For a while, I was lifetapping as needed to maintain my mana near 100%. Then a fellow warlock in my raid suggested that I stop and try to run my mana down as much as possible to diminish the number of lifetaps in my rotation and therefore allow for more spacefillers. I did notice an increase in dps, but I had also received new gear, so this is not really an accurate evaluation. What did occur to me last night was doing some sort of combination of the two. This is completely untested and only based on talents and theory.

I believe, that theoretically, life tap should be in a warlock's rotation to maintain mana near 100% until the point at which you think you have enough mana left and mana gains through replenishment of your raid to go oom at the same time as the boss dies. Warlocks are now an execute class with the 400% damage modifier on drain soul (< 25% mob health) and the 15% increased crit chance of shadow spells with 3/3 death's embrace (<= 35%). Side question: does anyone know for sure if death's embrace works on pandemic? The ability to omit life tap during the final 35% of a mob's health should increase overall dps of a fight if you are able to time oom with boss death.

Seeing as our raid is taking a break from naxx 25 this week, I will not be able to test this out in a raid situation for at least a couple of weeks.

Edit: Note that Death's Embrace is 12% increased shadow damage, not 15% crit as armory talents state. Ignore the Pandemic question, as this is obviously shadow damage.

This is a Sarth+3d Question (10 man)

I was attempting the fight on 10man and was not happy with my dps, It was under 3k as we burned down the first drake.

Im Aff spec, I have never had this problem on any other fight, i did just Xfer servers, mabye it could be somekind of server lag, im not sure.

If this was already discussed please direct me to the right thread, if not, please advise.

Deaths embrace is 12% increased shadow damage, not 15% increased critical chance. Not sure where you got that from, unless there are new patch notes somewhere no one has mentioned and that I'm not privy to.

Hey mate, what are the stat weights that you are using? I'll plug em into mine and see what I get.
Unfortunately now, chardev.org is charging to save templates so can't link anymore stuff but I've been improving on my algorithm and stuff today so hopefully get some faster/more accurate results.

Anyway, the generated set for 289 hit rating and 4pc T7 is as follows (pain in the ass not being able to link to chardev any alternatives?)

Gear: Item Comparison Tool - World of Warcraft

Thoughts?

Blizzard Talent Calculator still (incorrectly) have the old version of this talent.

Thank you. I was writing my message out of game, so I just armoried myself and assumed (maybe stupidly) that blizzard would have their own talents up correctly. I appologize for the error in my initial post. I will correct my initial post.

Just to verify, when calculating out the 289 hit, this includes the Dying Curse which is not listed in your Item Comparison Tool link, is this correct?

You can use dynamic programming instead of actually testing every combination. Have an array with the optimal score for all the possible hit values and update it while iterating over all the available items.
If you want to include set bonuses too, you need one more dimension, something like:
DP[h][p] = optimal score for h hit rating and p set pieces.

For few hundreds of gear pieces that should work instantly. Please let me know if something is unclear.

The list doesn't even need to be that large, if an item has less optimal score AND less hit rating than another item in the same slot, it should be cut out. The only exceptions are set pieces.

Yep, calculating hit rating -71 hit to compensate.

I will look into this later today, about the only thing I haven't looked into yet. See below for how I am doing it right now.

Yep, not long after my first post I managed to cull the lists way down. I've still left all hit rating pieces in the list but only left with 1 piece per slot with no hit rating (the one with the highest score). I will further cull it on that logic of hit rating and score. =]

At the moment I'm sorting each list of items by item score highest to lowest and then doing my main loop. Within a few seconds you typically have a 99% accurate result (it takes about another minute to have the same accurate result for 4pc T7 and by that time the other result is pretty much 100% accurate). I'll do some more playing around tonight to speed it up and make the UI up for custom parameters etc and go from there.

Cheers.

I recently respecced to affliction because both of the other locks in my raid have been dominating me at dps. However, when I went to practice on target dummies, I had a significantly lower dps (2.4k on dummies) than I did as 0/41/30 (3.2k on dummies). I have read through this forum and my technique is generally sound and my rotation seems to be correct. ( SB-Haunt-UA-Imm-CoA-Corr-SL-etc.) My gear is equal to that of my fellow raid locks, so I can't figure what I'm doing wrong. Am I missing something really obvious?

Are you key binded, you need to be as a affliction lok especially, I dont get many toons that out dps me as a affliction lock

Sorry to bring this up again, but where is this coming from?

Wowhead: OM NOM NOM still has the same talent as before, ie the 12% increased shadow damage below 35%.

Yes, but WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Warlock -> Talent Calculator still has the same talent as even before, which is "increases the critical strike chances of your Shadow spells by 5% when your target is at or below 35% health.", which is incorrect.

I've written an optimisation program myself. My results vary slightly to yours.

