DaveA50

The best way to look at it is by looking to the future. If the piece of gear will only be replaced by something in MH/BT, which you will hopefully be visiting soon, then it is worth it. Not being hit capped isn't the biggest deal for a short time. If the piece of gear can be replaced by something from SSC/TK, then keep what you have already.

 

Trickykid

Actually you are asking general advice on your gear since you want to know "how to work it into a boss gear set". You're pointing out that you aren't able to take what might be upgrades because you're afraid of losing 202 hit rating, which isn't too hard with properly socketed tailoring gear.

Opinions on the badge gear don't really matter since it's a simple stat versus stat situation. Plug the numbers into the spreadsheet and see, at your gear level, which pieces are upgrades. You'll be able to determine if dropping the hit is worth it as well as which pieces are worth foregoing for raid loot.

 

weet

Well obviously your #1 problem at the moment is having to socket too much hit, so try to get at least one of belt of blasting/vashj robes/t5 legs as soon as possible (guessing the belt would be the easiest to get) and you should have more room to incorporate those badge/za items into your gear.

 

Fireye

I didn't realize that the spreadsheet's interpretation of haste was valid. I'll use that, thanks.

 

Krazen

A belt of blasting would free up 23 hit. Do that, and then equip the Fetish of the Primal Gods OH. Since you seem to be an applicant, I don't believe they'll be handing you vashj or t5 robes any time soon, so you might want to consider picking up t4 robes (for the 2 pc bonus).

Hood of Hexing will give you all the hit you need, and then some extra on top of that. For now, though, you could regem that 6 dmg/4 int gem into a 4/5 topaz, allowing you to put another 4/5 topaz in your gloves. Mindstorm wristbands are excellent; I'd equip them right now over what you have even if you lose ~.5% hit.

 

Ammanas

Just some general advice: yes, hit is the best stat if you are not hit capped. However, while you should value it over the other stats and strive to be hit capped you should not severely gimp your damage/crit/haste to maintain 202 hit rating.

 

galzohar

Define "severely". As long as you're not losing more dmg than the hit equivalent on the spreadsheet, it's worth it to cap hit... This would mean you can lose a pretty damn high amount of spell dmg for hit and it'll still be worth it, however obviously there's an amount of spell dmg that will beat crit anyway. Instead of asking a million questions you could just look at the spreadsheet. tbh though if I was a guild officer I wouldn't consider someone who couldn't bother with the tailoring gear so far into TBC release.

 

PsyBomb

Hit cap is actually quite easy to maintain, this is sans tailoring and having never set foot in anything above Magtheridon's Lair. Our T4 set pieces are absolutely loaded with it, and the new badge gear is very nice as well. At this point, I have the 202 Hit set (Has just over 1k shadow self-buffed and 15% crit) and angling to get some different pieces so that I can free up some slots for other stats. Look at my armory if you want any ideas for any easy-to-get items.

To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.

 

Krazen

If I recall, 1 point of hit is in the neighborhood of 1.5 damage or so.

 

Arelenda

It depends on your spec more than anything, but my rule of thumb would be:

1 hit = 1.3 damage (on raid bosses when not capped)
1 hit = 0 damage (on anything else)

 

galzohar

More or less what I meant - some people would see their spell dmg drop under 1k when they cap their hit and think that's really bad even though they may have just lost maybe 1.2 dmg per 1 hit rating at worst - this is not severly gimping your spell dmg for hit this is actually increasing your dps.

 

deneba

I am trying to get a feeling for how these specs compare for a warlock who has achieved the 2/5 T5 bonus and carries the Solarian class trinket.

0/40/21 would keep a lower dps, more frail succubus up, but would offer up a bigger master demonologist bonus plus Ruin.

0/41/20 would keep a tougher, higher dps felguard up, but give up a bit of the MD damage bonus and Ruin disappears.

So far I am leaning toward the former--as I continue to stack crit, my experience has been that Ruin is great compensation for the times where my pet accidentally dies... as a demonology warlock I lose out when that happens (obviously) but Ruin dulls the blow a bit. But I've read some amazing things about 200dps felguards tearing it up in SSC and TK (most fights, anyway) once they have the 2/5 T5 and trinket supporting them. What I can't find is much information on how a succubus holds up (actively dpsing) in the same fights. Is it pretty likely that a succubus would survive most boss fights that a felguard would survive? Or, is she just too frail and best left on passive?

