A question about 2H frost dps

[DarthMetatron]

That's kind of what I was getting at. There is still difficulty to playing Unholy, but it's more in terms of having a good game plan for the encounter and executing it. At least for me, it leaves more room to watch the scenery and react to changing raid conditions. Frost is a twitch-reaction spec and you don't know what's coming next.

There is no reality in which Unholy is more difficult to play than Frost.

[Darkfriend]

Stop again with those "normal" kill logs, doesn't really help at this point of the expansion. No one on hc progression does normal bosses anymore thus the numbers overall are low since only people with very average gear/gameplay still compete.

Also frost is fine in normal because it still scales correctly, but get into hc and u'll get outdps fast once even if you have the best weapons, nothing can increase ur dps anymore.

Am a frost lover since cata (esp DW see my post on page 1), even been frost until my first hc lei shen kill but its scales so badly atm theres no reason to continue into it unless your guild doesn't care.

Normal modes u could be tank specced considering the amount of dps needed to kill each boss <.<.

To be fair it ENTIRELY depends on the fight. Normal durumu you can still be competing against skilled people, normal horridon not so much.

[Faids]

Stop again with those "normal" kill logs, doesn't really help at this point of the expansion. No one on hc progression does normal bosses anymore thus the numbers overall are low since only people with very average gear/gameplay still compete.

Also frost is fine in normal because it still scales correctly, but get into hc and u'll get outdps fast once even if you have the best weapons, nothing can increase ur dps anymore.

Am a frost lover since cata (esp DW see my post on page 1), even been frost until my first hc lei shen kill but its scales so badly atm theres no reason to continue into it unless your guild doesn't care.

Normal modes u could be tank specced considering the amount of dps needed to kill each boss <.<.

Doesn't really matter, scaling is scaling. If you really want to base "whats good" off of fights that 10% of guilds have completed that's fine, just compare FR dk to any other melee and its the same story.

[Murdos]

There is no reality in which Unholy is more difficult to play than Frost.

There is logic in what he says.

The only difficulty I've really had is pretty typical spec-switch stuff, just have to hammer the new rotation into my brain.

[Deleted]

The majority of people who claim that frost DKs are the easiest class/spec to play and so on are in the majority of the cases people who don't even have a swing timer. There's a common missconception between the "floor" of a spec and the "ceiling". In the case of frost the "floor" is quite high, meaning that you can be extremely mediocre at playing it and still do a decent amount of the spec's theoretical dps (I.e. OB, FS spamming). On the other hand, being able to play high-end frost close to it's theoretical maximum is a whole other business, especially with the high levels of haste experienced at BiS gear. Those split tenth of a second decisions and swing timer planning in order to just be able to squeeze that last GCD in before a new swing while still being fully aware of the raid environment makes frost one of the harder high-end specs to play in the game.

[Kronik85]

The majority of people who claim that frost DKs are the easiest class/spec to play and so on are in the majority of the cases people who don't even have a swing timer. There's a common missconception between the "floor" of a spec and the "ceiling". In the case of frost the "floor" is quite high, meaning that you can be extremely mediocre at playing it and still do a decent amount of the spec's theoretical dps (I.e. OB, FS spamming). On the other hand, being able to play high-end frost close to it's theoretical maximum is a whole other business, especially with the high levels of haste experienced at BiS gear. Those split tenth of a second decisions and swing timer planning in order to just be able to squeeze that last GCD in before a new swing while still being fully aware of the raid environment makes frost one of the harder high-end specs to play in the game.

Except none of this is true. IF Killing Machine was something you had to manage you would have a point......but you don't. Perfect management of KM is a 1% increase in damage at best (or so sayeth the math geeks), so the only thing your managing is Runes, RP and Rime procs (or throw BT in there if your inclined to use it). Use the swing timer, try and manage your KM procs and then come to realize that what your doing is more to satisfy yourself than to increase your DPS by anything meaningful.

What makes me sad about Frost atm is that despite playing it since 4.0 I can half derp my way through UH and get much better numbers. From a personal perspective I feel more or less skill capped with 2H Frost and yet I'm getting better numbers with Unholy whilst knowing I'm making mistakes (last time I played UH was ICC where I had been UH since 3.0....actually that's a lie since I leveled with HB/Ghoul/DW spec).

