Is Unholy strictly superior in dps numbers to Frost?

[Raikh]

Frost was plain garbage in ToT. Blizz didn't forsee festerblight and it was an insaely strong dps spec until they nerfed it a while later. Frost 2h was beyond redemption and dw was the worst melee spec in ToT, with melee generally being the weaker half during that tier.

Only very few frost dks even managed to do reasonable damage compared to unholy and that mostly happened on famr when it didn't matter anymore at all and unholy was nerfed significantly. Ji-kun was a brilliant fight for unholy, since you could snapshot dots with the buff + feather and have an insanely strong dot for the entire fight and while elss frequent unholy also had more burst than frost.
I don't see what advatages frost had on primordius, unholy could bring more damage overall and Hb cleave wasn't a thing for that fight. Megaera also, snapshotting wasn't as strong there but still decent enough, maybe frost was viable there but from an optimization pov a dk would better be benched than having a froist dk for that fight because frost was weak.
Iron qon is also not favoring frost, you could get snapshotted dots on Qon on hc when he switched mounts, you had pretty strong cleave with snappedshot dots in the last phase and also more burst to nuke the important parts of the fight.

Overall, even when frost was better than unholy for some time it was all around at best middle of the pack. T14 was a tier where frost was reasonably strong but you could see plenty of fall off with 5.1 when they introduced item upgrades and was trashed with ToT as frost was carried by the strong t14 set bonuses until that point.
ToT was one of the weakest tiers frost ever had, if ever entered heroic.

In SoO frost was better than unholy for a short amount of time until they buffed unholy and even then, there dks playing unholy during progression amogn the world first racing guilds, only fight were frost really could call out unholy was blackfuse on belt duty, because pets bugged and frost had more frequent on demand burst, if you weren't on duty unholy would again better.

Unholy also won fights like Lei-Shen and Garrosh per default because of stronger execute and the ability to backload damage by exntending dots for a massive amount fo time to be able to fully nuke a boss in the lats phase, which were limited by time like lei-shen p3 and garrosh p4. Frost had a slight advanatge on the garrosh transmissions but not very strong either, so if you really had problems frost might've helped your raid there but for the rest unholy was clearly better.

HFC was the first time that frost looked decent since quite a while and they butchered it entirely instead of minor adjustments that were needed to bring in line for the world first race, since with gear it wouldn't have needed a nerf at all.
110 might give us a new chance, but if that chance isn't visible right now on beta I wouldn't get my hopes up. I personally haven't really played beta, so I can't really judge that.

[Darktbs]

High Dps or not i just don't find Unholy to be fun to play.The only moment i feel im doing something is when all my undeads are up.

[Hellborne87]

Being a Frost DK is like being a Cleveland sports fan up until this year. They were known as, "The Endlessly Battered City". No championships for over 50 years in any sport and a complete laughingstock in all sports. Just a punchline. That's Frost DKs. The Endlessly Battered WoW Spec.

[RuneDK]

1h frost was the best DK spec by a lot on H(mythic)Garrosh first off, was better for atleast half the fights. And in ToT it was mandatory on primordious, it's was better on ji-kun, maggera, iron quon... I dunno where you guys were for this. But when it was relevant and people were progressing many of the top players would switch to frost for multiple fights. this isn't WoTLK were never gonna top meters every fight. But saying frost hasn't been viable since wrath is a lie or you have no idea how to play it

It was absolutely far from great in Siege. Both Frost and Unholy were the two worst specs in the game by a decent amount before getting a "tuning knob" adjusted in January. I can't even take you seriously anymore. I think the person who has no idea is you. Unholy was clear and away the better spec for every fight in Throne. Frost was in the absolute dumpster.

@Raikh regardless of if Festerblight was foreseen or not, the only reason why unholy was even shining in ToT was due to an RPPM bug with unholy presence. It never got significant buffs just a lot of QoL improvements for that patch but went from a mediocre spec to a top spec if you had a feather from Ji-kun.

[Hellborne87]

It was absolutely far from great in Siege. Both Frost and Unholy were the two worst specs in the game by a decent amount before getting a "tuning knob" adjusted in January. I can't even take you seriously anymore. I think the person who has no idea is you. Unholy was clear and away the better spec for every fight in Throne. Frost was in the absolute dumpster.

@Raikh regardless of if Festerblight was foreseen or not, the only reason why unholy was even shining in ToT was due to an RPPM bug with unholy presence. It never got significant buffs just a lot of QoL improvements for that patch but went from a mediocre spec to a top spec if you had a feather from Ji-kun.

