Why I use Glyph of Howling Blast

[Shelly]

This is not me saying GoHB is required, nor is it me saying that GoHB is superior to Glyph of Frost Strike on single-target enemies. This is just why I use it and I hope that it will be of benefit/use/information to other DKs that may find themselves following the same progression path I have.

As a DW Frost, and probably 2h Frost, you have two mandatory glyphs. Glyph of Obliterate and Glyph of Icy Touch, for your third glyph though you can either go with Glyph of Howling Blast or Glyph of Frost Strike. GoFS is the superior glyph for fighting bosses or single targets, however there are reasons you may want to go with GoHB instead.

Here are mine:

Most trash will not live beyond 20s or so, if that. Which means you actually lose dps on a pack of mobs when you do PS->IT->Pes->HB, compared to HB->OB-rime->HB, or even if you have to wait 6s for a HB to come off CD.

Next is if you're responsible for ITT, it's far easier to maintain that buff using free HB to keep up your FF than having to constantly refresh it with IT, as well as it then frees up another Obliterate and makes it easier to keep up your blood plague with a death rune.

Third thing is that a lot of folks say "HB hits like a wet noodle when you don't have your diseases up!" Which is false. It hits for 20% less, yes. However that's not a very big difference in power or overal dps over the life of a fight considering how with GoHB your FF at the very least will never drop off your target - even if all you're using are rime procs.

GoHB provides massive hits right from the get-go. This burst damage gives DW frost a lot of momentum that they can carry into the rest of the fight. It relieves a lot of the ramp-up time since you can just HB->Ob->BS->BS->FS->OB. Moving your heavy hitters faster up the line for quick fights.

It also applies your diseases to multiple ads in a harder hitting fashion than pestilince, which makes a pretty big difference when you are fighting things that have low health.

So if you find yourself in a gearing situation that leads you more into heroics than raids and other situations where the trash dies fast, and you make sure to prioritize HB on large groups of enemies and whenever you get a rime proc having the GoHB provides much better returns.

It also helps promote a more priority based rotation since you aren't as required to constantly reserve two GCDs for IT & PS.

Oh and if you are moving through trash and can get to the next group before the rime proc goes away you can apply FF for free to the entire group.

So that's my feelings on that. Hope it helps some folks.

[Nangz]

I could see how GoHB would be better on mobs where they don't live long enough to get through a theoretically highest dps rotation.

Honestly the ammount of times i've played dw frost are so little that the dps change is not enough. But I do try to stay current as I can.

Basically what i believe you're talking about is theoreticaly improving the rotation which, while is not always a bad thing, could be a problem considering that most death knights I personally know consider DW frost the hardest rotation anyway.

[Praxis]

You forget about Tundra Stalker. HB is losing over a third of its damage without Frost Fever up. I understand the desire to quickly get diseases up and how GoHB helps with that, but in general, if a pack is going to die very quickly, I just IT then Pestilence, rather than applying BP.

Also, I see "HB->Ob->BS->BS->FS->OB," but single-disease Frost is DEAD.

EDIT: Spelling.
EDIT2: The two mandatory glyphs for Frost are OB and FS, not OB and IT.

[Shelly]

You forget about Tundra Stalker. HB is losing over a third of its damage without Frost Fever up. I understand the desire to quickly get diseases up and how GoHB helps with that, but in general, if a pack is going to die very quickly, I just IT then Pestilence, rather than applying BP.

Also, I see "HB->Ob->BS->BS->FS->OB," but single-disease Frost is DEAD.

EDIT: Spelling.

You're right, I did. And yes, that extra 15% damage loss does stink. However it really does even out over the life of a fight since you are again a GCD ahead on your harder hitting abilities. And like I said GoHB makes it far easier to maintain FF on all enemies in the area to keep up your ITT.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by single-disease frost being dead though. At no point did I say you should skip blood plague entirely, also if you have 4pcT9 you better be keeping that plague up.

With the glyph it's obscenely easy to keep up your FF on your enemies, you don't mess up your rune-CDs when you pop UBA since you'll have a free rune to apply PS, and overall it smooths out your prirorities taking a lot of the micro-management out of the rotation. (Yes, I know the micro-management isn't that big a deal, and would be even less of a problem if/when they fix glyph of pest.)

