Hello, first time poster here! I've been doing alot of reading and searching and had a question that I could not find the answer to. I know that as an affliction warlock about 35-36% of my dps comes from shadow bolts after all dots have been applied. I am wondering which meta gem would be more beneficial to me. Swift Starfire Diamond adds +12 damage while Mystical Skyfire Diamond reduces the cast time of my shadowbolt, immolate, and unstable affliction.

Looking at the numbers it appears that they drop below the global cooldown. So for immolate and ua (in theory) it would appear that there is zero increase in dps if I used the charge on those. However it would increase the dps of shadow bolt slightly. I am just wondering if that increase in shadow bolt dps is worth more than the 12 damage from the other meta gem. I am under the impression that sustained +12 damage over dots + shadowbolt would be much better than a few Mystical Skyfire Diamond procs. However, I would love your opinons because I am not really sure how to proove this!

This is a very good statement to judge yourself on. I completly agree with it.

From previous experience, Mystical Skyfire Diamond was very good when I was 40/0/21 (Ruin - SB spam) but ever since I switched to UA I found that the 12 dmg increase was more siginificant and the run speed bonus allowed me to just add more staminda to my boots.

As a warlock (raid) or even on my warrior (pvp), I can not live without run speed in both PvP or raid setting. I can move quickly from position A to B and most fights now a days require everyone to be sharp on that note. If you're sticking with UA and gearing yourself around Affliction, I would use the 12dmg meta gem without any doubt.

Sorry to revive an ancient thread, but I had some questions about this gem (as I'm planning on respeccing to Destruction at some point). Is this really (effectively) 52 haste rating? Assuming you're Destro spec and just spamming Shadowbolts, you're only actually taking your Shadowbolts down to 1.5 seconds (thanks to the GCD), which is a 40% reduction in cast time. Using the formula here, that's more like 42 haste rating, right (or am I missing something)?

One major note is you need more blue than yellow gems to use the half cast meta, so you if you use a few Veiled topaz and not many blue gems you would have to resocket to meet the requirements.


Also, there is a 14 spell damage/5% stun resist meta (I think it requires just 3 yellow gems), but you need a large group of people for the NPCs to live long enough to spawn.

How does the relentless earthstorm diamond (Thottbot World of Warcraft: Relentless Earthstorm Diamond) hold up against the +12 and +14 damage and Mystical Skyfire diamonds metagems for a 0/21/40 build?

Mystical skyfire procs from lifetaping as well as placing dots like corruption or CoA..

It is awesome for any build, stack your gear with red spelldamage gems and use a blue one to get a socketbonus.. 1 blue > 0 yellows

With Ruin, your spells will crit for 206% of their hit damage.

It's ~20-30 spell damage depending on gear, ~25-35 with raid buffs for shadowbolt/incinerate.
The strong part is that this gem scales with both crit and damage, while the +dmg/+crit meta gems only scale with +crit/+dmg respectively.

It is a very good choice unless you have mostly green gear and use a lot of DoTs.

Edit:
How to calculate it, hm. Note your damage gear (dam), and your crit rate (crit) after talents and raid buffs. Then your damage is (572+1.06*dam)*(1+1*crit) without that gem, (572+1.06*dam)*(1+1.06*crit) with the gem (not including other multipliers and damage debuffs, but they don't matter to compare). Now see how far you have to increase your spell damage with the first formula to get the same average damage that you had with your old spell damage and the meta.

Edit II:
Actually, I realised that I checked how much +10 damage would increase it, and then how much the meta gem increased it. And the meta increased it by 2-3 times as much as 10 damage.

You calculate how much spell damage you will need to increase to get the same DPS increase as the meta would give you, as explained 2 posts up. His result was 20~30, yours will therefore probably be something in that area as well but if you want something accurate for your gear calculate yourself.

Mystical Skyfire Diamond
This generally translates into 5% chance to reduce casting time from 2.5 sec to 1.5 sec (grats for reducing cast time below gcd), or 5% chance to save 1 sec of casting time, which is 1 out of 20 spells. This translates into saving 2.5 sec of casting time on average every 50 spells. That is it will provide a DPS multiplier of 50/49, which is +2.04%. As a note in my current gear it takes about 18 spell damage to increase DPS by 1%, so Mystical Skyfire Diamond = 36 damage. It however has inconvenient activation requirements, but I believe even with sacrifices it will usually be worth at least 50-75% of this amount.

Swift Starfire Diamond or Imbued Unstable Diamond
Former has convenient activation requirement, but adds only 12 damage, it just seems more like worth it to gete Boar's Speed for speed rather than this. Latter has somewhat stupid activation of exactly 3 yellow gems, but it's still only 14 damage and not like stun resist will do you much good in raids.

Relentless Earthstorm Diamond
Currently, in Patch 2.1 it uses bugged Resilience mechanics backwards so it's slightly better than what you expect. It turns 200% crits into 209% crits. Note that this is fixed in 2.2 and will turn 200% crits into 206% crits. With fixed modifier it will change average damage from 100%+ChanceToCrit% to 100%+1.06*ChanceToCrit%. That makes an increase of:
1.265/1.250=1.012 which is 1.2% at 25% crit chance
1.318/1.300=1.0138... which is 1.38% at 30% crit chance
1.371/1.350=1.0155... which is 1.56% at 35% crit chance
This gem has overall better activation requirements, however it is also worth noting that for example at Tier 6 gear level you'll reach hit cap without gems and +12 spell damage Runed Crimson Spinel will probably make best DPS gem for any spec.
Current bug of course modifies 1.2%, 1.38% and 1.56% increases to 1.8%, 2.07% and 2.33% increases respectively.

My calculations of all the best gear in the game in every slot don't put you at 202 hit if you went t5 until you upgrade to illlidari council helm or t6 helm, or have skull of guldan(my calcs show 199 hit with best items in every slot and the helm enchant). So realistically most warlocks can expect to not be hit capped purely off gear until downing Illidan or Archimonde.. Ofcourse if you went the vashj robe/vr helm route you will be far far more likely to be hit capped without +hit gems... but realistically only the top 2-3 caster dps in dkp in any guild can expect to go that route unless you are getting savegly lucky on grand engineer helms.

In addition as a destro lock even if you were hit capped there is a possibility that using Potent Pyrestone to meet the yellow socket requirements for all those +4/5damage bonuses would be better than using Runed Crimson Spinels.

Also.. If you were hit capped with things like the +shadow/+hit cloak, belt of blasting, akama bracers, and the najentus ring you could easily drop for illidari council robe, trash haste ring, haste bracers, and the anetheron belt and socket with +hit gems for overall better damage.