Bloodlust & the "Execute" Talents

Interesting.

The 40 second cooldown was for simplification only.

Since the no cooldown comparisons are equal, this allows us to see that using any cooldown early, in conjunction with Bloodlust, is better than doing the same thing at the 35% mark.

Correct me if I've misunderstood something here, but doesn't all this math assume that the multiplicative cooldowns have an equal relative effect on DPS both above and below 35%?

I don't think that's a valid assumption: Warlocks have an execute mechanic in drain soul which drastically changes their rotation and causes their DPS to scale much better with haste.

It doesn't. If you re-read it you will see that the gain from the execute abilities/talents is actually less if you use bloodlust at that time. This is the negative feedback loop mentioned.

You seem to be talking about the results. I'm saying their method of arriving at those results is wrong - or rather, that their assumptions are wrong.

How would the math account for the potential difference in effect on DPS by bloodlust? Ichal calls this effect A and simply multiplies it by uptime and DPS (40 and x/y). Wraithlin calls it B, and, again, simply multiplies it by uptime and DPS (40 and X). To accurately model the situation I'm talking about you would have to multiply with a haste-scaling coefficient as well, with a different value above and below the execute limit.

In fact, once you realize that some execute abilities change how DPS scales with haste, it's easy to refute their conclusions:

Consider an imaginary class that gets zero benefit from haste, except for an execute ability that allows them to get 100% benefit from haste when the boss is below 35% health. Now imagine a raid stacked fully with this class.

For simplicity, let's imagine all of these DPSers are completely without haste gear or haste raid buffs, and that their execute ability doesn't change their DPS under those conditions. With 100k raid DPS and 10M mob health, the fight takes 100 seconds.

Add a bloodlust at the start, there is no change and the fight still lasts 100 seconds.

Add a bloodlust at 35% (after 65 seconds), and the fight lasts 65 + ( 3.5M / (100k*1.3) ) = 91.9 seconds.

Except that we know that an early bloodlust, with cooldowns, is a faster kill than a late bloodlust. The question is whether the gain for Affliction is greater than the gain from the early bloodlust + cooldowns combination, and for that you'll really need some sort of model/simulation system that can compare things.

So unless you have excess Affliction locks, I don't think it's anything to worry about.

I really wasn't disputing the conclusion that it may be just as good to pop BL early. And I certainly agree that we can't really answer the question in a generalized way if we include the haste scaling variable I mentioned. I just thought I'd point out that all the math in your blog entry was based on an incorrect assumption.

It might not be that unlikely to find a situation where your conclusions are wrong - my guild has had patchwerk kills where affliction locks provided nearly 25% of the DPS, and that's with just 3 locks in the raid.

I guess the real answer would be to plug your particular raid makeup into Simulationcraft - you'd just have to wait for it to support all classes first.

It seems like the assumtion in the first calculation that certain buffs are additive under heroism is skewing the result.
The only buffs additive under heroism are other haste effects.

Zakalwe: Yes, it's an assumption that you get the same relative dps increase above and within the range of execute type effects. And you're right, this isn't true for warlocks.

However compared to the original hand waving of "Bloodlust late because it stacks with abilities of three classes", we're down to one class, and a weaker effect at that. And if you do use late Bloodlust, it's virtually impossible to stack cooldowns across a raid. But not stacking cooldowns is a loss of dps. So don't think of the results as "the math says Bloodlust early" but rather: "The math says it's close to a wash, go for practical".



Jackk: Your comment is pretty vague, but seems wrong. Is it the A(x+B) term that you think is wrong? If it had been Ax+B then each trinketed spell cast during Bloodlust would deal less damage than without Bloodlust. I don't believe this to be the case.

It seems to me that the main arguments for an early bloodlust are essentially:

1) People may die before the bloodlust if we use it late

and

2) People may not sync their cooldowns with a late bloodlust.

and

3) A late bloodlust may be cut short by the boss dying

---

I say this because it seems obvious to me that any one person doing more damage inside of execute range would increase damage over all. Execute range abilities are multiplicative. Mages, for example, specced for Molten fury, do 12% more damage for the entire sub 35%.

Of course that means that their normal shots hit 35% harder as well, so it's not important to get any given cooldown in that space, right? Wrong.

Let's say a trinket adds +10 damage, flat. Execute improves this to 11.2 damage, a gain of -- surprise surprise -- 12%. Assuming, first of all, that using this cooldown outside of execute range implies it can't be used inside of execute range, the choice of where to use it is simple.

And that's where I feel that the math doesn't show "It's close to a wash." Stacking all your cooldowns at once is one of the best things you can do as DPS, along with maximizing uptime of said cooldowns and maximizing your DPS uptime.

Therefor, it's obvious that, given a fight with no unknown variables, a late bloodlust will always be better.

