Weakness would be worth considering if it actually reduced by a full 31. The problem is that it's applied before armor, so against a warrior with 60% armor reduction you're actually looking at 12 damage per hit that curse of weakness reduces.

I posted this on my guild's forums but my class leader still doesn't want to use it

You know Expose Armor makes sunder unusable?


-Armor is great for 3 classes dps, put it up, as long as you have elements and shadows as well.

Of course. I'm the MT. :p

Edit- We won't Expose for multi-tank fights but for single-tank fights, I encourage liberal use of EA (especially Imp. EA).

With diminishing returns on % damage reduction for higher armor values, wouldn't greater armor reduction on a mob get exponentially better as you reduced the armor values even further?

I think my dps went up about 10% when our locks started using CoR in MC clears.


A typical mob's debuffs for us usually looks something like:
1 Curse of Shadows
2 Curse of Elements
3 Curse of Recklessness (increases physical dmg, attk power bonus eliminated by demo shout - shouldn't be used on broodlord or flamegor)
4 Amplified Curse of Agony (Curse of Doom if you aren't affliction spec'd)
5 Sunder x5
6 Faerie Fire (even more armor reduction)
7 Demo Shout (lowers mob dps on MT)
8 Thunderclap (lowers mob dps by 10%)
9 Corruption
10 Corruption
11 Corruption
12 Corruption
13 Siphon Life (aids warlock mana/health regen and increases their sustainable dps)
14 Siphon Life
15 Crappy warrior crit debuff (random proc)
16 Crappy Fire/Ice Mage crit debuff (or other random proc) - Moonfire spam?

______

To the OP, things that may help speed stuff up:

Curse of doom does not scale nearly as well as curse of agony because your +dmg gear is divided over 60 seconds as opposed to 24 seconds for CoA. If your warlocks have a lot of +dmg gear (meaning more than 200ish) they should be using amplified CoA - especially if blizz ever gets around to fixing shadow mastery and +dmg gear.

Mass-dot offtanked adds - especially the giant pulls. You should have at least corruption (and probably CoA or CoD too) on the offtanked mob in a pull like that, especially if you have nightfall. Unless your tanks suck, they should be able to keep aggro during a slow burning dot.

Loot should be discussed among your classmates before a boss is dropped so that you don't spend 10 minutes figuring out who gets what. If loot takes more than 5 minutes to decide, something is screwed up.

Consider finding a new guild, you obviously know what you are doing.

They obviously do not.

Since we started using CoR on Broodlord we haven't had any tanks die.

Armor doesn't have (significant) diminishing returns.

Typical debuff slots for our raids are:
Sunder
Fireball
Fireball
Fireball
Deep Wounds
Deep Wounds
Deep Wounds
Deep Wounds
Curse of Shadows (Because I put it up there)
... (STOP SHADOWBOLTING AND PUT UP THE GOD DAMN CURSES)
Curse of Elements
Curse of Recklessness
Faerie Fire
Moonfire
Moonfire
Moonfire
Moonfire

Edit - btw, I never said that CoR actually did increase dmg taken on the MT by 6.4 dps, just to tell them that :)

:o waaat

Hrm, this thread has me curious as to exactly how much Faerie Fire helps. I hadn't really used it much, mostly just trying to keep it up on Fankriss/C'thun, since I didn't want to mess with the debuff slots too much. Is it a good enough DPS gain that I should try to keep it up on bosses? 505 armor doesn't seem like a lot compared to some of the other things that could be in that slot.

Remember, the more armor you reduce, the more effective each additional point of armor reduction becomes. Until zero of course.

Just cast CoR and ignore any bitching and they'll warm up to it eventually.

Fairy Fire is a no-brainer debuff on almost any mob where physical DPS is signifigant.

On a player with around 2000 armour it is around a 5% drop on flat DR. If the post-sunder armour on the mob is less than 2000, it will be quite a bit more than 5% depending on how low the armour is and assuming that mob DR works simillarly to player DR. The last assumption is unconfirmed as far as I know, but I do recall from parsing moderate amounts of farming data on humanoids in Silithus that FF amounts to a 3-12% white damage hit increase depending on the mob type and error of my limited sample.

