I hope by "never let a single dot drop" you aren't implying that you're clipping dots. In order to maximize DPS you should never recast a dot until it's duration is completed, due to the waste of DPS time, UNLESS

A) It has a cast time (I.E. Immolate and UA), then you should be planning to wind up the cast (say it's 1.4 seconds accounting for haste) around 1.4 (or a little less time on it, to give you some leeway) seconds left on it's duration to start casting it. You're trying to maximize dot uptime without wasting ticks.
B) You've already started accidentally casting it, it is better to reapply (as far as I've seen, anyway) then to waste the GCD of cancelling the cast and starting another.


Also, as it's been stated, on a note unrelated to that post, don't clip DS drains, otherwise there will be a large waste of casting time. Make sure you see those big 6k+ ticks before stopping the channel to recast a dot or two. Generally when a boss gets under 25% I begin to get a little less focused on maximum dot uptime and try to get more ticks of DS in because of it';s massive damage. Given, I don't forget to cast dots entirely (well, depends on the mobs health, if it's only gonna tick 1-2 times before he dies, may as well keep up the drain) but I definitely realize that the drain soul ticks are what's gonna be pumping the most damage.

Who else really enjoys that mechanic so far?

Somebody please correct me if this horrible napkin math is wrong, just a quick observation.

In Maalakai's patchwerk parse, his imp does ~634 dps. His curse of agony did ~263 dps.

If you were to change from 2/13/56 to 0/20/51, you would lose 10% damage off of your CoA, conflag/backdraft combo, and gain 20% damage to your imps fireball.

Based on this, backdraft would have to be worth ~103 dps for 2/13/56 to be better than 0/20/51. Has anyone done the math recently on how much backdraft is actually worth?

Edited for formatting.

Can anyone explain me: Using Imo with 56|0|15 is nessesary? or it's just for [Item not found!]
I looked some wws logs and cheked that Warlocks with this trinket using Imo.
The question is will Imo increase Dps or not without this trinket.

For the tier 7 level of gear that simcraft assumes, 0/20/51 and 2/13/56 seem to be about the same:

I am just wondering, (maybe because I am a noob lol) why is it better to wait until after 25% to use Drain Soul rather than SB? Does it pull to much aggro if you use it initially?
Any answer to this would be extremely appreciated.
Thanks in advance

As has been mentioned and shown in WWS's previously in this and the simple questions thread Immo is worth casting regardless of trinket. While it seems intuitive to think that "hey, immo is destructo and fire and thus is not buffed by any of the talents I use" you have to remember that you are in fact taking the biggest Immolate buffing talent in the game: Bane.

A glyphed Immolate (lets be honest, the other glyph options are pretty crap) with one point in Molten Core will likely be pulling 10-15% of your damage if you keep a good uptime.

The biggest arguement against using Immolate is the added complexity it brings, but so long as you are tagging it to UA casts (marco or just muscle memory) then it really doesn't add too much in the way of complexity.

Read the tooltip on your most recent rank of Drain Soul and all your confusion shalt be dispelled

Was wondering on the trinkets myself the heroic badge ones. The crit one with chance on spell cast to give spell dmg equals out to be like 100 spell power doesn't it?I figured one proc per minute is what it is around. So was wondering how many times the healing one will proc off of felarmor and if it procs off of SL heals. Another little question would be doesn't felarmor stop healing if your at full hp or can it still proc the trinket?

Ha, well now I feel like a complete idiot since it was right infront of my face, but yet thank you for the insight

I'm pretty sure (but can't back it up though) that if you're at full hp, the Fel Armor will stop healing, just like you can't use a health potion or a healthstone at 100%, and thus you won't be able to proc it. This is sort of what makes me not get the trinket since I'm very often at full hp and don't want to be bothered with always staying under 100% for max effiency (also, it's a bit cumbersome to tell healers to never heal me up to 100%).

Tbh. I very rarely find myself at 100% hp during combat. I always try to keep a somewhat steady balance between my hp and my mana so 90% of the time im gonna hover somewhere around 90-95% unless the encounter demands me to be fully topped. Depends on your specc obviously since you get a lot of selfhealing through SL and Haunt, but on a general basis with a 45s internal cooldown I cant see why you should proc this almost everytime its up if you are in combat.

