Is there any situation where using Shadowflame would be worth it?
For example if you could hit 3 low hp targets with it? Or is it always better to just cast a Shadowbolt on one of them?

Or am I completely wrong?

Thinking about this some time now, to be honest I would like the Idea of Shadowflame not being completely senseless.

There is for engineers, it's a 27sp +parachute-clicky cloak enchant called Springy Arachnoweave.

Better yet, if your all grouped up you can aoe them by spamming SoC on the boss. With this little trick, i've managed to beat the cleaving melee on bone spike damage two times in a row now. If your not all grouped up in a tidy melee bunch, it won't work though.

There's something I haven't managed to figure out yet:

The starting skill priority is sb - haunt - corr - ua - coa --> You want sb and haunt first for the 2 stacks of SE. When you cast your sb and it HITS you get the first stack, when you cast haunt and it HITS you get the second one. But usually corr will be up on the target before Haunt hits it. Will corr benefit from the 2 stacks of SE if it's put on the boss before Haunt reaches it's target? If it's not, we should slightly change our skill priorities.

As far as i know dot ticks will allways check the target debuffs which doesnt mean if you apply the dot before or after any debuff,

also i dont understand while ppl bother to start with 2.1 sec of shadow bolt only for the 5% increase by shadow imbrase while you can get corruption to start ticking...

This is what I understood from what I've read so far:
- A flat damage increase like SE (shadow embrace) has to be applied BEFORE you apply corruption. If you don't corruption will not benefit from SE untill you manually reapply it.
- A sp increase is recalculated every time you refresh the spell, also through Haunt, SB and DS. Flat damage increase isn't recalculated every refresh, but kept throughout the whole fight unless corr is manually reapplied. That's the reasons ToT works and the reason the 4set T10 might be extremely powerful.

Now I wonder, with our current rotation, corr will hit the boss before Haunt reaches is, assuming you're at medium-max range. Meaning that it will only benefit from 1x stack of SE from the initial sb. Is there any way to solve this issue, by maybe changing our initial rotation? Or does corruption benefit from the 2x stacks even if Haunt hasn't reached the target yet?

No that's not the case. You cast both an sb as Haunt before anything else to benefit from 2x stacks of Shadow Embrace

what you saying is true for your own buffs, not the target debuffs, go dummy, drop corruption, after 1 tick drop coe and see how the ticks dmg increase.

and still, like its been said on the first post, 2 sec+, for apllying only 1 stack of shadow imbrase imo is a dps lose (very very slight, yeah, because its only the start of the fight), you gonna aplly that stack in like 5 seconds anyway, even with the +5% crit this isnt worth it, and im not talking about situations you allready got in raid a demo/aff lock to apply that anyways.

You had me in doubt there, but it is simply not the case. Maybe you do it for the 2 stacks, but I surely do it primarily for the 5% crit.

I tested it. A flat corruption ticks for 1705 and crits 3807 average for me. Then I did one where I start my corruption, then SB and haunt afterwards. If what you said was true, Corr would have the exact same numbers, but that was not the case. It hit for 2340 and crit for 4532.

But, did you also do a test to see what corruption hit for when doing SB and Haunt FIRST and letting the SE stack before applying Corruption?

That's not really the point of my experiment. What I was aiming to prove is that the debuff is not the important part of applying SB+Haunt before Corruption. My test proved that a Corruption applied before those two will still gain the buff from the stacks and Haunt. Thus the only really important reason to apply anything before Corruption is the ISB debuff placed on the boss before Corruption.

Both are important. Without that initial SB you won't have 2x stacks of SE until your Haunt hits again. Without the initial SB you might not have the 5% crit debuff on the target which you really want, as crit can be rolled (it isn't recalculated if you refresh corr via EA).

Good to know that corr benefits from 2x SE even if it hits the target before Haunt does (assuming SB was cast first, Haunt second and corr third).

Like you say, you need to get up the Improved Shadow Bolt debuff anyway before casting Corruption. That is already one stack of SE. The Haunt debuff however, i presume is recalculated every tick by Corruption, so really the question is, is it actually necessary to use Haunt before Corruption? I say yes, because considering flight time, Haunt acts as a nice filler in between SM and one stack of SE to be applied so that Corruption benefits. The extra stack of SE and the Haunt debuff may or may not arrive in time, but does Corruption recalculate debuffs? It may well not re-calculate crit buffs, such as potions, trinkets etc, but what about target debuffs? If not, then corruption may never get the benefit from the Haunt debuff, that is 23% (with glyph) DOT damage increase, as your initial cast will have hit before the Haunt hits the target. I doubt this very much.

