Your assertion is misguided. You're comparing one unholy DW parse to several frost parses without asking yourself: "Does the extra damage done to the adds on Ignis signify that perhaps those DKs were assigned to kill molten adds?". Since you seem to want to discount damage done to adds you then have to account for the fact the those frost DKs in question would be running away from the boss to the adds and thus losing DPS time. Before you say otherwise, there is no possibly way that any frost DK would have 800k damage done on adds with just incidental howling blast AoE.

Point in case, you can't simply pick certain parts of parses and use those to make a comparison. Also, your math was a little off on the percentage increase. For frost to make up a difference the difference of 350k they would need approximately 24% more damage done.

Your diseases will fall off w/out epidemic too. I have a reeeeeally hard time believing disease glyph will ever be a dps gain. Better off with IT-PS-OB-BS-BS / IT-PS-BS-BS-BS-BS repeating.

Can you clarify this? Are you saying that if a parse shows 20-30% of the total damage going to Iron Constructs, It might be a result of the DK being assigned to break golems?

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Howling blast has a 10 yard radius, which isn't huge. So having 20-30% of your damage going into iron golems very well could and should be the result of being assigned to break golems.

if all you're doing is breaking golems, you'd probably only get 1 HB cast off, assuming it crit, the golem would be gone. To do 800k to golems the you'd have to have killed 80-100 or more golems if all you were doing is shattering them, and that would be a VERY LONG FIGHT.

At the same time however, Lazzeks parse on the same fight may have done significant damage in AE to the golems, but the fight itself was shorter as well. He did 1,173,842 damage to Ignis over 186 seconds, 6311 DPS to ignis, so both sides have made mistakes in comparing these fights.

The massive damage done to adds on these fights is most certainly a result of doing the achievement to not break golems. Having iron constructs out the entire fight allows people to reach silly levels of DPS through AOE, these parses are completely useless and should be disregarded as such.

The idea that any guild would purposefully choose to have a melee dps break off, run over, and pop the golems (eating the explosion) is simply ridiculous.

This. They're zerging down the boss, not having melee break adds.

This is right. Using those Ignis parses are not a very good show of frost single target dps. One of the parses linked was from me and we just had all the adds tanked near the boss with not exploding any of them and I did a howling blast every rotation which I would not do in a normal single target rotation.

Source is Main Page - WotlkWiki - Wrath of the Lich King Information

Anyone else seen this? Seems like it could balance Dual Wield's potential, but destroy 2H's. Not sure on how reliable that site is, either.

It's true, currently staring at my once precious sigil on the ptr.

I imagine this was done as the frost strike ability would benefit from this on both weapons (give ToT), bringing the bonus back up to 226 total. If the current bonus remained as is (the +380), it would be difficult to justify the new sigils.

A question for those that have managed to get on the PTR, does bloodstrike do enough damage with its buff to warrant a spec that maximizes its damage? Something along the lines of 25/46 so you can pickup bloody strikes, guile of gorfiend, frost strike and blood of the north while also picking up all the lower tier strike modifiers as well. It would seem if blood strike is capable of doing ~90% weapon damage a strike that it would be worth investigating.

The suggested build would be THIS with the idea behind it being to run in unholy presence, get diseases up and spam blood and frost strikes. Thoughts, critiques, disparaging comments are all welcome guys.

The new sigil (+200 Strength proc on Obliterate/Scourge Strike) appears to have a very high procrate. It was always up with an Obliterate-heavy rotation. Dual Wield isn't doing as much more damage than 2H as I thought, but it was still consistently about 200 dps more, with non-maxed weapon skills, and non-optimal weapons (especially compared to my Aesir's Edge). Everything else equal, and a dual-disease Obliterate-focused rotation. This was a Frost/Unholy build, and Necrosis would've added even more damage if the dummy registered it correctly.

On a personal note it was sad seeing the dummy dodge a Frost Strike.

