Frost DK situation.

[Halliax]

Hi guys, first thread here (long time reader).

I didnt want start my participation here with a whiny thread, but every time I check the statistics on warcraftlogs (cant post links) see us, frost dks, more close to the botton in terms of DPS. So, I´m new to World of Warcraft (played a little Wotlk, but only put some effort on this game on January last), I LOVE the DK lore, appearance, playstile, role, everything. My favorite spec is DK Frost DW (cant explain why, just love it), Im currently progressing with my guild in HFC HC (11/13), Im not a great player, but my DPS is on par with my group, and I´m ok with that, but In a short time we will start to raid Mythic, and Im starting to feel questions rising on my mind "should I stick with my favorite spec and hope for the best or change back to Unholly where I can be of more help to my guys?!"
I have 3 parts of my tier set, and we, frost dks, have a good 4 pieces bonus to single target damage, but it dont help a lot in AOE situations (most of fights in HFC), the Archmond trinket (wich I dont have) is useless to us, we suffered a major nerf in the first week of this tier (after sucking for a whole tier), and are starting lagging behind in most of fights, and I only see it getting worse. So, do you guys think I´m overreacting and should stop with this whiny atitude and become a better frost dk/player (always a good answer)? Should I keep some hope of blizzard give us some love(revert nerf? or revisit the Reaper´s Harvest for Frost Spec)? Or become a more practical person and just revert to Unholly (wich I would be fine with, but a little sad)?

Note: As you can infer, english isnt my native language, and I hope you can understand what Im trying to say.

[DingDongKing]

As far as I am aware, Dual Wield would actually be performing better than Unholy on most fights anyway, but the key is to not go with the Archy trinket but get Empty Drinking Horn and Discordant Chorus. Unending Hunger should be a decent option as well, but those two are best in slot.

If you have those, Dual Wield should pull ahead quite comfortably on most single target fights.

[Nisth]

Unholy looks 10x better on warcraft logs because people are starting to get more geared and are cheesing their air numbers with unholy. ST and cleave frost wins

[Deleted]

The chances of Blizzard buffing frost or the class trinket are non existent.

As far as I am aware, Dual Wield would actually be performing better than Unholy on most fights anyway, but the key is to not go with the Archy trinket but get Empty Drinking Horn and Discordant Chorus. Unending Hunger should be a decent option as well, but those two are best in slot.

If you have those, Dual Wield should pull ahead quite comfortably on most single target fights.

Unholy BoS says hello, while dw might be decent ST, BoS is already ahead with the ring and just keeps getting better and better each reset with the ring upgrades, and for AoE you wanna stick to UH NP.

[Raikh]

Unholy looks 10x better on warcraft logs because people are starting to get more geared and are cheesing their air numbers with unholy. ST and cleave frost wins

All that cheesing on iron reaver and Zakuun.

Unholy BoS = frost dw for ST
Unholy BoS + leg ring > Frost dw + leg ring

Unholy benefits mroe form the ring for ST than frost and unholy wins in the sustained AoE department quite comfortably.

Cleave is actually more benefical fro frost, but by know unholy is capable of brute forcing through that as all cleave bosses have either nuke phases were unholy wins or some other gimmick to win.

Unholy was underrated for ST quite a while, people had no MS enchants initially when testing it, BoS was underrated yet again for a while, too, so many didn't use it and sims were using incorrect trinkets for ST sims. End of story is that frost dw wa sovernerfed week one and while its not totally subpar in ST compared to unholy it isn't really better on any fight than unholy once the gear starts rolling in but has quite a few fights atleats for mythic were it falls behind.

[slapz]

Unholy is top spec for all fights. You could argue dw frost for burst AoE on Kormrok and iskar but that is it. When we were progressing on gorefiend our tank was on vacation and i tanked in his place. Our other DK and a combat rogue took care of the souls. This week our tank was back and I got to DPS. Since the soul situation had already been learned by these 2, I was STing. I ran BoS and i made a few mistakes including running out of strength pots after i Prepotted, I screwed up a BoS on the second feast, and garg was bugged and i could not cast it for the last feast. Despite all of those things, I did more dps than any frost dk out of the top 5.

BoS is very strong. It gets stronger every week with the rings getting stronger. There is really no debate about it. You might would go frost for kilrogg to get chains of ice on adds the you grip in but that is about it.