Wraithlin says you can model execute range as a straight reduction in boss health, and I counter with -- no, it's another cooldown.

But all the reasons for an early bloodlust are quite understandable. People might die (which should be avoided to max rDPS but maybe can't be, a la vael), people might not have their cooldowns up for bloodlust (if you're being vocal about when it will happen, this should not happen) and lastly, and really the only two reasons I consider to have a grounding in reality:

People might lose out on multiple cooldown uses because they saved theirs to stack with bloodlust which came at a percentage rather than a known time.

AND

The boss may die before bloodlust finishes, wasting potential uptime.

In these last two ways, a late bloodlust can be an rDPS loss, but I put forth that in all other ways it is an rDPS gain.

[Edit: Some apologies for the rather jumpy train of thought here.]

Congrats, you just made the same assumption that everyone else had been making before. Stacking all your cooldowns with a static duration is good. Stacking them with a "cooldown" that reduces its duration the higher your dps is while it's up, not so good for stacking.

aka: go re-read it again.

No. I got that part. The higher you can push DPS inside of the execute duration cooldown, the shorter that cooldown becomes, and the less it gives.

What I don't understand, and what hasn't been effectively explained here, is why that means you avoid dealing with it at all. It's still an increase. It becomes less of an increase the more you can stack during it, but it's still an increase.

If you have 16 people doing 5000 dps, and one of these is a mage, you get 15 * 5000 + 5600 sub 35%. Assuming 60 seconds under 35%, that's 4.8 million damage, with the mage doing 33600 damage.

With bloodlust, we assume a 30% bonus, so it becomes 15*6500 + 7280 = 104780 dps, taking 40 seconds to do 4.2 million damage, and the remainder takes another 8 seconds. The mage deals 33600 damage here.

If there's more reason to use bloodlust sub 35%, we would expect to see the mage dealing more total damage in that situation than otherwise. The reason is that they only have 80% of the 12% bonus that the non-bloodlust situation uses.

Okay, I understand. I did the math a few more times for a couple of situations, and while it's true that there's a minor rDPS gain in saving bloodlust, and it would be further magnified by having all cooldowns there. But, it does comes out to be, without any further cooldown stacking, mathematically a wash.

So, I conclude that there are too many other risks for it to be worth it, and this has been... quite interesting, and eye opening. Thanks.

Mages aren't the only class who scale better with haste during an execute phase than outside of execute phase.

TG warriors gain a much bigger benefit when bloodlust is running <20%. Above 20%, a 30% haste buff only increases our white damage and our heroic strike uptime, and below 20% causes us to execute in free GCDs and maintain our rotation.

At a certain gear level (I know I've hit it with 2xBoH, FotFF, 43% crit and ~3.8k AP), when bloodlust is active below 20%, we can spam execute without missing a GCD (or with minimal loss, bloodlust + flurry + speed potion brings white swings close to 1.5secs). The DPS increase is far higher, as it lets us use our most damaging rage-dump (which you can only use below 20%). Bloodlusting early forces us to use Heroic Strike as a dump, which is far less efficient.

Am I misreading the maths, or does it assume that you kill the boss exactly as Bloodlust fades?

Your math works out but your logic doesn't.

To extend your hypothetical, the raid is doing 80,000 DPS. 4.8 million being 35% means roughly 13.7 million total HP. 8.9m above 35% at 80k rDPS takes 111.25 seconds. Total boss fight is 171.25 seconds. This is our baseline.


Heroism below 35%, thanks to your math, shows that 60 seconds is converted to 48. Thus, total time is 159.25

Heroism above 35%: 16 * 6500 * 40 = 4.16m HP

13.7 - 4.16 = 9.54m is his remaining hp, 4.8 of that takes 60 seconds and is below 35%. So, we're looking at

40 + 60 + (9.54m - 4.8m)/(16*5000) = 100 + (4,740,000/80,000) = 100 + 59.25 = 159.25


I came to this conclusion, and stared, for a while, until I redid your math. You rounded. It takes 7.515 seconds to complete the kill after heroism ends under 35%, meaning that the kill time with Hero under 35 is 158.765 seconds.

This is a gain of roughly a percent. Not a whole lot, but you're assuming only ONE player is benefitting, whereas there are many classes that benefit from sub-X HP talents, and often more than one member of a specified class.


I can explain the logical flaw in your example if you'd like. I did not read the math in the OP, because my brain glazed over. I apologize, and I understand if your point is simply that the benefit of doing it below 35% is smaller than the benefit of cooldown stacking above 35%, but I felt the need to correct this post.