^^^ ALL of this. Saying that Frost was great (or anything other than trash) is just wrong and I'm pretty convinced that you weren't even playing the game or a DK if you think Frost was good in SoO. I lived this shit, having to play Unholy against my will all these tiers. Trust me, if Frost was great or even decent, I would have been all over it. Ignore this fool, RuneDK, he's clueless and probably trolling.

[Dracovian]

Just to clarify my main question, even if I don't have the legendary ring and my trinkets are D Chorus / Unending Hunger I should go UH?

And also, how can it be that Blizz allows this to happen? Don't they have internal testing to forsee how a spec will play out in future raids and adjust accordingly? I truly do not enjoy UH at all.

[Deleted]

I think everyone should calm down until we are well into Legion raiding, it is very hard at the moment to identify problems without having our artifacts. Saying that I play Unholy 90% of the time and have yet to even try Frost this entire expansion never mind pre patch so I can't comment too much.

uhmm what? we already did all the bosses on mythic/heroic on beta, UH was clearly superior.

[Baddok21]

uhmm what? we already did all the bosses on mythic/heroic on beta, UH was clearly superior.

Mechanically its more suited to handle raid encounters, and numerically it does stronger DPS with its abilities

[Deleted]

My magical mystical bunions have another prediction...

Within the next 10 days arcane mage mana costs will be massively reduced.

Dark arbiter will be nerfed into the ground.

After legion hits neither change will be undone.

[Deleted]

My magical mystical bunions have another prediction...

Within the next 10 days arcane mage mana costs will be massively reduced.

Dark arbiter will be nerfed into the ground.

After legion hits neither change will be undone.

Dark arbiter is already lot weaker then first version, if they nerf even more it might end up being weaker then gargoyle eventualy

[Deleted]

I'm not saying it deserves a nerf. Just that a lot of people see its burst in dungeons and assume its massively op rather than balanced for lv110.

Not tried many HFC m with it but we don't seem massively op, just up there with fire and mm and weirly spriests. Very roughly of course.

[Deleted]

Frost was plain garbage in ToT. Blizz didn't forsee festerblight and it was an insaely strong dps spec until they nerfed it a while later. Frost 2h was beyond redemption and dw was the worst melee spec in ToT, with melee generally being the weaker half during that tier.

Only very few frost dks even managed to do reasonable damage compared to unholy and that mostly happened on famr when it didn't matter anymore at all and unholy was nerfed significantly. Ji-kun was a brilliant fight for unholy, since you could snapshot dots with the buff + feather and have an insanely strong dot for the entire fight and while elss frequent unholy also had more burst than frost.
I don't see what advatages frost had on primordius, unholy could bring more damage overall and Hb cleave wasn't a thing for that fight. Megaera also, snapshotting wasn't as strong there but still decent enough, maybe frost was viable there but from an optimization pov a dk would better be benched than having a froist dk for that fight because frost was weak.
Iron qon is also not favoring frost, you could get snapshotted dots on Qon on hc when he switched mounts, you had pretty strong cleave with snappedshot dots in the last phase and also more burst to nuke the important parts of the fight.

Overall, even when frost was better than unholy for some time it was all around at best middle of the pack. T14 was a tier where frost was reasonably strong but you could see plenty of fall off with 5.1 when they introduced item upgrades and was trashed with ToT as frost was carried by the strong t14 set bonuses until that point.
ToT was one of the weakest tiers frost ever had, if ever entered heroic.

In SoO frost was better than unholy for a short amount of time until they buffed unholy and even then, there dks playing unholy during progression amogn the world first racing guilds, only fight were frost really could call out unholy was blackfuse on belt duty, because pets bugged and frost had more frequent on demand burst, if you weren't on duty unholy would again better.

Unholy also won fights like Lei-Shen and Garrosh per default because of stronger execute and the ability to backload damage by exntending dots for a massive amount fo time to be able to fully nuke a boss in the lats phase, which were limited by time like lei-shen p3 and garrosh p4. Frost had a slight advanatge on the garrosh transmissions but not very strong either, so if you really had problems frost might've helped your raid there but for the rest unholy was clearly better.

HFC was the first time that frost looked decent since quite a while and they butchered it entirely instead of minor adjustments that were needed to bring in line for the world first race, since with gear it wouldn't have needed a nerf at all.
110 might give us a new chance, but if that chance isn't visible right now on beta I wouldn't get my hopes up. I personally haven't really played beta, so I can't really judge that.

Frost wasn't that far off Unholy in ToT after they nerfed Diseases, I had R1 as Frost on 25hc Lei Shen even missing gear upgrades due to coming back from a break, beating all the Unholy DKs. I do find it interesting that because a spec is like 1% behind after certain points people think the other spec is the be all, end all though.

