• Darkside

You post makes no sense at all. How would you say that Unholy doesn't scale? It scales beautifully, especially since the extra GCDs are usually used for Frost Strikes. Furthermore, in the original incarnation of DW, UP was pretty terrible, as you were nowhere near GCD capped in BP.

Furthermore, UP is currently the best presence for Frost (in most cases at least). Since DW will change nothing about the frost rotation and style of play, it is highly likely that UP will remain the best presence for any Frost specced DK.

<XI|> if your dog barks do you debate the philosophical reason behind him barking
<XI|> no
<XI|> you say shut up idiot

 

phantazum

UP was only good with 6XIT. With a two dot rotation BP kills it. Its looking like two dot rotation frost is going to be on top. If you like standing waiting for runes to fill up then UP will be the right choice.

 

Valtiel

Disease bonuses and FS nerfs can likely tip the difference now.

OB is currently the best scaling DW strike, spamming Icy Touch instead of strikes is even a bigger dps loss, and the FS damage cut between talent nerfs and the Sigil nerf is probably around 20%. Even in live BP 2 disease rotations pull ahead of UP rotations if you don't use the SoVH - I honestly don't see UP being the top dog in 3.2 at the moment.

12 weeks without a Sigil of the Vengeful Heart drop and counting.

 

bpcatt1

To say that unholy presence is only used with an ITx6 or an IT machine gun rotation is uninformed. I've never made my way onto the WoW Meter Online all-time scoreboard, but I've done some descent numbers (11.5k on Hodir, 6k on XT, 5.4k on Ignis, etc.) all while running a 2 disease rotation in unholy presence using a 17/51/3 spec with glyphs of IT, OB, and FS.

Rotation is normally: PS, IT, OB, BS, BS... RP... OB, OB, IT, IT... RP. Of course, the beauty of frost is that you can break your rotation b/c of movement, picking up an add, etc. without any real dip in dps b/c it's really a priority rotation. As long as you have RP and a frost rune, you are in business until you can set up again.

In unholy presence all the OB's get the 2 disease multiplier, you get 3 IT's in (which glyphed along with the occasional revitalize I rarely ever have a free GCD), movement speed, and a nice bit of haste (which should be nice for dual-wielding).

I have tried 13/51/7 in blood presence, and it is very nice. However, it's a little ridiculous to say what is best right now with so little testing done and with no one actually pulling mobs in the new tier of content. You also don't get to say what is best without boss parses. I don't know which is better honestly. I only know which works best for me. Simulators can tell us where the break-even points are concerning movement, burst, etc. It will be up to each of us to find what works best once the viable specs/rotations/presence's/etc are determined. However, more mechanics, charting, etc needs to be done before we can nail that down.

What will happen in 3.2 will be simple... good frost DK's will still be good frost DK's. We just won't know if DW frost will be as competitive as 2H blood or unholy until the patch actually hits and we see everything in it's final version (i.e. we still haven't seen the nerf SoA yet, but you have to believe it is coming... or at least some type of reduction when you have a weapon in both hands). Let's continue to focus on frost mechanics and finding all the little interesting tidbits of deep DW frost before the patch gets here and stop worrying about presences, gear lists, etc.

 

Valtiel

Your rotation has 3 OB, 2 BS, 3 IT and 1 PS. That's 175 RP with Horn every 20 seconds. Assuming 6 FS with the help of Butchery, the total gets to 16 gcds - you should have 4 free. I doubt Rejuv is enought to fill it, but still considering BP has 13-14 gcds per rotation, it's certainly competitive - but a BP rotation will be filling GCDs with more damaging attacks, and add actual scaling to disease damage.

I'm picking up my last night raid log:

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

and even if in 12 weeks I've yet to see a single Vengeful Heart drop, I need to say that I'm having quite a good time with a BP rotation. It's not a particularly good report, and I repeat, my dps is theorycally suboptimal cause of the lack of a VH sigil, but still I can produce at least 6k dps on all bosses, had 7k on XT, 7k on Kolo, 7k on Thorim; I consider those quite decent results expecially since I wasn't glyphed for IT (we started late and wanted to clear things fast).
I've tested UP vs BP quite extensively and I feel the superiority of UP (once again, consider I don't have the VH sigil which probably helps UP more than BP) is stronger in theory than in practice.

