Unholy and frost comparisons?

[Gemini Soul]

Blizzard claims there's gonna be a mechanic to reduce the research time of artifacts regardless.
Probably when "world first" shenanigans going to dwindle.

That is a catch up mechanic, if you keep up on your AK you wont see a reduction. But if you fall behind, the work orders will complete faster per craft than they normally do till you catch up.

[Apollinaire]

I honestly hate this mentality....People play the spec they enjoy better than the one they don't regardless of how high the ceiling is. Player x plays frost at 200k dps but unholy he taps out as best as he can at 175k....would you rather take a 200k dps or a 175k dps? This isn't an argument for the cutting edge guilds. This player wouldn't even make it out of trial. This is for the shitbum try hard guilds who think they're better than they are.

Goddamn this is just as obnoxious as it was in that other thread when you tried arguing with me after I answered your question about why some of us play UH over frost. I'm starting to think you're just salty that you were stuck playing in some dog-tier guild full of shitters and have to resort to calling the better guilds try hards. You obviously care yourself, or you wouldn't have smashed your head against HFC for so many months trying to get an archi kill.

I know pre-patch data is pretty meaningless for Legion, and my faster kills translate to higher damage, so I almost hesitate to bring this up. The sole reason I am bringing it up though, is to compare the DPS done at similar percentiles. A 99% percentile rank is a 99% percentile whether the kill is 25 seconds or 2 minutes after all.

So, direct comparison between us on fights where we had equal or similar percentile ranks with you as frost and me as unholy:

Reaver, 99% frost vs 99% UH
122,194
358,885

Kormrok, 92% frost vs 97% UH
87,522
272,143

Gorefiend, 97% frost vs 96% UH (where you actually had the advantage because you were in Feast longer)
115,076
145,925

Zakuun - 98% frost vs 97% UH
99,007
195,543

Xhul - 95% frost vs 92% UH
103,537
158,695

Tyrant - 91% frost vs 96% UH
103,220
146,026

Iskar - 90% frost vs 97% UH
100,488
163,543

So please, tell me again how you're not hugely gimping yourself by playing frost. There are even fights where you have a higher percentile than I do, but your damage isn't even close. Honestly I don't even think I'm that great either, I'd say I'm pretty average for people doing competitive mythic raiding.

I still don't give a shit what spec the masses play. But let's not pretend that one spec isn't numerically inferior to the other in literally every way. There are updated sims for Legion and, shocker, this exact same trend of Unholy beating frost in every situation is exactly the same as it has been.

[Piz813]

Once again let's get this out there

NOTHING CAN COMPETE WITH RING AND DARK ARBITER. all that shit is gone tomorrow

[Apollinaire]

Once again let's get this out there

NOTHING CAN COMPETE WITH RING AND DARK ARBITER. all that shit is gone tomorrow

Dark Arbiter is dead. Legion sims are using Soul Reaper now anyway. Unholy is still way above frost. 27k DPS over frost at baseline for each with no trinkets. 31k with BIS trinkets. That difference is absolutely massive.


Again I don't care which spec any of you play. Just stop trying to pretend you can compete against Unholy with frost. If you're a half-decent player, you're going to perform better with UH. End of story. Constant posts of "I like it more so I'll do better" are just ridiculous. If you put 30 minutes into learning and practicing UH you're going to do better than you would as frost. It's not like there's some stupid hard gimimck like BOS anymore.

[Piz813]

Dark Arbiter is dead. Legion sims are using Soul Reaper now anyway. Unholy is still way above frost. 27k DPS over frost at baseline for each with no trinkets. 31k with BIS trinkets. That difference is absolutely massive.


Again I don't care which spec any of you play. Just stop trying to pretend you can compete against Unholy with frost. If you're a half-decent player, you're going to perform better with UH. End of story. Constant posts of "I like it more so I'll do better" are just ridiculous. If you put 30 minutes into learning and practicing UH you're going to do better than you would as frost. It's not like there's some stupid hard gimimck like BOS anymore.

they are discussing the issues with these sims as we speak. UH gear in the frost section etc. you put up numbers from HFC so one can only assume you are going by Live data...

