If you do it correctly, it does not cost a frost rune, but a death rune. Ideally, it is done after both frost and blood runes are down and macrod to blood tap. Spam it and you will get a death rune and cast UA instantly because both are not on the GCD.

The macro I use is this:
#showtooltip Blood Tap
/cast [modifier:ctrl] Blood Tap; Blood Tap
/cast [nomodifier] Unbreakable Armor


You don't really need to worry about UA's cooldown as both abilities have a 1 minutes cooldown. The control modifier is just so that I can precast it before a fight and save hotkey room.


Edit: Also, since when is 2hand spec white damage only, sounds like misinformation to me. Can someone confirm or deny this? I am of the understanding that the talent raises weapon damage, therefore, all white and strike attacks.

You're misunderstanding a few things here. You don't use a Frost Rune to activate UA, you use a Death rune, and macro it with Blood Tap so that you can use it without interrupting your rotation (Blood Tap ends your current GCD). You personally may not need 2 expertise from VotTW, but that doesn't mean you should discount it as it frees up gear itemization for other stats, and if we're min/maxing that's a valuable thing (certainly more valuable than spell hit for a Frost build). I personally moved points out of TS into VotTW because I'm far from exp capped, and dodges are a very very bad thing. You should also rethink Butchery, the extra 4 RP per 10 seconds takes your total RP generation per cycle from 95 to 99, which takes you from 2/3 to 3 Frost Strikes every rotation.

I'm still not sold on the Ghoul. Without NotD, your ghoul becomes a gamble. If it's up you'll possibly do a little more dps than a 21/50 build, but without the avoidance and cooldown reducing one mistake and your dps is decreasing substantially. Granted, I don't have a ton of experience with pet control so I'm sure some people are gonna be better at keeping him up than me, but there are still a lot of cases where unavoidable AOE damage is gonna take him down.

I have lost track of what each of these builds are entailing exactly. Are any of them in unholy presence? When I first posted about a 20/51 variation here it was pretty much written off but now 44/27 is kind of what I was saying or are you not in unholy presence? If you are in unholy, do you have any spare globals?

I looked through the last dozen pages and couldn't find any mention, but I apologize if this topic has been discussed already:

The build

I propose to use the DRM alongside BotN in Unholy presence to make an odd rotation, with 2 Obliterates, 2 Blood Strikes, and 6 Icy Touches per 20 seconds - that's enough rp ( 80+150 RP) and free gcd for 7 Frost Strikes each rotation, with a roughly 65% chance of a rime proc each 20s.

It performs well on the spreadsheet I'm using (dr_AllCOM3's), but I'm not comfortable enough with 2h Frost theory to be authoritative.
It's close to one of the standard (as I understand it) builds.. and it depends on the Obliterate set bonus. Can one of the Frost spreadsheet masters plug me in, and make sure I'm not using mine wrong? I have it beating both standard rotations fairly handily (by almost 10%).

please forgive my ignorance but when you are using IT/BS/OB/OB rotation do you depend on the pre-combat blood tap death rune bug? cause if not, i don't see it is happening since you will always have 1 blood run left out

Long time EJ reader here.

A couple notes about this thread:

The OP appears to be MIA. It would be nice to have this thread reclaimed by someone active and cleaned up (especially the first post) to reflect 3.0.8. Can we ask the moderators do that? I've been an avid reader of the enhancement shaman dps thread in the past, and the thread owner was excellent about keeping the first post somewhat current with the recommended builds. Can't have the shamans putting us to shame, can we?

Secondly, (or in the meantime) can we get a summary of rotations/presence/runeforge/glyph per spec? We're getting a lot of questions clogging up the thread that are simply a result of an aging page 1. I'm sure the veteran DK testers / posters are sick of answering the same question every 5 pages or so. If we get a proper summary, we could PM the moderators with what SHOULD be our page 1 content. Pages 20-32 are a great read right now, but could easily be condensed.

For example, we could list the 2 specs ( 17/54 -> 21/50 blood subspec and 44/27 UH subspec), with what we've sorted out so far. This would save us a lot of repeat posts and get us back to the valuable, information packed threads that the EJ community is famous for.