In all honesty, I think the strongest misconception is that UP is more "bursty" cause of movement speed - so far I've found that all fights that have limited dps windows strongly favour BP.

Another very important thing to consider for the future is that BP will scale better with BS buffs and will suffer less the FS nerfs (since it relies less on it and uses less in each rotation).

12 weeks without a Sigil of the Vengeful Heart drop and counting.

 

Aezoc

In BP you also can't really make effective use of AMS, since you're already GCD capped. Offensive AMS use is important on pretty much every Ulduar fight except Vezax, and means you can pretty regularly throw out a few more FS. We'll have to see the coliseum fights to know how important it'll be next patch, but that's part of the reason that UP is currently ideal for most fights.

UP is certainly more bursty, depending on the size of your DPS window. Consider Yogg P1, for instance - UP is far, far superior both for the movement speed and because a 1 second GCD lets you empty your runes and RP (or come pretty close, anyways) before the add has to be moved back to Sara.

 

thedjvan

Hmm, isn't AMS off the GCD? Or are you saying without extra GCDs the extra RP gained from AMS use goes to waste because there is no window to use any extra FS?

 

Aezoc

The latter. You can't both burn the RP from AMS and keep your runes on cooldown while in BP.

 

Veala

This doesn't necessarily matter though. When practicing priority all you have to do is use your highest return skills over lower priority ones. In the case of AMS I usually spam FS and FU OB while leaving my blood runes on CD until I'm caught up. It isn't more efficient resource use, but it is far more efficient GCD use for an extended period of time at the cost of maybe 1 rune refresh cycle. I recently switched from IT6 to two disease oblit and tried both BP and UP, and UP had far too much downtime to be worthwhile over a smart priority in BP. I also easily beat almost all of my old IT6 dps numbers as BP two disease. I'm inclined to agree with Valtiel in saying that UP is stronger in theory than in practice for non-IT6 specs. It has its places (Yogg saron of course) but overall BP readily outperforms it in my experience.

 

Syrellia

When you use you priority, no matter what you do, you still have to refresh your diseases. Because of the tightness in BP rotation, you have to trade your Obliterates for Frost Strikes whenever you soak AMS. That is not much of extra DPS increase, considering the number of KM proc will be the same, the average of Frost Strikes without KM will be just a little bit higher than the average of Obliterate that you traded (higher end strike but lower crit rate). While in UP, you gain the full advantage of AMS soaking by getting real extra Frost Strikes.

Also, UP frost does use 2 diseases not 1. In my experience I found it quite contradict to your experience, because I found UP worked very well for most fights in Ulduar esp. w/ soaking. The DK who runs 2h Frost in the same guild as I do use UP, and his dps is usually on top of everyone else.

 

Valtiel

The problem in your reasoning is that the argument that UP can use extra GCDs to weave in extra FS is sound, however the idea that the efficiency of the runes used in the extra free time is the same as the BP rotation is not.

If you use two diseases as UP, you'll probably run a rotation like (rotation as in rune usage, you'll probably break the scheme apart quite often):

PS IT OB BS BS - OB IT IT IT IT

in order to gain a decent amount of extra RP to actually have some extra FS to use.

A BP rotation not only has 15% stronger abilities, but it uses more damaging ones (namely 2 115% damage obliterate with 65%+ crit chance and 245% crit damage, compared to 4 puny IT).

Also, another very important factor when considering "burst" is that the UP rotation is certainly theorycally stronger on a full cycle. However, every time your dps window is smaller than that, such superiority is questionable. With 4-6 seconds of DPS exposure (speaking of Yogg, imagine the tentacles), the one extra strike you slap in may very well not be enough to catch up with the 15% damage loss, expecially if it's not a crit. Or if you're stuck on a point where you need to IT IT FS, while the BP guy would OB FS - he's gonna destroy you on damage.