So for that reason, i don't think casting SB and Haunt before Corruption is a bad thing. Even if corruption does hit the target before Haunt does, by the time it reaches its first tick, it should have recalculated the just-reached Haunt debuff and extra stack on SE. I would also think that if you pre-pot, casting corruption before anything else may not be a bad thing either, if you cast it earlier than you would anyway, but this may be wrong on all accounts, plus with the twenty second duration of the potion, this should allow enough time for Corruption to roll the crit using your normal rotation.

Alright, I might have started all this by nit-picking on the reason for applying SB+Haunt before Corruption. I thought the following was well established knowledge already:

1. Crit stays on the rerolling Corruption.
2. SE + Haunt debuff is recalculated on each damage tick, dot or direct.
3. SB applies ISB. Potion of Wild Magic + NMIC + ISB should be active when you cast your first Corruption.

I made my remarks with this in mind, as these have been established. Item 2 was established back when 3.0.2 was released.

I might be out of the loop when it comes to "well established knowledge" around here, but my understanding is that

- Modifiers from DEBUFFS are recalculated on damage tick. This applies to SE & Haunt, is easily verified.
- Modifiers from BUFFS are calculated once on spell cast. A DOT cast with a spellpower proc keeps the spellpower for its duration.
- Corruption, being special case, recalculates haste/spellpower modifiers when it is refreshed. This does not apply to crit buffs (verified through NIC because the crit increase is large enough to discount rng) or damage multiplying buffs like TotT (verified with the help of a rogue and target dummy).

If the above is all true, I would surmise that ISB, being a debuff, is recalculated every time corruption deals damage. A 5% crit increase, however, cannot be reliably verified through testing, so I'm interested in your evidence to the contrary.

+ 1
Exactly!

if someone can test this somehow...

I did the simcraft version of what Ralimenua just proved. 10000 simulations, Patchwerk, no raid debuffs and no raid buffs.

Including ISB Debuff
First I removed my trinkets and my ring from the simulation. Then I used the following to simulate Corruption cast with ISB up, where SB is cast until the boss has 90% health, then only Haunt.
Corruption crit ticks: 35.9%

Excluding ISB Debuff
This time no SB is cast.
Corruption crit ticks: 32.7%

Although it is not an increase of 5%, but only 3.2%, it is a substantial difference. I know proving points with simcraft is sketchy, but at least it underlines that simcraft also acquires ISB at cast time instead of at tick.

With 505 samples and a crit rate of 33.8%, if the crit rate of Corruption was 39.8%, that would be 2.83 standard deviations from 33.8% or less than a 1% chance that the actual crit rate is 39.8%(or greater). So yes, I would agree with your conclusion that the crit rate bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt applies only if Corruption is applied after the debuff.

How does this prove that ISB has to be up first when in fact it appears that you didn't include ISB in the second test at all?

This simulation fails when Haunt gets resisted (1%). In this case presumably Corruption is reapplied without the ISB buff, lowering the overall crit rate.

As stated in #1322, your second simulation tests only the base crit rate of Corruption. This is a useful simulation as a basis for demonstrating that the ISB buff doesn't apply if you apply Corruption before ISB is active, as the expected value of the later situation is the same as the former.

The proper Simcraft test would be to run three simulations (as Ralimenua did):

1. Base simulation with just Corruption to measure the expected crit rate of Corruption
2. Simulation in which you cast Corruption and then (Haunt, SB, SB, .., Haunt, Repeat)
3. Simulation in which you cast a bunch of SBs (say, to 90%) then Corruption, then (Haunt, SB, SB, .., Haunt, Repeat)

I reviewed my runs and sadly I made the glaringly obvious mistake of removing the misery debuff and also accounting for the hit on myring. I reapplied the ashen ring, but removed the proc. Then ran your three suggestions:

1. 33.0%
2. 33.1%
3. 38.0%

Pretty clean results this time.

Presumably then it's re-affirmed that the optimal opening order is indeed:

Pot/NMIC -> SB -> Haunt -> Corruption -> UA -> CoA -> Rotation

Based on both in-game and Simcraft findings.