From Maahk, he had Cinderglacier proc 13 times in 5'28" on Patchwerk (just because he's easy to use for comparisons). That means 26 either FS (most likely due to IT being used directly after FS) or IT got 20% bonus. 52 FS (22 crit), and 28 IT (18 crit). So 26 of these 80 hits (most likely to be FS due to the rotation), got 20% additional damage. So, napkin math says FS = 25% of damage, IT = 8% (frost fever doesn't benefit from cinderglacier). 26/80hits = 32.5% (were affected by Cinderglacier) at a multiplier of 1.2 , so 1.4% of FS is Cinderglacier (which comes out to 5.6% of FS damage) and 0.46% of IT's 8% was from Cinderglacier (which comes out to 5.75% of IT damage).

So, if Fallen Crusader's 1PPM is > 5.7% damage increase on all your frost spells, then it is better.

Looking at my numbers from last night re: cinderglacier - I was actively DPSing for 3266 seconds last night, and WWS is showing 85 gains of cinderglacier. I'm unsure whether it is registering each charge as a gain, or if one gain = 2 charges. I'll assume the latter is correct for now.

85 gains for 3266 seconds is approximately one proc per 38.4 seconds. With my proc rate, 13 procs should happen in a 9 minute fight. Patchwerk that Ewok noted is a bit strange. Has anyone determined if there is a CD on Cinderglacier? My proc rate would suggest a 30 or 35 second internal cooldown, but I haven't watched to check that yet. If the Patchwerk thing wasn't just a fluke, it looks like there may be no cooldown.


If there is one proc per 38.4 seconds, with perfect rotations the proc will move through the rotation so it will proc at various points in the rotation itself. It starts at the end of the rotation and gradually advances. I'm going to assume that we're not getting any rime procs for now, as they can't be counted on and add some randomness into the equation. The first proc is likely to get IT/FS for the charges, the 2nd proc will be FS/IT, and the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th should all be either FS/FS or IT/FS (split 50/50 for rotation 1 with 1 FS vs. rotation 2 with 2 FS.) If the proc was 100% reliable and your rotation was also 100% reliable, in theory the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th proc would all come on the 2 FS cycle.

The 7th - 13th proc would all be IT/FS, as all would fall in the first cycle.

If the proc is random with no cooldown, this doesn't apply so neatly, but it's still a good approximation of where the charges might be applied.

So, for a 9 min fight, you get 20% extra on IT 9 times, and on FS 17 times. If we assume an average of 3000 FS hit/crit combined, and an average of 1500 for IT, in a 9 minute fight Cinderglacier would be worth an extra [(3000+20%)*17-(3000*17)]+[(1500+20%)*9+(1500*9)] = 12,900 damage, or 23.89 DPS. Again, this assumes damage values for FS and IT as I don't have my actual damage values available. This also assumes the 20% is applied AFTER the crit multiplier. I don't know if the 20% bonus is also doubled on crit or not.


For Fallen Crusader, in Sunday's raid I had DPS time of 3092 seconds and had 62 procs. This is one every 49.8 seconds, so this likely has a 45 second cooldown. Do we know that it is 1 PPM for sure?

Each proc gives approximately (with my gear) an extra 600 AP for 1.5 rotations. If it procs every ~50 seconds, because the modified frost rotation is front-heavy, you get one full rotation plus IT, OB, BS, OB in the 2nd rotation. With 50 second procs, 9 minutes gives 10.8 procs. Rounding down to 10, that would be 40 OBs, 20 ITs, 15 FS, and 20 BS at 30% extra strength if everything was perfect (every proc happened exactly at the beginning of a cycle.)

If it is actually 1 PPM, you'd get 9 procs for 36 OB, 18 IT, 13 FS, and 18 BS, all at +30% STR.

The actual numbers will be a bit lower, but that seems like a lot of extra damage on a lot of extra skills vs. the Cinderglacier.