[Freedom]

Dark Arbiter is dead. Legion sims are using Soul Reaper now anyway. Unholy is still way above frost. 27k DPS over frost at baseline for each with no trinkets. 31k with BIS trinkets. That difference is absolutely massive.


Again I don't care which spec any of you play. Just stop trying to pretend you can compete against Unholy with frost. If you're a half-decent player, you're going to perform better with UH. End of story. Constant posts of "I like it more so I'll do better" are just ridiculous. If you put 30 minutes into learning and practicing UH you're going to do better than you would as frost. It's not like there's some stupid hard gimimck like BOS anymore.

What I want to know, and know ASAP, is if the difference is 2%, 5%, 7%, or this atrocious 13% that this sim claims. I've looked at Phenom's logs, and Frost did NOT look that bad in those logs. Then again, there were no UH DKs.... but it didn't include the bracer nerf and RI fix.

I do know they used mages as an example, saying, "If you're 15% better than the other specs as Fire, expect to be nerfed to 5% better. Not exactly equal, so that players don't feel they invested in the wrong artifact, but a more acceptable margin."

I have yet to see any Mage DPS data, however.

[Apollinaire]

they are discussing the issues with these sims as we speak. UH gear in the frost section etc. you put up numbers from HFC so one can only assume you are going by Live data...

Well, I'm going by a lot of the mythic testing logs too. But none of that is really as easy to compare directly as live for a simple anecdote. I also prefaced it by noting how meaningless it is, and how I was only doing it to compare damage at a percentile. In other words, how both are performing at a similar level of play. Believe me, I'd love to be able to pull up ranked logs from beta testing and only use logs from people playing well. It's a huge pain in the ass sorting through them and figuring out which ones are worth looking at and which ones aren't, and it's hard to figure out how the individual players stack up against each other to get a fair comparison. I don't care enough about some silly forum to go do that again right now to prove a point.

[Piz813]

What I want to know, and know ASAP, is if the difference is 2%, 5%, 7%, or this atrocious 13% that this sim claims. I've looked at Phenom's logs, and Frost did NOT look that bad in those logs. Then again, there were no UH DKs.... but it didn't include the bracer nerf and RI fix.

I do know they used mages as an example, saying, "If you're 15% better than the other specs as Fire, expect to be nerfed to 5% better. Not exactly equal, so that players don't feel they invested in the wrong artifact, but a more acceptable margin."

I have yet to see any Mage DPS data, however.

I saw some Frost logs too. One where a Frost guy beat a UH guy by a good amount. Think it was on Cenarious? Or Ursoc? not sure but it gave me hope and it was from like August 7th. S yeah before the RI fix and bracer reduction (which didn't matter much on beta when I played frost last few days)

in the end, we will all be fine. raids dont open for 4 weeks. Mythics a week after. 28 days to see some changes or level up another weapon or class if you are that unhappy with following the path of Frost and glory!

Ill debate all day on a timed Mythic duungeon frost's AoE cleave is stellar, fast, and hits HARD on everything in Scythes path while RW stuns them. Sure Epidemic is cool but 3 presses then its the DnD/SS set up which takes a few seconds.. Scythe is right there in their face critting for 360-400k with pillars running

[Apollinaire]

What I want to know, and know ASAP, is if the difference is 2%, 5%, 7%, or this atrocious 13% that this sim claims. I've looked at Phenom's logs, and Frost did NOT look that bad in those logs. Then again, there were no UH DKs.... but it didn't include the bracer nerf and RI fix.

I do know they used mages as an example, saying, "If you're 15% better than the other specs as Fire, expect to be nerfed to 5% better. Not exactly equal, so that players don't feel they invested in the wrong artifact, but a more acceptable margin."

I have yet to see any Mage DPS data, however.

It literally doesn't matter if the actual percentage is 2% or 13%. Even assuming it was only 2%, that's still enough of a difference to be the better choice. 2% of 300k dps is 6000dps. On a 5 minute fight that's the difference between 90,000,000 damage and 91,800,000, That's pretty big even at the absolute low end.

