Demonology in Cataclysm (4.3 Release) - Page 7

FlyingCow · 02/11/11, 8:38 PM

Originally Posted by niknar

Could you confirm that Felstorm is still worth using on CD on single targets since the 20% nerf (I'm assuming it is)?

Comparing the formula given in the tooltip of Fel Storm pre and post 4.0.6 i noticed they only nerfed the bonus damage from 134 to 111. The weapon damage component and spellpower scaling stayed the same. If this is actually the case i would argue the nerf to Fel Storm damage is almost non-existent.

Madkappa · 02/13/11, 8:00 PM

Originally Posted by niknar

A couple of questions about Felstorm:

Could you confirm that Felstorm is still worth using on CD on single targets since the 20% nerf (I'm assuming it is)?

The felguard's melee attacks continue during the Felstorm, so there is no reason not to use it. It's free damage.

netsach · 02/14/11, 10:08 AM

Originally Posted by Madkappa

The felguard's melee attacks continue during the Felstorm, so there is no reason not to use it. It's free damage.

From wowhead : "Felstorm .... The Felguard cannot perform any other abilities during Felstorm."

If by "any other abilities" it includes autoattacks, then on single target fights felstorm use could be questionable, if it does less damage per target than the auto-attack. Edit: typos

VoidStar · 02/14/11, 10:58 AM

Check your logs or even just just look at the tooltip: Felstorm hits for massively more than his weapon damage and it does so much more frequently than his auto-attack: regardless of whether it stops his auto-attacking it's worthwhile.

The duration is the same as the Legion Strike cooldown, so if you time it then it won't interfere there either.

Felstorm (even since its recent nerf) hits very hard on single-targets and almost unfairly hard on groups. If it's not going to break CC then it should be used at every opportunity.

Kroxy · 02/14/11, 12:49 PM

Originally Posted by netsach

From wowhead : "Felstorm .... The Felguard cannot perform any other abilities during Felstorm."

If by "any other abilities" it includes autoattacks, then on single target fights felstorm use could be questionable, if it does less damage per target than the auto-attack. Edit: typos

All felguard abilities are usable during felstorm and do not stop its damage. The tooltip is wrong.

Romeus · 02/15/11, 8:32 AM

Originally Posted by Kroxy

All felguard abilities are usable during felstorm and do not stop its damage. The tooltip is wrong.

Off the top of my head I'm going to agree because I recall using Axe Toss during Fel Storm a lot of the time while soloing. I'm not sure if legion strike is, but his charge and Axe Toss most certainly are.

Tarwin · 02/15/11, 4:24 PM

Originally Posted by VoidStar

Shadow & Flame provides much more dps per point than Improved Corruption: they both buff their respective abilities by 4% per point so it's easy to see that as long as your Incinerate + Shadow Bolt damage is greater than your Corruption Damage (and it's likely to be a lot more) then Shadow & Flame will be better.

Plus, Shadow & Flame allows us to guarantee the 5% crit debuff, although Destro Locks will be doing so as well now of course.

I wouldn't see it as a taking points out of Shadow and Flame. I would take the points out of Bane. The build would look like this: 3-31-7

We don't need Shadow Bolt as part of the rotation anymore with the Shadow and Flame changes, and we don't use Chaos Bolt. Is it worth 3 points to decrease the cast time of just Immolate? HoG is refreshing it.

Edit: I know I'm registered as a shammy, but I play my lock quite a bit.

nuibank · 02/15/11, 5:03 PM

Originally Posted by Tarwin

I wouldn't see it as a taking points out of Shadow and Flame. I would take the points out of Bane. The build would look like this: 3-31-7

We don't need Shadow Bolt as part of the rotation anymore with the Shadow and Flame changes, and we don't use Chaos Bolt. Is it worth 3 points to decrease the cast time of just Immolate? HoG is refreshing it.

Edit: I know I'm registered as a shammy, but I play my lock quite a bit.

Shadow Bolts will still have a higher DPCT than non molten core incinerates, so Bane will still be a useful talent.

blgdinger · 02/15/11, 5:40 PM

I want to know more about mastery but I'm not sure how to even approach it.

