EwokChilli

Sedith,
What frost spec were you testing with? Was it the 17/54/0 typical build, the 27/44/0 build or the variant 0(1)/44/26(27) build? Simply curious. Still glad to know that I wasn't crazy to think that frost was an acceptable build.

Mild Confusion,
After hit cap hit is worth about 0.

 

thevidon

Yeah I found myself throwing frost strikes into the middle of the rotation sometimes, and I'll go back today and test your modification on the rotation and see how the numbers are. I'm not necessarily advocating that my rotation in unholy is more DPS, but I was just really surprised at how close it is.

I think that the biggest stats besides strength for running the rotation would be crit and haste, because its kind of like a dual wield mindset where its relying on frequent white crits to proc KM for its DPS. If someone with high crit and haste could give it a shot and test it against the normal rotation that would be great. My gear isn't really good enough to support it.

As far as builds go, I think mine may have been sub-optimal for this rotation. I was 21/50/0, and I think moving a couple points over from blood to unholy for vicious strikes is probably better than having 1 point in veteran of the third war for this rotation.

 

Revart

I've been reading this thread, and I have to say that the new frost rotation has helped a lot, but I've been playing with talent points to see if I can simplify it to a single rotation instead of using 2.

So if right now we're doing IT>BS>OB>OB>FS / IT>OB>BS>OB>FS

If you were to spec 20/51/0 or 21/50/0 with DRM, could you just stay with IT>BS>OB>OB>FS?
I think a simplified rotation in practice could yield more DPS than in theory just because theres less of a possibility of messing up your rotation due to lag, misses, moving, procs (HB), or trinkets and cooldowns.

So would your runes cooldown like this DRM?

BDUUFF
IT>BS>OB>OB>FS
XXXXXF
XXXDDF
XBDDDF
DBDDDF
IT>BS>OB>OB>FS
XXXXXF
XXXDDF
XDDDDF
BDDDDF

Is this right? Allowing for a constant single rotation rather than a dual rotation?

 

Nicolai

That looks right to me. Are the talents you'll give up to get DRM worth the simplified rotation?

I suspect that the original rotation will always have slightly higher DPS for someone who can consistently pull it off.

 

EwokChilli

DRM can blow up your rotation. If you have all death runes (could easily happen), IT goes for the first death rune... which is in a blood rune slot, or it'll hit a plague rune slot, and all of those are bad for your next pass through the rotation. DRM doesn't actually help and it can possibly hurt.

 

Kellhus

Looking over this thread, and the WWS listed, as well as my own personal experience -- is there currently any reason to spec Frost in a raiding environment outside of the off chance you're the third DK in a raid and both blood and unholy are already in play?

The parses listed are generally under either unholy or blood on a fight/fight basis, and this isn't even counting the raid-wide auras from the other two trees in comparison to the wholly lackluster frost aura.

I loved frost, and leveled from 70-79 using it, but at 80 I'm having a hard time getting it to hold up even under the refined rotations listed in this thread. I guess my problem is that I'm finding frost to be situationally competitive, rather than all around competitive and situationally optimal. Are other Frost DKs having more success with the spec in terms of Dk v Dk output and contributions?

I certainly don't mean to step on toes here because I enjoy the frost spec quite a bit, I'm just having a hard time justifying running it when it's consistantly less forgiving and lower output than the out-of-the-box Unholy and Blood specs.

 

EwokChilli

How does switching from IT->BS->OB->OB(1st rotation) to IT->OB->BS->OB(2nd rotation help)?

You're postponing your 2nd attack until runes from your 3rd attack(1st pass) refresh. I don't see how that helps. Frankly, the only variation I like is the OB->OB->BS->IT rotation. Regardless of which rotation you use, the death rune from BS will refresh (giving 10 second rule and not 8), when you are about to BS again. The only way to make it roll out smooth is for your rotation to be slightly longer than the rune refresh. With a rotation of IT-BS-OB-OB-FS-FS, that's a 9 second rotation (after GCD), with latency and human error, it's pretty close to 10 seconds. If you get into the 8 second refresh window, then you'll always have a blood rune for BS and a death rune for OB.

Frankly, when something goes really wrong, it's usually that I end up with a blood rune and an unholy rune, so i just BS instead of OB and my rotation goes back to normal after that.

 

Revart

Thats the real question, I think its going to come down to play style and spec, in my case I'll probably do more dps with the simplified rotation just because I seem to lose track of which half the rotation in intense situations with moving and keeping track of self healing, or buffs and stuff. Many times I've had to pot, and then think crap do I BS or OB and unfortunately the game doesn't pause for me to look at my runes to and figure out which. With a rotation this tight using the wrong strike can throw things off and result in a loss of dps.