[Gemini Soul]

I saw some Frost logs too. One where a Frost guy beat a UH guy by a good amount. Think it was on Cenarious? Or Ursoc? not sure but it gave me hope and it was from like August 7th. S yeah before the RI fix and bracer reduction (which didn't matter much on beta when I played frost last few days)

in the end, we will all be fine. raids dont open for 4 weeks. Mythics a week after. 28 days to see some changes or level up another weapon or class if you are that unhappy with following the path of Frost and glory!

Ill debate all day on a timed Mythic duungeon frost's AoE cleave is stellar, fast, and hits HARD on everything in Scythes path while RW stuns them. Sure Epidemic is cool but 3 presses then its the DnD/SS set up which takes a few seconds.. Scythe is right there in their face critting for 360-400k with pillars running

The raid logs are kinda iffy, you can cheese them with T18 cause of the scaling. Only hope they adjusted their metrics accordingly removing all the T18 set bonus stuff if they used any of that data for balancing.

[Freedom]

It literally doesn't matter if the actual percentage is 2% or 13%. Even assuming it was only 2%, that's still enough of a difference to be the better choice. 2% of 300k dps is 6000dps. On a 5 minute fight that's the difference between 90,000,000 damage and 91,800,000, That's pretty big even at the absolute low end.

Well, personally, with minimal aim of doing Mythic raids, now happy with "just" Heroic, I can stomach 2%, 5%, even 7%, but 13% or anything really close to the double digits feels unacceptable to me, even for "luls scrub" content. The fact that UH has a better toolkit than Frost just makes it all the worse, given I like to dabble in PVP too.

[Apollinaire]

Well, personally, with minimal aim of doing Mythic raids, now happy with "just" Heroic, I can stomach 2%, 5%, even 7%, but 13% or anything really close to the double digits feels unacceptable to me, even for "luls scrub" content. The fact that UH has a better toolkit than Frost just makes it all the worse, given I like to dabble in PVP too.

And that's fine. For that level of raiding it doesn't really matter.

There's still a very vocal selection of players, most of whom seem to fall into the heroic raider / didn't clear mythic until summer category, who are projecting their wishful thinking into statements that they'll be able to keep up as frost. The numbers all around disagree heavily with this statement though.

I'm sure there are plenty of heroic raiders who DO want to optimize their play. Forgive the assumption, but I'm going to say most of these players are not keeping up with every detail of their class and tend to just skim the well-known resources for basic info and guides. Somebody spouting bullshit in a well-written manner is going to come across as correct to those who don't know better.

There's nothing wrong with playing frost. It would be nice if people would stop stating it as a fact that "frost will compete with UH if you like it more." Unholy has some intricacies to master, sure, but it's pretty straightforward and a little practice will go a long way. If you put a little effort into learning it, with the way things are, you'll do better as UH every time. Just admit it's the inferior damage spec and you're playing a sub-optimal spec out of preference, without trying to mislead people into thinking it's actually competitive.

[Dracovian]

Dark Arbiter is dead. Legion sims are using Soul Reaper now anyway. Unholy is still way above frost. 27k DPS over frost at baseline for each with no trinkets. 31k with BIS trinkets. That difference is absolutely massive.


Again I don't care which spec any of you play. Just stop trying to pretend you can compete against Unholy with frost. If you're a half-decent player, you're going to perform better with UH. End of story. Constant posts of "I like it more so I'll do better" are just ridiculous. If you put 30 minutes into learning and practicing UH you're going to do better than you would as frost. It's not like there's some stupid hard gimimck like BOS anymore.

Thank you. Finally someone else sees the light. These wishful thinkers think wishing something makes it true. Data is all we need. If a player does worse on UH than on Frost even if he prefers Frost he is a mediocre player. UH at 80% still beats a Frost played nearly perfect as things are atm period. It simply can't be argued. There is no sim in existence that makes Frost look even mediocre. It's the worst dps spec. Why are all these people so hungry for reassuring posts? You want to play Frost? Go ahead. It's fine! But don't come in here saying it's "neck and neck". Again, it's not only inferior to UH it's the worst dps spec in the game.