The question is if the proc, being highly uncontrollable, won't be wasted in many cases? Also this amount of haste is actually hard to handle during bloodlust.

It might be extremely hard to theorycraft the actual dps value of this trinket.

So the epic crit one doesn't that turn out to be like 100 spell power though? With 1 proc every minute?

Both trinkets : 45s internal CD, just for simplicity lets assume proc rate that triggers the effect once every minute.
[Sundial of the Exiled] - 84 crit + (10/60*590)sp -> 84 crit + ~98sp
[The Egg of Mortal Essence] - 98 sp + (590/6)haste -> 98 sp + ~98haste

Egg is clearly superior dps wise BUT we're not factoring things like:
- it won't proc when you're full hp
- +dmg is always good, managing so much haste might lead to serious rotation screwage and clipping if proc hits in "bad" moment (might be spec dependant)
- not sure if the proc on FE ticks is intended, would be shame if it got "fixed" in next patch.

Would love to see WWS or opinions of people that used the egg for more then one raid.

I am currently specced out with a deep affliction build. I have been reading about rotations and such and most people say that you should use Drain Soul when it's below 35%. I have started getting Drain Soul ticks for 5 to 6k so I can see that it's high damage. I do however struggle with the rotation when I start using Drain Soul. Do you abort the channel to refresh DoTs or do you channel and the "reset" the rotation and go again?

My other question is regarding the Infernal. I guessed I missed something important but why do people use it after 35%?

Start using DS at 25% instead since that's when it reaches it's full potential with quad damage. (Quake references ftw!)
The rotation becomes much harder at that point because when you're casting a SB as a filler it's much easier to see when the cast will finish and you can go on with whatever but it's a bit harder to predict when the tick of DS will come. What's most important is when you cast it, make sure you don't clip it, so wait until the first tick has come, then you can cast anything else if needed and then go back. That way, you've only wasted some mana, but still maintained a high DPS.

As for "reset":ing... I honestly think that's a bad idea. DS is as most powerful when you have a lot of effects up but the DoTs themselves still do a lot of your damage so DS is probably more worth as only a filler than casting all your DoTs, DS until it finishes and then recast all DoTs again.

You want to use Infernal for the last minute of the fight. If its a one minute fight, drop it instantly, if its a 10 min fight, you will probably drop it at around 12% etc. The reason that you want to end the fight with the infernal rather than starting it is of course that you dont want to spend 9-10 seconds casting an imp or a fel puppy.

This is correct.

It should be noted though that no one knows so far if it's intended or if it's a bug.

I have done some approximate what-if analysis based on a Patchwerk-25 fight with my current affliction build and gear to determine the value of "the next stat". These are the numbers I found:

+1 Hit -> +0.86 DPS
+1 Haste -> +0.60 DPS
+1 Crit -> +0.49 DPS
+1 Spell Power -> +0.47 DPS

(We had some lag issues on our server during this fight, so the numbers for hit, crit and dmg may be somewhat higher on normal conditions. Haste was valuated by considering the extra damage contributed by extra SBs.)

Some conclusions:

- Hit appers to continue to be the stat until the cap is reached even though its price in the itemization formula may have been increased. The value of hit is even higher if one considers the impact of misses on the dot rotation.

- Haste is a useful stat already this early in the expansion and will get even get better over time due to its multiplicative nature. Of course, it is not a "free" stat due to the increase in mana consumption.

- Crit is getting useful for affliction locks.

- The DPS value of spell power is surprisingly low to me. I would have expected spell power to have a higher value this early in the expansion, especially for affliction builds. Spell power may have been hit especially hard by the lags, though.

- As a general observation, the stat values are much closer than in BC, making priorization choices more subtle.

Yes of course that makes sense. I thought it might have some kind of execute ability or something.

Thank you that was very helpful. I did suspect as much but I wasn't sure. I did play with an other warlock in a 5 man and the DS also seemed to tick for more with other peoples DoTs as well. Is that correct?

Yes, it is for all Affliction debuffs on the target, not only yours. So in 25 men it's really interesting.

Do you have calculations to back this up? This seems so far out of the park compared to the simulator, spreadsheet and what common sense would seem to dictate for affliction. Those numbers would make more sense if you valued had SP valued at 1 and took away "DPS" from the other three lines.