[Deleted]

Except none of this is true. IF Killing Machine was something you had to manage you would have a point......but you don't. Perfect management of KM is a 1% increase in damage at best (or so sayeth the math geeks), so the only thing your managing is Runes, RP and Rime procs (or throw BT in there if your inclined to use it). Use the swing timer, try and manage your KM procs and then come to realize that what your doing is more to satisfy yourself than to increase your DPS by anything meaningful.

What makes me sad about Frost atm is that despite playing it since 4.0 I can half derp my way through UH and get much better numbers. From a personal perspective I feel more or less skill capped with 2H Frost and yet I'm getting better numbers with Unholy whilst knowing I'm making mistakes (last time I played UH was ICC where I had been UH since 3.0....actually that's a lie since I leveled with HB/Ghoul/DW spec).

KM is something you have to manage. By just looking at it through a logical perspective: Each swing has chance of proccing KM, by timing your OB to those swings you have an increased chance of getting a KM-OB, while also maximising your time on the next swing etc. While it _generally_ might not be worth sitting on runes and gambling KM, anticipating it and playing thereafter is something that should result in a dps increase if done correctly. Especially BT allows you to control the outcome as well as not wasting runes to a larger extent than RNG based talents such as RE/RC (not saying these are bad), i.e. you utilize your BT in order to have a OB at almost every swing. I'm fairly confident that if this is played to perfection it should result in a dps increase.

Just because people rank top 25 doesn't mean that they are playing close to perfection, generally you see a lot of people having a 50:50 (or worse, example: worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-xijbmhr55ctgx82g/sum/damageDone/?s=8683&e=9021#Klitschko) ratio between OB-nhit and OB-crit and who still rank highly. I'm not saying that these aren't great players, but if they executed what I mentioned above with perfection they should have something more like ~35:65in terms of OB-nhit and OB-crits while still having almost the same amount of FS/HB output and nhits/crits on these.

You can simply try it out yourself by some simple dummy testing (since you're 'skill capped' as frost I assume your results won't be off-set by poor gameplay). Anyhow, I might be wrong, and if I am, I wouldn't mind advice to improve my own gameplay .

[Nyanmaru]

You can simply try it out yourself by some simple dummy testing (since you're 'skill capped' as frost I assume your results won't be off-set by poor gameplay). Anyhow, I might be wrong, and if I am, I wouldn't mind advice to improve my own gameplay .

Would it increase your DpS simply looking at the math? Hell yes it would.
Would it decrease your awareness of encounter mechanics? Just as sure as the first point.
Would it be too much to calculate "on the fly" when your waiting is a DpS increase? Not if you are rain man.

Waiting for white hits to make sure you don't waste KMs on FS and prepare your rune regeneration so you always have an OB ready when KM procs is nice at really low gear levels. But when it comes to split second decisions in an almost GCD capped situation it doesn't work out that good anymoire and can effectively ruin your DpS instead of increasing it.

[Deleted]

Would it increase your DpS simply looking at the math? Hell yes it would.
Would it decrease your awareness of encounter mechanics? Just as sure as the first point.
Would it be too much to calculate "on the fly" when your waiting is a DpS increase? Not if you are rain man.

Waiting for white hits to make sure you don't waste KMs on FS and prepare your rune regeneration so you always have an OB ready when KM procs is nice at really low gear levels. But when it comes to split second decisions in an almost GCD capped situation it doesn't work out that good anymoire and can effectively ruin your DpS instead of increasing it.

Indeed it can result in a dps-loss, hence adding all that hazzle up with encounter mechanics is why I find it to be one of the harder specs to perfect. Nevertheless, this doesn't mean that it's not viable. And yeah, just for the record, I'm obviously talking from a high-end content perspective and experience (gear and what not) .

[Vintersol]

The majority of people who claim that frost DKs are the easiest class/spec to play and so on are in the majority of the cases people who don't even have a swing timer.

People who say this, didn't had played ever a ret pally...

[Raikh]

in my gear with a full haste setting, i barely have gcds free and have a swing timer below 2 secs, additionally the gain from actually succeeding this way is not noticeable. It's not like that it grants you 5-10% more dmg, 1-2% at absolute max under perfect conditions on patchwerk maybe.

Below 8k haste you may get a reasonable gain from gaming killing machine proccs, on high end gear you lose more dmg on wasting time doing nothing than you get from succesfully gaming a KM procc. And with the next content the playwise will diminish further. Frost 2h scales badly with anything but haste and that is even mediocre, if they do nothing frost is at its end next patch, if they buff obliterate you will further stack haste, especially since very powerful rppm trinkets are awaiting us.

