PVE Raiding Compendium - Page 14

Aliah_KT · 11/14/07, 11:01 AM

Originally Posted by Chimera

Is this what you were asking? Or were you asking about the relative scaling of haste vs spell damage? IE the more spell damage you have, the more (absolute) DPS you gain from haste, and likewise the more haste you have the more DPS you gain from spell damage.

I'm very impressed with all of the information out there on haste, and I can see now that there seems to be no diminishing returns on that particular stat, especially since I don't think it's even possible to attain a haste rating of higher than 300ish. The basic question I'm asking might be better rephrased another way, however. Is there a cap on the amount of bonus spell damage you can have and/or is there ever a time where 1.0 additional bonus spell damage may only actually count (for the sake of Blizzard spell math) as something less than 1.0 spell damage? I'm referring strictly to the stats from gear and not to the actual damage the spell does or other DPS figures.

As an example, I believe Shadow Bolt has a damage coefficient of 0.8571. Assuming I have 1000 bonus damage, this means my Shadow Bolt would gain an additional 857.1 damage. If I have 2000 bonus damage, does that mean my Shadow Bolt gains an additional 1714 damage? Likewise, does 3000 bonus damage (totally unrealistic, I realize) mean I gain 2571 to my Shadow Bolts, and so on, or is there some scaling factor thrown in to prevent people from gaining too much from one particular stat?

Thanks again to everyone for your input!

Arelenda · 11/14/07, 11:05 AM

Originally Posted by Aliah_KT

As an example, I believe Shadow Bolt has a damage coefficient of 0.8571. Assuming I have 1000 bonus damage, this means my Shadow Bolt would gain an additional 857.1 damage. If I have 2000 bonus damage, does that mean my Shadow Bolt gains an additional 1714 damage? Likewise, does 3000 bonus damage (totally unrealistic, I realize) mean I gain 2571 to my Shadow Bolts, and so on, or is there some scaling factor thrown in to prevent people from gaining too much from one particular stat?

Thanks again to everyone for your input!

No, there is no scaling factor. The factor is the same, always.

rochan · 11/14/07, 11:11 AM

Mathematically, the best time to soulshatter is around 70%.
Cast CoR if agro is tight, it will give the tank more agro by getting him hit harder (more rage) and also directly increasing his damage.
Remember that CoD is less damage/threat than SB. So if you are likely to pull agro, you can cast CoR which should increase your DPS by quite a bit more than CoD in the long run.
I suppose you could downrank SBs to keep the debuff up, but I havent really experimented with that. I usually just make sure im full mana by lifetapping if it's too dangerous to cast any more SBs.

Nas · 11/14/07, 11:29 AM

Originally Posted by rochan

Mathematically, the best time to soulshatter is around 70%.
Cast CoR if agro is tight, it will give the tank more agro by getting him hit harder (more rage) and also directly increasing his damage.
Remember that CoD is less damage/threat than SB. So if you are likely to pull agro, you can cast CoR which should increase your DPS by quite a bit more than CoD in the long run.
I suppose you could downrank SBs to keep the debuff up, but I havent really experimented with that. I usually just make sure im full mana by lifetapping if it's too dangerous to cast any more SBs.

When do you deem threat to be too high on say Omen? I typically try to be underneath the tank in threat, albeit really close to him. However, I have never been comfortable with the notion of being above him even if it were by a few %. I realise that there are bosses where you most definitely would not want to be anywhere over the tank (Teron is one that is mentioned the most), however, there are many other encounters where the bosses would carry out a move that requires them to target someone else in the raid - and correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't threat revaluated when a mob does that? Anetheron and Azgalor come to mind with their swarms/dooms.

Perhaps one of my issues is my unwillingness to be above the MT in threat while I wait for the optimal Shatter moment, should I not be this cautious?

dakalro · 11/14/07, 11:45 AM

On Teron I think I have gone over the tank a few times ... or more, didn't get him ghosted but only locks seem capable of such a thing. Last kill we used paladin tank and while I wasn't in a decent group another destro lock was and he could barely touch 100%. Did pala tank on Rage also and even if I (only) managed like 1.7k dps (me and 1 affli lock in raid, 2 spriests, didn't have any ISB up for the last 30+ seconds of the fight) I barely got to 100% of threat. This is of course without any soulshattering with the paladin.
Most of the time I just find myself forced to SS right off the start though, at like 80-90%, simply forgetting to wait for more than applying a curse but big problems in trying to not aggro, never had outside of Bloodboil without a Tranq Air totem but even there it depends on "luck" with crits.

rochan · 11/14/07, 12:55 PM

I push my threat pretty hard. I try to stay as close to 130% as I can obviously without going over. I’ll only finish a shadowbolt cast if I am about 6k threat behind the tank incase I get a 9k crit. Also if I have a CoD about to tick, I’ll leave an additional 8k or so threat buffer. So most fights I try to stay at 115-125% threat. Of course there are some fights you don’t want to go this high: Bloodboil, LoL Reaver , Illidan among others.
Also I still haven’t seen evidence you can ghost the MT on Teron by going over 100%.

