◊ Eej

Frost Strike isn't a spell. It deals frost damage, gains bonus from Ebon Plague/CoE but it's a weapon damage attack that scales with your weapon and AP. It's more advantageous to use Frost Strike with a two hander than anything else.

Ghoul pets need Night of the Dead and several stacks of Corpse Dust to actually be worthwhile. You don't have Night of the Dead.

You also skipped over 10% damage to all spells and abilities and +5 expertise and picked up Endless Winter in a DPS build which is just .

 

GhostRidah

In my opinion if your going frost with DW then HB should be used over OB, until you get a great weapon that can put OB over HB.

 

Hraka

Looking forward to seeing other peoples WWS sheets w/ frost. The one we have to work with now shows HB being quite a bit out in front of OB although without sigil of awareness.

From a H-raid standpoint what are the buffs that would apply to one and not the other?

OB:
Sunder Armor/Expose Armor
Faerie Fire
Blood Frenzy
LotP/Rampage
Hemo (are any rogues gonna raid hemo?)

HB:
CoE/EP/E&M
Moonkin aura/Elemental Oath
Totem of Wrath/Flametongue Totem/Demonic Pact/Imp DS
Misery

Are there any others I'm missing?
At base without any of the above we've seen that HB>OB unless somehow its a boss with 0 armor. Assuming a decent make up hitting most of the categories above which move benefits more? If HB ends up benefiting anywhere near as much as OB then it could be that in the end HB>OB raid buffed.

 

Darkrenown

I assume it's just a tooltip bug, but after finally getting my hands on a glyph of obliterate my oblit tooltip reads:
A brutal instant attack that deals 120% weapon damage plus 350, and an additional 176 bonus damage per disease, but consumes the diseases.

 

Prag

Odd, mine says something very similar. It seems like it adjusts the damage percentage, but not the Disease loss...

Nice to see someone else had an issue getting the Glyph. I was able to buy a stack of Ink of the Sea and the Parchments, but it seemed nobody on my server was able to actually make it.

 

Kalevi

Here's the WWS from last night: Wow Web Stats

Seems Obl was much closer but without the spell damage debuffs from a Boomkin/Unholy DK/Curse of Elements.

 

Zurai

EDIT: Whoops, replied to an old post; wasn't watching the page numbers.

 

Maahk

We haven't been able to get too far into raiding 25s yet, but I've noticed a slight lack of frost DPS as well. Fully raid buffed on 25-man Patchwerk I've been getting about 2800 DPS, vs. our Unholy DK with 185 less AP and 3% less hit at about 2950.

This is with the standard PS>IT>BS>BS>OB>FS; PS>IT>OB>OB>FS with Rime procs and extra RP spent at the ends of the cycle. I couldn't keep it perfect due to miss/dodge, but it was pretty close.

I haven't picked up enchants yet and my gear and rotation have room for improvement, but still doesn't really explain the DPS difference (my stats are still better than his are.)

My armory's here, and his is here. Unfortunately I don't have a WWS available for this fight, but raid comp was about average and was diverse - all classes were represented in DPS, tanks were warriors, 8 healers - 2 priests, 2 druids, 3 shamans, 1 pally.

The most disheartening part of this was that this was his first entry into Naxx and it was pretty clear that he was using a poor rotation (not keeping UB up,) but gargoyle and the ghoul were very significant sources of DPS for him at about 29% of his total (combined.)

Edit: got a WWS, linked at the bottom. What am I doing wrong to lose DPS?

If it weren't for the threat reduction and extra crit from blood, a 0/50/21 with gargoyle might work better than the 17/54/0. Has anyone out there happened to test this type of build?



Also, for Unbreakable Armor - is there any good time to use this? It seems like it would have to be used in the 2nd half of your rotation with death runes up and would cost you an oblit - is it even worth using? It would grant an extra ~200 AP at my gear level. Will 200 AP over 20 seconds gain more DPS than the missing oblit loses?




Edit: Was able to get a WWS. Be gentle - I don't claim to be perfect. Wow Web Stats Any help is appreciated - this is my first DPS character - I've tanked and healed raids in the past.

I do have Sigil of Awareness, so I hope it's at least helpful on the HB vs. Oblit topic. My HBs crit significantly less often than Oblits did, and crit for significantly less damage on average. My average non-crit Oblit was also significantly higher damage than average non-crit HB, so at least for me at my gear level and in my raid it looks like Oblit wins out.

