Finally decided to try Frost since I got 2 decent one handers, and man my damage feels so fricken low. I tried icecap and BoS, and do relatively better on BoS, but it is still a pain in the butt.
Coming back to BFA i am overwhelmed with Azerite Armor, Essences, and now Corruption too.
Any pointers or direction would be great. I was tried to use the Frost DK guide on WoWhead, but i must be braindead because my DPS feels so stinking low.
I’d say maybe try adding the focusing iris essence for a bit more haste. Faster rune regen therefore faster playstyle
Likewise for corruptions try going for the crit and haste ones.
this is all pvp nerfs
cold heart got nerfed by 65 %
BoS was nerfed by 35%
frostwyrms fury got nerfed by 65%
so all the hard hitting stuff got nerfed too the ground
Frost really benefits from Blood of the enemy major for ice cap build and lucid dreams for BoS. Bicep’s wow head guide is pretty much the go to, but some things you might be missing in your rotation. You want icy citadel. Pretty much stack it and then get frostwelps for ice cap build or whatever Sims the highest for BoS. The big thing about ice cap is that you need to be on the target 100% of the time so mechanics can hinder your dps in some situations whereas BoS does a majority of the damage and your dps loss from doing mechanics is not as noticeable.
With ice cap, it’s very important to line up abilities such as cold heart chains of ice (20 stacks) when icy citadel+pillar of frost+ unholy strength are active. That way you can land a possible solid crit that hits really hard (my highest I’ve seen was over 500k with Blood of the enemy still active on the target).
Pretty much don’t cap runic power hit your KM and rime procs accordingly to what the guide says and you should be fine. Also make sure you are saving runes when going into your next remorseless winter.
You’ve got your runeforges the wrong way around. Make sure to have razorice on your MH and fallen crusader on OH. Only matters in AoE with frostscythe.
In PVP frost got specifically gutted, so I have no advice.
In PVE you need to run these talents Icecap ,Gathering Storm, FrostScythe with these traits 3x frostwelp, 2x Icy Citadel, 1x Frozen Tempest. Then stack as much mastery and crit as possible with Blood of the Enemy Rank 3.
You will never lose AOE DPS races.
I’ve never been out done in AOE damage except by people 20ilvs higher. I’ve beat rogues, locks, and mages 10 ilvs higher. If you really wanna pad distance on the meters stack as much twilight devastation as possible.
In lower keys, sure. In higher keys UH wins hands down.
need a lot of crit for ice cap around 40%
Unholy gets a big talk, but the AOE damage is actually trash because it requires significant setup and is not consistent at all.
The “millions” of DPS Quadratic scaling scenarios are few and far in between, while Frost easily does massive AOE damage every single pull.
There’s no way an Unholy DK will ever out AOE DPS me doing when I’m doing 150k crits on all the mobs every fifteen seconds with welps and icecap. Nevermind remorseless winter’s ramping dot, frostscythes spammable AOE damage, frost fever’s dot, and HB Rime procs. None of which requires any extra planning effort or significant changes to our normal rotation.
You can go sim frost with welps right now for a 10 patchwerk fight I guarantee the damage is significantly higher than Unholy.
its because blizzard is to scared to buff the core rotation for some reason.
they have this huge obsession with making frost fever and auto attacks do large amounts of damage and they also really love putting all of our damage potential into a single ability that can easily be countered or played around (chillstreak)
So i hope youre having fun hitting frost strike for 10k-5k!!!1111
Don’t believe the hype on this thread bud, you’re never going to be an Arms / Fury Warrior, Demon Hunter, Outlaw Rogue, in AoE. It doesn’t matter how many frostwhelps you stack or how many OP RW you have.
DKs are a bit on the low end in actual play, be it mythic raids or mythic+. Some tips I have for you are…
Start with BoS, on lower end gear and learning the rotation, it’s more forgiving, Icecap isn’t hard but it is more punishing than BoS. Haste corruptions with BoS is pretty solid too, but we don’t get as much benefit from it as say, an Arms Warrior or Havoc DH.
If you’re looking for those big, massive, meaty meters, you’re playing with the wrong class. DKs can be near the top, but if you’re in any kind of competent group, other classes are just going to outshine you. My Warrior Sims around 10k more DPS than my DK, Frost or UH, with less gear, it’s just how the game is right now.
But if you stick with it, it is a fun class. Also exclude any big “500k DPS ever pack” Unholy talk, those pulls never happen unless you’re in an incredibly coordinated high tier Mythic group pulling boss to boss.
I’ll agree with you here. Even though I main spec UH, frost AOE is definitely easier to pull off in almost every realistic situation. I’ll log out in my frost gear so you know I’m not just talking out of my a55. Anyway, my two top sources of AOE are frostscythe and chill streak. So yes, if you want EZ AOE damage, frost is the way to go. There is no setup required, and your AOE gets stronger as the fight duration increases. This is due to razorice stacking on every target hit by frostscythe, and Pillar of Frost/Icy Citadel STR buff overlaps if the duration of an AOE fight goes on long enough.
However, I do have to say that a skilled UH player can do equivalent AOE that pulls ahead significantly every 1.1 mins with 3x Magus. My base ST burst with Apoc/Magus every 1.1 mins is 60-70k plus on a single target. With DND down, festering wounds up, Unholy Frenzy feeding me wounds, and Apoc/Magus up along with the stacks of festermight rolling, I significantly outpace Frost as UH. That said, the situation I just described only happens once ever 70ish seconds. Frost has access to their amazing AOE damage and toolkit almost 100% of the time.
