@Thuggernaut: Did you read the last few pages of discussion? We have been doing just that, and Disease does look beneficial as long as you don't have to keep up the haste buff yourself.
As for the spec, my testing showed Subversion as a quite large dps boost, and I still think either 3/51/17 or 3/52/16 (if you want to pick up UA) are the best options for deep frost.

@Esfernum
Actually, you do get the haste buff -- It's attached to Frost Fever not it's application per se. So as long as you keep bouncing the duration of frost fever, you keep bouncing the duration of Icy Talons.

@Astalion:
You got it -- the DRM rotation totally allows for the extra obliterate by saving the 1 death run from the previous rotation every other refresh of all runes. I'm doing a terrible job of explaining that since everyone's is like "5 rune rotation what now?" /facepalm.

That was my point. Trying to reach the best DPS is the goal but assuming that someone else bring those 20%, you cut yourself from a lot of others situations (10 men, dungeons, even some 25 men if roster doesn't allow it) when no one fulfill that 20% haste buff and still you spend some talent points in it. Furthermore, those 5% haste should be in the equation as well to fit to reality.
As i'm reading the tooltip, it's not attached, it's triggered by Frost Fever. Frost Fever - Spell - World of Warcraft.
Could someone check it ingame?

Icy Talons is attached to Frost Fever not Icy Touch. Glyph of Scourge Strike & Glyph of Howling Blast provide the Imp Icy Talons buff.

EDIT1: I stand corrected, according to wowhead, Glyph of Disease does NOT provide Imp Icy Talons buff. It only refreshes the duration does not re-apply the disease.


-WimpySmurf

As of right now (I haven't played frost in almost 2 months, but definitely have since the last patch), I don't get the IIT buff when I use Pestilence to refresh my diseases =\ Maybe IIT may only proc when you APPLY the diseases?

EDIT: Ah, I never use the HB glyph, I stick with IT for the extra RP. Good to know!

@Amiko: I can see how it's done, but I don't see why it would be better than other options. Runewise you're getting 5 OB every 20s, while my rotation gets that and an extra Blood Strike. You're also going to cut ticks from your diseases since you have to refresh them too often (I don't really believe it's reasonable to assume you're able to refresh within say <0.1 sec after a tick every time, and as such every refresh will lose some damage to clipping).

Running a quick comparison of the passive talents involved (2/3 BCB, Necrosis, Virulence, Vicious Strikes, Ravenous Dead vs Butchery, Bladed Armor, Dark Conviction), the unholy subspec seems to win out slightly (10-20ish dps), and I'm not really sure where else to look for something that might give the blood subspec some edge.

@Esfernum: The 5% haste are included, in general I think we're after the maximum possible dps build though, which is assuming fully buffed 25 man as baseline (this is after all what the simulator assumes).

@Thuggernaut: Yeah, you seem to be correct in that it is the application of Frost Fever that gives IIT, comments on wowhead confirm that Pestilence refresh doesn't proc it.

It has been mentioned many times in various threads, the Glyph of Disease does not apply Frost Fever, it refreshes it, therefore it does not proc Improved Icy Talons. Sure situationally if you don't have to worry about the haste buff and another DK or shammy can take care of it it may be an OK glyph to use, but then again if you're goal is to max DPS and you aren't providing the buff, you may as well go blood.

So now, instead of the argument for Pest being PS+IT+BS vs. OB+HB, it looks like it's turning out to be PS+IT+BS vs. OB+HB-5% Melee Haste (DK only IIT, No one else applies this for you). So we already know that PS+IT+BS vs. OB+HB supposedly has OB+HB at a 271 dps gain via Astalion. Now the question is if 5% Melee Haste is more than 271 dps bringing the BS Glyph back ahead.

Also what happened to the discussion on HB Glyph?

EDIT: Yes, I forgot that it's a constant 5% melee haste independent of FF.

@Kyruski: The 271 dps gain between the two specs is counting neither having 5% melee haste from IIT, as other talents give both of them more dps anyway. Both specs would still get the 5% haste if specced for it anyway, as that part isn't reliant on FF being applied (though obviously you wouldn't do this with a Glyph of Disease spec, as the only reason to get IIT would be to get the raid buff).

