I'm not sure that SM doesn't affect CoD. Here's my data with the numbers slightly rounded for ease of reading:
I've got a bit over 1100 in +damage and, according to the last WWS parse I have from Lurker, I averaged around 10,550 damage from my CoD and got about 11500 on the max CoD.
Best case scenario for me is that Spellstrike procs while Darkmoon:Crusade is fully stacked and I've just used Icon of the Silver Crescent so in theory I could have another 225 or so damage. Add in stat food and flask for another 100 damage. All of which pushes me to about 1450 damage or 9260 un-Amped, 11360 Amped, 9960 average damage by the no-SM model which is 600 less damage than what I'm seeing.
If SM did affect CoD and Amplify Curse applied after SM, that would be explain about 500 of that damage; the rest may just be rounding artifacts and/or a difference in gear that I might have been experimenting with on that particular day.
I would guess you had ISB procs up when your CoD's went off.
Awesome thanks. My guilds working on Kael right now and Im starting to ponder some of the less obvious upgrades in SSC/TK, specifically Mantle of the Elven Kings and Boots of Blasting (Both would replace FSW). Both of them *look*, at first glance, like clear upgrades but Im not 100% sure. Given the way my gear is setup with pretty good +shadow but only mediocre +crit, Im leaning towards at least the boots (I know, I know, Ive got a couple of slots that really need work but Ive had some bad luck with drops - Ive only seen one lost pendant from kara which went to a shadow priest and Ive never seen cloak/neck off Prince or even Gruuls +crit/damage cloak). I think dropping a bit of my shadow to better my crit rate would probably help.
I used this one after the hit cap for slots, like boots or cape, where I wasn't going to have any +hit. And used this one for bt/hyjal too because reaching the hit cap is unavoidable, though at this level I started to value crit slightly more (0.7). lootzor.com - World of Warcraft search and rate items - profile your wow character
No one knows. By all rights, it should. It seems to be an oversight, and is usually mentioned on most relatively complete list of warlock issues (which you tend not to see as much these days).
As far as personal DPS is concerned, you are most definitely better off sticking with damage over crit point for point at the gear levels you are currently at. Even at the highest gear levels, damage still outweighs crit at a, roughly, 7:5 ratio.
For me, that doesn't seem to be the case. According to my numbers, for my gear (roughly 27% effective crit rating, 1199 damage) damage and crit are near equal. Haste is about twice that (I have 28 haste rating, currently). Hit is hard to gauge since it's so fight specific. We're currently doing most of our fighting in Hyjal, where hit rating is a waste.
Originally Posted by Nas
A model for ISB uptime may be found here. If you want to check the maths for yourself, there is a fair bit of it on the thread I have linked above.
I tried modeling ISB but that didn't work too well. So I wrote an addon to track ISB damage. In our raids, it adds roughly 8-10% total shadow damage, with crits doing roughly 2500-3000 bonus damage on average. I'm still sorting out the oddities hiding in Blizzard's combat system, but most of the data seems reliable enough. ISB debuff value varies heavily on how often we change our dps target, and how many warlocks/spriests are present.
I have a quick question, how important exactly is for an Affliction lock to spec 3/3 Malediction? is the extra 3% that important? We have 3-4 affliction locks turn up in the raid, 5 last night. The former 3-4 locks usually rotate CoS/E/D duty each raid, just to be fair. What's your opinion on 0/3 vs 3/3 Malediction?
Also, everyone has different playstyle, is there a way to help them up their dps by minimising the dot gap? They are all all my senior but I have recently been promoted to be an officer, so my job of telling them how to play a lock seems nearly impossible.
For me, that doesn't seem to be the case. According to my numbers, for my gear (roughly 27% effective crit rating, 1199 damage) damage and crit are near equal. Haste is about twice that (I have 28 haste rating, currently). Hit is hard to gauge since it's so fight specific. We're currently doing most of our fighting in Hyjal, where hit rating is a waste.
I tried modeling ISB but that didn't work too well. So I wrote an addon to track ISB damage. In our raids, it adds roughly 8-10% total shadow damage, with crits doing roughly 2500-3000 bonus damage on average. I'm still sorting out the oddities hiding in Blizzard's combat system, but most of the data seems reliable enough. ISB debuff value varies heavily on how often we change our dps target, and how many warlocks/spriests are present.
According to the maths I have looked at and my personal experience I have found +damage to be more benefitial for DPS than crit raiting point for point, but if crit works better for you for whatever reason then that's fine as well! In the end it all boils down to your personal preference.