Arelenda · 11/14/07, 1:07 PM

Originally Posted by rochan

Also I still haven’t seen evidence you can ghost the MT on Teron by going over 100%.

I guess I'm the one that started that rumor, and it's based on my assumption that it was like Malchezaar.

For now, I think it's more sensible to assume I was wrong and Theron can't.

Trickykid · 11/14/07, 1:22 PM

Originally Posted by Aliah_KT

Is there a cap on the amount of bonus spell damage you can have and/or is there ever a time where 1.0 additional bonus spell damage may only actually count (for the sake of Blizzard spell math) as something less than 1.0 spell damage?

Actually, spell damage increases in worth with additional stacking at least for 21/40. Not to the point where it's worth sacrificing other stats, however. Each +dmg point increases the DPS of your shadow bolt by a constant amount, but also increases the % of time you're casting SBs (since it decreases LT frequency).

• Suggestive · 11/14/07, 1:25 PM

Originally Posted by Arelenda

I guess I'm the one that started that rumor, and it's based on my assumption that it was like Malchezaar.

For now, I think it's more sensible to assume I was wrong and Theron can't.

I've gone past 100% on teron, and i got ghosted as soon as the cooldown was up. I'll assume he doesn't have the prince bug , because if he did i shouldn't have been ghosted.

clavarnway · 11/14/07, 1:26 PM

Originally Posted by Suggestive

I've gone past 100% on teron, and i got ghosted as soon as the cooldown was up. I'll assume he doesn't have the prince bug , because if he did i shouldn't have been ghosted.

He most likely ignores his current aggro target and not highest threat then.

Arelenda · 11/14/07, 1:29 PM

Originally Posted by Nas

I'd like to touch a bit on threat management as 0/21/40, I seem to always be threat capped over the vast majority of some fights' durations; namely Naj'entus/Rage and sometimes on Teron Gorefiend. Our MT's threat is by no means low, in fact it is top end, and after some thinking I attributed my issues to blowing SoulShatter as soon as I am threat capped, often around the 70% mark of a fight instead of putting up with some DPS downtime and using it closer to the halfway mark - the downtime I would have waiting for the optimal time to shatter would be far less than that I would have to put up with if I shatter too early. That's how I see it anyway.

Just wanted see how other Warlocks in the community deal with threat, if you're putting out the high DPS on a fight with minimal movement requirements, when would you rather slow it down a bit - how do you usually time your shatters? Would downranking Shadowbolt when one is high on threat at the early stages be a good idea? Seeing how part of our utility is ISB, and how we would not be excercising that utility by standing around.

Here's what I do to mitigate threat issues with 0/21/40, and most people seem to use the same tricks.

Initial aggro issues:
- Apply dots instead (Immolate, CoA, Corruption), then follow up with SB spam. Typically on trash you want to use CoA on all tanked mobs before anything else anyway. (provided they live 24 seconds).

Sustained aggro issues:
- Soulshatter as late as possible. Soulshattering too early might make you catch up with the MT later on, which leaves you with no option but to hold dps.

To delay the SoulShatter:
- Lifetap
- Ask to be the CoR warlock instead of using CoD.
- Do fight specific stuff. (preemptively moving to a better position, etc)

Downranking shadow bolts could in theory work, but the returns will be low since you're eating ISB charges as well. The net effect will be positive if you have a high enough crit chance, but don't expect stellar results. It's better than doing nothing at all, obviously.

Personally I rather use any spare time to keep an overview of the fight and figure out what else we could be improving on. I haven't had consistent aggro issues though. Taking it a bit easier for a moment, then Soulshattering usually fixes all my issues.

◊ Stryn · 11/14/07, 2:25 PM

As a raiding demo lock, I must confess that I was extremely happy with the pet AI changes in 2.3. I expected my felguard to attack from behind / side, but I really didn't expect him to dynamically adjust during changes in positioning. I was happy with the net DPS increase, and my tanks were pretty happy about the decrease in parrys as well.

