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  1. #1

    What made UH scale better with gear than Frost?

    I'm not much of a theorycrafter, and I'm still in the process of deciding if going Unholy or Frost in Legion. I read several times that usually Frost is better when undergeared (i.e. at the beginning of an expansion), then Unholy clearly wins over time.

    Why is that, exactly? Is it due to Mastery, or 2H weapon damage scaling? Is anything changing on this topic coming Legion?

    Thank you in advance.

  2. #2
    Deleted
    In numbers the overall scaling from "as example" Mastery has a higher %dmg gain as unholy then the other speccs.

    Death Knight
    Blood [Mastery: Blood Shield] % of [Death Strike] healing is also applied as a shield, and increases Attack Power. 16% (1%every 55p Mastery)
    Frost [Mastery: Frozen Heart] Increases frost damage by %. 16% (1%every 55p Mastery)
    Unholy[Mastery: Dreadblade] Increases shadow damage by %. 20% (1%every 44Mastery)

  3. #3
    Don't forget that Crit has always been a dead stat for Frost, and Frost could always softcap Haste more easily because of its propensity for using 1-Rune abilities (Howling Blast) whereas Unholy always liked to use Festering Strike.

    Now that Obliterate is our main nuke, HB is only worth it with Rime, and Killing Machine only procs from critical auto-attacks, Haste and Crit should be a lot more valuable.

  4. #4
    No idea about how scaling in legion will be but when it comes to WoD, unholy out scaled frost because of the breath playstyle, ring, vial and 4 set. The fact that BoS lined up with ring and vial allowed unholy to do way more single target dmg than frost could even when frost was supposed to have better st dmg. Unholy was already better than frost when it came to aoe because of necroblight, the BoS playstyle for st just put the spec over the top and it wasn't even worth playing frost come mythic progression. I hope the scaling remains the same in legion, I seriously love unholy and don't like playing frost all that much anymore.

  5. #5
    Thanks for your input. When do you think they'll finalize tuning, so we can run a few sims to help us decide?

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by guzacon View Post
    Thanks for your input. When do you think they'll finalize tuning, so we can run a few sims to help us decide?
    There's 7 weeks left until the Legion launch, I think it's safe to assume that tuning will continue up to and through the launch.

  7. #7
    Deleted
    The 3 day Nerf after 6.2 didn't help frost scale either.
    Last edited by mmocf0b29d4c77; 2016-07-11 at 08:43 PM.

  8. #8
    It didn't this tier beyond ring and BoS. The damage gap for NP is just it being better mechanically rather than raw DPS.

  9. #9
    A few things in my opinion.

    Stat Scaling: As above, Unholy has better Mastery coefficients than Frost and that gap will only get wider once you start getting into the thousands. For every 210 Mastery on your gear you get 4% from Frost and 5% from Unholy. Example, in my Breath set (not even Mastery focused), I would have 6% more increased damage from Mastery than I would from being Frost in the same gear and that's not counting the difference in base values. That adds up quick. Thanks to Obliterate being a bad button Frost takes forever to go through runes so Haste pretty far from sexy despite it being their attunement stat. That leaves Frost with Mastery, Multi and Vers. Vers is just whatever. Mastery is fine on paper, but once again our scaling from Mastery is flat out worse than Unholy's but the side effect to stacking Mastery is that it makes Obliterate even worse than it already is. Multi suffers from a similar problem in that it's ok for us, but it's just better for Unholy. I can see the design intent for the Mastery scaling in that Blizzard seems to think that Unholy has less sources of Shadow damage than Frost has sources of Frost damage. I haven't seen much in the way of evidence to suggest this is true, but that's what it feels like to me.

    Ring: Breath and Vial lining up with Ring is amazing for Unholy. Even without Vial, it'd still be really good. Frost on the other hand can usually line Pillar up with Ring, but Pillar is normalized at half the power that a 2min CD would be. Also Gargoyle for the pull and occasionally it lining up with a second or third ring usage. Frost simply doesn't have anything comparable and so much damage revolves around the Ring it's kinda disgusting. I actually think this is the biggest one. If Pillar of Frost was normalized for PvE to sync with the Ring then Frost would probably at least be in a good place.

