The Mage Equivalent: The Destruction Warlock - Page 25

Trickykid · 01/19/09, 2:45 PM

Originally Posted by Reuben

My next question would be potential output of the raid buffed Infernal as well since it has a 20 min CD you could use on bosses between Doom cooldown.

I typically see affliction locks use DGs in parses, and they get around 750-800 DPS in most cases. In this patchwerk parse, he did 861 DPS, where the deep destro imps did 610-648 DPS. If they had MD as well, their DPS would likely be higher (and the loss of going from MD->DS from the imp would add up as well).

It's an increase, but considering it's only for 25% of the time, I'm not sure I'd take it.

EDIT: Edited to clarify my numbers are for a DG, not an infernal.

supplicium · 01/19/09, 3:26 PM

Originally Posted by Reuben

My next question would be potential output of the raid buffed Infernal as well since it has a 20 min CD you could use on bosses between Doom cooldown.

Dude, infernal lasts what, 60 seconds? So all in all over the course of an hour you have 18 min of pet time where you can be considered "decent" and then 42 min of sub par DPS, even in the best situation I don't think you would beneifit ALL that much from a demonic sacrafice vs having your imp.

As for the stats I use, I use the default simcraft stats, which basically assumes stacking dmg above all else, note this is BASE damage and not including fel armor, or any talents.

default_stamina=708
default_intellect=777
default_spirit=411
default_spell_power=2200
default_crit_rating=461
default_hit_rating=290
default_haste_rating=452

Also note that all data I am finding is for the upcoming 3.0.8 patch.

Woggle, The gear Levels I implemented for my scaling tests, as I said, when from mildly decent upgrades of a few hundred spell dmg and scaling hit and crit proportionally, to = spelldmg and = crit to the numbers listed above and scaling haste to an extreme. The problem comes with drain soul. It used to be haste highly benefited destro, and crit allowed it to scale too. But now affliction scales with crit and drain soul scales silly well with haste when executing. After all DS is only used for a few ticks between cast time, each time you can get enough haste to gain an extra tick is a HUGE boost in DPS, it would be like chain critting for the last 25% with incinerate.

Asmodaeus · 01/19/09, 4:11 PM

Originally Posted by Dirich

This being the destro thread, it's obvious we are going to keep up only 1 dot (or 2, for those of us that cast corr too). There shouldn't really be need to talk about this matter. Just count the number of times you can't tap without losing dps time on your next runs and you'll have your answer about how true is the statement you are arguing about.

the difference between affliction instant dots and destro instant dots is 1 (syphon life). it can be zero, since affliction ideally casts only 1 corruption per fight. you can also conflagrate, shatter, or shadowfury adds on the run.

Originally Posted by Dirich

Also, you are unlikely to be able to receive any heal trough SL during a phase where you have to move in order to not take damage (which is when it would be useful since your healers are on the move too, probably).

it's true. but the point is ISL, which in these fights allows you to life tap less.

Originally Posted by Dirich

Last but not least, if you are moving to avoid damage, you are supposed to avoid the damage so you are free to tap. On heigan, i.e. either you move or you die, so no problem with tapping. On the rest of the fights where you could take a hit, 2 rules apply:

1) if the damage is possible to avoid, than you should avoid it (thus being able to tap safely)
2) never tap unwisely (like when you are under 50% life in a sapphiron fight and your healers are oom, i.e.)

several aoe effects of bosses leave a dot. just remember azgalor and tell me if you tapped while running from the fire that had spawned right on top of you.

when you look at your health bar you can't see where you're going, and when your eyes switch targets you get temporary blindness. it's a physiological thing, it's not a matter of skill. this is the healer problem that makes them specially prone to die to aoe. your rules are terrible advice. if you're moving to avoid damage, the priority is to avoid damage, period. btw, every time i tapped during the heigan dance i died. every time i didn't tap i survived.

this is a place to theorycraft dps, but the results of theorycrafting are only useful if they have any bearing with reality. in a real raid environment, survivability is important, and it will be more important as new, harder content gets added.
i'm not saying SL and ISL are great survivability talents (they clearly aren't), but assuming that taps come for free in all mobility fights is pushing it, in my opinion.

Trickykid · 01/19/09, 4:21 PM

Originally Posted by Asmodaeus

when you look at your health bar you can't see where you're going, and when your eyes switch targets you get temporary blindness. it's a physiological thing, it's not a matter of skill. this is the healer problem that makes them specially prone to die to aoe. your rules are terrible advice. if you're moving to avoid damage, the priority is to avoid damage, period. btw, every time i tapped during the heigan dance i died. every time i didn't tap i survived.

this is a place to theorycraft dps, but the results of theorycrafting are only useful if they have any bearing with reality. in a real raid environment, survivability is important, and it will be more important as new, harder content gets added.
i'm not saying SL and ISL are great survivability talents (they clearly aren't), but assuming that taps come for free in all mobility fights is pushing it, in my opinion.