And I guess my point was - for 5s especially, but really any fight with a lot of adds, especially those ones where you don't want to leave your primary target - that GoHB is a very good choice, and most likely a solid tie since you take so much of the edge off.

[KidGosu]

Im not sure i understand the logic behind it being easier to keep iit up with the glyph. How, exactly, does it make it easier?

[Shelly]

Im not sure i understand the logic behind it being easier to keep iit up with the glyph. How, exactly, does it make it easier?

Right now if you use glyphed pest to refresh your diseases on your main target you don't get the improved icy talons buff. Also unless you have 4pc10 then Frost Fever is the important disease. It's the one that's giving you 15% more damage to almost every ability, 20% more damage to others as well. So there will be times where you'll let your blood plague drop off for whatever reason - most likely scrapper-lock on obliterates.

However with HB glyphed you'll typically get at least one rime proc, normally more, which will constantly keep reapplying your FF and ensure that you never lose the haste-buff.

Again, I'm not saying that GoHB is the best one for single-target dps. However I think it's the best one for utility and smoothing out the spec, freeing up GCDs that would otherwise be used in a rather slow ramp-up time.

[Albert the fish]

basically he likes GoHB and is inventing reasons why to use it.

as someone else noted it's FS and Ob not OB and IT that are the core of the frost dps spec.

also if you are messing up your rune cooldowns with UBA than you are simply using UBA wrong, macro Blood Tap in front of it, use it when you have bbffuu, use the other blood for...well whatever is appropriate at the moment. you ONLY fuck yourself over if you use it on DDffuu....or i suppose if you have bbffuu, use the good method, than panic for no reason and forget to blood strike, that might do it too.

let's examine the two method real quick. 20 second fight as proposed by yourself

you would hb first. i would also open; only yours apps FF. ff does no initial dmg so we're even.
you than ob with ts up and ticks all around on everyone, i it. you are ahead in dmg.
you bs, again with TS up and ticks all around. i ps. again favor you
you bs once more(finishing runes), yada yada. i pest. once more favoring you
you fs. i bb. you are still ahead but im quickly gaining ground.bb is making moves on the aoe and doing it's job, also with two diseases ticking on all targets now my disease do double the ground yours do. so i have done 1 tick(equal to 2 ticks of yours) you have done 4 so far. im halfway there.
you fs i ob. now i have the equal of 4 to your 5 diseases and im at dumping point.

ok do you see the trend yet? for the 20second fight you deal x damage on diseases and gain a slight speed advantage but in exchange i lost, let's be generous to you and say a full 3 second. one for each move. that's still 17x2 or 34 seconds worth of dmg. hell lets be MORE generous. 1 second to it, one to ps, one to pest, and a full second before any ticks. 16x2 is still 32 seconds worth of damage in 20 seconds to your 20 seconds worth in 20 seconds. also you dropped ob so my ob's cover more ground. making up most if not all of the lost ground from your minor advantage in being ahead of the rotation. and my ob and bb/bs both hit harder having 2 disease to roll on instead of one. making up the rest, if not surpassing your dmg.



GoHB is dead, in pve. in pvp it might be a different story. i honestly can't tell you in that case


~small edit to put bs in the list of things that hit harder

[Cactrot]

Next is if you're responsible for ITT, it's far easier to maintain that buff using free HB to keep up your FF than having to constantly refresh it with IT, as well as it then frees up another Obliterate and makes it easier to keep up your blood plague with a death rune.

I'm fairly sure that HB doesn't apply IIT. IT does. Just like if you refresh FF with GoD it doesn't refresh the buff. sooo, there goes that point.

[JebJoya]

I realise that this is a DPS thread, but from a tanking perspective when fighting packs (hcs + raids), has the value of GoHB been lost to the same extent as in DPS?

From my perspective, GoHB allows me to do a HB->OB->(Rime'd HB->)BB->BB opener (tabbing around like a mental) to keep threat up on all mobs in that painful initial few seconds. I realise that I'm gimping my single target threat with GoHB, but from my perspective single target threat is not where I have issues - multi target threat is the right royal pain in the arse.

