If you cast the 3th SB before your curses you miss 1 UA or CoA tick, and you gain 5% dmg on the dot ticks which happen during the time you are casting CoA/Corr/UA and during the cast time of your 2e SB (thats about 6 seconds). Not going to calculate it all here, but I doubt having +5% dmg over 6 seconds of dots is worth loosing 1 dot tick over. Its all very miniscule, but I would use the same rotation that I do now and apply the 3th SE stack when I start spamming SB. Also to keep it a little easier.

So I was looking at the simcraft, and as I suspected, the value of haste has gone up with the current gearing for affliction. I bumped my haste up to 1000 and I've seen a big jump in my dps. I went from middle of the pack in my raid to top 1 or 2 depending on the fight, which is where I was back in the early days of TOC. By next week's raid, I'll have my 4 piece and the 5% buff we're supposed to be getting, so I think I'll definitely be at the point where the simcraft says haste > SP.

That said, Runed and Reckless are still the way to go. Even with haste valued more, 23SP > 12SP/10Haste and 12SP/10Haste > 20Haste. Just barely. Do you think the value will go up even more as gearing gets even higher? Will there be a time when we gem reckless into red sockets and 20 haste into yellow?

This is the explanation that I was looking for. So the SB effect is only to get the bonus 5% crit and the corruption will auto update when the 3rd stack of SE gets onto the target. Thank you for clarifying that.

A few of the guides state how we should use NMIC at the start when 4p procs etc etc THEN again at 35% or below, but 70% of the time the trinket is not up again when the boss is under 35%, it usually comes up for me at about 10% or even 5% becasue our raid dps is soo high. NOW, my question is, IS it worth recasting it under 35% (not to mention when 4p procs) WITHOUT NMIC not off CD for the increase dam on corruption OR will the NMIC buff from the start outweight it?

Hmm, I wonder for fights that I know I might only get 1 proc, or 2 sub 10%, it might be better to just go spyglass due to the loss of dps (meaning the NMIC) during the sub 35% phase.

NMIC gives your corruption 20.04% chance to crit, that's an increase in damage of (1+1.09*(c+0.2004)) / (1+1.09*c) - 1, where c is corruption's critchance without the trinket (1.09 is for CSD). This increase is greater than 12% for c < 75.26%. Recasting corruption without NMIC is a dps loss if your corruption's critchance without the trinket is less than 75.26%.

If some other trinket is better obviously depends on how long you need to fight without your corruption benefitting from Death's Embrace. For 35% to 10%, that is a loss of ~3% of corruption DPS. (DPS with full benefit / DPS with reduced benefit = [0.65+0.35*1.12] / [0.9+0.1*1.12] = 1.0296... assuming the boss has less than 35% HP for an amount of time equal to 35% of the length of the fight.) If your DPS with spyglass is better than your DPS with NMIC if you use corruption_dps/1.0296 instead of corruption_dps, using spyglass would be better.

Yes.

Hi this is my first post and I have a question. I have reasonably high end gear and I've recently picked up Dislodged Foreign Object, obviously the max SP increase you get from the trinket is 1050 for the last two seconds of the proc. The question I have is, is it a dps increase to reapply UA and or CoA in those last two seconds if you can manage it. Either by clipping the dots... (and yes I know how horrific this sounds) or just not reapplying them if they have run out close to the last two seconds of the proc. I do intend to try and test this, and will post my results (however they will probably be just using recount with the aid of test dummies or Dr.Boom).

Was just curious to see if anyone else was having similar thoughts as myself and had done any tests of their own.

You would only get the added high Spellpower benefit for the first tick of your UA & CoA. For awhile now dots have adjusted based off of Attack power / Spellpower. The few effect types that do not update for each tick, but are only checked upon application of a buff are crit and percentage damage modifiers.

This is gone over several times in this very thread.

I believe you are slightly mistaken, the spellpower and haste buffs are calculated with each refresh due to everlasting affliction, but since UA and CoA do not get refreshed via haunt they should keep the benefit of the buff for the duration of the spell.

This would be correct. The refreshment of spellpower and the like only apply to Everlasting Affliction/Corruption refreshes. Every other spell takes its numbers from the start of the cast.

If you can manage to do this without clipping your dots I think it would be fine, but im not sure if it is worth it to clip the dots unless its the last tick or so.

