@Odii: I set up my spreadsheet to check UP out, including the damage loss from diseases (assuming 6 ticks per 20s, and assuming that autoattack related damage is unchanged). I also assumed the BP rotation would not cast any HB (aka use FS instead) at all, as it would also gain the same RP from AMS/other sources, and the additional RP needed in order to fill every free GCD with FSs is less than what's needed to make UP better.

My numbers suggest you would need roughly 53 RP per 20s rotation, which if you only count AMS would mean you need to earn 119.8 RP per use (if used on every cooldown, not accounting for the cost to cast it). That would mean a situation where you soak one big hit (say overload) using AMS would not be able to earn you any dps (you would have to gain 139.8 RP from that one hit). DoT type effects would allow you to dump some RP during the duration of the AMS, allowing you to possibly gain enough RP to warrant using UP. Of course, Revitalize effects would make it a lot easier to reach the amounts of RP needed, but I'm not sure what kind of uptime we can expect on those?

For reference, the damage values I used in this and previous calculations (in BP, OB glyphed, but not BS) are:

Ability	Damage
Obliterate	11596
Frost Strike	7804
Howling Blast	6980
Blood Strike	4923
Icy Touch	3429
Plague Strike	2726
Frost Fever	806
Blood Plague	733

Id just like to point out that Horn of Winter actually could be used 3 times per minute if you had the GCDs free, lowering the target extra RP needed per minute all the way down to 23 RP per minute. Factoring in Empowered Rune Weapon's extra RP generation (and extra GCDs used) may also effect that, though exactly say how much, because I believe that ERW will be a damage increase in BP as well, I just dont know how that increase would compare to the UP increase. UP should get more benefit though. Just not sure of how to calculate that out.

@Odii: Good point, except the 53 RP was per 20s, meaning the target RP per minute would be 129.

My bad, I misread that. So that lowers the amount needed per AMS to 97.2. Dont know enough about AMS's functionality to comment if that change makes any significant difference.

Revitalize is 15% chance on tick for 16 RP with Rejuvination or Wild Healing, Rapture is 100% on a fully used PW:S.

So maybe on fights with a ton of raid magic damage flying around? That seems about to be it.

I'm still quite confused as to what you are trying to show us. I agree with your closing statement that YOU do better with your DRM spec and rotation, however your parses logged both show very low DPS on a tank 'n' spank fight. I understand that you are on vapor duty which may have affected your DPS some, but why show a parse from a fight where your primary job isn't DPS.

I'm really not trying to dog your proposed spec, but it seems to me from the evidence brought forth is that your proposed rotation/spec underperformes and you may be off or not tight in your rotation while playing 'standard' frost (possibly due to not playing it often)?

I'm curious if any testing has been done on this spec/rotation.

13+/51+/+ in UP

IT-PS-OB-BS2-FS2
OB-IT4-FS4

Looking over this rotation it seems pretty solid.

well with the IT build.

Say averaging 7k ap raid buffed and i'm not even in full u25 gear pulling 6900 on avg.

Oblit would hit for ~9k
IT ~3.5k
FS ~7k
HB ~ 6500

So lets figure

Oblit +15% Hb = 10k *1.15 for BP = 11.5k
ITx2 + FS = 14k

So the rotation itself would produce more dps. However would not have access to necrosis or bcb which are easily 10% of a dw's overall dps.

Say we average 6k dps most fights(seems like a reasonable number for a quick comparison)
bcb + necro = 600 dps for the OB frost/unholy build
IT build loses 2 ob in favor of 4it and 2 fs 7000/20sec = 350 dps
However gains Bladed Barrier ~400ap

So 600 dps vs 350 dps +400 ap and a few other small bonuses.

One last question i have regarding the pest ob rotation is... Since glyph ot pest only refreshes the diseases and technically does not apply them for icy talons purposes. Does it recalculate the coefficient.

For instance if say we popped unbreakable then applied diseases if refreshing the diseases with pest would it keep the bonus ap coef throughout the fight?


Anyways atm I'm planning a 14/54/3, as i accumulate more hit as my gear advances I'll probably shift to a 17/54 at least until the highest dps spec for dk's is finalized. Atm I'm getting very accustomed to 0/17/54 dw

Apparently editing this made a second post somehow, please delete.

