediatly after you use your last rune, because if you wait too long, such as using your RP first, then you run the risk of accidentally burning a frost rune to use UA.
So, on a rotation that uses UA in it will look like this: IT, BS, OB, OB, UA macro, FS, FS, FS
I am a couple hundred DPS lower against the raid dummy as 44/27 2h right now compared with the normal blood subspec. I think the numbers will be even worse once gargoyle gets nerfed.
I actually just tested 44/27 using Blood Presence BT--->IT, HB, HB, BS Dump rotation on the PTR and I was going up over 3.1k on the boss target dummy, no gargoyle just Ghoul. With IT, Ghoul and FS Glyphs. That might end up trumping OB rotations depending on what happens with killing machine.
I actually just tested 44/27 using Blood Presence BT--->IT, HB, HB, BS Dump rotation on the PTR and I was going up over 3.1k on the boss target dummy, no gargoyle just Ghoul. With IT, Ghoul and FS Glyphs. That might end up trumping OB rotations depending on what happens with killing machine.
No idea how you did that, cant even figure out how a "perfekt" 2H 0/44/27 would look like, so many frost skills seem not to make sense at all not using ob...maybe you could link how you specced for that test.
No idea how you did that, cant even figure out how a "perfekt" 2H 0/44/27 would look like, so many frost skills seem not to make sense at all not using ob...maybe you could link how you specced for that test.
That is what I tested. I doubt the need for Runic Power Mastery as using HB the RP generation is obviously lower than OB, I never had enough to do over 3 FS's during my dumps. On the other hand you leave yourself the option to use OB in which case with 4 pc, IT Glyph, and Chill to the Grave you would need that extra RP storage.
Also the I am not sure the new gargoyle is worth the point. It was under performing 2 FS's per rotation when I did test it out. In which case that point could be used elsewhere.
What you do is do a normal rune rotation first: IT, BS, OB, OB. Right after that last OB, spam that macro. What will happen is that one of your blood runes that is currently on cooldown will immediatly repop as a death rune. It will then use that death to cast UA.
This macro works well because both abilities are not on the global cooldown. It is also important to do this immediatly after you use your last rune, because if you wait too long, such as using your RP first, then you run the risk of accidentally burning a frost rune to use UA.
So, on a rotation that uses UA in it will look like this: IT, BS, OB, OB, UA macro, FS, FS, FS
How do you OB twice in a row without using BT during the first rotation? IT and BS would leave you with BUUF available - enough for one OB but not two. Using BT and UA at that point would agani leave you with an unholy rune left.
01/09/09, 4:34 PM
.
Similar Threads
