Is my math correct for this nightfall/suppression analysis?

Suppression vs. +hit and nightfall is an interesting discussion.

Nightfall procs will save you 1 second over a normal cast with bane.

I'm going to assume that drain life usage in a raid setting is negligable. Corruption gives a 4% chance per tick for a shadow trance. {(60/3)*.04}=.8, or .8 AvgPPM. Assuming optimal corruption uptime and trance usage, you're looking at an average of 4 procs every 5 minutes with one corruption target, scaling a bit less than linearly with additional targets (the nonlinear scaling is due to the probability of a tranc procing before a previous trance is used). So every 5 minutes you get an extra 4 seconds of damage. Assuming 2000 damage shadowbolts, an extra 4 seconds translates into 3200 damage or 10.6DPS over those 5 minutes per corruption. (Additional value is placed on the increased ISB uptime, but I'm not sure how to model that.)

Each point of suppression is worth 25.2 affliction-specific +hit rating. If we assume +shadow and +hit rating to have equal itemization values per point, you "lose" 50.4 shadow damage to attain nightfall (assuming that you would otherwise stop stacking +hit after reaching your affliction cap. This can be argued due to the .2-.35 coefficient on destruction +hit, depending on your %destruction damage.).

I'm not sure how 50.4 damage stacks up against 10.6 DPS per target, but it's food for thought.

Your math is way off, I've had back to back to back procs on a single target. So thats three procs with just one corruption cast.

Also are you assuming the player has zero hit? If so then you really cant state 4 secs equals 3200 damage due to not being hit capped on the destro side. Even as affliction ~30% of your damage comes from bolt spams and suppression doesnt help you there.

I do not believe its as black and white as your math makes it seem. Too many factors not taken into account IMO.

I'm trying to find the average impact and tradeoffs. For every time you get back-to-back nightfalls, there's going to be a minute with no procs. On average, you should get .8 PPM.

I'm looking at a hypothetical player that is affected by points in suppression. For example, a player with +6% hit and 5/5 suppression will be hit capped for affliction spells. Or 10% and 3/5. An aff lock will get more use out of +hit before being aff capped than after; +hit over the cap only affects destruction spells. A player with 202 +hit won't notice points in suppression either way, but any players below that point make a tradeoff when points are moved out of suppression.

I'm only going for a rough model; there are too many factors for anything more than an approximation.

One note about Nightfall (and Backlash), is when you get either of those procs, it will eat the focus buff (from the MSD meta).


Assuming you needed the affliction hit and accounting for focus/nightfall, Nightfall even with suppression point for point, ignoring focus Nightfall is better.

What build is choosing between suppression points and nightfall points? There is a bit more to compare. Without getting into the complexities of all the math, I'd think it'd really just come down to preference, speed of gear upgrades, and willingness to respec after each upgrade.

I haven't seen anything specifically on this, so forgive me if I overlooked it and it's been answered already, a link would be helpful if that ends up being the case.

So, quick question. I'm currently fire destro (I know it's not the best for DPS, but I enjoy it, plus I already have the spellfire set done :x) wearing spellfire, and 2 of my Tier 4: shoulders and helm. We're starting to get into TK and SSC finally so T5 is becoming available. My first possible tier 5 is the tier 5 shoulders. Is it worth giving up the T4 2 piece bonus for tier 5 shoulders?

What brought about this line of inquiry was thoughts about the conventional wisdom of maxing out +hit and then moving your points out of suppression. It seems like a fairly large itemization tradeoff (+hit has weakened returns past the affliction cap) and raised the question "where would these extra points go?" One suggestion was nightfall, so I crunched some fast math on the tradeoff. With later gear it looks as if +hit is much easier to come by, but at an introductory 70 position it's a fairly large trade-off.

I wouldn't replace the bonus until you have upgrades for both pieces, perhaps VR's hat and t5 shoulders.

