If immolate doesn't do more damage than shadowbolt usually, wouldn't it still be lower damage per cast time even if you had to move(unless of course you had to move in 1.5 seconds, and not have time for a 2.5)? Did I misunderstand something here?
You're correct. Damage per cast time compares total damage, moving or not.
If immolate doesn't do more damage than shadowbolt usually, wouldn't it still be lower damage per cast time even if you had to move(unless of course you had to move in 1.5 seconds, and not have time for a 2.5)? Did I misunderstand something here?
Basically I'll just judge on how long I need to move, you can find yourself running for 10+ seconds on Archimonde and also how long I have to cast something. If a fire trail is coming towards me I might not have time for a bolt.
But to be perfectly honest, I will stick with bolts 99.999% of the time. I think Archimonde might be the only fight I will consider immolate.
Hi there, I'm a 0/21/40 specced warlock whos guild is now about halfway through hyjal / bt, and I am wondering why I see so many destro locks heavily stacking crit instead of damage. My own personal math, and the excel spreadsheet referenced eariler in thread both indicate that raw +dmg is superior to stack. With that said, I am always within the top 3 dps in my guild, but am starting to have doubts as I see many high end warlocks with +10 spell crit gems in every slot. Could somebody clear this up for me, and possibly critique my gear?
I clearly did more shadowbolts per fight than the other warlocks. They are all also 0/21/40 specced for shadowbolts as well. Cinnabun is wearing 4/5 Tier 6, and you can armory me for my gear. (passive 145 haste total). Cinnabun also does not wear any +Haste currently. Twp used to be affliction but switched to Destro and Lafakad has been destro for a while, but was geared for Fire.
With 4/5 Tier 6, the relentless meta, and the amount of haste I have, I assume it would be the best absolute combo for doing damage.
For some of the fights I am using my Imp for blood pact, not having anymore affliction locks hurts some utility and my damage of course. My assigned curse is Reck.
The mages are arcane spec, sans sereey who is using 4/5 Tier 6 and 10/48/3.
Because of the need for malediction, blood pact, etc, I'm going to try a new spec/setup for patch 2.2. I'll inform you later on the details after I find that it's working out.
I noticed you and your guild leader (Miaki) are both extremely well geared 'locks, while you're destruction and Miaki is Affliction. I'm curious as to how you two do on the meters compared to each other, and how the two specs perform with tier 6 gear where the hit cap is guaranteed to be reached compared to tier 5 gear in your experience. Thanks.
I noticed you and your guild leader (Miaki) are both extremely well geared 'locks, while you're destruction and Miaki is Affliction. I'm curious as to how you two do on the meters compared to each other, and how the two specs perform with tier 6 gear where the hit cap is guaranteed to be reached compared to tier 5 gear in your experience. Thanks.
Hard to say lately, up until last week we've only had 2 warlocks guilded that raided (we've never been able to recruit a solid 3rd or 4th warlock). As a result he sometimes gets to be in the tank group and not get a spriest or shaman totems (since he has imp out all the time). I've also been raiding on my warrior to pickup all the rotting tank gear since we had a tank shortage too...
I have no solid numbers or recent screenshots (i'll try and find a WWS, or at least get a WWS for next week) but the 0/21/40 spec is better for damage output and the reason I've been staying with it.
The other issue is that with 3 warlock setup, he's always going to do the damage curse while me and the other app will do COS/COE, but COA can be filtered out or substracted.
I'll get some WWS reports for you next week for sure (since I'm interested myself).
The other issue is that with 3 warlock setup, he's always going to do the damage curse while me and the other app will do COS/COE, but COA can be filtered out or substracted.
Since you rarely have 3 Locks, I see that you would not use Reck much. However, you would use a damage curse over Reck?
For some encounters like Mother it is a bad idea and I have little experience with Black Temple to see if it is worth it on the other encounters, but I know that is a good curse on the first two bosses in Hyjal.
Correct me if I am wrong, but in a raid setting that has primarily shadow destro locks, shadow priests, arcane mages and boomkins, wouldn't CoE become a bit obsolete and thereby free up a curse assignment and allow other locks to put up CoD/CoA instead? At what point are you determining that the cost of CoE (in your own DPS) isn't worth the benefit to the raid?
Correct me if I am wrong, but in a raid setting that has primarily shadow destro locks, shadow priests, arcane mages and boomkins, wouldn't CoE become a bit obsolete and thereby free up a curse assignment and allow other locks to put up CoD/CoA instead? At what point are you determining that the cost of CoE (in your own DPS) isn't worth the benefit to the raid?
Fire mages do more damage, and we have a few frost mages for Illidan, so we run COE. Of course if there isn't a fire/frost mage in the raid we'll put up COA/COD.