On tyrannical weeks in 15+, or on heroic to mythic raid bosses, single target is a wash. I can burst up to 120+k DPS as unholy initially, but over the course of the entire duration of the encounter, both spec seem to normalize around 65-80kish ST (depending on procs and what corruptions I’m wearing) overall as long as the encounter duration is 4-5 mins or longer. Unholy damage is all front-loaded, then levels off and decreases over time. Frost starts a bit slow but actually increases over time if you’re using Icecap.
Bottom line is this:
I’m at 34% crit and it feels too low. I’d go buy some severe, but I’m too obsessed with UH and I’m saving for more expedient.
Others will touch on talents, traits, essences, gear etc.
My advice is get your rotation right. #1 priority on every new character I make. You want to make sure you know HOW to maximize your damage, and executing your rotation properly is how you’ll do this. Otherwise all the gear in the world won’t matter and you risk being one of the many 475 ilvl players who can only put out like 40k instead of double that.
Go to raidbots website (google it) - click “Stat Weights”. Look up your character. Once selected, under the options expander (down the page) select Patchwork, 1 boss, 3 minutes.
Make SURE you select “no buffs” as the point of this exercise is to get your rotation right, and you can then do this by practicing on target dummies without having to buff, flask, heroism every try.
Find the 120 boss target dummy in your BFA city (google it if don’t know).
When it spits out your estimated dps, what I do is not leave the target dummy until I can get within 1-2k of this over the 3min fight. Then I know that i’m doing the rotation mostly correctly.
In your sim, once it’s generated, you can click down the bottom right of the page the “Full HTML report”. This will tell you things such as what % of your damage comes from what abilities. You can then check your damage meter logs on the boss dummy to highlight any basic mistakes to you. If the sim says a certain ability should be 10% of your damage but it’s only 5%, you now know you’re making some mistakes to do with that ability.
There’s also “sample sequence tables” in the repprt, which can help show you maximum dps openers and ability orders (in conjunction with your spec guide).
All of the above should be used after reading, and referring back to, your spec rotation guide on Icy Veins or Wowhead. Most people just read the guides, and then think they know the rotation, and proceed to be terrible. Don’t be them.
Almost nobody puts in the minimal amount of time and brain power to get their rotation correct like this. If you do, you will out dps the vast majority of people at the same ilvl, all for about 1hrs time investment.
Frost just get’s so disrespected in the forum it’s unbelievable.
Everyone is obsessed with the quadratic scaling situations, that they don’t remember Unholy’s aoe is needlessly complicated and starts off with garbage damage.
Regular 10 mob. Frost is better. Raid single target. Frost is significantly better. The only scenario where Unholy is better is massive 25+ mob pulls where the mobs are strong enough to not instadie, but these situations are few and far inbetween. The video with the millions of Unholy DPS was specifically planned out. There was a frost mage to slow mobs, so the tank could kite and wouldn’t insta die. There was a Druid to use Treants so the DK wouldn’t insta die from aggro. This situation will never happen unless specially planned out beforehand by pro players.
Warcraft logs has Frost ranked significantly higher on both Mythic Raiding and Mythic Plus, Raidbots has frost simming higher on both Single Target and AOE. Do numbers, rankings, and tracked performance not matter anymore?
There is literally no advantage to playing Unholy, except for in PVP where Frost got specific pvp damage nerfs.
As I push closer to 40% crit in my frost set, everything really feels better; especially my pillar of frost/icy citadel uptime and overlap.
The only problem I have with Frost is that it’s kinda boring. Being able to push out huge numbers on demand is amazing. There is literally no situation in M+ in which a Frost DK can’t PUMP. Very little ramp up time, massive aoe damage, and it only gets better as more stacks of razorice get spread through frostscythe and PoF/IC overlap for massive str buffs. All that said, using the icecap build there isn’t really a whole lot to do. Sure, I like cruising through M+ doing incredible AOE damage, but I literally have to switch to UH to avoid the mind numbing boredom of playing Frost too much. Unholy is just too much fun, especially with close to 50% haste unbuffed.
Few suggestions. Frost dps scales with secondary corruption enhancements. IE, remove your gushing and TD cause they are setting you back extremely.
Work on Crit and haste % corruption if you’re using Icecap.
I’m pulling 90k+ dps ST and insane numbers AoE.
When my dk and enh were both the same ilvl (458) my enh was 10k dps ahead of my dk, I really don’t think frost has amazing aoe, I was probably running terrible traits, though i did have 3 times frostwhelp. Ive given up on that alt since
Which should you be stacking? I’m kind of a noob to frost and im at 60% mastery cause i heard thats the best stat to stack(also because crit and mastery are crazy easy to get in this expac, haste is annoying af my shaman is at 35% mastery and 25% haste which is my best stat)
You want to stack crit and haste. Even at 40% crit, (for me) crit sims more than 1 dps (per point of crit) higher than both weapon damage and haste. Several points higher than vers or mastery.
I have two filler corruption slots that I’ll replace with “severe” (+12% crit from all sources) when the vendor has it again. I want to get as close to 50% crit as possible.
If you haven’t started already, start farming for the “battlefield tactician” achieve. Blood of the Enemy is incredibly strong for both ST and AoE. Especially if you plan on doing primarily M+, BotE is essential. That said, Worldvein sims higher ST and is going to give you the biggest ST boost in raids where other people are using Worldvein.
I’m finally getting to the point where Frost + Infinite Stars 3 + BotE not only sims higher than Unholy, but also performs better and more consistently than Unholy in raids. I’m really looking forward to trying it out in mythic Nya’lotha next week.
Well it doesn’t help when you get those that play unholy saying that unholy spec is the only real dk spec. Even though Arthas used frost and shadow damage. Some how frost is not a true dk spec.