ELI5: Obliteration rotation

Classes Death Knight
1

I put my DK down pretty much after initially gearing up in DF, kinda kept up on story content and world content in the past year, but haven’t gone into any instanced group content with it because it wasn’t any fun to play Frost (I did world content as Blood). Now I’m trying to pick it back up again, but I’m trying to figure out the priority for my abilities.

Previously I would basically do something like this:

  1. CD’s
  2. Remorseless Winter
  3. Obliterate (try to get a Howling Blast proc right away)
  4. Howling Blast (to apply Frost Fever right away)
  5. Frost Strike to get the buffs from it

Then I would simply continue using Obliterate, Frost Strike and Howling Blast as I could with procs and to prevent capping on runic power or runes, usually comes out to a pretty even mix of using Obliterate and Frost Strike back and forth, and I don’t really worry about Frost Fever falling off because HB procs often enough. So first thing, am I way off there? I’m not trying to min max, I know I could be planning more efficiently, but this is an alt and I’m just doing LFR and M0 at best.

Now I’ve added Chill Streak and Soul Reaper into my repertoire, and I’m curious how I should be using them. Again, not trying to min max, but do want to be effective enough to help my groups. As of now it seems like Chill Streak is only worth using during AoE encounters, is that true? And for Soul Reaper, I slot that into my priority/rotation just behind Remorseless Winter on cooldown, and before Obliterare/Frost Strike/HB (basically use Soul Reaper on CD too, after RW), but only below 35% health.

Again, I’m not trying to be the best Frost DK in the land, but my DPS feels pretty low, so I’m wondering what some easy changes are that I could make in the way I play that would help boost my numbers.

Looking for ST help btw, not AoE

2

you need to set up before pillar, that 12 seconds of obliterate spam should be optimized. my big pull burst order is this:

  1. abom limb (use rime proc for frost fever)
  2. empower rune weap
  3. remorseless winter
  4. chill streak
  5. death and decay /pillar (pillar isnt on gcd)
  6. press oblit if km, rime procs if no km, frost strike if no rime or km (rime procs keep razorice up)
  7. repeat
    If you have enough crit (like 30%+) you can double/triple up km procs during burst pretty often, so make sure ur not wasting them
1 Like
3

for pure single target you dont need to d&d and can save for add phases. also nice to drop before phase changes when boss is still undamageable (it gives haste).
Soul reaper can be worth but it doesn’t hit that much harder than oblit and lessens burst ramp + enduring strength uptime, so i just use abom limb

1 Like
4

So if I have a KM proc during RW I should always use that first, even if it overcaps Runic Power? I usually do prioritize the KM procs over everything (except RW), except in the case where I’m already at max runic power, then I’ll usually dump with 1-2 Frost Strikes before I use Obliterate again.

5

U will always cap runic for max dps prio because this spec was designed by apes

If about to drop 3x talons, FS/Glacial
Remorseless on CD
CS on CD
If 2 KM → Oblit
If 1 KM AND Rime → HB
If 1 KM → Oblit

If no procs, and close to max runes, use Oblit
If no procs and close to max RP, FS/Glacial

Basically just do your best to be as close to not capping runes or RP as you can, but know that it’s not perfect and your rune gen will overpower your RP spending capability because we just get more juice from rune abilities

1 Like
6

Thank you this is very helpful