Originally Posted by
chronomasakari
I believe the current DW frost spec is 3/51/17 for not IIT spec'd builds, which is the best for personal DPS, which does not include UA, or BA.
the only way to spec into BA and UA requires you to do something like a 10/51/10 build, where you forgo getting Necrosis and BCB entirely, I'm not sure whether the 400 AP from bladed armor (assuming around 14-15k armor) is enough to make up for the Necrosis and BCB, even though they are small amounts of your damage it's still typically somewhere between a 5-10% increase of your dps, and I frankly can't see 400 AP amounting to that much, especially if you consider the fact that Necrosis and BCB scale better with buffs because it's not a straight attack power increase. I haven't done number crunching on it, but the fact that the current DW Frost EJ builds don't include BA or UA, I assume they have, and unfortunately I'll believe them over anyone here.
If you spec into IIT, I believe you do go BCB, and your build is something like 53/18 and you forgo getting subversion. Obviously a big personal DPS loss at a lower crit rating on obliterate, but you do get IIT.
I'm not a huge fan of getting IIT for two reasons, one is the buff is easily provided for with an enhance shammy, I suppose you could grab it if your guild doesn't raid with one, however if you want raid utility there's more to be found in another spec. That brings me to the secodn reason why I don't like grabbing IIT, if you want raid utility, nothing beats the 13% damage debuff from unholy. DW Unholy is currently an acceptable build, and unlike IIT it's a debuff only unholy DKs can provide. Heroics and pugs, the IIT will hardly matter because you can never tell for sure if it's useful, for progression content your guild will more then likely be better off with with the the ebon plaguebringer anyway.
For UA, the 10% strength for 20 seconds isn't a huge buff because you end up losing an obliterate out of your rotation. For 20 seconds, a 300 AP increase doesn't seem like it'll make up for the loss of an obliterate which is probably a loss off 125 DPS assuming your obliterate hits for 7500. 7500 is an arbitrary number I made up based on my experience in my frost build, that's the average between my norm obliterates and crit obliterates, since my obliterate had a 50% crit chance saying that it's a 125DPS loss on average is about accurate for my old build and gear.