As long as frost 2h stacks haste the gain will diminish further and further and as long crit and mastery are such weak stats for us, we won't stop stacking haste.
With 544 i am currently sitting on ~12,5k haste in my uh setting and if i sim frost with ams soaking (ams cap every 60 sec) haste is still stronger than any other stat, if i exclude ams soaking haste is far superior than anything else (speaking of haste x2 vs str).

I discarded my frostspec know, but it did some tests on dummies, different lfr ToT bosses and durumu hc just a few days ago and i got better off every time merely buttonmashing trying to get in a "rhythm" to land a good portion of oblits in a km procc. The only "gaming" gain i've seen is to change the prio a bit if feather proccs to get 2-3 Oblits in the 8-10 stack range, which was a bit tricky from time to time, because wasting resources or time even here negates the gain.
Looking explicit at swing timers or waiting at any point i'm not resource starved never brought a visible gain, even messing up the opener normalized within the fight and the results were pretty steady and tzhe difference minimal.

Managing resources and to an extent feather procs were the only things i really felt somewhat important optimizing dps. The rest got lost in being nearly gcd locked and rnd oblit crits which still is a possibility as oblit still can crit without a proc and with around or even over 20% crit is not even that rare.

[Skarssen]

Someone needs to sticky this thread http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...you-feel-lucky so that maybe people will stop posting about how important it is to game KM procs.

[Kronik85]

You can simply try it out yourself by some simple dummy testing (since you're 'skill capped' as frost I assume your results won't be off-set by poor gameplay). Anyhow, I might be wrong, and if I am, I wouldn't mind advice to improve my own gameplay .

Your wrong, sorry. Arguments been done a bajillion times, read the thread Skarrsen linked. Improve your game play by watching the things that matter like your Runes, RP, your CDs and not standing in fire.

[Deleted]

I'm fully aware of the thread that you are referring to, I am aware of Runes, RP, CDs and fire.

Raikh, I've got slightly more haste than you do - So yes, I'm also fully aware of the situation with regards to GCDs etc. Secondly, I'm not talking about retardedly gaming/stalling for KM, what I'm talking about is simple propability and ensuring a maximum amount of possible uptime on KM-OB by using the opportunities that arise to do so where the swing timer does play quite a pivotal role. This has nothing to do with gaming, but rather on-the-spot management without wasting resources, and although it may be on a shitload of haste, it is still possible and will result in a dps increase in comparison to not doing so. Especially with Blood Tap a lot of RNG is eliminated and runes are easily predictable.

Like I said, what I'm talking about is not "doing nothing" while waiting for KM to proc, simply a bit more swing timer awareness and resource management/planning.

The guy who made the thread himself says:

"If you are not wasting rune regeneration, if you don’t have KM, and if your next auto-attack will happen before you start wasting rune regeneration, then stall for KM. Note that the sim will fill these empty GCDs until the swing with other actions like HoW, Rime-HB, and FS; it will not just sit around doing nothing.

And for FS:

If you are not wasting rune regeneration, if you have KM, if you cannot OB (yet), if you won’t overflow more than 10 RP (I later found this condition to be unnecessary due to frequency), and if your next auto-attack will happen after you would have the correct runes to OB, then stall for KM. The same note for OB applies here, minus FS.

If you followed my discussion up until this point, you should be able to see that those are the only two scenarios in which the only resource you have the potential to lose is Rime (and a little RP, but, again, I found this to not really happen). I already mentioned that overwriting Rime in favor of KM-OB is a DPS gain, and that as long as you don’t overflow more than around 10 RP per extra KM-OB, you’re fine. Thus, these are the only two scenarios in which stalling can lead to a gain. So, the question is then “how often do these scenarios occur?” "

These scenarios are partly what I'm talking about, the author himself mentions a 1.16% DPS increase (with 509 gear) although I've found it to be higher in practice today (~5%+?). Anyhow, you should be able to adjust for these two scenarios accordingly and see an increased ratio on amount of OB-crits as opposed to OB-noncrit (about ~65:35), while still keeping resources wasted to a minimum.