 

bionh

Heres one of Abom Wing + Frostie Lair:

WWS

6th on Patch - 3540
6th on Grob - 2752
1st on Gluth - 3734 (howling blast is the best aoe in the game, bar none)
6th on Thaddius - 6014 (400 less than last week, perhaps we had some deaths or I played poorly)
4th on Sapphiron - 2256
8th on KT - 2718

I have the Sigil of Awareness. This is with the tri-spec 14/50/7

Last week Abom Wing:

WWS

5th on Patch - 3558
5th on Grob - 2540
2nd on Gluth - 3167
3rd on Thaddius - 6452

Hopefully that helps set a base-line for the tri-spec.

Patchwerk DPS seemed to stagnate, possibly due to extremely bad crit luck on obliterate in week 2 (59% week2 vs 68% week1)

 

EwokChilli

Maahk
On the last page or two, we figured out that (especially after seeing your numbers) 1 OB > 1 BS+ 1 PS. Therefore you may want to change your rotation to IT->BS->OB->OB->dump. With IT glyphed and the +5 RP to IT and OB, you'll hit 2-3 FS nearly all rotations, or 1-2 FS and keep up Horn o Winter. Changing your rotation to this will make it almost impossible to get out of sync.

Another idea is to try Cinderglacier for the +20% to frost, because on your FS (especially the 7k+ ones) will be pretty hot. You don't even have to change your rotation for it.

Obviously, you'd benefit from a little more +hit, you're numbers show that.

I'm a fan of 23/48, get Vet of 3rd War for easy str+expertise. But I could definitely see how like, a 3/45/23 would also work... hrm... having Chill of the Grave and Dirge seems really good in hind sight... especially with Gargoyle. You'd be wracking up IT(25)->BS(10)->OB(25)->OB(25), for 85 per rotation... i need to try this out myself now. But you don't take epidemic because you're refreshing IT at the beginning of the rotation anyways.

For AE, you just swap out BS for Pest and one OB for HB. Ez.

I personally never find a good time for Unbreakable Armor. It always messes up the rotation. I don't even like it for tanking.

Edited because I didn't feel like multiposting.

So, with a 3/45/23, where you're rocking Dirge and Chill of the Grave, after your first rotation, before dumping, you could Empower to jump up to 110 RP, pop the gargoyle, and by the time you've refinished your rotation (6 seconds after GCD from gargoyle), you'd still be at 60-48(gargoyle)+85 = 97 RP. Since you make 85 RP per rotation and Gargoyle only eats 80 per 10 secs, you can keep Gargoyle up for the full duration (or until it croaks).

Hopefully some of this will help.

 

Solithaira

@ Maahk

As best as I can tell, you were both only in one fight (patchwerk try 4). I'm not an expert at breaking up WWS, but I'm starting to learn and here are some observations:

The fight lasted for 4min 06 seconds, or 246 seconds in total. Given that Blood Plague and Frost plague lasts 18 seconds, you should have had ~13 of each. Now you have 13 Plague strikes but only 5 Icy Touches. The lack of this second disease probably hurt some of your DPS.

Second, you only cast 6 Obliterates over the period of time. Give ~3 Obliterates per 20 second rotation, you should have at least 30ish Obliterates. This will be quite a large DPS boost for you as well.

It is kinda hard to compare your DPS to your friends at this point, because you are both somewhat off in terms of an "optimal rotation". In addition (I myself have never done Patchwerk but have read a lot about the fight) this fight is somewhat straightforward and thus your friends lack of experience in Naxx is probably not a huge factor (neither is 185 AP to be honest).

 

Maahk

Yes, the Patchwerk try 4 was the one I was noting above with the Unholy/Frost comparison. The issue with IT you are seeing is that I had only 5 non-crits. If you expand the ability in WWS, you will see 5 hits and 14 crits for a total of 19. The same applies to plague strike, oblit, etc. - plague strike if expanded you will see 13 hits and 5 crits for a total of 18 and if oblit is expanded you see 6 hits and 17 crits. This is still sub-optimal as in theory I could have had ~24 of each of PS and IT, and 36 oblits as well if I had 100% DPS time and a perfect rotation. I spent too much time moving back and forth from the slime due to some sub-optimal mob positioning and having 22k worth of heals from blood presence and Unholy Strength, and I dropped a good number of oblits due to the imperfect rotations. A good thing to note for sure - thanks for the catch.

