Let's take the discussion on talent specs to the appropriate thread.

Some of the discussion was bugging me, as a lot of glyphs were taken without consideration for the math... so I'm just going to do some quick napkin math.

Based off of my latest WWS Report on Patchwerks.

Haunt
The bonus damage granted by your Haunt spell is increased by an additional 3%.

Total Damage of my Shadow DoT's: 126 072 (Corruption) + 93 540 (UA) + 74 681 (CoA) = 294 293 damage.
Base Damage without Haunt (Assuming 100% Uptime): 294 293/1.2 = 245 244
Bonus Damage from Haunt: 294 293 - 245 244 = 49 049

Glyph Bonus: 49 049*.03 = 1471.47

DPS Time: 3min 1s = 181s

Glyph DPS Bonus: 1471.47/181 = 8.13 DPS

Am I understanding this Glyph wrong? Does it actually boost Haunt's debuff to 23%? If that's the case then...

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Total Damage of my Shadow DoT's: 126 072 (Corruption) + 93 540 (UA) + 74 681 (CoA) = 294 293 damage.
Base Damage without Haunt (Assuming 100% Uptime): 294 293/1.2 = 245 244
Glyph Bonus: 245 244*.03 = 7357.32

Glyph DPS Bonus: 7357.32/181 = 40.65 DPS

Could someone test which one it is?

Life Tap
When you use Life Tap, you gain 20% of your spirit as spell power for 20 sec.

Assuming 500 Spirit, you would gain 100 +spell power every 20 seconds. Last Patchwerks I tapped 4 times in 181s.

4*20/181 = 44.20% uptime.

So over time, that would give you an average of 44.20 +SP. If we use the standard 1 SP = 1.283 DPS, that gives 56.71 DPS. Not bad at all.

This Glyph also scales with your Spirit, which is very nice.

Immolate
Increases the periodic damage of your Immolate by 20% but decreases its initial damage by 10%.

Assuming Fully Raid buffed (Early Ulduar Gear Level):

+3000 Spellpower
+23% Haste
+25% Crit
100% Hit Chance

Affliction-->

Effected by:
1.13 (CoE/Earth&Moon/Ebon Plague)
1.03 (Malediction)
1.03 (Sanctified Retribution)
dot: spellstone (1.01)

Glyphed
DoT Damage
.=1.13(CoE)*1.03(Malediction)*1.03(Sanctified Retribution)*(1.2(Glyph))*1.01(Spellstone)*(785(Base)+1.0*Spell power)
.=1.13*1.03*1.03*1.2*1.01*(785+3000)
.=5499.477

Direct Damage
.=1.13(CoE)*1.03(Malediction)*1.03(Sanctified Retribution)*(0.9(Glyph))*(1+crit chance)*(460(Base)+ 0.2*Spell power)
.=1.13*1.03*1.03*.9*1.25*(460+.2*3000)
.=1429.59

Total Damage: 6929.067


UnGlyphed

DoT Damage
.=Glyphed/1.2
.=5499.477/1.2
.=4582.90

Direct Damage
.=Glyphed/.9
.=1429.59/.9
.=1588.43

Total Damage = 6171.33

Difference: 6929.067 - 6171.33 = 757.737
DPS Gain from Glyph: 757.737/15s = 50.5158

Has anyone considered the effective DPCT of the new lifetap glyph?

Admittedly it's indirect, but it's worth considering. If we assume you gain 100 sp, using 1.283 dps per sp gives us 100*1.283*20 = 2566 damage gained over 20 seconds. Now if we assume GCD is ~1.3 seconds, that gives DPCT = 2566/1.3 = 1973

I believe that's slightly less than a Shadowbolt, so at face value it would appear not to be worthwhile adding it to your rotation. On the other hand, it is certainly an argument for trying to work lifetaps into your rotation on a regular basis, rather then triggering them two or three times in a row when your mana gets low and you have a suitable gap in your rotation.

