Not to long ago I embarked on a journey to swap my dps spec from Blood to Frost and it’s been a fun ride. It has also taken me pretty deep down the rabbit hole into the mechanics of how to dish out the damage properly and learn many of the small intricacies that when added up can make a substantial difference in performance. I still have a great deal to learn but I’d like to share what I have already learned.

If you are interested in turning in your Heart Strike or Scourge Strike for Obliterate, or if you are feeling a little curious what all the hype is about, read on!

I will not be updating the blog post as the guide gets updated, for the most up to date guide please visit The Official 3.3 Frost Thread

I’m going to take information from a few different sources and start compiling an official Frost thread. I am predominantly my guilds main tank, but I’ve gathered some gear and I dps whenever I can. I am not an expert on Frost dps, but I do a decent job of gathering the information around me and displaying it in a readable format.

Audience
It is expected that you are already somewhat familiar with the DK class. Please see Tiki’s Spec Compendium for pros/cons and other general tree info if you are still deciding on what tree to go to. I will assume from here that you have already decided to go Frost and are aware of it’s benefits.

Sources
Elitist Jerks – An excellent Frost guide and where I have acquired a lot of the info for this guide.
Tiki’s Spec Compendium – Where I first got my hands dirty with the dps frost.

Talent Builds
For the most part, the community has concluded that the starting template should be this: (0/52/15)
This leaves 1 glyph and 4 talent points to spend.

With the 4 points left over you have some options for spending them. I simulated dps per talent based on a pretty standard ICC i264 geared toon with GoIT. I can expand the value of the points later.

Subversion
One of the major benefits of this talent is 8% threat reduction per point. From my sims it has produced the 2nd highest dps per point gain behind BCB.

Blood Caked Blade
The highest dps gain per point according to my simulations and many other resources I’ve read. I’d put 3 points here first unless you are experiencing serious threat issues.

Black Ice
My sims show this behind Subversion and BCB. I haven’t seen any recommendations to pick this up over Subversion or BCB, perhaps there is a reason out there somewhere?

Chill of the Grave
This talent actually simmed higher then Subversion and BCB but mileage is going to vary on your raid composition. The rule of thumb is if you are starved for Runic Power, put a point here. If you have to much RP, take a point out. (If you are running GoD build and have the extra FS available, the value of this talent goes up)

1/52/18
This is the spec that I have chosen to go with. I recommend spending at least 1 point in Subversion for threat reduction. 3 points in Blood Caked Blade as the top dps per point option.

Glyphs
Glyph of Obliterate is a must.
Glyph of Frost Strike is another no brainer.

What we are left with is either:
Glyph of Disease or Glyph of Icy Touch.

GoD – The benefit of GoD is an extra GCD for Frost Strike and an Obliterate instead of an Icy Touch, Plague Strike and one blood strike. The downside is if you have a great deal of lag there can be complications keeping the diseases up. The current fix to that is to use both blood runes for pestilence. So pestilence twice in a row. It will make sense when you see it.

GoIT – I have found this glyph to be more forgiving and reliable. On a fight where you have to apply fresh diseases often (target swapping) or where diseases fall off due to fight mechanics (air phases or having to run away from target) this GoIT is a better choice. The downside is it can be more difficult to squeeze all the frost strikes in to spend your RP.

Rotations
Frost is considered by some to be a priority system when used with GoIT, and a rotation system when using GoD and utilizing Rune Grace Period. Killing Machine is where the fun kicks in and what the “priority” revolves around. Here is a community accepted “priority” list for GoIT which is probably the best place to get comfortable as frost:

Single Target
1- Killing Machine + Freezing Fog -> Howling Blast*
2- Killing Machine -> Frost Strike
3- Keep Frost Fever up
4- Keep Blood Plague up
5- Obliterate
6- Blood Srike
7- Frost Strike
8- Rime
9- Horn of Winter

* Debatable, from what I’ve read it’s better to use Killing Machine proc for Howling Blast if Freezing Fog (Rime proc) is available. The reason is a HB crit + non-crit FS is better then a crit FS + non-crit HB. Additionally, FS crit rates are so high that you have a good chance of critting them both if you HB then FS.