So the skill in this case would be setting up your UI so that you can both see where you're going and your health bar? Understanding fights enough to know when you can tap on the move is very important to getting the most out of your warlock. If you're wasting GCDs because you're focusing so hard on the flame wall that you can't life tap, that's an area for improvement, not something you should just stomach for the sake of survivability.

On Heigan, you move the same way every time, and not only should you be using as many instants as you can profitably, but also there is plenty of time to slip in other cast-time spells. If you're dying to life tap during that, I'd recommend finding a better way to set up your UI or knowing where the fire spawns better.

Asmodaeus · 01/19/09, 4:28 PM

Originally Posted by Trickykid

Understanding fights enough to know when you can tap on the move is very important to getting the most out of your warlock.

The point is that it is not. Saving a few GCDs on a boss fight will not have a significant impact on your damage. This is the same reason why ISL is not a very good dps talent (it does the same thing).
You're just risking dying for a minimal dps increase.

supplicium · 01/19/09, 4:40 PM

Originally Posted by Asmodaeus

The point is that it is not. Saving a few GCDs on a boss fight will not have a significant impact on your damage. This is the same reason why ISL is not a very good dps talent (it does the same thing).
You're just risking dying for a minimal dps increase.

I think you just created a logical contradiction. To summarize your points:

1) You shouldn't lifetap when avoiding damage, because you might get hit.

2) Saving a few gcd's while standing still isn't as important as living

3) saving a few gcd's won't change your dps that much

3) ISL (a talent that reduces your need to LT by 30% plus passivly) isn't really that worth it.

So what you are saying is if there was some magical talent that reduced our need to lifetap while avoiding damage that we shouldn't be taking any ways because in most situations we'd end up dead either way, life taped HP or not.

Here's the deal, if you assume you might get hit by something like a flame wall in Sarth, you are assuming you are bad at doing a simple job. I always assume I'm dodging a flame wall, because once you do sarth 3drake if you get hit by said wall, you are dead, plain and simple. I don't Assume I'm going to be hit by a void fissure or a mana explosion on KT either, I assume some people are actually smart enough to do their job and I am smart enough to do mine.

Asmodaeus · 01/19/09, 5:51 PM

Originally Posted by supplicium

I think you just created a logical contradiction. To summarize your points:

1) You shouldn't lifetap when avoiding damage, because you might get hit.

i'm saying that it's often the case that you can't tap while you're moving. think of grobbulus when you get the debuff, for instance. this is where this discussion started

Originally Posted by supplicium

2) Saving a few gcd's while standing still isn't as important as living

what?? I'm saying that staying alive is more important than saving a few GCDs...

Originally Posted by supplicium

3) saving a few gcd's won't change your dps that much

yes, specially if you have replenishment effects. the math for this has been presented above.

Originally Posted by supplicium

3) ISL (a talent that reduces your need to LT by 30% plus passivly) isn't really that worth it.

yes and no. it's a bad dps talent, and it's a bad survavibility talent. but it's a talent that gives you a little bit of dps and a little bit of survivability. that's its value: it goes both ways.

EDIT: and I'm saying that there are alternatives to life tap while you're moving. For instance, at OS, making sure you put your pet on follow is arguably more important than life tapping.

Krathis · 01/19/09, 6:05 PM

Several comments got directed at my post so I'm just going to clarify everything I said earlier.

The effects of ISL are minimal on fights where you can life tap while moving. In other words it doesn't give you as much as it would on a fight where you can not move and life tap effectively or don't need to move.

Demonic Sacrifice plus Doom Guard is a damage increase over just an imp and currently a damage increase over Chaos Bolt + Doom Guard. While the Doom Guard does have a 15 minute duration and can only be used once per hour there are fights where his survivability is currently higher then an imps due to his large hit point pool (mine sits at 25k or so unbuffed) even though he does not have AoE damage avoidance like the imp does (as far as I can tell). An obvious example of this is Four Hoursemen because the stacking dots are not considered an AoE and make short work of an imp. On fights where a pet isn't usable at all for whatever reason (poor healing during Sapphiron would be an example) then DS is better dps then no pet dps and those extra 13 points in destruction would be hard pressed to out perform DS in such situations. As a personal anecdote I have an easier time keeping a melee pet alive on Grobbulus then an imp and the Doom Guard can usually be set to auto attack and forgot about in that situation and most guilds should be able to kill Patchwork and have Grobbulus down before the 15 minute duration expires.