On the 289 hit, the difference is negligable, but my build is chardev.org v6 ~ a World of Warcraft character planner
The only differences are these: Item Comparison Tool - World of Warcraft - I have arrived at Matriach's Spawn and Gloves of the Fallen Wizard instead of Surplus Limb and Gloves of Token Respect. I have more spirit at the expense of haste.

Using the weights given earlier (are you still using these or have they changed?), this appears to give my spec a 0.46 higher weighting, equivalent of ~1 haste (virtually nothing)


On the 368 hit rating spec, the results differ more significantly. My result is here: chardev.org v6 ~ a World of Warcraft character planner
The differences are as follows: Item Comparison Tool - World of Warcraft

Using the same weighting, and assuming I've not botched my maths, this gives my set a higher score by 11.98 (worth approximately 18 spell power). I think something may not quite be right with your 368 hit model, as that's a reasonably significant difference.

I have not yet attempted to model T7 bonuses, trinkets, or profession bonuses which may affect hit, such as blacksmithing and jewelcrafting, but otherwise my algorithm should be covering the search space completely, including socketing for +hit with +8/+16 gems and utilising socket bonuses where appropriate.

EDIT: For anyone who's interested, the stat difference between my 289 & 368 hit profiles is as follows:
-1 sp
-57 haste
-0 crit
-22 spirit
-19 int
which is I believe ~50 dps, give or take. That suggests to me that gearing for 368 hit and putting your 3 talent points elsewhere would be more optimal

If this is supposed to be the ideal set up going into ulduar (which I believe is the point now) then you need to compensate for the fact that a chaotic skylfare is far superior do to dot crits are actual crits now rather then a separate effect and there by 3% inc crit damage is definitively better (rather than debatably better) IE you need 3 blue gems.


Also next patch professions are probably JC and tailoring for min/max. One gives you significantly more static damage and one gives you a high procrate (45seconds 80% proc rate) of a large amount of damage.

Hey VenomByte,

Good to have a comparison to work with.
I have found a few bugs with my score adding and fixed most of it up and have come to this 368 hit rating set:

chardev.org v6 ~ a World of Warcraft character planner (glad can save CharDev again!)

Only swapped the chest out for Heigan's Putrid Vestments

Your score: 1999.75
My score: 1999.82

Stat differences with using my set:

+10 Intellect
-66 Spirit
+51 Haste

Although - TBH, with Fel Armor, that's a tossup between 22 SP or 51 haste, really. But the stat weights essentially control that.

But yes, as far as 3.1 is concerned, once there are some definitive stat weights, it will be easy to re-run.

Question, should I be using Ember or Chaotic skyflare as affliction right now?

I've been thinking about getting the range talents (grim/destructive reach) for a while and after trying out ulduar on the PTR I've really made up my mind, I find that I often lose dps time because of moving around and/or the boss moving or being kited out of range. I did a few attempts at Vezax the other night and I often found myself having to stand on the shadow crash buff and being out of range of the boss. Maybe it's just me being new at warlock or the fact that we were still learning the fights though. Feel free to tell me that I just need more practice.

Anyway, I've played around with simcraft a bit and dropping 2 points from nightfall and 1 point from demonic power is roughly a 70 dps decrease to gain those 6 yards, is that my best option or are there better alternatives?

I've also thought of getting speed enchant or meta gem for movement fights, thoughts?

Buffs to things like run speed and spell range are damned near impossible to plug into a DPS calculation, because they don't directly impact the numbers. What they do impact is things like "how quickly can you not stand in the fire" and "does the range give you an additional and superior location to stand that is not in the fire" and so on. (Or, for several of the Ulduar bosses, stand IN the fire.) The value of these is somewhere between zero and a whole lot, depending on the fight. On your classic Patch DPS test, where you do nothing but stand in one spot and cast, they're worth zero. On the more chaotic fights they can be worth a great deal, especially if you're still learning it, because they're basically giving you a cushion to your response time and positioning.

So in short my advice is that if you feel like they're helping, by all means take them. They're training wheels, and should be used to train with. After you know the fight and have tightened your play you can drop them again.

I've fixed a slight bug I had in my system and re-run it for 289 and 368 hit.

For 289, I get the same set as I did before. For 368, I now get exactly the same gear set as you do. Given that the two independently written apps have now converged on the same setup, I am 99% sure that what we've come up with is indeed optimal for the set of weights given.

It's worth noting though, that as little as a +/-0.1 on any of the weights can change the resulting gear set slightly. When they're recalculated for 3.1, it would be nice to have an extra decimal place on them, if this is possible within the margins of error used to arrive at the numbers.

Good to hear. I will link my findings here:

No 4PC T7 Bonus:

289 hit: chardev.org v6 ~ a World of Warcraft character planner
368 hit: chardev.org v6 ~ a World of Warcraft character planner

With 4PC T7 Bonus:

289 hit: chardev.org v6 ~ a World of Warcraft character planner
368 hit: chardev.org v6 ~ a World of Warcraft character planner

Cheers.