galzohar

Those mobs are lvl72 at the highest, though, which means you'll be hit capped with 5% hit from gear. Considering even affliction warlocks should have minimum 6% for bosses (becuase under that hit is actually the best stat to get as your affliction spells also become uncapped), and how trivial it is to have such a low minimum required +hit, I wouldn't get 16% hit just to soulshatter on trash - it simply provides 0 benefit.

 

Trickykid

I'm not saying 20% from gear is hard to get. I'm also not saying you saw a DPS decrease if you used that value "to shoot for" before you switched. What I'm saying is that there is nothing behind the arbitrary "minimum stats" for destro. Wear the best gear you can based on your spec, arbitrary minimums with no backing don't matter. If you're curious about switching from affliction to destro, check your gear in the spreaedsheet and respec to see how it pans out in practice.

 

Krazen

Does anyone have any further insight into crit % vs lvl 73 mobs, and how it relates to what you see in the character screen?

 

Bogeywoman

Hmm, good point, I had forgotten that they were lower level. That does raise the possibility of an affliction lock going strong on damage. Having had the rest of my arguments shot down from now, let me end with "but the amount of damage you'll get and the gemming you have to do to get there is probably not cost effective if you ever intend on going to any other spec at any time."

 

Spline

Not unless someone volunteers thousands of play-hours for testing. I'm no statistician, so I've got no idea exactly how many hours are needed to get useful results.

 

Humanwarlock

Should a destruction specced warlock be drinking mana potions or destruction potions for max dps? I think I heard somewhere that the time gained from not having to lifetap as often when chainchugging mana pots increases dps more than chainchugging destro pots would.

 

Trickykid

100 mp5 versus 0.25% crit and 15 spell power on the spreadsheet.

In general: if you need to lifetap when you could have been dealing damage, mana pots will win. You might be able to make a destro-pot win if you stacked it on top of heroism and skull of gul'dan, though.

 

galzohar

Also any fight with movement will allow you to lifetap with 0 dps loss, making destro potions better if you move often enough. Just carry both mana and destruction potions and use whichever suits the fight better. But yeah according to the spreadsheet if you're just standing and nuking mana pots win.

 

Moghedian

Well, even if its not higher dps I use gul'dan + desto pot + clicky trinket for big huge pew pew numbers. min/maxing the fun quotient is worth doing too

 

Morwen

As an extension, you 'waste' the mana pot if you end the fight with extra mana. The mana pot will win if it actually does save you that lifetap in practice (especially for vulnerability phases). If at the end of a nuke phase you still have 3k mana left over then it turns out you didn't get any savings from the mana pot at all.

Mana pots would also generate some extra threat, something to consider if you are closely riding the line.

 

Trickykid

For destro, a mana pot not only saves you the GCD but also the life needed to lifetap... so in a way it's also preventing you from losing 2400 HP which can be nice when you're low on life and can't afford to dip into raid-damage 1shot range. On that note, super rejuv pots give only 200 less mana but bring more HP than a super healing pot.

 

Krazen

LTing doesn't generate threat.

 

◊ Kyth

I can't recommend super rejuv pots enough, particularly for the T6 fights.

Just don't forget what other mana users learned long ago: use your pot cooldown early so that it's up again sooner in the fight.

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dakalro

With the amount of raid healing done on most bosses these days I'd much rather use mana pots, but again we rarely have less than 7 healers out of which 2 resto sham, 1-2 resto druids, 2-4 CoH priests (one specced CoH when someone suggested they try then all of them followed ... never seen spi in a 25 man ever since ), fill up with palas.

But unless you're in a double spriest group destro pots won't come close to mana pots. For healing there's 3xHealthstone, and ~1700 heal death coil and soul leech which can give some very nice healing when lucky (close to 4k a pop max).

 

Blackranger

Greetings,

I know these patch-notes are not confirmed yet, but I thought it'd be still interesting to see the numbers for these changes.
I'm a terrible theory-crafter, but I've been hearing a lot of moaning and whining going on about how big of a nerf this would be to warlocks. But actually, I'm getting the feeling this wouldn't even be a nerf, maybe even a slight buff. I assume of course, that because imp SB only works for the warlock who casted it, shadowpriests and other warlocks will not be able to eat up the charges anymore. Depending on the amount of shadowpriests (and probably affliction locks with less crit than you have) would this not mean it would even out the 5% damage loss from the talent?

This seems more like a shadowpriest nerf than a lock nerf to me.

Is there anyone with enough knowledge of math to do the numbers for this?

 

Arelenda

This would be a horrible nerf. Our main advantage over other classes is ISB and the incredible bonus it gives to all shadow users. Do remember that ISB affects all shadow damage. It buffs all shadow dots as well, without consuming charges. When you crit, you're boosting all SW:Pains, CoAs, UAs, Corruptions and SLs ticking on the target for the duration of the ISB debuff.

If this were to happen, affliction locks and shadow priests would take a very hard hit (which I estimate at 5% and 7%, respectively), destro locks will probably take a somewhat lower hit in personal damage (estimated at 3%), and raid damage would suffer. It is nowhere near a buff to any class or spec involved, unless you're obsessed by your own personal damage to the point where you would deliberately lower other people's dps to make sure you win on the meter.

It is definitely not a good idea. If anything needs nerfing, it's not shadow priest or affliction dps.

Disclaimer: these are rough estimates, based on ISB data from our last raid. Given how finicky ISB is, they might be off a bit. But I'm 100% sure about my conclusion.

 

Blackranger

That's why I said: This seems more like a shadowpriest nerf than a lock nerf to me.

I'm not saying it's a good thing, I just wanted to know how much it's an actual destro lock nerf.

