Thanks for the input. I'm approaching this from the point of simcraft mostly. My sims of him have him doing roughly 30% more DPS per fight than what he's currently at, so I'm looking mainly for the problem underlying the dichotomy I'm seeing, sims vs. real. I'm not expecting him to be at 95% of sim or anything, I would just like to see him back on a competitive level.
He's been pretty unlucky when it comes to set pieces and one handed weapons thus far, which is why he's not wearing tier gear. If he were to go back to DW, he'd been switching in 2x Ook's hozen slicer. Is LFR Shin'ka with the gem in it still worse off than normal starshatter? He has both, but i believe as of lastnight he's got Shin'ka upgraded 2/2 where the starshatter is 0/2. It seems like an awful waste ... but maybe I'm overvaluing the sha-touched weapon.
For the frost strikes, he says he was waiting for rune power >95 before frost striking if anything else was up but then frost striking if there he had downtime due to rune regen. He's right or course but maybe in practice he's waiting too long to frost strike and it's capping like you say.
As for pillar, I believe he has it macro'd to his ghoul, so sometimes he might forget to get it off.
It makes sense i guess (after talking to him lastnight) that he's overusing howling blast. He was complaining that he's on cooldown quite a bit on the legs and can't obliterate that often. So if he's getting antsy, maybe he's jumping the gun and using howling blast.
One more question, is there a priority addon for frost DK's? Something like
this? Or even a weakauras/power auras package that may help highlight what he should be doing at any given time.
---------- Post added 2013-01-03 at 02:35 PM ----------
Yeah, I didn't notice how low it was until I linked it lastnight. I hope it doesn't come to having him switch back. It shouldn't be that big of a deal to switch from 2hand to DW ...