Elitist Jerks The Mage Equivalent: The Destruction Warlock

01/02/10, 2:53 PM   #1336
Akutozo
Glass Joe

Blood Elf Warlock

Tanaris
 Originally Posted by Vicieus My calculations were off, but I think these should be correct. This is all self buffed (minus felpup) without human racial (Not all us locks are alliance humans = P) Your gearlist: Fel Armor Surrounds the caster with fel energy, increasing spell power by 180 plus additional spell power equal to 30% of your Spirit. In addition, you regain 2% of your maximum health every 5 sec. Only one type of Armor spell can be active on the Warlock at any time. Lasts 30 min. 30% of 867 spirit is 260.1sp Glyph of Life tap Use: When you use Life Tap or Dark Pact, you gain 20% of your Spirit as spell power for 40 sec. 20% of 867 spirit is 173.4sp 260 + 173=433 sp 2951 sp + 433 sp = 3384sp mine: 50% of 370 spirit is 185sp 3394sp + 185sp=3569sp ~185 sp difference.
There is a possible flaw in this, as we have ignored the probability of using Demonic Aegis in the Talent tree. That being said, the base effectiveness of your Fel Armor, which was 30%, is now increased by 30% (of that 30), making it equivalent to 39% of your Spellpower.

869 Spirit x .39% (which more than likely, most warlocks spec Demonic Aegis), would = 338.13 SP (unrounded).

That being said, 867 x.20 (Assuming LT Glyph) = 173.4 SP(unrounded).

These 2 would be equivalent to 511.53 (or 512) SP, and assumably the same math that drove motif's conclusion in the original comment.

A good way to calculate this is spirit being = to 59% rather than 50%.

 01/02/10, 3:01 PM #1337 Warlocomotif Don Flamenco     Warlocomotif Human Warlock   Emerald Dream (EU) No, a good way to calculate spirit is to not only factor in Demonic Aegis, but also blessing of kings (10%). It's not 59%, it's 64.9% (Or 66.847% for humans) The mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's open.
01/02/10, 3:41 PM   #1338
Akutozo
Glass Joe

Blood Elf Warlock

Tanaris
 Originally Posted by Warlocomotif No, a good way to calculate spirit is to not only factor in Demonic Aegis, but also blessing of kings (10%). It's not 59%, it's 64.9% (Or 66.847% for humans)
I normally would, saving that the original calculation did not include, and specifically excluded buffs. I was trying to educate where the difference in math came about is all. Either way is a good way (and there is the small (extremely small) possibility a group may not have a paladin, so the most absolute way as well, as it will reflect the true base stat).

 01/02/10, 4:50 PM #1339 angaroth Piston Honda   Greebo Undead Warlock   Twisting Nether Any serious group that did not include a paladin would have the Drums of Forgotten Kings at only 8% but still better than nothing.
 01/03/10, 6:37 AM #1340 Nerrun Glass Joe   Nerrun Dwarf Paladin   Madmortem (EU) with 0/13/58, what is the magic border of spirit at which it's better to replace the LT glyph with the Immo glyph, looking at the massive loss of Spirit with the t10 gear Last edited by Nerrun : 01/03/10 at 10:32 AM.
01/04/10, 10:42 AM   #1341
Neil.Reynolds
Glass Joe

Gnome Warlock

Aerie Peak
 Originally Posted by bastetswarrior Destruction spec sample values using Chaotic Skyflare Diamond (CSD) Meta: $N= 3$ $c_s= .3$ $c_r= c_s + .05$ from Devastation talent $m_s= 1.54$ (extra from CSD) $m_r= 2.09$ (extra from CSD) $d_s= 2777$ $d_r= 1842$ $h= .15$ $t_r= 2.0 / (1 + h) = 1.74$ $t_s= 2.0 / (1 + h) = 1.74$ Plugging these values into the previous formula, we obtain: Total RoF Expected AOE damage = 7634 Total SoC Expected AOE damage = 9680 RoF AOE DPS = 4370 damage/sec SoC AOE DPS = 5566 damage/sec
Could you include your spelldamage for this calculation?
SoC has a base direct AoE damage of 1785, so a damage of 2777 would imply a SD of 4629
RoF has a base damage per tick of 375, so 1842 would imply a SD of 2567

If this is wrong, it implies a change in the spell power coefficients, which would be a serious change, and well worth documenting. I just noticed Wowwiki says under Spell power coefficient that RoF gets 57% damage bonus per tick, but under the notes of Rain of Fire only 33%. I assume the first page is accurate because it says it was last checked 3.2.0, but I can't check it myself now at work

I believe your RoF AoE DpS should be 4390 (which doesn't change your argument in the slightest, I wouldn't mention it if I weren't anal retentive)

$m_s= 1.545$

Everything else you've written is quite clearly laid out and appears accurate.

