Unholy Sucks Right NowFollow

Hold on, are you actually trying it in beta or just looking at the tree?

Because, yeah, you're only supposed to get 6 extra seconds. I haven't gone back to dk on the latest build to try it.

essentially, yeah. its like the current SS glyph, or the Rip glyph if you're familiar with kitty druid.

Save the trees!

I am feral but I like my trees

Frost is both in an okay place and really awkward. It's hard to really talk about it because there's a randomness due to the random depleted rune refresh. For example, if it gives you a Frost rune, then you will use an Obliterate and a Festering Strike that cycle. If it gives you an Unholy, you'll replenish your Blood Plague. Blood, you BS.

And your normal rotation means you can refresh FF without having to actually stop (You get a Death Rune in the normal rotation that you can use on either HB or IT). Your BSs give you a death rune, which won't give you any more Oblits or Festering Strikes, since they both cost 2 runes (and you only get 3 on a normal refresh). If you are lucky, you'll get just enough Unholy rune procs that you end up never having to actually stop to reapply diseases.

But the randomness to it is still worrisome.

Plus, you get the random rune as a chance proc off of Frost Strike. Your haste increases rune refresh times, which means you'll be using fewer FSs as time goes on, only really prioritizing them so as to get a random rune or use a KM proc. Since BS does more and leads to a HB or IT, you actually want to use it.

So it is hard to imagine where the class is headed once we get better gear.

It works fine, atm, but I'm not a fan. It doesn't feel like live Frost to me at all, though, regardless of the fact that it retains the priority system.

So, a sample frost rotation:

Place diseases, blood strike, Oblit and blood strike. You use Frost strike and don't get a rune back. You use Obliterate and Howling Blast. You FS twice and get one rune back, and you lucked into a Frost rune. You obliterate and Festering Strike, then FS some more. You get an Unholy rune, which you use to refresh Plague Strike. FF is going to fall soon, so you Oblit and Blood Strike, frost strike, then Oblit and Icy Touch. And on it goes.

I think the priority system is something like this, though I'm sure there are specifics that TCing will figure out (I'm not bothering to place KM procs atm, for example).

No diseases? Place them.
Frost and Unholy rune? Obliterate.
Frost and Blood rune? Festering Strike.
Blood rune? Blood Strike.
Unholy rune? Plague Strike.
Frost rune and FF <5 seconds? Icy Touch.
Frost rune? Howling Blast.
No runes? Frost Strike.

That looks about right to me. DW and 2-handed don't really seem to play differently, but DW might have the edge since the 2-handed talent sucks. Atm, it and mastery seems WORTHLESS to me, since we are swimming in RP--we don't need more. They either need to change the mastery or reduce the amount of RP granted by abilities. But FSing less means we get fewer random runes, which means a less interesting spec. So I'm hoping they just let us keep the high-RP model and just let RP be the dump it has always been (and still is). I rather see them change the Frost mastery and the 2-handed talent.

Obliterate will be the highest % of damaging abilities, followed by FS. After that is either Festering Strike, which hits hard but we use it less, or Blood Strike. After that is IT or HB, with PS+BP last.

As for AoE, it's a really sucky system right now, imo. Place diseases, spread them (for 50% damage /sadface), HB, DnD, BB, FS, HB, BB and sit on an Unholy rune. I don't really understand what we are supposed to do with it.

No, but using it has a 45% chance of replenishing a random fully depleted rune (meaning, the rune that hasn't even started refreshing yet). It's still just an RP dump.

ugh looks like I may have to play unholy. If there's THAT much randomness on frost, I will probably do AMAZING about 1 fight a night, then do below average the rest of the night. Pretty lame.

I just don't like such a large portion of your DpS being random. Because, even on a long fight, it won't necessarily even out.

Why? Because even assuming you get even numbers of each rune returned, the placement of the free Unholy runes is highly relevant.

For example, say you always get your Unholy runes 15-25 seconds apart. Well, in that scenario, you'll never need to stop to put up BP. And each rune will have gotten a large return from PS+BP. But if you get an Unholy rune and then another in close proximity, you'll end up with the damage of three plague strikes, Blood plague, Icy Touch/HB and minus the damage of an obliterate (because you'll need to reapply the diseases and the second PS isn't going to stack it).

That's a pretty significant drop in damage returned. I think I would much rather prefer something else.

Personally, if they really like the random thing, I'd do this:

Make Death Rune abilities.
Cause the random refresh to turn a random non-D rune into one (but not take it off CD).
When it refreshes, 10- seconds later, it will come up as a Death Rune.

You can then use it as any rune or as the currency for a death rune attack. Ideally, the death rune strikes would be stronger than some abilities and weaker than others, so your specific order of rune refreshes would be important in telling you what to do.

It has the same random feel but takes off some of the risk of the RNG. This way, you could use the rune to keep diseases up, to help make an Oblit you weren't expecting to get or to use a special attack that's better than a PS/IT (minus the diseases). And since it replaces a random rune, you might end up with nothing, which should balance it out. For example, say it replaces an Unholy rune with a Death Rune. Well, assuming you don't need to put up Blood Plague, you'll still just use that for an Obliterate. But say it replaces a Blood rune? Well, you might use that to replenish a Disease or use a stronger strike.

Cinderglacier > Razorice for 5-mans, which is the topic here, you know that.

From what I understand, it's only going to be 10 RP (which makes way more sense), but it isn't working right now.

And you shouldn't be really thinking about hit ratings yet, since Blizz has been pretty blunt that they haven't given them much attention, since endgame and its gear are still being worked on.