So a simplified beginner example of an opening rotation would look like, making sure to use FS whenever a KM proc is available:
IT – PS – OB – BS – BS – FS – Horn
OB – OB – OB – FS – FS

Once the general concept is down, we’ll get into perfecting the system further below. However one thing you’ll want to learn early on is watching Killing Machine and make sure you use it quickly. It is a high priority. We’ll work on setting something on your UI to make sure you don’t miss any Killing Machine procs further below as well.

More advanced priority and rotations further below.

Runeforging
Mainhand: Rune of the Fallen Crusader
Offhand: Razorice

For most situations you want Razorice as your offhand Runeforge. If there is a fight with a lot of adds and single target dps is not as important, you can swap to Cinderglacier.

Advanced Topics and Techniques

Rune Grace Period
Rune Grace Period is something not talked about much and I don’t think I’ve seen it in a guide but it is something that needs to be understood. Typically after a rune is used, it takes 10 seconds to “refresh” the rune and make it available for you to use it again. However, without a “grace period” we would get less dps the slower internet connection we have. The reason is it takes a certain amount of time for your computer to send the command to the server to use the rune. If it takes 500 milliseconds (or .5 seconds) for the server to receive the command, then you are losing .5 seconds on every rune you are trying to use. So it would be 10 seconds for refresh, 500ms (or whatever your latency), 10 second refresh, etc.

No Grace Period
- Uses Rune
- 10 seconds later the rune is ready
- Player mashes rune again, but due to latency it takes .5 seconds for the server to use the rune.
- 10.5 seconds later the rune is available once again.

So as you can see if this is how it worked, we would see network performance play a huge part in players performance, or DPS. So what Blizz has instituted is a “Grace period” of 2.5 seconds. What this means is when the rune becomes available, you have 2.5 seconds to use the rune and the rune will begin refreshing AS IF you had used it as soon as it was available.

With Grace Period
So if we start combat with the grace period and use a rune immediately, the rune should be available at the 10 second mark.

0 – Rune used
10 – Rune available

Then we use it again, but due to the time it takes for the server to receive it, we lose .5 seconds. However, the grace period begins refreshing the rune with only 9.5 seconds until ready instead of 10 to make up for the .5 seconds lost on the network.

0 – Rune used
10 – Rune available
10.5 – Rune used (begins refreshing with 9.5 seconds instead of 10)
20 – Rune available

So the Grace Period compensated for your network delay. The fun part is we are allowed up to 2.5 seconds of this “Grace Period” where we can actually use other abilities and then use the rune and it will still refresh as if it was used immediately. I’ll discuss why this is important in the next section.

Using Rune Grace Period effectively
So hopefully we now understand the rune grace period. Now how it can help improve our dps. For frost spec, it’s primarily used to squeeze in frost strikes. Without knowledge of the grace period we typically burn all our runes, then dump our runic power while all the runes are on cool down but we don’t want to do this!

Instead we want to weave frost strikes in between rune usage. Let’s look at an example where we use our grace period to weave in a frost strike.

0 – Rune used
10 – Rune ready but we’ll Frost strike instead of the rune. Frost Strike has a 1 second global cooldown.
10 – 12.5 is our Grace Period and as long as we use the rune before the 12.5 second mark, it will still be ready at the 20 second mark.
11 – Rune used. Rune begins refreshing with 9 seconds until ready thanks to grace period.
20 – Rune ready

To explain the above, when the rune was ready we use a frost strike instead of our rune but still got the rune back at the same time we would have if we used it right away. How does this add dps? Well when we look at the big picture when all the runes are being used, there is time to weave frost strikes in between obliterates which provides more potential for using the Killing Machine procs because frost strikes will be separated instead of 3 in a row.