    Itemization: Frost's set bonuses are kinda ass. Crit is a dead stat and Haste isn't exactly something to get excited over due to how little of it Frost actually needs/wants so the 2pc is pretty lame. The 4pc is alright I guess? I don't know, it doesn't seem all that exciting. Maybe it's just me. EDH getting nerfed by 50% twice hurt a fair amount too but at the end of the day Frost just doesn't scale off of anything. Crit is dead as aforementioned thanks to Killing Machine and that shit being up so much more often from 4pc doesn't make it any better. Maybe if the 4pc had a clause that made your KM damage increased by your crit chance? That would've been sweet maybe or that could've just been the 2pc instead of the worthless one that was already there. A functional class trinket would've been rad too, but clearly too much to ask for.

  10. #10
    All of the above ^

    Synergy. Look how well Unholy works with the 100 talents (NecroPlague and BoS, specifically). Frost has no attacks to keep NP rolling while Unholy has Festering Strike. So Frost has to keep building NP stacks and spends very little time at 15 stacks while Unholy keeps it at 15 stacks for most of the fight. BoS is shit for DW Frost because Oblit builds your runic power and is rarely used as DW. No one plays 2H because it's horrible, but 2H would probably have SLIGHTLY better synergy with BoS. Neither compare to Unholy's relationship with BoS, obviously. The only talent that Frost worked okay with was Defile, and on fights with movement, you can throw that out the window.

    Synergy with trinkets was also bad for Frost. The class trinket for DW is unusable because it was designed for 2H Frost. EDH got nerfed hard as hell from the get-go. The Rumbling Pebble is an earlier (lower ilvl) trinket so that automatically puts it at a disadvantage. Unending Hunger has a nice strength proc but it's not on use and all that crit isn't really useful for Frost. You're left with a nerfed EDH and a damn cleave trinket. On the other hand, look how great Unholy's trinkets were.

    Syngery with gear; Everything and it's mother had multistrike, whereas finding top ilvl gear from later bosses with ideal stats for DW Frost wasn't as easy.

    Finally, the fact that Frost was broken in to 2 subspecs and trying to cater to both ultimately did it in, and thank god that changes on Tuesday. 2H Frost has long been a garbage spec and held DW back and those days are soon over.

  11. #11
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  12. #12
    One spec got demolished by nerfs into uselessness in 2 days for no reason and the other did not. What else is there to know? Even if they had never nerfed Frost, we wouldn't be touching arcane mages or sub rogues. Haven't you figured out that the devs are mostly SJW chimps who care about the classes they play and not about overall balance amongst all specs? It's been super apparent since Wrath.

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by guzacon View Post
    I'm not much of a theorycrafter, and I'm still in the process of deciding if going Unholy or Frost in Legion. I read several times that usually Frost is better when undergeared (i.e. at the beginning of an expansion), then Unholy clearly wins over time.

    Why is that, exactly? Is it due to Mastery, or 2H weapon damage scaling? Is anything changing on this topic coming Legion?

    Thank you in advance.
    The problem for frost before LEgion was....Frost didn't scale with crit at all....and with the use of mostly one rune abilities haste was quickly capped. So all we really scaled off of was mastery. Now in Legion Frost will scale off crit the entire expansion as well as haste. And mastery is an added bonus. Unholy has typically scaled well with all the secondaries compared to frost. However now it seems with the changes to frost that it "could" scale better than unholy.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Dkwhyevernot View Post
    The 3 day Nerf after 6.2 didn't help frost scale either.
    While I understand why they nerfed it(top guilds were planning on stacking Frost DKs for mythic). The overall nerfs were WAAAAAY too much. Such is the case, when it comes to nerfing and Blizzard. They tend to bring a hacksaw for the job of a scalpel.

  14. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by RuneDK View Post
    The problem for frost before LEgion was....Frost didn't scale with crit at all....and with the use of mostly one rune abilities haste was quickly capped. So all we really scaled off of was mastery. Now in Legion Frost will scale off crit the entire expansion as well as haste. And mastery is an added bonus. Unholy has typically scaled well with all the secondaries compared to frost. However now it seems with the changes to frost that it "could" scale better than unholy.

