I was referring specifically to frost DPS builds here. Epidemic works so well because it combines with Glyph of Scourge Strike in Unholy builds. The application of Icy Touch is actually a good thing for Frost builds, since it applies the haste buff and does significant DPS.

I'm feeling dense. In this ongoing PS-less rotation, IT, BS, OB, OB, FS, FS, you're only generating one new death rune per rune-cycle. Even if BS always uses a blood rune and not a death rune, it only turns itself into a death rune, and you still have one additional plain blood rune coming up. You're continually generating one death rune, but don't you need two, to avoid needing two BSes per rotation?

Let me break it down like this. You start out with a blood tap, so your runes look like:

FFUUDB

You open with an Icy Touch:
XFUUDB

Then OB:
XXXUDB

Then another OB:
XXXXXB

And now a BS to generate a death rune for the next rotation:
XXXXXX

At this point, all your runes are on cooldown. You should have enough runic power for two Frost Strikes. If your Icy Touch procced Rime, use a Howling Blast here as well.

At this point, the rotation restarts. Even though some of your runes are still on cooldown, they basically look like:
FFUUBD

Which is the same as where you started. Repeat ad infinitum, alternating the second OB and the BS to avoid conflicts.

You don't need two - only one is needed.

IT uses a frost
BS uses a blood, turning it to death
OB uses the other frost + unholy
OB uses Death (the other Blood from the previous cycle) and the other unholy.

No PS is used, and only one BS is required per rune reset to maintain the rotation.

To set up correctly for the rotation, you either need to use Blood Tap or you need to do a regular IT,PS,BS,BS,OB,IT rotation before it to get the death rune you need to have. If you do the former, the runes will work exactly as described above. If you do the latter, when you start the actual rotation you will have an extra unnecessary death rune, which you'll simply use as Blood for the BS, converting it back into a death rune again and setting up the death rune for the next rotation.


I've been using the IT, BS, OB, OB, FS > IT, OB, BS, OB, FS rotation with success as well. it's working better for me than trying to hold off an FS to fill the gap waiting for a blood rune to come off of cooldown. I topped the damage meter in a melee-only Naxx 10 last night. Still a bit concerned with how frost DKs stack up against other specs in a raid setting. I really WANT frost to work, but if it turns out that something out there works better, I'll have to swap.


Edit: Nikolai beat me to it and did a better job.

Whats going on with your runes in this rotation is you only need the one deathrune, because your still fitting one BS in every rotation.

frost - IT
Unholy/Frost - OB
Unholy/Deathrune - OB
Blood - BS
RP dump

then your next rotation should have the BS in between the 2 obliterates to avoid problems with runes and cooldowns.

The problem I have been having is every first rotation is generating exactly the same RP as the standard rotation. 75 RP, enough for one frost strike. and every so often it happens again.

Edit: lol... nevermind, 2 good posts above mine

Yes, but it's a measure of relative goodness that defeats your argument; Icy Touch may average ~880 damage but Oblit would average 2090 in that same case (numbers from a new, unreleased spreadsheet version I'm working on; released version should hold roughly true though), making it more worthwhile than recasting IT, thus making Epidemic's 50% increase in disease ticks extremely worthwhile, in theory. What remains to be seen is if epidemic is more worthwhile than any other talents that can me chosen...

You do get 75, at least until you get the 4-piece T7 bonus. So, you have 1 FS the first rotation, then 2 for the next 7 rotations. This doesn't include any gains from any other sources, so in practice you get more FSs.


1: 75 RP after blowing runes, 1 FS = 35 RP at end of cycle
2: 110 RP, 2 FS = 30
3: 105 RP, 2 FS = 25
4: 100 RP, 2 FS = 20
5: 95 RP, 2 FS = 15
6: 90 RP, 2 FS = 10
7: 85 RP, 2 FS = 5
8: 80 RP, 2 FS = 0
9: 75 RP, 1 FS = 30
etc.

Furthermore, with butchery you should be able to stretch it out a several more cycles.

4 runic power every 10 second cycle, leaves you 1 rp short, so you're less likely 1 FS cycle.

Ninja updated the spreadsheet before heading home, here's what changed:
-Massive redesign to clean things up a bit
-There's an entry for an enchant... but it's not doing anything yet
-Bladed armor has an entry but does nothing yet
-Removed +Hit double dipping (yeah. Big oops)
-Better KM modeling
-Other minor tweaks things I can't remember

Are there any more WWS's floating around? possibly with the new dps rotation?

