I'll try the UP with my current setup, if it does more I'll stick with it. When I get more Ulduar gear, which is hopefully going to be the case this coming week, I'll switch to the IT x6 spec and replace my HB glyph with the IT glyph and see the numbers I get. I do wanna note is that I was saying Vezax is a fight FOR the IT x6 spec considering you'll be stuck to the boss.

What people forget is, that the one person can stick with all speccs and rotations and doing well DPS, and the other person can't.
Every person has to decide which rotation and specc is the best for themself. If you're doing well with 2 Desease but suck with ITx6, stick with your own and best performing. ITx6 can perform very good numbers, if you can handle the rotation and has an eye on all your CDs.

You are not going to see good results because you do not have the new Sigil. ITx6 is not (as) viable without it.

That being said, yes HB is "only" a disease application, and as you duly noted you can achieve the same thing with a pestilence. However, HB has two distinct advantages over pestilence.

1) It does damage and doesn't waste a rune and a GCD. In an ITx6 sometimes a GCD can mean going over your 3 second rule by 3-5 seconds easily.
2) It spreads diseases in an AoE *originating from the target.* This is the reason why its so great in Ulduar...you run around a lot and diseases fall off and you have a very limited amount of time to DPS but sometimes you are presented with AoE situations.

There are many fights where HB glyph allows you to frontload effectively...Razorscale add pacts....Kolo body parts...Auriya Swarms...Mimiron parts/adds...Yogg tentacles that are grouped but you don't want to get near because they'll one shot you...

That's a lot of utility...and not all of it can be replicated with a pestilence. Most of it can, but while you're spreading I'm already pumping out an actual damage GCD. Add enough of those situations up during the course of the fight and you have a significant chunk of damage.

You're underestimating the purpose of the HB glyph. It's twofolded:

1) on aoe situations the two possible rotations are:

PS IT Pest HB BB (BT) BB

vs

HB BB BB OB (BT) BB

Rotation 2 is incredibly more front loaded. You don't trade a BS for Pest, you trade a BB. Now if you look at it on paper, in the end the damage difference isn't so obvious. Rotation one gains Blood Plague. Those blood boils will hit harder, and so on and so forth.

However, when you are mechanically into the fight, the HB glyph really shows its advantages. With the rotation one, for example, Auriaya's adds will be mostly dead before you can hit BB. On Thorim, you will barely get diseases ticks before they're down. On Mimir you'll be applying your diseases with a 3 gcd rotation that is worth about 5-6k damage instead of a single global cooldown that can inflict 25-30k damage.
With the HB glyph, FF starts ticking since the first application. You have the runes for an OB, which is a solid damage increase and may procc HB again for added damage. You start BB'ing before adds are already dead. The list goes on, but the utility for the HB glyph in aoe situations is huge.

2) on single target dps, the purpose of the HB glyph is essentially only one: it makes BP rotations competitive.
At the moment RP generation is still generous enough with AMS and Rejuv that I have no downtime in BP. I always have a button to press, and FS is the best button I can press. Rune powers are fillers, and I want to fill GCDs with the highest damage attack I can - that usually means Obliterate. The HB glyph allows me to basically use every single FU rune set for OB, and it generates the highest damage possible in BP in small clusters of GCDs (HB OB BS is better than PS IT OB, for example). If I can fill the rest of the time with FSs without running out of RP and while keeping rune generation in check, the HB glyph allows me to fill the "spare" BP global cooldowns with high damage attacks.
In a priority system, the HB glyph gains a role as single target dps. FS is the highest part of your damage. If you have RP, you should be FSing. You need to have FF running, and HB provides for that. Essentially what you do with the HB glyph, as long as you have RP running, is to give up on Blood Plague to fill all non FS gcds with 8-11k damage attacks.

The reason you see the IT spamm builds overperform this is that the IT glyph is overpowered enough to grant such high RP generation to be able to stick 15 powerful attacks in the same number of GCDs that this BP rotation stick 10. Individually the HB rotation strikes will hit harder, and the cooldowns will be spent on higher damage by resource abilities, but you won't catch up with 15 gcd worth of abilities expecially when so much of that is extra FS.

If the IT glyph ever gets nerfed, I promise you people will start looking at the HB glyph with different eyes for single target dps too, because the damage difference with double disease BP IT glyph rotations on single targets is minimal and the aoe utility is vastly superior.

IT PS Pes HB is 4 GCDs, the only time you get to use that many on AOE is on a fight like Freya. On pretty much every other fight adds die so fast that leading with HB would seem to be the clear choice. I suppose another argument could be made that if adds are dying that quickly on other fights, the AOE isn't as necessary, whereas the AOE on Freya is pretty vital to success on the boss (fights with quick AOE: Thorim, Yogg, Razorscale, possibly XT). It just depends on the fight. Trying to do useful AOE on Thorim without leading with HB seems unwise, but on Freya the slow buildup is better.

As far as I know, BB hits equally hard no matter how many diseases you have, as long as there is at least one. Quote from Wowhead:

A quick consideration on how we keep comparing the use of Death Runes for IT instead of OB - in most of the past comparisons we looked at damage in a vacuum.

It's true that 2 ITs can be equal or even over an average OB, but OB is an ability that very rarely falls below 65-70% critical ratio. IT isn't even close, and if it is it's because it leeched precious KM proccs from FS. And when those crits happen, OB's critical damage is vastly superior to IT's.