Hraka (or someone else with a strong grip on the math for the actual skill damage numbers) - can you do the numbers for these, preferably with both a lower-end gearset like my own (~1000 STR, 2700 AP, 25% crit or so) and with a higher gear level like the one you used for your previous calculations to see if things change as gear changes? I don't have as good a grip on AP modifiers and all of the different interactions quite yet. I'll work on it, but at the very least I'd like to have a second set of calculations to look at.

So, went and looked at a WWS for a well geared Unholy who was getting 1-2 on all fights. Seems that 17% of his dps comes from his ghoul. So, why don't we try some wierd 1/44/26 build so that we have this obviously broken pet. *shrug* couldn't hurt, obviously. Something like 1/44/26

The WWS with the Unholy DK also had a Frost DK that was 17/54/0 that was 2nd.

So, does getting Necrosis, BCB, Ghoul (permanent), Dirge, and Gargoyle worth Tundra Stalker, 2/3 Subversion, Bladed Armor, and 5% crit?

From the Unholy DK, Ghoul = 17%, Necrosis = 3%, BCB = 3%, Gargoyle = 9%.

So, if we dump 10% bonus to spells/abilities (not white swings), 5% crit, ~390 AP (for 14k Ar), and 6% crit with Oblit.

Looks like those Unholy talents just pack more of a punch.

Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding anything, but this seems to imply that Razorice would be a better candidate for this comparison than Cinderglacier. After a short warm-up period Razorice applies a 5% damage bonus to all frost damage done, so if a 5% bonus to Frost Fever + a 2% bonus to auto attack damage is greater than a .6% bonus to FS and a .75% bonus to IT then Razorice comes out ahead of Cinderglacier.

Using Ritrai's Patchwerk death for calculations, Razorice would gain 4114 auto attack damage and 2615 Frost Fever damage. Using Ewok's calculations it looks like Frost Strike would lose 1363 damage and Icy Touch would lose 564 damage, which seems to imply Razorice would actually do slightly more personal dps.

Something else important to consider is that Razorice applies the 5% increased frost damage debuff to the mob. If I understand Frostfire Bolt - Spell - World of Warcraft correctly, this would imply that all of your Frostfire and Frost mages are gaining an additional 5% damage bonus to 60% of their damage. For Ritrai's raid that means an extra 35622 damage from Conezone and an extra 36804 from Krakytwotoes, using only their main nukes in the calculation. That's a lot of damage for Fallen Crusader to beat.

Edit: After re-reading the Rune of Razorice - Spell - World of Warcraft tooltip, it applies a 2% bonus to -weapon damage-. Am I correct in assuming this indicates that all of our weapon damage based skills would see the 2% increase to the weapon damage component of the ability's calculation? I don't have time to try and calculate it right now, but it seems Razorice could really add up.

You're also forgetting to factor in the 4% 2h weapon dmg specialty, which as I'm writing this makes me realize that I forgot to factor in that talent in all of my comparison calculations which would give more of an edge to OB in most of the comparisons.

About the problem with the IT, BS, OB, OB rotation. I ended up adjusting to the more natural feeling IT, OB, OB, BS/IT, OB, BS, OB rotation, this will delay the overall rotation somewhat but its a bit necessary cause you'll often times have the death rune coming up before the blood rune so if you try and cast BS when you've only got the death rune then you'll end up wasting that on the BS.

Once I get a longer break in my writing I guess I'll come back and adjust some of my earlier calculations.

Spreadsheet updates:
-Broke frontend & backend into two seperate pages.
-Normalized strikes.
-Added in magic resist that an 'average' boss would have
-Penalized long rotations for letting diseases drop
-Added a toggle for blood presence (although you're retarded if you don't use it)
-Can use Deathchill on an IT, HB, or FS.
-CotT works properly for all rotations.
-Added two new rotations:
--IT PS OB BS BS FS | IT OB OB BS FS
--IT PS HB BS BS FS | HB HB HB FS
---It is worth noting that the HB spam rotation is the worst one of the 4, but there was a lot of curiosity about the effect of replacing OB with HB...

