I farmed out the trinket, I mentioned in the post above. During 10 seconds aura duration, FS cost is redused to exactly 10 RP.

I am not sure about actual raid dps potential of that trinket, but I find it very interesting for killing dungeon bosses or / and other players.

I just farmed this. Reduces the RP cost of Frost Strike from 32 to 10 for 10 seconds. Not sure if 10 seconds every 3 minutes is better than other DPS trinkets, though.

Whether or not FS is affected by "Healing cost reduction" should be tested. I'm not revered with Lower City, but someone should test [Lower City Prayerbook]. It seems like the most likely candidate for a solid DPS trinket outside of Spark of Hope.

It's 10.5 RP. Every other Strike will cost 11 RP instead of 10.

It's interesting that FS won't eat the proc and will keep getting the reduced cost for the whole ten seconds. I was able to get off 7 Frost Strikes in a row if you start with 100 RP. It would have been 8 if I had RPM (I didn't because I was using my tanking spec to test).

Seems like a PvP burst trinket at best until they fix it. Outside of ten seconds every three minutes it provides no benefit. Spark of Hope is good for PvE because it's passive.

I've done some testing of my own and found that while FS may not consume the effect DC, DRW and UB will. Also the cheaper cost on DRW does affect it's uptime(increasing by 2 seconds). With FS however if you get off 7-9 FS in the time it could be worth up to 193.5 RP, or a little more than 6 FS every 3 minutes.

Damit, you people figured out my secret :[

Auslese's Light Channeler is connected to your GCD from what I've found out, which makes it very unappealing to me for PvP. A 3 minute cooldown also makes it pretty lackluster for PvE, its not worth using over other trinkets from ulduar.

And yeah, after doing a bunch of numbers, 10 mana = 1 RP. I figured this out after doing some research on values of items/skills that increase/give RP, best example I can show is this ( Runic Power Mastery ).

Runic Power Mastery ( Runic Power Mastery - Spell - World of Warcraft )
Apply Aura: Mod Increase Energy (6)
Value: 300

Whenever you find something that involves increasing/lowering runic power there is always a x10 value on the actual numbers.

I think I was the first one to figure this little trick out, so I've been doing a lot of researching and testing, and came to the conclusion of this. There are 2 main things to look for when trying to find an item/ability that will copy this effect:

Apply Aura: Mod Power Cost (126)
Apply Aura: Mod School Power Cost (126)

I've literally spent over an hour searching through WoW item data bases, and have found very little that will repeat this effect ( School Power Cost) , Power Cost) )

As far as the Lower City trinket, I think it will work, because of the values its set for:

Blessing of Lower City ( Blessing of Lower City - Spell - World of Warcraft )
Apply Aura: Add Flat Modifier (14)
Value: -22

Now look at Glyph of Frost Strike:

Glyph of Frost Strike ( Glyph of Frost Strike - Spell - World of Warcraft )
Apply Aura: Add Flat Modifier (14)
Value: -80

Overall this is most likely unintended, but it does give some good ideas for the future of frost builds and items, I think the idea of reducing costs on abilities is cool, and a good way to give frost better overall damage ( if they ever nerf the burst frost can do, because Ill be the first to admit that its kinda silly what I can do in PvP right now in terms of burst damage. )

Since it seems my secret is out, if you find anything that I havent, please post :P

EDIT: some may apply to energy/rage, not sure though.

So hey, who else under Frost has lots of trouble staying up in the charts on Iron Council?

Wow Web Stats is my damage on it and I can't seem to bring it any higher. I'm not using the IT x6 Machine gun spec because I use my tank offspec a lot and that would replace it. My normal 17/51/3 spec does a lot more damage than the IT x6 Machine Gun spec in various fights, but I know it would do more on fights like this. My damage on Yogg is untouchable, and I'm not as low as this on General.

If anybody has found a way to bring their DPS up other than the Machine Gun spec please elaborate in the thread.

FS does not eat the proc because it's not a SPELL, but spells(DC/UB/DRW) does.

So, from what I hear from my roommate, 3.1.3 broke the Frost Strike glyph and it doesn't reduce the RP cost at all. No idea yet if it's doing something different but the tooltip didn't change.

Has anyone else had a bug where rime procs are still consuming the runes?

Happened every time so far.


Edit: Ya, the way it is working right now is that if you get a rime proc, and all your runes are down, the HB is still free, but if you use the rime proc with even 1 usuable rune, you lose the rune.