Hit rating is wasted on Hyjal trash you are right, however while in Hyjal's case the trash is often harder than the actual bosses that follow them, I just have been having a hard time getting over the "it's trash, it doesn't count!" mentality, so I don't even swap gear for trash lest I forget to swap back for the boss in case of falling behind on trash, or any other reason.
As for the addon, excellent work, I have been searching for something like that to no avail. Nice to see someone has put the effort into writing one, thank you.
I have a quick question, how important exactly is for an Affliction lock to spec 3/3 Malediction? is the extra 3% that important? We have 3-4 affliction locks turn up in the raid, 5 last night. The former 3-4 locks usually rotate CoS/E/D duty each raid, just to be fair. What's your opinion on 0/3 vs 3/3 Malediction?
Also, everyone has different playstyle, is there a way to help them up their dps by minimising the dot gap? They are all all my senior but I have recently got promoted to be an officer, so my job of telling them how to play a lock seems nearly impossible.
If you have that many Warlocks in the raid, and I assume at least 1-2 Shadowpriests, then 3% extra damage to all of those people is quite a bit, definitley worth having a Malediction lock keeping up CoS.
As far as DoT uptime is concerned, make sure they watch DoTimer religiously, if you have a short gap before a DoT is to run out and have just finished a shadowbolt lifetap instead of casting another one, or even worse, standing there waiting for the DoT. Always be doing something. Casting UA first then Corruption has served me well when I was affliction, having both dots active after 1.5 seconds will net you a small amount of damage over the fight, yes, but every bit counts.
One issue that your raid may be experiencing at times is DoTs getting pushed off, our raids used to be Affliction warlock heavy back when we were working on Kael, as well. We would usually have 4-5 Affliction locks, and curses (most notably CoS) were getting pushed off, along with the occasional DoT - you just can't have that as your raid would suffer a significant DPS hit. Ideally you'd only want 1-2 Affliction Warlocks with malediction, and have the rest go Destruction/Demo - otherwise, you would just have to omit one of the DoTs from each Warlock's rotation. Immolate comes to mind first, then perhaps Siphon life if the problem persists.
One thing that have worked for us back when we ran a UA heavy raid was casting Rank 2 CoS (and Rank 3 CoE), while a few have been denying the implementation of the old Debuff Priority system, I have found that those two curse ranks just never got knocked off, while other curses cast after them were (full rank CoR for example), which lead me to believe that those two pre-TBC ranks do have some sort of high priority compared to the newer ranks. Therefore, applying those lower ranks to bosses with normal resistances would save your raid the damage lost when CoS gets knocked off, and you the time spent re-applying it.
Yes, it definitely helps alot, as I am thinking to go 3/3 Malediction myself. We have another lock who is spec 5/5 Shadow Embrace, it might be a bit harsh to tell him to spec 3/3 Malediction too. At this point of time, I'll try out just myself doing 3/3 Malediction and depends if we are Shadow heavy or Fire heavy that night and cast CoS/E accordingly.
Yes, it definitely helps alot, as I am thinking to go 3/3 Malediction myself. We have another lock who is spec 5/5 Shadow Embrace, it might be a bit harsh to tell him to spec 3/3 Malediction too. At this point of time, I'll try out just myself doing 3/3 Malediction and depends if we are Shadow heavy or Fire heavy that night and cast CoS/E accordingly.
You don't necessarily have to sacrifice pve dps talents to get both.
It's something of a moot point since, as has been repeatedly stated, all this math is based on the premise that the Affliction warlock always forgets to use Amplify Curse which would hopefully would never be the case in-game.
[edited for missing punctuation]
I think the amped in the above example would be something like 8792.
Yes, it definitely helps alot, as I am thinking to go 3/3 Malediction myself. We have another lock who is spec 5/5 Shadow Embrace, it might be a bit harsh to tell him to spec 3/3 Malediction too. At this point of time, I'll try out just myself doing 3/3 Malediction and depends if we are Shadow heavy or Fire heavy that night and cast CoS/E accordingly.
You can get both 5/5 Shadow Embrace and 3/3 Malediction. I specced it, just don't take Fel Concentration, Intensity and Improved Healthstone and you can get a 43/0/18 spec, up to Destructive Reach.