@Ewok - Thanks. I hadn't seen that information before the raid (Sunday,) I'll try that out tonight and I'll post another WWS, though we likely won't have this same subset of bosses - we usually do Spider, Plague, DK, then Abom, depending on time.

 

Nicolai

Did I miss this somehow? I'm not seeing it in the last two pages.

Any chance we could get as volunteer to run IT>PS>BS>BS>OB for one week and the above rotation another and post some WWS?

 

Maahk

Nikolai:

Here's a quote from page 2 for the new rotation - I missed it too over the holiday.


This makes a ton of sense - you get an extra oblit every cycle other than the first vs. the other rotation and have cooldowns to spare for recovery or dump. Thanks Hraka and Ewok - sorry for missing this one.

I'll be running this rotation tonight and will post again with a WWS, but it's likely that we won't have the same bosses as the previous WWS - we have a lot of people who never went to Naxx pre-LK so we're on the slow side at the moment. I'd guess that the small theoretical increase in DPS will be overshadowed by increased DPS from easier-to-maintain rotations in my case.

 

Nicolai

So the theory is that the extra OB out-DPSes the PS, Blood Plague, and bonus damage from Glacier Rot and further OBs?

I can buy that. I wish there was an easier way to graph this with scaling gear to get an idea of where that rotation outdoes the other though. As OB dmg increases though, it should pull away.

 

Feorthas

Couple of spreadsheet updates: finally figured out how to share with the world again so I've linked to it below. It's a huge HUGE work in progress so this is more for peer review of some of the math than anything else.

Link: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...9K1OeEqdXN-wHA

It's set to read only but you should be able to export it and edit it that way.

Couple of notes:
-the rotations are hardcoded and I don't handle diseases dropping yet.
-haven't dealt with spell resists.
-I have the math for the 18s rotation pretty clearly spelled out (progression from base values to an 'average' hit to the damage output from parts A & B of the rotation); the alternate rotation is less clearly spelled out BUT the same process is involved in getting from strike damage -> rotation damage.
-HB is only used at a rate equal to Rime Procs.
-"Hit Behind" is the value for hit used in the calculations
-"Targets" scales HB damage as if all the mobs had FF on them (but doesn't cast Pest. to put FF up)
-DR is the % of physical damage that the target should take.
-nDiseases, FF, and BP are straightforward and nDiseases is the only one that matters (FF will eventually... Maybe)
-CotT = Chill of the Grave; doesn't effect the 12s disease rotation.
-KM = Killing Machine (speaking of, just made some major modeling changes--the italicized, "KM Alt" "complex" values are the most accurate atm)
-Blk. Ice, self explanatory; actually modifies base values at the front end of the spreadsheet
-DthChill, also self explanatory and has it's own little block.
-It is assumed that you are using the Obliterate glyph and NOT using the IT glyph.

---

As you can see, there are tons of holes in the sheet at the moment but it still works to illustrate some very general trends and is rather simple to use (albeit a mess). As I mentioned above, I'm changing my KM model and it's looking a lot better--I think KM actually outpaces Black Ice at 22.5% crit or so now!

 

Kalevi

I think I'll try out this rotation as well tonight. We are probably doing Sartharion ----> Naxx tonight so hopefully it will provide some good feedback.

 

Gehenna

Although I'm not 80 yet, I've seen validity in some of the claims that comes from those that advocate DW deep frost.

Could a deep frost spec like http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=000000000000 that still takes advantage of procs, but is able to utilize abilities that cost either 1 rune, no runes or runic power in conjunction with Unholy presence to completely lock down your global cooldown?

It seems like you could take a rotation like this to abuse all of your single rune abilities and use a large number of abilities that don't depend largely on weapon damage. I'm not sure how gear would place frost strike in comparison with Death Coil, but i assume that it would eventually surpass it even with a one handed weapon.

PS, IT, BS, BS, IT, PS, FS, (Rime Procs)
PS, IT, IT, IT, IT, PS, FS, (Rime Procs)

Are there any major flaws here that simply prevent deep frost DW from preforming well?

 

dr_AllCOM3

I think I'll release my spreadsheet soon, too. I don't have a reason anymore to hold it back .

