Most effective warlock raid dps spec? - Page 8

christide · 07/28/06, 8:16 PM

Originally Posted by Erongg

I see a lot of garbage on the WoW boards about downranking being good for DPS in general because you don't need to take time to Life Tap, but with current levels of +dmg that isn't even close to being true.

This doesn't make sense to me. How do higher levels of +dmg make downranking worse? Shouldn't the opposite be true?

Quigon · 07/28/06, 8:25 PM

Originally Posted by bartolimu

The only problem is it gives up Improved Imp, which is a 30% increase to our buffing ability. That's a substantial hit. I suppose you could take Improved Imp and only 2/5 Shadow Mastery, but that's giving up 6% of your DPS. Is it worth that? Probably not for most encounters.

0.2% more raid dps vs 200 or so more HP on the main tank(s)?

balorina · 07/28/06, 11:31 PM

From my spreadsheet:
With my current gear (625 all, 645 shadow, 16.6% crit)
Target debuffs of COS, COE, and Fire Vulnerability only (typical for our guild, no shadow priest stuff)
Talents: Devastation, Ruin, Improved Immolate, Emberstorm (no Imp Searing Pain)

You basically did the same thing I did, but in reverse. You wore more shadow gear than fire gear, and you don't get improved searing pain (which according to most accounts 1% crit = 1% increase in dps thus 10% increase in searing pain damage). Take your gear, up searing pain's crits by 10% and I would be willing to bet searing pain equals if not surpasses shadowbolt in not only dps but dpm.

Oft the current topic of a viable raid spec, 7/8/36 gives you pretty much everything you need to be 'viable' and still maintain damage. Searing pain itself is viable in a few fights (namely patchwerk), but by all accounts it 'should' outdamage shadowbolt.

It is **NOTHING** like downranking, people don't seem to understand that.

--->Downranking shadowbolt does NOT make it crit 10% more (negating sm's bonus).
--->Downranking shadowbolt does NOT decrease it's cast time by 1 second (increasing it's dps).
--->Downranking shadowbolt does NOT give you a 20% vulnerability bonus due to mage debuffs (surpassing it's lower damage).

saramin · 07/28/06, 11:44 PM

Originally Posted by balorina

--->Downranking shadowbolt does NOT make it crit 10% more (negating sm's bonus).

10% crit is not +10% dps, it is +10% of your searing pains that would otherwise not have critted.

--->Downranking shadowbolt does NOT decrease it's cast time by 1 second (increasing it's dps).

Yup. Also, if searing pain was a 0.5 second cast your +dmg gear would magically scale better. Nevermind that things like math get in the way.

--->Downranking shadowbolt does NOT give you a 20% vulnerability bonus due to mage debuffs (surpassing it's lower damage).

You also lose out on improved shadowbolt, which is massive.

balorina · 07/29/06, 3:10 AM

Comparing 9/21/21 to 7/8/36 using the following assumptions:

All mana/5 is in effect (nightfin, brilliant mana oil, mageblood, mana potion, demonic rune, BoW, JoW, bracer enchant)
9/21/21 has 5 piece doomcaller
9/21/21 is using a felhunter sac
9/21/21 includes the 5/5 devastation, 5/5 cataclysm, ruin, 5/5 bane, 2/2 imp lifetap
7/8/36 includes 5/5 devastation, 5/5 cataclsym, ruin, 5/5 emberstorm, 5/5 imp searing pain, 2/2 imp lifetap
+600 all damage
No modifiers on the mob (CoE, CoS, etc.)
6600 mana
300 int
5% crit gear, 4% hit gear

We find that the following is true:

Rank 10 shadow bolt spam will sustain 393.79 DPS (165389.88 damage over 420 seconds)
Rank 6 searing pain spam will sustain 361.91 DPS (152004.24 damage over 420 seconds)

Factor in the following debuffs: CoS (10%), CoE(10%), Fire Vuln(15%) [although CoS should be dropped in favor of CoR, I'll give it to you]
Disregarding ISB because of its variable nature

SB: 181928.87 over 420 seconds (433.16 DPS)
SP: 190005.3 over 420 seconds (452.39 DPS)

balorina · 07/29/06, 3:15 AM

The above was from Abduhl of P4L, not balorina. I can't register an account, and I can't edit posts either apparently. Searing pain is the better spell on Patchwerk just because of the debuffs in use. Further, the fact that many warlocks are gearing out with +shadow instead of just +all shrouds the fact that searing pain is actually a good spell.

