Dots and you: The Affliction Warlock Thread - Page 42

Cigni · 02/12/09, 1:04 AM

I managed to pull 8000 dps on patchwerk tonight, I did use a doomguard, but I feel it's justified

Patchwerk

Triza · 02/12/09, 1:11 AM

Originally Posted by Cigni

I managed to pull 8000 dps on patchwerk tonight, I did use a doomguard, but I feel it's justified

Patchwerk

Notice how Lockycheese had no pet damage. Now, notice how you an extreme amount of Doomguard damage?

WWS is extremely buggy when it comes to Doomguards, and at the moment it is combining all Doomguards in the raid into one.

dcpwns · 02/12/09, 1:12 AM

Beat me to it.Yeap your dmg was good but you got an extra doomgaurd phased in with yours.So make sure you don't do that before posting.Didn't seem a little odd to you he had 2500 dps?? Dot uptime wasn't even that impressive.Also 5 ToT come on now lol.

Cigni · 02/12/09, 1:20 AM

I wasn't sure of the average DG dps, so I didn't know that, but I just noticed the 2 heroism buffs, sorry about that folks I fail

Padraigh · 02/12/09, 1:21 AM

Krathis · 02/12/09, 4:03 AM

Originally Posted by Triza

Notice how Lockycheese had no pet damage. Now, notice how you an extreme amount of Doomguard damage?

WWS is extremely buggy when it comes to Doomguards, and at the moment it is combining all Doomguards in the raid into one.

On that note WMO seems to parse Doomguards correctly. I have a similar issue in my raid when I raid Demonology. We have another demo lock with the same felguard name as mine and WWS doesn't parse them as two separate entities.

achille · 02/12/09, 8:59 AM

Originally Posted by Woggle

I was thinking about posting this a while ago.

The increased damage debuff while fighting Thaddius behaves strangely with Haunt/Corr. Normally, any damage modifiers that are up when casting Haunt will be translated to the following Corruption ticks, but this is not the case here. Rather, you will have to recast Corruption with the stacked debuff and even then, it will sometimes show "a more powerful spell is already active", if some sore of spelldamage-buff (trinkets, etc) was up on the initial cast of corruption. So it seems that the calculation of Corruption's damage when being refreshed (or rather, prolonged) by Haunt is not factoring the debuff, which might actually be a bug(?) On the other hand, people could test if it is influenced by "50% less magical damage done" debuffs or anything similar. Otherwise, it might mean that only the current amount of spellpower is used whenever Corruption's duration is prolonged by Haunt and no modifying debuffs are taken into account.

I have not tested this on Malygos yet, but I have observed this strange behaviour several times on Thaddius.

As for the other DoTs, just cast them whenever you have the stacked / spark debuff up and don't cast them when you don't have it. (well, cast them anyways on Malygos before you have the spark debuff, but you get the point)

This matter is what I'd like to fully understand the most right now.
For example, I'm 100% sure that in vanilla WoW you couldn't clip coa, resulting in a "a more powerfull spell is already active". That was understandable, as you were replacing the last, harder hitting, ticks of coa with the initial, weaker ones. Since a while though, probably back in TBC, this is no longer the case as far as I could see, and coa can now be clipped. My guess would be that the "a more powerful spell is already active" check is now done on the whole spell's damage, rather than "tick-wise", so a new coa is just as powerful as the old coa, regardless of the hardness of the current coa ticks.

On the other hand, we have corruption and haunt. If I cast corruption and then get into a spark/proc a trinket, corruption's damage won't scale accordingly, or at least it looks like it. Is it really true though? I can think of one example in which a dot's damage changed dynamically, and I guess it's due to a difference between the buffs on the player and the debuff on the target? Because the "debuffs on target" damage multipliers type did scale already casted dots' in the past. For example, a shadow vulnerability did add 20% to a cod that was casted while no vulnerabilty was up, but triggered while one was up.