DocsDK UI
Simulator

 

Hraka

The math I ran with it didnt include armor or raid buffs so altogether I'm sure that at first the rotation using PS with BB might be slightly ahead due to BP bypassing armor but if you got the sigil and end up going all the way for 2+FSs each rotation (as I've adapted to) then the modified rotation will probably get back in the lead again. Also as someone stated earlier you can start each fight by blowing a bloodtap and getting the single death rune needed to start the rotation. With IT glyphed I'm creating about 79 RP every 10-11 second rotation leading to a lot of available FSs. If you have 4 pc tier bonus this would be 99 RP generated each rotation, probably overkill.

 

J2xC

A couple of notes about the

IT->BS->OB->OB

and standard rotations

For starters with the "new" rotation, using blood tap will allow you to skip the "opening rotation" as you will start with DBFFUU which is identical to what you would be left with after a IT-BS->OB->OB row.


However there is a slight issue with it:

As you consume runes you will go:
IT <= DBXFUU
BS <= DXXFUU
OB <= DXXXUX
OB <= XXXXXX
5.5 seconds later(in a perfect situation) they will start to come up in the following sequence:

XXFXXX 10.0
XDFXXX 11.5
XDFFUX 13.0
BDFFUU 14.5

If you repeat the IT->BS->OB->OB sequence again here they will be used in the following way:
XXXXXX 10.0
XXXXXX 11.5
XXXXXX 13.0
BXXXXU 14.5 can't OB!

In practice it can be done by delaying the BS so that it doesn't consume the death rune, however this also pushes back the rotation somewhat lengthening a "single round" every other time. You could try to squeeze in RP dumps here and make up for the lost rune time by squeezing in other GCD's but I would imagine it be very hard to manage in practice.

There is a similar issue with several of the other rotations though the 2second rule allows most of them to work... this one however is screwed over by the rune returning order as you would find yourself waiting for the blood rune to come up so you're not consuming the death rune with blood strike

With:
IT->PS->BS->BS->OB->FS
IT->PS->FS->OB->OB->RP dump

(swap IT/PS as suits)

will work fine (so long as you don't have too much latency... that second ob has to be fired within 2 seconds of the first death rune becoming available or you get a 2s cooldown delay meaning a 2second delayed rotation... However if you spend more than 12 seconds on this half of the rotation due to latency/rp dump, this becomes irrelevant)

Combined with the 8+2 second rule on rune cooldowns the above rotation would use every rune every 10s cycle without them ever losing the time between the rune coming off cooldown and being used(which is bound to happen with IT->BS->OB->OB unless someone has some good ideas). It also allows for 4 FS in perfect latency(but more realistically 3)... Though it may still be better to delay the cycle restart by casting as many as possible at the end of the second cycle(casting at the end of the first will definitely cause the first ob of the second half to come too late). In a similar sense, if you need to use any GCD's for other stuff(recasting HoW), it should always be done at the end of the second cycle not the first. If a rime proc comes up from the first IT, replacing FS with HB for the first cycle is advisable... casting both may be advisable IF you get RP capped though even there it may be questionable?

All this being said, I need to try these out in practice... I tried the "basic forms" of both rotations in EH with only self-buffs and 27/44/0 spec without the optimisation and at that time became aware of the issues and came up with the "optimisations" written above. At this time the "new" rotation came out above by about 75-100dps

If anyone has alternate solutions or critique I'd be very interested to hear them. Also testing both with better gear should show some interesting results I hope.

 

Maahk

Here's my WWS from tonight as promised:

Wow Web Stats

I talked them into doing Abom first so there are a few attempts available for Patchwerk from last week with the old rotation vs. this week with the new rotation.

The only things that changed from last WWS were that I got a new helm and was thus hit-capped, I ran with the potential new rotation, and I used Cinderglacier rather than the +30% STR runeforge. I'm not totally sold on cinderglacier, it didn't seem to make a huge difference vs. the 30% str, though I haven't had time yet to dig in to the numbers to find out for sure.

Overall I think my numbers were a little behind those from last week in the beginning, but as I got used to the new rotation they started to climb, and climbed to numbers higher than last week using the standard rotation.

I did beat out the other DK other than in a few places. On Grobulus I had a DC and I totally failed Thaddius - my own fault. I don't know if this is because of the new stuff or if he was just doing poorly - his numbers were lower than the attempt last week, though the attempts and kill this week were longer and so probably had less room for variability in the numbers. I also had significantly fewer crits this week - I haven't had a chance to dig in to find out exactly why. It's possible that whatever was increasing the number of crits was benefiting the other DK to a greater extent than me.