Removing similar terms

$1+c_i*(m_i - 1)= c_i*m_i + (1-c_i)$
$1+c_s*(m_s - 1)= 1.1635$
$1+c_r*(m_r - 1)= 1.3815$
$1+c_r*(m_r - 1)= 1+(c_s+.05)*(2*m_s - 1) = [1+c_s*(m_s - 1)] + 0.1045 + c_s*m_s$

Which shows that even with a large change in crit, for example an extreme case of a base crit of 40% the gap in the multipliers for the damage would only increase by 0.1545 for RoF over the increase of SoC (which supports bastetswarrior's argument)

Please clarify what spell damage produced your $d_s$ and $d_r$

01/04/10, 11:00 AM   #1342
Neil.Reynolds
Glass Joe

Gnome Warlock

Aerie Peak
 Originally Posted by Nerrun with 0/13/58, what is the magic border of spirit at which it's better to replace the LT glyph with the Immo glyph, looking at the massive loss of Spirit with the t10 gear
I did a VERY rough calculation on this earlier. Warlock: Simple Questions/Simple Answers

As your Spell Damage increases, the switchover point increases. I've actually stopped using Glyph of LT because
• the benefit was so minor,
• I would sometimes fail to maintain the buff,
• it required more healing for the increased use of LT,
• and not using it makes my life simpler.
If I get gear with alot of spirit, I'll switch back.

01/04/10, 11:22 AM   #1343
Warlocomotif
Don Flamenco

Human Warlock

Emerald Dream (EU)
 Originally Posted by Nerrun with 0/13/58, what is the magic border of spirit at which it's better to replace the LT glyph with the Immo glyph, looking at the massive loss of Spirit with the t10 gear
- Glyph of Life Tap essentially gives you an amount of spellpower, the DPS value for spell power is relative to the amount of haste, crit, and to some extend- spirit that you have. Additionally in the real world this glyph has a very real opportunity cost in the shape of requiring additional lifetaps to gain the buff. The oppertunity cost of this glyph to an extend inversely scales with the amount of intellect and spirit you have (More intellect = more mana regen = less lifetaps needed, more spirit = bigger life taps = less lifetaps needed).

- Glyph of immolate increases the periodic damage of immolate by 10%, this by itself is only effected by spellpower, however this glyph also translates into extra damage through conflagrate. The extra damage through conflagrate does scale with critical strike rating.

Basically what this means is... There is no magic border that will hold universally true for everyone, you're just going to have to try and run simcraft and see where the relevant border is for your gear specifically. Also consider the type of fight simulationcrat simulates, you might want to compare the glyphs on both a patchwerk and helter skelter settings as the oppertunity cost of glyph of lifetap is a lot more relevant when you're not fighting patchwerk.

The mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's open.

01/04/10, 5:23 PM   #1344
Oth
Piston Honda

Human Warlock

Cenarius
 Originally Posted by Neil.Reynolds Could you include your spelldamage for this calculation? SoC has a base direct AoE damage of 1785, so a damage of 2777 would imply a SD of 4629 RoF has a base damage per tick of 375, so 1842 would imply a SD of 2567 If this is wrong, it implies a change in the spell power coefficients, which would be a serious change, and well worth documenting. I just noticed Wowwiki says under Spell power coefficient that RoF gets 57% damage bonus per tick, but under the notes of Rain of Fire only 33%. I assume the first page is accurate because it says it was last checked 3.2.0, but I can't check it myself now at work
I believe the wowwiki page is erroneously referring to the mana cost of the spell (57% of base). Anecdotally and by napkin, ROF does indeed get 33% SP/tick. (My per-tick numbers and stats are very similar to the examples used in this comparison.) On a similar note, SOC costs 34% base per cast, but its explosion coefficient is 21.3% SP as noted on the wowwiki pages.

(EDIT: I made a suggestion that Backlash was getting ignored in these calculations. It was pointed out that Backlash affects all spell schools equally, which would make any increase in ROF's DPT proportional. I removed that calculation.)

However: We are also ignoring Empowered Imp procs. Every time the imp crits (assuming he starts attacking when you do), (EDIT 2: Tested this...) your next SOC explosion or tick of ROF is a guaranteed crit on all targets. Considering that a raid-buffed imp with pet crit bonus from tier probably will proc this once every 10s or so, this is a significant bump to ROF's DPS and should close the gap somewhat. It also boosts SOC significantly, so it ends up not changing the proportion except insofar as the crits on ROF have a higher multiplier.

I'm still a little hung up on the mana throughput as well; ROF is 2198 mana/6.8s (at my haste level); Cataclysm knocks another 10% off to make it 1977/6.8s. Meanwhile, SoC uses 5244/6.8s (to be fair, 4929 if you happen to have Suppression). If you really wanted to game the system to save mana, you could seed until EI procs, do a single ROF, then go back to seeds until you see EI come up again.