Assuming diseases are up and we have both death runes:
0 – OB1
1 – OB2 (ready at 11)
2 – OB3 (ready at 12)
10 – OB1 (ready again at 20)
11 – OB2 Ready! Frost Strike instead
12 – OB2 used (ready at 21) OB3 ready
13 – Frost strike
14 – OB3 (ready at 22)

As you can see, we weaved frost strikes in between the obliterates, and thanks to the grace period all the runes will be ready as if we didn’t frost strike at all! This is why Grace Period knowledge is important and how it will improve your dps. For more questions about the grace period check out this thread: http://deathknight.info/forum/index.php?topic=8341.0

Hit Rating
Thanks to Nerves of Cold Steel we receive an extra 3% hit. This means we only need 5% hit from gear for all of our special attacks and main hand auto swings to hit. We still gain benefit from extra hit rating for our offhand swings. I’ll look into the value of hit after the 5% cap and update the post.

“Rotations” and “Priority Lists”
Glyph of Disease rotation
When used with GoD this comes pretty close to a solid rotation.
Opening Rotation: IT – PS – OB – BS – Pest
Repeating Rotation: (damage part): OB – OB – OB
Repeating Rotation: (refresh part): OB – OB – BS -Pest

Frost strike mileage may very depending on raid composition/spec but the idea is you are using frost strikes in between each OB.

Glyph of Disease Priority
1- Pestilence to keep diseases up
2- Killing Machine + Freezing Fog -> Howling Blast*
3- Killing Machine -> Frost Strike
4- Obliterate
5- Blood Srike
6- Frost Strike
7- Rime
8- Horn of Winter

The difference between this priority and the GoIT priority is pestilence moves to the top.

Talents and stats
Killing Machine and Haste
reposting and cleaning up Akengro’s post at EJ:
Number of procs per minute including haste formula is : PPM = KM_P * (145 + haste % from gear)/100
KM_P is the number of talent points you have in KM.

Scenarios :
1) no haste on gear, 5pts in KM
PPM = 5*145% = 7.25

2) no haste on gear, 4pts in KM
PPM = 4*145% = 5.80

3) 10% haste on gear, 5 pts in KM
PPM = 5*155% = 7.75

4) 10% haste on gear, 4 pts in KM
PPM = 4*155% = 6.20

Tundra Stalker
If you are using Glyph of Disease, you will need to re-apply your first frost fever to get the effect of Tundra Stalker. This is because when you jump into combat and apply your first disease (usually frost fever because you icy touch as you run in) this disease does not benefit from it (because when you apply it there are no diseases). The next time you apply frost fever, it will receive the added benefit of Tundra Stalker and your Frost Fever can then be rolled with the full damage amount. The exception is if there is another DK in your group and they put Frost Fever up before you, then you will not need to refresh but they will. So coordinate with the other DK in the raid for who puts it up first.

I think there is a good amount of anticipation for this patch which will be releasing the new boss Halion into the Ruby Sanctum. It will also be the end of AVR in it’s current form as well as the addition of Battle.net Real ID. There will not be any major changes to the classes however, which I’m sure some were wishing upon a star for. Let’s take a look at what we are getting.

Halion is a Twilight Dragon and will have the same basic abilities we see from the stereotypical “Dragon” bosses: cleave, tail lash and frontal cone spell attack. It’s a 3 phase fight that is going to test raids with a  “don’t stand in fire” awareness check. Halion drops iLevel 258 items in the 10 player normal mode and iLevel 271 in the 25 player normal mode. I think Halion will be a nice booster shot for raiders that have been banging away at ICC since December. Happy hunting!

Battle.net Real ID is Blizzard’s new chat system that allows players to talk cross-realm and cross-game to each other. You will be able to send chat messages (whispers) to friends that you have accepted as well as update your status with a Twitter like feature. You can read more about this feature at Blizzard’s site by clicking on the link above.

AVR

Next we have the end of AVR in it’s current form. I say in it’s current form because there are smart people out there continually thinking of new ways to add modifications to your UI. There is already a mod giving similar radius life features called “HudMap” that you can find on Curse. For some the changes Blizzard has made to disallow drawing in the world will be a bummer, for some it will be met with great cheer.

There are quite a few other small changes like the dungeon vote-kick system, please see Blizzard’s official patch notes for all the details.

-MK

Cataclysm Friends & Family Alpha
The Cataclysm Friends & Family Alpha just started.

Important: The Friends & Family Alpha is restricted to employee’s friends and family, the only way to enter this phase of the alpha is to have a Blizzard employee request a key for you personally. Any mail you receive about a potential Cataclysm beta is a scam.