Now, the question I have is simply what are the other options for keeping up initial aggro without GoHB? DnD->IT->PS->Pest has too long a ramp-up time for threat in most situations, HB->BB->IT->PS->Pest (or something like that) still doesn't have as much snap AoE threat as the GoHB alternative (especially with potential Rime procs from OB). Maybe I'm just delusional, but I just can't see what else you could do to keep the aggro in those snap AoE situations? Please also note that I'm very much going to listen to your answers and give them a try - I don't like the fact that I'm using a single disease rotation on packs, and I don't like the fact I'm using a glyph which people laugh at me for using!

Jeb

[Momome]

It's a false gain to be honest. You still need to PS -> Pest to get both diseases up on all targets, so whether you start with IT or HB, that's still 3 GCDs you've used. With your remaining runes you can then HB (which will do more damage due to Tundra Stalker), and BB (which will do more damage because all mobs have diseases on them). That's a higher-dps use of runes that the OP talked about.

If you're using GoD then GoHB is clearly useless, if you're not, then you'll still have to refresh PS leaving you with a floating frost rune with nothing to really spend it on except IT, so you may as well just replace GoHB for GoIT. Honestly I've seen a million people argue that GoHB is worth it but I've yet to be convinced. I just can't envision a scenario where it would be useful at all, not even in heroics with fast-dying trash.

[Albert the fish]

lol you can't quote yourself

to be honest im not sure how i did. i didn't intend to.

cactrot, this is true, however he was arguing using only FF, for at least his first rotation. notice he never posted PS in the rotation.

Jeb, you really shouldn't be having critical issues in aoe that would justify gohb. while it's slightly more attractive to tanks than it is to dps due to initial pull threat from ff your opening hb should give you plentiful time to apply ff and bp and spread it around and bb the whole mass, following up with a rimed hb when first avail. it will be tight, but only in a relative sense.

also keep in mind that in true snap, omg wtf we're gonna die get the aggro NOWNOWNOW type situations, you can always ERW,DnD,HB(if off cooldown)BB. that should be enough to take all aggro squarely onto you. that is however an emergency maneuver ERW. if dps is regularly ripping threat on aoe packs than you arn't geared enough for those dps or they are poor dps.

basic initial frost pull should be hb-dnd-bb. or hb-it-ps-pest-bb-ob. either one works well. if you have issues with the snap than hb-dnd-bb is better. i think, key word, that overall hb-it-ps-pest-bb-ob would provide more threat longterm especially since you can just hb-dnd-bb the second round with diseases ticking and ts up. but im too lazy to do the math.

tl,dr= tanking still doesn't want it, change your priority system.

[JebJoya]

Jeb, you really shouldn't be having critical issues in aoe that would justify gohb. while it's slightly more attractive to tanks than it is to dps due to initial pull threat from ff your opening hb should give you plentiful time to apply ff and bp and spread it around and bb the whole mass, following up with a rimed hb when first avail. it will be tight, but only in a relative sense.

also keep in mind that in true snap, omg wtf we're gonna die get the aggro NOWNOWNOW type situations, you can always ERW,DnD,HB(if off cooldown)BB. that should be enough to take all aggro squarely onto you. that is however an emergency maneuver ERW. if dps is regularly ripping threat on aoe packs than you arn't geared enough for those dps or they are poor dps.

basic initial frost pull should be hb-dnd-bb. or hb-it-ps-pest-bb-ob. either one works well. if you have issues with the snap than hb-dnd-bb is better. i think, key word, that overall hb-it-ps-pest-bb-ob would provide more threat longterm especially since you can just hb-dnd-bb the second round with diseases ticking and ts up. but im too lazy to do the math.

tl,dr= tanking still doesn't want it, change your priority system.

Cheers for the info, I'll give it a go swapping out my glyphs and see what happens tonight. I guess the only question I've got left is whether GoIT is really as big a threat boost as is made out. The reason I word that as so is that I can't help but feel that by making the change to the "correct" glyph (at least, correct from a total damage/threat done perspective), I'm going to make my own tanking harder... I dunno, I'll give GoIT a concerted effort over the weekend (at work atm), and we'll see how I feel about it then - I'll post my feelings here on Sunday or something

Again, cheers for the help Albert

Jeb

[Mordockk]

They talked about fixing GoD so it refreshes IIT.