I repeat, I played both rotations extensively. Despite having positively zero luck with the Sigil (which I would say it's pretty essential to frost dps) I managed to get a placement on the WMO top 20 for Frost on most bosses (at least till we switched to WoL). I don't want to diffuse the false idea that UP with the IT glyph and an IT oriented rotation isn't the first road you should explore as Frost, expecially if you do have the sigil. The consensus on that build is universal, and having used it extensively, I can testify it works and it's probably the first choice for Frost. What I'm saying here is that BP works too, and despite being different and definitely more difficult to use, it can produce very similar results (if not better at times) and with the changes incoming in the patch, and the much reduced impact of FS on our rotations, and the increased disease damage, UP is taking a strong hit and BP is getting a slight buff.

12 weeks without a Sigil of the Vengeful Heart drop and counting.

 

Daerwen

A 2 disease UP rotation would consist of PS IT OB BS BS runedump, OB PS IT IT IT runedump actually. In the end it comes very much down to the individual deathknight to see what he can do to max his DPS. With my 220 MS for instance I am pretty much unable to do a proper blood presence rotation without overcapping RP and / or rune useage. Therefor, in my case, I run the above rotation in Unholy Presence to give me higher performance numbers then I would in blood presence.

Also, I agree with the above poster, if you play it right you might not fill the initial global cooldowns whilst you wait in unholy presence. However, later in the fight and getting AMS running, events happening that make you back off of the boss, it's quite hard to not use global cooldowns.

There has allways been a discussion about presences. And with the new dual wielding frost im pretty confident the people running the actual tests will find good results with different rotation / specs / presences like it has happened before with 2H frost. Maybe it's an idea to not discuss what presence is superior, but to do the actual tests and then post the actual data, and draw conclusions from that. Simply saying 'I have allways had better results in BP' is just going to be met by 'I allways had better results in UP'.

 

Edimasta

Just a curious question since we are aiming for OB 'n' stuff... Equip with ArP? Or more Str and Haste?

Anyone had the chance to test it out with enough ArP on equip?

 

Fargom

I think we are going to have to wait until we have decided on competitive specs to work on statweights. Speaking of which, what we need to do now is find out specifically what the simulator / Spreadsheet creators need tested. I feel our only way to move forward is to get a working simulator to test builds, as we know the targeting dummy is useless for that.

Anyone disagree? If not we need to identify issues that are holding back the simulator / spreadsheet programmers and work on them.

 

concept84

Without a simulator a few conclusions can be drawn based on the current stat weighting for Frost. Currently ArP is below Str, but above Crit and Haste.

It seems OB and BS will become larger portions of our damage, as well as melee white swings which are all affected by ArP, naturally raising its value. Considering it already being better than Crit and Haste, I expect this gap to widen, however I don't see ArP ever being better than Str in any DW Frost build.

 

Syrellia

* Please delete, the sims didn't take into account the change of sigil value so the numbers are off *

 

Astalion

A spec I haven't seen posted that seems to be competitive is this: 10/54/7.
Best options seem to be using BP, FC/RI (RI seems to be far superior to FC, especially with the increase to 10%), and SoA (quick simulation showed a large (~175 dps) difference in favor of SoA, no comparison made with the new Sigil yet)

I've been running my simulations on a modified version of Kahorie's simulator (added information I could find in this thread such as sigils not being affected by the offhand penalty, runes only being consumed on main hand hits, razorice stacking up to 10%, and just now (aka after most of my testing) the 15% increase to disease damage and SotVH nerf). I also added the hit from Heroic Presence, which might affect gear choices but hopefully (likely) not much else. (Simulations with the BiS gear below ended up at around 6.9k dps, but keep in mind that most of the changes I made to the simulator lead to increased DPS (but more accurate) values compared to others' simulations, and as such you probably should run your own simulations on this if you want some numbers for comparison)