Love him or hate him, GC took the time to get pretty involved in a discussion about DK’s success and failures throughout WotLK. The discussion was in the tanking forums and titled “3.3.3 Worked (sorta) for DKs” and can be found over at the official forums here.

Among the topics discussed was the population fluctuation of DK’s. First, they were “OP” according to GC, then they were fixed to be more inline with the other classes. This caused a lot of DK’s early on in the expansion, and tapering off later on in the expansion.

As the posters in the thread stated, the 3.3.3 patch was relatively successful for DK tanks, seeing our class used more often in ICC encounters. There is now a DK related blues news thread where we will attempt to consolidate any news relating to our class which should save some time trying to stay current. You can find the thread here.

Not the greatest illustration, I’m not the best at Gimp/Photoshop but this should give a rough idea.

Instead of the 200% example that GC was giving, it’s better to think of the strikes as taking 50% of our rune pool. It’s going to be hard to differentiate between Runic Power used for Frost Strike/Death Coil and the “Rune Power” or “Rune Energy” in the new rune system. Maybe a name will catch on somewhere…

Basically, we will have 3 runes now in theory. We will still actually have 6 runes, but to understand how it works, and to put GC’s description into illustration, it looks like this:

After you use an Obliterate, which used to take 1 UH and 1 FR, it now takes 50% UH and 50% FR. This leaves your Rune “Energy” now at 50%.

Now the UH and FR rune energy is regenerating, much like our old rune system did.

So our “Rune Energy” for Unholy and Frost is now 60%. If we Obliterate again, which takes 50% (of the full pool) we are left with 10%.

To discuss the system in more detail, please follow this link to the forums.

Here is an additional visual aid created by wooshiewoo at mmo-champion forums. This gives an actual breakdown of what we’ll see the runes doing in Cataclysm, according to what was released in the preview.

Blizz released their DK preview for Cataclysm yesterday and there are some pretty interesting changes. It’s still far to early to make any conclusions about the class and reactions have been both good and bad. We already know they are making blood the “tank” tree, but they gave some properties of the frost and unholy trees that will be pretty interesting.

Frost
Melee damage
Melee Haste
Runic Power Generation

Unholy
Melee damage
Melee and spell critical damage
Disease Damage

They also released the plans behind the new rune system. Personally I liked the “always busy” and “tight” rotations of DK’s, but I obviously haven’t tried the new rune system yet so the jury is still out. It should make playability easier and be more forgiving. For players already well skilled in the current rune system, the good news for you is this means on movement fights when you aren’t in range, it will take longer before you are wasting your rune time. So that should be a small cheer.

They also plan to bring back 2h frost which will make some players very excited, I can think of a couple DKi members that are probably doing back flips! So there should be 3 distinctly different playstyles available for dps: 2H Frost, DW Frost, and Unholy. They haven’t mentioned anything about a DW Unholy so we’ll keep an eye out for any hints in the possibility.

They’ve also added 2 new strikes and an “Outbreak” ability. The outbreak ability should help us out a great deal on trash, when stuff dies to quick to put up diseases. It should also help on boss fights where diseases drop off, either due to movement or air phases or however. Our ramp time should be diminished, allowing us to dig right into the damage.

To read the full Blizzard release and discuss the DK future with more members, please head to this post.

Blizz has announced that the three trees will no longer be both dps and tank. Instead, the Blood tree is becoming the tank tree while Frost and Unholy are the dps trees. They will be releasing more details tomorrow so stay tuned.

Read more.

Source

We’re doing our Cataclysm preview on the death knight changes later this week, but we knew one change risked overshadowing all the others, so we figured we’d go ahead and drop the proverbial Blood bomb today.

In Cataclysm, death knights will have a dedicated tanking tree, much like the other three tank classes. That tree will be Blood.

We’ll go into more detail in the upcoming preview, but we wanted to take the opportunity to explain the reasoning for such a big change.

