galzohar

You can't really make a breakpoint. The more spell damage you have the more crit will be required for ruin to beat UA. If for example 1300 damage and 25% crit gave equal DPS for the specs, then 1400 spell damage would require more than 25% crit for them to be equal.

Also the difference in DPS between ruin and UA also depends on how many shadow destruction warlocks are in the raid, their crit chances and the number of shadow priests in the raid.

For these reasons, it's best if you just use the spreadsheet to decide between ruin and UA, just make sure to place an appropriate dot-gap and raid shadow DPSers' stats, and take into account the rest-of-raid ISB DPS difference you get when you change specs.

 

Vlar

If the only thing you are changing is Ruin and UA, the only difference between the rest-of-raid ISB DPS difference should be your personal difference in DPS.

Also, I opened the calculator using the default setting, I input 30,000 +damage and 25% crit. Ruin still won (UA had 25,584 and Ruin had 26,210).

Edit: Punctuation.

 

Flamingcloud

Indeed there is no way UA is ever gonna beat Ruin in a sunwell gear level unless you are way below the hit cap. Plus the debuff cap is a real concern so its likely going no UA or Immolate is the best case scenario.

 

galzohar

The sample warlock in my spreadsheet more than meets those "requirements" (26 crit and almost 1360 buffed damage in tank group) yet gets more DPS with UA even if using the gear that favors ruin (gives best ruin dps out of the gear options) in both specs.

Ruin will also scale better with haste which makes it even more impossible to make "requirements".

Seems like I was wrong about the spell damage, though, and it actually makes little difference between UA and ruin. So the better build is based on some kind of multipication of your raid crit and haste taking into account the raid ISB (remember for some raid setups ruin will add more ISB uptime than it would for others, although this is probably a rather small differenece).

Anyway the main reason you can't make a breakpoint is that it depends heavily on both your crit and haste level - saying you need a certain level of crit is wrong as infinite haste will generally make ruin better with much lower crit rates than you'd need if you have 0 haste. And it's not the only factor, but it is the most significant one.

Since sunwell is filled with haste gear and your crit generally doesn't go down as you gear up, I wouldn't be surprised if ruin would pass UA with good enough gear. But you cannot put a line of "if you got X and Y stats ruin wins" as it simply won't always be true.

 

Vlar

Actually, with the premise that Haste improves ruin more quickly than UA, it kind of would be possible, given that it should be possible to meet the requirements prior to getting spell haste.

I did not run the numbers for this, since the spreadsheet was squawking on this computer and I do not want to take the time to break out my laptop.

Possible statement:

At 0 haste and no other spec changes, Ruin is theorycrafted to out damage UA at X +spell damage and Y% Crit. Haste is thought to lower this requirement.

 

galzohar

Yeah but your requirement on crit will go down as crit goes up, and therefore you'll have to make some wierd non-linear function of crit and haste even if you decide to ignore the other, less sinigicant factors (that also affect it). Easier to just use the spreadsheet since you should have all your stats placed in there if you care about your DPS in the firstplace.

 

shamitude

can anyone please tell me the best possible damage rotation for a destruction lock?

 

Arnath

Quoted from the first page of this very thread:
Read the existing threads before posting.

 

Presarc

Apply curse. Spam shadowbolt. Don't pull aggro.

 

Dassem

And try to stay awake

 

shamitude

Ok thanks alot guy, I just wanted to make sure I didn't need to use immolate,corruption, or conflagrate since my warlock is not well geared.

 

Flamingcloud

If you were in some sort of 4pc T5 setup, you would probably want to use corruption. Immolate is useful if you do all 10 fire talent points.. but I'd rather have the other stuff.

 

burnz68

From what I have found on my spreadsheet, I always benefit more from quick lionseye than any other gem when raid and party buffed. My guess is that there is an inflection point when you reach a certain spell damage. At that point it becomes better to throw out damage faster, than to simply throw out more damage at the same rate. Then again, I'm not 0/21/40 yet. I have 2T5 and VST so I'm still happy with the versatility and survivability I get out of 5/35/21. That will change when I break 2T5.

If you are using that v23 spreadsheet, you should make sure you're keeping your party and raid buffs accurate. For me that means an elemental shaman and max consumables but sadly no spriest yet. For you it may be radically different.

 

Nicarras

Yes, if you are trying to weigh the gems, make sure you mention if its just you and no party buffs, or fully buffed.