[Gemini Soul]

Hopefully they push some changes tomorrow or on Tuesday to close the gap and make frost better. I could handle frost with its subpar kit if it did competitive damage against unholy but sadly it doesn't and ideally it should be above unholy because it has a crappy kit compared to unholy.

[Deleted]

Jesus couldn't balance frost and unholy to within 2% of each other.

10% doesn't seem attainable going back to er...forever.

[RuneDK]

-snip-

I honestly think you have an issue with comprehension. I am not talking cutting edge guilds. Any guild outside of top 1000 really has no right to tell players to play a specific spec. Unless it is vastly inferior which even pre-7.0 patch there were only a few fights where frost was complete dumpster compared to unholy.

You then use pre-expansion patch numbers...where unholy has dark arbiter and the ring(you realize DA with the ring was hitting for almost as much as it is @110 right? That shit is beyond bonkers and broken). So thanks for showing me 7.0 numbers that have pretty much zero relevance as we're all tuned for 110....But I mean...I know a few fights the top unholy and top frost were within 15-20k of each other. Tyrant and Xhul are two of those fights. I believe there were a few more as well. The problem is the try hard guilds(which you seem to think I'm talking your guild or really any guild that can kill the final boss while it's still relevant) don't see that. They see well...unholy is better you need to play it...If you're not killing a final tier boss within six months you qualify as a try hard guild. Cutting Edge to me is anyone who kills the boss within six to eight months of release(and even then, tiers typically only last around six months anyways so most of the guilds who killed Archimonde after 2016 hit aren't that good since that was basically the six month mark). But again, I also think you fail to realize what I'm saying. Using the Legion sim(which is super inaccurate still anyways) Unholy is at about 236k and Frost is at 205k. You recruit a DK who is doing 200k dps as Frost, and as him to play unholy since it's the better spec. After a month and working out the nuances of playing the spec they don't really enjoy you notice they are topping out at 175-180k as Unholy. Now my question isn't for your guild or your guild's mentality. It's for the legitimate try hard guilds who are not good enough to kill the bosses within six to eight months. If you honestly think that him playing frost is the reason the guild took longer to kill the final boss...then I really am not going to say what I want to, because it would probably result in an infraction. In a world progress guild or even top 500 guild...yes this would matter...and he wouldn't make it out of his trial spot. This shouldn't matter for any guild who wouldn't kill the end boss anyways without a long content drought where you sit in the same raid for eight to fourteen months.

Also going to one of your other posts...I never said Frost would compete with Unholy just cause you like it more...so thanks for putting words in my mouth. I am simply saying someone playing the spec the prefer tends to do better playing it than the one they don't enjoy. Yes the ceiling for unholy is OBVIOUSLY higher...I've never even argued that. Which is why I think you have a comprehension issue. You're acting like I'm saying something I'm not. I'm simply saying player A likes frost but plays unholy and still does overall less damage than he would if he were frost. Those situations DO happen in the shittier guilds.

[Rixarius]

I've said it time and time again. If you want to play Frost, don't play UH because it's better right now. If Frost is under preforming by a lot then it will be buffed. Mark my words on that. Watcher literally said that because of the lack of weapon drops and commitment to your artifact, they are going to be meticulous about balancing this expansion.

Nobody should feel shoe-horned into playing UH because of how well it is preforming on the prepatch before Legion actually hits. Just play whatever spec you enjoy most. Once everyone is out there doing Mythic dungeons and what not, Blizzard will have reliable numbers to go by to see what needs buffed or nerfed.

[Freedom]

Also going to one of your other posts...I never said Frost would compete with Unholy just cause you like it more...so thanks for putting words in my mouth. I am simply saying someone playing the spec the prefer tends to do better playing it than the one they don't enjoy. Yes the ceiling for unholy is OBVIOUSLY higher...I've never even argued that. Which is why I think you have a comprehension issue. You're acting like I'm saying something I'm not. I'm simply saying player A likes frost but plays unholy and still does overall less damage than he would if he were frost. Those situations DO happen in the shittier guilds.