Honestly, once you have the 2PC T5 set bonus, and assuming you actually keep good uptime with damage, the pet can just eat whirlwinds and you'll be fine. Make sure Paladins are buffing it with Kings and that it has FULL raid buffs. I never have issues with him dying, at all. Just make sure between submerges you toss him 2-3 ticks of Health Funnel if he's low.

I was perusing the mage thread a few minutes ago, and they all seem to be ga-ga over [Mystical Skyfire Diamond] and how it's able to proc on every tick of AM. So, this got me thinking: would the same thing work for Drain Life in an affliction build with Soul Siphon? Would this make DL better than spamming SB after all your dots are up? [0]

Assumptions:
- 2/2 Soul Siphon, 5/5 Fel Concentration (not important for math, but important for real world raiding), 5/5 SM, and UA; no Ruin for now
- 3/3 Malediction (13%) CoS used on target
- Best case scenario for DL, 12 affliction debuffs on target (so, 60% damage increase)
- ISB uptime of 50%
- Hit capped for both affliction and destruction spells (202+ rating)
- Crit rate of 15%
- 2-roll system (hit, then crit)
- Neglect level-based resists as I'm lazy and they should (I think) effect both SB and DL equally
- Drain Life coeff of 0.71 [1]

Shadow multiplier = CoS * Misery * Shadow Weaving * (1 + ISB * ISB uptime) * Shadow Mastery

[top] 1.13 * 1.05 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 ~

1.58

Let x be our damage:

SB = (572 + x*(3/3.5))(1.58)(0.99)(1.075) = 1.68 * (572 + 0.86x) = 962 + 1.44x
SL = (540 + 0.71x)(1.58)(0.99)(1.6) = 1351 + 1.78x

Cast time is a bit trickier than normal, since we are dealing with MSD. I'm going to neglect it procing off of previous dots for the moment and just deal with the DL/SB "spam" section of a warlock's rotation. For this, the SB will get a flat proc rate of 5% per cast for half time, meaning a reduction of 2.5% casting time. DL will have a chance to proc on each tick, so it's 1- (1-0.95)^5 = 22.6% chance to proc per cast. This gives us a 11.3% cast time reduction.

SB time = 2.5s * 0.975 = 2.44s
DL time = 5s * 0.887 = 4.43s

Now we can do DPCT. Let's evaluate at 500, 1000, 1500, and 2000 damage.

So, we're still behind SB spam, though not as dramatically as we were before. Some thing that might improve DL's standing:
1. Accounting for focus procs from dots (since that will help DL more than SB).
2. NF procs since you're spending more time doing things that can proc it.
3. Haste gear.

[0] I don't actually know if DL can proc MSD like AM is doing. If it can't, then all of this is moot. But, I'm bored, it's Friday, and I'm tired of hearing about Fel Guards. :-P
[1] This is listed on wowwiki and wowhead as the coeff. I can't double check it since I'm not able to play WoW atm.

I'm fairly sure AM has a mechanic all to its own, ever since they implemented the LOS check on every tick.

The massive barrage of posts regarding arcane missiles and MSD is due to this recent change from the 2.2 patch: Previously to 2.2, many proc effects checked for chance to proc at the beginning of arcane missiles. Now each missile counts as 'cast', plus the check at the beginning, for a total of 6 chances during the course of the channel.

I'm aware that DL may not be affected at all by MSD changes. If it's not, it's obviously not worth it. I can't really test it, either, since my only hat with a meta socket is [Hood of Oblivion]. I don't feel quite ready to waste a couple of hundred gold in testing something that doesn't even look promising from the first pass math.

Of course, I guess I could "borrow" the crafted gem and do a PTR copy to test there. It's probably faster to get some data from someone that has the gem already, though.

My question was, "Well, suppose MSD did affect it like AM. Would that change anything?" It seems it doesn, but not enough to catch up to SB filler.

Does anyone know if NF procs have an internal cooldown or somesuch? Or are they always 4% after any tick? Of course, additional NF procs can be problematic, as they will also consume the focus buff (acknowledged bug, and probably not one that is going to be fixed).

No cooldown unless they changed something in the last patch. I've had 2 consecutive corruption ticks set off 2 NFs.

