Devastate:
An instant weapon attack that causes 50% of weapon damage plus 35 and additional threat for each application of Sunder Armor on the target. In addition, this attack will renew the duration of the Sunder Armor effect.

What Devastate actually does is 50% weapon damage + 25 damage per application of sunder + 35 damage + 101 innate threat.

So it's 125 damage (5x sunders) + 50% weapon which in my case is 70 + 35 + 101 innate threat.

That's 336 threat for 15 rage versus 301 threat for a 13 rage Sunder.

This means roughly there is no difference between going imp sunder versus devastate TPS wise. However the crits and the damage output do make me consider a respec. I had no idea devastate did 25 more damage per sunder application. I love hidden features.

I may be mistaken with my math, but I thought sunder = 300 and Devastate = 100+Damage. So anything over 200 damage on devastate = more threat than sunder (plus you can factor the damage you do as more help to the raid). Factoring in crit%, and devastate seems much better for threat with a decent weapon.

I'm in my PvP gear on the armory, I usually have that on if I'm not in a raid. My actual +damage is fairly similar to the other 2.

Also for any aspiring shadow priest, DoT uptime is the the best thing you can turn your focus to. I'm still getting better at it myself -- keeping VT up as much as possible is paramount since the rest of your group is counting on that mana.

My apologies then. I guess that's not a good case study for showing DoT uptime > gear, but it's still impressive seeing 75% uptime with 4 graves. I'm looking at other kills and seeing priests with 0 graves and less than 75% uptime.

A bit off-topic, but how do you check DoT uptime with WWS?

Well, DPS Presence is a good indicator, but really just # of ticks and length of fight is a pretty good indicator. Everyone should keep their DoTs up basically full-time. If Warlock A has 120 corruption ticks and Warlock B has 90, then Warlock B fucked up.

I computed total time for a dot as time = 3 * ticks. The uptime was (pain_time + embrace_time)/2, which works out to 3/2 * (pain_ticks + embrace_ticks). I ignored Devouring Plague because it has such a long cooldown. The percent of DoT uptime was the DoT Time divided by their total time in the fight.

If the boss is swinging a weapon at you, you pretty much want it up every cool-down.

Here is from last night's Gruul kill, who we've been doing for quite some time.
http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...&m&s=2915,3300

We then went after Magtheridon the same night and killed him for the second time. (First was Monday.)
http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...&s=10423,11155

Was our first and probably only time to have a moonkin and elemental shaman with the mages. (The weakest mage was a tryout, so he was both new to the encounters and specced frost, so I understand his DPS being lower.) Moonkin used to be a resto healer pre-BC, so he's new to DPS. (Tried being Feral for us a bit, but just didn't have the reaction time for it.) Elemental shaman is planning to respec resto because (A) our current resto shaman is unreliable; (B) we've had healer attendance issues in general and our elemental shaman feels it's his duty as a former holy paladin and an Officer to pick up the slack; (B) he's displeased with the dearth of shaman caster gear outside of the tiered sets (and is uncomfortable taking cloth caster gear from the 3 mages, 4 warlocks, and 2 shadow priests in the guild); (C) he can't seem to get the Prince dagger to drop to save his life and we're not likely to catch Doomwalker when he's up. Anywise, as a mage benefiting from their two buffs, I had a good time watching my crit rate climb.

[s]I'm curious about the disparity between our two hunters. On both Gruul and Mag, Luminaire is posting nearly 200 more DPS than Caronte. Caronte is Markmanship and his shots all hit for more, so I'm left wondering if Lumi's Beastmaster spec is causing his pet DPS to make that huge difference. Any insights?[/s]

**Never mind. Just looked at the total number of shots that Lumi was doing relative to Caronte. Seems Lumi was gaining Haste repeatedly throughout the fight and therefore doing nearly as much damage as Caronte in just a fraction of the same time.**

Also, I'm curious as to the great disparity between our 2 destruction locks on Gruul. Fairuza has a bit more dmg, hit, and crit, but I can't see that explaining the massive differences in their damage output. My assumption is that it's something with their spell rotation. Fairuza didn't bother with Shadow Bolts and used far more Incinerates than Cleoie - is that the explanation?

