Sigh... this thread is quickly degradating.

All that could be said here, was said already. Devs can stay with current system that makes 2-3 warlocks per raid optimal number and patch our DPS with set gear bonuses (seems like tier 3 bonus is worse in this respect compared to tier 2.5 though), or redefine our role in raid by either making our debuffs more meaningful (top issues - debuff slots problem, only 2-3 curses useful for raid, what to do when curse is up) or just make us better purple mages (top issues - mana efficiency, aggro).

PS. I come from the group that tries to utilize 5 representives of each class no matter min-max optimalization. But I'm inclined to roll BE paladin in TBC as I see it as perfect replacement for my raiding spot in most of the fights, switching to warlock if needed (read - "not that often").

I do think that warlocks could use some tweaks in PvE (I like the sound of lifetap changes, or a mechanic change to allow the use of dots) but I can't help shake the feeling the problem is not that warlock dps is that woeful, the problem seems to be that mages got too big a pve buff. The complaint of warlocks isn't that they feel threatened that hunters will take their raid spaces, but are concerned that mages are the better choice for raid spots (by a reasonable margin).

I played my alt mage the other day to help out in nax/aq40 and with my comedy zg gear I found myself out-damaging very well eq'ed warlocks, hunters and slack rogues.

So something has to change, but if warlocks get buffed to Mage lvl dps, then you can guarantee other classes will start to complain that there is no longer any room for them in the optimal raid make-up (hunters being the most likely candidate).

I'm going to jump on the "this thread sucks" bandwagon, seems fashionable. No top-DPS warlocks have come on stating all of:

1) What gear they have
2) What their strategy is to achieve such DPS
3) What mods (if any) they use to facilitate this
4) Whether they feel any aspect of their strategy is in the long term wrong or unsustainable (eg Succubus sac/res, constant PIs, flasking, piggybacking other warlocks Shadow Vuln, Shadow Weaving, you name it)

But hey, here's some screenshots of high DPS warlocks so I guess the class is fine and there is some L2P involved. Personally, I tire of the lack of engagement in PvE and have rerolled a warrior, that each class cannot be equally engaging while raiding is a shame, that's just my point of view.

Yes yes, people, we know this thread has started to go to the shitter. Instead of flaming and bitching about it, why don't you try to help us bring it back up to some semblance of usefulness?

In the interest of doing just that, I have done a bit of math using Sancus's data. I hope this will shed some light on what we've been saying in a way that you can understand, Sancus. Please believe me when I say I don't consider these calculations any more or less valid than your own conclusions from the data. I'm simply crunching the numbers you present as definitive evidence in an attempt to shed some light on our problem.

For the purposes of these calculations, let us assume a few things.
1. Patchwerk resists spells as a level 63. Anecdotal evidence from both Zibro and me can corroborate this, as we see 7-10% resist rates wearing between 5 and 8 spell hit. That is not proof, however. This merely allows us to count all Spell Hit as DPS upgrade, instead of wasted.
2. Vulturex has Ruin. Most raiding warlocks have it, so this is a reasonably safe assumption.
3. Player ping and response time were roughly equal. Freezes, lag spikes, and slow casting affected them approximately equally.


Halakarie: 705 DPS
Vulturex: 589 DPS: 83% of Halakarie's

Halakarie: 697 +damage, 10.65% crit, 9% hit
Vulturex: 720 +damage, 7.59% crit, 7% hit: 3.3% more +damage, 3.06% less crit, 2% less hit

That much hit/crit differential, assuming Ruin, means 5.06% lower DPS than Halakarie would get with the same amount of +damage. Since Vulturex has 3.3% more +damage gear, he should be doing in the neighborhood of 1.7% more DPS than Halakarie, all things being equal.

Instead, he's doing 17% less damage.

Some of that is because Shadow Bolt hits for less. This is fine, there's no reason SB should hit for as much as Fireball. Some of that is because of Ignite. Does anyone have reliable numbers on what percentage of their DPS rolling Ignites contribute for fire mages? I doubt it's 20% of their total. And remember, most warlocks keep Corruption up during combat as well, which would act as a sort of buffer against Ignite's skewing of numbers.