This should lead us to accepting that while it would be crazy to beg for a nerf to the IT glyph, we can't afford to be the specc that is at the moment balanced around being inferior to UH thanks to an overpowered glyph and a suspicious sigil. The 6xIT rotation moves us away from the strike almost all our talents work to build (Obliterate), to the point of devaluing some of said talents (talents like Ryme or MoM aren't the same dps increase by point in a 6xIT rotation), even before nerfing the already minimal damage increase of our set bonuses.
If Frost was dominating damage meters, we could just accept it was once again "clever use of game mechanics". At the moment Frost is competitive but sensibly below the best dps speccs, and to do so it has to exploit a glyph and rely (to a lesser degree) on a suspiciously powerful Sigil. At the moment the most welcome change we could see is something that makes us switch back to be wanting to use OB over IT whenever we don't need to apply FF (IT still has a niche in its ranged and magical properties) while obtaining an intermediate RP generation between OB rotations and IT chaingun ones. Reality is that we would be generating more damage using OB than we do using IT, assuming a rebalancing work on RP generation - and for once, not through gear or sigils.

The UH 6x IT rotation uses every double run refresh (20 seconds) 2 OB, 2 BS, 6 IT, 1 HoW and about 7 FS. That's 18 gcds over 20, so you'll end up having a terribly hard time weaving abilities for KM. In many cases, I found it beneficial to try and chain 2-3 ITs in a row whenever possible between a swing and another. Using a swingtimer addon like Quartz can help you trying to slap ITs between melee swings as long as KM didn't procc, but most of time you can't delay attacks and so RNG will be the dominating factor.

Thanks a bunch Kroot. I really appreciate the contributions you've made to the Frost DPS community!

I honestly don't get why you think UP or ITx6 is "overpowered." Especially the IT glyph..if *anything* is overpowered, its Frost Strike. OB does indeed have talents that buff it, but so does IT...Rime still procs for me (see the video!) fairly often, and it gives +15% crit on IT which is nothing shabby.

Also..where are you getting your data that leads you to believe such a generalized statement as 'Frost is competitive but sensibly below the best DPS specs.' Frost is incredibly potent right now. Unless I screw up I am almost always near the top of the meters no matter the fight, and I know Kroot and others are getting competitive results as well and I don't think they're even using ITx6.

I disagree with you in terms of 'welcoming changes' as well. You seem to really love OB and want to build rotations around using that more, and that's fine, but I don't see the purpose in calling for a nerf to a rotation just because you aren't a fan of it. I think that the frost tree is very well organized and it allows for multiple choices in terms of specs and rotations. Isn't that the hallmark of good balance? Choice?

Another part of your argument that doesn't particularly make sense is when you are talking about glyphs and gear changing your rotation....again, its about choice. If you choose the HB glyph, your rotation can change...if you choose IT glyph your rotation can be performed in UP. If you choose ITx6 you have to worry about things that you don't have to worry about when in BP with HB solo disease. I'm pretty sure the reason that Blizz implemented glyphs was so that we could tinker with our rotation and we have a variety of glyphs to alter it to our specification.

If ITx6 was so viciously overpowered you would feel compelled to spec it in order to do competitive DPS, but I don't see that attitude at all around here.

Furthermore, the build still relies on OB, but in a slightly different way (death rune generation). If you watch the video that I put out you can see that you have to monitor your rune generation exceedingly close and with a 1 sec GCD you have to be really spot-on with watching for a KM proc if you want to optimize. You still OB, you still get Rime procs, you just swing the balance a little more over into IT whereas with other rotations you spam OB a little more.

By your standards is Epidemic an overpowered talent? I mean, it completely changes the way that you use SS and OB in that you can use them much more without refreshing diseases. What's the big deal with having gear or talent choice affect your rotation?

Edit: Also, in response to your post about not being able to weave in ITx6....watch the video I posted. Multiple times in there I wait for 1-2 GCDs in order to properly weave and set up rune refresh. It's still the same concept you just have to be quicker.

Btw, whoever asked...I use MagicRunes as my rune UI with default settings

Putting aside the HB/IT quarrel for a moment, here are more results using IT/FS-based rotation. First Yogg kill last night after only a few attempts more:

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

WoL seems very nice, and it was a website that we could get to load the data properly (WWS supposedly had issues). It's a little bit of a hard fight to record due to people being in and out of portal phases, and I was on the top of the charts on a few peoples' reports, but regardless it seems to have worked well given the amount of movement required as a melee in that fight. It worked especially well in the third phase.

Considering the amount of damage that FS does now on this specific rotation, I think it's important to factor the value of ArP on weapons and gear overall. In an Obliterate-heavy build, it would have been appealing, but with so few, it's tougher to say. White hits still make up 20% or so of my damage (~21% on Yogg), so ArP does benefit that but very little else because of the rotation, given Blood Strikes and Obliterates are only every 15-20 seconds.

At this point, could be asked of this rotation is: is haste then a little more valuable point-for-point for it than ArP, or is ArP even better due to faster white swings? In my current gear setup, my normal melee attacking speed with the Betrayer (3.4 speed) is down to 2.14 seconds after UP, Improved Icy Talons and 248 haste. I find that Killing Machine procs so often that it is very difficult to not be forced to use it on IT to keep up the rotation. I have some work to do in terms of getting better at that, but it feels as if the extremely fast weapon swings are having a major effect and that there are 8-10 PPM. Do you experience the same sort of thing, Erekose?