I applaud your sarcasm and contributions to this thread EwokChilli!

To bad people dont want to spend the time reading the rest of the thread, unlike some of us
They need to accept that even with the Obliterate Glyph (v.2) plague strike and blood plague isnt worth having on in the Frost/Blood Spec.

Now what I wanted to test if Icy touch and several other diseases were on a raid target... what would the dps of just saving runes for Obliterate and BLood Strike look like?

Would it be worth picking up Epidemic from 6 or 7 points in Unholy? and would it: (concerning the 3 or 6 second extention of Frost Fever and Blood Plague(if applicable)) Still show the uselessness of Plague strike and Blood plague? Extend the current rotation to add in another Obliterate and Frost Strike(or 2)?

The problem is that the front page post does not often get updated, and the PS rotation is still listed on the front page. As for icy touch, I'm fairly certain the consensus is that A: what else are you going to spend that one frost rune leftover in your rotation for, and B: icy touch hits pretty hard brah so why would you not want to use it. The points are probably better spent in blood.

To me it seems like you haven't read the thread.

A) your point about epidemic. In ANY frost rotation, you use IT at least once. You SHOULD be using it a bit more. Why? because IT = 25 RP with the glyph and spec. That means that if you use the 6x IT rotation you're generating 150 RP from IT alone. Granted when done right it's spread out over two 10 second cycles. If you do the IT OB BS OB rotation you're generating 150 RP from IT mixed with OB's over two 10 second cycles (assuming 4 piece t7) and an additional 20 RP. With the 6x IT rotation you generate 228 RP over 20 seconds (including butchery), and with IT OB BS OB you generate 178 RP over 20 seconds (including butchery). 6x IT then allows for 228/32 = 7 FS's in 20 seconds. The other allows 5.5 in 20 seconds, and compensates for the loss of DPS with more Ob's.

So as far as using PS and then doing an Ob/BS rotation, it depends on your answer to this question:

Is a
IT PS BS BS OB FSx2

OB OB OB FSx2

rotation, with 820% weapon damage + 2150 + 1404 from diseases

better then

IT OB BS OB FS x3

IT OB BS OB FS x3

rotation, with 940% weapon damage + 2450 ?

lets calculate that with a low base weapon damage and not including crits.

1000 min, 1000 max weapon damage

1000x820 = 8200 + 2150 + 1404 = 11754 not including disease ticks and IT

1000x9.4 = 9400 + 2450 = 11850 not including disease ticks and IT

so even at that subpar damage level, with no crit involved, the better rotation is the one discussed millions of times in this thread. If you include KM and HB and Crits, the second one pulls even further ahead, because of how much better it scales.


edit: forgot to mention that you end up losing 9% OB/BS crit and a bunch of attack power/2% damage to spec 7 points into unholy.



So to answer your question in short (TL;DR) No, you are wrong.

Khaosknight,

I did not make a statement that a rotation with Epidemic would be better than a rotation as the current Frost/Blood spec. Nor did I mention the ITx6 rotation... I was simply asking how good a rotation may be if one had Epidemic. So you're wrong because I wasnt right or wrong to begin with.\

For the most part I wanted the investigation of a

IT OBL BS OBL FS OBL FS FS FS (or a derivative of) rotation with epidemic (1 or 2).. in blood pres... with 1 death rune

Since I do support the theory of the viability of an epidemic (1 or 2) rotation as Frost/Blood/Unholy than any Frost/Blood or Frost/Blood/Unholy rotations with Plague Strike.

I think I understand what you are trying to do, but I don't think it will work, due mainly to rune cooldowns. What I think you are trying to do (basically) is to do the "IT - OB - BS - OB" cycle, but add an extra OB and make it a cycle and a half of rune cooldowns (so you do your cycle twice in 3 refreshes, rather than 2 as normal). This is why I think it won't work:

0: BDFFUU ->IT
1.5: BDXFUU ->OB
3: BDXXXU ->BS
4.5: XDXXXU ->OB
6: XXXXXX
7.5:
9:
10.5: XXFXXX (cd from IT)
12: XXFFUX ->OB (cd from OB)
13.5: DXFXXX ->IT (cd from BS) (with epidemic, you still have your disease up here, without it, you didn't).
15: DBXXXU ->OB (cd from OB)
16.5: XBXXXX ->BS
18: XXXXXX
19.5:XXXXXX
21:XXXXXX

It is possible you have some way of staggering rune cooldowns in mind, but it is not immediately obvious to me, and I think the 7 points in unholy are likely wasted compared to in blood anyway.