Whether you feel a ~15-20% differential in DPS is fair or not, Sancus, you need to acknowledge it exists in the case you're presenting. I await further information on specs (the numbers change somewhat if Vulturex lacks Ruin, for instance), differential buffs (which you say was not the case, aside from mana tide/stream), and other mitigating factors. In their absence I explain the DPS variance thus:

Life Tap tanks our DPS in endurance fights. Every time Vulturex hit the Life Tap button, he reduced his effective DPS. At 589 DPS, a 1.5 second cooldown costs 883.5 damage. Assuming the 5-piece Doomcaller bonus is a 15% reduction in the amount of lifetapping necessary, and assuming he was using the consumables I usually use and had approximately the same starting mana pool (Mageblood potion, Nightfin, use of Major Rejuvenation whenever cooldown finishes, around 6500 starting mana raid buffed), he was tapping about 17% of the fight - my usual is 20%.

What was the variance between mage DPS and warlock DPS? 17%. How much of the fight was Vulturex probably lifetapping for? 17%. Interesting, no?

Vulturex's gear was about 1.7% better from a DPS perspective. Yet if you remove the lifetap unconformity and assume he had enough mana to keep up, he still wouldn't be doing more damage than Halakarie, despite being better-geared. So no, removing the GCD on Lifetap would not render us tiny gods. It might make us somewhat better than we should be - I'm not really going to argue against that. But something really does need to be done to make us slightly more competitive with mages at DPS. Life Tap is the main thing that holds us back, and probably the easiest fix to make.

Hopefully the expansion will expand want Lifetap does (remove the global cooldown, increase the life/mana ratio or add an -aggro component to the spell).

The global cooldown removal would be nice, but that may be too powerful. I look forward to seeing want blizzard decides to do.

Not to be nitpicky...

But can this math be right? Without thinking too much about it, 3% crit and 2% hit would strike me as contributing much more to overall DPS than +23 damage. Do warlocks scale that much better damage wise via talents than fire mages? I haven't really examined the warlock talent trees, but it strikes me as unlikely.

A very interesting post overall, but in particular I'd like to focus on this area

At 33% crit (mine)

100*.67+150*.33+60*.33

out of 136.3 damage 20~ will be ignite or 14.7% being ignite.

From personal experiance, ignite contribution has been from 3% to 40% (on full boss kills) for me.

I'd say on average it seems around 25%~ of overall damage. 10~% more, which adds to around 12~% more overall damage for me, and maybe 8% if you account that some criticals from me or others did not recieve the ignite.

However, very likely the mage in question did not fireball 137 mana / second = 57540 mana spend~.

Cut in half because of regen, MoE/Jow?. Subtract 8000~ for base mana pool. We still have 20770 mana to go. Even mana gems/major mana's do not cover it.

Regen calc: 80/2 regen (Seems veeeery reasonable for a mage using fireball) still gets 40740 mana to spend. Quite too much.

Scorch however, 90/2 regen at 100/sec usage comes out to 19800 effective mana to spend, veeery reasonable.

So, while the mage gets an extra %dmg from ignite, we lose imp fireball dps. That seems to balance out bane. What the warlock should be doing is chugging those mana pots like mad as well!

patchwerk



http://img91.imageshack.us/my.php?image=2fb5.jpg

sm/ruin , 5/5 doomcaller - 7crit from gear (total of 19,4% with raid buffs/talents) ,7 hit , ~600 dmg with rune of the dawn
used 4 major mana pots and 2-3 bandages

ALL mages and locks without exeption had flasks and pots

improvements to be made :

- switch to DS felhunter / ruin build and do ALOT MORE DPS
- use demonic runes
- be in shaman group



I dont think warlock need more dmg I just want blizzard to tone down the skill needed to be doing nice dmg as warlock. Mage dmg comes 100% from one spell - frostbolt. While locks need to put alot more effort
I never had ANY trouble if i focus to come on top of dmg meter in
- MC all trash and bosses
- BWL all trash and some bosses*
- AQ20 all trash and all bosses
- AQ40 skeram , bug family , sartura(by a large margin) , fankriss , cthun , ouro, most of the trash
- Naxx - ALL TRASH (by a large margin) , anub , patchwerk ,grobolus,noth,**

had screen of the dmg meter of all trash and bosses i've fought so far but lost them. Havent lie of any of the things above.