I have been reading this thread with interest for some time now, and I'd like to reiterate the request to condense and summarize the information for the weak of heart. I just spent the time reading up on the entire thread to try to get a feel for how to maximize my damage for my own lock, but I'm sure that other locks in my guild don't have the time or patience to go through the entire thing, even though they're also interested in the theorycrafting aspects.
Now for my own new question, which isn't so much about dps as about talent-point usage and raid utility. My warlock is Chinua (US - Garona) The Armory I've been slowly working on gear through dungeons and trying to build rep. I'm hoping to get into Kara soon, but we're currently doing Milk runs for under-geared mains, so I'm on the back-burner when it comes to invites. I've been trying to tailor my gear toward doing as best I can in raids and am collecting other pieces with more spell damage but less spell hit for dungeons. Anyhow, to get to the point... I am a bit at a loss as to where to put extra talent points I earn back from Suppression as I get more spell hit. Soul Siphon is kind of nice when I'm out grinding on my own, and it seems like it'd be a plus to get back health quickly if I life-tapped myself nearly to death, etc. A big fight in my guild leads me to think I should consider putting a point into Imp. CoW some day. Any opinions you guys have would be greatly appreciated.
Finally, I was wondering how you best conserve mana in stand-and-blast fights. I have no problems dark-pacting and life-tapping when on the move, but it seems that when I am just standing and dpsing, I eventually run myself out of mana and waste a lot of time earning it back at once. I have installed a mod that annoyingly reminds me to Dark Pact, which is helping, but it seems I still run into trouble around 2-3 minutes in. I apologize if this has been covered--I mainly recall seeing posts reminding you that in most fights, you have plenty of opportunity to get mana back while running the heck away from something.
I have been reading this thread with interest for some time now, and I'd like to reiterate the request to condense and summarize the information for the weak of heart. I just spent the time reading up on the entire thread to try to get a feel for how to maximize my damage for my own lock, but I'm sure that other locks in my guild don't have the time or patience to go through the entire thing, even though they're also interested in the theorycrafting aspects.
Now for my own new question, which isn't so much about dps as about talent-point usage and raid utility. My warlock is Chinua (US - Garona) The Armory I've been slowly working on gear through dungeons and trying to build rep. I'm hoping to get into Kara soon, but we're currently doing Milk runs for under-geared mains, so I'm on the back-burner when it comes to invites. I've been trying to tailor my gear toward doing as best I can in raids and am collecting other pieces with more spell damage but less spell hit for dungeons. Anyhow, to get to the point... I am a bit at a loss as to where to put extra talent points I earn back from Suppression as I get more spell hit. Soul Siphon is kind of nice when I'm out grinding on my own, and it seems like it'd be a plus to get back health quickly if I life-tapped myself nearly to death, etc. A big fight in my guild leads me to think I should consider putting a point into Imp. CoW some day. Any opinions you guys have would be greatly appreciated.
Finally, I was wondering how you best conserve mana in stand-and-blast fights. I have no problems dark-pacting and life-tapping when on the move, but it seems that when I am just standing and dpsing, I eventually run myself out of mana and waste a lot of time earning it back at once. I have installed a mod that annoyingly reminds me to Dark Pact, which is helping, but it seems I still run into trouble around 2-3 minutes in. I apologize if this has been covered--I mainly recall seeing posts reminding you that in most fights, you have plenty of opportunity to get mana back while running the heck away from something.
Thanks!
I have honestly never consistently put up Curse of Weakness in any PvE encounter. On some of our first Gurtogg attempts, I would alternate between it and Curse of Recklessness, but eventually just stuck with CoR full-time. With most of our mages Arcane, and only one other lock, I'm the CoR debuffer and I put it on pretty much every boss, unless melee are heavily restricted (e.g, Supremus during the kite phase.) Therefore, I would recommend against putting any points into Improved Curse of Weakness and instead max out Soul Siphon.
As for mana consumption, for my Destruction rotation I usually curse, bolt x4 or x5 and then tap. Were I to ever switch back to Affliction, I would most likely implement something along the lines of UA, Corruption, Curse, Immolate, Siphon Life and then bolt x2 or x3, then Dark Pact. Dark Pact works out to be ~60% of your pet's total mana? So one rotation with Dark Pact and then switch to Life Tap until your pet is above 60% mana at which point you would DP again.
CoW doesn't stack with demoshout. A dps warrior can easily pick up imp demoshout without losing anything important, while a warlock doing CoW means you dont get CoE or CoR, or you lose ±150 DPS from CoA/D.