"Most trash will not live beyond 20s or so, if that. Which means you actually lose dps on a pack of mobs when you do PS->IT->Pes->HB, compared to HB->OB-rime->HB, or even if you have to wait 6s for a HB to come off CD."
You shuoldn't care much about trash pulls lasting 20secs....id still rather apply my diseases and pestlience with a better chance of having a killing machine proc THEN casting howling blast. Dk's do double dmg on crit strikes with spells...hellooo

"Next is if you're responsible for ITT, it's far easier to maintain that buff using free HB to keep up your FF than having to constantly refresh it with IT, as well as it then frees up another Obliterate and makes it easier to keep up your blood plague with a death rune. "
So now we're tlakin about longer fights....seems like you want your rotation to be based on RNG with rime procs. Even if it procs 'most of the time', the times it wont proc hurt....especially frosts intricate rotation/piority system, it just furhter complicates it.
you're still basing this all on the fact the you're not going to be applying blood plague...single disease frost is just far inferior.

"So if you find yourself in a gearing situation that leads you more into heroics than raids and other situations where the trash dies fast, and you make sure to prioritize HB on large groups of enemies and whenever you get a rime proc having the GoHB provides much better returns. "
- so if this that this and that then GoHB is much better. so fill your bags with tons of glyphs for 5% of your gameplay to swap in and out and flex your epeen on short trash pulls.

[Gerian]

So the OP's reasoning for using GoHB is trash dps...I don't recall trash ever being a problem for frost even without HB glyphed. :

[Shelly]

First of all, Cac, it's FF that applies the Icy Talons debuff, not Icy Touch. http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=50887 So each time you reapply FF it's supposed to refresh Icy Talons.

basically he likes GoHB and is inventing reasons why to use it.

as someone else noted it's FS and Ob not OB and IT that are the core of the frost dps spec.

I never said it wasn't. However we're dealing with a priority rotation here. As such anything that shows up "free" is often a better thing to hit than using resources. Of course we're rather lucky in that a Rime proc lasts long enough that we can use it after blowing all our other runes and dumping RP with FS. Although I'd still prioritize it ahead of hitting Obliterate when it procs since it then clears the air for another proc.

also if you are messing up your rune cooldowns with UBA than you are simply using UBA wrong, macro Blood Tap in front of it, use it when you have bbffuu, use the other blood for...well whatever is appropriate at the moment. you ONLY fuck yourself over if you use it on DDffuu....or i suppose if you have bbffuu, use the good method, than panic for no reason and forget to blood strike, that might do it too.

No issues here with such, however I know that it's an issue for many people. I am making an assumption that some of these other people might benefit from using the GoHB to free up their rotation a bit and not require as many specific rune CDs.

let's examine the two method real quick. 20 second fight as proposed by yourself

you would hb first. i would also open; only yours apps FF. ff does no initial dmg so we're even.
you than ob with ts up and ticks all around on everyone, i it. you are ahead in dmg.
you bs, again with TS up and ticks all around. i ps. again favor you
you bs once more(finishing runes), yada yada. i pest. once more favoring you
you fs. i bb. you are still ahead but im quickly gaining ground.bb is making moves on the aoe and doing it's job, also with two diseases ticking on all targets now my disease do double the ground yours do. so i have done 1 tick(equal to 2 ticks of yours) you have done 4 so far. im halfway there.
you fs i ob. now i have the equal of 4 to your 5 diseases and im at dumping point.

Are you using 4pcT9? If so then and only then is Blood Plague equal to Frost Fever. Otherwise your FF does at least 20% more damage because you'll have it glyphed. I know it would still be unequal over the life of a long fight, since it's not twice the damage done, however over the short 20s fight you've got as our testing area applying FF ahead of time and getting an extra 15% damage with all abilities for at least one GCD before you pops ahead.