Does anyone know if mastery on the char sheet is rounded down? This is what I've been thinking about for the past hour:
I have 14.41 mastery, which makes the tooltip on my mastery add 28% more damage during meta. Does that mean I'm getting a mastery bonus equal to 14.00? Otherwise the .41 mastery would be about a .81% damage increase during meta. Initially that sounds like such a minuscule number that you wouldn't care, however when meta is popped and you're using demon soul + possibly an on-use trinket (more likely a proc trinket) and your crits are going for 40-50k very frequently, that's small chunks of damage that can could add up to tens of thousands of damage during a fight.

At the same time, if I were to switch up a reforge then I'd be just under the 14.00 point, in which I would only care about getting 13.00 mastery if mastery is rounded down. That would open up more places on gear in which you could increase your other stats, but would going for 13.00 mastery and increasing other stats make up for the 2% (or more) damage lost from your pet as well as during meta?

I keep running simcraft using my profile and I will only change small things like 1 add or smoothing RNG and I get pretty different scale factors (obviously I'm running it at 10k iterations). It's enough to make me think that all data is just invalid, or that there's a possibility of mastery being not nearly as terrible as one would think. Obviously it will scale better with more spellpower and such at higher gear levels, but what I ask about mastery point per point is still something that probably needs some light shed on it. (also I think I had more to say but my firefox crashed bah).

VoidStar · 02/16/11, 3:17 AM

The bonus that rating stats such as Mastery are not rounded for player characters, the tooltip for Mastery rounds the provided bonus, but tooltips can be misleading.

A notable exception to this strategy is the amount of Expertise our pets derive from the hit rating we possess: their expertise does round down.

Incidentally, including even a single Add to an encounter is not a "small change" to the encounter as far as Demonology is concerned: we deal a significant amount of splash damage with some of our abilities and our strategy for achieving maximum dps will be very different in such a situation. A change to scaling factors would be the least of my concerns ;-)

Mastery is far from terrible, indeed is currently simmed to be our best secondary stat when we reach a certain threshold of gear: it provides a fairly constant bonus regardless of skill (for the pet) and a large bonus when you use Metamorphosis skillfully given the makeup of the encounter.

VoidStar · 02/21/11, 12:10 PM

There used to be a problem where certain levels of Haste (just before the thresholds for extra ticks) reduced the duration of Immolate to such an extent that it was very difficult to refresh it using Hand of Gul'dan. This meant that there were haste values we wanted to avoid. This is no longer the case because with the newly increased duration of Immolate it's impossible for this interaction to occur, so there are no more Haste thresholds for Immolate: Haste now linearly increases the dps of Immolate as long as you can refresh it with HoGd.

There are still haste thresholds for our other spells where they gain extra ticks and the important ones are noted in the OP, but they're much less significant. They represent a dps increase (perhaps higher than what you could have achieved with other stats) but getting near and failing to reach them can no longer be a dps loss.

Immolation Aura and Shadowflame are both spells that particularly benefit from the haste thresholds because their cooldowns are much longer than their durations. With other spells it is more a case that they become suddenly more efficient at the thresholds because you have gained a tick period's worth of time where you don't have to refresh them, clearly less time refreshing DoTs leads to more time on filler.

TL;DR - The value of haste may change because some of our spells have thresholds where they gain significant value, but gaining haste can no longer be a dps decrease. As to whether Haste is worth more or less than other stats before or after any thresholds, you would have to generate your own scale factos to find out, but doing so near the thresholds might be a good idea.

Meegosh · 02/21/11, 2:29 PM

Originally Posted by VoidStar

I was wondering about something I cannot work out how to test using Simcraft: specifically using the Felguard whenever Demon Soul is available and then swapping back to the Succubus afterwards.

Answering a quite old post here :

I don't have simulations to support this either, but many raid tries.

In my experience, starting the fight with the felguard and then swapping to succubus does give a huge dps boost, however, swapping in-fight back to felguard to get his demon soul ability seems to be a dps loss (since you have to stick with him for 45s or hard cast the succubus summon).