Blood Strike is definitely more damaging, but I'm not sure it's by enough to warrant a Blood-heavy spec. Even with the 4 piece Darkruned it wasn't doing stellar damage with Dual Wield and both diseases up. Definitely something to test, though.

I've been trying to figure out how SotVH works with DW on the PTR, and I'm kind of stumped with the numbers I'm seeing. Hopefully the problem is just my wee-hours-of-the-morning math. If someone can point out where I'm going wrong, that'd be great.

Setup and assumptions:

• This build
• Using 2x [Shortsword]
• Target dummy is above 35%
• Frost fever is kept up
• AP is constantly 3506, no procs
• Rank 6 FS is 55% weapon damage + 138
• SotVH is listed as 113 damage to FS
• Normalized 1h speed is 2.4

My FS crits are consistently 2466-2468 MH and 1693-1695 OH, which is different than what I keep coming up with what they should be. My thinking was that my max crit should be reflected by:
WPN = 4 + 3506 / 14 * 2.4
FS_base = .55 * WPN + 138 + 113 (sigil)
FS = FS_base * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.2 * 1.15 (Black Ice, BotN, Glacier Rot, and TS)
FS_crit = FS * 2.45

Plugging in my numbers, without rounding (no idea how the game does that internally), I get:
WPN = 605.02857142857142857142857142857
FS_base = 583.76571428571428571428571428568
FS = 974.77198971428571428571428571422
FS_crit = 2388.1913747999999999999999999998

Which is clearly not what I'm seeing. In fact, taking SotVH out of the equation, this seems to be a general issue with FS (or just my math). With no sigil equipped, my hits are around 785, which matches with the above formula. However, my crits are 1989-1992, which is higher than expected.

Edit: Corrected base FS values. After getting the correct bonus damage for rank 6, this appears to be a bug in our favor (or just bad math). I'd still like to nail down exactly what's amiss though.

Did you account for the bonus damage nerf to frost strike? It's only 110.55 now. As well as the Blood of the North nerf? From 15% to 10%.

I did account for the BotN nerf. I believe FS was 110.55 at some lower rank, but I'll double-check. If I accidentally plugged in the multiplied FS bonus damage and then multiplied it again, I'll kick myself.

Edit: Dur... ok, mystery partly solved. I checked the trainer and got 55% + 250 for the untalented FS rank 6 values. Problem is, I had SotVH equipped at the time, which affected it. Completely naked, the listed value for FS rank 6 is 55% + 138. This matches my FS non-crits without the sigil perfectly. However, I still can't explain my crit numbers or exactly how the sigil interacts with things now.

Edit: Delete pls!!

Did you do all the tests completely naked except for weapons and sigil? Since the 3% bonus to total crit damage from the meta would more or less exactly account for the difference.

They just changed the patch notes and cut the BS bonus per disease down to 25% (lower than the 50% it was at, but higher than the 12.5% on live,) and then increased frost fever and blood plague's damage by 15% each. Same concept of making single-disease rotations less viable (which I suppose was the idea,) but less damage from BS itself.

I'm pretty sure that the answer to this would be no due to the large difference in RP generation, but for a DW frost spec would using your death'd blood runes on OB be better than using them on two ITs to fuel more frost strikes be better now in light of the nerfs FS has gotten?

(EDIT: to clarify, I'm referring to the double-disease IT -> PS -> OB -> BS -> BS -> DUMP -> OB -> IT ->PS -> IT -> IT -> DUMP rotation, not the ITX6.)

That's what I get for testing before sleeping. :/ That works to within a few damage points, the difference almost certainly being due to rounding.

Now, the fun part... trying to figure out how the sigil fits in. Using that same formula, I get 1598.894 offhand damage if we assume that the sigil applies to the OH and the 113 bonus damage is reduced to 65%. If we assume the sigil's bonus damage is not reduced by the OH penalty, then we get expected damage of 1765.548. Neither perfectly fits the observed values of 1693-1695, and I don't think the difference in either case can be attributed to rounding.