It's a lot more complicated than that. You aren't including the UP vs. BP damage difference of the IT>PS>OB>BS2>FS2 part between the two. Right there, you'll most likely meet and surpass the 2.5k damage needed for BP to outweigh UP. The difference between the OB will be 1.5k of the 2.5k leaving 1k needed for the rest of the rotation, and this is not including the diseases. You will be missing Blood Plague for the last 1/4 of the IT Spam build and you'll be constantly clipping and overriding FF. They will also be ticking for less in UP. I also don't understand where you are getting these numbers from, unless you're just giving us hypothetical numbers.

NINJA EDIT: I forgot to mention that it would be 2.5k x2 for each rotation, but it still is very unlikely that IT Spam will surpass an OB spam BP build.

I don't really think those arguments really hold fully. I agree that theoretically the IT spam build seems fairly inefficient. But at the moment for frost 2H its probably the strongest build.

FS is getting a nerf in the next patch, which makes it less attractable and also you'd miss the power of Necrosis and BCB for a DW build (which seem to be very strong for the points invested).

However the fact that you fight in UP and that you keep overwriting the IT buff hasn't stopped it from being a very good spec.

----

On a related subject. Quite some patches ago I read something in the patchnotes (could've been PTR notes) of blizzard changing the way refreshing DoTs worked. In that if you refresh a DoT spell when it has say 1 second left untill its next tick, the "new" DoT will tick 1 second after applying.

Did they revert that change, or did it never make live ?

Reason I'm asking is that if that was implemented, the IT spam spec wouldn't lose any DoT dps.

You have to remember, they buffed the damage of our diseases.

Also are you trying to imply that 15% of PS+IT+OB+BSx2+FSx2 is not more than 5k? That's excluding the other OB and 2FS that are both in the second part doing 15% more damage. If that's not enough, then you also have the added Disease damage. Just using his numbers, the IT+OB+FSx2 in the first part in BP will do 3.95k. Adding in the Other OB+FSx2 in the second part is another 3.45k. That's already 1.4k over what's needed, and that isn't including the diseases, PS, and 2xBS.

One of the reasons (to my knowledge) of why it works so well on live now is because of how powerful FS is. Also, there is the possibility that we will drop the SotVH in favor of the new Sigil of Virulence. This will drop FS Spam even further behind.

It depends. It doesn't perform sensibly better (and in some cases, even well) on the fights where Frost is actually a strong specc; it is however probably the highest single target frost specc, however its single target edge is smaller than its aoe deficit, and since at the moment Frost is only really competitive (in the traditional sense these boards use) on aoe heavy fights, there's very little purpose for it at the moment.

Dual speccs made it obsolete: you keep a BP Frost specc for fights like Auri/Freya/Thorim, and then for single target you can safely have a blood offspecc which will sensibly outperform Frost UP.

As for the future DW speccs, the FS nerfs seem to really spell doom for the specc. OB hits for so much with DW that the damage loss from spamming IT plus the damage loss for having 15% less damage with everything are hardly gonna be overtaken by extra FS that hit for far less than they do on live.

This seems very interesting for the Disease Glyph rotation. It would mean having to IT twice at the start (in order to get TS effect on the FF ticks), but it would also mean 2/3rds additional ticks every 20 seconds (Using IT to refresh every 20 seconds would cut 2 seconds off the disease). Would be nice to have this confirmed, I'll see what I can find myself.

Edit: My tests seemed to confirm everything you said (got a BP tick 0.6 sec after casting Pestilence even). Something I found interesting, however: switching to UP and casting Pestilence still had them with their BP damage bonus (Edit2: Turns out it wasn't a big deal for us anyway, as the UP Pestilence rotation was behind IT/PS refresh anyway. Using the UP Pestilence with BP diseases would need about 1.5 RP less per 20s than my previous calculations to beat the BP rotation).

Also, something I forgot to mention about my previous calculations on RP needed for UP, that was comparing to a BP Pestilence rotation, compared to a "standard" BP rotation with glyph of BS you would only need 13.5 RP per 20s (HoW uses taken into account)

Does FS get nerfed that much then ?