My fully buffed values in T6ish gear will place haste considerably more valuable than dmg. Basically what I'm doing is all my yellow slots are +10 haste, all my red slots are +12 dmg. You can see that our gear generally has more yellow than red slots.

I still have 2T5, and cant stand raiding as Felguard, so i'm just either shadow or fire destro depending on the day, or lock tank.

 

Garith

I have read alot of the guide and resulting posts but not sure which direction to go. I have an unusual gear set up as of now...

The World of Warcraft Armory

at any 1 time i have a raid buffed and fully proc'd spell damage of around 1500. Now having the mag's eye trinket I am not anywhere near hit capped. So in wanting to try out a destro ISB spec. Wondering if pushing for a tad more haste then crit would be beneficial or not. Dont get me wrong i love my affliction spec and will prolly stay it after this trial. But i want to see some big numbers for a while before going back to afflic. I had set up my entire gear set around proc's cause i am a lazy bugger and hate making macro's and clicking trinkets. Any thoughts on if this gear set with a few gem enhancements might be viable for going a destro spec? i have some other + crit pieces i can switch out at that cost of some haste.

Any feed back would be taken and put to work.


Garith

 

Ammanas

Destro is even more hit dependent than affliction, if your going to re-gem you need to try and be hit capped. Mags eye is a decent trinket only because of the high passive damage, the proc is pretty damn bad and gearing around it is not a good idea.

 

Garith

Bad as in how? Not sure what you mean....an extra 170 spell damage is damn good in keeping dots ticking as high as possible and pushing my low SB DPS up.

 

Ammanas

Bad as in hit is the best possible stat for warlocks, and gimping your hit to try and keep a decent proc uptime on the trinket is a bad idea. If you don't gimp your hit, it will hardly ever proc. Either way its bad

 

clavarnway

The idea is that you should never be happy when it procs. There is the 1% chance it will proc for every spell cast due to resists that you can't mitigate, but if it's proccing any more than 1% you need more spell hit.

http://sigs.guildlaunch.net/sig.php/1424974uXyta.png

 

burnz68

I take a different look on the eye of magtheridon than most. And I've done considerable homework to get there. Here's what I have found to be true:

1) never focus on hit to the exclusion of all other stats. You cannot do more dps with capped hit if you just lost 100 crit and 200 spell damage for your 202 hit rating. I'm exaggerating here for effect, but the point is, you can sacrifice a little hit if it means that you will hit harder or crit more when you do hit. Obviously if you are affliction, crit is basically a complete waste, so adjust how you value certain stats according to your spec.
2) You can and should always stay above 10% hit at a minimum, but it is entirely reasonable to end up raid-buffed for hit around 12-14 percent, especially with the EoM. Example: self buffed I hover around 10% but I have an elemental draenai shaman in my group at all times. That gives me the extra 4% to hit I need to get to 14%. Going higher is a waste on all but boss fights, anyway.
3) The EoM trinket seems to be best suited for situational use for those warlocks with a hit rating of around 13-15% hit. Any higher and you might as well go with a use trinket, and any lower and you're going to resist too often on boss fights. What is nice about the trinket is that it does a great job of compensating for resisted damage on boss fights for a set of gear that is ideally tuned for trash. Assuming you had 13-15% hit, you can actually swap to a use trinket during trash, and swap in EoM specifically for the boss. Take those resists as a blessing in disguise; a resist is like a mini agro dump; useful if you're trying to redline your threat.

 

Nicarras

The man speaks truth. Back when I was raiding Mag I thought that trinket would be sweet...but as you dig into the math you realize the passive damage is the only good part.

@Garith

Some recommendations for your gear.

+6 Stats Chest
Subtlety to Cloak

Your gem choices could use an overhaul. Blue stam gems are not needed for PVE. If you are going to break the socket bonus on your chest with the reds, then you may as well remove that one blue there as it isnt helping you. The hit on gloves is iffy, yes you are under the cap...but I prefer to do dmg to gloves and gem for hit. Seems easier to remove hit then as you acquire more gear.

You also have a terrible meta gem in one of the two best helms in the game. The half cast time proc has been nerfed in the patch, and it does absolutely nothing for Affliction. Your best bet is to upgrade that to a CSD asap, especially if you are going to be switching to desto.

Also if you are to stay aff I'd remove your points in iHoT, and put them in Malediction. Better spending of talent points overall for the raid (unless you have another Male aff lock already?). You should swap out your Kara ring with the Exalted CE ring for affliction...that would get you a little closer to the hit cap.

