Valimar

I'm assuming that this is connected to a change they've brought in recently, I'm guessing it was introduced in 3.12 because I never spotted it before, but that's mere conjecture. Anyway the change is aimed mainly to benefit Blood DK's.

If you were to go into a situation where you use heavy amounts of Death Strike for self healing, thus leaving yourself with BB/DD/DD rune setups and your diseases fell off, you would use both your Unholy Death Runes on PS/IT and then your remaining Death Runes on the DS, originally this means you'd be given a BB/DD/UU setup.

Instead now, when you cast that Death Strike it will convert one of the Unholy runes you used on PS/IT to an Death Rune and one of the Frost Runes that should have been a Death rune into a Frost Rune. The cooldowns are switched to synchronise with their corresponding partner, so your Frost Rune will come up with your Unholy Rune and your two Death Runes will come up shortly after together (swapping the Frost and Unholy runes cooldowns with eachother)

In short, it's actually a nifty little change.

 

Vraxis

I noticed that the other day and messed around with it. From what I saw, the second Blood Rune will become a Death Rune if Pestilence successfully touches a nearby target. It does not need to spread a disease, it simply has to "jump" to something other than the target it was cast upon.

 

Erekose

Something to think about...if ITx6 only uses OB on one half of the cycle, the importance of the OB glyph is diminished. I'm going to be running IT/HB/FS from now on for the next week or so and see if my damage drops. I really like the HB glyph for certain parts of Ulduar and I feel like it can outperform the OB glyph (though only for ITx6 obviously).

 

Runz

I'm not going to waste space here with parces, because we all know how misleading dummy DPS can be. At the risk of taking the conversation off topic, I do have one question maybe a few of you can help me with. I was wondering if you're specced 17/51/3 using the following rotation...

IT -> PS -> OB -> BS -> BS -> DUMP
OB -> IT ->PS -> IT -> IT -> DUMP

Wouldn't it make more sense to replace the IT > PS in the 2nd half of the rotation with an obliterate? As I said, I don't want to post a screen shot of recount (not the point of these threads, also not exactly the most accurate), but using simple logic, an obliterate does more damage than an icy touch combined with a plague strike. I know that IT will generate an extra 10 RP, but with obliterate doing better damage than IT + PS, especially with 4pc T8 bonus and avoiding disease timer clipping, I would think that it'd be worth using that and taking the 10 less runic power, especially if you're not gearing for expertise in favor of other stats. UP in this rotation can leave you with a second or 2 here or there where you have nothing to use and are waiting for runes to come off cooldown. A dodge due to lack of expertise isn't nearly as damaging to this rotation as others (blood specs for instance).

Even if you're expertise capped, I would still think the extra damage from an oblit (again, especially with 4pc T8) would outweigh the 10 RP. Is there anyone who has tested this extensively or has any reasoning why IT + PS is better than an obliterate?

 

Travex

Just tested on the test dummy and it was difficult to keep Blood Plague on at all times with the rotation you suggested. The runic power loss and dps loss from Blood Plague would likely outweight the damage difference between IT+PS and Obliterate even with 4pcT8 (which, from what I've heard, is less of a damage increase than you'd think). I do not yet have 4pcT8 so I cannot test this myself so if someone else wants to...

There is also the option of going 13/51/7 if you can afford to take the crit loss but Ulduar plate dps gear barely has any crit already. Seems like a lot of effort just to get in an extra Oblit.

 

Synia

Erekose, after getting a night of testing in on some 10-man hard mode attempts/various achievements (e.g. Disarmed), I am indeed finding positive results from your more dominant IT/FS rotations with UP. Color me surprised, but I was pulling about 5k DPS on our kill of XT, and over 8k (and 9k at points) on Hodir. Clearly not a 25-man, but certainly showing some positive results, considering I've not yet optimized/learned a proper rotation setup yet. Pardon if some numbers are lower as going for some of the achievements meant I couldn't go all out and slowed down a little in order to make sure not to mess anything up. XT is a good measurement, though, considering it is mostly just beating on a single target for several minutes in terms of the hard mode.