I would really like to see more comparisons with frost to the other specs. Its still early but unholy and blood both seem to be outperforming frost from what has been presented so far.

Well, to get another Obliterate off you'll need an additional death rune, which adds the BS back in.

Also, you also need to add in the DPS from the haste gain for all melee provided by the buff. I'm pretty sure that needs to be reapplied as epidemic doesn't extend that timer (unless it's 20 seconds? which is moot then).

Honestly, I'd be surprised if come 3.1 the didn't change the frost DPS spec to require PS for maximum effectiveness. Ghostcrawler has been clear that disease management is supposed to be our primary focus. Skipping out on a disease to get maximum DPS probably means there's a design flaw (from Blizzard's POV).

This would definitely not be the first time to show that Blizzard wasnt aware of how the core aspects of a class they created work (former paladin here). I think with the talents available to us however that this altered DPS rotation isnt a cheat of anysort or complete venture in a direction other than what Blizz had envisioned. Imp Icy touch is a 20 second buff so you're not running into any problems what so ever with epidemic.

Feorthas: i'm loving the spreadsheet. I ended up screwing up one of the formulas in it and so had to figure out exactly how to use google spreadsheets in order to fix it and while I was at it ended up altering a few other things (hope you dont mind, probably shoulda asked first). Added in 2 spots in the front page to add in effects of both Glyph of Obliterate and Glyph of Icy Touch (1 for yes, 0 for not used). And then added in a small formula for Bladed armor which I had figured you just didnt get around to but think you might be trying to figure out a formula to let someone with the talent already plug in their character sheet's AP lvls and then figure out the AP loss if they were to take away that talent, I'll look at that some more.

I also added in a spot to factor in 2handed weapon spec (something that I also missed in my original calculations in this thread).

With the both glyphs used the dps of all of the weapon based rotations go up between 100-150 dps. When I adjusted the stats closer to my own (almost all heroic blues+3 epics) I found all 3 of the relevant rotations to be very close 2116, 2122, 2112 respectively.

I've exported the sheet now so any further changes wont potentially screw up your work (awesome job though once again).

Edit: I used a rather simplified formula to calculate benefit of Glyph of Obliterate in that spreadsheet cause of the differences in the tooltip of the glyph and the modified tooltip of Obliterate once you actually use the glyph. Has there been any sort of official word as to the actual effects of the glyph? It says it reduces the amount of bonus dmg from diseases however when you use it it actually increases both the basic bonus dmg as well as the disease bonus dmg...

Thanks.

And I'm pretty sure that I'm already including Obliterate's glyph in the base Obliterate calculations--there's pretty much no reason to ever not have it so I left that choice out of peoples' hands so they wouldn't do something dumb and do comparisons without the glyph in effect (and yet I left the option in to turn off Blood Presence... oops).

If anyone is having rotation issues, I highly suggest trying out a 21/50 build, the huge number of death runes keep you a bit more flexable on mobility or changing mechanics fights where you can't just stand and deliver, with this build I was pretty much able to solo gluth's adds dropping a howling blast and then 3-4 bloodboils into them, I had to tone it down a bit to let the other kiter get some.

So I want to try out frost in raids this week. I just read through this entire thread and I can't for the life of me figure out if I should be speccing into blood/frost or frost/unholy and what the mix of points should be in each. Can someone do a quick compendium post of the various builds and the pros/cons of each?

Myself and Everwatch both seem to be trying a 1/44/26(mine with master of ghouls) or 0/44/27(his with 4/5 impurity and no master of ghoul). Which gives us both CotD and Dirge for +15 RP from IT (glyphed) and +10 RP from OB. So with the rotation, it's IT(25), OB(25), BS(10), OB(25)=85RP. Guarantees you 2 FS and allows you to keep up Horn of Winter and/or Gargoyle easy. With the 4/4 set, you're getting 105 RP per rotation. I have never felt bad about slowing up the rotation for FS ever (although you can easily fit 2 FS into the rotation without slowing it up ever), so I don't see how we could ever have "too much" RP.