Trickykid · 11/14/07, 4:22 PM

Originally Posted by Arelenda

Sustained aggro issues:

I used to have a crit-heavy set for threat-capped boss fights. My average shadowbolt was worse, but I spent more time casting. Net result was my total damage stayed the same (effective DPS dropped) and I contributed more to ISB uptime.

galzohar · 11/14/07, 4:59 PM

The best time to soulshatter has EXTREME dependance on your threat/sec VS your MT's threat/sec. The more threat you do over him, the later in the fight you should pop it, and the closer your threat generations are the earlier you should be using it. The idea is to almost pull aggro by the end of the fight being capped until shatter and slowing down and going all out after shatter. If this isn't exactly what's happening then your soulshattering timing is not optimal.
If you're not threat capped, obviously, soulshatter does nothing.

Trickykid · 11/14/07, 8:32 PM

Originally Posted by galzohar

The best time to soulshatter has EXTREME dependance on your threat/sec VS your MT's threat/sec. The more threat you do over him, the later in the fight you should pop it, and the closer your threat generations are the earlier you should be using it. The idea is to almost pull aggro by the end of the fight being capped until shatter and slowing down and going all out after shatter. If this isn't exactly what's happening then your soulshattering timing is not optimal.
If you're not threat capped, obviously, soulshatter does nothing.

If we find the optimal time for the last shatter (the most important since it drops the most threat/fight), we can determine the best times to shatter in general.

Aims:
1) End fight at 130% threat of tank.
2) Only shatter when at 130% of tank.

(realistically you'd shatter JUST before 130%... but for the sake of simplicity I'll use 1.3)

Fight length = 1
Time of last shatter = N
Tank's threat gen = 1/unit-time
Lock's threat gen = W/unit-time

At time=N, we're at 130% of tank, shatter and in the length of time (1-N) we generate enough threat to get back to 130% of the tank.

At the end of the fight the tank has 1 threat, so we can have 1.3. Our threat by the end of the fight is the amount of threat we have after the last shatter (1.3 * N / 2) plus the threat generated in 1-N time (1-N)*W.

So we need:
1.3 = (1.3*N/2) + (1-N)W
or
N = (1.3-W)/(.65-W)

Since tank tps = 1, W = warlock_TPS/tank_TPS. So for any given ratio W, this shows the % through the fight when the last shatter should be. Every 5minutes previous to that should have another shatter.

So if W>1.3 (ie you generate enough threat to eventually pull), you should hold back to W=1.3 until the first shatter, at which point you can go hog wild.

Some example ratios W:

W	Boss% at last shatter
1.3	100%
1.4	87%
1.5	76%
1.6	68%
1.7	62%

Nas · 11/14/07, 9:05 PM

Excellent suggestions, I know that I will definitely lose that paranoia of going over the tank's threat from now on (bar Teron (just to be safe for now, unless the DPS is really needed), Gurtogg and Illidan in T6 content - any other T6 fights where being 120-128% of the tank's threat would be an issue?

I'd say my value of "W" (going by Trickykid's maths) would be roughly a bit over 1.3 on average, but I'll definitely take a closer look next time around - how useful would a mod that calculates the ratio and put it in a little visible box be? Unfortunately I have next to no experience with programming, heh. Although, I guess Omen can do that in a sense, I'll look more closely at the "Threat vs Player" window Omen provides once I get back home.

I do typically DoT on incomming, I have found that to be very useful - I would have to work on using CoR on more boss fights as well. We typically only have one Affliction Warlock in the raid, and I usually go for utility Curse duty because of the aforementioned threat issues, as for CoR - I suppose there is more paranoia involved there even though theoratically it would be perfectly fine to use on most boss fights.

clavarnway · 11/15/07, 4:19 PM

Just because I was curious I did some testing.

Shadow Ward was modified in 2.3 to reduce the base absorb, but scale with spell damage.

On current 2.3 live server, my Shadow Ward, with base absorb of 875, and with 1220 +shadow damage, absorbed 1270 Shadow damage. This means that Shadow Ward after 2.3 receives about 32% of your +Shadow damage as extra absorb.

Compare this to our previous version of Shadow Ward before 2.3 which only absorbed for 900 Shadow damage, this is a buff for me.

The break even point where you will absorb the exact same amount as before the patch is about 80 +Shadow damage. Anything more than that, and you will absorb more than before 2.3. Anything below, you will absorb less.

This is from my testing, if anybody wishes to test this also, by all means!