It may be worthwhile someone more knowledgable about the mechanics of this having a closer look at the maths. Will it scale up faster than shadowbolt? It could turn out that Blizzard have complicated our rotation further with this Glyph.

The thing is, your DPCT is based off of a dps per sp calculated for a rotation which does not have you tapping regularly. Since Life Tap contributes to your damage via other spells, you can't measure how worthy it is of casting via DPCT.

However your question is a good one. If we tapped every 20 seconds, what would that do?

Let me see, if we use our previous Patch example...

181/20 = 9 taps. 5 more than normal.

I have 20% haste raid buffed (rounded up), making my GCD:

1.5(base)/1.2(haste) = 1.25s
1.25*5 = 6.25s extra for keeping up Lifetap.

Shadowbolt Cast time:
2.5(base)/1.2(haste) = 2.08s


Damage Lost:
(6.25s/2.08s)*(Average Shadowbolt Damage)

Average Shadowbolt Damage from my Report (with 25% Crit Rating... we were missing a Fire Mage):
4531*.75(noncrit chance) + 9061*.25(crit chance) = 5663.5

Therefore damage lost = 3.00*5663.5 = 17017.73 damage

DPS Lost: 17017.73/181s = 94dps lost.

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Keeping 100% up time on the buff means that instead of 44.20+SP, you gain 100+SP period. That is a gain of 55.80+SP. Even if we used the 1.283DPS per SP conversion, that would be 71.59 DPS gain. Which is less than the DPS lost.

Interesting. I wonder how those results scale with spirit?

Lets assume you somehow had 700 spirit instead of 500. That means you'll get 200*0.3 = +60sp from fel armor compared to before.
As far as I am aware (please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm fairly new to this), that would directly affect the damage on your shadowbolt by a factor of (sp+60)/sp, which assuming sp 2000 buffed gives 2060/2000 = x1.03. That gives 17017*1.03/181 = 96.8dps lost by lifetapping for the buff.

On the other hand, the 100% buff uptime now gains you an extra 40 spirit, which means gains of 1.4*55.8+sp. If we use the 1.283dps per sp ratio again, it now comes to 1.4*55.8*1.283 = ~100dps.

Now, is there anything obvious I've missed? If not it would suggest that if other stats remained constant, lifetapping for the buff might become worthwhile if you had 700+ spirit. Obviously that's not exact since we won't get 1.283dps per sp from the lifetap buff being up, but as a ballpark figure it's useful.

Following from that though, to get that lost 20 dps we need another ~80 spirit. So the breakeven point is 580 spirit, which seems reasonable for Ulduar gear.

20 dps / 1.28 (dmg/dps) / .2 (dmg/spi) = 78 spirit.

I was wanting to discuss Meta glyphs. I'm going to be picking up Corruption along with Immolate and Felguard. As far as live glyphs and to be honest i really don't think the meta glyph is going to be worth it in all honesty. I think 20% DoT damage on immolate is a lot better than getting 2-3 extra sbolts off. It's really debatable though i could go both ways on that argument.

Cooldown reduction of 30% means once every 126 seconds instead of 180. Still not once per minute.

Thanks for the correction, had my mind on another thing while I was posting.

Still sounds better than Glyph of Corruption.

Meta is currently a 2.1 CD on PTR with talents.

The glyph only extends in by 6 seconds, i still think the extra sbolt proc is worth it since you are keeping up corruption for 2pc.

It's more complicated than that. First of all, the 1.283 dps per sp estimation is greater than what it would be if using this model of spell casting. Additionally, you have to remember that since Life Tap scales with Spirit, the number of taps within a fight will scale inversely with spirit.

Another interesting aspect of this glyph is that it allows immolation aura to be used more than once per demon form. The exact gain could be huge depending on the nature of the fight & haste effects active.

But since spell power will go up as well as spirit, that would mean a greater dps loss from life-tapping I think. If this is the case then the amount of spirit needed to counteract that loss would go up as well. I think of the spirit bonus from life-tapping as a way to somewhat eliminate the dps penalty for life-tapping instead of a possible buff.

