Master simple is dead, and here's why

[Storm 426]

To preface this, my dps set was 582 ilvl at the start of the night last night, everything has mastery on it, gems were all either pure mastery or haste/mastery orange gems. My stats were roughly 105% mastery, 40% haste, I want to say around 35% crit, and roughly 2000 attack power.

 

I'm going to be basing my math off my Sha of Pride log from last night .

 

Average Hits

Frost Strike = 13704

Howling Blast hit = 6969

Obliterate MH+OH = 7365

Plague Strike MH+OH = 1563

Blood Plague = 307dps (average hit is 926 and it hits every 3 secs)

 

The master simple rotation is basically to spam howling blast, and use plague strike when all you have left is unholy runes. This is a huge dps loss and here's why.

 

1 obliterate hits for basically about the same dps as 1 howling blast. on some logs, like this one, Obliterate hits harder, on other fights like Iron Jugg my howling blast was hitting slightly harder. So we'll call them even. if we ignore the unholy rune for just a minute, for 1 frost rune howling blast is equal to obliterate.

 

"But Storm, obliterate takes 2 runes not one" I'm getting to that next. 

 

In the master simple rotation you would use your unholy runes on Plague Strike. plague strike in this log was hitting for 1563. So if we compare Howling Blast + Plague Strike vs. Obliterate we're looking at 8532 dmg vs 7365. So 2 runes in 2GCD's gets you 8532 dmg, vs. 2 runes in 1 gcd gets you 7365. But it's what we can do in that next GCD that's going to prove to you master frost is dead. Rime has a 45% chance of proc'ing off obliterate. I'm not sure if it was buffed, or it's always been that way and I just didn't notice because obliterate just recently became more valuable for DW, but if 45% of the time you get a free howling blast after obliterate, then we can assume that the open GCD after obliterate is worth 45% of a howling blast.

 

So Howling Blast + Plague Strike Vs. Obliterate + 45% Howling Blast = 8532 Vs. 10501

 

Obliterate + 45% Rime proc chance is 23% better than master simple in terms of what you can do with your unholy runes. It's actually so much better that if outbreak is coming up within the next 6 seconds you should let your blood plague drop and wait for outbreak instead of refreshing with plague strike.

 

2x howling blast is about 30% better than Obliterate+ rime proc chance when dealing with 2x Frost/Death runes though, so continue to primarily spam howling blast.

 

tl/dr: Obliterate is immensely better than Howling blast + Plague strike. Don't use master simple anymore, and if you want a "New Mastersimple" completely forgo plague strike and use obliterate for all unholy runes and drop blood plague except when you outbreak, it'll be less of a dps loss than the old master simple.

 

But optimally you should just do the real masterfrost rotation. and only plague strike when you absolutely have to refresh diseases.

[Cupidx 5]

All of this will change in WoD, though. Mastersimple was extremely close to regular Masterfrost during all the beta testing, and that's when we were scaled down. I imagine that by the time people are in Mythic gear, Mastersimple will be back. Based on the way our mastery, rune system, and KM works, it's inevitably going to lead to Mastersimple being the better of the two.

[Plyte 0]

All of this will change in WoD, though. Mastersimple was extremely close to regular Masterfrost during all the beta testing, and that's when we were scaled down. I imagine that by the time people are in Mythic gear, Mastersimple will be back. Based on the way our mastery, rune system, and KM works, it's inevitably going to lead to Mastersimple being the better of the two.

I don't know about that.  If I understand DKs, you get 10 RP per rune spent (20% extra from frost spec), so when you use obliterate you gain 24 RP like with Howling + Plague, but then you have a 45% chance to gain 12 more RP from Rime.  So  Oblierate + 45% Rime averages 29 RP .So if you assume no mistakes, you'll average an extra 2 frost strikes per minute from that extra rune power.  I don't think the plague strike DoT can cover that.

Using storm's logs, he had 72 frost strikes over a 287 second fight..  Thats about 15 frost strikes per minute. If we assume no GCD issues, its potentially 17 frost strikes per minute instead, a 13% increase.  13% of frost strike (29% of his total damage) is 3.8% beating out plague strike damage and blood plague damage combined (2.55%). 

Edited October 28, 2014 by Plyte

[Storm 426]

Rime procs don't give RP because you aren't actually spending any runes. Still a gain though just from the Oblit+ 45% rime vs. howling blast + plague strike

[Plyte 0]

Oh my bad, I thought they did.

[Moozedude 47]

Could you argue then Plaguebearer at 56, so as to almost never have to waste that UH rune on plague strike?  Outbreak to get them up, then frost strike will automatically sustain?  Then you can just Oblit when rune up, HB when not, and frost strike for giggles.