rutiene

Ahh, I see. I use Timbal's Focusing Crystal as well as the Darkmoon Card: Crusade, so I didn't even think of that. I do use the Icon when I'm destruction, and it is macro'd to my Shadowbolts.

 

Trickykid

There are no crit "breakpoints". Crit adds to ISB uptime with diminishing returns with every point. It still seems to me that if you're concerned about DPS you should be going to destro since it leaves less room for error. All you need to worry about is minimizing movement, timing cooldowns and life taps with phases and other cooldowns.

 

rutiene

By 'breakpoints', I mean those indicated here: [Warlock] Destro raiding and minimum stats for the reasons stated there. I also find that minimizing movement is fairly hard to do in most fights since most T6 fights tend to require mobility. The few times that I tested destruction (one of which was last week), I ended up around 5th on the DPS charts, whereas usually I"m 1st. This is against the DPS'ers in my original T4/5 guild.

 

Morwen

This is worth commenting on since there's a common misconception that one can tell how good an affliction warlock is by looking at their DoT uptime and so people try very hard to keep DoTs active as much as they can. But in fact the actual dps difference between someone who refreshes DoTs 0.05 seconds after they drop vs 5 seconds after they drop is quite minimal, perhaps something like 40 dps in the worst case with all else being equal. The primary dps skill of any warlock is the ability to take advantage of the spell queue to chain cast shadow bolts with zero effective latency. Everything else -- including your gear choices, gems, and details in the talent spec -- is just a trifling in comparison.

 

Trickykid

That thread has a lot of arbitrary minimums in it that have no real backing. If you look at the work done on understanding ISB uptime, you'll find that no such minimums really exist.

The fact that most fights require mobility was exactly my point... One of the best things you can do to increase your DPS is to increase the time you are DPSing. Minimize movement by figuring out the fight mechanics and working with them in a way that bumps up the % of the time you can sit there spamming SBs.

 

PSGarak

Most people recomend getting a mod like DoTimer to help keep DoT-gap down to a minimum, since it helps correct for latency effects with greater precision. I tend not to use it myself, but it can help. The more important question is, are you sitting there waiting and not casting a spell in order to get your immolate off at the right time? This is a common mistake. It's better to cast a shadowbolt and get the DoT off late, than to have dead time. If you're slick you can shift lifetaps and shadowbolts around in your rotation to better fit the window available, but you should never stop casting.

As far as that thread... it's almost a year old. We were all young and stupid. And haste gear badge loot didn't exist so much. Pretend that thread never existed. 25% crit is meaningless to ISB uptime, and the +dmg tradeoff to get there is too high. As a rule of thumb, affliction and destro are equal around late T4/early T5, and destro does better in late T5 on.

The ISB uptime model is a straight-up quartic equation with two translations. There are no additive cubic, quadratic, or linear portions, meaning there's no non-trivial extrema or even inflection points. The graph has no peaks, valleys, or changes in slop. More crit is better, more crit is less better at more crit than at less crit.
Raid ISB uptime in general has been found to be pretty resiliant to changes in personal crit rate. Besides, it's modelled in the spreadsheet. Plug it in and see if you really would be the ISB-drain you think you would be--I doubt it.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

s[orc]ery

Has anyone else found quartz latency bar to be completely off? Many times i am able to start a new cast much earlier than quartz suggests.

Is there a mod which works similar to quartz' global cooldown bar but customizable? I merely want a timer that operates in real time each time i press my shadowbolt key

 

Ammanas

I don't know where this would fit, but might be useful to add a section to the compendium with stuff about when haste/damage is calculated. Like, +damage is applied to spells at the completion of the cast (not when the spell actually hits, or when the cast is started). Haste is calculated at the beginning of the cast. For fire, the immolate bonus to incinerate is applied at the completion of the incinerate cast not when the incinerate actually hits the target. Also how +damage bonuses work with dots (I think that might already be on there though).

 

taybul

I found that the latency bar tends to go off even during a cast (i.e. spamming a button), so what you're probably seeing is the GCD timer setting off towards the end of a cast.

 

smoo86

I know about casting a spell when the old isnt finished yet due to latency, but I never used that feature and now I want to improve my raid DPS due to this latency-"bug".

Is Quartz working or not? And does Quark accept a new spellcast right away, or do I have to add a macro which stops spellcasting and starts a new spell? Help about this would be great.