Why the about face? We actually thought the “tri tank” experiment worked out okay. We suspected there would always be a “best” tanking tree, because that’s the way these things shake out, but we hoped it would be close enough that many players could tank with their favorite tree. When we tried out this design for Wrath of the Lich King, we were using it as a test case to see if we wanted to do similar things with the warrior and paladin talent trees.

A lot has happened since that time. We introduced the dual-spec feature, allowing players to have a tanking spec and dps spec that they could switch between. We introduced Dungeon Finder, which makes it easier to find players who want to tank, and even let players level up using a dedicated tank spec. In Cataclysm, we are introducing the concept of passive talent tree bonuses and we think that feature is a lot stronger when the talent tree has a particular focus (such as damage, tanking or healing). For example, it’s safer to give more passive damage to a tanking tree than we can a dps tree. Above all, we were just spending a lot of effort trying to balance three trees (though it was really six trees, since each tree was trying to do two things).

It started to feel unfair to the other tank classes that we had to spend so much effort tweaking three types of DK tanks, and it even started to feel unfair to the DK that we couldn’t focus their tanking experience. One bit of feedback that really struck home was the DK players who said, essentially, “I look at the Protection tree and I’m jealous of all of the cool tools they have to help their tanking. As a DK, I have to pick and choose tanking talents from within a sea of dps talents.” Rather than have a strong focus, the trees felt a little watered down because they were trying to do so much. With Frost as a dual-wield, spell and runic power focused tree, Unholy as a disease and minion focused tree, and Blood as a self-healing, defensive cooldown, tanking tree, we think the focus of each tree is a lot clearer and cooler.

In Cataclysm, Blood will be the death knight version of a Protection tree. It will have passive talent tree bonuses that reflect tanking. It will have tools, such as a Demo Shout equivalent, necessary for tanking. Several of the more fun tanking talents from Frost and Unholy will be moved into Blood. We will be able to revise (or even remove) clunky mechanics like Rune Strike and focus on letting DKs generate threat with their normal Blood tanking rotation.

This is major change, and we understand it will be met with some disappointment from players who really liked the flexibility, those who appreciated the unorthodox talent tree design, or those few of you who really liked Blood dps. Nevertheless, we are convinced that this is the right change for the game.

More exciting death knight news coming up soon in the preview.

According to Blizzard, they will begin releasing information about the classes this week.

“Beginning Wednesday, April 7 we will begin releasing class previews containing an overview of some of the changes currently being planned for each of the 10 World of Warcraft classes. The type of information you can expect from these posts are a list of the new spells from 80-85, the new passive mastery bonuses for all talent trees, a brief outline of some of the talent changes we’re currently planning, and in some cases new low level spells for select classes.”

Death Knights will get a preview of their cataclysm changes on April 8. Stay tooned…err tuned!

(source)

mmo-champion.com reports:

Cataclysm Testing Will Start in April
Many people wonder when will the beta of Cataclysm will start, it’s time to (try to) answer that question!

As far as I know, the Beta is supposed to start in April. At this point it’s not very clear if there will be a Friends & Family Alpha, if there is one it hasn’t been widely advertised internally.

This is probably why Blizzard decided to spoil the Cataclysm Prologue in 3.9 a few weeks ago and waaaay before it’s deployed on live servers. They’re not huge fans of spoilers and the only reason to do it is to make sure people know what’s going on when they eventually play on Beta servers.

From a technical point of view, I guess it also explains why most of the assets for both Patch 3.3.5 and Patch 3.9 have been deployed with Patch 3.3. It’s probably much easier to maintain a Beta and a Live build at the same time when you don’t have to deploy tons of files just because you had to add something on live servers.

Of course, this is a pretty risky news because Beta tests can be postponed if something funny happens but as far as I’m concerned, it should definitely happen in April. If the beta lasts as long as WotLK’s you can expect a release of the expansion in September/October, most likely before the Blizzcon.

And before someone smart posts in comments, I do realize it’s not hard to predict that. We all know that Cataclysm will be released in 2010, we all know how much time a beta test takes and we all know the beta will start in April/May/June. But I’ll just pretend it was an April’s Fool joke if I’m wrong, you can do that in May.

No matter what happens, you will NOT get any beta invitation before it’s officially announced. Anything you receive is a huge scam to steal your account.