    - - - Updated - - -



    While I understand why they nerfed it(top guilds were planning on stacking Frost DKs for mythic). The overall nerfs were WAAAAAY too much. Such is the case, when it comes to nerfing and Blizzard. They tend to bring a hacksaw for the job of a scalpel.
    The nerfs were stupid. We still wouldn't hold a candle to soul cap users or POF arcane mages. That's why FDKs are so salty. They let things that were beyond broken as fuck go but god forbid DKs do competitive DPS.

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by NecroSleetstorm View Post
    The nerfs were stupid. We still wouldn't hold a candle to soul cap users or POF arcane mages. That's why FDKs are so salty. They let things that were beyond broken as fuck go but god forbid DKs do competitive DPS.
    Well they nerfed the strength trinkets but never touched soul cap/PoF. That was a problem cause of rets/warriors. However yes the nerfs were unwarranted. We would be upper middle after everyone got gear. It sucks but it is what it is.

  16. #16
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by RuneDK View Post
    The problem for frost before LEgion was....Frost didn't scale with crit at all....and with the use of mostly one rune abilities haste was quickly capped. So all we really scaled off of was mastery. Now in Legion Frost will scale off crit the entire expansion as well as haste. And mastery is an added bonus. Unholy has typically scaled well with all the secondaries compared to frost. However now it seems with the changes to frost that it "could" scale better than unholy.
    Hope frost never becomes significantly better then unholy, frost is nowhere near as fun or interesting as unholy. Im fine if theyre equal or close, but not if frost ends up being lot better tehn unholy at some point.
    Last edited by mmocc56b999c4f; 2016-07-17 at 11:58 AM.

  17. #17
    Hope frost never becomes significantly better then unholy, frost is nowhere near as fun or interesting as unholy. Im fine if theyre equal or close, but not if frost ends up being lot better tehn unholy at some point.
    To hell with that. It's all opinion. I think blasting foes with huge obliterates and icy attacks is more fun than managing dots and babysitting Timmy. If anything, Frost deserves some time in the light after being bad for so long. If Frost outperforms Unholy at some point, I'm coming here and dedicating a thread just to you

  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by cyrisela View Post
    Hope frost never becomes significantly better then unholy, frost is nowhere near as fun or interesting as unholy. Im fine if theyre equal or close, but not if frost ends up being lot better tehn unholy at some point.
    Yea, well some of us are tired of being forced into unholy for the past five years. And to be honest, unholy on beta is very similar to live(without breath) just to me a lot more boring. At least with breath or necrotic plague there's some form of paying attention to what you're doing. On beta/ptr I barely pay attention to festering wounds. Yes I still pay attention but as a whole I thought it was REALLY boring gameplay compared to live. So a matter of fun is subjective.

  19. #19
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by RuneDK View Post
    Yea, well some of us are tired of being forced into unholy for the past five years. And to be honest, unholy on beta is very similar to live(without breath) just to me a lot more boring. At least with breath or necrotic plague there's some form of paying attention to what you're doing. On beta/ptr I barely pay attention to festering wounds. Yes I still pay attention but as a whole I thought it was REALLY boring gameplay compared to live. So a matter of fun is subjective.
    youre right its all opinion, for breath i hated hated that playstyle for unholy, i even played necrotic plague on fights like reaver, tyrant, soc , felord, cause i hated it so much bos for unholy. I like legions unholy much more then wod unholy i find it more engaging and we can have dfifferent ways to do our dmg.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Hellborne87 View Post
    To hell with that. It's all opinion. I think blasting foes with huge obliterates and icy attacks is more fun than managing dots and babysitting Timmy. If anything, Frost deserves some time in the light after being bad for so long. If Frost outperforms Unholy at some point, I'm coming here and dedicating a thread just to you
    i dont dislike frost or anything like that but i just find unholy lot more fun (and think evryone wants the spec they like most to be the best spec). Hope they will be quite equal overall and main differences style of how they do aoe dmg for example. main thing i dont want is to see frost lot better then unholy like 10+%.

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by cyrisela View Post
    Hope frost never becomes significantly better then unholy, frost is nowhere near as fun or interesting as unholy. Im fine if theyre equal or close, but not if frost ends up being lot better tehn unholy at some point.
    See and that's how I feel about unholy, never enjoyed it, let hope blizzard got tuning right so people can play the spec they most enjoy , rather then the spec that out pro forms the other. Having played this game for 10 years I think we got a snowballs chance in hell of them actually getting the tuning right

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