Thanks for a great board. Long time reader, first time poster.
Trying to confirm my personal feelings towards immolate. Is this a totally obsolete spell in endgame raiding today unless you don't run shadowpriests and always bring firemages to your raids? Immolate followed by conflagrate sure is great burstdamage when you need it but this far (working on Kael'thas Sunstrider) it doesn't feel worthwhile compared to Nether Protection, Soul Leech and Cataclysm. Upholding the Improved Shadowbolt debuff seems alot more important for raiddps than personal dps on sw_stats or am I just blabbering?
Hard to say lately, up until last week we've only had 2 warlocks guilded that raided (we've never been able to recruit a solid 3rd or 4th warlock). As a result he sometimes gets to be in the tank group and not get a spriest or shaman totems (since he has imp out all the time). I've also been raiding on my warrior to pickup all the rotting tank gear since we had a tank shortage too...
I have no solid numbers or recent screenshots (i'll try and find a WWS, or at least get a WWS for next week) but the 0/21/40 spec is better for damage output and the reason I've been staying with it.
The other issue is that with 3 warlock setup, he's always going to do the damage curse while me and the other app will do COS/COE, but COA can be filtered out or substracted.
I'll get some WWS reports for you next week for sure (since I'm interested myself).
Thanks for the quick response. We're working our way through hyjal/bt now. In ssc/tk, I was easily 1st in dps as affliction, but now our destro locks are catching up. This is partly due to, as you said, them getting shaman totems/spriests and other dps group buffs while I'm always mt imp.
I'd appreciate any WWS reports, and thanks again for your fast response.
edit: I suppose my case is also a bit different as you said you've only had 2 guilded locks that raid, while we raid with a minimum of 3 locks, sometimes 5, therefore increasing ISB uptime, letting myself and the other affliction lock see a nice dps bonus.
Since you rarely have 3 Locks, I see that you would not use Reck much. However, you would use a damage curse over Reck?
For some encounters like Mother it is a bad idea and I have little experience with Black Temple to see if it is worth it on the other encounters, but I know that is a good curse on the first two bosses in Hyjal.
My guild uses recklessness on Gorefiend, RoS, and Illidan in BT (so not on Council, Mother, Najentus, Supremus, or Bloodboil). We use recklessness on every Hyjal boss except Azgalor. We typically raid with 3 Warlocks so it's usually CoS, CoE, CoRex for my guild, personally.
Immolate takes more than you would reasonably expect to go out of style, as it turns out. For myself, with 300 extra shadow damage, a shadow priest, and no improved sorch it finally turned into a wash. It wasn't even the damage, it's still like 4 damage per cast time higher than shadowbolt--it was the extra time I spent lifetapping that closed the gap. This difference changes when I put elemental shaman buffs into the spreadsheet though =/.
It's a DoT, it's got all the advantages of a DoT, it's just not a shadow DoT. I'm actually giving up a few theoretical dps in raid situations by dropping it, but it tightens up my DoT management so I think it's worth it.
Anyways, long story short there's no real way to tell without running spreadsheets and parsing WWS.
Regarding Curse of Recklessness, there is one caution I will always point out to anyone when using it: mobs have different AP->DPS formulas. All players have a 14:1 base ratio, for MAP and RAP, but you will note that no warlock demon does, and furthermore that they have their own unique ratios. I forget exact numbers atm, I think 28:1 for the voidwalker and 10:1 for the sexybus, but the point is: you can't actually run dps calculations on how CoR effects your tank without some statistical samplings. I would recomend Demo Shout for such samplings, not CoR.
That said, I've never personally seen a fight where it noticeably impacted the tank, and armor penetration may very well end up being the Next Big Thing.
Plus every time immolate crits, you will be thinking to yourself "If I had cast sbolt instead, that would be an ISB proc!"
Has anyone managed to convince their mages to spec arcane so CoEl becomes a thing of the past?
Just because Immolate crit, that does not mean SB would have crit (since the roll for crits is different each time you cast).
Fire spec may be less theoretical dps, however being a Fire Mage is much easier than Arcane to play (the spell cycle [Scorch to 5 then spam Fireball] plus it is much harder to go OOM).
Plus if CoE is up, it gives you a reason to cast Immolate .
A note on dps, I rearranged my DoTimer to show the timers just above my castbar (before it was at the top of the screen with castbar on the bottom) and my dps went up since I didn't have to move my eyes, it is too bad I never thought of changing position before today.
Picking a topic that hasn't been discussed in some time...
It seems that most warlocks I've encountered in game have regarded the 4-piece T4 bonus as largely worthless. There was talk about this in the past but it was laid to rest relatively quickly (regarded as a minimal dps improvement) before any real numbers were presented. They were mostly generalizations:
"The T4 / 4-piece bonus gives quite a ridiculous global dps increase (less than 1%), so i only recommand to get the 2 part bonus and to keep the crafted set for the other slots."
