I’m curious what crit without buzz runes are. These dks running?
I’ve. Gotten the best gear that’s fallen my way and I’m sitting at 20% unbuffed crit.
I get up to 30 35% with buzzes, raid buffs, and trinket activation
One of the things I despise about this choice is, I have to hunt for 1 piece of gear vs 2. With the way Blizzard has designed loot tables, and Itemization, it’s a freaking mess. 2 Handed Frost with the right haste feels more combat impactful than dual wielding. I never liked this goofy idea from the jump. Death Knights swung large weapons, Rune Blades. Two handed axes, Swords and polearms. They were terrifying and contrary to the weird opinions I’ve seen on here about class flavor, DKs were Fast. They weren’t slow juggernauts, probably one of the dumbest narrative impositions pulled out of the void of never happened and implemented into their design philosophy. Peak warriors of their craft wielding death magic. They feel anemic even with two weapons in hand. So I refuse to bend on this, 2 handers almost always if I can help it. The game desperately need more creative scythe weapons.
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Rider does not favor 2h; if anything, it still favors DW more since Breath & Shattering have more RP damage and the choice node above Apocalypse Now is entirely RP based.
And the only flex talent 2h has over DW with Rider is specifically when it’s 2h vs. Shattering DW which lets you get TLW in AoE; the rest of the talents you get are more-or-less equivalent to the Shattering sute. And even then, non-Breath non-Shattering builds sim better than 2h builds.
All the below are done pre-tier bonus using one of your guild members.
ST Rider DW (No Shattering/Breath) - 935k~
https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/wcHbYrqY3xedbtHzhpT46z
ST Rider 2h - 902k~
https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/ioBpcN8Ei7WUZReoYHJqUk
A 3.65%~ spread towards DW
ST DB DW (No Shattering/Breath) - 932k~
https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/ntFgRZJgBh6p3sgSwyVjR2
ST DB 2h - 895k~
https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/r9cJHtEGLuVYk6NPbxXtRF
A 4.13% spread towards DW.
Dungeon Slice Rider DW (No Shattering/Breath) - 1.533mil~
https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/6Ejq2TZEEdcuwPKz4Z5zLy
Dungeon Slice Rider 2h (No Shattering/Breath) - 1.483mil~
https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/8dt3AsPZe5scQScyJFJ9Yi
A 3.37% spread towards DW.
And when there’s more haste and crit, it’ll just slant towards DW more due to IDT and these are also not using the better DW builds. This is literally just the same build for both 2h and DW, which puts DW at a disadvantage, and 2h still has to make up a 3% minimum & 4% maximum spread to be equal to the worst of the 3 DW builds.
I don’t know why you have such a vested interest in pushing this “2h will pull ahead as early as season 2” narrative when there’s nothing to indicate or imply that and everything that says otherwise. DW scales better with secondary stats; getting more KM procs that can’t be used also means getting more IDT procs which are used. The “sleeper Rider 2h build” is Unholy and it’s not really sleeper.
And again, 2h Rider could possibly beat out DW in a sustained 3 target scenario, but this “Rider favors 2h more and lacks synergy with DW” is just straight up false. And 2h “pulling ahead as we get more stats” is also just false, since it was only 1%~ or so ahead (and in most cases equal or behind!) during preseason, when we already had these high-level stats that you keep saying will make 2h better than DW, a Legendary weapon that had 3-6 ilvls on DW, and a tier set that supposedly favored 2h more than DW.
I don’t know if this is some high IQ mean play that you’re doing to say “2h is fine and doesn’t need any help” so that it doesn’t get buffed and people that like 2h get to be 5% or more behind for the entire expansion, but you’re not providing any actual proof other than “trust me” while the actual existing data we have says the opposite.
Ya idk, I trust my boys, they’re parsing pink on bosses you havent seen. I trust them before I trust Acherus randos. And I trust Acherus randos over people who post here. Get somebody like Bicepspump or another dude with extreme levels of class literacy in here backing your point, and sure, maybe you can convince me to change my mind. It’s not like you’re offering anything more substancial than I am, in terms of raw proof. We’re both speculating. The difference is the level of play the sources of the speculation are coming from.
IDK why you bothered simming in current gear, when we’re talking about a hypothetical situation some 6-8 months down the line. I’m very open with admitting that 2h isn’t a competitive spec in current gear.
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No it doesn’t, where does this idea come from?
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The spec is not hard to figure out and Biceps is going unholy.