Wow Web Stats

I find that not necessarily using 6 ITs is needed, and I might use around 3-4 at a time, but it's a work-in-progress and using more could prove beneficial. As for now I've used DKInfo as my add-on which I like very much, and throw Obliterates in when I have both diseases up and have either an odd combination of runes free (such as FFU, DFU, and so on) or only the two to use the ability, so long as I have both diseases up. My damage with FS has gone up to the mid-40s in terms of percentage of damage dealt. With this change, dropping the four-piece T8 bonus is very reasonable, I'd say, since there are a couple known pieces that are statistically superior.

As for using the Howling Blast glyph, I'm not sure -- it may prove more beneficial on AoE fights, but in terms of single target, I am never using it except when Rime procs off of the now-few Obliterates I do. Thus, I'd think that for single-target fights, it might not be as effective since you still perform some Obliterates (as well as use IT enough that the disease is always up), but for the AoE, it could definitely be a viable option.

 

Erekose

With ITx6 Machine Gun you never put up Plague Strike/Blood Plague, if there is an unholy rune that is not Death then you OB to convert it for the next go around. 4pt8 is next to useless. As for HB glyph I consider it to be worth it seeing as so much of Ulduar has an AoE component involved. You get to combine some of the more interesting rotation choices of BP HB glyph solo disease and IT spam, making you more flexible when it comes to the situations that Ulduar offers. I'd willing to accept a (very) minor DPS loss (20% on an ability I use ~2 times every 20 seconds is fine by me) in exchange for higher AoE damage and utility.

 

Synia

I will have to test that then and see if it ups the results improve even further. It does make sense, and I'm used to the single-disease setup of pre-3.1 yore, but it will feel funny dropping PS from my rotation yet again! At the same time, some numbers could probably be run which would differentiate between using and not using PS/BP in the rotation. I will try doing that for the time being and see how the numbers end up. Thinking about it, it would make the rotation less awkward if I never have to worry about PS, so you are probably correct on that account. I would also be able to get more Obliterates in, increasing DPS.

If you would like, I could try using the HB glyph in place of Obliterate and see how it works on our Yogg attempts this coming night. At the very least, it might provide a DPS/AoE boost on the tentacles in the portal phases (in particular, the torture scene with the three grouped tentacles). It might just be extremely effective on fights like Razorscale, Freya, or Thorim, but it could be worth a shot. Better/fuller results would come in the following week, though.

 

Tigga

Sounds good, I will give it a try this evening. My thoughts on this was: HB OB BS BT IT UA Dump; HB IT IT 2xFS IT IT Dump, in BP. I suspect that you don't have the GCD to use all your FS. Currently I'm not at my Mac but will give it a try.

 

Valimar

This is why I was asking in the BiS list if 4pc is really necessary for Frost as IT heavy builds generating RP for FStrike spam seem to be dominating.

I've not gone as far as an ITx6 yet, still using the PS/IT/Ob/BSBS > Ob/Ob/ITIT rotation so far, it had pretty good results at Decon, WoL link: Deconstructor would have done better but with the casters slacking 2nd and 3rd Heart Phases failed a bit yadda yadda, numbers aside and the fact I buggered up at one point, the majority of damage is F-Strike based. 2x IT at the moment is not much less than Obliterate, with the Glyph and CotG I'm generating over double the RP so any damage loss is overly compensated by F-Strike, going to be trying the ITx6 build next week so will post comparitive results here.


Anyway I'm pondering Hodir atm, RG wise there's other things that need resolving but personally I'm wondering if I've got the best rotation down for this one. Atm I'm going in with IT/PS/HB/BSBS > FS dump > IT/PS/HB/ITIT > FS Dump. Completely ignoring physical based attacks to benefit as much as possible from the Toasty Fire debuff stacked on Hodir with magical damage. So far we've yet to have any decent attempt at keeping the debuffs up long enough for me to gain a full measure of it's efficiency. I'm not asking for hand holding here, as I'm fairly confident that I've hit the nail on the head, but if anyone has had the luxury of being able to get a full try with the debuffs up and been able to tweak their rotation to something else I'd appreciate them sharing their findings.

