Confused about the DW Frost Priority list

[Knaprig 0]

The thing I'm confused about are the points 5 and 6:

 

5. Use your Death and Frost runes on Howling Blast.

6. Use your Unholy Runes on Obliterate.

 

Would this priority not mean that I will never be able to cast Obliterate since it requires a frost rune and that it's a higher priority to use both frost and death on Howling Blast?

[Storm 426]

It's kind of a weird situation, but the ways its in the guide isn't necessarily wrong. Howling blast is higher priority than obliterate because it does more damage. but you should use your unholy runes on obliterate rather than plague strike whenever you can. this does mean you have to plan ahead and not use all of your death and frost runes on howling blast. you'll need to save 1-2 runes to coincide with your unholy runes to obliterate.

 

If you're using plague leech and blood tap you should be able to minimize the number of obliterates you need to do by gaming the unholy runes and turning one of them into a death rune most of the time. but you should still obliterate whenever you have a basic unholy rune.

[Pistons 0]

Not worth it at higher gear levels in my experience. If Killing Machine procs and you blow it on Obliterate you lose out on quite a bit of damage. I usually just stick with MaserSimple and it does well.

[Storm 426]

definitely worth it for the rime procs with the current state of gear and ability damage. plague strike's damage, and blood plagues dot tick are so low that they aren't even worth casting right now unless you have absolutely nothing else to do. Using an unholy rune + frost/death rune on obliterate gives you a 45% chance to get a rime proc which then gives you another free howling blast. Since obliterate is almost equal to howling blast currently, you're mathematically doing the equivalent of turning 2 unholy runes into 1 howling blast which is a huge gain over 2 plague strikes. If you also take into account all the unholy runes that will become death runes through blood tap and plague leech, you really won't have to obliterate too often, 10-15 times max in a roughly 5 minute fight, but that will easily lead to a 1k increase in dps.

 

Killing machine proc on an obliterate isn't a big deal at the moment. it is a dps loss, but it's hard to always have enough RP for all the killing machine procs you're getting anyways. so accidentally using 2-3 on obliterate per fight still isn't as big of a loss as not turning unholy runes into rime procs.