Also I can increase my AoE damage ahead of yours pretty quickly by just BBing twice rather than BS.

ok do you see the trend yet? for the 20second fight you deal x damage on diseases and gain a slight speed advantage but in exchange i lost, let's be generous to you and say a full 3 second. one for each move. that's still 17x2 or 34 seconds worth of dmg. hell lets be MORE generous. 1 second to it, one to ps, one to pest, and a full second before any ticks. 16x2 is still 32 seconds worth of damage in 20 seconds to your 20 seconds worth in 20 seconds. also you dropped ob so my ob's cover more ground. making up most if not all of the lost ground from your minor advantage in being ahead of the rotation. and my ob and bb/bs both hit harder having 2 disease to roll on instead of one. making up the rest, if not surpassing your dmg.

I'm aware that eventually having used PS and Pest you can, and should pull away. My point is for most AoE fights it's not needed and on single target fights you'll have BP up anyway but that if you are responsible for IIT then keeping BP up is pretty far down on your list of concerns.

GoHB is dead, in pve. in pvp it might be a different story. i honestly can't tell you in that case


~small edit to put bs in the list of things that hit harder

It's not really dead at all. Sorry, just appeals to a different and more lax playstyle, which is what I feel was the intention.

My point is that the GoHB is an incredibly useful tool and that you are not gimping your dps by a considerable (over 500k) margin if you chose it over GoFS.

Gerian, thanks for the smiley with the rolling eyes, much appreciated. And no, my point is that on short fights it shines, on long fights it adds an extra level of convenience to the rotation and that choosing to use the GoHB won't gimp your dps.

[Albert the fish]

problem is, it only shines on fights that are so short they are inconsequential. yes in a fight that lasts less than i full 'rotation' GoHB will outshine another glyph. but are you really REALLY going to glyph for those fights? even most trash will last a little longer




however you are very correct in that it's FF that procs IcyTalons. in fact GoD is going to be using that to fix it's lack of Icy Talons buff soon(woot i guess)


yes i agree, prioritize rime procs over OB, it's free. even in single target i'd place it beforehand. the faster you use rime the faster another can proc. especially good on AoE. that really was neither here nor there in the debate but im glad we see eye to eye there.

as for GoHB helping people that simply can't pull off the frost playstyle. sure that's valid, i wasn't aware that this debate centered around GoHB as a choice based around ease of use, we started off as it simply being a reasonable choice. i concur here as well, if you suck at keeping the frost playstyle up,which is fair...ish, it is the most difficult of the 3 dps specs, than GoHB is worthy of mention.

and yes i know that FF ticks more due to talents and such, im oversimplifying for ease of understanding. it's called hyperbole. i apologize if i hadn't made that clear. my point still stands though, over the course of the majority of trash fights it won't outshine the other glyphs. and in the case of boss fights it's 100% worthless.

also you brought up a good point by BB instead of BS, you missed however the aprt of the post where i mentioned that all my BS/BB and OB will hit harder since they will take from 2 disease instead of 1, also my OB will hit harder due to glyph. so yeah you can HB>bb>bb>ob and make a quick move
if i REALLY REALLY want to dps as much as humanly possible in 10 seconds than i can DnD>hb>bb>erw>bb>bb>hb>ob>dump

i honestly think you are underestimating your role here. you are buffing the raid yes, but in a good priority system you don't even have to think about keeping Icy Talons up, it does it by itself. you should not have to lower your own dps to sustain the ability. again with the idea that for ubershort aoe fights you can use my alt rotation or just not care. if you are downing them in under 10seconds than really does it seem like something that is important enough to glyph specifically for?

as for the last statement i can agree that it's a reasonable glyph for a certain lazy playstyle. i would however disagree that it's worth advocating, more of offhand mentioning "do this this this and this,,oh yeah if you arn't good at the frost style yet or just dont wanna pay attn GoHB helps"

true enough you won't gimp your dps in an aoe fight by replacing FS with HB, but come on, you know as well as i do that your overall dps is going down. especially on bosses where it counts most

alright now counter my arguments, this is keeping me entertained :P

[Gerian]

Gerian, thanks for the smiley with the rolling eyes, much appreciated. And no, my point is that on short fights it shines, on long fights it adds an extra level of convenience to the rotation and that choosing to use the GoHB won't gimp your dps.

You keep hammering on this "short fight" subject as if it is of great enough importance to sacrifice a Major Glyph to make a trivial encounter more trivial. On longer AoE fights the "extra level of convenience" is merely an excuse to not be spreading diseases with tab-pest, which you should be doing anyways.