And lastly, my very own question -- is the IT spam rotation being proposed / tested simply a reaction to bugged OB, or is it something the proponents would use once OB RP generation is fixed?

Thanks for all the valuable posts so far -- I need a raiding spec tonight, and it looks like I have 2 great choices (still not entirely sure of which I'm going to use, and which rotation/glyphs will be best).

Absolutely agree. The crit rate on Obliterate and the set bonuses flat out trumps Icy Touches for 2H frost, easily.

Now, what about the new Necrosis? Does 5% strength, a much longer frost fever, a slightly stronger ghoul, and 20% shadow damage on auto-attacks trump 5% crit to all attacks?

Having seen the new Frost Strike in action, I don't think that Gargoyle will be an acceptable use of Runic Power for Frost DPS. The major question breaks down to the value of Necrosis, assuming BiS [Betrayer of Humanity], and at least 5.6 AP buffed for 25 mans.

I could see the longer disease timers coming in very handy for chaining massive obliterates, but I think one would almost have to add blood plague, and only use Howling Blast on Rime procs or when out of range.

Talk me down. Is Bladed Armor and +4% strike / auto-damage better? Or is it going to be 18sec diseases, 5% STR, and 20% auto-attack damage as shadow?


edit: Spec for reference

It doesn't depend on any bugs. The BS generates one death rune per rotation, and the second Obliterate consumes the death rune generated by the last rotation. The net result is that if you start with BDFFUU, this rotation will have runes come off cd as DBFFUU, and as such becomes self-perpetuating.

Someone feel free to chime in if I muck this up, and to fill in the unholy subspec variants as I know nothing about them.

But the blood subspec builds should be something like:
17/54: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft (with the caveat that this has a lot of utility filler at the top, the 4 additional points in frost that differ from 21/50 have pretty minor dps impact and can probably be shifted elsewhere)
21/50: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
27/44: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Pre-3.0.8 I'm pretty sure all of these were Blood Presence all the time. I don't know if glyph and HoW changes now mean we have so much RP that the FS dump now clips into the rune's coming off cd (and it's hard to tell with oblit bugged). I'm inclined to think Blood Presence is still going to be the better option, but that's a gut reaction rather than evidence based.

It's always in blood presence unless the post specifically says "unholy presence" in it. The only time unholy is going to come up is with IT spam builds, which a few people have posted but nobody has cared enough to theorycraft.

You either carry over a death rune, use UA a minute in when Blood Tap refreshes, or you simply IT/PS/BS/BS/O your first set of runes and drop into the rotation the next time around.

The proponents of the IT spam rotations are suggesting them for general use and not in response to bugged Oblit. IT spam is actually pretty strong, so it's potentially workable but aside from somebody up the page running the numbers through doc's spreadsheet, nobody has theorycrafted them. Feotheras isn't interested in IT spam specs and while I could theorycraft it, the variation doesn't interest me because I'm pretty set on my sub-optimal 23/48/0 offtanking build.

As for a summary:

(edit builds in post above) in Blood Presence. Glyphs are always IT, Oblit, FS. Rune is Fallen Crusader. Rotation is IT/BS/O/O/dump+Rime. Frost Strike dumping is higher dps than the average of the rest of the rotation, so you spam FS till empty. With 4t7, that should be 3 FS per set of runes. There's a 23/48/0 variant on 21/50 that takes 2 ponts from Tundra Stalker and puts them in VotTW, which is a trivial dps loss (under 1% if I'm reading Feotheras' numbers correctly) for more health/expertise. The 27 blood variant is lower personal dps but provides the AP buff to the raid if you don't have it otherwise.

The 0/44/27 build people are talking about works exactly the same but with a permanent ghoul pet. Summon the gargoyle during a bloodlust and FC proc with your trinkets up if possible.

if your melee attack accords for 30% of overall dps, 20% of that will be 6% increase
if strikes accords for 80% of overall dps, 4% of that 3.2% increase

bladed armor gives about 500 AP in raid, 5% str of about 1500 str(im kinda counting FC here) is about 150 AP, so that's about 300 AP difference, which is about 10% of total AP difference

let's say AP has around 70% contribution to your overall dps, so that's about 7% difference between bladed armor and 5% str. so you are looking at about 7% difference here (without considering the extended time on diseases)

the more i look at this, the more i think this build is better

as for the 17/54 build, i completely agree than any more than 17 points in blood its gonna lower your dps than allocating those points elsewhere, though putting 54 in frost might end doing the same, i was leaning towards a 17/51/3 build, with 3 points for more deathcoil dmg, before you flame, keep in mind that frost strike is a melee ability, so in fights like sapphiron the ability to use icy touchs, and dump that RP into more powerful deathcoils could end up in more dps, than using those points in useless talents at least for a couple of fights.