Link: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...9K2uUxI_yc1bEw

Frostfire Bolt is the major reason of Razorice raid DPS.

Frostfire is about 70-80% of a typical mage's damage, it's a bit hrd to determine because a WWS cannot tell us how much of the Ignite damage belongs to Frostfire Bolt and would thus be increased by Razorice as well.

Razorice is a 3.5%-4% damage increase for every Frostfire mage in the raid.

For Fallen Crusader, WWS doesn't track reprocs while the proc is up. So we cannot easily check the uptime.
If we have 50% uptime (seems generous right now), Fallen Crusader is about a 4% damage increase (200 DPS weapon, 6.8k AP, 1200 strength).

OK - so using Feorthas's spreadsheet to do the skill damage calculations (thanks) I'm getting the following unbuffed numbers:

IT: 817.9 Damage (average considering crit rate)
BS: 1189.3 Average
FS: 2088.4 Average
Oblit : 2550.4 Average
HB: 1925.4 Average

With the extra AP from Fallen Crusader, but otherwise unbuffed:

IT: 900.3
BS: 1263.2
FS: 2251.9
OB: 2678.9
HB: 2103.2

Taking my assumptions from earlier (which works out to be an uptime of about 23% on Crusader BTW as it does not include any re-procs) we get the following:


If the gear level goes up from my gear level to 3500 AP, 1200 STR and 35% crit, we get the following:




So, it appears that even with a conservative uptime, Fallen Crusader beats Cinderglacier at a lower and at a higher-end gear level. The more STR-derived AP one picks up, the better Fallen Crusader gets, and if one picks up more straight AP, Cinderglacier will improve comparitively, but still be low from the looks of things.

Another thing that might be interesting to model would be something like a 2 DK raid, one with Razorice and one with Cinderglacier.



Edit: On my way home, will try to format better when I get there.

Some things of issue:
The stats you're using might be slightly skewing the results in favor of OB as opposed to HB. a 186 dps weapon will only rarely be found on a DK with only 2500 AP and 21 crit. This would only really happen if a newly 80 DK does H-HoL and gets the axe there to drop on his first go as his first purple. More likely someone who gets that axe will be sitting around 2800AP at least factoring in HoW.

Also is there a way to change the IT, OB, OB, BS rotation to not include the first (a) rotation to set up the death rune? so far as has been suggested by others we'd burn blood tap on our way into the mob to grab that death rune and so would run IT, OB, OB, BS, FS, FS nonstop till we get a dodge occuring on the death rune'd OB.

Also is there anyway to view cell formulas in google spreadsheets? Never used it before.

Edit: NM, found the function. Go to view>click formula bar

I tried a 160 DPS weapon and 4000 AP and it made no difference--Obliterate just crits about 2.5-3x as often as Howling Blast so it's going to outdistance it by brute force if nothing else.

p.s. the public version is open to editing so people can change around the numbers as they see fit so you may see some outrageous weapon/stat combos. I'll lock it again and restore from my personal copy if it gets messed up though.

Addendum:

Changing Rotation #3 to IT OB OB BS FS (??) | IT OB OB BS FS (??); preliminary work shows it right underneath Rotation #1 (IT PS OB BS BS FS | OB OB OB FS (??))

A further Addendum:

Frost Fever and Blood Plague appear to be ticking a _lot_ harder than the sheet is predicting so I ramped them up to about 1000 base damage each--I'll probably update the public sheet at some point tomorrow so that I can make a few more changes before then.