And I suppose in the interest of fairness, if you have any critiques/suggestions for the mage performances, particularly my own (Mariah), I'd be glad to hear them.

If you are a fire damage lock, the spell rotation (roughly) is immolate, incinerate, incinerate, conflag. Cleoie only used a handful of immolates and even less conflags. In fact, the amount of spells he/she cast total is really disappointing.

Last night logs since I haven't seen (m)any VR/Al'ar logs yet.

Al'ar (second kill) Samlii the shaman wasn't there but was erroneously on the log with no stats, so no we didn't really have 26 people .
http://www.exigenceguild.org/WWS/wws-20070529-1921/

Void Reaver (7th kill): http://www.exigenceguild.org/WWS/wws-20070529-2037/

Yeah, I know we had an assload of healers thats what logged on last night

EDIT: I should note, we had to abort the first Al'ar pull 10 seconds in thats why the timestamps say 23 minutes, fight was actually only 12 or 13. I'm a bit of a WWS noob is there any way to reset the combatlog parse if you wipe or abort a pull, short of logging out and deleting the log file?

No, the spell cycle is Immolate->Incinerate x 5(6)->Immolate. Conflag lowers your dps if you use it. It's covered in lots of threads, warlock spreadsheet thread in particular, as well as the spreadsheet confirming it if you check. Short version, it scales like crap and the fact that it consumes the last immolate tick gives it lower dpspc than 1.5secs of an incinerate.

You mean Vampiric Touch.

Anyhow, yes, the combination of almost twice the duration and ability to cast while moving on SWP means it is far less likely to drop off during anything that disrupts your casting for a short while (Ground Slam, etc). A poorly timed and positioned Ground Slam could leave you with as much as 8-9 seconds without VT up, but you'd have to have some very special circumstances to lose more than 1-3 seconds of SWP uptime.

Some of it is just laziness and poor dot timing, obviously.

That's what I get for losing an hour of sleep. Yes, Touch is what I meant. Thanks for the correction; edited the original post and now it should make a lot more sense.

As requested:
RDPS is low because you have 9 healers + 1 s.priest. If you check the first link on the first post, you'll see we did it with 6 healers + 2 x.priest. I am fairly sure we could have done it with 5, but I won't pretend I know healing well enough to make wide generalisations.

Your casters on average wear too few hit gear. Try to get 16% after talents/totems.
Your mages/locks are mostly ok in their presence%, however they generally have a bit subpar dps time%. On gruul you should have your casters nuking 100% of the time, the only downtimes being the silence, and then theres shatter. While you're being flung by shatter you can still do actions that don't have cast times, such as fireblast, or POM, or ice lance if you feel inclined to do something. If you have a cave-in, you can also fireblast as you are moving away from it (or blink, whichever is more appropriate).

Isbil shows a really poor standing from what I see here. 80% of presence is pretty bad. 5 wands too ? 11% miss rate on arcane blast ???!? 13% miss on frostbolt ! I will assume this mage isn't specced for PVE. Putting 5pt in arcane focus would increase his DPS by 10% of his arcane blasts. Plus his arcane blast hit on average the same as his frostbolt ??! I could go on but this is already harsh as it is.

All of your mages/locks have totally lacking hit gear. Not much to add here. I expect to see miss% varying below 3%. I see 10-12% ' s. If all your mages/locks had 14%+ hit, you would see a good increase in RDPS.
To be honest, I am not too surprised to see lower-ish DPS numbers than what I am used to in this log : there is only 1 shaman in the raid. Yes, totems are THAT good.

I won't comment on presence% and dps time here due to possible cube clicking duties, although they seem a bit low. Isbil is back in force now in full frost spec, and 3% miss. I am dumbfounded. For the better. Of course a real PVE spec, fire, would give better numbers, but the performance he shows is an order of magnitude better this time around.
4 shamans and yet the DPS seem a bit low. I am unsure as to whether or not the shamans are dropping the totems to helps dps, or if the dps is in range of them. I was expecting a bit higher numbers overall.

No offense, but i'll pass on awfull kills. Nothing good can come out of it.

Isbil now in full fire spec, with no miss% whatsoever.



I can see you did not use the AOE strategy. It is really unfortunate as it really drags down your overall RDPS. I will not comment on this kill either because I am used to see numbers for the AOE strategy.