Hangman · 07/29/06, 3:43 AM

Balorina ,
you missed one of the best talents in game - improved shadowbolt. No one takes cataclysm intead of improved shadowbolt , people that have that spec take BOTH improved shadowbolt and cataclysm. With 23 points in destruction you dont miss anything.
All mages in my guild are frost , can you tell me how can I factor Fire Vuln. debuff. You are comparing VERY gimped shadow build ( LOL no improved shadow bolt) vs best possible and specific situation for fire damage. I am not even going to start that with that you will most likely will have corruption on too and improved shadowbolt you affect it too.

balorina · 07/29/06, 3:54 AM

Originally Posted by balorina

Factor in the following debuffs: CoS (10%), CoE(10%), Fire Vuln(15%) [although CoS should be dropped in favor of CoR, I'll give it to you]
Disregarding ISB because of its variable nature

I did not miss ISB. I chose not to factor it in. If you want you can tack on the additional 7% or 10% or however much you want and you'll find that SB and SP are still about on even grounds. Further, this is not a "specific" situation going on. Any guild with at least one fire mage will most likely have scorch up on the mob. Further, improved corruption is an asset of both builds. The damage cancels itself out on both sides of the equation and gives a net gain to neither.

I'd also like to take this time to point out that I made a mistake in my spreadsheet in where I inserted the emberstorm bonus into the equation. Correcting this yields the following:

SB: 393.79 DPS (165389.88 damage over 420 seconds)
SP: 377.83 DPS (158688.29 damage over 420 seconds)

Adding in the following debuffs: CoS (10%), CoE (10%), Fire Vuln (15%), and throwing in ISB just for kicks this time at a 10% SB increase (more than it's worth really)

SB: 472.54 DPS (198467.85 damage over 420 seconds)
SP: 472.29 DPS (198360.36 damage over 420 seconds)

Please bear in mind that the numbers for SB go down considerably if you do not have both doombringer 5/5. There is no similar decline to SP if you do not have a specific gear set. The difference is one fourth of one DPS in this situation.

Searing pain is, no matter how much you want to deny it, a viable spell to spam and spec for in the Patchwerk fight.

Once again, this is from Abduhl of P4L and not balorina.

Hangman · 07/29/06, 5:53 AM

Ok I dont want to sound like cocky guy and upset you but again for improved SB :)
additional damage from imp SB talent = 0.2 * (1 - ( 1 - crit chance)^4)
example - with a 20% crit chance : 0.2 * (1-0.75^4) = 11.8% extra damage
with ruin build and only 4 crits from gear + raid buffs I have 19,6% crit chance or at least thats what the theory craft mod tells and I believe it because after a full raid night ct_combatstats always read 20% give or take crit chance on shadowbolt.
3 corruption ticks at least during the 12sec of shadow vulnerability would be doing more dmg than the destrucion corrution ticking:)
I do admit , yes , SP is viable at patchwerk but SB wins due to doomcaller set and ISB.

balorina · 07/29/06, 6:33 AM

Originally Posted by Hangman

Ok I dont want to sound like cocky guy and upset you but again for improved SB :)
additional damage from imp SB talent = 0.2 * (1 - ( 1 - crit chance)^4)
example - with a 20% crit chance : 0.2 * (1-0.75^4) = 11.8% extra damage
with ruin build and only 4 crits from gear + raid buffs I have 19,6% crit chance or at least thats what the theory craft mod tells and I believe it because after a full raid night ct_combatstats always read 20% give or take crit chance on shadowbolt.
3 corruption ticks at least during the 12sec of shadow vulnerability would be doing more dmg than the destrucion corrution ticking:)
I do admit , yes , SP is viable at patchwerk but SB wins due to doomcaller set and ISB.

Okay, I don't want to sound like a cocky guy and upset you but I'm just going to go over this real quick:

In order for SB to even have a chance of beating SP in sustained DPS on Patchwerk you must have
1) cataclysm
2) ISB
3) sacced felhunter
4) 5/5 doomcaller

Even when you have all four of these you end up ON PAR with SP spam. The DPS difference between the two specs is so small that five seconds of lag anywhere in a 7 minute period will put the other spec on top.

Further, attempting to simplify the ISB talent into a formula like you provided is just plain wrong. You can't even begin to model ISB correctly without a firm background in probability theory, specifically conditional probability. Using a ^4 in the equation is unrealistic because other players take ticks off the proc also, so the 20% over 12 seconds is not guarenteed yours.

With a ruin build and only 4% crit from your gear you would have to have around 500 INT raid buffed to achieve the crit chance you're posting. It's not really that unbelievable that you're pushing 20% crit %.

3 corruption ticks during the 12 seconds of shadow vulnerability would have the shadow build's corruption damage up by 10% compared to the SP build's which is not significant if you begin to factor in the fact that the SP player will also be using immolate. The entire system can be reduced to a SP vs SB system or it can be into a model so complex that it would take a day just to write the spreadsheet for it. What matters is that in the end, SP and SB spam is comparable damage on Patchwerk with neither side decisively winning under ideal circumstances for both builds and with SP winning conclusively when the SB player is not using the most ideal of mana efficiency gear.