 

Erekose

Depending on what rotation you use, 4pt8 is either very nearly worthless or just completely useless. For me, I only use 1 disease, and I use 2 OB every 20 seconds. I don't plan to get the 4p bonus unless the shoulders just fall in my lap before the others from Cat Lady.

I've been checking the BiS thread and I'm 100% certain that the list posted is not optimized for ITx6, though who knows maybe Blizz won't like us having fun with interesting priority systems again and it'll get nerfed. As it stands now with the rotation I've been using (people who PM me, I'll gladly answer your questions but watch the video I posted on the last page please) I don't really care about OB other than to convert to Death. It's damage isn't amazing compared to the RP from IT or ranged aoe damage from HB.

A point of discussion that came up in the tail end of the last thread was whether or not IT glyph and associated rotations were 'overpowered' and I would like to revisit that. For me, something is overpowered when you have no choice but to choose X option because Y and Z are just straight up inferior. I don't believe this to be the case...if the various questions have shown nothing else in this thread it has shown that there are choices.

You can go ITx6 Machine Gun, 2x disease OB spam, 2x disease OB spam with IT on Death Runes...

Your glyph choices are somewhat locked in but if you change your rotation to include more or less OB you can glyph accordingly to *choose* to optimize yourself away from or towards single target/aoe respectively. The choice is the part that makes me think IT glyph is not overpowered...

One potential problem or argument I see however is relating to the patch that nerfed IT damage and moved Rime...Blizz basically said IT hits too hard, we want you using OB more. For a while I was using the HB glyph single disease rotation with OB spam in BP and it was working quite well and it had an interesting dynamic...based on hardest hitting strikes/spells etc.

So, if you are using ITx6 and only using 2 OB every 20 seconds, is that below the threshold that Blizz wants for us? A counter argument would be that Blood glyphs for Death Strike and that had a large amount of re-design...but they only use that ability a little bit more than the ITx6 uses OB. Again there is a choice here because by choosing less OB you are resigning yourself to the fact that you'll get less free HBs which situationally can be very, very huge DPS gains.

Another argument is Presences. I don't have any blue post or anything besides memory to go off of, but I faintly remember a blue saying that Unholy Presence is the "PvP" Presence and Blood is the "PvE" presence..but lately I find myself using UP 100% of the time in PvE and only using BP for high burst in PvP. Ironic much?

This is a distinct advantage that Frost offers as I don't believe that Blood/Unholy specs can reach their full potential in UP. It increases our KM uptime significantly and offers an impressive movement advantage that can be used to great effect in Ulduar. I know that Unholy in particular would suffer as it has a large amount of free GCDs already. Blood probably wouldn't be hurt as much but if you run a tight rotation you should have no problems keeping the rotation going in BP.

I hope they don't nerf ITx6 again, but I wouldn't be surprised. They tend to nerf what I grow attached to

 

Vaelzek

ITx6 will most likely be nerfed in the future. Blizzard has previously stated (around when 3.1 came out) that they want us to use our entire arsenal of IT/OBL/HB/FS to do our damage. They saw the problem with 4p t7 being better than t8 due to the RP generation (which is what we're all about) and they simply cut down the RP a little. I can foresee them nerfing glyph of IT down to +5 RP before the end of time.

 

GBF

I really, really hope they look at the core problem instead of just nerfing the glyph and being done with it. We need increased RP gain to fuel our Frost Strikes, but we need it from TALENTS, not gear or glyphs. As long as that glyph exists, it will be the best possible choice in all situations, and it will skew our rotations to favor Icy Touch over Obliterate, when Obliterate SHOULD be a heavy-hitting attack that we want to use as much as we can.

edit: Arioch, you mentioned to pay attention to your rune usage in the video, can you explain exactly what you did? It's a bit hard to see just from the video without any notes.

 

Valtiel

Please, this kind of nonsense doens't help the discussion. I've checked your posted logs and while still raiding with Awareness I vastly surpass most of the people in your parses as Frost, both as HB BP and as UP IT glyph.

Frost is MUCH better with the glyph, and if your point was that Awareness should never be a choice if you have Vengeful Heart, everyone with a brain will agree. But raiding without it as Frost is plenty possible and unless the 15th dpser in your raid is sitting on 6k dps on all fights, you will be competitive. I've been over 9k on Hodir without VH, I've been over 7k on XT without VH, I've been over 5.5k on Razorscale without VH, I've been over 5k on Vezaxx without VH, I've been over 8k on Thorim with VH, and so on.