I think the largest advantage is to people with really bad lag, it all comes down to practice vs. theory.

 

Nicolai

The biggest argument for frost is the haste buff if you don't have a Enh shaman around. Frost is also very very dependent on weapon damage strikes, so as your gear improves, so does your DPS. At entry level raiding gear, you're going to have trouble competing straight up with Unholy and Blood. Things look to be evening out though.

The biggest reason is personal preference and playstyle I think. I like the frost spells and rotation more than the Unholy and Blood ones. So I'm frost.

 

EwokChilli

castsequence. I just use a macro that I smash and I told it to have a reset of 4 seconds, so that if the last attack goes wrong or something like that, i just smash FS and then i restart the rotation and i don't have any problems until i get dodge/parry/miss. I just tend to roll through my dodge/parry/miss and not worry about doing the attack again.

/use trinket
/use trinket
/castsequence reset=4 Icy Touch, Blood Strike, Obliterate, Obliterate

On a separate note, I was curious if 3/44/24 might work. Simply curious if Necrosis/BCB/Gargoyle(which i love)/Dirge might be worth the 10% from Tundra Stalker, AP from bladed armor, and %crit from Dark Conviction, and 4% from 2H special.

Nevermind, I just thought back through my math and i'm pretty sure 17/51/3 is better (for me), although I love Dirge+CotD.

Edited so as to not multipost.
Edited to fix links cause i'm obviously inept.

 

Feorthas

Another thing to keep in mind is that, after applying diseases, you can use your runes in any order as long as you remain internally consistent. For example, if you like IT BS OB FS OB Dump (x2) that's fine; someone else might rather have IT OB OB FS BS Dump. The only one that loses anything places the FS and dump adjacent to eachother at the end of the rotation as it is very possible to pass 100rp if you have 35 left over from the previous rotation.

 

bionh

Why do you need morbidity? Frost dumps RP with frost strike. Similarly, you don't need to get Runic Power Mastery because you're spending it as you get it, instead of pooling it for a burst. Finally, howling blast is dubious beyond heroics. Either go 14/50/7 and do a long rotation or grab it glyph/4pc t7 and try the short rotation.

 

Maahk

@Ewok -

The reason for the switched-up 2nd rotation was explained by J2xC on Page 5.


Basically, if you follow the same IT>BS>OB>OB>Dump sequence twice as soon as runes are available, you burn a death rune on Blood Strike instead of on Oblit. You either end up waiting for the non-death blood rune to refresh, leaving you standing there auto-attacking and lengthening your rotation (less efficient,) or you can oblit first, then BS 2nd when the blood rune is up, leaving much less downtime in the cycle. You'll still have to waste a global cooldown waiting to be able to use your Oblit, but it's available much sooner than waiting for blood to come up (3 GCDs, leaving you no room to dump at the end of your rotation, or delaying your next rotation while you dump.)

With the 1.5 second rule, you could theoretically have 3 dumps at the end of the 2nd cycle and still not delay your rotation, vs. waiting for blood to come up and having only a single dump at the end of the 2nd cycle if you don't want to delay your rotation. A single dump isn't adequate, especially with rime procs and extra RP from 4-piece T7, to keep you under max RP.

You can do the dumps while waiting for blood to come up - it's just harder to manage (I tried it and posted my findings, that switching up the 2nd rotation and dumping at the end is easier than managing RP to dump while waiting for blood, also on page 5.) If you do it this way, the 2nd rotation becomes IT>Dump>BS>OB>OB>Dump, which is definitely more complex and difficult to manage.

 

thevidon

Ok I tried out your modified rotation and here is my problem with it. The second IT in the rotation is using a death rune.....and when that IT fails for some reason you are stuck with 2 blood runes to end your rotation with and you miss out on an IT for that whole rotation. I prefer to use the first 2 frost runes for IT and using the death rune for the OB in the rotation. It is much less likely that you will miss on an obliterate due to the lower melee hitcap and the fact that we do not have virulence in this build.

I do agree that losing rime procs to double procs on consecutive icy touches kind of kills the whole point of the rotation I am trying to do here, so I did the following in my testing today and it worked well.

IT -> PS -> Rime HB if available -> IT -> OB -> BS -> Dump

By inserting the plague strike in between the two icy touches you have time to recognize a proc from the first one and get off your free HB before you cast your second IT and try for another proc. If you proc rime on both ITs within a rotation you can get off the second one at the end of the dump phase when you do FSx2 (or 3).

