[5.4] Affliction Warlock and Encounter Specific Guides

[espoire]

Is there a reason we're supposed to hard-cast Corruption and Unstable Affliction instead of extending them indefinitely with Fel Flame? Two Fel Flames adds about as much duration to both, and does some damage on the side.

[EvreliaGaming]

Because it takes less time to refresh their duration to full by hard casting than it does by using Fel Flame.

[Zerel]

I have one question, might be silly but i didnt see answer to it.
Between start of Drain Soul channel and first tick there is some time, and DS have MG-like bonus on targets that are below 20% of hp.
My question is, if i start channeling it when target is at 21% but first tick happen when target is at 19%, do i get extra dmg and DoT ticks or do i have to start channel when targets is below 20% to get bonus effect ?


Edit:
Done some testing, and now im 100% sure that DS check target status on tick, not on start of channel.
Even done some channels where 1st and 2nd tick were above 20% and 3rd and later below 20% and when target dropped below 20% DS dmg got doubled and dots started doing extra ticks on DS ticks

[Count Zero]

I have one question, might be silly but i didnt see answer to it.
Between start of Drain Soul channel and first tick there is some time, and DS have MG-like bonus on targets that are below 20% of hp.
My question is, if i start channeling it when target is at 21% but first tick happen when target is at 19%, do i get extra dmg and DoT ticks or do i have to start channel when targets is below 20% to get bonus effect ?

My understanding is that it's supposed to work that way. Haven't personally tested, however.

[espoire]

Because it takes less time to refresh their duration to full by hard casting than it does by using Fel Flame.

So, the reduced frequency of having to maintain them makes up for the damage you're not doing while hard-casting both?

[shags the penguin]

So, the reduced frequency of having to maintain them makes up for the damage you're not doing while hard-casting both?

Yes and also that with the amount of haunt uptime we get we really need to be solid casting our drain soul or MG when haunt is up. The extend would mean you would have to use a global without the MG tick procing the extra hits inside the haunt bonus damage.

Or at least that is how I see as a re-rolled chicken.

[nightfalls]

On clipping malefic grasp:

The current simcraft doesn't model "preferring" to chain DoT refreshes, which is only possible with Pandemic. In other words, it will prefer to refresh DoTs as soon as a refresh is available (meaning remaining time is less than 50% of the DoT's duration) rather than waiting on a refresh until another DoT becomes available for refresh, or all 3 if possible.

Of course given latency and human error, it's always preferable to chain refreshes. Notice also that if you have three refreshes available (meaning that all three DoTs are below 50% of base duration) then you are gaining the exact same amount of extra DoT duration per refresh, so there is no benefit for waiting longer to refresh, unless you are at a point where the boss is about to die.

[Tresdallah]

On clipping malefic grasp:

The current simcraft doesn't model "preferring" to chain DoT refreshes, which is only possible with Pandemic. In other words, it will prefer to refresh DoTs as soon as a refresh is available (meaning remaining time is less than 50% of the DoT's duration) rather than waiting on a refresh until another DoT becomes available for refresh, or all 3 if possible.

Of course given latency and human error, it's always preferable to chain refreshes. Notice also that if you have three refreshes available (meaning that all three DoTs are below 50% of base duration) then you are gaining the exact same amount of extra DoT duration per refresh, so there is no benefit for waiting longer to refresh, unless you are at a point where the boss is about to die.

Well, just because all 3 are within the refresh window doesn't necessarily mean that you gain nothing by continuing to channel extra MG's. For example, let's say that Cor and UA are both 1 second away from being inside the window. Agony is already there, but still has 15 second left on the entire DoT. You could, at this point, refresh each DoT. Or you could decide to channel 2-3 more MG's before refreshing each (depending on how long Cor and UA have left on the back end.) If you have CDs about to come up within, say 5 seconds, you would want to wait to refresh because those DoTs would not end up benefitting from said CDs unless you re-refresh the DoTs just after having refreshed them.