You're using 8 runes in one rotation, I'm not sure what exactly you are trying to do. And that rotation doesn't even include plague strike, which makes epidemic redundant, since any frost build will use ITx1 at least once per 10 seconds.
with your rotation and blood presence you would have this as your rune refresh:

0.00 BT
0.00 IT
1.50 OB
3.00 BS
4.50 OB
<95 RP with 4piece t5, 97 RP with butchery)
6.00 FS
7.50 FS
9.00 FS
10.00 Blood Rune
11.50 Frost + Unholy Rune
13.00 Death
14.50 Frost + Unholy

So with your rotation you'd have a solid 2.5 seconds every cycle of no damage. not to mention further rune clipping as you progress...

11.50 Ob
13.00 anything after this is pushed 2 seconds back every swap.


So still, epidemic is useless.

Point: deep frost subspecs into blood. Always. If you ARE going to do the unholy route, you lose some AP and such but gain necrosis, and BCB, which I'd be interested in seeing how that increases DPS, assuming you still use a

IT OB BS OB

BS OB IT OB

rotation, since the 6x IT rotation can't be used without 13 points in blood.

@Melizande
You don't see 17/54 in the top dps pst because they're all 21/50.

The ITx6 rotation is better for people with high AP but a bad weapon.

@Khaosknight
If you're REALLY stringent on not wanting any clipping on your rotation, then OB OB FS (IT BS) Dump is the rotation to use, but after you get enough RP generation (IT Glyph + 4pc T7) then you'll constantly be going over 10 seconds and your runes will have plenty of time to refresh anyways without having to start each fight with 2 diseaseless OBs. i believed the favored frost rotation atm (with 4 pc) is IT BS FS OB FS OB Dump, which will always net you 7-8 abilities per rotation (not that it's a bad thing).

I assume you're referring to the 21/50 that stretches it just to get one point out of Veteran (which to me feels like a bit of a minmaxing preference) — feels a bit wasteful to me, if only because I don't see the point in either DRM or Rune Tap if you're using a strike build. You'd be turning Unholy and Frost runes into Unholy and Frost Runes. I can see why you spec that way for a 6x IT though.

I'm fairly new to this spec/build (orig unholy/tanking) so bear with me or just curse me, either way is fine.

I'm trying to 21/50/0 spec listed, and yea, as the above poster stated, the reach for 2 expertise and about 20str seems kind of wasted, but maybe thats just me. My post is more around rotation. I've tried several from this forum and seem to be finding IT fall off before i get the cycle done (usually by less than 2 sec, but still). I am using the IT->BS->OB->BS->OB-> dump till runes back up.

Is this completely wrong? Am I going about this the right way? I don't think the ITx6 Spec is for me since I have a 203dps Weapon, But I guess I got lost some 20 pages into here with a lot of math that I probably won't ever understand.

17/50/0 are the really mandatory Points, but there is nothing in reach where you can get really any dps increase out of the last 4 Points, so most people here came to the conclusion using 3 "filler" somewhere in the bloodtree to get at least 1 Point in votw (2% strength and 2 expertise is for just 1 point not that bad actually...).

Of course you can without any real DPS decrease put the last 4 Point somewhere in the frosttree, but there are no talents left which would be any increase to your dps.

@royaljester

would be a seven rune rotation which is not really doing any good. It should be (as stated in this thread already some dozen times...):
(Bloodtap) IT - BS - OB - OB with FSs inbetween whenever you have enough rp to do so and HB on rime proccs.

Bloodtapping before you start is always strictly worse than hitting it just after the first BS. This allows you to get UA up, 1 IT, 2 OB, and 1 BS during the first set of runes.