Original tests were done using my own DKs T7/T7.5 gear, but from further testing it seems to scale properly with T8 BiS gear as well.
BiS Gear stats used for those interested: Str: 1426, Agi: 245, Int: 46, Arm: 14291, Hit: 177, Crit: 752, Haste: 255, Arp: 160, Exp: 179, OH/MH: 178.9dps/2.7s, 4p T8
Yes, the hit is kinda low, but from EP calcs it actually doesn't seem to be that important (melee hit cap being a lot lower due to NoCS, and relatively few spells used)
LootRank listing (EP values derived from the T7 gear, being below spellhit cap. Above the spellhit cap the value of Hit falls to roughly 0.77 (or 77 with AP set as 100, but lootrank isn't a fan of big numbers :P). Note: Kahorie's calculations seemed a bit dodgy regarding weapon dps and weapon speed EPs, so I made some calculations of my own which halved the listed value of MH weapon dps, but makes more sense matematically, unless I missed something :P)

Priority used was: FF > BP > OB > BS > FS > Rime
With the T8 4P bonus moving BS above OB seemed to give a few (<10) DPS increase from a few short tests (2*24h simulations on each), and with proper estimation of free GCDs (taking into account Rime procs and such) it might be a worthwhile tactic for maximising DPS, but doesn't really seem worth the hassle in my opinion.

I also did some tests using Glyph of Disease instead of Glyph of Blood Strike, and it seems to be a DPS loss of about ~40, but still being better than using any other Glyph. (Note: The simulator's priority system doesn't take full advantage of this Glyph, and has to reapply disease with PS/IT fairly often even with it. In practice Glyph of Disease might actually be superior)

As for the Blood Strike Glyph, if you need to get Chillblains (did we get confirmation on whether this actually worked on bosses?) the best point to move seems to be UA (Though I once again wonder if this is something the simulator uses properly, and you might want to have both a dps and a survival cooldown for various bosses, in which case you probably want to move a point from Black Ice instead (didn't test that extensively though))

Hopefully this will help narrow down some of the questions in the OP and possibly help decide the spec to use in 3.2.

 

Edimasta

I agree with that.

I am also getting the best numbers with that build, seems to be the most efficient one and pretty neat in scaling with gear.
As I said before, you need Epidemic to get a smoother rotation which favors 2 diseases, OB and FS and just 2x BS for the death runes.

And as said before, Deep Frost will be the only solution to go. Blizzard is doing everything they can to block any hybrid possibility. So I think it would be fine to see some other test results from our dear fellow theorycrafters here.

 

Astalion

Trying to picture the rotation, I have some doubts how that would work in practice.
The priority above should produce a rotation along the lines of:

IT - PS - OB - BS - BS - FS - FS
(10.5 seconds, disregarding spellhaste for IT (latency should account for at least that difference if not more), meaning you either have to wait 1 second to start the next line (U rune not ready yet), or use the time for HoW/Rime/Excess RP dumping (should be some after a few cycles, even without AMS soaking))

OB - OB - FS - OB - FS - FS
(Waiting out the 1 second means the last GCD ends at 19 seconds from start of rotation, using it for random abilites means 19.5 seconds)

Changing the last OB (that's the one that uses the Death Runes) to 2*BS would then add another 1.5 sec, meaning that IT would run out before being reapplied (you don't want this: Tundra Stalker on 6 ticks of FF gives you 0.9 of a full tick, giving you a DPS gain if you reapply it in the 0.3-2.99 seconds window (the closer to 2.99 the better obviously)).

--NOTE: The above parenthesis is a simplification and only really calculates the FF DoT with no regard to the cost, but it seems to make sense considering that rotationwise it's optimal to refresh after 2 rune refreshes, and the fact that you don't want to use any other ability without FF up anyway. The above math doesn't account for the increased IT damage either, which should be fairly large considering Glacier Rot, so I think it's fairly safe to say IT should be refreshed before it runs out but after the second last DoT tick.