Ok, so I waited a while to post this so I could get accurate data from raiding a week as the 6x IT Unholy Presence build, and my standard 13/51/7 double disease Blood Presence build.

Now, to preface: I understand the theory craft and discussion has basically indicated that this spec is dated and/or not worth mentioning compared to the above (6x IT), but by all means take a look at my parses.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

6-15-09 to 6-18-09 is all 6x IT UP build: 20/51/0 ... 6-21-09 to 6-23-09 is all: 13/51/7

Comparing the builds, I find myself doing more damage with 13/51/7 in almost every fight. Sure you can say perhaps it was because I was more used to the 13/51/7 build than the 6x IT build, but even more so, it's just plain easier in general to maximize the former than the latter and the gain for maximizing the latter isn't as much as it's cooked up to be.

The build I run is linked here (including glyphs): Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Now to give an example, comparing to Fargom's recent Ignis kill for single target only, to my WoLogs of the same boss:

Fargom: Wow Web Stats

Seratha: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

My only collateral damage was like 2.7k dmg on a single construct add with Howling Blast, once. I forgot to use Army of the Dead and Risen Ghoul at all, and my dps was higher regardless. The fight was about 25 seconds quicker though, thus why my damage wasn't higher than his overall since my whole raid's damage was higher in general (and slightly why my dps was higher even without AotD + RG).

I'm not really sure why my build isn't even considered these days, even though it pulls higher damage than most other frost builds that I've seen on the same fights, under the same conditions.

For reference I run Blood Presence and my rotation is as follows:
IT, PS, OB, BS, BS ... OB, OB, (OB or 2x IT) <- Depends on how my Runic Power needs are.

I double Icy Touch if I need more RP, or Obliterate if I have too much. Obviously, intelligent weaving of Frost Strike in between spots in the rotation, especially when Killing Machine procs is necessary. Also note, making sure Frost Strike uses Killing Machine is faaaar easier in Blood Presence than Unholy Presence, especially when you aren't spamming Icy Touch like the 6x IT build does.

For Runic Power absorbs with Anti-Magic Shell, it still works great with Blood Presence as well. You just make sure Frost Fever stays up and unload Frost Strikes over rune abilities until you get to a reasonable level of runic power you can keep doing your rotation with and not cap out again early.

For AoE intensive spots, Blood Presence pretty much demolishes Unholy Presence. Spread diseases (they last a long time in this build), Howling Blast, and Blood Boil. If stuff is still alive on rune refreshes, Death and Decay, Howling Blast, and either Pestilience or Blood Boil, depending on how close stuff is to dead.

For fights you have to lance on, or move out of melee for whatever reason, this build still performs relatively well in. Take Mimiron for instance. When he casts Shock Blast and you have to run out, Unholy Presence can run out slightly quicker, but at the same time, it caps out on runic power quickly if you spam icy touch at range, and if you howling blast, you're far better off doing it in Blood Presence for the damage bonus, not to mention you can still Icy Touch, and it still hits harder, you just can't (and don't want to) spam it.

For fights like Freya on lashers or whatnot, you can keep your diseases going longer while a tank aoe taunts them and drags them out of the raid to explode them (mostly hard mode). For anything aoe across the board, longer diseases means refreshing with pestilence less often.

The build in general has a lot of strengths, so I figured I'd share my results, and hopefully it can get some recognition, and maybe some more testing by others to see their results. The build is also very easy to learn, especially if you're coming from Unholy builds (similar).

P.S.- I run 4 piece T8 and the Vengeful Heart sigil.

TLDR: 13/51/7 is very competitive. Build: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Kistrel, you build is indeed considered among the 3 possible frost builds. At least it was in the old topic. I would say the dps difference between 17/51/3 and 13/51/7 is mostly cosmetic - the rotations are more or less identical, and the difference is more crit vs ease of KM use.

Moving to PTR changes, it would seem now Frost is balanced around DW and DW only. The cumulative nerfs are going to completely destroy any viability Frost 2h had.