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.

I'm pretty sure most people won't argue that the Howling Blast glyph is useful, however most people want to know what will put out the top DPS overall throughout all the fights. The Howling Blast glyph is only providing an easier way to spread diseases, thats it. You don't even benefit from the diseases on your opening Howling Blast, so the glyph itself is only worth whatever the DPS difference is of using a pestilence vs a blood rune as I mentioned above. The only reason it is so useful in full T7 is because it is completely replacing IT in to apply FF in your rotation, which is not the case in your IT heavy Unholy Presence T8 frost rotation.

That being said, I'm still not sold on Unholy Presence fully although it seems to make sense to me on paper, in practice tonight on Vezax we did 4 attempts, 2 of which I used the IT spam and 2 of which I used the basic IT>OB>OB>BS rotation in the same gear in blood presence, and the blood presence rotation came out ahead both times by about 300 dps. I felt pretty comfortable that I didn't have any issues with the rotation either so for me I just don't know. On AOE situations that you referred to being so prevalent in Ulduar which it is, blood presence is definitely more damage.

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.

I disagree with the above poster claiming the HB glyph makes AoE more front loaded.


You gain +40% damage to HB for attacking a target with FF up.
I'd rather do IT PS Pest HB+40% BB than HB BB BB OB. All you're doing is trading blood plague ticks and 1 blood boil for a far weaker HB. Sure the damage is coming ~3 seconds earlier... but you lose too much in my opinion. In many cases you will already have a FF up on your primary target - in which case the simple Pest->HB works better than glyphed HB->BB.

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.

Finally a updated Frost DPS thread, thank you for your hard work Kroot!

I am still stuck with "old" way of doing frost DPS but I will be looking in to the new 6xIT machine gun rotation. Can you guys who are more familiar with the rotation give me a rough estimation how often KM will be wasted on IT? I guess its like everything else and it is just about learning the timing of swings and do IT's between them so not too much KM's go for "waste"?

I watched the rotation video what was posted few pages back and it looked quite intense spamming, my question regarding the UI would be that what is the name of that addon what you used for the Rune timers? First I thought the rotation would be complicated but after watching the video over for couple of times it seemed to have nice flow to it.

I know this is a bit of speculation now, but Blizzard did announce that they are going to bring back dual wielding for DK's and I have a bad feeling that it is going to be the Frost tree. I think I will still stick to frost no matter what happens since it has been the most fun to play so far, tho I'm not completely taken about "abusing" a glyph for some degree, but I am going to do it anyways today and see how the results will be.

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!

You guys are way too stuck on the HB glyph being a better "frontload" ability and saving you all these cooldowns that you say you're lacking which totally contradicts the purpose of the HB glyph. If the adds are dead before you can HB twice, then all you're adding is like 1-2 frost fever ticks with the glyph because my Howling Blast will hit just as hard as yours does. That being said, we run with a blood dps DK as well who is very solid, and most people run with atleast 1 other DK so HB spreading frost fever is pointless for me because the other DK I run with will have spread his diseases by then which is all I need to get the bonus from HB and FS.

And saying we have to use "PS>IT>PEST>HB>BB" is pretty stupid because you aren't using PS and neither are we so drop that, most of the fights with AOE we already have frost fever on our main target so all we have to do is "Pest>HB" as opposed to just "HB" which means we actually are hitting alot harder than you because our FIRST HB will hit harder, and as you said the adds usually die shortly after. You guys have to be so stuck on the glyph that you'll try and make it work no matter what and guys, it just isn't going to be a DPS increase over the Glyph of Obliterate on almost any fight save maybe Hodir.

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?

If you are going to ignore all of my good arguments and instead debate the ones that were presented by someone else entirely, I don't know what to say to you. If you are going to quote me at least respond to *my* arguments. Like...where did I mention PS? I didn't. Drop what?

The HB glyph gives an OPTION. Your HB and my HB are completely the same except mine also spreads FF originating from the target (which can be 20 yards away from me! Can your pest do that?). If the adds are going to die without me being able to get 2 HBs on them, I USE PESTILENCE TOO...if I have the time luxury and don't need to frontload.

I don't have the luxury of having another DK in the raid 100% of the time, and I'm sorry but any strategy that involves you relying on another person to pull off is poorly thought out, at least in the context of doing hard mode encounters and being self reliant and pushing your own character to the max. What if you go different directions on the same fight? What if he dies? YMMV, as I said I don't always have another.

I would care more if OB was a significant portion of my damage but more often than not its 10% or lower. I (and you may in fact have a different opinion, thats cool) just see the extra utility/option of the aoe *ranged* disease application to trump making my OB button a tiny bit more effective.