"I'm showing more than 1% though, I'd say more than 1.5% but less than 2% fully buffed."
I decided to run the numbers myself.
I don't have the set so it's something that I have to make a few assumptions about.. those assumptions are:
1. The base mana cost of the spell does not change (seems obvious but..)
2. The overall damage of corruption is increased by a ratio of 21/18.
3. The direct damage portion of immolate does not change but the dot portion of the spell is increased by a ratio of 18/15.
I used the spreadsheet to compare the set bonus vs. not having the set bonus. I did this by changing the duration of the spell and adding a damage multiplier for corruption and immolate of 1.16667 and 1.2 (respectively). I checked my work by confirming that after all calculations the damage per tick for each effect did not change, only the number of ticks.
The improvement of the t4 4-piece set should be substantial because it improves damage in multiple ways:
1. The cast time of the spell does not change so the damage per cast time improves by a significant margin.. 1.2x in the case of corruption. For long duration warlock DPS, damage per cast time is king.
2. The spells do not need to be cast as often to keep the rotation going so fewer total spells (of the improved types) need to be cast over the duration of a fight. Fewer castings mean less mana spent over the duration of the fight as well as less time lost to lag when recasting spells.
3. Since fewer corruption and immolate spells are being cast, the time that used to be used to refresh those spells can be spent casting shadowbolts instead (which may increase the uptime of imp. shadowbolt).
For specs with a long duration curse, a nuke, and these two dots.. these improvements should be significant.
My warlock has the following specs before talents and buffs: 1043 shadow, 863 fire, 10.49% crit, 15.77% hit (0/0 suppression), and 0% spell haste. I'm a 0/21/40 shadow destro lock with no points in improved immolate or emberstorm and 3/5 cataclysm. I assume a 2.0s delay to recast DoTs and 0.2 sec of lag. I used an arbitrary 600 second duration for my simulated fight. The mob is 3 levels above me. I used the raid method of determining ISB duration. My character benefits from the 2-piece T4 in both examples as well as the icon trinket and quag's eye (I forgot to remove the trinkets before running the numbers.. but the trinkets are constant between trials).
Taking a look at corruption since it's simpler:
Without the voidheart 4-piece bonus my corruption does 3306 per casting. At 29.78 castings over the period, the total damage of corruption amounts to 98,446 at the cost of 11,018 mana.
With the voidheart 4-piece bonus, my corruption does 3857 per casting. At 25.92 castings over the period, the total damage for the fight is 99,975 damage utilizing 9590.4 mana.
The total damage over the period for corruption is largely unchanged. However, 4 piece t4 saves ~1500 mana (a lifetap) and about 4 castings of corruption. These are resources (both mana and time) that can otherwise be spent on shadowbolts.
Looking at the bigger picture, the following are major statistics about each configuration (with and without the 4-piece bonus):
So the ratio of damage of each spell doesn't change much but the number of castings of immolate and corruption are reduced by a non-trivial amount. The saved resources for each of these spells are dumped directly into shadowbolt which increases overall damage.
For me 4-piece tier 4 represents a 37 dps increase (+3.1% overall), which with my current setup is equivalent to 51 spell damage. It should also be noted that the benefit of this effect scales well with additional spell damage (I'm not sure how it scales with additional crit).
I'm guessing that the value of the effect is reduced for people with affliction spec since damage is spread across more spells.. 2/5 or 2/6 damage spells are improved instead of 2/3 for non-affliction specs.
The value may be significant for demonologists who have more general +damage buffs than destruction (SL/MD vs. DS).
I found that even with the great disparity between my shadow damage and fire damage, lack of fire improving talents, and sacrificing the succy for additional shadow damage.. I still saw significant gains from using immolate with 4-piece T4 where I did not see a dps improvement from using immolate without the 4-piece T4. 4-piece t4 with immolate is 1208 dps, without immolate it's 1191 dps. However, even without using immolate, the 4-piece bonus improves overall dps by 20 for my character.. a value I consider significant.
I can understand how the 4-piece T4 bonus may be subpar for players deeper in the raid content. For players raiding at the T4 level.. I believe the 4-piece bonus is a significant improvement in dps.
Now I worry that I may have done something terribly wrong in my math...
I've been intensely looking over Nyarlathotep's Felguard Information concerning Raid DPS, but I haven't found anything listing whether or not Pet's gain a percentage of the master's +Spell Hit...
Basically my question is, can I value +Spell Hit when I'm spec'ed as Felguard as much as when I'm UA, or say DSac/SnF? I checked Nyar's Armory, and he is sitting at only 155 hit, and I was wondering maybe that's the gear he wears for trash killing, etc.