If that gear you are in on your armory is the gear you are going to do destro with, then you need 2 things. More hit (cap) and more crit. Unless you are getting a Moonkin and an Ele Shaman in your group you'd need to improve these stats or else you are just going to be more of a detriment to ISB uptime than an asset to keeping it up.

 

LockApologist

Unusual gear is an understatement. 12 stam in your shoulders? Haste OH/belt/wrist/gems as Aff? That terrible neck? why would you do that? No Malediction, Imp CoA, CoEx. Serious changes are in order.

But, to your specific question, your gear is not well suited to destro, or Aff. To go destro, you need to
a.) swap your meta
b.) swap gear/gems till you hit cap
c.) preferable replace Mag's Eye

You'd be better off replacing Mag's eye with Timbal's, dropping your haste, and fixing your aff spec to pick up enough suppression/SE/Mal and drop your pvp/solo talents. If you're going to come back with "But I only raid casually, and want to keep those." you're asking the wrong questions in the wrong place.

 

Trickykid

These two statements contradict each other. Don't focus on it, but follow a totally arbitrary minimum of 10%?
The focus of this thread is maximizing DPS on raid bosses. If you want to maximize your trash DPS, you can down to 5% hit anyway.
Not casting any spells for a while is a mini threat drop as well. :P

 

Vlar

I agree with most of the statements laid out, so I dont need to quote the entire thing... Looking at the Armory, he has 15% crit with his current spec. Changing to 21/40 will jump that to 23%, so the crit is not nearly as bad as is looks.

Edit: I hate it when I notice the misspelling right as I click "post."

 

lairpie

Due to a rather ample supply of forum browsing time, I've recently been working on helping a number of our damagers improve their damage, largely through researching what they should be doing, looking at what they are doing via wws, and trying to close that gap. We've recently killed illidan. In our first night of sunwell, a night we didn't have enough of the usual raiders on to do BT or hyjal, we got kalecgos to 60% without too much of an idea what was going on exactly, and 7 people in the raid that were just random PvP friends or whatever that had never been to BT, Hyjal, or in some cases ant t5 content raids at all. At least 2 of these people managed to not make it into the bubble and were locked out each pull somehow, and i don't think everyone was even on vent. With a real raid, based on that, we figure we could kill kalecgos in a night or two with relative ease.

However, there is 0 chance we can kill brutallus right now. From a combination of lack of skill and lack of gear our raid simply can't do that much damage in 6 minutes. Our only 4t6 damager is an enh shaman alt that we've been bringing to raids trying to boost our melee damage (we get like a lot of protector and don't have too many of the people that use it) so we have a grand total of 0 of the amazing 6% on shadow bolt, 10% on steady shot, etc bonuses. We have 4 total people that consistently are over the 1700ish dps that the raid has to average, 2 rogues, a mage, and a lock. Our ret paly, shadow priests, blood frenzy warrior, are all pretty close to the damage numbers i'm seeing for their classes from WWS Brutallus kills, but those classes just aren't going to be pulling the average up.

Anyway, my main issue is that despite our tanks putting out comparable threat based on wws to what is common in other guilds, our warlocks are doing less damage while still frequently pulling agro on boss fights, or having to slow damage to avoid pulling agro. One of our warlocks is pretty good, has a ~2300 3v3 and a ~2400 arena team, so he's obviously not retarded, and seems to be threat capped around 1800-1900 dps most fights. Warlock number 2, same spec seems to pull agro at least as much, says he can't do any more damage w/o getting agro, but is doing 2-300 dps less most fights. Both are fairly standard 0-21-40 builds. The only way i can really see where warlock one is doing less than warlocks in other guilds because he's threat capped, and warlock 2 is also somehow threat capped is they're both horribly misusing shatter. I did the math out a while ago for optimal shatter timings for a 10 minute fight, no agro gimicks, based on your dps and the tank's tps, and it basically came down to shatter as soon as shattering then means you can go all out for 5 minutes till you shatter again. Another way of looking at it, when you are at double the amount of threat you can catch up by in 5 minutes, shatter.

Warlock #2 said he just always shatters at 70%. That's obviously not ideal. I think, though I'm not certain, that warlock 1 is shattering a bit early. Is there some sort of generalized formula or guide that I can't find for when to shatter for optimal damage done over the course of a fight? With brutallus in mind, in a 6 minute fight, its obviously possible to shatter twice, but is it ideal? Seems like someone has to have a decent guide worked out, not be just guessing, but haven't been able to find it.

Brewmaster of WBC