 

Amandil

I was wondering could someone clear a few things up for me. In a 0/21/40 spec, how does Corruption and Immolate fit in? This may have been mentioned before and I missed it. I've heard differing opinions on whether or not to add Corruption and Immolate to a cast sequence. As far as I can see, Corruption would be doing 3500-4000dmg for a 2 sec cast, in a 25man. It seems pretty clear that sticking both immo and corr in would improve dps overall, but, at some point as crit increases, is it better to leave them out? If so, when?

 

PsyBomb

In both cases, only use the spell if you know that you will get the full effect (same goes if you're allowed a damage curse, rather than a raid-boosting one). If you will, great. If not, then you're losing DPS when compared to shadowbolting. To the best of my knowledge, this never stops being true.

To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.

 

galzohar

Corruption is calculated as a dps LOSS for 0/21/40 afaik. Very small loss but why bother. Immolate gets similar results except you need to either lack imp scorch or have some haste for it to actually be a small dps loss rather than a small dps gain. Also there is currently no really accurate imp SB model that will show how much dps your raid is losing by you casting immolate instead of shadowbolt every once in a while.

 

Arelenda

It actually does stop being true. Extra hit, crit, haste and spellpower are ALL in favor of Shadow Bolt for that spec. Also there are the shorter range, interruption, debuff and threat factors.

At low gear levels (starting Karazhan) Immolate and Corruption are better dps. As your stats increase there is a grey zone, and at the end of Hyjal/BT Shadow Bolt spam is just better. The grey zone is grey because of ISB and the value you put on the factors I mentioned before.

 

Arelenda

I tried it, the day we learned Bloodboil. It was a nightmare. Whenever she died I was severely handicapped, and asking for buffs on her was a major pain since no healers have pets on their raid screen. I kept getting ressed last and having no time to actually summon my Succubus before group buffs. My Shadow Bolts hit for significantly less due to missing out on SnF (Demonic Knowledge didn't compensate enough).

She's _very_ frail and needs constant looking after, she doesn't have the 50% aoe avoidance the Felguard has, and can't use Lash of Pain on the primary target. (because it eats ISB)

However:
- most of the problems I had are avoidable. I was new at the spec and at the fight.
- I did not have the trinket (although I had 2p T5)
- I didn't have the "dismiss" macro (linked in the compendium)
- It theoritically has a really high payout, especially if your gear does not sport very high spellpower and if the Succubus can dps as well.
- it is very fight dependent, and Bloodboil is probably not the best fight due to random poison damage being done to the Succubus

I'm not saying it's a bad spec, it's a potentially very effective spec, and it comes with Fire damage tanking capacities. The downside is that it is harder to play, and your performance will depend on the encounter being pet friendly, moreso than the Felguard spec.

 

PSGarak

HOW TO: Incorporate ISB-Uptime Changes In A Raid Scenario Into A Spreadsheet

You need two extra data fields that you have to assume are relatively constant, and which you will have to obtain from your other warlocks and shadowpriests by either asking them about their cycle or parsing their data. You need the frequency of incoming shadow spells, and you need the ISB proc rate (or preferably ISB proc frequency, in procs/sec).

From these, you add your own SB casting measure and proc frequency, and you get your raid-average ISB proc rate, from which you get raid ISB uptime from 1-(1-x)^4. This should give you a dynamic ISB uptime model that matches a raid expectation and reflects the effect of your crit rating on your shadow damage including ISB uptime.

If you have an estimate of your raid's average pre-ISB shadow damage (or post-ISB damage and ISB uptime) you can us it to figure out the extra damage loss/gain from the change in ISB uptime, and therefore the explicit value of damage to crit counting raid damage rather than personal damage.

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

 

Krazen

I wonder if some observational Dr. Boom testing can give us reasonable figures:

Take your normal shadow raiding crew and unlearn your destruction talents, nuking Dr. Boom for 5 minutes. Record individual and total DPS.

Have all the warlocks person put 5 points into ISB and repeat the test, recording individual and total DPS. Note the % increase in individual and raid DPS.