Right now I want to improve my DPS... and I ask myself if I can do sth special with my casting?

(Armorylink: The World of Warcraft Armory)

Actually, in a raid I spam SB with a macro that activates my Trinket everytime its ready. I lifetap (no mana pots, thats not an option ). My questions are:

Is it usefull to cast Immolate for me? Or should I ignore it? Most of the time I have to do Curse of Elements, so Curse of Agony is not an option either.

How does this stopcasting due to lag work? Hopefully anyone can help me.

 

Faldrath

You don't need stopcasting macros anymore. It's simple (assuming default options): cast a spell, you'll see a blue bar. When the bar turns red, you can press the key again and it'll chain cast. For added precision, you can hold the key while the bar is still blue and just release it when it turns red.

It's not 100% effective and you'll miss a cast every now and then, but it's much better than not having it.

edit: about Immolate, please use the spreadsheet.

 

taybul

I forget the exact details but at some point you were able to use a /stopcasting macro right when the Quartz casting bar hit the red area to compensate for your latency so your next cast starts without delay due to lag. They changed server-client casting communication in such a way that this macro isn't needed. So I believe now you can simply spam shadow bolt and churn them out every 2.5s instead of 2.5 (+200ms lag) seconds.

With a 0/21/40 shadow spec, you're better off not using Immolate.

As for lifetapping, if you really want to min/max you should use mana pots because they don't set off the GCD meaning you can immediately go back to bolting after chugging a pot. Lifetap as a form of agro control or you need to move, and of course, only when it's safe to do so.

 

rochan

It sounds like you are completely terrible. You'll notice the spreadsheet doesn't even have an option to use shadowburn regularly in a rotation because it is laughable and will waste so many shards. I suggest you spec destro, get quartz and practice. Regarded as one of the simplest raid specs, it takes some practice to "master". Knowing when to lifetap is key and will differentiate an excellent warlock from a mediocre one. On trash you don't really want to CoA offtanked mobs because they generally won't have the +shadow debuffs and switching targets will mess with your rhythm, making it a dps loss. In general, you should always be casting something.

A warlock may do well on Brutallus, but struggle on M'uru (think Gothik) because they are unable to quickly change targets, judge omen threat. It just takes practice, and good DPS instincts; you wan't to be very aggressive, but not reckless if you want to top the meters.

 

Redelm

I am at work atm so using the spreadsheet isnt an option immediately. I am the guilds affliction lock. My build the 40 / 21 Mal / Ruin build. Are the affliction locks seeing a better return from pursuing haste / damage / crit? Or is the more "traditional" damage / crit / haste priority? The above is of course assuming hit is capped.

My thought process was that Nightfall is most likely providing more “haste� than Destro locks could ever achieve. However, with SB being 75% of my damage output, working on my haste rating would still increase the majority or my damage contribution. Of course this comes at the cost of damage and crit.

 

Arelenda

Considering haste speeds up your dots (well, the cast, anyway), haste is very good for you. Check the spreadsheet, but I'd be very suprised if it wasn't substantially higher than crit rating, and more than on par with damage.

 

Arelenda

Should be on there now. Linked at the bottom.

 

Deelit70

I'm curious if anyone is interested in an actual battle simulator for this spreadsheet? I used to have my own spreadsheet which was similar thing that Leu's does, but one of the things it did was create a timeline and actually model the battle on a per second basis.

In looking at the new version of this spreadsheet I realize it has all the tools to allow me to streamline and create a macro to actually simulate battle, rather than create a theoretical dps number.

Anyway, for those who know something about macros you can find a very basic ex of what I am talking about here:

warlock_dps_v24_version_2.xls - FileFront.com

Just click over to the output tab and edit macro2. The output value will be wrong since it doesn't actually use any values from the sheet yet, but I wanted to show the basic framework of how it would work. Basically, it breaks time down into 1/100th of a second, and during each time piece it does independant events (dot ticks), player choices, boss movements, and end effects (buffs wearing off). It runs this decision making 60,000 times. You'll have to view the macro for more details.