It's plenty possible to end Ulduar clears keeping an average of 5.5-6k dps without the sigil of VH as Frost. You should get your hands on the sigil as soon as you can, but DK dps is so high at the moment that you are gonna be plenty "viable" raiding as Frost BECUZ IT MAKES YE FEER FUZZY.

 

Travaggie

The glyph of Howling Blast is never going to be a good substitute for the Glyph of Obliterate plain and simple. First of all the Unholy Presence IT Spam uses OB on both half of the rotation (or if you use a priority system like me every time you have an unholy rune available), so 2 OB still gets decent use out of the glyph. Glyph of HB does nothing for you simply because you are spamming IT the entire time so why would you ever need HB to apply frost fever? There's 0 chance it would be more DPS to do so after moving away from your 4 piece T7.

 

Lazengann

In my experience in Ulduar, I've noticed it essential to the raid to have an Unholy DK and a Frost DK, regardless of the sigil used by either of the two.

Currently, the Unholy DK in my guild pulls an avarage of 1k less than I do, I sit as Frost. He doesn't have to do much, just his normal rotation and not pay much attention, while I have to make sure I pop the right CDs and attacks at the right time. You'll notice that AoE fights really give Frost DKs the advantage of using KM on HB and DCh on HB as well to hit a minimum of 7k per HB hit.

This areguement of sigils doesn't take away the big hitter of frost in most the Ulduar fights, AoE HB hits. Frost Strike will of course outweigh it, but it boosts your DPS and it will only sit 4-9% of all damage done away from HB. Focusing too heavily on FS will end up lowering your use of HB and demanding you to fill up on RP. The IT x6 method works only on a fight like Vezax and forces you to be more attentive in the fight, increasing the possibility of messing up on the fight itself, especially if you're on silence rotation. Now, I don't mean you won't use KM or DCh on HB during this rotation, but most likely you'd accidentally use it on the 6 IT or the various FS you'd be throwing out on any other fight than Vezax.

All in all, the sigil is useful, but not decisive of using the spec and the IT x6 rotation is really only viable on one fight in Ulduar.

 

Erekose

Yeah, applying AoE FF to bosses who have multiple parts (making subsequent HBs hit harder at no cost to you in terms of having to rely on Pest to spread diseases), or free disease application to entire aoe add parts of bosses is completely worthless when compared to the awesomeness that is 20% on an ability that doesn't even account for 15% of my DPS. I think you are vastly understimating the amount of utility gained with this Glyph.

I'm sorry but this is just a complete and utter lie. ITx6 has performed exceedingly well on more than just Hodir which is what I assume you were referring to. In fact, I can't think of any fight in Ulduar in which ITx6 does not excel just as well if not better than the other frost builds.

 

Nightseye

I'm going to take a sample of 1000 rotations to compare the total damage output of the 2 specs, using my current stats/gear and the average damage values taken from a recent WWS Parse of Kologarn.

Given 1000 rotations of ITx6, the 2x Disease can pull 1041 rotations in the same allotted time.:

ITx6 Full Rotation Runic Generation: 180,000
2x Disease Full Rotation Runic Generation: 166,560

Therefore, using the number of skill uses per rotation listed on the OP:

ITx6:

6000x IT
2000x OB (1-Disease)
2000x BS (1-Disease)
5625x FS

Total GCDs: 15,625

2x Disease:

4164x IT
2082x PS
2082x OB
2082x BS
5205x FS

Total GCDs: 15,615

Here are the damage figures from my last Kologarn WWS Parse:

IT Average hit damage: 1517
IT Average Crit damage: 3183

OB Average hit damage: 2920
OB Average Crit damage: 7388

OB 1-Disease Average hit: 2628
OB 1-Disease Average Crit: 6649

FS Average hit damage: 3858
FS Average Crit damage: 11887

BS Average damage: 1371
PS Average damage: 1114

Blood Plague Average tick: 653

Now to account for critical strikes:

IT Crit Chance:

