The crit cap for spells has always been considered the highest available crit rating you can attain with the current gear while being hit capped. If you manage to attain this level of gear, you're spell damage will be significantly high enough that Shadow Bolt will be your highest Damage Per Cast spell, therefore meaning that Corruption is a loss to cast, hence making this trinket useless at this level (currently this level of gear is very easy to attain with the current itemization).

Edit: Adding another reply as it was posted at the same time.

First, you should replace some of those +9 gems with Veiled Noble Topaz or even Great Dawnstone and get yourself at 202 hit rating ASAP (You'll see a huge difference when you're hit capped.)

At your current spell damage level, Shadow Bolt should have a higher Damage Per Cast than Immolate, meaning you could stop casting Immolate entirely. Conflag is basicly useless to cast for the same reason, Shadow Bolt would go more damage in the same time frame. I think this is one of your main dps loss's, in order to avoid this, you could try a different 21/40 spec, here's an example:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=AZbxszIbzZEt0tr0zhhi (Keep in mind, your fire spells are useless unless your shadow school is counterspelled, so it's a waste to put talents in fire.)

On non-transition fights, CoD+SB spam is your best bet. Otherwise time your CoD around the transitions (ie: Hydross, CoD at 50% stack each phase) or cast CoR (ie: Leo). If the boss add or mob dies in less than a minute then you can put CoA at the begining to get in some extra damage or use CoA/Lifetap rotations with your shadow bolt spam.

Hope this helps the confusion.

Your partial resist rate may be the cause, it looks like your penetration is weak. Check your logs and see how many partial/full resists you are getting. If it was my warlock, I'd resocket spell penetration into your blue sockets over stam gems. I try to keep 50 spell pen. You could also use 23 more hit rating to cap it out.

For your yellow and red sockets, it's better to use +4crit(hit) +5dmg hybrid gems in both. Ask yourself, what is better, +9 dmg gem and a +8 crit/hit gem, or x2 +4/+5 gems. You end up with more stats using hybrid gems.

Other than that, your crit rating is a little low for a destro warlock.

As far as spell rotation, as 0/21/40 you should be spamming shadow bolts and whatever curse you're assigned. The spreadsheet shows Immolate in rotation as a slight increase, but again you'll be losing imp s.bolt procs.

Not sure if you're using stop spell cast macros, but if you aren't, consider it. Look up "Quartz" it's an ace mod that lets you know how much spell lag you have client->server. By using a spellstopcasting macro you can essentially keep your s.bolt spam at 2.5 seconds instead of 2.5+lag time.

I thought boss's had an innate spell penetration that was unavoidable, making spell penetration useless in PvE. I've seen this in more than a couple places in our threads. I personally have +20 sp on my cloak because I have been too lazy to enchant Subtlety.

Edit: Just realised that's not my PvE gear in Armory.

I don't think I could advise using spell penetration gems whilst keeping a straight face.

Each their own, it improved my partial resists.

First of all thanks for your replies guys! I am using Quartz and stop casting macros to almost all my spells. And most probably tonight or tomorrow the latest i will be getting the Belt of blasting so that will boost my hit a bit. The hit issue will be resolved very soon (in a matter of days). And about Penetration, i thought that was only good for pvp. There's even a thread here that states that penetration is crap in pve, so i don't know about that.

Also i looked at my wws stats and usually my sbolts only miss about 1.7% of the time.

Here shef, you can compare to our raid last night if you want:

http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...&s=11890-12486

That's the Leo kill I think, I was using CoR. You can check the FLK and MT as well. I had 200 hit rating, 26.59 crit and 1165 sdmg (giving stats because my current armory isn't my raid gear.)

You actually did good, or better than me the least. On the same fight last night i ended 9th ..by a small difference..but still.

http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...&s=29603-30135

I have a specific question about spell hit rating for an affliction lock. I've read a lot of posts in these forums about the need for 16%, but I haven't seen a value placed on hit, specifically for an affliction lock. Let me explain:

I am currently 42/1/18 with 12% spell hit and 2 points in suppresion. That caps my affliction hit, but leaves me with 12% for my shadowbolts and soulshatter. I have looked at resocketing some gear but want to make sure I'm actually boosting dps as I'll lose some spell dmg to cap my hit at 16% for shadowbolts.

My armory:



http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/ch...igg&n=Creosote


If I resocket my 3 shadowweave pieces with +6 stam/+5 spell dmg gems and +4 hit/+5 Spell damage gems, the net change is:

+21 hit, +18 stam, -24 spell damage.


