Runic Empowerment has a 2.0% chance to proc per Runic Power spent (from 1.5%)
Frost Fever’s chance to generate Runic Power increased to 30%
Chance now diminishes on targets beyond the first
Breath of Sindragosa now has double the usual chance to proc Runic Empowerment
Breath of Sindragosa costs 18 Runic Power/sec (from 15)
Developers’ Note: Frost was starved of resources too often, especially when using Breath of Sindragosa. This increases Frosts’s Rune income baseline and includes a further change that returns many extra Runes while using Breath of Sindragosa. Breath builds will now be able to fill more global cooldowns with casts of Obliterate, to make up for the lost Frost Strikes. The cost of Breath itself is increased to keep its overall duration roughly unchanged.
Just when I abandoned Frost over a month ago. I’m actually having fun with Unholy, though I’m curious to see which spec ends up doing better than the other!
New Azerite Essence abilities will be the return of the 60 second Breaths, but you’ll see it move to a 3 minute cooldown as the ability that allows you to prolong the breath is 3 minutes…
It’s like they have no clue on how to make Frost a fluid spec, so they just copy and paste it from Legion…
Don’t get me wrong, I actually liked the BoS spec back in Nighthold. But the dungeon favored the spec and the Tier bonuses flowed so well with it. Not to mention the fact that the Legendarys and the trinket that dropped from Elisande, Convergence of Fates, also favored the spec very well… The perfect storm really for BOS spec…
Now we’re dealing with spring showers for the spec.
Runic Empowerment proc rate is getting buffed, AND BoS Runic per second is getting buffed to proc at twice the usual (now buffed) rate. 3 more Runic cost per second is just a very small counter-balance to these significant buffs. And I say very small because this Runic increase is also increasing the proc chance for RE by 12% just by itself. With these current numbers BoS will have a 72% chance to proc RE per tic, which is 49.5% higher than we have right now. Even though we get one less tic of damage per full bar of Runic, we’ll still net many, many more RE procs on average. We’re getting much more bang for our buck, at least with current numbers.
As someone mentioned, I was thinking at most they would increase our damage but they actually fixed a huge problem in our mechanics. I think it’s going to be quite a huge buff in both rotation and damage wise. A lot more obliterates to fill all that downtime.
Sustained applause to you Blizzard. Now the 8.2 wait begins.
Killing Machine- Your auto attack critical strikes have a chance to make your next Obliterate automatically critically strike.
Procs per minute changed from 4.5 to None
Runic Empowerment- Each Runic Power you spend has a 1.5%2.0% chance to instantly grant you a Rune.
Talents
Breath of Sindragosa- Continuously deal [(52% of Attack power) * ((Attack power + Offhand attack power) * 2 / 3) / Attack power] Frost damage every 1 sec to enemies in a cone in front of you, Deals reduced damage to secondary targets. You will continue breathing until your Runic Power is exhausted. or you cancel the effect.Deals reduced damage to secondary targets.
Has an increased chance to trigger Runic Empowerment.
Cost changed from 0 Runic Power, plus 15 per sec to 0 Runic Power, plus 18 per sec.
Am I reading this right or do I have the wrong information? Killing Machine procs from 4.5 a minute to none?
Where are you reading that it specifically says that the PPM is going from 4.5 to none? Checked on MMO-Champ and they’re just showing that the text saying “Approximately 4.5 procs per minute” is going away - not the actual affect, just the text. It was probably deemed confusing to have it, especially since the proc scales, making that 4.5 misleading once you have any amount of Haste.
That’s from wowhead. Haste/crit should effect the procs drastically if it’s truly triggered EVERY auto attack critical strike, and not just 4.5 crits a minute? I don’t know why they used the word ‘none’ though, weird.
What this usually means is that previously Frost was limited by a maximum number of Proc’s in terms of Killing Machine of 4.5 which actually means you had a chance to Proc 5 per min but generally this averaged out to around 1 - 2 per minute for most players.
The issue with PPM style abilities was that many other melee classes have been changed to not have a proc per minute style of play and only had this style of change on things like trinkets or abilities which has an effective cooldown on them hence automatically becoming a PPM style ability with the cooldown.
DeathKnight’s have been sadly missed along the path with the issues around PPM style abilities as it very much limits the scaling. Why should a frost DK stack Critical Strike for example it will only effectively give them a maximum return of 4.5 PPM for Killing Machine whereas if this limit is removed stacking critical on a Frost DK would potentially see a higher impact on KM procs as you are no longer limited to how many you have in a minute.
So this has two effective bonuses
1 - It removes the limit in terms of scaling when considering secondary stat stacking etc.
2 - It allows talents like Obliteration to seem a lot more attractive in terms of potential. It is potentially possible with some of these changes that Obliteration will actually come out above BoS for Single Target encounters for the Frost DK. It’s something to consider and do some simulations with.
Killing Machine procs were never limited, and that’s not what PPM means, or how it works. The game does not track a time and a proc count, and then prevent you from seeing procs past ‘X’ number within ‘Y’ time.
PPM has always just been a way to convey base proc chance, and normalizing the proc across various weapon speeds for auto-attacks. It’s literally just a formula so that a 2.6 speed and a 3.6 speed weapon can proc something off white hits at the same rate on average. The actual proc chance is still just a percentage on every hit, and the PPM formula is just there to make sure both speeds net the same average at the end of the day. Since the formula is calculated off of base weapon speed, Haste does scale these procs, and since Killing Machine is further based on Critical hits (and presumably the base 5% Crit chance every character has), Crit also scales up the proc by increasing the number of hits which can proc.
Killing Machine having a 4.5 PPM just means that before factoring in extra stats, players should see an average of 4.5 procs per minute. I really don’t know where you got the idea that PPM set an upper limit for procs. And I’m further confused by your assessment that this will somehow affect Obliteration at all. How does the proc rate of Killing Machine change anything about Obliteration triggering it’s own KM procs off of Frost Strike and Howling Blast?