In other words, what the 0/28/43 spec lacks in raw dps on pet friendly fights it makes up for in versatility over a 2/13/56 spec. Being able to use a Doom Guard cooldown coupled with DS isn't just about a damage meter flex.

I'm not saying the 0/28/43 spec should use a Doom Guard and DS on every fight the cooldown is available nor should it drop an Infernal every cooldown. But there are situations when an imp won't or can not survive and the 2/13/56 spec doesn't have many options for making up for that dps loss.

The question should be if the added versatility is worth the loss of 101 average dps as the numbers posted earlier stated.

Trickykid · 01/19/09, 6:14 PM

Originally Posted by Asmodaeus

The point is that it is not. Saving a few GCDs on a boss fight will not have a significant impact on your damage. This is the same reason why ISL is not a very good dps talent (it does the same thing).
You're just risking dying for a minimal dps increase.

i'm saying that it's often the case that you can't tap while you're moving. think of grobbulus when you get the debuff, for instance. this is where this discussion started

That's a unique case of taking more damage at the end of the move. I even life tap during this, taking care not to go below the amount of damage I'll be taking. In virtually every other case, by moving you are going to be taking less damage, not more.

My point is that once you know how to make it through a fight (which arguably can be understood after one time through the fight), using the entire fight length for spells which will maximize your damage is the the name of the game. I don't tap below a threshold that will make me dead after an expected incoming damage source. So yes, I still think tapping on the move is a good idea in almost every situation. The few that aren't are so obvious when you're in them (ie: you'll be taking 10k damage soon and you have 11k life, should you life tap while moving?) that they don't need to be called out here.

supplicium · 01/19/09, 6:17 PM

Originally Posted by Asmodaeus

i'm saying that it's often the case that you can't tap while you're moving. think of grobbulus when you get the debuff, for instance. this is where this discussion started

Why can't you LT on grobbulus, are you running through poison clouds? do your healers forget about you? You should safely beable to LT atleast once both ways, or just port 1 way.

what?? I'm saying that staying alive is more important than saving a few GCDs...

Yea I got what you said, what I'm saying is you shouldn't be dieing while moving to avoid damage. The more important things to watch out for are things you can't move away from, For instance saphron, you cant LT too far, etc because of all the damage. BUT if you can avoid the damage, you should, the farther you progress in raiding the less likely it will be that you will survive one of these effects, there by Lifetapping while moving shouldn't be a risk except to those who would just die any ways.

yes, specially if you have replenishment effects. the math for this has been presented above.

This is a thread about maximizing your dps, but you are right, it probably won't be the worst thing ever.

yes and no. it's a bad dps talent, and it's a bad survavibility talent. but it's a talent that gives you a little bit of dps and a little bit of survivability. that's its value: it goes both ways.

No one ever said ISL will improve your dps by 6000 or any thing, it has been said time and time, that Both SL, ISL and F&B are rather lack luster, and all in all are one of the reasons that destro won't scale as well.

EDIT: and I'm saying that there are alternatives to life tap while you're moving. For instance, at OS, making sure you put your pet on follow is arguably more important than life tapping.

Ok, First off, you can do many things while moving, you can cast instant cast dots if they have fallen off, or a conflag if it's up, but Lifetapping is something that always has to be done and if Conflag is on CD, dots are all upm you might as well because there's nothing else to do.

second, Lifetap=gcd, pet follow=no gcd for player or pert. There's no reason not to do both.

Nezek · 01/19/09, 9:37 PM

ran some simcraft myself.. the results I got show that 0/20/51 (5 unholy power and 4 F&B) gives higher DPS than 2/13/56.

 107507 100.0%  Raid
   5990   5.6%  Warlock_53_0_18_FH(3CAT)
   5960   5.5%  Warlock_53_0_18_FH(3MC)
   5724   5.3%  Mage_57_3_11
   5707   5.3%  Warlock_56_0_15_CoE
   5478   5.1%  Mage_52_19_0
   5410   5.0%  Mage_0_53_18
   5364   5.0%  Warlock_0_20_51_conf_imp_coa
   5355   5.0%  Warlock_2_13_56_conf_immo_coa
   5333   5.0%  Mage_20_51_0
   5187   4.8%  Warlock_0_28_43_conf_imp_coa
   5166   4.8%  Druid_58_0_13_SF
   5116   4.8%  Warlock_0_41_30
   5106   4.7%  Priest_14_0_57
   5091   4.7%  Warlock_0_31_40

with infinite mana the margins go up a bit..

