A level headed comparison is what we should be doing now with what we have. But instead you've gone ahead and labeled your PVE compendium with a top spec without any factual data or comparison. The only evidence you've offered is simcraft and your personal experiences. So you've posted 0/40/31 is the top dps spec, when we have nothing empirical to base it on.

On another note, how did you come to your conclusion about Sayia's dps? The fight was a total of 253 seconds, so that's about 84 ticks of immolate. Sayia had 75 total, which is only 9 short of maximum. Where did you get 20 missing ticks from? Yes he missed about 29 ticks of corruption. At 1055 average per tick, this would be 30,595 damage. If he casted those 5 extra corruptions, that would be 3 less incinerates. His average incinerate was about 8000 damage, so that would be a loss of 24,000 damage. This gives us a net gain of 6,595 damage over 253 seconds, or an increase of 26dps. I could also point out that RNG favored Sayia over Rydya, with Sayia's 55% crit rate on soul fire and incinerate.

Sorry you are right fallenman I typed in 263 to the my calculator over 253 so yes he is only short a few ticks rather than twice the actual number.

That being said, 3 or 4 parses off a patchwerk like boss where there is a lack of true data, the post you linked me contains few well created reports and fewer still that provide information that is clearly one way or another, as we don't have any idea of gear, or glyphs or exact specs for any of these people let alone knowing what version of the ptr said specs were tested. Hence the reason to use Simcraft as the current standard. I have all ready conceded to talking about 2 other specs with high dps an aff and a deep destro (probably 3/13/55) so i don't see a reason to continue this rash line of argument.

Also pointing out RNG favored x over y, is, well partially lacking, both because rng serverd both players well, though if I look at my crit on the ptr in the gear I will be wearing it would be rightly 50~% raid buffed on a raid debuffed target as 40-31 while a deep destro build won't carry as much crit.

edit
maybe I should have written out the entire post before I posted, but I wanted to receive feedback and edit as I go, sadly this may have been the wrong decision.

It is waaaay too early to tell what is going to work in what situations and when. Although I appreciate seeing threads like this with the pluthera of information they provide, it leaves me with too many questions on a "personal" playstyle perspective being that it is so pre-mature in nature.

Time will tell, and that's what a lot of us are banking on. (Well, at least I am)

I do honestly think that 40/31 is going to get nerfed. As much as I enjoy the spec, and the burst damage it provides on both sides of the coin, PvP will dictate this spec getting nerfed, which will ultimately nerf PvE damage in the end.

I am sure we'll see affliction jump back to the top (w/o DG), or be equal to a 41/30 or Deep Destro.

Again, time will dictate the direction 95% of us will go in.

So do not hesitate and share your personal experience with us?

I think the different personal experiences gives us a complete understanding of the whole jigsaw.

Supplicium, you are doing a very good job!

It is important that you put all the informations together from different threads and posts.
I also appreciate that you share the work early, so that everybody is able to contribute.
Not everything is known, so everyone should judge the information carefully.

He did give his take, but taking the average of 10 people's experiences doesn't get the community much further along.

I don't think anyone is trying to say that 0/40/31 might not be the top spec, just that we don't have much to base that on other than simcraft and a small sample of WWS at this point. And while simcraft is currently the most worked tool to compare 3.1 specs, it shouldn't be used to tout a spec the winner without it put into use in a live environment.

At this point (pre 3.1), discussions around best practices and top specs probably ought to stay more in the 3.1 simcraft thread where those things are being actively discussed. A raiding compendium probably should wait until the release is cut so that it includes all final changes. Up to now it's still speculative, so it should remain in a more speculative thread.

Getting back to feedback for the compendium, I think under your glyphs section for conflag you had some typos:


In terms of gear, you might want to add a section with currently known BiS ulduar gear. For example, specs with suppression: Item Comparison Tool - World of Warcraft
And specs without: Item Comparison Tool - World of Warcraft

I used the following scaling factors from simcraft to determine the gear above:

I was impressed by how well the chaos bolt spec performed in that parse. That said, Rydya did receive three Power Infusions (which I didn't realize until a few weeks after I posted the parse, otherwise I would have noted it in the original post). I'm 'missing' Corruption ticks because I stopped casting it under 35%. 80 seconds of sub-35% is generous - raid DPS ramps up significantly during execute range so while I'm sure I could have played better and fit in more Soul Fires, I think the parse is a good representation of 40/31.

It says to use incinerate as meta, isn't shadowbolt higher dps without emberstorm?

Yes it is, if you look at the damage distribution etc you also see that the sim uses shadow bolt. My guess is that he copied and pasted it from elsewhere without changing incinerate to shadow bolt.

Oops you're right. Guess it's still a rough draft

Quick question wouldn't it be possible to weave Incinerate and Soulfire with a macro after you manually cast the first Incinerate?

Ast Motif said yes Use shadowbolt, it was a mistake do too my wanting to expedite the writing as much as possible and is now fixed.