[dyce09]

As a DW Frost, and probably 2h Frost, you have two mandatory glyphs. Glyph of Obliterate and Glyph of Icy Touch, for your third glyph though you can either go with Glyph of Howling Blast or Glyph of Frost Strike. GoFS is the superior glyph for fighting bosses or single targets, however there are reasons you may want to go with GoHB instead.

Here are mine:

Most trash will not live beyond 20s or so, if that. Which means you actually lose dps on a pack of mobs when you do PS->IT->Pes->HB, compared to HB->OB-rime->HB, or even if you have to wait 6s for a HB to come off CD.

So what you're saying is that you would rather glyph for trash encounters than boss encounters? I hope you're not in my guild!

[Shelly]

problem is, it only shines on fights that are so short they are inconsequential. yes in a fight that lasts less than i full 'rotation' GoHB will outshine another glyph. but are you really REALLY going to glyph for those fights? even most trash will last a little longer

however you are very correct in that it's FF that procs IcyTalons. in fact GoD is going to be using that to fix it's lack of Icy Talons buff soon(woot i guess)

Yeah, but unless it was made a minor glyph most folks will still be split between GoFS and GoHB.

And again, I'm not saying that GoFS won't outshine GoHB. I'm saying that by choosing to use GoHB over GoFS you aren't gimping yourself and that it's a viable choice. Now if I really gave a damn about all of this I'd have a stack of glyphs ready to go and I'd swap glyphs depending on the fight, now maybe you're that hard-core but I honestly don't give a damn, especially when I'm still way up there on the meters and able to follow an easier rotation that allows me to prioritize my harder hitting abilities (obliterate and HB) while maintaining the one disease that absolutely must be maintained for frost (FF) without having to constantly weave IT into my rotation as well as PS.

yes i agree, prioritize rime procs over OB, it's free. even in single target i'd place it beforehand. the faster you use rime the faster another can proc. especially good on AoE. that really was neither here nor there in the debate but im glad we see eye to eye there.

as for GoHB helping people that simply can't pull off the frost playstyle. sure that's valid, i wasn't aware that this debate centered around GoHB as a choice based around ease of use, we started off as it simply being a reasonable choice. i concur here as well, if you suck at keeping the frost playstyle up,which is fair...ish, it is the most difficult of the 3 dps specs, than GoHB is worthy of mention.

Honestly it's not that difficult. It's only at the start of large multi-add fights that it gains a gigantic amount of complexity, since you have to do your IT, PS and pest. However on fights with adds that have a lot of movement (anub burrowing phase) or where you may target adds outside of your normal range I still feel that GoHB is going to be superior since it promotes the use of your hardest hitting ability that you can use at range or against enemies that you may not want to get too close to. As well as adds that can do high damage but have generally low health (Gunship.)

and yes i know that FF ticks more due to talents and such, im oversimplifying for ease of understanding. it's called hyperbole.

Don't use hyperbole. It just makes things a thousand times worse.

i apologize if i hadn't made that clear. my point still stands though, over the course of the majority of trash fights it won't outshine the other glyphs. and in the case of boss fights it's 100% worthless.

Again, a difference of opinion. Boss fights it lets you maintain FF using an easier rotation, as well as many boss fights include multiple adds that hit hard but have little health in places where a pest is either unable to be used (as they may have so little health that it dies before you can pest after applying FF & BP) or because they show up in an area where you cannot reach them with a pest from your primary target.

also you brought up a good point by BB instead of BS, you missed however the aprt of the post where i mentioned that all my BS/BB and OB will hit harder since they will take from 2 disease instead of 1, also my OB will hit harder due to glyph. so yeah you can HB>bb>bb>ob and make a quick move
if i REALLY REALLY want to dps as much as humanly possible in 10 seconds than i can DnD>hb>bb>erw>bb>bb>hb>ob>dump

You forgot to do it from PS>IT>Pest>DnD>et>al. Although I'd probably throw in a blood tap there after Pest so you could throw on UBA. Speaking of UBA, 20% strength! Woot!

i honestly think you are underestimating your role here. you are buffing the raid yes, but in a good priority system you don't even have to think about keeping Icy Talons up, it does it by itself. you should not have to lower your own dps to sustain the ability. again with the idea that for ubershort aoe fights you can use my alt rotation or just not care. if you are downing them in under 10seconds than really does it seem like something that is important enough to glyph specifically for?

