I think blood rewards well-timed bursts extremely well, which is something frost lacks, especially with the upcoming UA change. Because I have become intimately familiar with that process, I do see frost numbers ending up marginally lower than blood, maybe by 200 dps - if I can do sustained damage. (6900 vs 7050) But I could easily see this coming down to a slightly better execution of blood than frost, and not really an issue with the frost spec itself. Honestly, the gap might close if I got a better trinket for frost or something.

There are always going to be fights where one spec trumps the other. Any fight where you can make use of heart strike's cleave (Val'kyr, Kologarn) will see blood shoot to the top. For larger-scale AoE and crit-intensive fights like Hodir, frost will win out.

Anyone know offhand if those stat weights for 0/17/54 are up to date? For some reason the gear optimizer and the stat weight generator's are giving my pc fits.

They are good as of a few versions of the simulator ago, I'll run another long sim soon to confirm, but almost nothing has changed.

I ran 0/17/54 DW DC-spam numbers last night (based on my gear and future 4pt t9) and getting results similar to the old numbers with the exception of crit. Since we loose the 2pt T8 bonus which reduced the value of crit on our main attack and the gain of 4pt t9 it's quite understandable that crit is overtaking haste.

According to THIS POST, while they want to address both Shadowfrost and Unholy-Obliterate, there are some caveats:

* It's possible to play a DK competitively in both PvP and PvE aspects without being Shadowfrost. This wasn't really the case the first time around, when Frost and Blood and traditional Unholy has PvP issues that made Shadowfrost significantly better.

* All the DK specs are doing relatively decent DPS, so it's not as big of a priority just because the way to play it is divergent.

That being said, it is true that the current PTR build does not change anything for Shadowfrost, while at the same time eliminating Unholy-Obliterate as a viable spec simply by virtue of losing Death Coils from Dirge's RP production.

I didn't see any discussion about this in here and wouldn't expect to but at the same time there is no thread for it so I'm just gonna say it here:

I just like most other people thought 2h frost was dead but if you look at this Recount Image you can see that Devah is doing quite well with it. I believe this calls for some form of discussion about the spec being used.

and that's what happens when you start posting before your first cup of coffee in the morning. i will stfu now.

edit: well now that I am looking at it, what if they were using it from the Champ fight? I could see this being good for both the champs and anub for the slowing of champs and all the little adds so you get lots of CC. It has most of the major DPS talents, all except IIT and Merciless Combat. Chillblains and hungering cold would even the playing field with the perma frost on the ground and and the Endless winter is to keep you from having to spend RP on Mind Freeze for interupting the large adds major hit.

Assuming virulence you really want to max out spell hit (for DW Unholy) at:

342 Alliance/368 Horde: This assumes alliance always has a dranei in the raid

OR

263 Alliance/289 Horde: Assuming you always have a shadow priest (misery) or boomkin (Imp FF)

I've opted for 342 as my raid group does not always contain a shadow priest or boomkin. When they are there the hit is still providing a bonus that isn't far behind crit or haste. If neither misery nor imp FF is present, that hit is more valuable than strength point for point. We have enough dranei that I can consider the 1% hit they give more or less a static buff.

The point is you cannot just blindly take the numbers on the first post. You need to properly apply them to your situation. Actually the OP should probably at least be updated to point out that the stat weights for hit are up to 10 or 11% (alliance or horde).

The OP assumes you have an optimal raid composition which includes the 3% spell hit buff. This thread is about optimal damage and raid composition so it is fine the way it is now.

They seem to have changed their spec between when you posted and when I looked just now - they are in a dual wield spec now - what was their spec that you were talking about 2h frost?

Sorry if this has already been brought up but Im having trouble finding any information on it. According to the op "Killing Machine and Rime procs are to be used together to get the optimal dps. If rime procs hold it until you get a KM proc, if KM procs save it for a Rime, or let it be consumed by the FS dumps at the end of a rotation."

