I don't think Doc meant it anyway else. Its just that just like the unholy / blood 2H builds. Your runes are priority 1 and you save RP dumps for last. If you cut into your rotation, usually these dumps are the ones to be replaced.

FS is still an awesome way to dump RP and it being such a good way to dump RP makes frost DW one of the strongest builds in 3.2 I think.

But I think Doc was merely saying that both rotation wise and KM wise. FS has been moved from a top priority spot, to a low priority spot. Obliterate and HB-Rime take the lead on those.

I see a lot of people promoting Blood Strike as the 3rd glyph. What are you counting on to provide the debuff consistently? No mage specs FFB anymore other than on Hodir sometimes and ferals don't spec infected wounds.

Good point, I don't know. Didn't thought about that.

Feral DPS doesn't spec infected wounds. If you have a consistent feral tank, then BS is clearly the best third glyph. Otherwise I guess it's between GoDisease (assuming you don't have to provide IIT) and Glyph of IT if you do? Although any time you're getting RP from Rapture or Revitalize now, Glyph of IT would be basically worthless.

The only other options i can think of are:
- Glyph of Plague strike
and
- Glyph of the Ghoul

Although i doubt they're really that strong. I guess glyph of IT is better.

Good point about glyph of BS though, i've thought about it before, but since so many mentioned it i assumed that mages were gonna spec frostfire in 3.2.

My simulations earlier showed Glyph of PS being better than Glyph of IT, but they were made quite some time ago - I still think it's worth checking out at the very least.

Actually, due to the extra GCD that opens up, the trade for Disease Glyph would become BS+PS+IT vs OB+HB (with KM Rime higher on priority that would change, and instead you'd gain some fraction of a HB and some fraction of an FS instead). This is however assuming a 12 GCD/2 rune refreshes rotation (which is what you'd get with the 200ms commonly used for sims) - the Disease Glyph loses some of it's edge with lower latencies.

I'd take the IT glyph over PS, just for being able to use DC better when I have to run around. Since running means your runes are ready when you can start again, your rp would be wasted anyway.

Disease glyph sounds interesting, since we basically have an unused glyph slot and one more gcd would be nice. I know how to test this, but my VB skills are just not good enough to rewrite the sim.

I'm personally hesitant about disesae, simply because we're arguably the bast applicator for the 20% haste buff... I saw some interesting numbers with GoHB , and some math for it earlier, is that just considered a nonoption at this point? ( will post up the numbers I have when the power comes back )

I'm not sure how you can say that as Enhancement Shaman are still prevalent in raids easily giving people 20% haste through WF totem with little to no effort. Especially with the one button drop of totems in 3.2 release.

The question is, if this still is a good choice even if the snare is constantly on the boss. Bloodstrike on the PTR has been reverted to its 3.1.2 live state where you only get 12,5% bonus damage per disease up. Since you usually use one Blood Rune for pest and only one per two rotations for the bloodstrike, I really don't see any reason to take this Glyph. Even if you don't like Glyph of Disease you'd still be better off with Glyph of HB or IT in my opinion.

I guess this + the use of BS-glyph explains why a spec that has been tested before suddenly showed up with ~500 more dps?

About the BS glyph: It seems we have to get kinda lucky to have the debuff up for us which we shouldn't rely on. What glyphs are possible replacements? IT, PS, (HB?), ghoul? Should make some calculations for them.

Also, might it be possible to start listing what dps the different specs (with rotation/priority listed) gets with the second statset? Live might just be coming soon enough as Fargom mentioned.

You'd only use a blood rune for pest if you have the glyph of disease - other rotations use both blood runes for blood strikes. You also only use one IT during those 20 seconds, and all simulations I've seen show the BS glyph ahead of IT.

For when you can't rely on something to proc the BS Glyph, I'm finding that PS Glyph actually seems superior to IT (of course, as doc said, IT glyph will help you far more during parts of fights where you can't be in melee range). Would be interesting to see if we can get the sim to use the HB glyph in some intelligent way, such as the one where blood runes alternated between PS/BS and IT/BS, switching in HB on Rime procs (iirc the math done back then didn't account for additional Rime procs possibly clipping the diseases - that is if we actually want to use Rime procs in any other places)

@mojo0070: If you're already in melee range, you'd have to set up your diseases using something like IT-PS-IT-BT-OB-Pest (I think that should result in the smoothest transition to the actual rotation, while giving TS bonus to FF and making sure your diseases are up for the next Pest). From range you could probably do IT while running in, then IT-PS-OB-BS-Pest.
The simulator currently isn't really capable of handling this kind of rotation though afaik.