As I've said before I'm going to be running IT/HB/FS glyphs for the next 2 weeks in raids and I'll let my parses speak for themselves.

If I had the choice of either Haste or ArP I'd go with Haste for now..and yeah you are forced to eat KM procs at times with the ITx6 rotation, it's unavoidable. The trick is knowing when you can afford to weave and have it not break your rune separation.

Before I get bombarded with "blah blah 2h is > DW" just a simple question. the 6xIT spam runeforge, which do you use? DW'ing would it be viable to use 2x crusader, or possibly RI OH? or a CG OH?

Currently DW Frost is not viable when viable is defined as optimal. This is not the place for those questions until Frost is designated as the DW tree, which might happen (I hope not).

That being said, FC is the only viable enchant right now for 2h users. The DW Unholy threads seems to be fans of 2x FC for even higher uptime. If i had to pick a runner up I'd have to say FC/RI but at this point in time the only reason you would be dual wielding is because you're obsessed with how pretty you look with two weapons on.

I did respond to your argument, as well as the guy who expanded on your argument, when you said it allowed you to frontload more damage as a staple in your argument. I'm sorry but that's just not true.

There are alot of OPTIONS as you say, my argument is that your OPTION just isn't nearly as effective as you're making it out to be unless you're in full T7 and using that rotation. IF YOU USE PESTILENCE TOO then the HB glyph is null and void correct? So what's the point?

I'm not saying everyone has another DK in their raid, but if they do have a reliable one it makes the glyph that much more useless. It's not poorly thought out, in fact it's very much thought out and if you play it correctly with a complimenting DK you can pull of higher numbers by not having to refresh diseases at times to get the FF bonuses.

Basically I'm just saying sure it's an option, and you may enjoy it more, but I'm making sure people don't get confused and think it's a valid option as their main spec to pull of more DPS because it simply isn't going to stand up to the Obliterate glyph in terms of DPS output. That's it.

Since you have blatantly ignored my AoE range disease application arguments, I am being forced into doing math to prove my point which is unfortunate both for you and myself as my math is bad. However, it is bad in a way that gives the OB glyph an amazing amount of 'benefit of the doubt.' Looking back on my 10 man hard-mode parse:

XT hard mode kill, OB is 11.3% of my damage and did 287,345 damage. This is with the OB glyph. Let's say OB glyph accounted for 20% of the damage done there (and its far below that)

287,345 x .2 = 57,469 bonus damage when my entire damage pool from that fight is 2.5 million. And that's grossly overestimating it.

On Kologarn my OB was 7.9% of my damage at 82,565 total damage.

82,565 x .2 = 16513 bonus damage when my damage pool is 1 million.

On Auriya OB was 7.5% of my damage

On Hodir OB was 8.9% of my damage

Do you see a trend here? THE OB GLYPH GIVES VERY VERY LOW RETURN for an ITx6 build.

If I used OB more than 2-3 every 20 seconds and there weren't tons of situations where having ranged AoE disease application was very nice then it would be a no-brainer to glyph for OB. As it stands, I don't feel it is worth it.

I can rattle off so many situations that might come up in Ulduar where HB glyph will give you better results than OB glyph...in fact, I did do that already. Heres some more....Lets say you have a Rime proc and there are adds around you, but you have no Blood runes for Pest to spread the disease from your first target?

Boom, HB...now all of them have FF ticking on them and they all take max damage from your subsequent attacks. Even more gravy if they will be alive for another 8 seconds so you can HB again for max damage.

Or...lets say you're on Yogg going left in the portals and some poor soul got constrictor'd and lost his portal and the right side tentacles are still up...HB and you're all set to spam FS to get them down asap. (yes, this requires that they be morphed out of dragon form first I know, I only use this example because it actually happened on our Yogg kill)

Any encounter where there are a pack of adds at range from you...HB on them, then you can start IT spam at range without risking KM getting eaten and you do max damage, then as soon as you hit melee range just whack away with FS. If you don't have the glyph you have to IT the first one, then pest (giving you less RP than if you used it on IT, assuming it was dead), then HB, then FS. You keep saying that HB glyph doesn't allow you to frontload more effectively and that is just plain 100% wrong.

I could go on and on. To me, those situations and dealing with them better are more important than an incredibly paltry amount of single target DPS.

I have an idea. Both of you shut the fuck up.

I'd love to see this thread move towards figuring out BiS gearsets, especially for the two IT specs discussed in the OP. The current BiS thread's frost gearset is most likely reliant on the BP, OB-heavy spec / playstyle.

If anyone can help me with approximate stat weights (or maybe Khroot updates his spreadsheet to include these specs) I'll be more than happy to work out BiS sets.