[Darkfriend]

KM is something you have to manage. By just looking at it through a logical perspective: Each swing has chance of proccing KM, by timing your OB to those swings you have an increased chance of getting a KM-OB, while also maximising your time on the next swing etc. While it _generally_ might not be worth sitting on runes and gambling KM, anticipating it and playing thereafter is something that should result in a dps increase if done correctly. Especially BT allows you to control the outcome as well as not wasting runes to a larger extent than RNG based talents such as RE/RC (not saying these are bad), i.e. you utilize your BT in order to have a OB at almost every swing. I'm fairly confident that if this is played to perfection it should result in a dps increase.

Just because people rank top 25 doesn't mean that they are playing close to perfection, generally you see a lot of people having a 50:50 (or worse, example: worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-xijbmhr55ctgx82g/sum/damageDone/?s=8683&e=9021#Klitschko) ratio between OB-nhit and OB-crit and who still rank highly. I'm not saying that these aren't great players, but if they executed what I mentioned above with perfection they should have something more like ~35:65in terms of OB-nhit and OB-crits while still having almost the same amount of FS/HB output and nhits/crits on these.

You can simply try it out yourself by some simple dummy testing (since you're 'skill capped' as frost I assume your results won't be off-set by poor gameplay). Anyhow, I might be wrong, and if I am, I wouldn't mind advice to improve my own gameplay .

You are 100% wrong. Even with perfect play, 100% perfection, it's less than 2%. And any mess ups at all end up costing more than its worth.

Frost is, by far, the easiest DPS spec I've ever played/raided with. Both to learn, and to play at a competent level. Obviously skill capping is harder than playing at competence, but the gain between playing a 2h frost DK at skill cap and playing a fury warrior at skill cap is a much larger DPS gain. Hell, ignoring everything else just using HL/IV/HT correctly is 2-3% DPS gain.

[Murdos]

You are 100% wrong. Even with perfect play, 100% perfection, it's less than 2%. And any mess ups at all end up costing more than its worth.

Frost is, by far, the easiest DPS spec I've ever played/raided with. Both to learn, and to play at a competent level. Obviously skill capping is harder than playing at competence, but the gain between playing a 2h frost DK at skill cap and playing a fury warrior at skill cap is a much larger DPS gain. Hell, ignoring everything else just using HL/IV/HT correctly is 2-3% DPS gain.

This is a fallacious argument, because Fury notoriously scales TOO well, while frost notoriously doesn't scale well at all.

In the time it takes to play a Fury Warrior to skill-cap, you've scaled with gear far better then the Frost DK has, you can have two Players, a 2h Frost DK and a Fury Warrior both in perfect 522 item level gear, and the Fury Warrior will always do more DPS even if they play perfectly. Because Fury Scales better with the gear their both have.

Not a great comparison.

However, the fact remains that every damn class in this game is easy to play competently if you're not completely braindead, Frost isn't that large of a delta above others, because I've seen a LOT of really, really bad 2h frost DKs. Just do LFR at any given moment, they're doing 80-90k DPS in 502 item level gear, when I was doing 90-110k in 489 ilevel gear.

Skill-Cap in this game is a over-wrought ideal that really is just a strawman, if you're at-all good at gaming; hitting the skill-cap for any class or spec in PVE isn't rocket surgery.

[Darkfriend]

This is a fallacious argument, because Fury notoriously scales TOO well, while frost notoriously doesn't scale well at all.

In the time it takes to play a Fury Warrior to skill-cap, you've scaled with gear far better then the Frost DK has, you can have two Players, a 2h Frost DK and a Fury Warrior both in perfect 522 item level gear, and the Fury Warrior will always do more DPS even if they play perfectly. Because Fury Scales better with the gear their both have.

Not a great comparison.

However, the fact remains that every damn class in this game is easy to play competently if you're not completely braindead, Frost isn't that large of a delta above others, because I've seen a LOT of really, really bad 2h frost DKs. Just do LFR at any given moment, they're doing 80-90k DPS in 502 item level gear, when I was doing 90-110k in 489 ilevel gear.

Skill-Cap in this game is a over-wrought ideal that really is just a strawman, if you're at-all good at gaming; hitting the skill-cap for any class or spec in PVE isn't rocket surgery.

That is one of the most stupid arguments I've heard, and I've heard a 551 warrior saying capping OH expertise was needed ^.^.

My argument makes NO claims as to class scaling. Hence your counter is to a straw man, and not to mine. My argument is based ONLY on skill. The difference between a competent, but not skill capped Frost 2h DK and that of a competent, but not skill capped warrior is much larger, in favor of the warrior gaining more through skill.