Edit:

By my logic, if the raid can time CDs against Heroism at low HP, it's ALWAYS better than if you can time CDs against Heroism at high HP. If you CANNOT time CDs against Heroism at low HP, but you CAN time it at high HP (i.e. you charge in and hit all your trinkets and they're not back up for Hero, but you can't stop yourself and you do it every time) then it's a complete wash and it doesn't matter when you pop Hero.

Cutting Hero off by popping it late and killing the boss too fast IS a big issue. Losing any amount of Heroism time is a big DPS hit.

If your raid is intelligent and you define when you're using Hero, popping it low is a DPS increase. If your raid is unintelligent or you don't define when you're using Hero, popping it low is NOT a DPS loss. Thus, there's no incentive to pop it early.

I can prove all of this algebraically if you really need me to.

I don't think he rounded where you think he rounded. When he says 4.8 million he means ( 15 * 5000 + 5600 ) * 60 = 4836000, meaning the total HP is closer to 13.82M than the 13.7M you used in your calculations.

Redoing your math using the exact figure, we get:

Heroism above 35%:
(4836000/0.35 - 4836000) / 80000 + 48 = 160.264286

Heroism below 35%:
40 + 60 + (4836000/0.35 - 16 * 6500 * 40 - 4836000)/(16*5000) = 160.264286

Basically, what we're doing here is just redoing the math quoted in the original post using numbers instead of symbols. I think we're back to concluding that the math and the logic in the original post is all correct, but that they're based on the incorrect assumption that heroism will provide the same relative boost no matter what percentage the target's health is at.

you don't have to add numbers to see the flaw in the argumentation

bloodlust is haste.. this means you don't do more damage, you do the damage faster.. popping bloodlust gives you a 30% dps increase.. BUT if you have to cast 20 frostfire bolts in the 35% range you will have to cast 20 frostfire bolts with bloodlust.. so you have exactly the same benefit from the +dmg buff as if you would not use bloodlust. the only thing that changes is the time you have to spend for the 20 casts.

it would be different, if it would be a flat 30% dmg multiplier, which would only let you cast 16 times on the target below 35% wasting 4 casts with the 12% dmg bonus

just my 2 cents

edit: typo

Actually, he rounded in more places than I thought >_> Same thing.

These are backwards, but aside from that perfectly correct.

Teppic definitely explained it in a way that makes much more sense to me. Honestly, it's a tad terrifying that the concept is so unintuitive that I couldn't believe the claims so much so that I wrote a post that virulent.

Anyway. Apologies >_>

Althought Wraithlin says he achieves the same result, he does not. He shows that T1=T2 (which appears to be correct), while Ichal claims T1<T2 (I do not agree).

The following in Ichal's calculations seem fine:
x = DPS above 35%
y = DPS below 35%
Ax = DPS with heroism above 35%
Ay = DPS with heroism below 35%
A(x+B) = DPS with heroism +trinket above 35%

However this implicit assumption seems wrong:

A(y+B) = DPS with heroism and trinket below 35%.

Consider a mage, where y=1.12x. Then dps for this mage with heroism and a trinket should be

1.12A(x+B) = A(1.12x + 1.12B) = A(y+1.12B)

The point is that popping a trinket during execute time is not just additive (at least not by the same amount as non-execute time) because execute bonus will affect the trinket as well. With this accounted for, T1=T2.

Very interesting calculations - was certainly an eye-opener for me.

Thinking about it now, perhaps a simpler way to understand the concept is that Heroism lasts 40 seconds but with 30% extra damage you effectively do 52 seconds of damage in those 40 seconds (assuming 30% haste = 30% extra damage).

So regardless of when it is used heroism shortens the fight by 12 seconds.

Another factor to consider is trinkets with internal cooldown (and few class abilities with internal cooldown such as Eclipse).

If you were to pop bloodlust extremely early into the fight you would virtually guarantee that trinkets are not yet on cooldown. If you were to wait perhaps 20-30 seconds from start you would probably have almost all such procs on their internal cooldowns (though some would still have the proc active, perhaps). By the time boss hits 35% things would be very random - some trinkets would proc while others would be on cooldown.

Additionally other abilities sometimes dictate that you don't always use your cooldowns as soon as they are ready or even at predictable times. A moonkin might click his trinkets when he gets an eclipse proc, over a course of fight this can make it impossible to line the trinkets up with a late bloodlust while it should be relatively trivial with an early one.

--

A very quick calculation indicates that a a proc based trinket with ~31% average uptime can give up to 40% uptime during a bloodlust if used early enough in the fight. I didn't have proper tools to make a good diagram handy, but here's something anyway:



In other words: for a bloodlust starting ~5 seconds after DPS starts these buffs will have a 40% uptime throughout the lust. Later in the fight the internal cooldowns get out of sync due to random events and it's pretty much irrelevant when the lust is used.

Long story short: using lust very early in the fight will give better value for procs with an internal cooldown.