What I am having trouble understanding is why wouldn't you just use howling blast instead of the last obliterate in your rotation over using a frost strike in regards to a KM proc without a Rime Proc? Or am I misreading this? It seems as if a Howling Blast crit does far more damage than a Frost Strike crit or an Obliterate crit, or is the extra obliterate in the "Rime'less" rotation worth using killing machine on frost strike?

Does anyone have any concrete numbers that compare SoA with the new SoV? I have used the Search but couldn't find anything.

So I was wondering for 0/17/54 do you still just go for stats/dmg on wep and ignore speed?
Because i just got my hands on Lionhead Slasher
nd i was wondering if i can use it properly.


------EDIT------

Just to be sure i was talking about 0/17/54

Slow/slow is preferred. A slow weapon from a previous tier of content is better than a fast weapon from the next tier.

If you aren't using ToT, offhand speed is irrelevant and you should just pick up the highest dps one you can find, so yes, the slasher is more than ideal to use.

Killing Machine is essentially a free crit. To maximize benefit you have to weigh the damage gain from this crit against the probabily that the ability would have been critical without KM. Depending on you gear-weapon-ratio, FS crits slightly harder than HB (if your gear is well-balanced) or severly harder than HB (if you have very good weapons and significantly worse armor). On the other hand, FS has a higher crit chance without KM than HB (due to agility only giving melee crit), although HB does benefit from improved-scorch-like debuffs, which FS does not.
That is basically the trade-off, FS usually crits higher, but FS also has a higher chance to crit before KM. I honestly don't know where the sweet spot of damage difference and crit chance difference is, such that it is equally good to use KM for FS or HB, though. It could also be possible that this information to use KM for HB instead of FS is still from an earlier patch build, where KM only affected MH-FS (on live it affects MH and OH). From a raiding perspective it's probably safe to say, that any sort of waiting (i.e. lost time while you could be doing something) is worse than just using KM for what is at hand, FS or HB.

The one exception to this being cases where you right now have enough RP for a FS, you have a Rime proc, but it is forseeable that in short order a GCD is coming up where you would have neither RP, nor runes to use, but Rime would be run out by then. In that case, you would use Rime now and save the FS for the free GCD. But situations like this only occur a few times during an encounter.

Ok, I know that sub-blood has been discussed and thusfar proven inferior to sub unholy specs with regards to frost DW. However, over in the Unholy 2h thread, they have discovered that sub blood and specifically the talent Dark Conviction(+5% chance to crit) will be superior to everything else, come 3.2.2, with the 4pc set changes.

I guess what I'm asking is twofold: first, has sub-blood been revisited on the PTR with regards to Dark Conviction and 4pc? And second, if the former is the case, then will our current cookie-cutter best dps builds stay the same/change?

One of the reasons blood suddenly became very viable is that Subversion now includes SS, isn't it, though.

You're comparing two very different things here. Unholy subspec is superior for Frost buildsdue to Necrosis and BCB mainly. Unholy DW specs already get these talents as their main tree.

Frost builds compare Unholy versus Blood subspecs, while Unholy builds compare Blood versus Frost.

Can't have cake and eat it too unfortunately. You either have to choose to have 5% more crit, slight ap gain, 9% ob crit chance or 10% more shadow damage (DW Unholy biggest hitter is death coil), 3% melee hit, 15% offhand damage, 2% melee crit, 10 more runic power on IT.

Don't think blood subspec is worth it.

It's a bit more complex than that. Waiting on a Rime proc generally doesn't hurt, but if you use Obliterates inbetween there is the possibility that you waste the Rime proc by overwriting with a new one. That may not be important as long as you have plenty of RP, but if you're short on RP then you should make use of all the Rime procs you can get (mostly a GoD spec issue). In that case you would need to evaluate between potential rune downtime, the possibility of another Rime proc and, of course, KM, always an interesting decision.

Also, what shouldn't be forgotten, HB counts as a spell, so the gcd is hastened by all spell haste effects. Depending on gear that can be quite significant, especially when you got Blood Lust, so as long as you are gcd starved, the haste directly corresponds to the damage.