Update: Frost DPS live

[kelindel1]

Let me first start off by saying, I still haven't optimized my priority system yet, I'm still working it out, but the new integrated power aura's is helping a lot. And I'm finding this to be working out really really well so far. I've seen a large dps increase of at least 1k dps for a boss fight (between 1 and 2) It's a little hard to -accurately-

Comments

[knightofravens]

I've yet to do much more than respec and re-glyph Ulrikka, but I have a feeling 4.0 is going to have quite a learning curve for me. I'm used to tanking as Frost and DPSing as Blood, so to have those swapped around on me at the whims of Blizzard is going to take a great deal of getting used to. My own tentative frost spec is somewhat different - I've been using a two-handed weapon up until now and don't plan to change that until Cataclysm's one-handed Strength-based DPS weapons are available and/or dual-wielding proves itself superior to two-handed weapon use.

I'm also going to miss the talent or glyph that allowed Pestilence to refresh the duration of diseases on the primary target, and the change to Pestilence (reduction of the damage done by diseases spread by Pestilence by 50%) sounds like it will make the relatively low-maintenance AoE threat generation I've become used to a thing of the past. I know this is intentional on Blizzard's part, but again - it's going to take some getting used to, and it's going to keep me out of PuGs until I'm satisfied that the era of "AoE DPS everything and bitch out the tank if you die," is well and truly over.

[kelindel1]

I started off the same way and I'm -still- sad that blood is now only tanky spec because I loved blood dps. And I can see what you mean about the two hander thing, I just have two 25 man one-handed swords and even though they are agility, the damage output on them is amazing and I've seen an increase as I said.

And yeah the AOE threat thing is going to be an issue I think, -but- even with that, blood presence now increases threat by 200% where it used to only do it for 125%. So that is a -huge- increase and even with the diseases doing less damage, I think you are doing a net more threat. I don't know -quite- how this will play out, need to try tanking still, but I think it looks promising.

[knightofravens]

One of the reasons I haven't really dual-wielding on Ulrikka is that the only remotely current raid I've taken her into is Onyxia-10 and I'm not especially comfortable with either of her gear sets; I just haven't had the time to pick up one-handed weapons that match her (recently acquired) iLevel 232 two-hander. It wasn't a priority for me because every bit of advice I could find on the subject of two-handed tanking vs. dual-wield tanking said "in general, dual-wielding loses too much threat due to lower weapon damage to make it competitive," but if that's not currently the case, I'll definitely look into it again.

The increased threat in blood presence should definitely help, but it's more the ease of maintenance and consistency that I'm now worried about. Previously, I could maintain AoE threat once my diseases were applied simply by hitting Pestilence once every ten seconds, on just about any target in the pull, and with the extended duration on those diseases that a talent in the Unholy tree provided (I don't know yet what the prevailing wisdom is on including that in a tanking build in the new scheme of things) I had a little bit of leeway on that, as well as regular Howling Blasts to give me an extra burst of threat on the whole pack. Now... I can see myself maintaining equal or greater threat to that, but having to work quite a bit harder and smarter to do so. I guess what I miss is the ease with which consistent AoE threat could be maintained before; I don't trust most PuG DPS to have figured this out just yet, especially with their tendency to write off any underperforming DK, particularly a tank, as simply a bad player rather than putting any thought into what goes into building and holding threat as a DK tank. I appreciate that getting away from easy AoE threat is one of the design goals of the Cataclysm class changes, but it's going to be a nightmare to try and tank for groups that have become so used to that easy AoE threat allowing them DPS almost mindlessly, until enough time has passed, enough experience has been gained, and enough parties have wiped for the population to have figured that out.

[knightofravens]

...And just to be clear, that's not all I was doing to maintain threat; it was just a convenient baseline of one frost and one unholy rune to apply the diseases, and then one blood rune every ten seconds in order to keep them rolling, a nice low-budget use of runes that left me able to use Death & Decay, Blood Boil, and Howling Blast as the situation (rune and ability cooldowns) permitted.

And maybe it's just the fact that I'm using Frost to DPS rather thank tank now, but have they increased the base damage of Howling Blast, Frost Strike, and (rather significantly) Obliterate?

Still not happy that Howling Blast has been removed from the pool of abilities that Killing Machine lends an auto-crit to, but 10K Obliterate crits aren't a bad compensation.