Base Spell Crit + Dark Conviction + Rime + Boomkin Aura + Imp Scorch

15.71 + 5 + 15 + 5 + 5 = 46.71%

Obliterate Crit Chance:

Base Melee Crit + Dark Conviction + Subversion + Rime + Annihilation + Leader of the Pack + Heart of the Crusader + Mark of the Wild + Horn of Winter + Kings

23.87 + 5 + 9 + 15 + 3 + 5 + 3 + 0.59 + 2.48 + 0.7 = 67.64%

Frost Strike Crit Chance:

I couldn't find a reliable way to model the KM Procs, so I'm just going to use the 60% crit chance given to me by my WWS parse for Kologarn

Using those figures, the damage output for the following 2 rotations are:

6x IT:

Total IT Crit Damage: IT Crit Chance * 6000 * Average IT Crit Damage = 46.71% * 6000 * 3183 = 8,920,676
Total IT Hit Damage: (1 - IT Crit Chance) * 6000 * Average IT Hit Damage = 53.29% * 6000 * 1517 = 4,850,456

Total OB Crit Damage: OB Crit Chance * 2000 * Average OB (1-Disease) Crit Damage = 67.64% * 2000 * 6649 = 8,994,767
Total OB Hit Damage: (1 - OB Crit Chance) * 2000 * Average OB (1-Disease) Hit Damage = 32.36% * 2000 * 2628 = 1,700,841

Total BS Damage: Average BS Damage * 2000 = 1371 * 2000 = 2,742,000

Total FS Crit Damage: FS Crit Chance * 5625 * Average FS Crit Damage = 60% * 5625 * 11,887 = 40,118,625
Total FS Hit Damage: (1 - FS Crit Chance) * 5625 * Average FS Hit Damage = 40% * 5625 * 3858 = 8,680,500

Total Damage Dealt Over 1000 Rotations: 76,007,865

2x Disease:

Total IT Crit Damage: IT Crit Chance * 4164 * Average IT Crit Damage = 46.71 * 4164 * 3183 = 6,190,949
Total IT Hit Damage: (1 - IT Crit Chance) * 4164 * Average IT Hit Damage = 53.29% * 4164 * 1517 = 3,366,216

Total PS Damage: Average PS Damage * 2082 = 1114 * 2082 = 2,319,348

Total OB Crit Damage: OB Crit Chance * 2082 * Average OB Crit Damage = 67.64% * 2082 * 7388 = 10,404,260
Total OB Hit Damage: (1 - OB Crit Chance) * 2082 * Average OB Hit Damage = 32.36% * 2082 * 2920 = 1,967,307

Total BS Damage: Average BS Damage * 2082 = 1371 * 2082 = 2,854,422

Total FS Crit Damage: FS Crit Chance * 5205 * Average FS Crit Damage = 60% * 5205 * 11,887 = 37,123,101
Total FS Hit Damage: (1 - FS Crit Chance) * 5205 * Average FS Hit Damage = 40% * 5205 * 3858 = 8,032,356

Total Blood Plague Damage: Total GCDs / 3 second per tick * Average Blood Plague Tick = 15,615 / 3 * 653 = 3,398,865

Total Damage Dealt over 1041 Rotations: 72,802,402

Conclusions: I'll leave that up to someone else. Right now I need to go have some dinner.

EDIT: At the time of the Kologarn Parse, I did not have 4 piece T8.

 

Lazengann

I didn't mean Hodir, I meant Vezax.

Hodir's fights has no AoE, but due to the jumping around, erratic placement, and sporadic buffs make me think the 1 disease HB, OB, FS, BS, BS, FS, OB, OB, OB, RP dump would be much more efficient than the IT x6 rotation.

You'd wind up being capped with RP almost all the time, unless you NEVER have to move away from Hodir during the fight which is extremely unlikely.

Vezax doesn't require that, only silencing if you're stuck into the rotation and the couple kiting situations, you move away from the boss which would supply a higher DPS from the IT x6 rotation.

