Plus, there is a point at which 2h equals DW KM proc chance but its like 37% more crit chance than what DW has. If you do have it stack like that then it could be way more if someone just stacks a metric ton of crit to push it to crazy levels of 3 stacking KM procs where they could overlap and you miss out on proc stacks which is one of the reasons, if not the reason, that they changed KM to be based off of auto crits in the first place because people were complaining that it would double proc or even triple proc at times and you could lose 1-2 procs in the process. What people didnt understand if that it just didnt matter since you had so many procs.
It sure seems awfully quiet on the alpha forums too. No communication from the devs about anything to do with the class and no changes in what feels like a long time. I do not doubt things are moving along, but the lack of any communication is disconcerting.
The recent alpha post about frost as a whole missing something is bang on. Also that BoS/scythe are what it looks like frost is being built around, despite both of them being talents and neither are ever really chosen for PvP.
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This is my other big issue with frost other than balancing 2h/dw frost. I hate BoS and don’t like anything that can be used as a substitute for obliterate. It’s extremely important to me that something other than those two talents be equal to or better than either one. Blizz has had 2 xpacs to balance BoS and they’ve failed to do so. Icecap can be viable in certain circumstances but those bandaids are going away with the removal of azerite. It’s important that when I go back to raiding on this toon, with a 2h weapon, that BoS isn’t the only optimal build.
It’s time to replace BoS with something that’s a fixed duration and that doesn’t cost resources/sec. An initial resource cost is fine and to be expected. Draining resources over time feels terrible.
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And that is the only pick in PvP. Those whelps are what make it work though. It makes an otherwise super boring damage CD have a positional requirement + up front damage + mastery interaction with the rest of our frost damage.
Hitting pillar of frost without the whelps and triggering a GCD feels awful. Add that to pressing empowered Rune weapon right after for yet another GCD is even worse. They both just feel like empty GCDs that you always press together.
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I second this wholeheartedly
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Agreed. Compared to what’s been happening on the druid feedback forum (I know Feral and Balance were in much worse places than Frost) the lack of communication is still quite jarring. It’d do so much to just have a blue post go up saying “Hey we’re hearing the concerns about 2h and we wanted to ask, do you want it unique or do you not want the spec split”. Even something as simple as that just so we know where their heads are at.
The main thing I can see getting better for Frost pvp is Obliteration. KM’s change and Icecap losing all of it’s borrowed barrow indirectly make it the best possible option from everything we’ve seen. You’ll still be able to rely on things like Chill Streak and Blinding considering neither of those got changed.
Maybe put some more Focus on Frostwyrm somehow? It’s the biggest button we’ve got and is really basic outside of it’s amazing visuals. Carry over the Mastery effect from welps maybe?
At this point, I wholeheartedly believe BoS is the thing Blizz want’s Frost to be. Hypothermic and Hysteria being added tells me nothing but that. I hope it doesn’t end up that way but I don’t know what else to call it.
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Breath was buffed in terms of aoe, it also lost frostwyrm if you take hypo. Don’t go Ravendreth and you also don’t get the 1m+ breath durations since it basically stops the drain of breath for its duration. Kind of like Legion Shadow Priest with its artifact ability but the dk can do other things while mist is active refilling the RP bar.
These are things that people were warning blizz about, not just in terms of the dk, but just overall. One covenant can offer just too much power and it’s a go this or you just suck. Then if something else comes along that would change the build another Covenant might become best, and then when that is over breath might be the best again and it would be a pain working to get back into that covenant.
It’s really a mess and anything introduced to change something throws everything in a spin. It’s why people were saying covenants should just be cosmetic then there is no issue. Too late now though.
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LOL it is not 4 times less killing machines. 2H has maybe 90% the amount of killing machines that DW has.
It procs from auto-attack crits, and DW attacks 277% as often as 2h. At 20% crit, DW gets an AA crit on average every 6.5 seconds, and 2h gets one on average every 18s. I’m not sure whether KM is still PPM or whether it’s a percentage proc on crits now, but either way that favors DW, unless KM is at <3.33 PPM. Anything more than that, and 2h simply doesn’t crit often enough with AAs.
Edit: Maybe it would just be easier to tune if they made KM straight RPPM on auto-attack, rather than AA crits. That would automatically make the proc balanced between the two.
Yeah, the more I think about it, crit procing is really odd. So you want to stack crit to guarantee your rotational ability will proc full crit but with enough crit that ability will already be criting a decent amount? I don’t know why it changed to be like this but it’s weird. It crit boosted crit damage it might make sense but to my knowledge it doesn’t so…
Right now, Blizzard needs to let us know what they’re thinking of doing with 2hs. A lot of speculation has been going on about what Shadowlands could mean for DK’s and one of those possibilities is absolutely meeting Arthas, getting his help, meeting the guy who made Frostmourne, and making another one. So if 2h Frost went live as is, it’d be really unfortunate to see all those DK’s with Frostmourne on their backs getting kicked or benched because “you’re playing 2h Frost. Lol bye”. If they want it to be a more unique playstyle, there are balancing issues. If they want it just next to DW there will be balancing issues. Even if you put it next to DW, couldn’t that just make DW irrelevant?
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If it were a straight guaranteed proc on crit, or if it’s percentage based (I can’t seem to find data on its proc mechanic in BfA. Wowwiki says 4.5 RPPM, but wowpedia has no proc information, and wowwiki is usually the more out-of-date of the two), then having it proc from crits makes it scale with crit, and thus prevents it from unnecessarily depressing the value of crit. However, an easier solution to that would be to add the Chaos Bolt treatment to it, where the damage of a KM Oblit is increased by your critical strike chance. If it’s still RPPM, then having it proc only from crits seems like needless complexity, because it still wouldn’t really “scale” with crit. 4.5 RPPM is an average proc interval of 13.33 seconds. DW auto-attacks on average every 1.3s (2x 2.6 speed weapons), so you’d only need about 10% crit for the RPPM side to be the dominant metering effect anyway.