Even if conservative, a 3% increase in raid physical DPS is well worth a debuff slot in most cases.

It would be interesting to quantify the effect of armour debuffs on various level 63 boss mobs. We may all be missing something as far as the impact of these armour debuffs if there is no hard data.

Yes. hit the mob a bunch of times, with say, a 2H. Look at your average damage on your character sheet per white hit. Calculate the average damage (not including glancing blows) done to the mob. Look at the % mitigation and apply the armor->mitigation formula in reverse, using 63 as the level if it's a boss.

I was thinking more of the exact numerical armor value in a way similar to Beast Lore. I know the damage reduction is reverse engineerable.

To calculate DR it would be simple to just use a fixed damage phsycal attack and start from there. Unless you had a decent amount of samples, averaging out the damage of several variable attacks would generate some fairly skewed results, and be almost impossible to do on the fly.

Use a low lvl weapon that has no dmg range, should make it alot easier.

forcing water down casters every second spent out of combat when you're not running,

FUCK YES. Nothing -- NOTHING, sped us up like this. We're not good enough yet to pull with too-low healer mana (though mage mana is ignored unless their damage or AoE will be needed), but when I realized that a bunch of casters and healers were standing around looking silly with low mana?

We're still not perfect on it. I'm thinking of making a "You! %t! DRINK, STUPID!" macro...

Broodlord doesn't die fast enough already? :P

If deep wounds healed you at 100 per tick, it'd still manage to be more worthless.

I heard that shadow mastery wasn't working with +dmg gear for siphon life on the test realm (along with a few other spells like curse of agony), any idea if they've fixed it yet?

Demi, as a horde guild, we won't have judgements up there. You generally don't frost shock too much in a raid environment :), so we have 2 more debuffs to play with. Also, the shadowpriests usually burn out when they realize they are severely limited by mana regen on the horde side so those are also pretty uncommon. It should free up a slot for the frost mage debuff and more of those "hot" deepwound debuffs.


Based on the data Lrigatonmai collected, your raid adds a fairly significant chunk of dps by adding faerie fire (say you do an average of 250 dps per physical dmg class * 15 guys * 6% more damage output that'd be 235 dps by adding one debuff). Because this damage is widely distributed among several people (some of whom are your tanks), it shouldn't screw up aggro too much.

I'd be curious to see what it looks like when you add all 3 debuffs (CoR, Faerie Fire, and Sunder). Because you will not hit 0 armor for most raid mobs, there is still a benefit to applying additional armor reduction. Based on the armor values in that sheet, you're basically looking at the difference between mail and leather armor when you add Faerie Fire and CoR to a sundered mob.

His final numbers for AC don't seem right to me.

I'm coming up with 3734 where he's getting 6770, and so on.

So fully debuffed(Imp EA, Faerie Fire, CoR), raid bosses can be brought down to around 100AC. That's a 24% increase in damage from just being fully sundered.

I think a couple things were wrong with the armor formula (see below). It doesn't change the fact that the incremental debuffs seem to be a good idea, you still don't hit 0 on the mobs that were tested. Even though 500 armor doesn't sound like much, it has big dps implications .

The attacker is level 60 (that'd be us) so the 5750 should be 5500. Second, sunder and faerie fire need to factored into the formula. So the mitigation formula of AC/[AC + (85*level + 400)] is actually (AC-debuffs)/[AC - debuffs + (85*level + 400)] when you solve for the AC.

If I correct for that, I get around 4k armor (3,686 to be exact, check my math, that seems really low). That also means you probably wouldn't get a lot of mileage from having the ability to stack expose armor and sunder armor along with CoR, and Faerie Fire. You'd hit 0 armor with only the first 2-3 debuffs for most of these mobs, which would only free up one debuff slot at most.