Warning for VoidStar: 10. Do not respond to terrible posts.

• Meaning · 08/25/11, 1:07 PM

Post: SimulationCraft for Warlocks (Cataclysm Edition)
User: VoidStar
Infraction: 10. Do not respond to terrible posts.
Points: 0

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

This is an awesome explanation, but the parent post is really, really bad >.<

Original Post:

sigh I almost wish Blizzard would remove the ability for DoTs to gain extra ticks, or have it just slap an extra partial tick on the end or something, but I digress. It feels like I'm typing this same sentiment out several times a week at the moment.

Firstly: gaining an extra tick on Drain Soul will do absolutely nothing for your DPS. When are you ever channelling DS for its entire duration anyway?

Secondly: UA is refreshed by Drain Soul during the execute phase, which means that extra ticks are meaningless for it as well during the execute.

So, outside of the execute phase, what wonderous benefit is derived from gaining an extra tick on UA? Well it goes from 6 ticks to 7 which is surely a 17% rise in damage (I hear you cry)! Only, it isn't. It's a 17% rise in the damage of each cast, but because you can still only get 100% uptime... it doesn't improve the DPS of the spell at all. What it really means is that you have to cast UA fewer times over the course of the fight for the same amount of damage, so you have made UA more time efficient: you have improved it's DPET or "Damage Per Execute Time" as Simcraft puts it (thanks for the slight correction Gilgrissom). And this allows us to spend all those precious extra fractions of a cast time on more Shadow Bolts! Yay!

The HT12 simcraft Aff lock casts UA 24.9 times during the fight, whereas if we gave him enough haste to get the extra tick he'd only have to cast it 21.3 times! So by gaining an extra tick, we've gained 3.6 UA cast times, which is about two more Shadow Bolts. Take that damage meters!

So no: it's not worth bending your gear out of shape for.

A caveat to this is that in multi-dotting situations reaching the haste thresholds is a DPS rise where you have enough targets that live long enough for the DoT to tick to expiration, but I would find it hard to justify gearing for such a scenario in the current tier (or any other tier really).