People are just shouting out glyphs now without any reasonable consideration behind it.

First of all glyph of Howling Blast, this came up on the WoW-europe forums too (where i try to relay some info we get here), but just think about it for a short while.

What would we possibly gain from glyph of howling blast ?

You can't alter your rotation because you still need that PS. So you're still left with a single frost rune you can not use on anything but......... exactly Icy Touch.

You can alterate your rotation but:

HB > OB > PS > BS
OB > OB > BS > XX

Is the best i can come up with. That means you lose 1 obliterate, unless you get rime procs in which case you still have 4 obliterates.
However you still have a free deathrune (XX) left which you can only use on ? Guess what: ICY TOUCH.

There is as far as i see simply NO GAIN to get from glyph of howling blast, unless you drop epidemic and go with a rotation like this:

HB > Ob > PS > BS
HB > Ob > BS > PS

You give up 2 obliterates (!!!) to be able to make glyph of howling blast work, and better yet you can now spec into the blood tree which is already worse than the unholy tree even without trying.

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@mojo:
Did you use a simulator for that or dps on a dummy.

Blood subspec has already been (semi-) confirmed to be a worse option than the unholy tree.

Unless of course you start hitting a dummy without raid buffs, because the crit from blood is quite a lot better without raid buffs (if you have 30% crit unbuffed and 40% crit buffed that 14% crit from blood is gonna be a bigger increase on the unbuffed part).

Also since the mob is not debuffed you miss out on a lot of the good unholy talents that thrive on that. Blood talents hardly scale really. Whereas necrosis and BCB scale insanely well with buffs / debuffs and better gear.

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@astalion:
I'm not 100% sure, but if you would have an extra rime proc wouldn't you be able to move an extra FS to the next part of the rotation.

So instead of:
PS > IT > OB > BS > BS > FS > FS
Ob > Ob > Ob > FS > FS

You'd get:
PS > IT > OB > BS > BS > HB > FS
Ob > Ob > Ob > FS > FS > FS

for example. One of the things i noticed with this build is that you actually rarely go over the 80 RP, so you have quite a large buffer with RPM.
I agree things would be easier with Glyph of disease though.

Also on this same note, would it be more ideal to use a 4/4 rotation instead of a 5/3 rotation. As to better spread the Rime procs and GCDs:

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

And then you can use this sequence as a starter:

IT > PS > OB > BS > BS
and then do OB > OB > PS > IT next instead of 3x OB, and you should be able to fall into the aforementioned rotation.

I'm gonna totally think out of the box here.

I was thinking:

Ideally we would want to have 4 major glyph slots, because besides, what we consider the 2 mandatory glyphs FS and Ob we could take 2 others.

My thought process was to combine the benefit of the glyph of disease with the frost fever application (and thus IT refreshement) of glyph of howling blast.

So i was thinking. How about we drop glyph of Frost Strike. And take Glyph of Obliterate, Glyph of Diseases and Glyph of Howling Blast.

Glyph of frost strike is a pretty huge loss. It means that you lose 20% of the dps on your frost strike. However if you use Glyph of diseases to keep diseases up, and glyph of howling blast on rime procs (i'm somewhat assuming you get at least 1 rime proc per 20 sec rotation here), you would be able to pull an extra obliterate like this:

OB > OB > PT > BS
OB > OB > OB

You are keeping disease up certainly with PT, and you keep refreshing IIT whenever a rime proc occurs.

This is of course just way out of the box thinking, and probably wont help that much. But you'd trade IT + PS + 1/5 FS for 1 Ob (i think).

The only big problem is that you can not garuantee a 100% uptime of IIT with this. (It has about a 80% chance to proc every 20 seconds this way)

EDIT: Did some simming. It shows up as a reasonable dps loss compared to OB/FS/BS though, and I'm not 100% sure how well this can be simulated really.

I see a problem right there. If I understand correctly, the way Glyph of Disease refreshes your diseases works like this: you put your IT up once you've got, let's say, FC and Greatness proc. Now your IT and PS gain the increased AP bonus and tick harder. When you refresh your diseases with Pest, you will retain this bonus. That would suggest, each time you use a Rime proc on glyphed HB, you would lose those benefits and trade them for your current procs which means sometimes you won't get any benefit and therefore lose DPS.

