I was advising him to upgrade to 4pc T13 though. ._.

Edit: Oh I see what you mean. If you're comparing the bonuses on a Patchwerk fight, yeah 4pc T12 bonus > 4pc T13 bonus. The 4pc T13 bonus is lackluster, you can't argue against that. The numbers have been run, and it doesn't equate to much more than a 2% DPS increase. While multi-dotting, you'll proc Shooting Stars more, making the first part of the bonus wasted. However, casting more Starsurges from insta-procs will increase the 10% bonus part, so I'm unsure whether it's a net bonus or loss.

Your example with H-Spine isn't necessarily correct, either. While you do need to hold onto an eclipse for the tendon, having 4pc T12 would probably make it possible to get another eclipse cycle in, and would significantly boost your damage, rather than casting the wrong nuke which is a huge DPS loss. This can also be applied to any fight in this raid, except Blackhorn, as you most likely would not be able to make a full cycle before the drakes reappeared.

I do advise people to upgrade from 4pc T12 -> 4pc T13, whether or not they have any T12H pieces. WrathCalcs/Sims are great for fights that you don't need to gimp your rotation much (Morchok, Yor'sahj, Zon'ozz, Ultraxion, normal phases of Hagara, P2 of Blackhorn), so the numbers wont lie during these parts. General tweaking can be made for the other fights, like holding onto eclipses or even sitting in them, but these are only temporary phases of the fight, and you're hampering your DPS if you continue to follow those strategies during a "normal rotation" phase.

tl;dr: I'm arguing your point without advocating 4pc T12.

So, this is where I have arrived... I'm regularly struggling to break 20k dps. I have watched other boomies out-dps me by 5-7k fairly consistently. I've got a good mix of gear and I know that i'm just losing something somewhere. When i check recount, I see that other Boomies are using, more or less, the same spells that I am. Refresh IS/MF in every eclipse (and IS whenever it drops unless i'm one cast away from eclipse), SS on cooldown and every proc, FoN on cooldown, starfall on cooldown (though i try to make sure it comes off CD in Lunar).... and that's pretty much it. I do use mushies for big AoE's, like on Hag trash and during that one phase of what's-his-face (the sludge guy) and always before we open i lay them out. I try not to detonate unless i'm in eclipse. Here's a link to my armory... Llianka @ Thorium Brotherhood - Game Guide - World of Warcraft

Anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears. (And i'm not opposed to reforging/respeccing, either)

Your reforging looks okay to me, gemming could be optimized (don't go for a bad socket bonus, but that's pretty minor in this case), spec looks fine. I'd change Glyph of Innervate for Glyph of Starfall, and Glyph of Wrath for Glyph of Insect Swarm (if you want to keep Glyph of Starsurge, otherwise you could go for Wrath/IS/MF.
On to your gear: you should generally try to get as much haste as you can. Moreover, your trinkets are pretty bad, there's tons of better options out there, and I personally don't like Ti'tahk much, but you might not have a better option available.
All of this is going to give you a solid DPS increase, but is probably not the core of the problem, so to speak. Most of the bosses in Dragon Soul make comparing DPS numbers difficult, but what do you pull on Ultraxion for example? Please add your raid size and composition, because buffs/debuffs you might or might not have change your DPS quite a bit.

10man. Composition changes regularly as we seek to find the right balance. I see why you'd choose Starfall over innervate, as the small self-heal isn't a dps boost, but I'm curious about the primes... With the 4pc T13, isn't starsurge almost mandatory? If that's the case, then it comes down to wrath vs MF vs IS, etc... If I go straight off the wrathcalcs data, then it looks like SS replaces IS and the others stay.... Open to ideas on the point, though.

Yes, my trinks suck. I'm debating picking up a VP trink... Adds 256 haste at the cost of 300 Int but allows big SP boost every 1.5 mins... The haste isn't enough to make the next break point, and makes my dps a little bursty, but we'll see.

Ti'tahk is my best weap at the moment... And it's the deathwing staff... Should be the best option... Yes?

Rotation: what do you other boomies use? I've read through several threads and there doesn't seem to be much consensus...


Thanks, best.

EDIT: just noticed the previous post. Apologies for using the wrong thread. Will move discussion of gear and rotation elsewhere.
-Lank

It shares a cooldown with Bottled Wishes, so that's not an option.

Sorry, I perhaps should have phrased that better. I'd be considering WoU + MC, as opposed to WoU + BW. My question was, is BW so much stronger that it wins by default? I'm not too certain how straight SP weights against a Mastery bonus of that magnitude.

Moonwell chalice has a 2min cooldown, which is too long to (reliably) use on every burn phase. On top of that 50% of its proc will be wasted when you get out of eclipse after 10 seconds, while Bottled wishes will last and benefit almost from start to end of the burn phase. There is no real discussion that BW is much better.

The 2minute CD is the real problem.

MWC has far more than a 50% benefit however:
Insect Swarm, Sunfire, and Wild Mushrooms will have 100% benefit.
I've found that with no legendary, no DI, reforged into mastery (loss of haste costs me on average 1 uneclipsed wrath) I can get about 10-11 wraths and 2 starsurges (4pt13, no SS procs). 8 of those wraths will benefit from eclipse because of travel time. With no SS procs, 1/2 of the starsurges will. Treants will get no benefit from mastery (though I haven't seen treants do more than 65k to a tendon...usually closer to 50k).

So, that's 100% mastery bonus for IS, SF, WM. ~80% bonus for Wrath. 50% bonus for Starsurge, 0% for treants. The mastery bonus from MWC gets you an extra 18.89% eclipse damage. I don't know enough about SP scaling for our spells to say how this mastery scaling compares with SP scaling in terms of increasing damage...ie how much damage increase does 2290 SP buy you...but that's what you need to figure out to compare the two trinkets in terms of their burst benefit.

Keep in mind that BW is also only 15seconds of the 20second window so just like your last few wraths won't benefit from MWC proc, neither will they benefit from your BW proc.

Again...the 2min CD is the real issue... but if your raid waits for 2min cooldowns (healing or dps), or if you take out the first and third plates without waiting for VP trinkets to come up again, then you might be better off using MWC.

I meant that of the 20 secs I only spend 10 secs in eclipse (wih Berserking, NG and legendary procs getting me through solar in 10 seconds), I realise that differs from players and the 'build' you are going. However the difference in strengths of the trinkets shouldn't matter that much when you have them up (this week I accidentally forgot to equip my BW and I did spine hc with IotCM, the dmg differeence on tendons was 300k on 6 lifts with no other gear difference), it's just that the 2min cd is indeed the main problem.

I'm currently working on the legendary, but, in the meantime I'm trying to weigh using Rathrak/Dragonfire Orb versus Ti'tahk. I thought the latter would be a complete outright winner because of the haste, but, I found in practice Rath/Dragon gives me about a 2 - 5K boost over Ti'tahk on single target DS bosses, which seemed odd personally (both are 403 of course). I guess the poison damage on Rath is decent, but it typically only accounts for 2% - 4% of my total damage, which equates to about 1.5K tops. Any thoughts, other than the obvious "well if it's better, then you should use it"? More along the lines of (a) anyone else finding the same thing and (b) is haste that weak now that some nature damage is much more effective for boosting dps?

One other question, is it worth it taking Owlkin Frenzy anymore? In previous tiers it seemed to be a nice little bonus (ICC it proc'd all the time for me), and I never have mana issues anymore, so I've got talents to spend, but I never seem to see it proc in DS and wondered if others are seeing the same.