I can compete on aoe vs mage just as good , just have to know where aoe is coming to equipt fetish
*was once top on chromagus meter , lucky shadow vuln. when fetish was up (2 of them :))
**learning heigan atm , i think if i get lucky i might end up on top there if a rogue die in the process :P

another down side is that you MUST have good tanks because you are an aggro machine :)

I dont know why you all talk about mage dps its usually fury warrior and rogues infront. Mage and warlock dps is pretty much the same.

Nitpick: In a raid setting, it's pretty safe to assume CoE and 5/5 Imp Scorch, which will boost the relative dps of Ignite by 25%. So, while raiding, Fire crits effectively do 225% damage of a normal hit, all of it being backloaded on Ignite, and 17.6% of your total damage will be Ignites (assuming no stacking).

Of course, ignoring stacking at a 33% crit rate is a bad idea. With that kind of crit rate, you have a ~10.89% chance of getting an extra Ignite tick if you're spamming Fireball.. Then, the expected damage would be:

100*0.67 + 150*0.33 + 75*0.2211 + 112.5*0.1089 = 145.3, out of which 28.8 is from Ignite, or 19.8%.

In a raid setting, it is expected that a Fire mage cadre wwhose members have crit rates of 33% would have more than this percentage of their damage come from Ignite due to Combustion, Combustion synchronization, the probability of getting higher stacked Ignites and the methods people use to extend Ignite dps at the expense of Fireballs (Scorches).

That's about as helpful as saying "warlocks are super PvE gimp buff plz." Are warlocks flawed? Yes, as a class they certainly are. They lack stackability in raids, and no matter what DoT and aggro management is going to be a problem for them.

At the same time, why is it hard to believe warlocks can do a very substantial amount of sustained damage? When a warlock (or two, now that we have a 2nd 5/5 DC lock) consistently clocks in the top 10 for Patchwerk kills (along with many other bosses) for us, then I see damage meters where warlocks are barely above Hunters, I think something is being done differently between raid groups and players.

Unfortunately I am quite advanced in terms of crit over everyone else. I can only count on two other people using fire spells, and they have quite a reduced chance of critting (28%/24%).

I think your overall ignite calculation is not completely acurate as I do not see where it accounts for a third ignite stacking, or the fact that the next ignite will only add one extra tic to the first crit:
100*.67*2+150*.33*2+90*.33*2+45*.1089 << extra tic = 298.3005 dmg total over2 casts, 64.3005 from ignite = 0.216% damage over two casts average. Hmm, anyone want to continue this line of reasoning or maybe make a convergant series/taylor aproximation of this ;P

And yes, nice catch on the fact that ignite gets the 25% bonus twice. Thats what I get for posting at work.

The difference is generally who is going to be on imp duty, and if they are getting heals on patchwerk, and if you are saving a bit of cash using Greater Dreamless Sleeps vs Major Rejuvenation Potions. Also, it matters how many other warlocks are in the raid to fight over the approximately 4 dot slots on the boss.

Without outside heals its about 40000 mana to spend in 6 or 7 minutes (depending how you pace the fight).

Health pool of 7500
Mana pool of 6500
Dreamless Sleep x2 = +4200 health and mana, and 24 seconds
Bandage x4 = +8000 health and 32 seconds
BOW @ 6 min = +2880 mana
DemonArmor = +1080 health
Lifetap x46 = -19504 health and +23414 mana, and 69 seconds

Health = 7500 + 4200 + 8000 + 1080 - 19504 = 1276 left over
Mana = 6500 + 4200 + 2880 + 23414 = 36994 to spend, with 1000 ish more coming from spirit during long lifetap cycles
125 seconds spend recovering health and mana, in a 6 minute fight, hey look its 33%


I am conflag speced and can spend exactly this amount of mana just doing Immolate + Searing Pain over a 6 minute fight. Its around theoretical 450 dps (subtract -10% for resists in real world conditions), and my Imp gets around 27 dps on top of that assuming I micromanage its mana recovery. I still switch to shadowbolt at 5% since it is higher dps but the mana drain is a lot stronger.