As far as i know its weapon damage goes down from 60% to 55% and it becomes blockable (not raid related), parryable (not raid related) and dodgable (small effect if you have some expertise).

I feel like i'm missing something, because everyone is suddenly treating FS like the outcast stephchild of its former self.

Also i'm not critizising the theorycraft, because i agree with most of that. And i already stated i doubt that IT spam build will work out for dual wield.

I'm just saying that you have to keep in mind that IT spam build is currently still decently strong. Although i did forget about the disease buff for a moment, that would indeed make an IT spam build even less ideal.

All im saying is that sometimes theoretical values can be decieving. At first sight (even on live currently) the IT build looks somewhat odd. After all you give up Blood Presence and pretty gut your Frost Fever dps to get 1 or 2 more frost strikes every 20 seconds. And yet it works.

The fact that the best dps build will most likely be one where you have to discard your raid buff (IIT), is quite annoying.
If you can keep up your buffed diseases throughout the fight that seems like quite a huge dps plus for a Glyph of Disease build.

EDIT:
I'm just saying, its very likely you can pass on the raid buff for 25 mans as its likely you'll have an enh shaman.
But for those that dont, for those that do 5 mans and 10 mans (I mostly do 10 man hard modes etc). It's practically impossible to do that.

Weapon damage went down 5%, then the bonus from BotG went fown another 5%. Adding the nerfs to the SotVH (which added about 900-1k damage on noncrits, and up to 2k on crits, and was nerfed for about 70% of the damage) and you will see that FS received a nerf in the region of 15-20% damage. So yes, it's the stepchild of its former self.

@Foxx2405

The IIT debuff is 20 seconds, which is actually a fair amount of time to do things -- you can interrupt the oblit/disease rotation every "other" rune set for an icy touch to keep the buff up without loosing too much dps. ( http://wowwebstats.com/q6uzrwji122tc?s=31486-51663 -- 10 man vezax hardmode of me doing that. Only ~90% up time cause i'm still working it out. )

Yea but if you have to use an icy touch every other rune set, then what use is glyph of disease ?

You might just as well follow a:

IT>PS>OB>BS>BS
OB>OB>OB

rotation then, because thats nearly the same.

If you use glyph of diseases you might not need to reapply PS, but you still need to IT every 20 sec to keep IIT up, which means you're either stuck with an unused unholy or death rune.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you somehow.

AFAIK the rotation you want is:

OB>OB>PT>BS
OB>OB>IT>xx

Which is the same only without using PS.

So on this same page we were discussing how much extra RP you would need to make UP viable with a standard OB heavy rotation. It was 53.

Now your rotation generates 60 extra RP over the OB heavy rotation we were discussing by trading 4IT for 2 OB, so you made it by 7 right? Not so much. You lose half a HB via Rime proc, which is worth significantly more then 7 RP. And you lose the Glyph of Blood Strike, so you lose 1/6 of the Blood Strike damage. And 2 Icy Touches do a lot less then 1 OB, so you lose even more damage there. And your losing damage taking Butchery, Bladed Armor, and Death Rune Mastery vs. Necrosis Ravenous Dead and Blood Caked Blade. And you have lower Blood Plague uptime and you are clipping your Frost Fever. And you've pretty much eaten up all your free GCDs in the process, so less extra RP growth potential.

Its sub optimal DPS.

I was curious if anyone had looked at 0/38/33 build that goes after ImpUP and uses DC for RP dump. I'm not sure how hard DC +UB would hit compared to FS. I was thinking you'd Glyph Dark Death, UB and OB. Which means you lose out 29% dmg done from BP & TS, but gain Perma Ghoul (assume 1/5 Desolation). I don't think it'll surpass a BP, OB heavy with FS for dump rotation, but was just curious.

Your taking the Strike focused design of deep frost DW, and the spell focused design of Unholy DW, and your watering down both with this spec.

I am willnig to risk an infraction or this but...

17 pages - could we please update the 1st posting to get an overview for builds / rotation and the current DPS? What is best, what is not?

It's really a bit frustrating searchin to 17 pages where most is just "blabla" and it's hard to read out the good postings

Thank you!