Trickykid

The DPS lost from no ISB is remarkably small (for my raids it's around 50 depending on which gear-set I'm considering). Given the DPS difference between SPs and other destro locks, only about 10 of that is coming from the SP. 10 SP dps is 2 mp5 for each party member, which is not going to make up for 50-100 DPS gain from fire in this specific case.

 

Maelduin

Just as an addendum to the bit about Aff builds. I'm wearing a couple bits of T5, one each of 4 and 6, Belt & boots of blasting, nethervoid cloak, rittsyn's neck, badge dagger w/Soulfrost, Akama offhand, Mag's crit wand, Attumen gloves, pvp bracers, Icon, Quag's, ZA timed ring, Hyjal revered ring, for gear comparison. I've been running as guild curse bitch, and wanted to maximise my personal DPS. No, i didnt run any WWS, just used Damage Meters for some seat of the pants estimation. The following is pretty much copypasta from my post on my guild's warlock class forum...



Well i did some benchmark testing on Dr. Boom, in hit capped gear. Buffs were Fel Armour, food, wiz oil, and a shadow elixir (not burning a flask for this, lol). Cast cycle was CoS, SL, Corr, UA, trinket, nukes, refresh Corr/UA (same duration), 2 nukes, renew SL, nukes, refresh Corr/UA, tap/pact in place of a nuke as needed, and popping trinket whenever up. Did this for a full bar of Booms life, approximately 650K. My original UA build came up with about 1050 DPS, which adjusts to about 1025 vs a lvl 73, for hit capped gear.


Went and respecced Malediction/Ruin, giving up UA and 4 in Contagion to get Ruin, maxxed out Devastation, and a couple fillers in Cataclysm. Went back to Boom and got 1150, adjusted to about 1125. Cast cycle was pretty much the same, less UA. This is without any pally buffs (BoW = less taps/pact = more DPS cast time), mark, 25 less shadow damage from the elixir vs. the flask, etc.

Conclusion: UA is no longer raid viable for a curse bitch build once you reach 202 hit cap. If you're still relying on Suppression to make cap for your dots (leaving your nukes below cap), its probably a wash, or even better as T4 and crafted gear is much lower in crit than I was running (about 15%). But once your nukes are fully capped, Malediction/Ruin looks to be the way to go. I expect to see a bigger gap with raid buffs like Kings and AI that increase spell crit.

 

Arelenda

Thanks a lot.

Can you update the original post with your stats (in addition to the gear outline) and I'll link to it in the compendium.

 

Turbo Moses

Well, unless I see some more convincing numbers, I'd say it really depends on raid makeup and the gear of the players, more crit means a higher ISB uptime, and any raiding lock knows how sporadically that thing can be up there, ISB uptime changes a lot fight across fight. It's a tough case, and unless someone shows me something that's convincing for fire as better, it's a tough call. But fire can put out a considerably DPS over shadow, I could believe more fire locks in an "average" raid would benefit the raid more. But in more specialized makeups (I've been fire and not had a fire mage, kinda blew, we had inconsistent mages then, or having more shadow users than normal) I could see it working out the other way.

 

wind

Let's look at it from another perspective, then. First of all, I think we can all agree that in any fights where there is a lot of movement, both the dps time and the isb uptime will be reduced. Therefore, the difference in specs would be greatly felt in a full-out dps fight, such as Brutallus.

Now, assume 2 caster groups of resto shaman/mage/mage/spriest/lock, and elemental shaman/lock/lock/lock/spriest. The only reasonable way to implement this(at least to me) is using figures from my own guild's wws parses, and assume they're representative and/or accurate for what is perceived to be a suitable gear level and dps for guilds that have cleared BT and are progressing in Sunwell.

For simplicity, I'll use the highest dps of the best geared member of the mage/lock/spriest classes. On our last Brutallus kill, the figures were 1984, 2314, and 1370. The shadowpriest got a burn, so I'll assume a no-burn situation and increase his overall dps to 1500. To help with calculations, I'll also round up (or down) to 2000, and 2300 dps for the mage and lock respectively. The elemental shaman's dps was 1737, so I'll round that down to 1700.

Also, I'll consider:
- a personal 15% increase in personal dps for every warlock going from shadow to fire destro
- an 80% isb uptime with 4 shadow destro warlocks in the raid, a 70% uptime with 2, and a 60% uptime with 1.
- a 65% overhealing rate for the shadowpriest ve
- 3000 mana returned from JOW, and 7600 from 3 mana pots

I'll try and implement 2 possible cases.