Final edit for the night:

Forget updating tomorrow, here's the latest version:

link: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...9K1OeEqdXN-wHA
I will be deleting the old one tomorrow by noon EST (yes, I updated the old link to kill traffic to the old one)

Updates:
-Boss armor increased from 20% Melee reduction to 34.9% based on predicted values in one of the threads in public.
-Frost Fever/Blood Plague increased to 1000 base damage (18 second version; 12s is scaled properly)
-3rd Rotation changed as noted above

Thoughts:
-Wow. Rotation #4 become really, really competitive, even at my gear level (just picked up a De-Raged and some other upgrades--those were my last 5 man buffed stats in the sheet, give or take a little (of course, only those who look before someone changes them will see the right ones but w/e)).
-One point in KM is more worthwhile than Deathchill right now; who knew. I think Deathchill is still really, really worth it for tanking though.

Plans:
-Will see if I can add a Bladed Armor entry to the Talents list tomorrow if I can figure out how to reverse engineer the contribution from it from your AP and N talent points. This'll let us see if BA really is worth the points over KM or Black Ice at this point (betting yes, but I've been horribly wrong before--see my thoughts on Killing Machine prior to creating and refining the sheet).

I originally posted this concept on another forum here, however it seems this thread is beginning to hit on the concept as well.

Oblit > Oblit >BS > BT then IT > RP Dumps.**

My version of this is more based upon allowing your first two Oblits to not take advantage of IT for the sake of allowing the rest of the fight to be a simple and elegant rotation that easily supports RP dumps for the large amount of RP it produces.

I am not geared enough, nor have the mathematical capability to give you a full workout of how the rotation works- which is why I come here. So I ask, to those of you who are open-minded enough to throw away PS from a DPS rotation, mind helping me out with some numbers to see if this actually outperforms the "traditional" rotation?

P.S. - If the conversation picks up in this thread I will continue with it. However, as I am quite frightened of the Mods here (I am new to the EJ forum), I will continue to answer questions on the other forum as best I can. I do suggest reading it as it goes into depth on this concept.'

*EDIT* - In my haste to type this out, I messed up the rotation (not horridly). The correct is Oblit>Oblit>BT IT>BS>RP Dump.

*EDIT* - The other thread is growing rapidly. Just to keep up with current concept- the most recent variation of the rotation is FS>Oblit>Oblit>FS>IT>BS. Reasoning found on the other thread.

The rotations that exclude PS is definitely faster when leveling and farming.

You don't need PS to kill normal mobs.

I am not sure about raiding. But I would set up a rotation where PS is purely optional and placed at the end of a rotation rather than at the start. This is so that you will always use unholy runes as part of obliterates whenever you can instead of on plague strikes. And if you miss, you will have time to reapply other much more damaging strikes rather than PS. PS should always be last priority to apply and the first to be given up in favour of any otehr strike or attack if it calls for it.

Just my 2 cents.

@Maahk:
Just because you're getting on average a proc every X seconds, that doesn't have anything to do with an internal cooldown.
I've seen both Fallen Crusader and Cinderglacier chainproc a few times in less than 10 seconds so there is no internal CD for sure.

Assuming Fallen Crusader procs anywhere near as often as Cinderglacier, it will always be the better enchant in proper gear. Fallen Crusader usually increases your total AP in a raid by approximately 15% for one and a half cycle, that's approximately 9 abilities and 15 seconds of autohits. Cinderglacier increases the damage of two of your abilities by 20%. While the Cinderglacier proc is approximately 50% stronger, it lasts 1/4.5 of the time Fallen Crusader lasts. Fallen Crusader should including refreshing procs be at least double as strong as Cinderglacier.

If I recall, Fallen Crusader only lasts for 12 seconds, but I do agree it's a better choice over Cinderglacier.

As for the IT->BS->OB->OB rotation, a lot of people seem to have forgotten the 8 second refresh on runes if they're not used for 1 second after they repop. So, if you always throw in 2 FS at the end of the rotation, then it's a 9 second long rotation + latency/lag. So, even though it should have problems with a 10 second refresh, I've personally seen the rotation hold for 3 minutes straight without a hitch at IT, BS, OB, OB, FS, FS (but i have both CotD and Dirge for 85 RP per rotate) on a dummy.