So, refreshing it with haunt will apply your newly gained buffs to corruption? Refreshing it once again with haunt outside of sparks/etc. will restore the normal corruption damage back to normal?

Do you get the "a more powerful spell is already active" with dots that aren't corruption? I could swear that I could chain cast UA at malygos, moving from sparks to non sparks I didn't have a problem reapplying it.

Woggle · 02/12/09, 10:00 AM

That was exactly the matter. It seemed as if debuffs increasing damage (edit for clarity: debuffs on yourself. Such as Power Spark or Polarity) were not factored correctly (which is why you can chaincast ua no matter if moving between sparks or not). Intriguingly, it seemed as if Haunt's refreshing of Corruption showed the same behaviour.

According to an earlier reply, this has been fixed, but I have not yet gotten to testing it.

achille · 02/12/09, 11:14 AM

I have another question about the matter, sorry if it's a known mechanic but I don't think I saw it mentioned anywhere.

First, we do know that drain soul's check of whether it should do 400% or not is done on cast, ie start channelling at 26% won't automatically buff the spell when the boss's hp goes below 25%. This particular buff is neither a classic buff (for classic buff I mean a buff that shows and is eventually removable like a flask) nor an explicit debuff on the boss, so it kinda doesn't fit in either of the two cases mentioned above.

My question now is this: dots scale dinamically with death's embrace? Again death's embrace isn't a classic buff or debuff. It should be easily tested if anyone can log in.

If dots actually scale dinamically, it would be interesting to understand if it's a mechanic that gets "activated" depending on the spell, the talent or what.

Rhad · 02/12/09, 12:18 PM

I just completed re-rereading all 25 pages of this thread (ok, I skimmed over some)

. I also worked on a test dummy last night and found that I was having a fair amount of SE and Corruption drops, especially when practicing my <25% DS rotation. Though this topic has been covered (~pages 14-16), I’d like to recommend something more is added to the main post.

Namely, a reminder/emphasis that Haunt isn't a DoT. Its only damage is direct damage. It's DPCT is less than Shadow Bolt (119.64 or 484.19 less DPCT depending on gear, per Namnalia), but not enough less to warrant the negatives from losing, even for a tic, the 20% DoT damage bonus, SE and/or Corruption.

Therefore, you can't “clip” haunt via a recast, since its damage is direct, and because of the critical benefits of Haunt, it should be cast very soon after its cool down, ie, every ~9-10 seconds. This is all the more critical in <25% DS rotation, since Shadow Bolt isn’t refreshing SE.

Though the above is probably obvious to experienced Affliction Warlocks, newbs like me would benefit from it being spelled out. One practical change that I am going to implement is to imbed Haunt’s CD timer into my DoT timers, so that I will be able to more easily spot when I should consider casting Haunt (currently I have to glance at my spell bar to see Haunt’s CD).

alhill · 02/12/09, 12:23 PM

Originally Posted by Rhad

I just completed re-rereading all 25 pages of this thread (ok, I skimmed over some)

. I also worked on a test dummy last night and found that I was having a fair amount of SE and Corruption drops, especially when practicing my <25% DS rotation. Though this topic has been covered (~pages 14-16), I’d like to recommend something more is added to the main post.

Namely, a reminder/emphasis that Haunt isn't a DoT. Its only damage is direct damage. It's DPCT is less than Shadow Bolt (119.64 or 484.19 DPCT depending on gear, per Namnalia), but not enough less to warrant the negatives from losing, even for a tic, the 20% DoT damage bonus, SE and/or Corruption.

Therefore, you can't “clip” haunt via a recast, since its damage isn’t a DoT, and because of the critical benefits of Haunt, it should be cast very soon after its cool down, ie, every ~9-10 seconds. This is all the more critical in <25% DS rotation, since Shadow Bolt isn’t refreshing SE.

Though the above is probably obvious to experienced Affliction Warlocks, newbs like me would benefit from it being spelled out. One practical change that I am going to implement is to imbed Haunt’s CD timer into my DoT timers, so that I will be able to more easily spot when I should consider casting Haunt (currently I have to glance at my spell bar to see Haunt’s CD).