1. All locks are shadow destro.

This leads to a total of 7800 dps for group 1, and 10100 dps for group 2. A grand total of 17900 dps. Out of that:
-4000 dps from mages
-3000 dps from spriests
-9200 dps from warlocks

The spriest gains from vt and ve are as follows:
- ve does 247.5 hps, 65% of which is overhealing. That ends up as 86.625 effective healing per second to all party members.
- vt returns 75 mana every second to all party members, leading to a total of 37600 mana returned during the fight, or 104.5 mps


2. All locks are fire destro

Warlock dps increases by 15%, becoming 2645. Shadowpriest dps decreases by 16%, becoming 1260.
Group 1 total dps becomes 7905, and group 2 total dps becomes 10895. Total dps from both groups is 18800.Out of that:
-4000 dps from mages
-2520 from spriests
-10580 from warlocks

The raid gains 900 extra dps, which can be considered as a 5% increase in raid dps, and a 5% decrease in dps time needed. Therefore, the groups that needed to dps 6 minutes, now only need to dps 5 minutes and 42 seconds, or 342 seconds.

Taking that into consideration, VT/VE gains are:
- 207,9 hps, 65% of which is overhealing; 72,7 effective healing
- vt returns 63 mana every second to all party members, leading to a total of 32146 mana returned, or 94 mps.

Some other considerations:

- the decreased dps time due to higher raid dps means that the loss in spriest dps is actually less than 16%
- ideally all dps casters would be at 0 mana once the fight ends. In practice, most of them are at 40% or more mana. With a 12k manapool, that means that casters would be at 4800 mana once the fight ends. Incidentally, that's pretty much the difference between mana returned in the 2 different cases.
- again, all this is pretty much dependant on raid setup, but in this particular case, the dps increase was similar to the buff granted by [Drums of Battle], with no major tradeoffs. If some guilds considered that increase significant to make all their casters level leatherworking, I'm sure they will consider this particular increase significant as well.

 

ninielin

15% of dps increase by going fire isn't really a realist figure to start with. You gain maybe 100 dps going fire.

 

wind

and you base that figure on?

 

Arnath

The spreadsheet. 100 is even at the high end (most I've seen is more like 50). What are you basing 15% on?

EDIT: Also, using your guild's WWS (or WWS in general) as a way of making overall conclusions about Fire vs. Shadow doesn't make sense because of the variation between parses and guilds and player skill. Use the spreadsheets/simulators that are available if you're going to try to theorize about it.

 

Jakiri

Using Leulier, my current gear, normal raid buffs (but no party buffs) and lifetapping when needed going from Shadow to Fire nets me an improvement of the order of 220 dps, which is ~13%.

This DPS increase seems to be somewhat static when I give myself the actual raid environment I generally get on static dps fights like Brut (Shadowpriest, shaman, drums), but is still a much higher amount than you are suggesting.

It is enormously gear dependent though, shadow certainly becomes more competetive as you get to Sunwell.

 

Morwen

Presumably Leulier as well as looking at firelock parses, and the fact that despite fire's theoretical advantage shadow still scales better across all stats and catches back up at end-of-Sunwell gear? I'm equally curious where all these 2645 dps firelocks are coming from, let's not make it sound as if someone's suddenly going to make it up to wwsscoreboard as soon as they switch to fire. It is all well and good to say that a spec is theoretically superior but to make that decision for a guild, that guild's warlocks need to actually put out appreciably more dps as fire.

 

Blaktose

I am sure that somewhere in this thread the answer to my question has already been posted, however I do not have the time to read through 100+ pages of forum posts.

Anyways I am curious to the ratios of hit:spelldmg:haste:crit for a 0/21/40 shadow warlock. I was previously told it is about 1 spelldmg:1.3 hit:.7crit:1 haste approximately, however i am not sure how accurate that is if anyone could post if this is correct, or the actual ratios that would be great, thanks.

 

Jakiri

It depends on the rest of your gear; at a really trivial level, there obviously is a point where hit is useless, for example. Crit and haste scale, pure damage does not.

For me it's about 1 damage: 1.7 hit: 0.75 crit: 1.1 haste. I know Leulier has the ratio displayed, Rawr probably does as well although I don't use it myself.

 

Blaktose

Ah, I see. I know about Leulier however I am not familiar how to work it and stuff. What would I have to do with it to see the ratios as they apply to my current gear?

 

LockApologist

I didn't plug your gear into the xls, but I can make a couple guesses why you see the results you do.

a.) Your crit rating is low. 19% paper doll isn't a great crit rating for shadow.

b.) You don't have 4 pc T6. Shadow gets the 6% to 100% of their dmg. Fire gets it to 85-90%.

c.) You're gearing for haste. On paper, haste seems to make fire scale very well. However, beyond the point where you can get 7 IC during an Immo, the gain of haste is not as the same as SB spam. Fire is limited by the 15 sec duration of Immo. SB is not.

d.) Shadow scales better, thus as your gear improves, it catches up to Fire more and more.

As a contrast, if I swap to fire (changing to fire neck and ZA haste cloak), I see a dps increase of ~100. Rdps loss of 100-120.