I looked at every post for the last 150 carefully, and none match anything like what I listed. I saw one person who mentioned a build that had DRM, but nobody posted an unholy presence rotation. Could you link me to the post you're referring to? If it's been discussed, I'd probably find that discussion useful..

You cannot 'trump' dps. The crit rate on obliterate is higher, and obliterate does more damage, but that doesn't imply that
1.15 * (4xOblit+2xBS+2xIT+4xFS) / 21.0 > (2xOblit+6xIT+2xBS+7xFS+.6HB) / 20.0. If you have actual math to post, or a decent spreadsheet to plug in, or a link to someone else's math, please let me know. I am not interested in off-the-cuff statements like this one, that don't provide any evidence one way or the other.

Seraphthrone: Given that teir one in unholy tree is complete filler to a frost spec (given standard rotation), you are effectively giving up 3% crit, 2% str (lets ignore the stam and extra expertise) in exchange for longer disease durations. Given that the first spell cast in each segment of the rotation is a IT, I don't believe the longer lasting diseases are that helpful. Unless there is some logical way to at least weave PS into the rotation, I do not believe this will result in a beneficial change.

Zergote: I'd rather take put the points into increasing the range on icy touch, to make it easier to cast on Saph/Heigan type fights. In general though i'd strongly prefer to have 2% str/stam and the increase in expertise on a regular basis, as opposed to a somewhat weak spell with situational benefit.

@Janraea:

The only possible way to do an IT spam rotation and manage to have GCDs for any RP dumps is in unholy, so that post may very well be what I'm talking about.

Hopefully this isn't "cross posting" but since Howling Blast still has a cooldown, I uploaded the super-simple 'addon' I wrote to Curse: ReasonRime.

This addon should replace the '/cancelaura Freezing Fog' line in your Howling Blast macro (Change to: '/script ReasonRime()'). This function will only cancel Freezing Fog if:
a) You have the runes to cast Howling Blast (this checks death runes)
and
b) The spell is off cooldown (slightly broken right now for obvious reasons)

Seems like the Frost-dps thread is best for this.

Alright, I tried out 21/50 with Glyph of OB, Glyph of Frost strike and Glyph of IT.

My WWS -
Wow Web Stats

I failed apparently, only 3.8k DPS not including army.

Now this post will be about killing machine procs.

On patchwerk I had 8 procs, the fight lasted 2 minutes and 45 seconds.

So that is 3.265 PPM.

Does anyone else have some WWS so we can get a solid number on the PPM?

It does seem five points for only 3.265 procs per minute is terrible.

Indeed, all 2H spec talents are a global modifier to your damage. The way you can see it is the 4% modifier on your weapon damage, but it affects all strike and spell abilities.


A note about deep Frost specs, if you don't get Ebon plague (13% more magic damage) and don't have a Balance druid, another DK needs to get it or a Warlock loses his curse of agony.

Here is my wws from last night's Patchwerk Wow Web Stats

Seems I had 16 killing machine procs,and the fight lasted 2 minutes and 55 seconds.

Shows I have 5246 dps,but that is including Army of the Dead used as well.(17/54/0 specced)

That build looks pretty solid actually, but now we have to debate the value of 18 second diseases over the extra 3% crit. To me, it seems like 18 second Frost Fever trumps 3% crit.

I'd respectfully disagree, your rotation is going to have IT in it (and therefore renewing FF constantly) so to me the 3% crit is probably more desirable?

It is going to have IT, but if I can drop one IT for an additional OB every other rotation, due to having to refresh my diseases less, will the damage of that extra OB be worth it over the 1 chance at 15% rime proc, and 3% crit overall?