Your take on the HB glyph is all wrong ;P The idea was a rotation along the lines of
OB-OB-XX-YY
OB-OB-BS-BS
XX would be rotated between BS and IT, or replaced with Rime whenever it procced, YY would be rotated between BS and PS. I think I managed to make the simulator do this (or well, I made it only use HB to refresh FF if Rime is up), and it's simulating above Glyph of BS (I still have some adjustments to try that might make it sim even higher)

And yeah, you would usually be able to move an FS to the next part of the rotation (I think I already stated this as part of my Glyph of Disease post, except I phrased it a bit differently), but if you put every Rime proc to use you should in theory risk capping your RP at some point (my theory was based around 6 GCDs/rune refresh however, if you use 13 GCDs/2 rune refreshes your results would probably be different).

@HB+Pest Glyphs: It seems sort of redundant to have 2 glyphs for refreshing diseases - keep in mind simulations would probably show a dps decrease from the HB glyph due to disease clipping, and the only real reason you're using it would be the raid buff the simulator already assumes you have. Also, the simulator would probably be even less likely to use Pestilence in a good spot with HB screwing up the timers, unless you used a rotation, which means it won't use Rime procs properly (afaik).

@Ebonplague: That's how it'd work in game, yes, but the simulator updates the damage for every tick of the disease according to what buffs you have at the time.

Yeah, other than your typo that seems correct as to the general idea
I'm pretty sure the simulator will just leave a single death rune on it's own - Blood Strike in the priority will not use Death Runes that it made itself (or rather, blood runes that were somehow turned into death runes, pestilence included) for example.
Your second point is very valid though, but other than a few wasted Rime procs it shouldn't make a huge difference in what order abilities are used (but it becomes much neater/easier to keep track of for a player), as any gaps can generally be filled with FSs or something. I think the simulator probably produces roughly this rotation with what I'm doing:
IT(or Rime)-PS-OB-BS-BS
OB-OB-OB
(a priority of FF>BP>OB>BS>KMRime>FS>Rime)
Edit: Meh, increased the simulation time, it actually seems like HB glyph is slightly (~15 dps) behind BS glyph, should still be ahead of IT/PS/Ghoul glyphs at least.

Hi everyone, long time reader, first time poster, you know how it goes.

I just wanted to point out that when using Glyph of Howling Blast, Unbreakable Armor will fit nicely into a rotation by eating the spare frost rune that is leftover on the current cycle, simplifying the next rune cycle's rotation and allowing Blood Tap to be used for something better like an extra Obliterate when spliced between bB runes instead of being used just to activate UA.

The BiS gear is something along the lines of

Warhelm of the Champion
Frigid Strength of Hodir
Conqueror's Darkruned Shoulderplates
Drape of the Faceless General
Embrace of the Gladiator
Armbands of Bedlam
Gauntlets of Ruthless Reprisal
Belt of Colossal Rage
Plated Leggings of Ruination
Melancholy Sabatons
Bladebearer's Signet
Sif's Promise
Comet's Trail
Darkmoon Card: Greatness
Caress of Insanity
Vulmir, the Northern Tempest

and

Warhelm of the Champion
Frigid Strength of Hodir
Shoulderplates of the Celestial Watch
Drape of the Faceless General
Embrace of the Gladiator
Gauntlets of Ruthless Reprisal
Belt of Colossal Rage
Plated Leggings of Ruination
Sabatons of Lifeless Night
Sif's Promise
Seal of the Betrayed King
Darkmoon Card: Greatness
Comet's Trail
Caress of Insanity
Caress of Insanity

depending on which items you want to include. Gem for Exp cap and Str. I've generated EP values with the sim and used them in the DK_Optimize spreadsheet.
Don't try too hard to get items now, because the 3.2 items are all better. I've included them in the optimizer and just Hodir's neck survived .

Um, my tests showed the t8 bonuses as strong enough to use over offset pieces, did you calculate the benefit from those?

Has anyone done the hard math on stat weights for deep frost DW? 0/53/18

Also,
Is that supposed to be for Unholy DW because I would think that Deep Frost would at reach for the 2 pc. T8.5 bonus for frost strike.

Of course I did. I'm not sure, if the sim handles the set bonuses correctly. It maybe undervalues them. Unfortunately it takes so long, that I don't want to test it.


Unholy DW is dead and please stop quoting long posts. You could have easily shortened it like I did with yours.