As noted by J2xC above, the rotation does skew a bit and the runes start coming up funny, with the unholy available before the blood, so if you just spam you use the unholy for a BS instead of an Oblit and have only a single oblit that rotation. I started to solve this problem initially by simply waiting for the blood rune cooldown. That seemed to work OK, so I started doing the following:

IT>FS or Rime>BS>OB>OB>1 FS if 70>RP>=40, 2 FS if RP>= 70, and it should only rarely happen (if you need to use horn, interrupts, etc.) but 0 if RP<40. This is assuming you have the IT glyph, and is so you have enough RP after the IT to fill in the gap next cycle. For the most part this worked pretty well, and still allowed for a buffer at the end of the cycle for extra dump or recovery. You have to be extra careful to wait for the blood rune to become available, or you kill that rotation and lose oblits until you can recover in the next rotations.

Also as noted, this was a bit hard to get used to doing after building a muscle memory while leveling for pressing 1,2,3,3,4,5,5 etc. but when I did it right, it worked pretty well.


It's a bit hard to say for certain which worked better. I think the standard rotation is pretty easy to maintain, while the new rotation is a bit harder but probably has more room for error. On trash I definitely liked getting to oblit before trying to get in a PS and BS - that's staying for me for sure no matter which rotation I decide to keep - stuff just dies too fast to benefit from trying to get your diseases up, then BS, then Oblit. I just FS and Oblit, or IT, Pest. HB if there are multiple mobs. For bosses it's less clear. It is at least similar DPS, jury's still out on if it's more or less. Need many more parses to tell.

For Thursday I'm putting the old runeforge back on but keeping the new rotation, to try to get a better comparison with more of what's available from last week's WWS. I'll post that one as well.


Take a look and let me know what you think.

 

J2xC

Ok... I think I've probably solved the IT->BS->OB->OB dilemma I mentioned above to come up with a theoretically possibly BUT very latency dependent rotation:

Starting with DBFFUU(use blood tap)

IT->OB->OB->BS->RP[0-2]
IT->OB->BS->OB->RP[0-2]

This gives you 4 runic power dumps per cycle and an optimal cycle time of 20s using all runes within the 2.0 second rule. By swapping the order of the BS/OB at the end we guarrantee that BS doesn't consume the death rune and keep that same rune constantly refreshing at x3.0

Notes at the bottom if you doubt it. Correct me if I screwed something up.

Of course this is all theorycraft and while it is theoretically possible, I am not sure if with human variation and latency it is possibly to keep it going steady as the 2.0 second "mercy zone" is cut to 0.5 seconds and a quick pause and restart may be necessary when misses take place(possibly a good time to refresh HoW?)

Honestly, with oceanic server lag I doubt I can do it but would be curious to see if anyone can, and their results. I think I'll be stuck with my modified version of the classic version or something. Ideas as always are welcome

IT->OB->OB->BS

DBFFUU
DBXFUU
DBXXXU
XBXXXX
XXXXXX

this will regen to
10.0 F
11.5 FU
13.0 BU
14.5 D

Time regens to Use Becomes

10.0 XXFXXX IT XXXXXX F regen at 20.0
11.5 XXXFUX OB XXXXXX FU regen 21.5
13.0 BXXXXU BS D regen 23.0
14.5 XDXXXU OB U regen 23.0 B regens 24.5

20.0 XXFXXX IT XXXXXX F regen at 30.0
21.5 XXXFUX OB XXXXXX FU regen at 31.5
23.0 DXXXXU OB DXXXXU BU regen at 33.0
24.5 XBXXXX BS XXXXXX D regen at 34.5

This will again regen to
30.0 F
31.5 FU
33.0 BU
34.5 D

Which is the same as 10.0 so we can repeat from there

Making our final rotation
IT-OB-OB-BS->[RPx0-2]
IT-OB-BS-OB->[RPx0-2]

 

Mild Confusion

So is the current idea that rune of cinderglacier is more dps than fallen crusader?

 

Nicolai

This is still up in the air. Until a rotation gets nailed down, we won't be sure. Maybe the rune even depends on which rotation you use. And this doesn't even include the possible use of frost vulnerability from Razorice.