The best way to handle this, for what i know :

Soulburn roughly 4s before pull, in order to still be able to use your potion before the pull,

Start your usual spell cycle (Meta > Demon soul ... ) while using felstorm and pop the succubus when you're about to start casting some shadow bolts (you should still have the soulburn buff) and go on with your fight normally.

I usually get a 40-45k burst at start, sometimes going over 50k.

As previously said however, this is only for single target fights, since you'll keep the felguard in aoe situations.

darqueseid · 03/02/11, 9:43 AM

I've been having an ongoing argument with my raid about the demon spec,

Generally they see demonology as a lesser spec or "the worst spec for raiding" compared to afflic or destro. I agree affliction seems more suitable for some fights, Namely any of the ones with multiple bosses that you can take advantage of glyphed soulswap. Affliction doesnt seem to do any better on single target fights though. At least not significantly better than demon spec does.

My argment to the raid is that the 10% spell power boost clearly outweighs the 1-2k more dps that an afflic spec can bring to the table.

My Question is this then, has anyone determined/shown just how effective the demon spec spellpower boost is?

My feeling on the matter is that using demon spec is clearly better for the raid in the event that your raid doesnt have a a spell power buffer (6% for elemental totem or mage buff) already in your group, and it may indeed still be better for just the 4% extra spellpower your 10% buff provides.

if this has been done, great, please link it for me. If not I would be happy to try to chart this out to show exactly what the cost/benefits are and post it.
I'd need to know just exactly how much 1 point of spell power helps particular classes/specs, even if only as an estimate. has this simcraft been done? I'm guessing yes, to determine stat weights, so please post it or point me to it if the info exists

Thank you.

VoidStar · 03/02/11, 11:11 AM

TL;DR - It's almost certainly better for the raid for you to be Demo.

This used to come up a lot in discussions, but frankly the answer to "is 10% vs. 6% spellpower worth more than another spec" is now very obvious and very clear from even a cursory consideration of the sim results. There are other related questions such as "should I bring an elemental shaman or a demo warlock?" or "I have several warlocks, which should go demo?" that have much less clear-cut answers, but that's not what you asked so I assume that those aren't options.

Firstly, precise stat weights can only be direclty applied to very specific circumstances (the ones for which they were generated) thus making generating precise stat weights for an entire raid essentially impossible, or at least hopelessly specific. As such one cannot "know just exactly how much 1 point of spell power helps particular classes/specs". It's generally not especially useful to do so anyway because it's the relative worth of stats that is generally important when making gear choices, but I digress.

Generally speaking, however, Spellpower is (I believe) simmed as the second best throughput stat for all casting classes (behind only Intellect). Thus, the answer to how much it helps is: "a lot". Do not forget that the effect that the spellpower has on healers is also important, but rather challenging to weigh against the personal dps gain that a non-Demonology spec might conceivably bring you.

However, the theoretical difference between the different Warlock specs is now so small that it currently sims better for you to be demo if you're the only source of the buff even if you're the only caster in the raid.

If you want some numbers, let's ignore a swathe of dangerous assumptions and use some from the Simcraft thread. You are either the 359 demo from the simcraft thread, or the best 359 in those results: Destruction. You do 23863dps in demo and you do 24304dps as the destro warlock before we take off the spellpower buff. Spellpower simmed as being worth 2.3013dps per point and you had 8597 of it when raid buffed. Losing the buff would lose you 313 spellpower, thus a loss of 719 dps, putting you at 23585dps, which is less than the demo spec. Remember: this doesn't even consider everyone else in the raid. The numbers shouldn't really be used this way, but it serves to illustrate that the buff is worth orders of magnitude more to the raid than the difference in your spec.

Now, your raid might be better served by someone else going demo, or someone else bringing an elemental shaman or many other options that only you can know or decide about, but to raid in another spec and go without a 10% spellpower buff at all is, in my opinion, doing yourself and your raid a grave disservice.

As an aside: I am astonished to hear that your fellow raiders would complain about you choosing to buff them at what they perceive to be your own expense!

Demonfire · 03/02/11, 4:52 PM

If you had an elemental shaman in your raid he would already bring a 10% spell power buff, so you being demonology would have no additional effect.