If I put full +8 hit gems instead of the 4/5 gems, it'd be:

+30 hit, -39 spell dmg


With the second option, I will move up to 179 spell hit, still short of the 16%. Would you suggest resocketing some of the other gear as well to get the last 20 points? I know I'll free up 2 talent points, I just want to make sure the loss of spell damage is justified by resocketing.

Thanks in advance for your opinions.

If that were true I'd never see partial resists, but I have, and we do use CoS/CoE. The point is, I get less partials now including curses then when I did without any penetration including curses.

Somehow I dont believe spell pen is completely useless.

If this is true then it shatters a lot of accepted knowledge with regards to resistances and spell penetration. But before anyone believes it some more substance filled evidence will need to be provided other than "I think I get less of x, therefore y is true."

In my humble opinion partial resists will not be enough to warrant socketing penetration at any point in the current game. The cloak enchant sure since the multiplicative nature of subtlety is definitely not worth as much as it used to be for horde (now that we have bos). For reference here is a vw kill wws. The mitigation of my spells adds up to a relatively small amount. In comparison if i had failed to hit 2 of my shadowbolts it would have been equal to the mitigated damage through partial resist that my shadowbolts received during the whole encounter. So in regards to socketing hit vs penetration (if you are not at cap) hit wins. I would highly suspect that crit would come out on top vs penetration if you are hit capped as well.

wws: http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report...&m&s=8421-8944

You have very solid gear to start with. The only thing I would recommend you to change is to put two +9's in that Girdle of Ruination and adjust your suppression accordingly if needed. It's not really a big change but simply a going all out +dmg factor, you should be able to pull some very interesting numbers with that set.

I also noticed that you had Imp CoA and Mal, you should talk with your other locks and free up those 2 points if you want to be a Mal lock. If you follow my recommendation above, you could put one of those CoA points in Suppression (to counter the -8 hit) and the other in Imp Imp or Imp HS (however you coordinate your Imp HS's with your other warlocks.)

Hope this helps!

It's fine, I stated what I believe. You dont have to accept it. Although I haven't seen anything other than "I think x is useless because of y thread" where people haven't produced z evidence otherwise either. I saw nothing but pure theorycraft in that thread. Word of mouth. Perhaps I'm wrong and didn't see the actual evidence in there among all the theory. By the way, theories are just that until found true. If it's a theory then it hasn't been fully proven yet.

Blue sockets are horrible when you want the socket bonus, I choose crit/pene gems over stam/dmg gems because I do see less partials with some penetration. Why not put resist or armor enchants on your cloak then if penetration is useless?

I dont have any logs on file to back it up, but neither do you. If you would like to hound me further with omg you're wrong because someone else in some other thread said so, take it to pm's. Until the theory has been proven it'll just be back and forth bantering. I'll refrain from further "touchy" subjects.

quick question: what settings do you guys use with Quartz? I've tried both settings as far as where the lag appears and don't like either but am wondering which is more efficient (referring to whether the lag is built into the beginning or end of the bar...)

and...how do you utilize it? like if the lag is in the front of the bar do u just wait for the bar to clear out before you go to the next spell or do you "queue" up the next spell before that???

ok last thing...there is a conditional macro that allows you to only cast a drain life if there isn't another channeled spell being cast... couldn't that be done with normal spells, making a /stopcasting macro spammable (because I like to spam click in big fights cuz it feels better..lol silly I know but hey it just feels more intense when you slam the hell outta a key instead of precisely trying to time the crap)

-Shag

Yes they do, the WWS parses ARE logs and they DO back up the theory that spell penetration is useless for PvE by demonstrating that the presence of locks casting CoS and CoE on a boss has no statistically significant effect on the rate of partial resists for boss mobs.

It is a fact that you will see partial resists against bosses and it is also a fact that these resists, with the exception of supremus, are not mitigatable via CoS, CoE, or spell penetration.

Again, if you want to claim that you see fewer partials with spell penetration than you do without then post some actual evidence that points to this because the current logs posted on WWS appear to indicate the contrary.

If for your spec 1 hit is > 1 dmg, and you have the choice if to socket +8 gems instead of +9 gems in some of your gear or replace twice as many +9 gems to 4 hit 5 dam gems, the best option should be obvious. 2 gems of 4 hit 5 damage give 8 hit 10 damage while 1x8 hit + 1x9dmg give 8 hit and 9 dmg... Same sockets less dmg.
If the dmg rating loss is worth it for upping your hit for affliction can probably be found on one of the various spreadsheets around, or you could make your own ;p The actual ratios are also slightly dependant on current gear so it's really best to use a spreadsheet rather than asking on forums for how much of which stat is better.