[Saiyendra]

^
I'd imagine Kormrok and especially Iskar are firm Unholy fights. The only fights where Frost might be sort of competitive up to a certain point are Socrethar and Tyrant Velhari but it's starting to lose even on these fights. It also does more effective damage on Council up to this point.

[Khain]

Is there a new cheese to keep BoS up longer. Without the fuel thing the uptime seems really shitty.

[Raikh]

normal ams soaking. You can soak something on all fights. A few situations might be rng dependent but overall it works relatively well.

[Choot]

As far as I am aware, Dual Wield would actually be performing better than Unholy on most fights anyway, but the key is to not go with the Archy trinket but get Empty Drinking Horn and Discordant Chorus. Unending Hunger should be a decent option as well, but those two are best in slot.

If you have those, Dual Wield should pull ahead quite comfortably on most single target fights.

Unending hunger for frost is good?

[DingDongKing]

A friend of mine used it whilst he was getting Empty Drinking Horn and Discordant Chorus. Worked better than Reaper's Harvest. I'm not a big fan of Unholy to be honest, so my personal bias would lean me towards Frost anyway. Though, please do bear in mind that this is all from a spectator's view. I haven't raided this expansion at all. Only been speaking to fellow Frost DKs and the like.

[Deleted]

Never ever equip the classtrinket as frost. Unending hunger is also quite shit, a.k.a BRF trinkets are better, but nowhere near as bad as classtrinket. Unholy is ahead on ST because of Vial/legendary ring & BoS synergy. Most fights people play unholy, with the exception of Socrethar & Tyrant ( Not saying unholy is terrible here..). If you really don't want to play unholy (u're crazy ..) but then frost is absolutely fine on most fights, depending on difficulty and such. Frost dw is viable on everything, and so is unholy unless you're looking for that 1# log

[Halliax]

Thank you, guys. It is as I feared...gonna finish my HC progression as frost (until I complet my 4 pieces of t18 and get a new two-hand), and change to back to unholy. I know frost is still viable, but when we start our Mythic Progression we probably gonna need every one performing in the better possible way.

[eXtOphius]

normal ams soaking. You can soak something on all fights. A few situations might be rng dependent but overall it works relatively well.

Hi Raikh!

I'd like to nominate you for the next DK theorycrafter since Skullflower was poached! Your posts are always informative with solid mechanical knowledge backed up by your logs! It's a pleasure to read them.

Would you care to elaborate more specifically on how you use your Breath of Sindragosa for some Mythic encounters? When exactly you are popping it, what you are looking for during the encounter to AMS soak (timings), etc. No worries if you don't want to, I could always just investigate logs better, but I feel it would be very beneficial for the DK community (as we all swap back to Unholy)!

Cheers!

[Raikh]

Glad to hear that my posts are helpful. Sadly though, I'm not quite the math-guy to theorycraft and number-crunch everything and provide those shiny guides and spreadsheets like skullflower did. Most of the time I test and try stuff ingame and compare that to sim results or depending on the situation also vice versa and work with that. I'm also not super experienced with writing APLs to optimize SimC and stick with standard apls unless something looks totally off. For instance I experimented a bit with BoS apls early HM as sims and reality were quite far apart for me and while I managed to improve it quite a bit, I never optimized it to the point were you would want it to be as a theorycrafter.

So many times I'm closer to an experience report rather than hard proof or mathed out numbers. Its also vastly easier to build upon an already theorycrafted base and try to expand it than to create that base with those means I have at hand but I will gladly continue to share my results with the dk communityas I really like to do those experiments and am very interested in finding the limits of the class.


Concerning BoS. Essentially you want to use BoS as quickly a spossible after pull and then use it on CD. YOu want to delay BoS only for the legendary ring if its used at another point of the fight, encounter mechanics wouldn't allow you play it out effectively or you wouldn't get another breath in and get the chance to sync BoS with garg, so your second pot benefits both CDs. Butcher and Gruul were great exmaples for this. You wnated to use your second BoS after 3 min combined with garg so you could use your second pot with both CDs up resulting in higher output as you wouldn't lose a BoS use.
Its also worth to delay BoS for a second ERW if you don't lose a BoS use due to that.

The standard BoS opener should still be in skullflowers 6.2 guide which can be found on sonofalich now. Ams soakign is very encounter dependent. Generally you want to soak with few rp left so you have less rp overcapping and also more BoS uptime. If you have ERW for your next BoS you have 2 windows where ams soakign would be best. First would be right before you would've have to use ERW and second right before it would expire after using ERW. Those 2 points are probably rather obvious, still pointing it out though as every tick you gain by optimizing ams soaking or rune usage can snowball into you getting a rune back and getting another tick in before it actually expires which is quite valuable.