While I normally agree with you, I think the bolded is wrong. In Cata T13, coming back after a medium break, I liked Fury as TG better than Arms. When I saw how much better DS Arms was after quitting mid Firelands, I bit the bullet and tried it for DS. I ended up loving it, and doing more damage than I could with Fury, loving two two handers more than Arms or not.

If the difference were 2%, 5%, hell even 7%, I agree. But this is almost 15% according to these preliminary sims. That's not something you can hand wave away with "But I like this spec better and will do better".

I know this is a prepatch example, but I was at 45k on one kill as lower geared Frost, and when my old tryhard guild took me in next, having only then just set up Unholy bars and timers, with no real understanding of the finer points of the spec, I pulled 65k. Even without DA and the ring, it would have been 50-55k most likely.

Liking a spec versus not liking a spec will not make up for double digit number disparity, unless you absolutely DESPISE Unholy and are actively distracted by hating it while you play, or simply cannot handle keeping up diseases and managing wounds... in which case you probably should look into playing a warrior or DH. From everything you've said, it sounds like you absolutely despise Unholy, even if you can play it properly.

[RuneDK]

While I normally agree with you, I think the bolded is wrong. In Cata T13, coming back after a medium break, I liked Fury as TG better than Arms. When I saw how much better DS Arms was after quitting mid Firelands, I bit the bullet and tried it for DS. I ended up loving it, and doing more damage than I could with Fury, loving two two handers more than Arms or not.

If the difference were 2%, 5%, hell even 7%, I agree. But this is almost 15% according to these preliminary sims. That's not something you can hand wave away with "But I like this spec better and will do better".

I know this is a prepatch example, but I was at 45k on one kill as lower geared Frost, and when my old tryhard guild took me in next, having only then just set up Unholy bars and timers, with no real understanding of the finer points of the spec, I pulled 65k. Even without DA and the ring, it would have been 50-55k most likely.

Liking a spec versus not liking a spec will not make up for double digit number disparity, unless you absolutely DESPISE Unholy and are actively distracted by hating it while you play, or simply cannot handle keeping up diseases and managing wounds... in which case you probably should look into playing a warrior or DH. From everything you've said, it sounds like you absolutely despise Unholy, even if you can play it properly.

I actually find this version of unholy to be the most fun to me personally since festerblight during ToT. I just haven't had this much fun playing frost(from a mechanical standpoint) since wotlk. I hated breath unholy with a passion, it wasn't fun gameplay to me, but i know that it showed the difference between great dks and good ones. I am actually in the process of testing out enhancement and may be going shaman as I enjoy ele a lot, but would rather play melee. Just need to get everything set up properly. As a whole though, im not dedicating a main until Nighthold. I plan to have three 110's by Emerald Nightmare(DK, Mage, and either Shaman or Rogue). However, I want to wait to see how DK tuning comes by Nighthold, simply because Blizzard has acknowledged that they need to keep things tight with the artifact system in place.

However, there are some people who are THAT bad at unholy because they truly despise the spec. They hate having a pet(even though it's basically completely passive) and they hate the management of diseases and the like. Frost is like the Ronco Rotisserie, set it and forget it. Where unholy has some management. Granted some of the frost talents/artifact stuff will require some more management than blindly pushing buttons and "winning" in Legion.

[PeopleReady]

I honestly hate this mentality....People play the spec they enjoy better than the one they don't regardless of how high the ceiling is. Player x plays frost at 200k dps but unholy he taps out as best as he can at 175k....would you rather take a 200k dps or a 175k dps? This isn't an argument for the cutting edge guilds. This player wouldn't even make it out of trial. This is for the shitbum try hard guilds who think they're better than they are.

- - - Updated - - -



Seeing as raids don't come out until the end of September...I think you have until the raid to really figure it out or "hope" for some buffs.

Any competent player would play unholy at higher DPS than frost, so your example is a straw man and a bad one at that.