No, You want to use the cast queing that blizzard implemented to help with latency.

You want to be at max aff range. I think I may end up drawing a chart.

Also Latency does play a huge factor in all this. It and haste can totally mess with your rotation. If you have too little haste and or too much latency your casts will be too slow and there by the weaving fails, BUT you can still use Soulfire when it's up. Do to the amazing nature of the US ptr, I've pulled a succesful 2:1 Incin: SF weave at 800 MS. It's a DPS loss over the normal spec, But, in theory, still an over all dps gain over deep destro.


[FALSE]Note:

Too much haste can mess with the rotation as well, in this case though you just need to close the distance between you and your target.[/FALSE]

You can't really have too much haste, because for it to be too much haste you basically need to start casting your next soulfire before shadowbolt hits the target. That would look something like this:

Finish Shadow Bolt 1
Start Cast Soul Fire
Finish Cast Soul Fire
Start Cast Shadow Bolt 2
Finish Cast Shadow Bolt 2

If at this point your Shadow Bolt 1 hasn't hit the target- you have too much haste. This however, is impossible. Even if you have infinite haste the combined global cooldowns of Soul Fire+Shadow Bolt being capped at 1 second each (2s total) would exceed the projectile time of Shadow Bolt 1 (Around 1.6s).

When I did SF weaving testing on PTR, I did it with a fire stone. On PTR I think I had around 550 haste, so with just 550 haste (16.7%) and no external raid haste buffs (8%)- it's doable. If you add the spellstone with master conjurer you should only need about 100 or-so haste from gear when combined with spellstone and raid buffs to have sufficient haste for 1:1 SF Weaving.

This is incorrect, read the post below for reasoning.

Heres the thing, with 1 secocond cast at max range on a large hitbox target (like a dragon where missles go to the head) you run into this:

Finish Cast SB
cast SB2
Finish SB2
Cast soulfire
SB1 hits


I think the issue you are missing is in order to throw a wrench into the decimate rotation you only need to clip the missile speed of the first shadowbolt with the second one. But as I said the only thing you need to do is get a tad bit closer.

Also, taking the gear that I currenltly plan on using in 3.1 I will be at over 800 haste or about 24.5% haste.

I thinkyou're looking at SF weaving the wrong way- when you say:
SB SB SF SB SF SB SF

The reason you start with "SB SB" is not because that would be how your rotation works- the "SB SB" is purely a "how do I reproduce SF weaving on a training dummy?" type of thing. Realistically you should look at SF weaving as:

[You have decimate] SB SF SB SF SB SF.

If that means that you need to start your SF weaving rotation with SB SB SB SF SB SF SB SF- then so be it. The result is still that you're weaving SB-SF in a 1:1 ratio. In the real world you're probably not going to look at his health to say "ok now I start weaving", in the real world you should simply start weaving once you get your first decimate proc.

25% with Spellstone ?

First, see the to do's at the bottom of the post, I still need to make my aff gear list (actually I'll do that once I post this)

Secondly, Yes, we have reached the conclusion that posting just one potential high dps spec is a bad Idea, hence me adding aff all ready (thanks to our fellow warlock authors) as well as I will be adding a 3/13/55 spec to that list as well.

But you can't say

X spec is better than Y spec only if you can manage [insert magic rotation]

Lets be honest, managing a DS execute rotation is actually much harder (currently in 3.0.9) then the 1:1 weave. In 3.1 they are about equal. If you have time to get off 1 DS tick you should have just as much time to get off a SF/incin combo.

The difference between a 1:1 weave and a DS execute rotation is not the difficulty, but the 1:1 weave is not actually possible in all situations. It can only be done if you are far enough away from the target. Numerous encounters have mechanics that require you to stand at a specific spot, often close to the target. Specifically think of fights like Hodir or Iron Council. There are places that you are required to stand, whether they be close or far from the boss. A 1:1 weave just isn't possible in some situations, where a DS execute is possible in all situations.

One thing i would like to see is that once all things are considered, how do these specs change once we have to lose our 4p T7 bonus? Is it worth losing it? At what point is it worth losing it? If we don't use 4p t7 is the Glyph of Lifetap still the highest DPS glyph?

There are very, very few people with the 2 piece at the moment, that being said the only person I talked to said it wasn't effecting conflag, if this is intended than thats an issue, and I'm not sure how good it will be if this was a bug, that conflag builds will be doing very very well.

Testing has already been done for the hybrid specs using a 2:1 rotation. The dps loss is minimal and even with the slight loss it still places the 40-31 spec equal to or slightly higher then then affliction. Those numbers can be shown here.

With that said the 1:1 rotation should not be the basis of a discussion on whether or not those specs are viable since they do not rely on that rotation to put up numbers.

Just a question of gear to get ready for the next patch. Obviously 4pt7 is much more useful as it is already incorporated into the design of the rotation but I am just curious as to what people would be using for non-tier pieces in order to get hit cap and the gems to go along with it.

Also, it might be useful to add a bit on trinkets.