Icy Talons - Over/Under-rated?Follow

Well erm, there are a few points to think about:
1: icy talons is more effective than Windfury totem, but unlike windfury it requires 9 points to be spend
2: the improved icy talons talent also gives YOU an alltime buff of 5% haste on top of whatever haste your gonna get raidbuffed

DPS point of view:
So? is 11% haste (6 difference from windfury and 5 from talent) worth 9 point...
To start off, 3 points are needed in frost dps/tank build anyway, the points in Improved icy touch.
That makes it 6 points for 11% haste... Take a look at the following builds:
WITH icy talons: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=jfcMcZGhxzIxdMhRVosxbG
Without icy talons: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=jfcMcZG0xthxdRhRVosxbG

The difference is avoidance at the cost of haste, for any frost death knight build to dps this goes.
What u get is 30 extra max Rune power and 9% more armor from items.
At the cost of 11% haste.. or 25% if there is no shaman

I can see a few occasions where this is gonna be better, but tbh with the ammount of haste you have while raiding, you should hardly ever NOT have time to RP dump before you hit 100 as frost dps, so the 30 rp is neglectable. the 9% armor makes a difference of a few % damage absorbtion, it CAN save you but not worth the points.

Tank point of view:
Tank build WITHOUT icy talons: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=jbtMcZGxxzhed0hRVosx0g (you could swap the 3% crit for Acclimation in frost)
Tank build WITH icy talons: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=jbxMZGxxthIdohRVosx0g

When taking, your taking the avoidance talents anyway, so you are looking at change on dps talents here, what you should note is that the cost of the icy talons talents i roughly:
1 AP for every 180 armor (which should be like 20k+ as DK in frost presence? so 100+ AP)
3% crit
20% chance on crit of melee swing to get your next frost move to crit

All that at the cost of 11% haste (yeye, 25 with shammy :P)
As you can see, on DPS specs its somewhat a shot at preference, while in tanking builds its either haste or pure damage output.
What is gonna give you more threat in the end is prolly no icy talons build, but i cant say this for sure since i respecced before tanking serious heroics.


EDIT:
Forget to answer your question directly:

Well, you cant place these points just wherever, your gonna be forced to put them in low tier frost, to bridge the lack of points you have to get to the higher tiers, so its not like you can significantly increase your damage per hit if you pass out on the haste

Edited, Dec 26th 2008 9:20pm by Chamassa

Its not an official source, but the link also has a stat calculation you might want to take a look at. It has some clever thinking u might want to see:
http://www.wowhead.com/?forums&topic=56434

In my experience, ive been seeing less enh shammies and less shammies in general to drop WF totem.
in a 10 man its not as big of a deal, but in 25 man with multiple DKs and rogues (and even ret pallies/wars) there is a pretty significant dps increase (which you know is there because melee dps will be on top of the charts over mages).

That's more of an objective answer, I don't have numbers, but in 10 mans its really iffy whether its useful.

TLDR: My general opinion, blood's abomination might > frost's icy talons for most things, but if you are speccing frost imp. icy talons isn't that bad of an investment in a raiding environment, and if you have multiple DKs its better to have one of each spec for more buffs rather than have multiple unholy or blood DKs

Guess I was thinking something like this IF (and it's still an "if") Toughness factors favorably into Bladed Armor. Still have a few points to put down, but that's the basic idea. The last 4 could go to off-tanking stuff or PvP goodies, flavor to taste.

But as I noted, it almost entire depends on Toughness and Bladed Armor. But you convinced me about the shaman thing. Very good point, IF (again, another "if") I really want to help the casters.... and if you knew the casters in my raid you might not be so quick to suggest helping them with anything =)

Actually, anything that increase your armor by a % (Talents, Presence, etc) doesn't increase Bladed Armor, last I heard anyway.

If it increase it by a fixed amount (Scroll, Devotion Aura, Mark of the Wild, etc), then yes it does.

i'm not positive about bladed armor, but if you pop into frost presence, wait for the next bladed armor pulse (up to 30s), you will get more AP due to higher armor.