 

dakalro

Might be 0, might even be a slight buff (well, if you compare to current without a spriest in group, ~1%), might be a slight nerf (~1%). But you will see wild variations in dps due to crit streaks added to current crit% variations. I mean in theory you'd have it at 100% uptime anytime you go over 25% crit if crits were evenly spread and you always got exact crit rates .

Unless you didn't use spriests/affli locks this won't be a nerf. Life Tap would, so would regen loss from spriests, so would uptime loss for affli. But hey, fire was already close to shadow, a nice buff to coefficient and we'll all turn from skull missile shooting monkeys to ground burning fire shooting ones . Though they better buff spriests/affliction if they do this.

Fortunately if these changes do show up on PTR at some point there will be plenty of people and numbers to show their effects as possibly Sunwell could even be farmed on PTR by the time it goes live. And there's always Rage right there to do some dps testing so until some official explanations show up, no need to worry.

 

Pintofbrew

No, you will not have 100% uptime with 25% crit, particularly in theory. Casting four spells at 25% crit does not mean you have 4*25=100% chance to refresh your ISB.

The chance you have to refresh it is in fact 1-(0.75^3)=69.4%. Even with 99% crit you wouldn't have a guaranteed refresh.

I'm curious how while you gentlemen noticed "ISB narf" none of you noticed in the same alleged notes "Incinerate coef. incerased". Bearing in mind 0.21.40 imp-saccing benefits from delicious talents like Emberstorm, and imp. Scorch combined with Misery is 20% which is signifficantly ahead than Shadow Weaving+Misery at 15%.

We all know how kinky percentile increments are... I can't wait till we start considering maledicted CoE as a DPS optimizer.

 

dakalro

You said:

I said:
I mean in theory you'd have it at 100% uptime anytime you go over 25% crit if crits were evenly spread and you always got exact crit rates.

You said:
I said:
But hey, fire was already close to shadow, a nice buff to coefficient and we'll all turn from skull missile shooting monkeys to ground burning fire shooting ones.

New stuff:
And at this point Fire, even before ISB is accounted for is about 4% behind shadow. Removing ISB raid buff certainly makes fire not only viable but with a coefficient increase of at least 5-10% even better (it's what, 61-62 mana cheaper than SB with Cataclysm on?). Inci starts at 85%, SB at 102% with S&F ... big difference here. From crappy calc it would seem they need to bring Inci from 71% base to 80% to be slightly under SB at scaling, not damage/cast but that's prolly offset by the mana cost.
It's been a long time since we last had an affliction warlock in raid, can't even remember, but I always give mages CoE, if only just to delay my "always at the start of fights 9k-10k crit streaks that always force me to soulshatter therefore doing nothing for a large part of the fight". Plus they whine, big time, not a big as spriests for locks to get more crit though .

Visit to the opthamologist required or just skipping what you don't want to read? :P

 

Pentamorfi

I did notice this. Generally, the difference between shadow and fire destro was ISB uptime (plus bigger mana returns by shadowpriests) . We don't have an idea of how much the Incinerate coefficient will be increased, but I'm going to assume Blizzard wants to bring the two specs more in line with each other. If this turns out to be true, you'll essentially be doing the same damage both as fire and destro, only without the aggro spikes of ISB-fueled mega crits. It just seems like a backwards way of achieving this, since affliction locks and shadow priests hardly need a DPS nerf.

 

Krazen

Plugging these values in the spreadsheet shows that the mana pots are more than twice as good (about 13.51 for the destro pot and 28.97 for the manas).

I can only conclude that destro pots can never be better if you ever lifetap when you could nuke otherwise; Heroism and Skull don't double your damage.

 

Stran

Smaller crits will also help out on RoS. And Doom + ROS = bad.

 

Morwen

1. I think on this board by 'in theory' we tend to mean 'mathematically expected over the long term', rather than the 'Communism works in theory' usage.

2. Going off on a tangent, if you are forced to do nothing for some period of time post-soulshatter then the optimal play would have been to wait longer to soulshatter and move the do-nothing period towards the start of the fight.

 

galzohar

Doing some quick numbers with reasonable raids and ~25-30% crit warlock, the personal DPS gained by ISB will be pretty damn close to what it is now. You'll have more personal ISB time but gain less damage from it, and if you do the math you'll see that your dps doesn't really change with this patch change.

So what does it really do?

Well first thing it makes modeling so much easier ISB uptime will be 1-(1-crit)^4 for spamming shadowbolts continuously (slightly less if you have to move when ISB charges are up, and say, only get 3 shadowbolts during those 12 seconds).

Shadow priests will be losing massive DPS with such a change. In my normal raid ISB should be up 50-60% of the time which would mean a 10-12% DPS loss to shadow priests.

For affliction warlocks' personal dps it'll really depend on their personal crit. Since they often have 12 second intervals where less than 4 shadowbolts are being cast, yet damage is still being dealt via DoTs, calculating ISB uptime becomes a bit complicated, and the DPS increase from it even more complicated. No longer should you be able to make the approximation of "dps increase = uptime * 0.2" although it might still be reasonable close - it needs more looking into.

This does give a side-effect buff to affliction as destruction warlocks no longer bring any increase to raid dps over affliction aside from their personal dps, while affliction brings malediction. Right now the ISB increase from going from aff to destro actually increases raid dps a bit more than malediction would, making affliction pretty much a purely "imp+SE bitch". So while I'm not sure how the personal dps of affliction warlocks will change with this (although I am sure that wether it's an increase or decrease depends on the affliction warlock's crit chance), affliction warlocks will at least increase the DPS of other shadow users better than destruction warlocks would.

Overall I would expect raid dps to go down if such a change would be implemented, even before taking into account the secondary effect the lower regen shadow priests would have.