Well my realm is still down, but if this is true Blizz probably got a hold of these tests people were doing where FS was getting reduced from the mana reduction trinkets and items. I can totally see them trying to fix it last second by making it not benefit from cost reduction abilities and totally overlooked the glyph which uses the same mechanic. GG Blizz if this is true.

Just tested both, everything is working as normal as it was before the patch.

Well, his definitely isn't. It won't let him throw it prior to 40 RP accumulated.

Now I am getting the frost strike glyph bug. 40 rp per FS now, with the glyph.

Edit: I think it's some kind of aura cost bug. Because now my guilds feral druid is saying that he is not getting any kind of cost reduction on his abilities.

Are you testing these inside of an instance? I'm hearing that these issues are only happening when inside any kind of instance. It's probably why they're doing rolling restarts related to talents, doesn't seem to be any problem with baseline abilities.

Yeah, I'm in Ulduar now.

Getting back on the whole Fs thing, i know a while back there were 3 or so favored runes among most frosties for "Dps", and even with the inherent nerf, Fallen Crusader it seemed to be the all out winner, Razor took too long, cinder wasnt deemed worthy.

I know personally i use FC, but for a time before that i was using cinder, and given the nature of some of our rotations im wondering why that isnt still a valid rune, it still scales just as well, and given it only effects frost and shadow spells it is easily worked into a rotation of double diseases, being easily left for frost strikes or eaten by the occasional IT.

Even more so with 4 item bonus on T8/8.5, using an alternating rotation, while not yeliding as much RP during the 3rd oblit phase does yield just as much dmg even more so if your sitting on cinderglacier proc's during the RP dump.

I just dont think, especially with the 4 item bonus that the rune of cinderglacier should be completely ruled out on the Pve Dps front.

It appears as though Blizzard quickly caught their mistake with [Auslese's Light Channeler] and the like. Was reducing the runic power of Frost Strike last night, and tonight it is not.

Confirmed, my robes don't work anymore either. Damn, that was fast.

As pointed out by many before, it's interesting to notice that in the end both rotations are suboptimal.

IT machinegun is superior to double disease, but both are inferior to Blood and Unholy - by which margin is debatable, but you just need to take a look at WoL/WMO to see that Frost is more or less nowhere to be seen with the notable exception of a couple HB intensive logs.

The reasons for this are essentially 2:

- both Blood and Unholy can hold their rotations in Blood Presence; Frost, unless you stick to the technically even more inferior HB rotation, cannot. Now while I appreciate the diversity of the option to use UP, it's a technically inferior presence and results show it. UP makes rotations much easier to hold on static targets, but contrary to what most believe, moving bosses are better handled in BP than UP. The reasons are very simple - higher downtime on the boss means more lost GCD and UP loses GCDs at a 150% faster rate. Making an example, having to run away from Mimir for say, 5 seconds means losing 3 gcds in BP, and 5 in UP. In similar "lancing" situation the relative advantages of UP get strongly devalued (UP needs a minimal uptime to catch up).
Notice that this also goes around depending on resource availability and time-windows of dps - so the statement has to be taken with a pinch of salt, because it's very easy to imagine a situation where a boss, say, allows you to dps in 3 second burst and in that case it's easy to show how UP would lead by a huge margin, as for example:

(let's say we can use a GCD to deal 100 damage)

BP: 115+115 = 230 damage over 3 seconds
UP: 100+100+100 = 300 damage over 3 seconds

This would be universally true (and putting UP in the lead as a presence) if it wasn't for the fact that to fill all or most GCDs in UP (something that is generally needed to make up for the damage loss of 15%) and to generate enough RP to beef up those FS, the UP rotations fill GCDs with "lightweight" attacks, so the equation above gets filled with much smaller numbers. In those windows of movement Frost may need to use PS or IT or BS (which make up for 8 of the 10 rune GCDs of both rotations), which certainly will struggle to reach the damage potential of DS and HS for Blood or the SS machinegun spamm of UH.
So the UP presence rotations do beat the BP presence rotations for Frost, but when compared to the two other speccs, you're more or less losing the damage comparison AND using and inferior presence. FS spamm looks a lot less attractive when you're hitting for 9-12k in UP while the BP UH dk is hitting for as much with his SS spamm, a pet and 3 diseases running and the Blood DK is pushing 6 HS who can procc DC in Blood Presence.
We have to make do with what we have, and atm UP IT heavy builds are the "smartest" option Frost has, but it's certainly not what Blizz had in mind and we will keep struggling to keep up because it's unlikely that they will buff something they ultimately didn't want to happen.