Yes I've found a good rule of thumb is, if you can't be perfect, then err on the early side with haunt, and on the late side for all other dots. For me it is always a challenge to avoid clipping dots, which is particularly bad with CoA.

Rhad · 02/12/09, 12:34 PM

Originally Posted by alhill

Yes I've found a good rule of thumb is, if you can't be perfect, then err on the early side with haunt, and on the late side for all other dots. For me it is always a challenge to avoid clipping dots, which is particularly bad with CoA.

I like that, other than "all other dots" since haunt isn't a DoT.

I find myself stressing so much over whether the haunt will land in time to refresh corruption or SE that I'm going to pretty much cast haunt within a second or so after its CD. Why take the chance, when recasting haunt early doesn't damage DPS other than a difference between Haunt's damage and a Shadow Bolt's.

Crazyone · 02/12/09, 12:53 PM

Well I guess this would go here.

How much (or when does) latency time starts to affect DoT performance?

I have one hell of a time getting Immolate to stick unless I wait a sec or 2 AFTER it expires. No I'm not missing.

So with that said, it can make keeping a sound rotation going a pain.

I average around 250-275 latency when in raids.

Use Quartz/Dot Timers/etc Yes there are other locks in raid casting Immo.

So is it on my end or is this prob others have?

dave55man · 02/12/09, 1:09 PM

Originally Posted by Crazyone

Well I guess this would go here.

How much (or when does) latency time starts to affect DoT performance?

I have one hell of a time getting Immolate to stick unless I wait a sec or 2 AFTER it expires. No I'm not missing.

So with that said, it can make keeping a sound rotation going a pain.

I average around 250-275 latency when in raids.

Use Quartz/Dot Timers/etc Yes there are other locks in raid casting Immo.

So is it on my end or is this prob others have?

Latency has a HUGE impact on Affliction DPS. At leas from what I have noticed. If your lag is above your GCD (1.5 second delay) then it becomes near immposible to play. The only way to get around it is to have Quartz and to pre cast everything. And with Immolate, try to refresh it when it only has 1 second left, that way you will never overwrite it and get the immolate drop bug.

I'd say with latency of 250-275, your best bet it just using quartz and getting used to the rotation with that bit of time offset. Also try reduce your lag by turning down settings and testing you connection.

Shayo · 02/12/09, 4:39 PM

Originally Posted by Rhad

I just completed re-rereading all 25 pages of this thread (ok, I skimmed over some)

. I also worked on a test dummy last night and found that I was having a fair amount of SE and Corruption drops, especially when practicing my <25% DS rotation. Though this topic has been covered (~pages 14-16), I’d like to recommend something more is added to the main post.

Namely, a reminder/emphasis that Haunt isn't a DoT. Its only damage is direct damage. It's DPCT is less than Shadow Bolt (119.64 or 484.19 less DPCT depending on gear, per Namnalia), but not enough less to warrant the negatives from losing, even for a tic, the 20% DoT damage bonus, SE and/or Corruption.

Therefore, you can't “clip” haunt via a recast, since its damage is direct, and because of the critical benefits of Haunt, it should be cast very soon after its cool down, ie, every ~9-10 seconds. This is all the more critical in <25% DS rotation, since Shadow Bolt isn’t refreshing SE.

Though the above is probably obvious to experienced Affliction Warlocks, newbs like me would benefit from it being spelled out. One practical change that I am going to implement is to imbed Haunt’s CD timer into my DoT timers, so that I will be able to more easily spot when I should consider casting Haunt (currently I have to glance at my spell bar to see Haunt’s CD).

You might want to look into using the Ghost Pulse mod. I found out about it while researching pvp addons, and it's helped my haunt uptime dramatically. While it's extremely useful for pvp, it's also got some application in pve when you need a reminder to cast haunt next or a reminder that your demonic teleport cool down is up.