Actually it's a standard rotation system where you won't have to worry about keeping FF/IIT up. Since there will be a time in your standard rotation that you block out specifically for the refresh of FF. And yes, actually I would say having the glyph for them works great since it immediately provides everyone with the haste bonus that makes everything go down faster. If your tank is a warrior they can crank out more cleaves, if your group is mostly melee you get a ton more attacks, if your tank is a DK that's a pile of runestrikes. I'd say the faster trash dies the more sense it makes to have GoHB, if for no other reason than to maintain IIT.

as for the last statement i can agree that it's a reasonable glyph for a certain lazy playstyle. i would however disagree that it's worth advocating, more of offhand mentioning "do this this this and this,,oh yeah if you arn't good at the frost style yet or just dont wanna pay attn GoHB helps"

Ha ha ha. Thanks for playing the lazy card, and it's probably not an inappropriate card to play, however I prefer to think of it as reprioritizing your rotation to be less IT dependent.

true enough you won't gimp your dps in an aoe fight by replacing FS with HB, but come on, you know as well as i do that your overall dps is going down. especially on bosses where it counts most

alright now counter my arguments, this is keeping me entertained :P

Indeed I do. But the argument isn't whether your dps will go down or up on a boss. The argument is whether or not it's a valid choice or gimping choice. And GoHB is perfectly valid, especially if you break your 4pcT9 and so have less of a drive to maintain BP.

What I'm apparently failing to convey is that for your third glyph choice as DW frost you have to pick between dps and convenience/utility. However the dps gain is not so much that it's a slam dunk when compared to the utility gain that GoHB gives to your rotation.

And I'm enjoying the conversation as well.

@Dyce, if I am I'm 3rd on Overall dps in most encounters, beating out at least one DK with Bryntroll. Only two ahead of me consistently are a rogue and a mage and that's right where they belong.

@Gerian, you're right. I keep bringing up short fights, but I bring them up because the faster you can kill something the easier the fight becomes. As well as there are boss fights where the additional up-front damage favors HB and the adds themselves are placed in such a manner that pest, even with the extra range when glyphed, isn't an option.

[Albert the fish]

ok, let me convince you firstly of why GoHB is a major gimp in dmg for boss fights.
we'll work on the rest later

my rotation in a single target would be
IT>PS>OB>BT/UBA>BS>dump

HB>PS>UBA>BS>BS>dump
this is yours, right?

i assuming you'd do that on the basis of HB taking preference for you, the second disease needing to be up, UBA would consume that hanging frost rune without a need for bt, and the 2 remaining blood runes would be blood strike to convert them

this is the most efficient rotation i can think of using HB in place of IT as your FF generator.

ok down to the nitty gritty. since we both apply diseases to the single target at the same time, there is no extra uptime on FF for you, so we can simply take away like factors and we're left with

IT+Ob+BT for me
BS+HB for you

IT on average does more dmg than even a diseases BS so my favor
Ob on average does more dmg than a HB to a single target, not a huge amount but it does, again in my favor.

also i mentioned BT. i do this for a reason that im coming to
in my first rotation i gen up 75 runicpower without aid of gear, this is just talent work.
you gen up 60. not a lot but we're getting to why that's important

second rotation we both do
ob>ob>ob>dump

we both gen up 60 for this rotation
that means at the end of the "full rotation" IE:the entire moveset before it has to begin again, you gen a total of 120, i gen 135. the generation is split so i get full usage of mine, which is nice. let's throw HoW in, we all are going to use it. the totals are now 130 vs 145
with 130 rp over a 2 dump periods you can FS twice since you swapped out the glyph of FS
with 145 rp over a 2 dump period i can FS 4 times since mine is cheaper.

i have produced more dmg over the first half of the rotation by OB>HB and IT>BS. the only thing you gained was UBA buff one cooldown ahead of me
over the entire rotation i also gained a full extra FS

so you mean to say that the UBA for one cooldown>(OB+IT)-(HB+BS)+FS is NOT a major gimp to dps?