I wouldnt say out exactly. Specing for IIT doesn't lose you too much DPS even if you dont need to bring it, and glyphing for Disease doesn't cost you very much DPS either, even if your not using it (Blood Strike is the 'best' 3rd Glyph, but its not anywhere close to as influential as the OB or FS glyphs). If you are expected to provide melee haste say half the time and need your second spec for something else, Id probably recommend just splitting the difference and spec for IIT and use the Glyph of disease. While you will be off peak DPS in either situation, I think overall youd be better off as you gain more from the Glyph of disease when you can use it then the Blood Strike glyph.

Really, its just a question of how often you can use it.

This is turning into a bit of an awkward situation though.

I personally do a lot of 10 mans as well, I'll be expected to bring the 20% haste buff.

I understand in 25 man, the optimal dps build is to forfeit the raid buff you bring along. But it seems a bit dodgy to always assume someone else provides that raid buff.

Maybe just split it into 2 builds. For the people who "always" raid with an enh shaman, and for people who want to bring the raid buff themselves.

Has there been any information from blizzard about Glyph of Diseases ?
The fact it doesn't refresh IIT sounds like a bit of a bug to me. As similar glyphs (SS / HB) DO refresh IIT.

Well how I see it, it isn't a bug because HB can apply FF if there is no FF on the target, And SS applies both diseases even if there are none on it, but Pest can't apply diseases if there are no diseases on the original target for Pest. Basically like someone said before, it's just refreshing the diseases, not applying them. The part where this can get iffy is when you include adds, since it is technically applying it to the adds, though that isn't part of the Glyph.

Ah very true and that does make sense.

Hmm another downside for the glyph of diseases. And pretty much kills it for anything but a spec that can skip the raid buffs.

Its hard to justify taking a DK that brings no raid buffs to any competent raid, because you may as well stack more Rogues at that point, but lets assume the DK in question in just incredible and competes at the top level anyway, making him an asset. Lets also assume there is no Enh Shammy, but room for another Shammy to drop regular Windfury totem.

In this situation we'd be comparing 4% extra melee haste to the raid, and an additional 5% personal melee haste to gains from the 270 or personal DPS the Disease glyph brings.

With quick head math it seems that even in the least extreme situation the Disease glyph is still a net dps loss to the raid unless an Enh Shaman is present.

On another note it seems going with an Unholy subspec is the way to go, and with the recent BCB change do we think its more beneficial to pull a point from Subversion to max BCB?

Technically if an enhance shaman is in the raid we bring no raid buffs or personal buffs whatsoever as WF totem and SoE totem override both our buffs. If you had an alternate Shaman who could drop non-buffed WF totem than our personal haste buff would override it, but the raid wide one would not.

Finally, Dk's are rarely brought in for their raid buffs, as other dps classes can have the same buff. They are brought in because of their versatility as a great dps and great tank something a rogue cannot do. You are correct in that if Glyph of Disease doesn't proc the personal buff than it's probably not better than BS glyph.

Is Glyph of Disease a DPS loss? Perhaps, but has yet to be tested.

Is the DPS loss worth the ease of rotation? I would think if the dps loss is only between 75 and 100 dps than i would say yes, as the rotation to reapply the disease is really tight as is

Does the Glyph of Blood Strike work on all situations? If so it's definitely the top dps 3rd glyph

How much of a difference is Unholy Sub spec and Blood spec? Unholy has more wasted points, but if BcB changes are as strong as we assume them to be than it's definitely even better of a spec.

I would really like to see some testing on the Glyph of Disease, and perhaps we can talk Blizz into changing the glyph into a reapplication and not a refreshing (something I don't see them changing).

I do think that Glyph of Disease and Glyph of Blood Strike are going to be situational glyphs and are going to be viable options depending on your lag time and your ability to fill out your rotation.

On DPS loss for going Glyph of Disease over Glyph of Blood strike: Id pin the DPS loss at around 100ish. The gain when using glyph of disease seems to be around that 270ish mark. So if you dont need to provide IIT, or you need to provide IIT about 60% of the time or less, and you cant use your dual spec to have the best of both worlds, then just go ahead and use the top Disease Glyph.


On Blood vs. Unholy subspec: Epidemic is pretty much a necessity, and most of the truly "wasted" points in unholy are in that first tier. Once you get to that 2nd tier in unholy, its not so bad. Meanwhile, you have to move 2 more points in blood into butchery (almost complete waste) to even get to bladed armor (which isnt that great). If you epidemic werent such a useful talent, I could see blood posibly being a viable subspec to explore, but necrosis and BCB are excellent talent choices in comparison to Dark conviction and bladed armor.