I wanted to do this because I firmly believe that a) theorycrafting presents systemmatic miscalculations due to its inability to allow changes in behavior mid-battle. These miscalculations will not factor out in a large number analysis because they're systematic rather than random, b) theorycrafting only grants you a value against a patchwerk or dr. boom, and it is wrong to assume it translates evenly to all bosses and c) Although certain things will translate due to law of large numbers (i.e. while in any particular fight you may crit more/less than average, but over the course of a night you will balance out) there is value in knowing how far from the large number average you can fall on any given fight.

Is this something the community (and the spreadsheet creator, since I am building on his work) would be interested in?

 

rochan

Leulier's speadsheet give you the average (or expected) dps for a given time (OOM time). I would be interested in seeing a min/max dps based on many samples run for a given fight. One Brutallus run you get 41% shadowbolt crits, the next run you get 17% crit. It would be interesting to see the range of how the RNG can affect your dps bottom lime (partials, crit, resists, dot gaps, etc). Basically the standard deviation of your dps for a given fight.

 

Althir

In short fights or ones where you are blessed with a Shadow Priest, Destruction potions as well. Also, macroing your trinket to Shadowbolt isn't necessarily a good thing. Pairing it with other things (Heroism comes to mind) can often be worth waiting for, especially when waiting only a short time will probably not effect the total number of times you get to use the cooldown in the fight. (In a 5 minute fight, you have ~1 minute of free time to use a 2 minute cooldown 3 different times, so waiting 20 seconds for a Heroism is absolutely the right choice).

For instance:

0:00:00 - Use CD
0:02:00 - Re-use CD
0:04:00 - Re-use CD

^---- your macro will do this.
Alternately, you could:
0:00:30 - Use CD (Give your tank some time to build threat, so you don't kill yourself with huge crits to start)
0:02:40 - Re-use CD with Heroism
0:04:40 - Re-use CD to close the fight out

Anyway, point is, it's easy enough to manage your CDs manually, and can often be worth the effort.

 

Ammanas

Yes, the general rule of thumb with trinkets (and any other CDs) is that it is better to wait and sync them with a heroism or something else AS LONG AS that waiting doesn't cause you to drop you're total number of uses in a fight. You just use your judgement and knowlege of how long the fight generally lasts.

Edit: Was wrong about skull/BL

 

Arelenda

I believe exactly the opposite was shown. Since heroism doesn't actually give haste, it's a separate multiplier, the skull gets an extra bonus out of it. Check out Roywyn's posts a few pages back.

 

LockApologist

Actually, it was shown to be a minimal increase (like about 2 dps, iirc). Using a dmg trinket would be better during lust. It's not worse, but if you're waiting 30+ sec to sync skull w/ lust, you'd have been better off to use skull earlier.

 

Densor

Post Removed.

 

rutiene

First off, thank you for all the suggestions. As for the trinket popping, the only thing I would be waiting for is Bloodlust, and due to the way our guild uses it in boss fights I find that this would greatly effect the number of times I pop the trinket, so I normally don't think about that. However, I can see where taking a closer look at optimal trinket popping times might be a good idea.

Deelit70: I think that is a very good idea. Most of the model, as of right now, is deterministic, with the ISB simulator being one of the only things which make may make it stochastic. And since deterministic modeling is only truly accurate when looking at a large number of people, being able to model the full range of possibilities with distribution may be far more helpful than just pure DPS numbers for the individual case.

Garak: What you said about T4/5 vs T5 is exactly what I'm trying to say. My gear is T4/5, and a couple pieces of 6. And generally I have found destruction to be just as effective as affliction in terms of potential DPS with my current setup, especially since I really don't have that much crit rate, and I happen to be very good at utilizing my instant casts while running around on boss fights.

manly: I apologize, I didn't see your 2nd post. Your alt has 3% more crit rate than me, and is basically at the point I'm waiting to hit before I do respec to destruction.

Densor: I'm not quite sure how you calculated your uptime, but I personally can't really follow your reasoning. From basic modeling, the formula should be something like:

Let P(a) be the probability that ISB will be refreshed on hit "a" after falling off.
5*P(1) + 6*P(2) + 7*P(3) + ...

So lim (x-> inf) [Sigma (i = 1 -> x) (5+i)*P(i)], but I'm not sure if that makes any sense or is what you were trying to do.

 

Roywyn

That's correct, and I have no idea what you start calculating afterwards.
ISB is up if and only if at least one of the previous 4 casts was a crit. Which is ~79%, as you said.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.