From there, we could probably extrapolate what the value of 1 point in crit is for both criteria. It won't be exact, but since everything is in percentage terms, the results should reasonably carry over to a raid buffed setting. The problem I primarily see is that ISB uptime has some sort of S curve behavior, and the value of 1 point of crit varies accordingly.

 

galzohar

Now to make lieuler's spreadsheet do it automatically so I can point warlocks at it to evaluate their gear

While this looks very, very rough, it also seems incredibly more accurate than just assuming a fixed ISB time and/or just ignoring the raid dps benefit of ISB.

 

Spline

After playing around with Leulier's ISB simulator, I managed to learn that stacking crit for the purpose of increasing ISB uptime will not have noticeable results. Why? Several things are going on to account for this. I first noticed that the simulated uptime for a single 10min fight varies by as much as 15% with an average destro-demo-aff-SP crew. It's easy to find an average over multiple fights by increasing the fight length - at 10,000 seconds, the variance is less than 5%. With this fight length, I tried adding varying amounts of crit to each Warlock. As expected, giving crit to Destrolock had the strongest effect on ISB, which sadly wasn't very much. 10% crit added to Destro only pushed uptime up by 5% or so.

Going back to the 15% variance between 10min fights. I could severely mutilate my gear in order to gain that 10% crit. However, I wouldn't notice that 5% gained uptime on an individual attempt, since the random variance is so large. I suppose that on average, there will be more uptime over a large number of fights, but on a single fight the random-number-generator is going to have a stronger effect on uptime than anyone's individual crit rating.

 

Krazen

Taking these figures:

I'll assume 1000 shadow dps per user before ISB:

An additional 5% presence of the 20% damage boost provides a 10 dps boost.

Now, at the hit cap, the leulier spreadsheet provides that 1 spellpower provides a .80-.87 dps boost depending on your crit. I'll assume .85, thus the 10 dps = 11.8 spellpower.

Thus, 221 crit rating has the additional bonus of 11.8 spellpower (per shadow user other than yourself), or about .0534 per point in crit rating.


So, splitting the value of crit into some function X + Y, where X is the value of 1 crit to yourself and Y is the value of 1 crit to everyone else:

X is .58 with the base leulier values. You can insert your own value here.
Y is .05*Z, where Z is the number of other shadow users in the raid.

I don't know if I'm way off or my math is wrong, but that number doesn't seem unreasonable.

 

witchedwiz

a lil question :P
currently my equip consist of two "sets" (2 x t4 pieces, 2 x spellstrike) and we are stuck on vashj (let's just say that some of us lack the motivation, so to speak)...
is it worth it to throw a need at any t5 pieces (head/legs mostly.. since hands don't interest me the sligthest having both attumen hands and studious wraps wich i currently use)?
and when exactly is it worth to spec into destru shadow? (%crit chance in tootip incl 3 backlash and min spelldmg would be appreciated).. i already have some other crit equi (s3 silk cloth bracers for one, boots of blasting... got no belts of blasting so far, since it didn't drop)...
and is it REALLY worth to try to regem a bit my gear in order to fit in darkmoon faire crusade + icon, evnetually reverting back to attumen's hands//jewel of infinite possibilities//ashyen's gift//other to compensate for the loss of the bloodscryer gem? (i have all those items already, so it's simply a matter of swapping//regemming).. or should i just wait for the next batch of upgrade (vashj chest, some tk drop [we've abandoned tk till we down vashj :X]) and then re-trim my equip (consider that as far as caster items are concerned, i'm third dkp-wise on the current "raiding" roster, and second in a lock-only items perspective)?
just a side note :P refrain from any comment on my sucky wand <_> i've had no luck with magtheridon/aran/black stalk since september (started again at the beginning of september and geared myself completely from green/blue drops with the help of my guildmates:X) and i'm getting so depressed that i'm starting to consider the badge wand :X

 

Arelenda

Take a look at Leulier's spreadsheet, or use ShadowSeer.

If you get a shot at Vashj's chest, it's great long term item.

As for when it's worth respeccing: it depends. If you had bothered to read up, you'd have found plenty of discussions on the subject.

 

Spline

In my guild, Vashj's robes are considered an endgame item and are eligible for guild-provided epic gems.