I'll try to repeat the core points in a succint and easy to understand way to both avoid clugging a theorycraft thread with lengthy rants and also allowing you to understand my actual points, because you clearly seem to have missed them.

- Frost Strike is fine, and nerfing it would affect all builds, not just gimmick IT glyph ones

- if anything is wrong, it's the IT glyph, something that makes an inferior-by-rune ability become the best possible choice in all situations. Here I could tell you that if you wouldn't normally use an ability any more than strictly needed without the glyph and you use it whenever possible with the glyph, then the glyph is probably too powerful. But I'll make it simplier: if you had 6 death runes every rotation, you would use 6 ITs to maximize damage likely, unless you ended up running out of gcds.

- on the concept of talent efficiency, IT receives the following talent buffs in Frost builds:

+20% crit chance, +45% damage, 5 extra RP

Obliterate receives:

+27% crit chance, +4% damage, 245% critical strike damage, +5 extra RP, 15% chance of proccing Ryme

If you consider Icy Touch's minimal base damage and Obliterate's extreme crit ratio, you'll see that we would get more benefit from using OB than from using IT before the glyph. I'm posing this problem for a question of scaling. Both the ITx6 build and the PS ITx3 build (the most popular at the moment) hinge on the IT glyph. The second the glyph is changed, your specc (but I remind you I proposed it first, because it was blindly obvious that Blizz didn't solve the past mistake) is broken. The moment ITx6 starts appearing on actually high performance logs, Blizzard will see that FS is 45% of our damage and thing "god, FS needs a nerf" without even stopping to consider that the damage is so high because we're using pathetically weak abilities to stack RP and skipping talents and glyphs that would buff OB and such.
I would also point you again at the fact that our setbonuses always include and buff OB. It's clear that Blizz wants us to use it, and it's clear that if going for a specc that doesn't make full use of our talents and our setbonuses is the way to go, we have a problem in balance.

- on the point of the IT specc being overpowered, and it being competitive with other speccs:

WMO Scoreboard

You will notice a grand total of 1 Frost DK. It's you, and 37% of your damage is HB. I constantly top damage meters for my guild too, but that doesn't change the fact that Frost is out of the radar when it comes to DK dps. UH and Blood are still dominating and much more represented in that list. And repeating once again, since glyphs and sigil come and go but talents stay the same, what we would need is being competitive with core talents, not with glyph exploit gimmick builds.

- lastly on the point of options, here I'm not ranting of what I like or dislike to play. Options are fine, the problem here is of optimization and scaling. If tomorrow IT glyph builds stay competitive with other frost builds I'll be more than happy. If what happens is that they pull ahead in the Frost family, get FS nerfed and thus bring other speccs even lower, we will have a problem. And also, the more we go on and the more the scaling problems will be obvious.

IT scales with:

crit
attack power
marginally with hit

OB/BS/melee scale with:

crit
attack power
armor penetration
expertise
weapon damage

FS scales with:

crit
attack power
weapon damage
(according to GC, soon with expertise too)

Not only IT is missing the scaling with weapon damage (which is more sensible than most would think), but if tomorrow Ghostcralwer does what he claims and puts FS on the dodge table again, we will be starting to hunt Expertise again, and we will have even more stats on our gear that don't scale with IT but would with other abilities.


Log parses show that at the moment the actual strength of Frost is HB. Frost Strike is a very powerful tool but it doesn't pull us ahead of other DK speccs, nor even on par. I'm not saying Frost isn't viable or even competitive, but at the moment we don't have a "Frost is overpowered" problem. To rise in single target dps, which is our weak point at the moment (like that scoreboard proves), we would need to fix the RP generation problem. My point is that the IT glyph is a crutch. You essentially sacrifice 5*n dps from your rune abilities to gain 7*n from your RP. The balance is positive, but you would better off using your best rune abilities and still be competitive on RP based damage. It's not a matter of tastes for me: Frost has an RP generation issue. The IT glyph is an anomaly that combined with DRM can create gimmick rotations that will end up only making our RP generation look fine and Frost Strike look overpowered - while Blood and Unholy still do more dps.

How much DPS difference are we looking at here, between the new UP rotation and the old single disease rotation?
I've mostly been unholy DPS as I am addicted to unholy's run speed. Normally when I dps as frost, I just recycle my tanking rotation in BP:

IT Ob BS (BT) Ob


I am mainly interested in the 'new' double disease rotation in UP:

IT PS Ob BS BS
Ob IT PS IT IT

As you would only use Obliterate twice every 20 seconds, and IT 4 times every 20 seconds, wouldn't [Sigil of the Frozen Conscience] be better than [Sigil of Awareness]? At least until you get your [Sigil of the Vengeful Heart]?