PSGarak · 11/15/07, 5:29 PM

It actually got some gear scaling as far back as 2.0-ish, although not nearly as much. It was never explicitly documented for shadow ward, although it happened when mages got scaling for fire/frost ward. I want to say that it was around 10%-ish, like all absorb-shield at the time, which would dovetail nicely with me remembering "(1050 absorbed)" or that ballpark from my shadow ward next patch. So it's not as big a buff but it's still pretty big--I'll probably end up netting around 200 on it.

clavarnway · 11/15/07, 5:37 PM

Originally Posted by PSGarak

It actually got some gear scaling as far back as 2.0-ish, although not nearly as much. It was never explicitly documented for shadow ward, although it happened when mages got scaling for fire/frost ward. I want to say that it was around 10%-ish, like all absorb-shield at the time, which would dovetail nicely with me remembering "(1050 absorbed)" or that ballpark from my shadow ward next patch. So it's not as big a buff but it's still pretty big--I'll probably end up netting around 200 on it.

I was not aware of that, but I cite this part of the patch noes as reason for my testing:

Shadow Ward: This spell now gains additional benefit from spell damage bonuses. Base absorb value of rank 4 has been reduced.

Ebi · 11/15/07, 6:01 PM

For crafted items, you should mention the epic engineering head, [Destruction Holo-gogs]. Not all of us are tailors.

• frmorrison · 11/16/07, 12:25 AM

Before 2.3, my shadow ward absorbed 1100 damage with 1000 damage gear (was tanking Illidan when I looked it up).

I forgot what it absorbs now, but it is absorbing more damage than before.

galzohar · 11/16/07, 12:53 AM

Isn't the engineering headpiece better than spellstirke even if it breaks the set bonus anyway? (at least assuming you have other places to drop damage/crit for hit such as gem slots so you remain capped) Meeting the new meta requirements (12 crit 3% crit damage 2 blue gems) pretty much requires you match the socket bonus on your head plus another item with 1 blue socket, while ignoring socket bonuses on the rest. If you compare this gem setup to a setup of socketing each item optimally you probably won't get much dps difference anyway - probably 5 spell damage worth at the worst, more likely 1-2 spell damage worth net loss from meeting the meta's requirements if not even less (actual number really really depends on your gear and availability of epic gems but it's low in every case).

Then again T5 pretty close to it (with a lot more stam on the side) and you will sooner or later unequip your goggles, while proffessions like enchanting stay forever. Then again you can only have 2 proffessions, but for most people tailoring is quite a must-have.

Soulriper · 11/16/07, 6:33 PM

You say that shadow/destro spec is the best spec that scales with gear, and that outruns Affliction in high end raids. I'd just like to know when and with what kind of gear, one aff lock should respec and go shadow/destro for raids? How much +spell hit and dmg would he need to make the spec more viable then Affliction?

Trickykid · 11/16/07, 7:20 PM

Originally Posted by Soulriper

You say that shadow/destro spec is the best spec that scales with gear, and that outruns Affliction in high end raids. I'd just like to know when and with what kind of gear, one aff lock should respec and go shadow/destro for raids? How much +spell hit and dmg would he need to make the spec more viable then Affliction?

From original post:

Originally Posted by Arelenda

There has been much debate about what the exact gear treshold is, for destruction to outperform affliction. Opinions are divided on the matter. Both specs require different play styles, resulting in boss fights typically favoring one spec over the other. ISB damage is hard to measure. Because of this it is virtually impossible to get solid evidence. The debate is unlikely to cease any time soon. The old rule of thumb "you need Hyjal/BT gear for destruction to outperform affliction" is most definitely untrue.

The best idea if you're curious about it is to respec and see how you compare to yourself.

Arelenda · 11/16/07, 7:27 PM

Originally Posted by Soulriper

You say that shadow/destro spec is the best spec that scales with gear, and that outruns Affliction in high end raids. I'd just like to know when and with what kind of gear, one aff lock should respec and go shadow/destro for raids? How much +spell hit and dmg would he need to make the spec more viable then Affliction?

Is answered by the compendium.

Originally Posted by Compendium

There has been much debate about what the exact gear treshold is, for destruction to outperform affliction. Opinions are divided on the matter. Both specs require different play styles, resulting in boss fights typically favoring one spec over the other. ISB damage is hard to measure. Because of this it is virtually impossible to get solid evidence. The debate is unlikely to cease any time soon. The old rule of thumb "you need Hyjal/BT gear for destruction to outperform affliction" is most definitely untrue.

It depends more on playstyle, player skill and taste then on spec, at low gear levels. Both specs work and will do good damage. In my experience, even at Khara level destro locks are viable. As more gear becomes available, destruction clearly outperforms affliction. For this reason I recommend having one and only one affliction warlock in a raid, for Blood Pact and Talented CoS. Of course, with Fire mages maybe becoming more viable in 2.3, CoE might make a comeback.