See what your numbers are for this rotation. I was getting 10 DPS more than the standard rotation today on the boss dummy.

 

Terraburn

Would you lose too much potential dps by not taking RPM in a 17/54/0 spec?

I OT our 10 mans and sometimes tank heroics, and I'm wondering if not having RPM and having FD for when I'm tanking would hurt my dps too much.

 

Maahk

You will have cycles with 1 FS more often if you don't take RPM, and you will lose a FS for all cycles in which you could have had 3.

This will be more pronounced with 4-piece T7, as you'll drop those extra FSs more often.


As far as DPS goes, if you have Icy Touch glyph and Butchery you will have 1 IT cycles more often than with RPM, but not significantly more. It looks like you'll lose 1 IT per 200 seconds (20 cycles) vs. picking up RPM , which works out to be about 25 DPS at 5k a FS. With 4-piece, you lose many more FSs.


No Butchery, with RPM

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

Butchery with RPM

1: 79 RP after blowing runes, 1 FS = 39 RP at end of cycle
2: 118 RP, 2 FS = 38
3: 117 RP, 2 FS = 37
4: 116 RP, 2 FS = 36
etc.


No butchery, no RPM

1: 75 RP after blowing runes, 1 FS = 35 RP at end of cycle
2: 100 RP, 2 FS = 20
3: 95 RP, 2 FS = 15
4: 90 RP, 2 FS = 10
5: 85 RP, 2 FS = 5
6: 80 RP, 2 FS = 0

Butchery, no RPM

1: 79 RP after blowing runes, 1 FS = 39 RP at end of cycle
2: 100 RP, 2 FS = 20
3: 99 RP, 2 FS = 19
4: 98 RP, 2 FS = 18
...
21: 79 RP, 1 FS = 39

 

Terraburn

Wow, ok. Glad I took it then lol.

 

Maahk

Actually, I had a 2nd look at my numbers. I was calculating the DPS incorrectly. The correct information has been edited in. The actual loss is more like 25 DPS with a minimum fight time of 2 minutes.

 

EwokChilli

@bionh
Only reason I have 3/3 Morbidity is for the -15sec on D&D, which is helpful on trash, AE boss fights, & heroics. And the extra 3 points in Frost or Blood don't get me anything near as useful.

 

Maahk

After looking at my numbers on the FSs per cycle for Teraburn, I decided to look at the T7 4-piece bonus.


The 4-piece T7 bonus looks to be a very significant increase in DPS for us.

Because one of our main DPS strikes is RP based, this bonus gives us a large increase in damage output.


The increase in output is as follows:

Butchery, RPM, 4-piece T7, IT>BS>OB>OB rotation
75+20 from T7, = 95 RP per cycle, +4 from butchery = 99 RP per 10 seconds.

1: 99, 2 FS = 19 (1 FS gained vs. normal)
2: 118, 2 FS = 38
3: 130, 3 FS = 10 (1 FS gained, 8 RP lost due to cap)
4: 109, 2 FS = 29
5: 128, 3 FS = 8 (1 FS gained)
6: 107, 2 FS = 27
7: 126, 3 FS = 6 (1 FS gained)
8: 105, 2 FS = 25
9: 124, 3 FS = 4 (1 FS gained)
10: 103, 2 FS = 23
11: 122, 3 FS = 2 (1 FS gained
12: 101, 2 FS = 21
13: 120, 3 FS = 0 (1 FS gained)
14: 99, 2 FS = 19
etc.

This amounts to never having a cycle with only 1 FS, and having an extra FS every other cycle (20 seconds.) if FS hits for 5k average, this is a (5000/20=250) 250 DPS increase simply from that set bonus. A 3000 damage avg. for FS yields a 150 DPS bonus. I've been averaging about 5000 including crits - this is why I used that value. This will only improve as gear levels improve.

I haven't tested it as I don't have the bonus, but this bonus may make unholy presence worth using, as you could potentially have 4 dumps at the end of the rotation (3 FSs plus Rime procs) that would otherwise take 6 seconds worth of GCDs to put out. I'll test this when I get the bonus. Because of the 1.5 second rule, it's theoretically possible to fit them all in one rotation, I just don't know if my latency will allow this.

I was thinking about skipping some of the set and not taking the bonus because I liked how some of the other non-set pieces were itemized, but this has definitely changed that.