I'm not sure why these are mutually exclusive. You should still be applying Haunt in the sub 25% "phase". With an 8s cooldown for Haunt you have a relatively large 4 second buffer to re-apply without dropping SE. Haunt obviously also refreshes Corruption, so really you're doing both at the same time (in conjunction with Drain Soul reapplying Corruption).

I'm not sure why you cite Professor Putricide as an example as the BL/Hero will almost always come in the third phase (making it easy to keep SE and Corruption rolling, as the amount of movement is pretty small).

If your SE does fall I don't see why you'd cast SB to re-stack, since they'd build back up from Haunt. You might want to re-cast SB to re-apply ISB before you apply Corruption (assuming this has fallen as well), but assuming you're in a 25-man raid, it shouldn't have fallen anyway (since there are other Warlocks with Nightfall procs or Demo Warlocks to keep it up).

I am recently considering dropping the [Item not found!] for [Glyph of Corruption] since there is no spirit on T10, while haste is rising, increasing the chance of nightfall-procs.

While with great amounts of haste especially during the execute-phase nightfall-procs become so extremly valuable, even the loss of about 200 spellpower could possibly be worth the change.

Unfortunately I have a hard time calculating the gain/loss of this change and was wondering if anybody had some information on this subject to share.

T10 is only 4 out of 13 pieces so I wouldnt base your choice upon that.... Also I believe the nightfall proc is a very small dmg buff. Much smaller then the extra SP from the LT glyph.

Why is the nightfall proc extremely important in the execute phase?

Nightfall just puts shadow bolt down to the GCD (which is still basically a cast time). Also during execute drain soul is so much more powerful that nightfall is useless except as an instant cast while moving or refreshing 5%imp shadow bolt crit. Taking the damage % from simcraft profiles and the average uptimes of nightfall it's really only a 20ish -30ish dps per point talent when I've re-mathed it. It is fairly unimportant and the talent I chose to drop for range talents. Cheers.

I think the numbers indicate that [Item not found!] only remains valuable if spirit remains above around 250. Dropping the glyph looks kind of inevitable.

The obvious answer is to keep the stacks of shadow embrace up then redraining. A lot of times haunt doesnt land fast enough cause of travel time.

That and ISB, of course.

Now notice that via DPET, SB is higher than Haunt, and since Haunt does not provide any benefit towards SB, therefore you should be casting 2 SB's prior to Haunt.

Shadow Embrace updates, please stop misinforming others.
See this thread for more information: Affliction: Learning to corrupt

That was definitely a brain fart on my part, for some reason I was thinking of SE as a buff on yourself, which would not update. Edited my post.

It still makes more sense to cast SB twice before Haunt due to the a combination of the same reasoning as before of why we should stack 2x SE prior to any DoTs (just more DPS) and the DPET of SB versus Haunt.

Edit This is wrong. Read this post.

I disagree.

When casting SB->SB->Haunt, you sacrifice the casting time of one Shadow Bolt of dot uptime. Let's assume that's 2s, that would be 1/9 of UA, ~1/7 of Corruption and 1/12 of CoA. So for all three dots, this makes out a lot more than 5% of their damage. As the third stack of SE gives only 1 - 1.15/1.10 = ~4.5% damage increase this starting sequence would not even be good when SE would not update immediately, which it does.

So the only reason to start with SB->SB->Haunt would be a rolling effect on Corruption, but as this has been proven wrong, there is not reason not to start with SB->Haunt->Dots->SB.

Could you not make the same argument for the first SB? I based my assumptions on the fact that it was already previously proven that the first SB is worth its cast time.

The main issue is how much you're actually losing. Due to the nature of the relationship between time and damage done, the plateaus are important on such a microscale. For example, at the end of a boss kill, I never refresh my DoTs if the boss has less than 6s left, it is just more DPS to continue casting DS (by comparing DPET). Depending on how the DoTs line up, the worst case scenerio would see you losing the damage of one tick from every single DoT from a 2s shift, but that is not how it would usually happen. The best case scenerio would see you lose no damage, because all the DoTs run out within the last 8s of the boss kill. With how DoT ticks normally line up, a 2s interval would most likely see 2 DoTs tick on average rather than 3, so the average damage lost probably falls between (Average of UA and Corruption tick)+Curse of Agony Tick and 0.

Perhaps the only real way to quantify this is with Simulations. As far as I can tell SimCraft does not allow you to change the opening sequence. I considered generating ~10 combat logs and shifting the times by 2 SB to see the effect on DPS, but 10 simulations would not be enough to give a good estimate.