You can drop in Major Rejuv's instead of Dreamless Sleeps and save 22 seconds or so, but you get less overall mana to spend in more time (not a huge difference really).

My calculations do account for extra Ignite ticks as follows: you have a 0.33*0.33=0.1089 chance of critting two Fireballs in a row, which would be an Ignite that lasts for 3 ticks on the first Fireball. Your other crits (the 0.67*0.33=0.2211) would only have two Ignite ticks. If we normalize Fireball to 100, then each Ignite tick will do 150*0.2*1.25 = 37.5 damage.

As for a third Ignite, it's pretty insignificant. We can put an upper bound on the amount of extra damage as being 0.33*0.33*0.33*37.5 = 1.34, or a maximum percentage increase in your damage done of 0.9%. The actual increase is smaller, but I'm too lazy to do the real math, but as you can see, it's pretty small.

And yet there are 15 people between you and the next highest warlock. Do those other warlocks suck, then? Is it coincidence that those 15 people look to be all of the mages and rogues you brought to that fight in addition to the 2 DPS warriors? It also looks like you took 7 mages and 3 warlocks. Why not 5 and 5 if warlock and mage damage is about on par? Afterall, this fight eliminates one of our negatives as a DPS class, that being our high comparative aggro. It also lets us lifetap like crazy unafraid of random damage finishing us off or ending the bandage early.

I'm not knocking the fact that you can outdps those mages on that fight under those conditions, thats pretty cool. But that doesn't mean that the class is perfectly fine. Personally I don't care about doing mage DPS, they can come out ahead, but warlocks need something for raids to want more than 2. Yes you can take them and you wont be too bad off in most cases, but how is it fair that warlocks are getting raid spots just because the raid leader decided not to build the raid optimally? Every example I've seen has 1 or 2 warlocks competing with the other DPS classes (amidst a sea of blue, mind). Great, that covers the 2 warlocks you're gonna bring anyway, now find me a reason to include the locks that aren't up there.

Now I don't hate my class or think we're broken persay, but I definately think there are some things that should be done (and hell, even if we don't get boosted in any way, at least fix up the talent trees so we have some interesting choices to make besides what archeotype to choose). None of the anecdotal evidence I've seen changes my mind on that matter.

What Curse did you cast?
How many DoTs did you have up on Patchwerk?
Do you think you could have done nearly as much damage if you couldn't put up your DoTs?
What "effort" are you referring to? Pressing a second key for Corruption? Warlocks aren't complaining about having to press more than one button. The complaint is that once you have 5 Warlocks in the raid, all you can really do is click your Shadowbolt button. There simply isn't room for each Warlock to put up their DoTs.

I second that.

Your mages need to learn to play Hangman. It's not very hard to outdamage warlocks, and you´re naive if you think you can compete with a decent mage. Your class is pretty broken, face it :/

Well I guess I missed that then. Obviously they need to implement the rest of their debuff priority system, but they also need to fix your talent trees. Talents like improved soul drain, improved curse of weakness, improved spellstone... I mean wtf. All the life tapping is also ridiculous and even if the idea is cool, it's not really working in practic, partially because your dots gets bumped off.

But even if they weren't, you can't realistically have your dots on the boss when there's so many dpsers around, let alone with multiple warlocks.

Nah, I hope they overhaul all your talents and some core abilities in the BC. Something is terribly wrong if raiding with 2 warlocks is optimal when the game is supposed to be balanced for 5 of each class.

Maybe they could let CoA/corruption/agony/siphon life/immolate stack like ignite? and also allow you to put on one "passive" curse like CoE/CoS/CoR plus one "active" curse like CoA, making it two.