- the other factor is the lack of talent synergy. For example, PS gets no love in Frost builds, unlike Blood and Unholy ones, so it would sort of make sense to use it as little as possible. Instead for RP generation reasons the double disease rotation prefers to PS IT than to OB. OB is the ability our talents buff more, up to Ryme which is from a theorycal point of view one of the best dps-by-point talents ingame (trading a gcd for 8-12k damage for no resource cost and a small RP gain is pretty much fantastic, not to mention fights like Hodir where HB hits for upwards of 60k damage). However, we can't afford to synergize with those talents because FS spamm is still superior and thus IT glyph "abuse" is the way to go.

It's rather clear that the problem here is that we don't find a way to use all our resources like other speccs do. We have to specc into talents we barely use, we have to shy away from the best presence, we have to skip using our best strike, etc. This is even reflected into glyphs: while Blood and Unholy make an effective use of their "specific" glyphs (DRW, SS, Ghoul, DS etc), our 51 pointer-tied glyph is questionable because, in the end, we don't use our 51 pointer all that much in our best rotations.


I understand I'm threading into the ranting territory here, and I'll welcome the eventual moderation, but I don't see an easy solution to the problem. From an optimization perspective, as we are built now I don't see Blizzard moving us back to BP rotation setup; however, while inferior in PvE, the IT powered FS spamm is under the radar in PvP (as stated by GC) and if we end up with the IT glyph or worse FS nerfed and still no real incentive to use OB, we will be back to pre 3.1.

It seems as though people understood me wrong when I said frost was broken. I did not say it wasn't a competative DPS-spec. Personally I LOVE Frost because I always think it had the best Death Knight feel and funniest way to play.

But it does not take away the fact that Frost relies HEAVILY on glyphs and sigils to be viable. Sure Frost-dps is not dead without these but they need them to be viable.

There is no debating this really, Frost dps is not viable without the FS-Glyph. Frost Dps is not viable without the IT glyph. That leaves one glyph up for choice really. And blizzards intent with glyphs was to allow people to customize your spec to your preference.

If you look at Unholy there is only one "mandatory" glyph and that is the Glyph of the Ghoul. And if you look at blood there is no really mandatory glyph needed to be viable.

And when it comes to Sigil preference there is only minor diffrences in DPS for both Unholy and Blood. As I think the OP mentioned you shouldn't go Frost until you have the XT-Sigil.

So I will stick to the fact that I believe that the Frost tree at this moment is broken due to heavy reliance to glyphs and the sigil to be viable.

But if you can come up with a spec that doesn't need the Glyphs and the Sigil and does DPS on par with the other specs you will have me convinced. Until that I stand by my oppinion that Frost is next up on the chopping board and with the coming changes to make DW viable it just seems as the logical way to go.

edit:

On a totaly unrelated note, have anyone done any testing on the AMS-glyph? If people are unfamiliar with it it increases the lenght of AMS with 2 seconds. And seeing as the OP explained the usefullness of it there could be an intresting way to go. The only issue I can see is if it capps you beyond being able to dump fast enough to take advantage of it fully. I'm not saying it is the optimal glyph but I'm just curious of its effects and as my computer is in the shop I have no way of testing it myself.

I think I might have over-estimated it's value since seeing as not much of the damage is done over 7 seconds. Limiting its usefullness even more. But if someone has any numbers I would appreiecte it.

Due to the recent changes to AMS (its absorbtion is capped at 50% of your total health), I don't think the glyph is entirely worth it. Furthermore, on many fights (Ignis, XT, Kologarn etc.) you're relying on 'burst' magical damage to fuel your RP engine, which the glyph won't affect at all. On some fights (AoI, Yogg) the glyph would give you a bit more RP, but would probably not result in any great DPS increase over the over available glyphs.

6/02/09

Runic Power costs will no longer be lowered by abilities intended to lower mana costs.
The Leviathan MK II’s Self Repair will no longer be canceled when VX-001 casts Spinning Up.

It wasn't much of an issue in PvE. Can you imagine the chaos when DKs run around w/ a lvl 61 trinket in Arena unloading 10 Frost Strikes in a row?