 

Travaggie

So you're telling me the "hassle" of using the ability Pestilence at lets say the opportunity cost of 1 Blood Strike's damage ~ once every lets say 30 seconds on average per fight is worth getting the glyph over Obliterate which will be used consitantly twice every 20 seconds in every fight in all of Ulduar netting you ~1000 extra damage each hit? Please tell me you're joking? I can very well see someone dual speccing for the glyphed Howling Blast for those heavy consistant AOE fights like Kolodar, Razorscale, Freya and possibly Yogg but not if you are planning on speccing out of frost for your dual spec.

 

Lollersk8er

Hodir has a lot of aoe and you can AMS almost on cd.


The one thing that Frost doesn't have is a good cd to use with Bloodlust. Unholy has the Gargoyle and Blood has Hysteria+DRW, but Frost has only UA. Especially in UP you run out of stuff to do and the others pull ahead. You'll notice this even more on harder bosses.

 

Lazengann

Amazing point, but with our high overall damage, BL or Heroism affecting other's DPS higher than ours doesn't mean we won't top the charts. Everybody else will subside below you after it wares off.

 

Erekose

I'm pretty sure I didn't say every fight, and for some fights that are only single target there's no possible way I could argue HB glyph being better; I'm not that stubborn. However, those bosses are less common than the ones where HB glyph is useful. If I had more money and cared more I would just carry around stacks of both with me and switch out on the fight.

That's the thing though, the OB glyph (for the ITx6 rotation) is such a minor DPS boost that I don't really care. OB is coming in around 10% of my total DPS. I'm no math whiz but 20% of 10% doesn't sound like a huge increase. I'm sorry if that is blasphemous I know the myth is that these threads are all about what the highest single target DPS build/rotation is....but the real discussion should be about which build/rotation/strategy is most effective when dealing with the current highest end content.

So far out of all of the builds and rotations I've used in Ulduar ITx6 feels like it performs the best.

 

Erekose

We still benefit from it we just don't have to make sure we're timing another CD/pet with it in order to max our DPS. I don't know about you but I see this as a blessing; I hate waiting on Heroism in order to pop a CD...I'd rather just use it when it lines up with my other stuff that I can monitor more easily.

Also its not like Heroism allows us to use more abilities than we could normally; since we're already at 1 sec GCD Heroism doesn't do anything for us in that regard (pretty sure, right?).

I'm not sure I understand how you can be running UP ITx6 properly and be 'running out of things to do.' Even without AMS I only have ~3-4 GCDs (1 sec GCDs at that) of deadtime per 20 seconds, and those quickly get filled if you get a Rime here or you get some AMS soaks going (which you can on almost every boss in Ulduar).

This illusion of UP having extreme deadtime is just that. Nonsense. You're doing it wrong if you have a lot of dead time.

 

Erekose

1 - If you're RP capping on Hodir...You're doing it wrong. Just make sure you are low on RP when you pop AMS so you get as much benefit as possible and spam that FS. That HB OB rotation you posted smells like Blood Presence which is just too slow for super competitive Hodir numbers.

2 - As for moving away from Hodir..the only time is when the Flash Freeze bubble is out of melee range of him and I can count on my one hand how many times that has happened the last 3-5 times we've killed him. Maybe I'm just lucky.

3 - Vezax is incredibly easy to stay glued to the entire time. In 10 man I solo the interrupts as they don't come very often and the only time I'm off the boss is for MAX 1-2 seconds when he flies away towards the tank after he's gotten a speedy bubble and an intervene out. Again, it sounds like you're running in BP and being slow and losing the boss.

Thing is, I KNOW someones gonna be like 'well I do that shit in BP and I do gud DPS.' Sure, I can do all the fights in BP too. I actually did when I was in 4pt7 and used the HB glyph solo disease rotation, so yeah you CAN do it...but the results are much higher in UP with an RP rich rotation. I just see no reason at all why a Frost DK in Ulduar gear would choose anything other than UP given the current Glyph situation.

Edit - Sorry for the multiple posts. Upon request via PM I have re-taped and re-commented my video. New and Improved features include:

Comments! Detailed play-by-play for the first couple rotations then commentary throughout at important junctures to show the especially tricky decisions you get to make during the rotation in order to optimize it.
Better Song!
More Easter Eggs at the end! Forgive my shamlessness :P

IT6.wmv Download File