I did 100 drain lifes on dr boom, and had a total of 7 focus procs. It's not a huge data set, but I think it's pretty clear that MSD isn't procing on drain life "tics" and just on initial casts. Additionally while doing the test I didn't see any focus procs pop up at the end of a drain life cast, like you might expect if it were procing off of tics.

My assumption is that drain life doesn't proc MSD on tics because it's treated as a DoT, whereas arcane missiles has a spell hit check for every bolt.

Believe it or not, I've found 0/41/20 to be a superb raid DPS spec... yea better than 0/21/40 IMO

Sadly it relies on having 2pc t5 for your Felguard, and without that the spec is worthless.

Here are the numbers for my last Void Reaver though.

Etheryus - WWS

Note, I'm overgeared compared to everyone else in the raid, so please don't say they suck or anything.

I'm curious as to why so many points in destruction. With a Felguard I find it's worth casting corruption, and thus putting 1 or 2 points into imp corruption and not taking destructive reach. Not going so deep into destruction also frees up some points for mana feed and demonic resilience.

Evening ladies and gents. I'm a long time troller and first time poster looking for some clarification.

My question involves the 0/21/40 spec. A guildee and I were discussing point placement in the destro side and what would make for better dps (Fire or Shadow). I understand gear and raid make-up account for a lot of the dps between these two, however my question is based more off of what I have seen and what I have witnessed. Let me elaborate.
Take this destro tree:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

It has the Imp Immolate, conflag, and fire damage bonus with no soul leech. Personally, I saw only a slightly higher dps output on Dr. Boom with SB spam over Immo/Incinerate spam (no conflag, since everything I read says it's better to renew Immo rather than Conflag).
Now here's the arguement:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Take this tree which has 5 points in Cataclysm, 4 in Imp Immo (just to step up the tree), and 2 points in Soul Leech. His arguement is that the Soul Leech and Cataclysm will reduce the number of times you would have to LT, which would increase dps using SB spam since there isn't any points in Emberstorm for fire damage.
However, my concern is that from everything I have seen and read about warlocks going into BT/MTH, they all use the Immo/Incinerate combo and don't do a SB spam.

So the question (or questions rather) are:
Why are warlocks in BT/MTH doing Immo/Incinerate instead of SB?
and
Why does his arguement about Soul Leech and Cataclysm seem to both make sense, and yet not make sense to me?

Hopefully you don't think this a retarded question, and unfortunately after hours of trolling/searching I can't find a good answer myself.

Cheers

Just wanted to also clarify that I understand Soul Leech will not reduce the number of LT. It was used to reduce healing needed as a result of LT'ing. My previous post was typed out more difficult than the actual question is.
Is Cataclysm worth the points to reduce LT'ing to increase dps?
and
Why are locks using Fire over Shadow with the 0/21/40 spec?

Short answers:
Cataclysm is worth it if you can't rely on getting healed after Life Tap, or if you don't have a shadow priest in your group.

The only reason to take fire over shadow is if you don't have a shadow priest in your raid. Otherwise the Improved SB debuff makes shadow much better.

I haven't found much of a reason to put more than 1 point into Imp Corruption. Even then it results in a relatively small amount of DPS increase (IIRC it was 11 extra DPS with my current gear) and, thus, becomes more a matter of preference.

If I wanted to (or if it was your preference) you could very well shift points from DR and Shadowburn into Demonic Resilience or whatever it is that you like. It just so happens that I prefer Destructive Reach and Intensity.

Where are you seeing these fire locks? In this forum the question of fire over shadow has come up a few times but its been well established that shadow is going to out perform fire. (Unless you don't have a shadow priest in the raid like the above poster mentioned.)

Shadow Bolt gets more of your +dmg from gear due to its base cast time being longer.
Shadow Bolt can provide and use the Improved Shadow Bolt proc.

And when you switch to a shadow-destro sepc you can now have room for soul leech, cataclysm, and nether protection, minor talents that probably should be overlooked in a fire spec.