There seems to be a lot of people (myself included) unsure as to whether Glyph of Lifetap is worth it in non-affliction builds.

For say Destro (3/13/55), should we be using Glyph of Lifetap over Glyoh of Incinerate/Immolate?

Should we lifetap every 20secs to keep the buff up, or do it just when we need too?

So, which to replace (immo or incin) for lifetap? If any?

Immolate/incinerate are slightly better in 25 man because it is unnecessary to life tap every 20 seconds with constant replenishment and other mana regen.

Glyph of life tap is good for affliction simply because there aren't really any other competing glyphs. You should Life tap as needed, not for the buff. According to sims for 3.1.2 Conflag / Life tap / Incinerate. Live, i think it's Conflag / Lifetap / Incinerate.

According to simcraft lifetap > immolate glyph.

Do the sim use conflagrate on every cd? I think it will make a difference if immolate glyph also adds conflag damage by 10%.

It conflags every cooldown.

Like I said, different opinions always.

Nuibank, your saying that Incin glyph > Immo glyph.

But on the very first post of this topic :

"We use the same glyphs as 0/40/31

* Glyph of Life Tap This new glyph massively boosts our dps and gets worked into our cycle.
* Glyph of Conflagrate Add in this to the new Conflag glyph is self explanatory.
* Glyph of Immolate It boosts immolate's damage, as well as conflag's, double win!

use Glyph of Incinerate until you can attain Glyph of Lifetap. "

This is saying Lifetap/Immo>Incin.

Ok, I missed that.

I'd love to run some tests myself, just because 10% of immolate (which also boosts conflag) vs 5% on incinerate, in my head I go with Immolate everytime.

Nuibank, so your saying we should go :

Lifetap, Incin, Conflag - and NOT lifetap to keep the buff up?

Correct.

It's worth noting that conflag/life tap/incinerate is the optimal glyph makeup for 3/13/55 only - conflag/immo/incin is superior for 0/13/58, which according to simcraft outperforms 3/13/55 once you start picking up Ulduar gear. This is because Improved Soul Leech returns enough mana to negate the need for many of your life taps.

Got banned for writing this the last time, but I'll try again

Did some testing with our guilds elemental shaman. And it turns out that DP benefits from ToW. In other words, DP gets 28 more SP when ToW is down.

SP before DP and ToW: 2815
SP with DP without ToW: 3091
SP with DP and ToW: 3119

Guess this would bring some updates to the rDPS discussion. That optimal raid may very well be to have both ToW and DP..?

And could someone pls verify these results?

Thanks for the numbers. Does this apply only to the first DP proc? Or to all refreshing procs as well?

I ask because I assume the ToW buff gets cleared when the initial DP procs, so it's conceivable the refreshed DP buff gets 28 less SP than the initial one.

In the 3/14/53 spec, why isn't corruption used? Still a lot higher dpcs then incinerate and chaos bolt right..?

And when I am testing choas bolt on dummies, the damage is always WAY lower then incinerate, even the dpcs is lower... How can that come??

Because of the above I tried the following rotation for the spec: CoD, immolate, conflag, corruption, inc, inc, inc etc
so no chaos bolt. I did an avarage of 3.5k dps whit it, while I do an avarage of 2800 dps whit the rotation mention in OP.

The DPCT of corruption is lower than that of Incinerate and it makes the rotation more clunky. Are you using rank 4 of chaos bolt? Go see your warlock trainer.

When I tested on the dummy corruption is always way higher then inc in DPCS. Plus corruption activates the 2 piece T7 bonus.

Whit same gear and same buffs for both (inc had even higher SP while testing because of trinket), corruption had an avarage of 3412 dps and incinerate (whit a cast time of 1.93 seconds on my char) did an avarage of 3229 dps...
My GCD is 0.84 (haste is 16%). So incinerate is 1673 DPCS and corruption 3922 DPCS.

And btw, I indeed didnt had the highest rank chaos bolt :S

Incinerate should have a higher DPCT because it can crit. A 25man raid should give you at least 13% more crit (moonkin aura/scorch/totem of wrath for instance). Don't expect conclusive proof from dummy testing. Also, you didn't say if you tested with or without immolate on the target.

In short, you'd be more credible with some screenshots.

Raid buffs/debuffs of the same nature never stack with each other. The maximum crit buff is 5% (moonkin aura) and the maximum crit debuff is also 5% (ISB) so you will never get more than 10% extra crit rating from being in a raid.

This is a normal incinerate, lets say you have 25% crit rating then the avg damage would be around 4750. And that is even a high number because my trinket buff is also up. So DPCT would be 4750/1.93 (which is my casttime) = 2461 DPCT.

Corruption:



This is 1 corruption, I even did it whitout cape and trinket to make sure no benifical buffs affect it. 3683/1 DPCT is alrdy higher then the DPCT of incinerate and I dont even take shorter GCD into account.

25% is way too low to be realistic - your armory suggests your incinerates will have a crit rate of 35.45% when fully raid buffed. Also, a GCD is 1.5 seconds before haste, not 1 second.

If your non-crit average incinerate is 3848, your average incinerate damage with 35% crit is 3848 * (0.75 + 2.09 * 0.35) = 5700. If you have 16% haste, its DPCT is 5700 / (2.25 / 1.16) = 2939.

If your average corruption damage is 3683, its DPCT with 16% haste is 3683 / (1.5 / 1.16) = 2848.

And this is at a pretty low gear level with no flask or spell power raid buffs. As destruction, incinerate will scale much much better with spell power than corruption will.

Oke thx for that.

So how come incinerate glyph is better then immo for 3/13/55 u got some numbers to back that up, or speculating???

@Fecys

The only reason Corruption is worth a GCD is for more uptime with Demonic Soul - Spell - World of Warcraft

Once you have 4pc T8 you can drop it entirely. It's low cast priority for me but I still try to cast it while moving.

I have just gotten to the point where I have a base line of gear to start having really competitive DPS in my raid. When looking for upgrades, I do not understand how to decide between an item with Haste and an item with crit.