That's correct, so it makes sense to look at the ratio between spell power and spirit. You're obviously not going to benefit much if you have ten times more spell power than spirit, but if it was twice as much it would be a huge buff for you.

Here's a possible approximation:

If you assume GCD on lifetap of ~1.3s, done every 20 seconds, then that is 1.3/20 = 6.5% of your total casting time. So it would cost you something in the region of 5-6% of your dps (since DPCT priority has you casting the best spells when possible). To make that worthwhile then, you would probably want to see a >6% increase in dps from the lifetap. If you take spell damage to increase in direct proportion to spellpower, this means you want 6% more spellpower, which in turn means that your initial spirit must be 30% or more of your spellpower.

In other words, at 2000sp you will be looking at ~600 spirit for the break even point, and at 2500 sp you will be looking at 750 spirit.

So for the experts on gear and itemisation: Is it feasible for high end gear - either now or in Ulduar - for spirit to be 30% or more of spell power? Given that spirit currently is ~25% I'd say it's pretty close to being achieveable, if not quite there yet.


Of course haste will change too. The higher haste gets, the lower cooldowns get, and the smaller a fraction of your time (and therefore dps) is lost by lifetapping. Using the math above, this comes to (GCD/20)*5 = fraction of spell power needed as spirit. So the requirement varies from 37.5% to 25% as GCD goes from 1.5 - 1.

In reality it's less, but as mentioned briefly above, I've not attempted to approximate how significant the effect of only replacing your lowest DPCT spells is. If it is a significant drop this may be worthwhile modelling too.

Next point to think about. If you do get past the equilibrium threshold, how much spirit is it going to take for a 1% increase in dps? I'll give this some thought later.

I'm sure you could, but it would be impractical. I have 3000SP while casting, raid buffed, but only 485 spirit. That's 16.17%. There are so many +SP raid buffs and SP is such a better stat overall, that you'd have to go out of your way to stack spirit... which just doesn't make sense.

With the cataclysm change to reduce mana by 10% i was wondering if the SB glyph would be worth while since that would reduce SB by 20%. I'm thinking of a 0/53/18 type build with a meta/felguard/SB glyph setup.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I would be really grateful if rutiene were so kind to sum it up in "where the thread is" in post #1

Maybe that is futile until servers goinglive or at leats final blueposts, but then it would be just as well

Thank you so much!

Sorry if this has already been mentioned.

Now that they are removing immolate from and affliction locks rotation would UA glyph actually be viable ?

On the ptr im still using siphonlife glyph (due to lack of any other glyph there atm) does anyone know if the Sl glyph will still work with Corr (im sure this is unlikely)

And last but not least does anyone know if haunt or lifetap glyphs are live on the ptr yet? i havent been able to get any information on it whatsoever.

The UA glyph is pretty good at its current form, almost as good as the CoA glyph, I will likely be using it come 3.1. The SL life glyph would not work with corruption, it just increases the healing effect via siphon life through corruption by 20%, making corruption heal you for 48% of the damage done.

In current 3.1 theory, Glyph of Lifetap and Glyph of Haunt are must-haves, so you have 1 spot left. Most likely the CoA glyph is the best one to fill that spot.

Has anyone actually done the math to determine whether the glyph of CoA is better than Immolate come 3.1? I understand that Immolate is taking a pretty big hit for affliction locks, but given the huge advantage of glyphing Immolate before, I find it hard to believe that it's no longer a viable choice, especially since aftermath is now available to boost immolate's dot.

As far as I'm aware you can no longer have Immolate and Unstable Affliction on the same target, so as Affliction you wouldn't be casting it in 3.1.

Yep, they really seem to be attempting to increase the divide between being an afflock (shadowlock) and a dstrolock (firelock), while at the same time normalizing the damage each can ultimately output.

Our (afflock) execute is a channeled spell and desto's is of course DD, etc etc.

I still can't believe my eyes when I see the pre and post 3.1 simcraft..... Just painful to look at.