   6083   5.6%  Warlock_53_0_18_FH(3CAT)
   6063   5.5%  Warlock_53_0_18_FH(3MC)
   5960   5.4%  Mage_57_3_11
   5794   5.3%  Warlock_56_0_15_CoE
   5566   5.1%  Mage_52_19_0
   5516   5.0%  Warlock_0_20_51_conf_imp_coa
   5449   5.0%  Warlock_2_13_56_conf_immo_coa
   5356   4.9%  Warlock_0_28_43_conf_imp_coa
   5349   4.9%  Mage_0_53_18
   5283   4.8%  Mage_20_51_0
   5257   4.8%  Warlock_0_41_30
   5239   4.8%  Warlock_0_31_40

* no soulfire during backdraft

supplicium · 01/19/09, 9:53 PM

Sorry I don't get these results at all , you are forgetting corruption in the rotation,

   5158   3.5%  Warlock_2_13_56_+corr    <- using courrption and spellstone
   5155   3.5%  Warlock_2_13_56+corrFS   <- using corruption and fire stone
   5133   3.5%  Warlock_0_20_51+corr  <- using corruption
   5115   3.5%  Warlock_0_20_51         <- not using coruption
   5112   3.5%  Warlock_2_13_56_immo      <- not using coruption
   5097   3.5%  Warlock_2_13_56_imp      <- not using coruption

Nezek · 01/19/09, 10:26 PM

both 2/13/56 and 0/20/51 are using corruption

edit can't see how I'm getting higher numbers.. i'll re- download simcraft and start with the default raid setup again.

supplicium · 01/19/09, 10:39 PM

Originally Posted by Nezek

both 2/13/56 and 0/20/51 are using corruption

edit can't see how I'm getting higher numbers.. i'll re- download simcraft and start with the default raid setup again.

Are you using the latest version of simcraft with the 3.0.8 data?

Nezek · 01/19/09, 10:40 PM

here.. fresh raid setup file, only replaced the affliction warlock without drain soul with the 0/20/51.

 111434 100.0%  Raid
   6396   5.7%  Warlock_55_0_16_DG
   6028   5.4%  Warlock_56_0_15_Inf
   5908   5.3%  Warlock_55_0_16
   5612   5.0%  Warlock_56_0_15_CoE
   5612   5.0%  Mage_57_3_11
   5368   4.8%  Mage_52_19_0
   5259   4.7%  Mage_0_53_18
   5211   4.7%  Warlock_0_20_51_conf_imp_coa
   5210   4.7%  Warlock_2_13_56
   5210   4.7%  Mage_20_51_0
   5046   4.5%  Warlock_0_41_30
   5015   4.5%  Druid_58_0_13_SF
   5005   4.5%  Priest_14_0_57
   4950   4.4%  Warlock_0_31_40
   4947   4.4%  Priest_14_0_57_NoSWD
   4902   4.4%  Mage_18_0_53
   4875   4.4%  Shaman_54_17_0
   4830   4.3%  Warlock_0_53_18
   4634   4.2%  Druid_58_0_13_W
   4595   4.1%  Shaman_16_55_0
   4469   4.0%  Druid_58_0_13_W_FF
   2536   2.3%  Priest_38_28_5

0/20/51 and 2/13/56 use Corruption in their rotation
0/20/51 glyphs are conf, imp and CoA
2/13/56 glyphs are conf, immolate and CoA

+1 dps is basically nothing.. I prefer having to lifetap less and not be as dependent of my imp.

however, same raid setup with infinite mana gives

 112912 100.0%  Raid
   6474   5.7%  Warlock_55_0_16_DG
   6131   5.4%  Warlock_56_0_15_Inf
   5995   5.3%  Warlock_55_0_16
   5785   5.1%  Mage_57_3_11
   5697   5.0%  Warlock_56_0_15_CoE
   5413   4.8%  Mage_52_19_0
   5356   4.7%  Warlock_0_20_51_conf_imp_coa
   5286   4.7%  Warlock_2_13_56
   5233   4.6%  Mage_0_53_18
   5178   4.6%  Warlock_0_41_30
   5171   4.6%  Mage_20_51_0
   5111   4.5%  Warlock_0_31_40
   5010   4.4%  Priest_14_0_57
   5009   4.4%  Druid_58_0_13_SF
   4964   4.4%  Warlock_0_53_18

so you can see as mana becomes less of a problem 0/20/51 becomes better
I think we can safely assume that in fights that don't require life tapping 0/20/51 would be better, but I haven't seen a fight like that yet..