Coldskull ,
I its rank6 and I use that very seldom

Clantus ,
-Voest is a girl and I think she never played this kind of game before or many kinds at all. Her gear is 8/8 nemesis without a single enchant on it.
-Pastora Wasnt prepared with major mana pots and he is destruction build which is not the optimal you could have for this fight.
-People dont take more warlock because they are generaly underperforming because of the more skill involved and effort for playing this class and ppl are unskilled/lazy to do it.

Auphi ,
-Using doomcount addon , was recasting corruption , the second they do their last tick , so you could say they were up(corr,coa) 99,9% of the time and they were never kicked out. Dont have the screen but ct_combatstats showed 2/3 of the damage came from shadowbolt rest 1/3 from corr+coa. We didnt use CoR as you can see.
-i am reffering to "the effort" of recasting dots particulary on this fight(and most boss fights) while mages press one button. Lets be honest every dps class press roughly from one to three button in raid envinroment , so this "effort" the warlocks are doing actually comes as double or triple the work other dps classes are doing. Why warlock need to press 5 and be outperformed on their job by class which press one , but thats the chalenge and thats why I cant stop playing this class. If we speak about trash mages assist the main assist and start pressing the frostbolt key. While warlocks ... let me give an example. Firstly I cant outdmg the real good mages by doing only SB spam I need to dot the other mobs. So the example , deathknight wing - dont dot the deathknights because they fear the tank and will come and kill you if they manage to fear him :). Dotting the deathknight captains is ok. - there it is more knowledge about the mobs and game that I need so I can compete with mages. Also you need to know which mobs will last more than 15sec so putting corrtuption will be justified. - again more "effort". So as someone said I guess there is alot of l2p involved when talking for the warlock class.

Arch ,

I agree that on 7min straight forward nuking non stop without moving mages should outdmg me , may be I was lucky , may be they need to l2p. But on trash pulls where no AoE is involved warlocks out dps all other classes by alot !

patch 6% wipe rogues died first after they evasioned and then I was the first from ranged to die


patch 2% wipe same as 6% wipe


anub


noth


so I am satisfied with warlock dps but the amount of "maintanence" I need due to lifetap is just sad :(.
warlock is mage with the aggro , with the healing needed for him , without the aoe ! so all in all its kinda of broken yes :(

The results aren't that bad for being a warlock anyway. Do you constantly remind people to not put on the shitty dots (SW:P, hunter stings, forcing warriors to skip deep wounds) ?
And what gear are you using?

Hangman, you imply you were using CoA/Cor, and working hard to keep them up the majority of the fight. That's great, and it's clear that the work paid off. But would you be able to do just as well if I were in the raid, putting up my CoA and Corruption? What if Voest was just as steadfast about keeping up her DoTs? What if all your Warlocks were perfect about keeping their DoTs up? You wouldn't have near the kind of DPS you are posting because our DoTs would knock each other off.

Warlocks would be fine 'if' our DoTs would stick. When there are only one or two Warlocks actively DoTing, this isn't a problem. But when you bring a 'balanced' group of 5 Warlocks to your raid, none of them can play their class to the fullest becausea they're stepping on each others toes.

I know I sound like a broken record right now, but I can't fathom the class/raid design that forces a class to cannabilize each others potential.

Hangman's result for SM/Ruin is definetly impressive (yes, 9/21/21 or 7/21/23 would have better result using the same consumables) but I'm more concerned that such a mayor impact on warlock DPS got one gear set bonus, not any other aspect of the class. Having 5/5 Doomcaller and not having it means difference between being in top 10 or not. I'm sure that even after tier III becomes more common, many locks will keep 5/5 Doomcaller set because of that and will aim for 4/9 of Plagueheart only.

I'm not sure if any other DPS class relies so heavily on set bonues.

http://ctprofiles.net/2036015

as you can see there is alot of improvements (gearwise) to be made
Switching trinkets alot - those 2 and rune of the dawn , eye of the beast , eye of moam. Still dont have neltharion's tear :(.

pvp gear is the same but putting on fel infused leggings , nemesis boots for the 3pcs bonus and band of dark dominion