Oh, and regardless of where you put the BS, eventually the death rune will get used in a manner where a blood rune will always refresh before a death rune for the rotation (if using the 10 second refresh instead of 8 seconds for using the 2 second rule). I probably should look at the DPS compendium and test the 8 second rule some, see how reliable/flexible it is.

I tend to think the only competitor to Fallen Crusader at this point is Razorice, and that will probably depend on raid composition. Have a frostfire mage or another DK around? One of the DKs should probably have Razorice as the resulting buffed raid damage will be greater than Fallen Crusader. The question is, how much of a personal DPS sacrifice is it?

OK, you guys keep arguing Cinder vs Crusader, but someone touched on a point showing that Razor was more personal dps than Cinder was. Can we confirm this? From everything I've read here so far, it appears that the greatest personal dps Runes in order = Crusader, Razor, Cinder. However considering Crusader doesn't appear to be leaps and bounds above Razor, with only 1 Frostfire mage it seems that Razor's dps bonus to both you and the mage would yield the highest overall raid dps bonus. Comments, ideas, confirmations, rebuttals?

And not to be difficult, but seeing how these builds are developing with this new rotation, what about the alternative builds that dip into Dirge, Impurity, and Gargoyle? 0/44/27 appears to show a great deal of promise.

Hasted weapons benefiting from BCB and Necrosis.
5% more Strength.
+3% spell hit for a very spell damage heavy build.
Gargoyle, which is obnoxious.
Impurity for an additional 20% AP bonus on all spells.

While I don't see it as a landslide winner for an optimal spec, it has so many strengths to where it deserves some serious theorycrafting.

There may be some possibility here. But you're losing out on threat reduction as well as crit and additional weapon damage from Blood. Also, points in epidemic seem to be wasted since you actually want to be casting IT since it hits like a truck.

I'm not sure if the build was edited, but I don't notice any points in epidemic. I would agree though as most of the theorycrafting in this thread seems to suggest that that points in the talent actually hurt frost dps.

I'm not sure how comfortable I would be dropping Subversion completely, as it is our one and only form of agro reduction. I feel like the talent will end up being mandatory to raiding DPS DK's.

That being said, points in both Dirge and Chill of the grave might be overkill, as you might end up with more runic power than you can unload while maintaining an optimal rotation (although I can see this being very good when combined with the Gargoyle). You could perhaps pull two points out of Dirge and one point out of Impurity which could be spent in Subversion.

I'm confused about the PS-less rotation. Blood Tap lets you do that for one rotation. Are you guys saying that it's only worth to replace PS for the one rotation where Blood Tap is available, or that you can permanently get rid of PS, by using Blood Tap once every minute?

The rotation includes a blood strike. So if you are specced 5/5 blood of the north, then on the next rotation, that blood will be a death rune. So the rotation continues.

It's actually a really tight rotation with little down time.

It also works on aoe portions of a fight with pest. On Maex, I was on spider watch and as soon as the timer was close, I would IT Maex, pest as soon as they spawned and HB. The spiders would either all die at once or die in a couple seconds from frost fever. And I can go right back into my rotation from pest being turned into a death rune.

You permanently get rid of PS. Since you're using that unholy rune for an Obliterate instead, you only need on death rune.

When you open up with the blood tap, you start with a death rune. You Blood Strike once, which gives you a death rune on the next rotation. Only doing one Blood Strike gives you a death run to be paired with the extra unholy rune every rotation. This takes less time, so you have time to fully dump your runic power with Frost Strikes and use any Rime procs whereas the old rotation means you're sitting on your runes for a few seconds if you do that.

All the blood tap does is give you that starting death rune to "prime" the rotation, so to speak.

Blood tap is required to set up the rotation but the extra death rune is generated each rotation by the single Blood Strike.

Also, the current high-DPS roataion is in fact one with epidemic. This may not last but, as of now, it holds that epidemic is a useful talent for dps and is definitely useful for tanks (less disease re-application allows for more HB spam on AE packs).