Yes, warriors scale well COMPARED to DKs. They don't scale as well as most cloth casters do this tier, partially due to certain trinkets, fight mechanics, and the like. They do gain the most of any, or most specs with the 600 cloak though.

Thus, I agree Frost scales like shit. Haste fills a few more empty GCDs-Maybe. Crit gets wasted due to KM procs-often. Mastery only buffs some damage, instead of all damage 80%+ of the time like warriors.

But to conflate skill scaling, as it were, and gear scaling, as it is, is simply asinine.

I will concede if they made 2h Frost gain more DPS from requiring a higher level of skill to play that would be the preferable solution to simply changing numbers around.

Personally, I'm still baffled at the ridiculousness of your argument overall though. To reiterate, the reason your argument is stupid is you attack GEAR scaling as well as SKILL scaling, while I talk ONLY ABOUT the difference that exists between two points. That of a decent and a skill capped DK, and that of a decent and a skill capped warrior. One gains much more through perfect play than the other.

[Murdos]

You're the one that compared two classes DPS in a climate where one vastly outscales the other, not me. I was pointing out the 'asinine' aspect of trying to claim that Fury's higher DPS is solely because it has a higher skill cap, which just patently isn't the case.

The vast majority of Fury's DPS is gear oriented, not skill oriented. Thus is the nature of any class who's primary damaging abilites are based on random-chance crit procs. Ask a Fire Mage sometime.

[Darkfriend]

You're the one that compared two classes DPS in a climate where one vastly outscales the other, not me. I was pointing out the 'asinine' aspect of trying to claim that Fury's higher DPS is solely because it has a higher skill cap, which just patently isn't the case.

The vast majority of Fury's DPS is gear oriented, not skill oriented. Thus is the nature of any class who's primary damaging abilites are based on random-chance crit procs. Ask a Fire Mage sometime.

Sigh. I NEVER said that fury>Frost. The fact that it is is IRRELEVANT. GEAR scaling is an issue I don't address, as it is not relevant to the point I am making, hence why your argument was stupid. I said the DIFFERENCE as in the AMOUNT of DPS difference between someone playing decent, and playing amazing as frost and that of someone playing fury decent, and amazing is LARGE. That is to say, playing some specs WELL gains you more DPS than playing other specs well.

The fact that one class also gains more from gear has absolutely no bearing on my point, or it's veracity. It's also the reason I'm ignoring your "fury relies only on gear" implication, as it isn't relevant.

Say they both did equal damage, simply to get that into your head and make it a non-issue. Two players, equal skilled but not amazing, one frost one fury. Two players skill capped. One fury one frost. The DPS difference between the two Frost players will be smaller than that of the two Fury. Thus, skill matters more.

Reading comprehension much?

[Murdos]

Sigh. I NEVER said that fury>Frost. The fact that it is is IRRELEVANT. Scaling is an issue I don't address, as it is not relevant to the point I am making, hence why your argument was stupid. I said the DIFFERENCE as in the AMOUNT of DPS difference between someone playing decent, and playing amazing as frost and that of someone playing fury decent, and amazing is LARGE. That is to say, playing some specs WELL gains you more DPS than playing other specs well.

The fact that one class also gains more from gear has absolutely no bearing on my point, or it's veracity. It's also the reason I'm ignoring your "fury relies only on gear" implication, as it isn't relevant.

Reading comprehension much?

You're trying to Argue that Fury has a higher skillcap then Frost, when Fury's actual rotational fluidity is VASTLY impacted by GEAR, not skill. You literally cannot press enough buttons to be 'good' without gear to support the crit rating for enrage uptime, this deep-sixes your entire arguement. Skill enters the equation LAST for fury, it's all about getting enough unbuffed crit to generate enrage procs with a higher then 50% uptime. There's no skill involved with that, it's a purely mathmatical exercise.

Your ARGUMENT is inherently flawed because you picked a class to compare that has more rotational distribution through gear then the other. Frost 2H has NOTHING that compares to that, because our full rotational abilities are available every so many seconds independent of gear; while Fury like Retribution Paladins and Fire Mages, are ROTATIONALLY DEPENDENT ON GEAR, not SKILL DEPENDENT.

You could be the best fury warrior in the world, but without 25% crit you're going to have a bad time. Unlike 2H frost, where Haste just makes it go faster, Haste does not make Obliterate light up magically on a 50% chance. It just makes it go faster.