(Did we just invent AOE weaving? Ugh.)

Last edited by Oth : 01/04/10 at 7:41 PM.

 01/04/10, 6:20 PM #1345 Flew Glass Joe   Flew Orc Warlock   Dunemaul Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding what your saying but: Backlash increases crit chance, not crit damage. And its for all spells, not just destro spells. Empowered Imp increases your crit chance for all spells, not just destro spells.
01/04/10, 6:35 PM   #1346
Oth
Piston Honda

Human Warlock

Cenarius
 Originally Posted by Flew Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding what your saying but: Backlash increases crit chance, not crit damage. And its for all spells, not just destro spells. Empowered Imp increases your crit chance for all spells, not just destro spells.
You understand me completely. (In that I totally let that 'all spells' go over my head.) :p Good catch. I'll have to carve that out.

If that's so, it more or less removes Backlash as a contribution.

EDIT: Checking how EI works, I just went ahead and tested this out in an instance, and each tick and explosion are indeed considered to be a separate spell hit chance (EIs that proc mid-ROF crit the next tick, and EIs that occur when a seed's in flight cause crit-plosions.) This actually boosts the DPT for both spells considerably because it makes full use of the EI procs (it also makes it necessary to model EI uptime to figure out how much it does so). That means that the only consideration turns out to be mana usage, which is significant in a long AE pull or boss fight but not necessarily a deal-breaker.

Last edited by Oth : 01/04/10 at 7:47 PM.

 01/06/10, 12:15 AM #1347 bastetswarrior Glass Joe   Urbanprey Human Warlock   Terenas Seed of Corruption vs Rain of Fire Greetings You are correct that I prematurely rounded, thank you for the correction! Now that I can verify in game the spell coefficients, at sufficiently high levels of spell power, RoF will do more damage than SoC. With that said, those levels are not sustainable levels in game at this time. I have 3041 spell power with no procs, self buffed with Fel Armor. I took off any trinkets and did not life tap. I left the imp on passive. My gear has changed slightly since the original post. Collecting a small sample, I obtained (after removing crits) on an 80 target dummy. 2648 2562 2760 2672 2610 2672 2591 which averages 2645. This isn't enough to verify the spell power coefficient, I just wanted to verify I had given accurate numbers. 1779 was my dmg for RoF with that 3041 spell power Base RoF is 3112/4 = 778 (not 375). I confirmed this in game by testing it's damage naked on a target dummy. Using the assumption of actual spell dmg being calculated as non crit spell damage = (Base damage + (Coefficent * Spell Power))*talents*(% dmg multipliers like CoE) we obtain coefficient = (non crit spell damage - base damage)/ spell power since I had no damage multipliers up, and no talents boosting the damage. This calculation confirms RoF coefficient is indeed 33% per tick. I corrected the wowwiki RoF article I linked in my original post to specify 33% / tick. The same calculation gives 28-31% as a rough estimate of the coefficient of SoC, which is in the same region as the previously mentioned values. I realize that Spell power coefficient - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft lists the spell coefficient of SoC as 25% for the AoE, but this can be seen to be slightly incorrect using the process described on that wowwiki's discussion page. Restating the process, using the maximum damage and working back to the spell power coefficient gives a lower bound for the coefficient of 28%. Similarly, we can find an upper bound using the minimum damage of 31%. So, Seed of Corruption does scale slightly less well than Rain of Fire. Thus, my previous statement that SoC would always dominate RoF (ignoring mana considerations) is incorrect. At sufficiently high levels of spell power, RoF will do more damage than SoC. I used an estimate of 29% for the spell coefficient to Seed of Corruption to find the threshold, but the expression is easy to derive in general which I will do below. The threshold decreases (nonlinearly) as crit increases, but is up in the spell power 7000+ range for crit about 40% and 5000 spell power range for 70% crit. The base damage for RoF is just so low, and coefficients sufficiently close, that even at the extreme case of 90% crit, about 4390 spell power is still needed for the threshold. Rough supporting mathematics: Let $k_i$ be the spell power coefficient. Let $b_i$ be the base damage (per tick for RoF, explosion for SoC). Let p be the spell power. Let $f_i$ be the multiplicative talent modifiers, and $g_i$ multiplicative damage modifiers. Observe $d_i= (b_i +k_i*p)*f_ig_i$ is the non crit damage from spell i. We also define a few intermediate variables to ease notation. Let $\alpha_i= (c_im_i + (1-c_i))f_ig_i$ - weight including the talent and damage modifiers $\beta_i= (c_im_i + (1-c_i))$ - weight excluding talent and damage modifiers. So, the AOE dmg for spell i is $AOE_i(p)= N*(b_i +k_i*p)*\alpha_i$. We seek to find the spell power value p at which $AOE_s(p)= AOE_r(p)$. Setting the two expressions equal and solving for p, we have $p= \frac{b_s\alpha_s - b_r\alpha_r}{k_r\alpha_r - k_s\alpha_s}$ Scanning the list of talents and damage modifiers, it looks like $f_sg_s= f_rg_r$. With that assumption as a special case, we have $p= \frac{b_s\beta_s - b_r\beta_r}{k_r\beta_r - k_s\beta_s}$ giving the desired threshold for spell power for RoF to dominate SoC. Going through some examples $b_s= 1765, k_s = .29$ $b_r= 778, k_r = .33$ $f_i= g_i = 1$ Plugging in c_s = .3 and c_r = .35 gives $\beta_s= 1.1635$ and $\beta_r= 1.3815$, and so p = 8920 would be needed for RoF to do more AOE dmg than SoC. The threshold is nonlinear as a function of c_s though, so c_s = .4 gives p=7166 as the threshold and c_s = .5 gives p = 6328. This reaffirms that certainly in 5 mans and solo, SoC > RoF. As far as I know, these are not currently attainable gear levels for spell power. Empowered Imp effectively increases the crit rate, although it's not immediately clear by how much, and that indeed that lowers the threshold value for spell power. Even with a massive c_s = .7 as the crit rate, we still have p=5161. Correct me if needed, but 5161 spell power is only achievable with full raid buffs, near BiS gear and trinket procs. On the bright side for Rain of Fire, if any talents or buffs give a multiplicative boost to Rain of Fire but not Seed of Corruption, that brings the spellpower threshold lower. Further work on pinning down more precisely the spell power coefficient for SoC would also be useful. I'm holding off on considering mana until we have the pure damage situation clarified. As always, corrections and feedback are welcome.
01/06/10, 11:45 AM   #1348
Neil.Reynolds
Glass Joe