Related to not taking RPM, with the bonus you would effectively lose 1 FS every other cycle, meaning you'd have a 250 DPS LOSS by not taking RPM but having Butchery, IT glyph, and the T7 bonus. T7 would still be a DPS increase, but it would only be about 25 DPS/Sec.


If this holds true, it makes me worry for T8. Depending on what those bonuses look like, T7 could very well end up being better for frost than T8 due simply to the bonus.

 

Feorthas

It's been a while but I come bearing major spreadsheet updates:
-Fixed some misc mistakes.
-Added relative value calculations for most offensive combat stats based on the max damage rotation from your talent/rune spec (does not have any math for KM as of yet--that may take a bit).
-Added 2h spec as a talent option
-Crusader works; assuming 33% uptime

-----

Major discoveries of note:
-If it didn't cost a GCD, we wouldn't care about hit or expertise; we'd stack Armor Pen and Str/AP.
-Worst stat is haste, followed closely by agi.

Todo:
-Other Enchants
-Other shallow Blood/Unholy talents that you can't model via stat changes
-KM interaction with relative values of stats (gonna be a PITA)

 

thevidon

These two things are closely related and needs to get implemented asap. KM is the only damage ability that scales nicely with haste (and crit). I don't think we can write off haste until the KM math comes in.

 

Feorthas

No, haste and agility will still be horrible. I can drop my 27% haste (IIT + 2% from stats) to 0% and have KM drop from a 113.89 DPS increase to a 93.4 DPS increase. So, my decreasing my swing timer by 27% I get barely more than a 20 DPS increase from KM.

So, to be very generous, haste nets a 1%:1 DPS increase in KM, plus 3 DPS from a faster Auto Attack. Ok, so we add an extra 1% of haste, that's ~400 points of stat-value on an item. For the same number of points, I could get 1% hit, 1% expertise, 2.16%(!!) Armor Penetration, or 33.25 Str (66-70 AP after Crusader). Respectively, each of those adds 10.9, 10.11, 31.13, or 17 DPS.

I'll take the 10.9 from hit, until cap, then consider the other three, thanks!

 

dr_AllCOM3

My spreadsheet now has SEP, in case you want to test it yourself.

DocsDK UI
Simulator

 

Dieseltank

I've been following this and the old giant thread for ages. I'm currently raiding as Frost due to there being another DK in our raid group that is Unholy and since switching the Frosty ways have grown on me. I decided to throw down a post due to the speculation on a 'new' and possibly better rotation. I did some tests tonight and took the best examples of each. These were 5 min tests, the screenshots included have my pertinent stats, recount, plus the basic breakdown. I'll be raiding H-Naxx tonight using the 'new' rotation and I'll try to WWS a boss or two or three if I can remember and get the data to you number cruncher types.

A couple of notes:

'New' rotation to me is: IT-OB-OB-BS-FS-FS

'Old' is: PS-IT-BS-BS-OB-FS-FS // PS-IT-OB-OB-FS-FS

On both I will only use HB when Freezing Fog procs and I prioritize it if Killing Machine procs at the same time. I prefer to use KM on freebie HB as, obviously, the crits are much larger. The new rotation is really appealing to me due to its simplicity. Its repeatable, easy and is showing more dps on my Dummy tests. I used the boss dummy in Ebon Hold also with Rune of the Fallen Hero and NO buffs, not even HoW. WYSIWYG on the paper doll outside of RotFC procs.

Current Spec

'New'

New Rotation

'Old'

Old Rotation

Question: Has anyone else noticed any bugs with BoTN? This only applies to the 'old' rotation but I found that quite a bit of the time my blood runes didnt convert to death runes when I would BS. This was with no miss, dodge, or anything. Strike would hit, rune comes back as blood. This would force me to repeat that state of the rotation again if Blood Tap was on CD. I felt that I was losing quite a bit of DPS due to this. On that second screenshot above I believe it happened 3 times during the 5min test.

Also: Please critique my spec or anything else that looks off. Obviously without a WWS there isn't much you can see, so mainly my spec. Its mostly cookie cutter with a few tweaks. Frost Presence is worthless IMO unless you are doing an arcane damage fight. Pally frost aura supersedes this in raids so I went for Acclimation for Sapphiron so I wouldn't have to wear much, if at all, Frost Resistance gear. Last week on Patchwerk I came in 7th place with 3198 dps. I botched my rotation once and had to bail myself out with Empowered Rune Weapon which I'm sure shaved off some damage and I was using Cinderglacier instead of RotFC.

Keep up the good work in here!