 

Jakiri

Oh, I know the reason that fire is better for me is that my gear is sub-par (I only started raiding again a month ago after having quit for a year). It doesn't mean that, for certain levels of gear, fire isn't competitive from a raid dps point of view though. Just that it's general benefit is less than the guy stated.

Of course the best thing about fire is you don't have to farm so many sodding shards.

[edit]

Sunwell's where I'm having the issue.

 

Arelenda

Good point. At this point I'm fairly convinced fire and shadow are well balanced. Plus fire and shadow require different gear, with fire emphasizing haste and shadow crit a bit more. It seems to come down to taste more than anything.

I never had shard issues until Sunwell. The only boss prior to SWP where you actually need a good number of shards is Archimonde, since all others have trash or adds that give you shards. When learning Kalecgos, you can keep going without having to reclear trash as long as you have shards to summon nonressable people. So I came prepared.

Brutallus and Felmyst have very little trash, one pack plus a robot for two bosses, but they require a lot less shards to begin with. Felmyst doesn't leave people unressable, and reclearing one pack is very fast anyway.

 

Fafhrd

Arelanda is correct, fire and shadow are well balanced. Theoretically fire is a small dps gain for high level gear. However that dps gain is offset by Immolate dot clipping by quite a lot in real life situations. It's very individual how much that loss is, but checking the top dps parses on WWS Scoreboard gives you that shadow is still better, even for the individual Warlock. This has been our guilds conclusion also.

Fire might be more fun, and saves shards, but it's not better for the raid.

 

Sethrod

Hope I'm not asking a question that has been asked 15 times before, but I just planned my "perfect" sunwell gear, and wondered how much haste actually makes sense, or, if you can actually have too much haste.
chardev.org - A World of Warcraft character planner v.3.a to me looks like the best gear you can get up until M'uru, where you would obviously replace ring of ancient knowledge and hex shrunken head, which would result in even more haste. If I socket only quick lionseyes in the yellow sockets and equip shifting Naaru silver, that would result in 476 haste rating, or 1,918 casting time on shadowbolts.

Would you consider this as too much? Apparently noone comes even close to these numbers in haste as of now, so I wonder if there as been any extensive theorycrafting on the ammount of mana/lifetaps needed and the aggro component.
With such an immense decrease in casting time and a significantly lower GCD, I'm bound to believe that some problems might come up.

Of course any possible improvements on my current gear choice are also appreciated.

 

Flamingcloud

The only boss in the game you need to farm shards for is felmyst really, with no trash and the need to drop healthstones after most attempts.(not to mention some attempts with double shatter)

Sethrod.. There is no such thing as too much haste. If there was two sets of gear in sunwell, one with haste and the other without then maybe it would be worth debating but I am pretty sure you can't for example get enough haste to make hex shrunken head better than the m'uru trinket, or translucent spellthread better than amulet of unfettered magics. You can clearly have too much haste that you should be using spinels in red slots. As for gear.. I think it is likely that there will be a no spirit helm off kil'jaeden(with stats similar to the ele shaman helm) leaving the 4th malefic piece as shoulders or gloves(probably shoulders). Then I have +1% hit from draenei so I would definitely want sunflare + chronicle, and if I am not at 190 hit by that point just gem a bit.

 

Sethrod

Yea if there actually is a helm without spirit I'll probably keep t6 gloves, since I'm horde and don't have a skull of gul'dan yet, maybe never will, since we only do Illidan once every 2-3 weeks right now. But as I said, this is just up to M'uru, thus including only the currently known drops. Anyways I'll probably settle somewhere between 320 and 370 haste, or around 2-2,1 casttime on bolts.

 

Krazen

Shifting Naaru Sliver:

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...skmuruloot.jpg

Either extremely overpowered, if its a group buff, or a downgrade from the Skull, if its a solo buff.

Can we get these loots in the spreadsheet?

 

Flamingcloud

My guess would be extremely overpowered group buff. The stats are too similar to the za trinket (ilvl 133) to be ilvl 159 if it affects you and has a drawback (remaining within the circle)

 

Sethrod

According to winternight from Sk a GM confirmed that anyone within the circle will get the buff, no matter if he's in your group or not, but that it is currently bugged and works only for yourself. In any way, it's definitely the best trinket to get along with the skull.

 

Kruth22

I have considered trying out the fire destro mtyself. My guild is small and starting in 25 mans, on a low pop server too. I have 1160 shadow damage w/fel armor. My overall bonus damage will drop once I swap out some shadow weave, but the spreadsheet puts me at 75DPS more. Although, Conflagerate will lower my dps. That came as a surprise. Can anyone enlighten my as to why this will decrease DPS.

 

Trickykid

Because it has a lower damage per cast than incinerate, Swapping out FSW shouldn't lower your +fire damage, so you may be looking at the wrong field.