Darklocke · 07/29/06, 7:18 AM

I did a little math on paper here and these are the numbers I am getting.

SB=380 Mana-538 Damage
SP=168 Mana-240 Damage

Considering a mana bar of 6500 mana, you can cast approx 38 SP's, or 17 SB's. If you multiply it out you get 11,088 damage per mana bar with SP with all possible fire talents and 10,047 damage per mana bar with SM/Ruin. Less efficient but let's check DPS. Those 38 SP's take 57 seconds to cast (194.5 DPS). Those 17 SB's take 42.5 seconds to cast (236.4 DPS). This takes into account 0% crit (except the 10% crit SP talent) and both builds have their respective spell class boosted by 10%. This was the simplest I could make it for my own decision.

Next I decided to rate my Felheart gear vs my normal higher end DPS gear ( http://ctprofiles.net/214085 ) and see how much DPS each would do over 7 minutes of spamming SB. I included how big each mana bar is, how much mana per cast, and how much +dmg on each set. I have 368 dmg in full felheart. I have 527 dmg in my regular gear. Chance to crit wasn't factored in because there is only a little more than 1% difference. I also included lifetap time (15 seconds per- equiv of 10 lifetaps or so). DPS in Felheart comes out to be 223.45 over 7 minutes, while my regular gear pulls a whopping 227.06 DPS. LOL Upgrades? Makes a difference of about 3.5 DPS or 1,470 dmg over 7 minutes.

I didn't include things like Nightfall because it is very random at imes, even though it says 4%. My math may be screwed, I am tired but I did what I could as quickly and simply as I could at work in between stuff :P

balorina · 07/29/06, 10:41 AM

0.2 * (1 - ( 1 - crit chance)^4)

ISB is a variable, that is the problem. You will usually only get two shadowbolts out of it w/ two warlocks and the last is going to be gobbled up by either of you (probably the other since your SB procced it). Three warlocks and you'll get only one, with the last getting gobbled up by a random one of you. You would have to factor in the crit chance for all two-three warlocks to get a "substantive" figure for how often it will be up.

both builds have their respective spell class boosted by 10%.

The problem is you are not boosting searing pain by 15% for improved scorch. If your guild has no fire mages then it's a given that won't be up, but I think most mages realize that fire is superior to frost in pve now. You can even make the argument that the warlocks need fire mages too!

Darklocke · 07/29/06, 10:50 AM

Very interesting fact indeed. I need to see how much Searing Pain I can get away with next time in Naxx in that case. After thinking about it, wouldn't 15% of 194.5 be less than 30? If so then it looks like Shadowbolt still wins. I will just have to see what kind of DPS I pump out in real fights and leave this theorycraft behind. Imp scorch, how does it work? I should know but I don't.

Erongg · 07/29/06, 1:35 PM

I see a lot of garbage on the WoW boards about downranking being good for DPS in general because you don't need to take time to Life Tap, but with current levels of +dmg that isn't even close to being true.

This doesn't make sense to me. How do higher levels of +dmg make downranking worse? Shouldn't the opposite be true?

No, you read it backwards. Current levels of +dmg are too low to let you downrank and end up doing better damage over the course of a fight of reasonable length. Once you get to a few thousand +dmg, you're able to downrank and do more damage by spending less time Life Tapping.

Lethshyish · 07/29/06, 4:11 PM

Originally Posted by bartolimu

DS/MD stacking is, from what I hear, alive and well. The method to get it to work has changed slightly, but people are reporting getting the benefits on Test. Maybe it'll get fixed before it goes live. Maybe not.

SM/Ruin is, to me, the best warlock raid DPS spec because of the reasons stated before. It doesn't care what demon you have out (or if you have none). It's equally at home in the MT group or the caster group. The only problem is it gives up Improved Imp, which is a 30% increase to our buffing ability. That's a substantial hit. I suppose you could take Improved Imp and only 2/5 Shadow Mastery, but that's giving up 6% of your DPS. Is it worth that? Probably not for most encounters.

MD/Ruin is pretty neat too, but the loss of Improved Life Tap has more of an impact on long-term DPS than most people are willing to consider.

I agree.

Also for those wondering (sorry if someone said it already) Imp life tap is not a small increase in susitained dps, it gives 20% more mana and therefore 20% more damage output over the curse of a long fight, so it does a lot more then ruin for sustianed dps.

Even if Blizzard is slow to fix the demonic sac/MD exploit it IS an exploit and therefore a really shady way to play.

Nightfall is not a huge increase to average dps but it's still a couple percent, and seeing as how it's only 2 talent points a 2ish% increase is not bad at all. And sometimes you get a big string of procs that are very nice...

SM/Ruin also lets you max out surpression which is not a big increase to dps because it only affects affliction spells but it's still really nice to have.