Thanks for the input so far. We don't have many warriors in our guild right now, much less warriors with any points in imp. demo shout, so it was just a thought. I agree it would be extremely rare that I'd use it, especially since, afaik, I'm one of the few locks with 3/3 malediction and would generally be on CoS/CoElem duty... Just pondering where those points could actually be useful.
I have been reading the forum and this thread in particular for a while now and have finally pulled together my thoughts for my first post. My question is, is my gear ready for a destruction build in raid.
I have been reading the forum and this thread in particular for a while now and have finally pulled together my thoughts for my first post. My question is, is my gear ready for a destruction build in raid.
I need 2 more cards for the Crusade trinket. Unfortunately there are a number of things I would like but don't get to have until I see them drop and I get them, like the neck from prince, the cloak from Gruul (I'm waiting to spend badges until I see who needs FR stuff)...a number of things.
I'm pretty sure I want to stack hit before crit, but I can cap my hit in raids, just ...not sure if I can bring more to the table as destro compared to affliction.
Unfortunately I didn't log with my exact boss gear; but that's pretty close. I'm wondering if putting a crit/dmg gem in T5 pants was a mistake and that +dmg is how I should be doing all gems once I'm over hit cap? We typically have 2 locks and 2 shadow priests.
Unfortunately I didn't log with my exact boss gear; but that's pretty close. I'm wondering if putting a crit/dmg gem in T5 pants was a mistake and that +dmg is how I should be doing all gems once I'm over hit cap? We typically have 2 locks and 2 shadow priests.
Thanks for input.
As posted above, I'm writing ShadowSeer to answer exactly this kind of thing. After a raid, it'll tell you how much damage you would have gained gain from hit rating, crit rating, spell damage and haste.
I would highly recommend you both stay affliction. Destruction doesn't really out damage affliction untill the hyjal/bt level of gear.
I beg to differ, while I we are currently working on BT/Hyjal (4/5 4/9) I am in no way Hyjal/BT geared, yet I easily outdamage myself as affliction. That being said, you'd want to be either hit capped or pretty damn close to being so before considering destruction as well as have decent shadow damage (1100-1200+ with fel armor comes to mind), you don't really *need* a set amount of crit, however. I started with 15-16% tooltip crit, but I was definitley hit capped.
That being said, you do not need BT/Hyjal gear before you acquire said stats.
I switched to destruction "early" (mid-Mag) because we were running out of debuff slots and, well, someone had to do it. And I definitely had to push hard to maintain my same dps level at that point. But it didn't take much late T4/early T5 gear for me to become comfortable.
Now of course, I'm doing quite well.
I usually use the shortcut given here of 15% tooltip crit (includes 3% from backlash, so 12% for any currently-affliction lock), 13-14% hit, 1100+ shadow when people ask. But really, I'm blowing smoke out of my ass and I don't actually know the point at which it's "worth" it. Unlike demo, there's not a specific set of gear that "makes" it far easier at a particular level, the spec just scales very well as gear increases given how Blizzard's itemization works.
Either way, I've never quite understood all the angst about it. Try spec A, try spec B. Look at your damage. Think clearly about what factors went into it each time. Ideally use WWS (even if just uploading your own logs) to understand what's going on. Download the spreadsheet -- it's not hard, it's not scary, you can figure it out very quickly if you actually go get it. And you'll learn *tons* about your class just playing around with it.
Lock is a very flexible class, have fun with it. If DPS is important to you and your guild, find the spec that plays to *your* strengths and lets you do the most damage (not everyone is cut out to be a dot-manager: although I'll say that I do almost as much work tightly managing my health/mana/nukes as a destruction lock as I did as an affliction lock, it's just different.)
I would highly recommend you both stay affliction. Destruction doesn't really out damage affliction untill the hyjal/bt level of gear.
I don't know why we keep hearing this. I have been destruction (0/21/40 shadow) since we started on Mag. And from that on I was one of the top dps'ers in the guild. I second everything Kyth says.
It's just that you will need to focus on getting more hit, dmg and crit (ISB is great for your raid). You need to focus on all three with the right priorities mentioned before here. There is gear you can get way before MH/BT that serves the destro lock well. If it wasn't, I guess mages would be pretty much fucked. Our problem is that we need to get to a much higher hit cap.
EDIT: If you are running with an Elemental Shammy try to get a spot in that group. Destro locks are the ones that will get the most boost out of it.
Don't think that you can't go destruction and do great before running MH / BT. It's just not true.
10/04/07, 10:06 AM
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