It was never hit v/s penetration. I just recommended penetration for blue sockets. Moreover I use crit/pene gems.

According to your shadow bolts, 11 out of 54 hits were partially resisted, but you aren't concerned? Going on, 25 ticks out of 139 for corruption was partially resisted. UA was 23 ticks out of 130.

I assume the raid was using CoS/CoE.

Now.. I know for a fact I've never had 11 out 54 s.bolts partially resist with 50 spell pen. I dont need a glorified log to see partials, I can see it realtime. I know for a fact I'm not seeing 1 bolt out of 5 getting partially resisted. Total damage partially resisted for all your spells was approx 21,000 damage. So I wouldn't say penetration is useless.

You have a point with penetration possibly not being worth the trade off for blue damage gems, but I wouldn't say it's completely useless like others have stated in this thread.

Looks like Nikteus swapped in a ton of hit rating for this, as the miss % on his shadowbolts is down several orders of magnitude -- good. You all still need to cap though, but I think you get the general jist.

DoT uptime is significantly better, but stands to improve to varying degrees. I think you get this though. If you want to calculate the uptime yourself, just take the number of DoT ticks, and multiply by the tick frequency (e.g., Corr: 90 dots x 3 sec (x dmg every 3 seconds for corruption) = 270 seconds of corruption --> 4:30 of uptime, out of a 7 minute fight, so you're missing a lot of ticks).

Megz appears to be using CoA constantly -- drop this and use CoD. I see CoA from time to time in your other logs, but I assume there's some context behind this that I'm missing (all the mages died, so drop CoE? Dunno). Fix this and Megz should have all the affliction execution down.

This seems dubious to me.

I vaguely recall trying to simulate these scenarios using the warlock dps spreadsheet (http://www.leulier.com/).

Dropping immolation however, or rather, creating a configuration of gear that brought shadowbolts damage per cast time over immolation was impossible (even doing crazy stuff like implementing 2500 shadow damage and 2000 fire damage) for me. Perhaps I made a mistake.

Show me a log(since I dont have one) of a warlock with 50 penetration that shows the same amount of partially resisted spells as someone without 50 penetration on the same fight.

Do that proof, and then I'll be satisfied with the fact penetration does nothing in PvE. I'll drop all the penetration on the gear I have if proven true. I dont mind being wrong, but prove it first.

I really depends how much of the damage was resisted, not how many. According to bliz's official site, 50 resistance against level 50, which is known to be qual to 70 resist against level 70, as 1:3 ratio of 50% resists to 25% resists, and it goes up as resistance goes up, meaning at the low theorycrafted value of 24 resistnace for a boss, less than 1/4 of the partials will be 50%, rest will be 25%.

So let's estimate it as if 3 of those shadowbolts got 50% resist, and 8 got 25% resist:
(8X0.25+3X0.5)/54=6.5% damage reduction. 24 resistance based on what known until today against a lvl70 leads to 24/(70X5) X 0.75 = 5% resistnace. while this doesn't prove the theory as correct, your stats from WWS match the theory that says bosses have 24 base unmitigateable resistance. Of course to get real results you will have to repeat both tests with once with no penetration and one with extreme amount of penetration, and in both get a much bigger sample and how big the partial resistances were, then calculate in a similar manner to what I did and see if you actually get a difference in the damage reduction.

I remember using glock in the past and it showed what it was supposed to - showing bosses as if they had base resistance of 24+75 from CoE+10 from arcane sublenty (pre-BC), as glock couldn't tell if the mob had resistances before those were taken into account or not. So it had been tested (by more than just me of course) that bosses have a minimum of 24 resistance and never more than 24+75+10, which makes penetration do nothing. Of course there were exceptions to this but most of the bosses follow this rule of penetration being useless afaik. Worth testing still, but I doubt you'll get different results if you really test how much damage is being mitigated.

In the essence of killing monsters, casting a shadowbolt > immolate for 0/21/40 destro.

Personal dps might be slightly higher, maybe not. Depends on how much isb uptime the other warlocks create. I do know if I casted an immolate the other shadow dpsers will definately not be getting more shadow dmg from me for that specific cast.

Please remember the spreadsheet does not include a full raid scenario. (Since we're being technical today, you could have also found out this information by using the search button)