Even if you did choose to wait out the 1 second window before the second line of the cycle, you'd only have 0.5 seconds to refresh your FF, which could easily be ruined by latency, as well as the fact that you lose more DoT time and stretch your rotation to an effective 20.5-21 sec per 2 rune refreshes. It also means you lose out on the window for HoW/Rime/extra RP dumping, unless you go back to OB on the death runes for those cycles where you need to do any of those (which I believe is likely to be most of your cycles anyway)

Changing FS GCDs to BS is not an option either for pure damage reasons (and you shouldn't have RP problems with this spec in BP)

Feel free to point any mistakes I may have made :P

Edit: So much wall of text

 

Edimasta

Huh? What did u think I meant with "2x BS just for Death Runes" ??

To of course do them in the usual rotation. I just did not write in the correct order
Now you did write this whole stuff... for nothing ^^

 

Hashut

Depending on your build, you can delay the RP Dump (FS spam) till next rotation, like:

IT PS OB BS BS FS
then
OB OB FS OB FS FS

and back to the beginning.

Of course that requires Virulence

 

Syrellia

Blizzard is making every effort to ensure Deep Frost is the way to go, yet currently in PTR it's not the case, even with UB nerf. I ran some numbers from the sims of Kahorie's, and 0/17/54 always pull forward by a good 300 - 400 dps of the same gear level. I'm trying to tweak deep frost to get better numbers but no luck so far.

 

Astalion

Err, read it as using the Death Runes for BS, as had been suggested by some posts :P

The problem with that is you'd have a very small window for FF refresh, it seems to be more efficient to add that FS before the second rune refresh (unless I'm mistaken your rotation will be slightly shorter putting that 2nd FS there as well).

 

Kyruski

One of the main problems that I potentially see with the Disease glyph is you first rotation will be a little out of wack. What I mean by this is let's take a look a rune usage for example (Assume .3 second combined lag and human reaction time and .1 for haste, Also counting Butchery, Also switched from PS>IT>OB>BS>BS to PS>IT>BS>BS>OB):

Ability	Runes Before	Runes After	RP After	Time at use
PS	BBFFUU	BBFFxU	10	0
IT	BBFFxU	BBxFxU	25	1.8
BS	BBxFxU	xBxFxU	36	3.5
BS	xBxFxU	xxxFxU	47	5.3
OB	xxxFxU	xxxxxx	67	7.1
FS	xxxxxx	xxxxxx	36	8.9
FS	xxFxxx	xxFxxx	5	10.7
OB	xxFxUx	xxxxxx	26	12.5
Wait 1 second	Dxxxxx	Dxxxxx	26	14.3
OB	DDxxxx	xxxxxx	47	15.3
OB	xxxFxU	xxxxxx	67	17.1
FS	xxxxxx	xxxxxx	36	18.9
FS	xxFxxx	xxFxxx	5	20.7

Here's the problem, you can pest at this point at 22.5 when IT is .3 seconds away from falling off and PS has fallen off, or you remove that last FS and try to pest here, But the big problem is you don't have a Blood or Death rune at the time to pest with (Doesn't refresh a blood rune until 25.3), so you have to Blood Tap in the beginning if anything for every starting rotation. After that, your rotation should be fine. I don't know how the Sim is handling your Pest and it might not be doing it correctly but this is something to look into.

 

Astalion

For the glyphed Pestilence, my plan was to use the first one instead of the first or second BS (depending on when your FF is going to tick) and it should be fine, it's a slight dps loss but makes the rotation a lot simpler. I made the simulator do this, but due to the delay before the third OB in the second rune refresh the blood rune didn't refresh on time and it went back to using IT-PS to refresh it (which btw I think is preferable to PS-IT, you lose the Glacier Rot bonus on the first IT but gain the TS buff on PS+BP, as well as being able to apply it while running in). Might be able to figure out some other way to set up the priority to make it do this properly.

Edit: In an effort to make this post slightly less useless, I ran a simulation with 200 extra Strength but no useful Sigil (Arthritic Binding, for the record) to simulate 100% uptime on the new Sigil, it turned out to be roughly 60 dps worse than SoA (just a quick 24h Sim, but the difference seems big enough anyway).