Well, you don't HAVE to make your first rotation the recycled rotation. You could just do IT BS OB BS (UA Macro) (only 5 runes) the first time around then do the normal rotation afterwards. Don't get hung up on doing the rotation and just try to think what's the most beneficial use of your GCDs and Abilities. While you can BT before you start the rotation, it's much better to use it for either UA or an additional IT.

I don't think UA instead of 1 OB or even UA+IT instead OB is a dps increase. Actually i think doing as many OBs as possible IS the most beneficial use of the runes...

UA, as it stands, is a 1-2% (ballpark, 50 dps) increase in damage if used on CD so it's definitely no worse than a decent trinket and is probably just as good or better than 90% of trinkets out there.

Now, with that said, abuse UA as much as possible before it gets changed to the shield / block button that is noted in the preliminary 3.1 notes; while frost tanking is getting a few slight buffs (more points for additional utility while tanking), I think frost dps will take a slight hit unless OB/HB get better disease scaling (rather than a base damage nerf and additional damage buff to bring it back to baseline).

When you BT with a blood rune ready and a death rune cooling down, the death rune is instantly refreshed and the blood rune turns into a death rune. This is not a bug, and you do not gain an extra rune. BT simply does half of what it says in the tooltip to each rune.

That is my line of thinking, for the most part. Until I stop seeing people mention ITx6 as an option and start talking about it as "highest frost DPS spec", I'm probably going to stick to my IT -> OB -> OB -> BS -> FS rotation. It feels like the better option for someone in 4/5 set swinging an Armageddon. Naturally though I'm waiting to be told differently so I can go back to playtesting. I'm always looking to improve my numbers.

This is actually posted in the very...very first post of this thread. But I'll repost it because I'm nice.

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

The above is a strike heavy build for 17/54.

I recently heard a rumor that KM proc'd on misses and dodges so I decided to run a test to confirm/deny this.
This is the results of my tests.


Each test was conducted for 80 minutes on a heroic target dummy.

DW PPM
http://i95.photobucket.com/albums/l1...109_123517.jpg

DW stats Naked
5% haste (talents)
Axe skill 270/400

PPM
Cinderglacier: .66
Fallen Crusader: .34
KM: 1.67


2H PPM
http://i95.photobucket.com/albums/l1...109_140204.jpg

2h stats
Hit capped
5% haste talented
-2% dodge
2h mace skill 400/400


PPM
Fallen Crusader: 1.23
KM: 5.06


Understanding the results.

KM is 5 PPM
5% haste yields 5% more white atks and therefore 5% more PPM
1.05 * 5 = 5.25 PPM


DW investigated
DW misses 48.9% and is dodged 19.4% for a total of 68.3% miss.
1 - .683 = .317

31.7% chance to hit

.317 * 5.25 PPM = 1.664 PPM

If you compare that to the test, 1.67 KM procs it is almost identical.


2H investigated.
2H does not miss but is dodged 3.8%, sry I missed that in the photo.
96.2% chance to hit

.962 * 5.25 PPM = 5.051 PPM

If you compare that to the test, 5.06

Once again you can clearly see that it is almost identical.


PS: Yes I know the supposed expertise dodge cap is 6.5%, but I am not interested in the theoretical in this test.


Conclusion:
It is easily clear that dodges and misses DO NOT PROC KM from these results.
I know this is not a surprising result for me or others, but I was trying to be as thorough as possible with this test and not be bias.


DW FC PPM
.317 * X = .34 / 1.05
X = 1.021 PPM

DW CG PPM
.317 * Y = .66 / 1.05
Y = 1.983 PPM

Pretty much Identical to 1 PPM and 2 PPM respectively.

edit: I misread your screenshot. 31.7% sounds low for base DW MH hit chance. If only you had screenshotted the melee breakdown, not BCB. I'm hoping you didn't make the same mistake I just did -- your 31.7, 48.9 and 19.4 numbers appear in the BCB breakdown.

What are the current stat values for 21/50 2h frost?
I've been looking and looking and can't seem to find them.
Sorry. ><

...

These stat values are starting to be bit vague sort of. 2h frost has been stated for quite some time to scale best with gear. But looking for example those values in previous post and latest estimates for 2h unholy, unholy is scaling lot better due str. Frost has lot higher weapon dps scaling but will not match unholys str scaling due available itemization.