Here's that further testing i promised earlier, both from live.

2 vezax parses -- in the first parse i'm using the following glyphs: obliterate, frost strike, icy touch.

I'm running the standard 2h rotation in unholy presence mashing out the frost strikes.

Wow Web Stats

In the second parse i'm using the following glyphs: obliterate, frost strike, icy touch running the shifting rune DRM rotation in blood presence.

http://wowwebstats.com/efrfwratnbtiu?s=717692-780140

Yes my dps is low in general, i'm a tank first and my dps gear is haphazard, my gear is essentially the same between parses ( went from valorous dark runed legs to conquers dark runed legs -- not that big a deal ).

Neither one of these attempts is a hard mode attempt and I'm on vapor duty for both of them ( being the offspec dps in the raid ).

I'm clearly doing way better with the disease rotation.

No offense, but I'm not sure what you're trying to prove with that comparison. Nobody runs Vezax in UP, because there's nothing to soak with AMS, and therefore nothing to fill your empty GCDs with. Vezax is the one fight in Ulduar where UP is completely worthless.

I've been running UP on Vezax (and every other fight) and don't really have problems with empty GCDs.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

^ parse of me running UP rotation on Vezax.

I'm not really familiar with how WoL displays parses, but from glancing at that it seems that the fight lasted ~8:20, or 500 GCDs in UP (ignoring latency). I count 408 used GCDs, plus whatever was spent on HoW (buffs cast lists it incorrectly). I'm not really sure how to figure out latency's effect on the GCD - I think with the wiggle room coded in, you should be able to keep it pretty close to 1s. But 408 used GCDs out of a theoretical 500 means you would be a lot better off in BP using an Ob-heavy rotation for that fight, and my own experiences indicate the same. As a general rule of thumb, UP is only going to pull ahead of BP if you have incoming raid damage to AMS soak/benefit from healers' Rapture and Revitalize. Also if your DPS window just happens to be extremely short, but Yogg P1 is the only current fight I can think of where that applies.

Having a 100ms latency would bump that up and extra 40.8 seconds, and then adding in human latency, let's say .1 seconds fo r human latency, or another 40.8 seconds. That bring it up to about 490/500 seconds. Also looking at his active time, he was 99% active according to WoL. That comes out to a total on 5 seconds not being active/doing something else.

Another thing to consider is he's using the 6xIT Machine gun build. The point of the other person testing in UP on Vezax was to show a rough estimate of UP with a build on live that would act similar to the ones we're theorizing. I know shopshopshop might have just been trying to prove that UP was used on Vezax, but it doesn't really provide much to our DW Discussion since we've 1. Pretty much ruled out 1 disease builds (6xIT Machine gun) and 2. Have ruled out things that focus on FS over OB.

Some quick and dirty napkin math follows.

The UP discussion got me thinking, how much extra RP do you need to generate to make this rotation do more damage in UP? First with a 200ms delay it takes 20.4 seconds to execute this rotation, meaning you get an average ability damage of 4681.03 DPS from abilities (Im assuming non-ability damage is unaffected). Losing the 15% blood presence drops the damage to 83037 damage, but you shorter your rotation by .4 seconds, so you get a dps of 4151.85 DPS. So you need to make up about 530dps, or more precisely 10583.6 damage per 20s to get things to work out.

First, lets just add the RP that missed, in addition to the RP Astalion didnt count from Rime procs in this original post. Thats +5.15 Rp for an additional .1609 FSs, + the extra .94 Rime HBs that werent used. When you take the 654 HB damage, divide it by 0.09 you get an average HB damage of 7266.67 HB damage per ability. Factor out the 1.15x BP bonus, and figure .94 Rimes, using Rime HBs gets you about 5939.71 damage, meaning your still 4643.88 damage short. Now, whats that extra .1609 FS is worth? Well 30484 FS damage for 3.91 FSs gets you 7796.41 damage. Divide by 1.15 and multiply the .1609 FSs you can use and you get 1090.82 damage. Still short 3553.06 damage. Now, FS is 6779.47 damage in UP, so you need another .524 FS, or 16.768RP. Thats 50.304 RP per minute.

Of course, thats a generous estimate, since the mechanics of the abilities not listed I believe favor BP. For example, 15% UP haste isnt as good as a 15% damage increase, KM is going to be stretched by more then 15% more additional frost abilities, disease damage favors BP, ets.