That all said, personally I don’t really care one way or another when it comes to 2h. I’d like for it to be viable, because I really enjoyed 2h frost in the past, but unless there’s a strong mechanical difference (such as MotFW previously), it’s just whether your strikes come in two hits or one. What I do want to see is BoS finally balanced properly, or revamped away from it’s mini-insanity mechanic. I absolutely loath that mechanic, and BoS’s strength over the last two expansions (and my middling interesting in Unholy) is why I just can’t really get into DK the last few years.
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Actually, it is from the tests performed on alpha. Over a 12 minute period 2h only got 22 procs while DW got 85. It’s just shy of 4 times as many. Not quite 2 procs per minute on average for 2h and just shy of 8 per minute for DW.
Even with how it procced before DW without haste had a 20% chance every 1.3 seconds while 2h had a 30% chance every 3.6 seconds.
PPM gives you a % for however that ability is supposed to proc. So for example if an ability has a ppm of 5 then 1h weapons have around a 22% per auto, and 2h has 29.99% chance per auto. In this case it’s per auto crit. A chance on a chance.
Nearly all “PPM” effects in the game these days are RPPM, purely because of the issue with attack speed. RPPM effects operate independently of weapon speed, provided that the time between “procable attacks” (in this case, AA crits) is less than the average time interval between procs.
The issue is that, if it’s still the old 4.5 RPPM, that’s an average proc interval of 13.33s. To reach an average AA crit interval of 13.33, a 3.6s weapon would require 27% crit chance (note that haste is irrelevant here, since RPPM procs per minute and AA attacks per minute both scale at the same rate with haste). That said, even that’s not good enough, since RPPM caps at 10s for the “time since last procable attack” piece of the equation, which means any interval longer than 10s between AA crits is simply wasted procs.
This is why having it proc off AA crits is just not a workable design with 2-hand frost in the mix.
Those were the good old days where you had awesome talent trees and a limited number points to spent. Even though there were still cookie cutter builds it felt like a far more rewarding system to use from my perspective.
It wasn’t like you were a Blood, Frost or Unholy DK you were just a DK and could specialise down a certain path if you wanted to.
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So it’s ppm, RPPM is reserved for things like trinkets and if you have a RPPM of whatever number it will give you that amount per minute. If it’s 1, it gives you one, so if it’s 4.5 then it should give you 4.5 a minute instead of almost 8.
Again, PPM gives you a proc chance, that doesn’t increase by haste or crit, but increasing crit or haste gives you more chances to roll this %, exactly how it has been working for 11 years. If you get more crit, more autos are able to crit allowing for the roll. If you increase haste as well you have even more attacks that can do this.
These things fall in line with each other from the explanation of the different proc types, to how it functions in game. I don’t even know where someone came up with RPPM for it since RPPM is a set number that the game gives you per minute regardless of what you do.
I’m not sure why you’re convinced it’s PPM. Why’s that?
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If it’s giving you 4.5, it’s RPPM. PPM is a fixed percentage based purely off weapon speed, it has a much higher spread as a result. How would the PPM percentage even work for something that triggers off of AA crits? If it’s, say, 4.5 PPM, what would you expect the proc chance per crit to be? The only way that would even work is if the proc percentage also factored in crit chance, which is basically just a crappy way of re-inventing the wheel for what RPPM does.
For example, let’s used your above 20% for DW and 30% for 2h. Let’s say you have a 20% crit chance. That means the average interval between crits for DW is 1.3 / 0.2 = 6.5s, and for 2h is 3.6 / 0.2 = 18s. With a 20% proc rate for DW, that means our average interval between procs would be 6.5s / 0.2 = 32.5s, or ~1.846 procs per minute. For 2h, it would be 18 / 0.3 = 60s, or 1.0 procs per minute. So much for your 5 PPM.
The only way that would work if if the proc chance per crit was divided by your critical strike chance first, then used as the proc chance. But again, that’s basically just re-inventing RPPM, except in a more brittle and less reliable manner.
Nearly every single effect in the game that’s a proc is now RPPM, and that applies to both trinkets and class abilities. RPPM controls for deviations in the interval between proc chances, and has bad luck protection built in, which is why it is used.
Also, RPPM scales with haste directly. It literally uses Base_RPPM * Haste as your expected procs per minute for the calculations. I doubt crit significantly increases the proc rate of KM, however, unless it’s no longer RPPM and is now a simple flat percentage.
That’s not even slightly how RPPM works. The game isn’t keeping track of how many procs you’ve gotten and handing them out to you to ensure you get that many in a minute. RPPM is a way of computing a percentage chance to proc on each attack based on how long it has been since the last chance to proc occurred (whether that chance actually proced or not). It exists to isolate proc rate from attack rate. It in no way guarantees that you’ll get X procs per minute, “regardless of what you do”. What it does do is maintain the same average proc rate per minute regardless of the average interval between procable events (within certain limits).
Now, KM may not still be RPPM, but if it’s not, it’s going to be a flat percentage proc chance (like Demon Blades and Lucid Dreams minor), not regular PPM.
Edit: Blues confirmed that Killing Machine is 4.5 RPPM as of 8.2: https://www.wowhead.com/news=292226/frost-death-knight-changes-in-8-2-feedback-on-the-spec-so-far
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I think I actually felt that link drop in here, sounded a lot like a mic.
This is actually not a direct blue post. It’s from spelldata where we saw a change in the RPPM that was related to them fixing the proc rate.