[Acidbaron]

The damage your pet takes from Corpse Shield can't be reduced by DR's afaik.

Sludge has bile shield according to some who recommend macroing it the 90% transfer is effected by the 50/60% bile shield.

[Wolfman31]

I always say play what you like because if you don't like a spec, you're not necessarily going to be as good at it regardless of the spec's theoretical DPS. I've noticed a direct correlation between performance and how positive you feel at the time. A happy camper playing his favorite spec is more likely to perform better than the salty lump on the log who feels forced to play a spec they don't like just to compete. But that's just my opinion. Your mileage may vary. Some people perform better when they're pissed off and have an axe to grind. Emotions are intriguing beasts.

In terms of raw output, right now Unholy is superior in every way, both ST and AoE, but as others have said, much of that depends on your gear. For example, I don't have the ring, trinkets, set bonuses, etc on my DK so I've found Frost to be roughly even on single targets with my gear level, which is currently 705. For AoE though, there's no question. Unholy is better and I think that will continue to be the case in Legion as it seems Blizz designed the spec around that particular niche. Even in burst AoE situations where Howling Blast once ruled the roost, Unholy now has things like Epidemic and DnD+Clawing Shadows that trumps Howling Blast. I can see Frost becoming the ST spec once the dust settles after the Legion launch though.

[RuneDK]

^^^ ALL of this. Saying that Frost was great (or anything other than trash) is just wrong and I'm pretty convinced that you weren't even playing the game or a DK if you think Frost was good in SoO. I lived this shit, having to play Unholy against my will all these tiers. Trust me, if Frost was great or even decent, I would have been all over it. Ignore this fool, RuneDK, he's clueless and probably trolling.

He probably got throttled by a frost dk and was like frost is OP...Anyone who got throttled by a frost DK in ToT, Siege, BRF and HFC is just an overall terrible player. This is of course in top end raiding.

- - - Updated - - -

Frost wasn't that far off Unholy in ToT after they nerfed Diseases, I had R1 as Frost on 25hc Lei Shen even missing gear upgrades due to coming back from a break, beating all the Unholy DKs. I do find it interesting that because a spec is like 1% behind after certain points people think the other spec is the be all, end all though.

Then the unholy DK's you were playing with were shit. The only nerf to diseases that happened was they couldn't benefit from rogues tricks of the trade ability. Festerblight was far and away better than frost on every fight if the DKs you were playing with weren't terrible.

[Deleted]

He probably got throttled by a frost dk and was like frost is OP...Anyone who got throttled by a frost DK in ToT, Siege, BRF and HFC is just an overall terrible player. This is of course in top end raiding.

- - - Updated - - -

Then the unholy DK's you were playing with were shit. The only nerf to diseases that happened was they couldn't benefit from rogues tricks of the trade ability. Festerblight was far and away better than frost on every fight if the DKs you were playing with weren't terrible.

u wot mate? I said ALL the other Unholy dks. You're practically calling every other Unholy DK that had ever done that fight prior to SoO being released shit by your logic.

http://i.imgur.com/jx9Duis.png - I'm sure you can find an archived page of the Unholy ranks, I really cba digging through old WoL ranks to argue with some pleb on mmoc that hasn't even done any end game content whilst its relevant. In fact, I remember you saying Frost wasn't good after the buffs it got mid way through T11, shows when you haven't even fucking done any of the content, rofl.

[Hellborne87]

Unholy was by far better than Frost in ToT via Festerblight. There is no debate. If you think Frost could touch Festerblight with snapshotted dots, you plain and simple didn't raid ToT, or at least heroic content.

[CausalXXLinkXx]

Unholy will do more on high aoe burst fights. On 2-3 target cleave frost will destroy it.

[RuneDK]

u wot mate? I said ALL the other Unholy dks. You're practically calling every other Unholy DK that had ever done that fight prior to SoO being released shit by your logic.

http://i.imgur.com/jx9Duis.png - I'm sure you can find an archived page of the Unholy ranks, I really cba digging through old WoL ranks to argue with some pleb on mmoc that hasn't even done any end game content whilst its relevant. In fact, I remember you saying Frost wasn't good after the buffs it got mid way through T11, shows when you haven't even fucking done any of the content, rofl.

Never said that so you're confusing me with someone else, especially considering I thought frost was fine with the qol changes and buffs in 4.1. But in glad you felt the need to stroke your own ego like killing internet dragons makes you some worshipped celebrity. Newsflash nobody will remember you for killing Internet dragons. Anyways, I recall Nedda getting a Rank 1 parse(is it really too hard to type out Rank?) on numerous fights and was last by a long shot.

[Djuntas]

Any got some WA strings for frost?