With this said, I'm actually a very fresh lvl 80 (still using lvl75 blue Ring of Blood Axe). By switching from a 27/44/0 to 1/44/26 i went from (on test dummies) doing 1350 dps (real low, i have bad gear) to about 1550 (still real low, but not as low). I equate most of that to the permanent ghoul pet. Some people say he dies a lot some people say he doesn't die ever. I suspect his survival is often based on the number of holy priests/shamans for their smart heals to keep him alive in raids. But his dps is too substantial to ignore for almost any build IMO.

Wow Web Stats

I have a few disclaimers to add though. Lasciel is a very good unholy DK in similar gear, and typically out-dpses me by a respectable margin, but this WWS seems to not be representing ghoul damage. Over the course of the night, the Instructor Razuvious death fight is the only fight that Recount says I beat him on, and there it was only by about 50 dps or so. Typically just add about 400-500 dps to his numbers to represent the ghoul and you're closer to what he actually pulls (he sustained 4100 dps on Patchwerk for example according to recount =p). I'll hopefully have some better single target numbers later now that my gears caught up to his, but so far based on my experience it's looking like Unholy is a stronger spec than Frost, but we're still quite viable.

Sal is blood, but Lasciel and I outgear him by a respectable margin and he just had unfortunate luck a few times, so take those numbers with a grain of salt.

For Instructor Razuvious attempt 1 I was using the old PS rotation, on Instructor Razuvious death I was using the no PS rotation. However, our 2nd attempt was significantly more stable than our first, so this comparison is probably biased towards the new rotation. I highly doubt that the no PS rotation genuinely gets 700 more dps than the old one in ideal situations, but that's still a very marked difference between the two(and also possibly a testament to the no PS rotation being easier to sustain in a chaotic environment). I can't at the moment, but if anyone wants to examine for any flaws in my execution on each attempt and judge the numbers accordingly it would be most welcome.

Spreadsheet updates:
-Bladed Armor now shows its contribution properly
-Crusader does some math but doesn't change the results yet. Need to decide how to model uptime since I now know procrate.

Thoughts:
-Black Ice appears to be about 33-50% better than Bladed Armor; this seems a bit much.
-Glyphed Obliterate is stupdly good and you're pretty much retarded for not trying to spam it if you are using a 2-hander. We're talking near Pre-LK-shaman-using-GoA-in-the-melée-group stupid.

Further updates:
-Added toggles for Glyphs of OB, IT, and PS.
-Modified the 'Dump' slots so that they cannot be overloaded and forced to do both HB (Rime) and FS. In the future I'll have to add a toggle to allow an extra GCD to be used but that's really low priority.

Coming soon/next week:
-Relative worth of item points worth of stat y
-Crusader enchant
-Razorice Enchant

The problem with this rotation is you can't backload obliterate, the reason you IT right after FS is so you don't waste a killing machine proc on IT. Good for lazy people I suppose but it is worse for people that aren't lazy.

I think the original poster has updated the rotation to something more like OB -> FS -> OB -> BS -> FS -> IT.

I'm not sure that's any better than the second rotation posted here though. I'm not seeing anything especially advantageous about one over the other.

My spec is very similar to that, but I placed the 2 points that you have in runic power mastery into frost aura as my 10 man lacks a druid.

I also took those 3 points you have in death rune mastery and placed them in rune tap and 2 points into imp rune tap and glyphed for it as well. Reason for this is because you don't really need your oblit runes to become death runes cause you are gonna oblit again anyhow.

Also, glyphed rune tap is very versatile. Last night on Loatheb, I noticed that death strike was not healing me, however rune tap was healing my group. It can take some pressure off your healers in certain situations like that. It was similar on Gothik, one of our healers got 1 shot by a loose mob and I rune tapped on every cooldown to assist.

Yet another spreadsheet update:
-Rotation 5 (OB FS OB BS ?? IT (twice)) added
--With Glyph of IT & OB, full CotG and Black Ice this is the new maximum damage rotation. While it requires frontloading one crappy rotation (OB PS BS BS FS IT, most likely) the remaining portion will rotate infinitely.

Edit:
Aha. This was already in yet a little mathematical error kept it from being the top rotation and doomed it to mediocrity (I accidentally left out a GCD from rotation 3 for some unknown reason and rotations 3 and 5 are mathematically identical, aside from one requiring a lead in and the other just *working*). I'll have the fix up soon.