And no, you are speculating, Van is taking evidence based on the performance now and the performance during pre-patch. If you are right then the better players then you and your buddies must be missing something, or you are just flat out wrong yet again.
2h only really has damage in Obliterate. Everything else is normalized in damage and that damage is better suited for DW when you take into account the native attack speed difference. 1.3 sec attack speed vs 3.6. that is almost a 3-1 difference baseline. IDT, RI stacking for Shattering and so on is in DW favor and that was shown in pre-patch where you went DW for just about anything unless you had the legendary.
If your buddies want to back up their claims then let them because you aren’t doing a good job of it. You aren’t backing anything up and it is still a DW spec after all and that SHOULD be the better option or Frost is just a noob trap.
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Begone troll.
Do you have anything of substance for anyone to read or are you just going to be salty showing everyone you are just wasting your time here?
If you only listen to your buddies or someone who isn’t playing Frost, why are you here other than your dumb little hate campaign?
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Why are there so many hidden posts in this thread? Is it haunted? 
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Talk about derailing a thread lol. Can’t even stay on topic can you
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I mean, it is filled with dead people 
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He is the theorycrafter for Frost DKs, the wowhead guide writer, and the individual that maintains the Simcraft API for Frost DK, explaining that there is already a massive gap between DW & 2h builds and that it’s actually larger than originally thought.
And you’re saying that not only will this gap (5%+) be removed but flip as early as Season 2. You can ask him (there or in Acherus) about whether he thinks that’s probable but I won’t be as I’ve already provided more than enough proof of my claims.
Now is apr 2025. I was drawn to this thread while seeking the answers.
I used Raidbots service to do some sim. I am not ding 80 yet, so dont’ know if the result I got would stay the same.
My result was, holding all other equal, 2H runed with Razorice yields best result (by small margin than the), next is DW with razor MH/Fallen OH. all other options 2H or DW were all lower than these two.
So if DW is ONLY WHEN significantly smoother, then DW is the choice according to the raidbot result.
The difference between the 2 at the moment is largely negligible. You can play 2h and end up easily beating someone playing DW no matter what hero talents you’re both running. I have a crafted 675 2H along with a crafted 675 1H and a 665 1H. In my experience, Hero talents are irrelevant between the 2. DW once in a while eeks out ahead for pure ST, but the second there are other mobs involved, 2H starts taking names. Especially 2H Riders. DW simply cannot keep up with 3 target Obliterate spam since 2H ends up doing like 2x the damage per GCD.
Now Im sure that DW would be slightly ahead for me with an additional 675 1H but the biggest difference I’ve seen between the 2 is that DW is smoother and has more consistent resource generation. It doesn’t need HoW like 2H does.
That being said, I do believe 2H will end up outscaling DW. I’m only 663 and I often hit points where Im full on procs with low runes and a ton of RP while DWing. That doesn’t happen nearly as often when playing 2H so I’m inclined to believe the higher damage per hit of 2H will end up winning out.
To top it off, Unholy is only ever so slightly ahead of Frost in general so if tip top DPS is your goal, grab a 2H and play Frost if you’re high on crit and low on Haste/Mastery. Once you can ditch most of your Crit for Mastery/Haste, you can safely swap to Unholy. 2H lets you just cover more bases that way and the only downside is doing slightly less damage than DW for pure ST. 2h kicks DW to the curb in M+ and Unholy completely dumpsters both of them once you get enough mobs into combat.
You’re perfectly fine no matter what you want to do. All 7 builds we can possibly use for DPS are within a couple % of each other for raid content.
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just an update, my dk has ding-ed lvl80, now I m full honor pvp gears with except two conquest tier set gears. I tested it again.
The number is slightly higher on DW now, around 5% in sims (at their pve ilvl).
Frost Strike and Howling Blast damage figure on tooltips are almost same (DW slightly better). Obliterate tooltip number 2H=220k while DW=150k atm.
So DW dummy beating is slight better but way more smoother to play.
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From my understanding, DW and 2H Oblits are pretty comparable but in my anecdotal experience, DW gets more KM procs which makes the experience much smoother, instead of getting strings where you have no KM procs outside of Pillar/Obliteration windows.
I am not sure if there’s a certain point where one becomes more mandatory than the other especially given Unholy is by far the more popular option when it comes to DPS DKs, as it always seems to be.
Unholy is Blizzard’s baby, and Frost is the corpse rotting in the closet Blizzard is trying to forget about. Pun totally intended.
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