In response to Toabo your kills for Mag+Gruul, you may want to tell Krazyness to use shield block a lot more than he currently is.

Comparing myself with his Gruul numbers, I tanked in a ~4 minute kill and gained Shield Block 27 times. Krazyness tanked in a ~6 minute kill and gained Shield Block 24 times. Either something is wrong with the way it detects Shield Block gains or your MT just isn't using it enough which is something that needs to be fixed. If this is an accurate number, there is no way a person who tanked for roughly 2 minutes longer should have less Shield Block gains.

I can't say much for the Mag kill as a druid tanks Mag for us, but your MT should be using a lot more shield block than he currently is.

Just to further strength this point, it's not a parsing failure - he takes 17 crushing blows. That is a *lot* - it's an unusual Gruul kill where I take more than one or two crushing blows (and generally those are failures on my part, not because I blocked so many that he stripped my shield block charges off early). The max is for ~9500, so it's not like he was just lazy at the start of the fight either.

Actually, Devastate has a built in flat hate bonus of ~100, while Sunder Armor's hate value is around ~300. Meaning the magic number is 200 damage Devastates before Devastate beats sunder for threat.
For most raiding tanks, this number is trivial to hit. Meaning the only reason to use sunder armor is when the stack size is less than 5 or if you have the *talented* sunder armor and threat per rage is a concern.

e: link to reference material Kenco: A Guide To Threat.
e2: ugh, I missed the previous poster who said exactly the same thing.

Magtheridon 30.5.07

http://cromfel.battlefield.fi/wow/ww....07/index.html

As Retri Paladin I was in MT group, so didnt get BS etc group DPS buffs (WF totem only). And I died once on cleave due those damn bubmers that throw me on top of MT.

Casters can very easily shoot 1 wand shot every time they get silenced and still have their global cooldown back up before you become unsilenced. 5 is not unreasonable for Gruul.

Maximizing your dot cycle makes sense from a DPS perspective, and I tried to look at it that way but in all honesty it's way too complicated. I use a simple 60s cycle right now when I'm using Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death, and if I'm just Mind Flaying, it gets broken down even simpler to a 30s cycle. I prioritize Vampiric Touch above and beyond anything else in my cycle. If Vampiric Touch drops off the mob and I do damage and mana isn't restored, my cycle is broken and so is my usefulness to my entire group. Doing dps is second to restoring mana to my party, imo, even though they are directly related. Basically, Shadow Word: Pain is up for 24s of a 30s cycle and Vampiric Touch is up for 30s of a 30s cycle. I tried to rework a cycle that would maximize both dots but it is just too complicated. It doesn't repeat itself for like 4 minutes, and that is just a crazy cycle to commit to. 30s/60s is really easy to reset (in your head, that is) if the fight requires mobility, etc.

I'll try working in a better dot rotation and refreshing them as they expire in game, since I'm just looking at colors on a spreadsheet right now, but I think 4s lost or something (counting global cooldowns and whatnot) on SW:P is acceptable. *shrug*

For what it's worth, I don't even have a cycle in mind. I make my decision for the next spell cast while I'm doing the current one and just watch debuff timers to plan casts. Top priority is also Vampiric Touch for me, followed by Shadow Word Pain. If the current Touch only has 1.5 seconds left, I know I need to start casting a replacement now. And if I have to move on a fight, I try and lump as many instant cast spells together as possible so I don't lose cast time while moving.

Then there's also the issue of using your temporary buffs like Icon of the Silver Crescent and Quagmiron's Eye. Because Mind Flay is technically a DoT, its spell damage and speed "locks in" as soon as you cast the spell. Mind Blast's damage doesn't get calculated until the end of the cast time. So if you have only one second left on Icon, you'd rather Mind Flay first and Blast second. If you have two seconds left, you want to do it the other way around.

Anyway, to make a long post short, if you want optimum DPS as a shadow priest, you can't stick to a fixed cycle. You have to react to the local situation.

Here are some DMs from last nights SSC where we first tried out WWS.

Hydross : http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=63jrktl2f25ze

Morogrim : http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=lv3snezjwb2b5

Lurker : http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=bygjugei2hilk


We didn't have a third paladin for most of the night if I recall so no kings on most dps.