Gnome Warlock

Aerie Peak
 Originally Posted by bastetswarrior 1779 was my dmg for RoF with that 3041 spell power Base RoF is 3112/4 = 778 (not 375). I confirmed this in game by testing it's damage naked on a target dummy.
Thanks for answering my questions and for going so much further. I haven't read through your answer with the thoroughness it deserves because I'm at work, but I will.

I got the 375 from the spell's tooltip, and then screwed up my math. According to what I read it was 2700 base damage for 4 ticks, which should have been 675 If I could divide properly (why I got 375 I don't know). This is of course before all of the talents that boost fire damage, which explains why you got 778, or the spell's mis-documented.

N.B. A basic failing of mine: When I read or reply to messages here, I'm not near my game machine, and tend to answer based on numbers from wowhead and wowwiki which I usually accept as gospel, and simcraft and other posts here which I usually accept as "Very likely true" or "True enough"

 01/06/10, 12:21 PM #1349 bastetswarrior Glass Joe   Urbanprey Human Warlock   Terenas RoF misdocumented in wowhead and thottbot Good catch, I had somehow missed that Emberstorm changes the tooltip, even though the multiplier is actually applied to spell damage as well. With that said, testing naked on a target dummy with 0 spellpower standard destro spec gave about 778.5 damage/tick. This is odd, since (778.5/1.15)*(4 ticks) = 2708. While certainly different from wowhead, thottbot, it is a pretty small change. I could use some help in explaining the change from 2700 to 2708 if anyone has any ideas? I changed specs to my demo spec as well, and the tooltip listed 2708 as the base damage for RoF as well. No pet was out. The correction to RoF's base damage and including Emberstorm implies a spell damage coefficient of about 29% for RoF instead of 33%, so I was wrong earlier about confirmation of RoF's spell coefficient. As before, since RoF has better scaling (due to Emberstorm) there is a spellpower threshold (inversely dependent on crit rate) at which RoF will outdamage SoC. Since we have the formula set up in general, I went ahead and plugged in the revised values. $f_r= 1.15$ $k_r= .29$ $b_r= 677$ The other root values are unchanged. Plugging and chugging again, we can input various crit values to graph once again out how the needed spellpower threshold changes. Similar to the initial post though, the gear levels needed for RoF to dominate SoC are not currently achievable. At $c_s=.3, .4, .5, .7$ the spellpower thresholds are 7848, 6812, 6033, and 4941 respectively. Last edited by bastetswarrior : 01/08/10 at 12:02 PM. Reason: Emberstorm correction
01/13/10, 6:09 AM   #1350
k3x
Glass Joe

Blood Elf Warlock

Mal'Ganis (EU)
 Hopefully this post doesn't get too buried in this thread since it's grown quite a bit since I last posted. Another change we'd like to make for Destruction warlocks concerns Conflagrate. We're looking into doubling the damage-over-time effect to 40% of Conflagrate's total damage, up from 20%.
source

Would it be a nice buff?

 Elitist Jerks The Mage Equivalent: The Destruction Warlock