Frost Downtime

[:1]Hey all, I've only recently picked my DK back up - as DW Frost. It's such a nice change from my Arms War. I wish I had known months ago so I could have wasted all my time on this guy instead. But I digress...

Is it normal to have ~3-4 sec of complete dead time about once a boss fight? I understand procs are random and all, but it happens regularly. No Killing Machine, no Rime, all my runes are down and I'm too low on RP to Frost Strike. So I get to Horn and then stand there like a goober for a few more seconds.

Is this normal? Am I doing it wrong?

Thanks for any insight!
I believe more hast should lessen the occurrence of down time. Also, if it's happening on every fight make sure you use blood tap, it gives you a free death rune every minute (or 30 secs if you spec into it).

I typically only have that happen to me on Madness when Empower Rune Weapon and Blood Tap are both down.
Just looked at your set up.

Get rid of On a Pale horse and put points into butchery.

Only 2 pts in runic power mastery. Put the points needed to advance in either icy reach or the interrupt talent.

Also, you only need 2 pts in the talent that makes diseases last longer, not 3. A second of downtime on blood plague won't kill your dps and the points are better used elsewhere.
Alright, thanks. I usually use it as soon into the fight as possible when I don't have enough runes to use up my KM proc. I try to save ERW for extra damage phases or execute range.

My runes recharge @ 7.85 self buffed - what is a good rate?
In raids, the group often saves bloodlust for the execute phase, and you don't want to stack erw and bloodlust (it's an overall dps loss).

Recharge rate you'll have to check EJ.

I haven't done it yet, but you might also want to look into speccing for chillblains as it is very useful on heroic madness.

Also, read into runic empowerment gaming. It's whole purpose is to keep you swinging longer and is what separates the wheat from the chaff.
Hmm, I'm not coming up with much on forcing runic empowerment - everything seems tank oriented. Is there some sort of concept/walk through page you know of?

What would I drop for chillblains? Although, heroic raiding isn't my goal anyway.

I just respecced as well, any pointers?
I'd just copy my frost spec. You lost virulence which is really important. Imp blood tap is a trade off between that and increased time on diseases.

People get chillblains by dropping imp frost presence. i'm not there yet either so I still have the interrupt build that people use for alysrazor.I will post more on gaming when I find the link.

EDIT:

Ok, so rune gaming for frost works just like rune gaming for tanking, except instead of death strike and rune strike, we have obliterate and frost strike.

You want to frost strike later in your priority system because it has a chance to give you a fully depleted rune (ie both runes of that type are on cooldown). It is slightly more tedious for tanking, but the general concept remains the same.

As a caveat, do not continue to obliterate/howling blast if you will not gain runic power, hit a frost strike then go back to it.
I really appreciate all the help! It sounds like basically what I've been doing anyway...use as many runes as I can and then spam FS until I get a KM or can OB again.

I've been wondering though, when I'm about to cap RP with a KM proc waiting(say 115/120) - use OB and waste RP, or use FS and waste some damage?

Edit: Leaving for class, I'll be back in about 2 hours. Again, thanks for all the help!
I typically use frost strike in that instance.
Red Sockets is for Str gems
Sometimes it's just up to RNG and there's nothing you can do about it. I have over 2400 haste and this week on Zonozz I didn't get a single Rime proc from 50% - dead. Frustrated the hell out of me.