For some specifics I could take iron reaver mythic. You can presoak with ams at the cannons from HFA and get your ghoul to 4-5 stacks of shadow infusion, if you time it correctly and do it like 30 sec before the pull you will have ams back for the first barrage and you should be able to soak it with ams + ibf before your ERW. For a less risky but also slightly less powerful opener (atleast I think so) just use the rp from the cannons to be able to instantly fire BoS on pull but be careful to not overcap rp after your first 3 runes (1 FeS and 1 SS) as the RP overcapped might lose you a few ticks without getting you anything benefical from it. Try to use PL early for the second opener as PL provdes no RP and empty globals can make BoS expire sooner than you want. You can't ams soak for the first BoS in this scenario but have more pot uptime on it and also more ring uptime if your raid uses it instantly on pull while still providing pretty solid uptime similar to ams soaking in combat.
YOur second BoS on the fight can happen at 2 points. Either isntantly when its off CD as you can fit in a second ring + BoS before reaver flies away but you would most likely need ams to be able to be dragged along in his charge which would avoid the debuff application of his first charge but leaves you with the on from the second. If thats again to risky for you you either have a relatively short BoS or simply wait for after the flgiht phase were you can soak barrage or fire or a pound if you wait a few seconds before using BoS.
Depending on fight time the latter can be more effective if you wouldn't get another BoS in after flight phase when used shortly before because in that case you can simply better wait, ams soak properly and sync it with garg to get more vlaue out of your second pot.

I could write about other bosses, too, but the diea is the same. Use BoS as often as possible but keep it synced with your legendary ring. Look at the expected fight duration and as long as you don't lose a usage you can delay it to either ams soak better or sync with gargoyle for a more impactful second pot. Although sync with the legendary ring has the highest priority of all those factors.

Generally don't try to deviate too much from your standard priority during BoS; meaning spam down SS and only use FeS when you would use it anyway or you are truly overlfowing right now and would overcap runes for more than second or youneed that second of BoS uptime right now to get ams soaking or ERW/arcane torrent in. Only use sudden doom procs when you have an empty gcd anyway or have high RP as it gets you extra BT stacks to feed into BoS. Always use DT during BoS atleast if you wouldn't lose BoS early due to that. Ideally you can mask that with arcane torrent in case you are a belf.

Thats in essence, along with the pooling which I mentioned in other posts and can also be found in the guide as mentioned above, all you need to know. BoS is very variable in value as a CD and for that reason you need to tailor it a bit for you strats and killspeeds, especially concerning ams soaking. Its a practice heavy talent and you're most likely best off when you experiment with it a bit on dummies or even better in raids and get some feeling for it.
One half is the planning so you know when you will use it during the fight and the other half is executing BoS properly to get the value in and I personally simply go through the planning part with the priorities named above (mechanics, ring, other cds, killtime) and adjust during progress on the bos sif necessary and the rest is just pushing the right buttons at the right time which is simply practice which you get while using it.

[Veiled Shadow]

Raikh, this is kind of off-topic, but how much of a difference does being a blood elf make when using BoS? As I recall in another thread you noted that "free" ticks are extremely powerful as they enlarge the window for you to get more runes into it duration, and Arcane Torrent is 1.3 free ticks.

[Raikh]

I'm honestly not really sure right now. Back when simming for HM gear it was a few hundred dps. It can also vary if it actually snowballs into toher runes or not, as otherwise its simply one tick more, which is nice but no huge deal. APLs were also a bit questionable and it was a direct comparison with another race, so it includes the general difference in power maong racials, not only AT.
Being belf is definitekly not mandatory, jsut very practical and I would think it simply feels better than it is.

If I had to guess I would say 1% at max for torrent, let it be 2% for general racials differences as belf is quite strong for dk overall. Also have to consider that orcs for instance offer bloodufry you can sync with it for more flat damage or trolls berserking which gives you more resources as a payoff.

[ghost hardware]

and garg was bugged and i could not cast it for the last feast.

This happens to me EVERY week. Is there a fix for this or what's the deal? It's quite annoying.

[hexify]

Is it still master>multi for dw?

[Deleted]

How to keep BoS synced with legendary ring when on most fights it is instant use?