Can I get a clarification if +Spell Hit is as valuable to a 1/41/19 Warlock like it is to a 42/1/18(1Pt. Healthstone for stacking stones in raid :P) I haven't actually spec'ed for it yet, but I'm very, very interested.
Idk I think that the immolate/corruption spells don't get an increased modifier from the t4 bonus though, just an extra tick at whatever damage they were ticking at before, or an increased duration if you like.
Now I've only read 5 or 6 of this Epic 61 pages thread, so forgive me if this has already been mentioned before.
My former Warlock main was regularly kicking out about 1.2k DPS or higher in lvl 70 blues +FSW set. And my spec isn't affliction, is demo/ruin. Now I know in Gruul(which seems to be the most mentioned battle so far) you cant just stand there and nuke, and I'm not going to debate the utility power or UA or SM/ruin, but this is w/o(or at least, no more than one of the following) and Ele shaman, boomkin, shadow priest or 13% CoS lock. Can any better geared+more experienced Locks who have tried this spec in Real End game confirm this builds capabilities.
Battle pattern is roughly this: CoS, trinket, coruption, imolate, SB,SB (reapplying DoT's +trinket when applicable, until I estimate less than 15second left of the battle)
Now a lot depends on how soon I see the ISB defbuff, and whether or not it stays up for the full battle (I have about 30% crit chance, so it often does) if it does, shadow bolts do roughly 2.2k (between 1.9-2.5) which is about 900 DPS, with crits adding +30%, the succubus does her part, and corruption makes up the rest.
Idk I think that the immolate/corruption spells don't get an increased modifier from the t4 bonus though, just an extra tick at whatever damage they were ticking at before, or an increased duration if you like.
This is correct. Four piece T4 bonus works exactly like a Shadow Priest's Improved SW:P. Each tick is the same amount, but you get an extra tick. All four piece T4 does for a warlock is save cast time by reducing the frequency of Immolate/Corruption re-applications. And, actually, I'd argue that if you are affliction, the twenty-one second corruption may be nearly a DPS decrease on certain fights as you can no longer cast UA-->Corruption to easily manage the up-time of both DOTs. Instead, you have to manage a 15, 18, and 21 second DOT.
I've been intensely looking over Nyarlathotep's Felguard Information concerning Raid DPS, but I haven't found anything listing whether or not Pet's gain a percentage of the master's +Spell Hit...
Basically my question is, can I value +Spell Hit when I'm spec'ed as Felguard as much as when I'm UA, or say DSac/SnF? I checked Nyar's Armory, and he is sitting at only 155 hit, and I was wondering maybe that's the gear he wears for trash killing, etc.
Can I get a clarification if +Spell Hit is as valuable to a 1/41/19 Warlock like it is to a 42/1/18(1Pt. Healthstone for stacking stones in raid :P) I haven't actually spec'ed for it yet, but I'm very, very interested.
Pet gets nothing from spellhit. Still you do 80% of the damage (20% from pet) and you need to max out spellhit. So no for pet, but build still needs it. Spelldamage seems to be powerful stats for felguard locks, haven't seen from L's spreadsheet, but I tried to simulate it with one of my own and especially with eye of mag, extra spelld amage seem to be easier to get if you consider other stuff (like dkp and what items are most wanted, etc).
Idk I think that the immolate/corruption spells don't get an increased modifier from the t4 bonus though, just an extra tick at whatever damage they were ticking at before, or an increased duration if you like.
Did you not read the part where I said, "I checked my work by confirming that after all calculations the damage per tick for each effect did not change, only the number of ticks."?
I recognize that it just increases the duration by 3 seconds but I believe this is quite an improvement for the reasons that I listed.
Originally Posted by Furio
I'd argue that if you are affliction, the twenty-one second corruption may be nearly a DPS decrease on certain fights as you can no longer cast UA-->Corruption to easily manage the up-time of both DOTs. Instead, you have to manage a 15, 18, and 21 second DOT.
Where does the 15 second dot come from? Remember that immolate is improved as well. Instead of having 15, 18, 18 (immo, UA, corr), you have 18, 18, 21 (immo, UA, corr). I do believe that the benefit of the effect is reduced for affliction locks for the reasons that I provided earlier, but I'd like to hear some firsthand knowledge of affliction locks managing their dot rotation with it.
Originally Posted by Furio
All four piece T4 does for a warlock is save cast time by reducing the frequency of Immolate/Corruption re-applications.
"All" that saving cast time does is effectively improve damage per cast time, reduce mana cost, reduce the effect of lag, and reduce damage lost to the delay of recasting dots.
I still fail to see why this set bonus is so undervalued.. I really think it's because people don't understand how the 3sec change affects a casting rotation.
08/30/07, 3:38 PM
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