glyph of howling blast

[omnus]

So this is my first post. I tanked in bc as a protadin. Now I am a dk and I love it. I often have 2 tank specs. I love having multiple talent trees that help me in different ways while tanking.

So anyway, I want to ask about "glyph of howling blast" and single disease rots. I was having trouble getting a good rotation going. I was looking for some info and I stumbled onto a post by a frost tank swearing by the glyph and a single disease rotation. I like to experiment so I tried it out.

HB - OB - BS - BS - FS
OB - OB - OB/HB - FS

Use rime procs to keep up frost Fever when possible. The down side is less disease damage and weaker OB's. Advantage is that you can apply frost fever to groups without pest. Killing machine price never wasted on weak icy touches. You also net more OB's.

For single target I love pulling with a death chilled HB and then going right obliterate. For aoe tanking its HB and right to blood boils.

I love this spec and rot now. Any one have any good or bad experiences with this?

[Satorri]

First question: are you 2h or dual wielding?

The balance works out pretty easily. 2-disease methods are stronger now with dual wielding, particularly glyphing Oblit, as your OB's and BS's really hit harder. The trade off is that the two disease rotation is not nearly as easy or static. The single disease method, which is ideal with glyphed HB is great on AoE packs regardless, and the rotation is simple, but for the sake of maximizing threat, it won't hold up quite as well (though it will almost certainly still do the job).

I actually favored splitting them. I glyphed HB, and for aoe packs I just leaned on HB and BB heavily, no PS, no IT, no Pest, no BS, and OB only to proc Rime if HB was on CD. Then on bosses and big single target fights I ironed out a dynamic 2-disease setup (but rotation is a bad word for it, it doesn't smooth out easily enough for you to follow a simple bi-phasic cast sequence, not that I favor sequences anyway). I did figure out ways to not use IT often enough and just applied FF through HB instead. It did make things a little easier but it ended up using Blood Tap to find some FU pairs in weird places.

[Jeges]

I do something similar, Satorri. For packs, open with HB, BB, etc... For single target, open with IT, PS, OB, BS, BS... From that point on, I'll put up both diseases if there are no diseases on the boss, but if Frost Fever is up from HB I'll use the frost/unholy rune pair for another OB. This actually takes advantage of dual-wielding plus Rime - since I get so many free Howling Blasts, I'm able to achieve an average of about 1.6 diseases up, including always having Frost Fever (the important one) at the expense of only putting up 0.6 diseases. In other words, there are 15 FU rune pairs per minute; I only have to spend just over two per minute to keep diseases up, leaving almost 13 for Obliterate. My Obliterates (and Blood Strikes, oh no!) are on average about 5% weaker, but there are more of them. It's probably still a *slight* damage decrease (when the loss of a little bit of Blood Plague damage and other even smaller incidentals are figured in), but it frees up two talent points in Epidemic. I'll trade half a percent of my DPS for two talent points any day - and if there's any opportunity at all to catch a second target in some HB->FF splash, the DPS loss becomes a DPS gain.

Note that for very large packs, it actually makes sense to go to a two-disease approach. I'm thinking Onyxia Whelps, for example. Howling Blast and Blood Boil have damage caps that really hurt when you're hitting 40 targets at once. Diseases, as far as I can tell, have no such caps. Getting a second disease ticking for 150 DPS on 40 targets is 6000 DPS. That's a lot more than you'll get from the single Blood Boil you lose in order to Pestilence your Blood Plague onto everyone.

[Satorri]

Howling Blast and Blood Boil do not yet have damage caps. That's a discussed change for 3.3.

When I was Frost, doing Ony, I would laugh to pop Deathchill and see my screen freeze with 40 "7000's" flashed.

[omnus]

I am currently useing anguish with rotsg. I don't need the Def. I am over 540 in Dw to. I have 2 peacekeeper blades, a broken promise and an aledars battlestar. I think I will go Dwight with 3.3 and the new rune. Right now I am leaking expertise with every upgrade. I think mh broken promise and offhand peacekeeper come 3.3

On whelps the build is amazing. Single target threat
has been a concern but the only people getting close are locks and currently still got room for them to increase

[Jeges]

Howling blast on an aggregated whelp pack does a hair over 1000 damage per whelp, somewhere in the mid 2Ks if it crits. This is obviously much less than it usually does. I don't know how else to explain this if there isn't a damage cap.

I was under the impression that the change in 3.3, for AoE attacks in general, was that rather than having arbitrary damage caps these attacks would have their caps calculated as 10x the damage that they'd do to a single target (hence, scaling with gear and being uniform between attacks and classes).

Maybe there's something going on that I'm not considering? I do have diseases on the whelps before I HB, so it's not that. Or maybe the damage cap was recently spliced in? I do sort of remember averaging 4-5K DPS over the whole Onyxia fight when it first came out, and lately it's been more like 3K... Or maybe I'm just delusional/wrong... Happens sometimes...