[nightfalls]

Well, just because all 3 are within the refresh window doesn't necessarily mean that you gain nothing by continuing to channel extra MG's. For example, let's say that Cor and UA are both 1 second away from being inside the window. Agony is already there, but still has 15 second left on the entire DoT. You could, at this point, refresh each DoT. Or you could decide to channel 2-3 more MG's before refreshing each (depending on how long Cor and UA have left on the back end.) If you have CDs about to come up within, say 5 seconds, you would want to wait to refresh because those DoTs would not end up benefitting from said CDs unless you re-refresh the DoTs just after having refreshed them.

Yes, cooldowns and procs both change when it's optimal to refresh DoTs especially with Pandemic. My post was more of a response to the earlier discussion. Bottom line, you mainly want to refresh when you can refresh as many DoTs as possible, when as many procs and cooldowns are up as possible, and after a MG tick. Getting those three conditions is much, much more important than trying to finish MG channels before refreshing, considering that you will always lose a bit of uptime due to latency after an MG channel, just as you would after a tick.

[shags the penguin]

Haunt clipping...
It seems to me that you can clip haunt inside haunt and the new haunt actual damage will get the increase from the old.

(assuming 100% uptime not possible therefore a gap between haunts would not be a dps loss)

So how would this effect us if for those times that we can chain haunts back to back? Does the 25% extra damage on the haunt hit outweigh the potential extra MG tick and extra dot hits.

Back to back haunts inside each other for the extra damage
vs
Mg till the very end of haunt then instantly put up another (1.5 second downtime)

Inside Dark Soul I can only really give the advantage to the extra MG as you should get around 2 ticks while haunt cast time will be faster the problem is that being human we cannot really be expected to remember haunt is slightly faster and to cast it later.

Looking at a glance I think it actually is haunt clipping based upon the basic simcraft numbers, but I will see if any of you smart people have already worked this out, else i will have a deeper look.

[nightfalls]

It seems to me that you can clip haunt inside haunt and the new haunt actual damage will get the increase from the old.

This is true, haunt benefits from its own debuff.

The current simcraft does clip haunt but realize that you have to account for haunt's (variable) travel time.

[Tresdallah]

Haunt clipping...
Inside Dark Soul I can only really give the advantage to the extra MG as you should get around 2 ticks while haunt cast time will be faster the problem is that being human we cannot really be expected to remember haunt is slightly faster and to cast it later.

TBH, you should ALWAYS know when your Dark Soul is active, as it applies it's buff to DoTs only from a snapshot.

[Alone0129]

It seems they have fixed Glyph of Soul Swap so Soulburning doesnt put it on cooldown anymore.

[EvreliaGaming]

It seems they have fixed Glyph of Soul Swap so Soulburning doesnt put it on cooldown anymore.

\ o / huzzah

[Tresdallah]

it seems they have fixed glyph of soul swap so soulburning doesnt put it on cooldown anymore.

omfg so happy

[stuninc]

Don't think I overlooked it, but I think that the glyph of dark soul would be better than the glyph of soulstone if your group has more than one combat rez. Even if you are holding off casting the spell, the passive haste the glyph does is very appealing to me over something I dont use very often (casting a soulstone).

[Rustjive]

Glyph of Dark Soul is a DPS loss for nearly every scenario. I don't know why that would be appealing.

[Alone0129]

Don't think I overlooked it, but I think that the glyph of dark soul would be better than the glyph of soulstone if your group has more than one combat rez. Even if you are holding off casting the spell, the passive haste the glyph does is very appealing to me over something I dont use very often (casting a soulstone).

You should usually be casting Dark Soul everytime it's off cooldown so in essence you would be losing out on 3% haste since you don't get the 3% while it's on cooldown.

[Brusalk]

Glyph of Dark Soul is a DPS loss for nearly every scenario. I don't know why that would be appealing.

It'd be pretty good for a fight where it's impossible to use Dark Soul on cooldown thus making the passive 3% haste better than the equiv haste when used on CD.

Not that there is such a fight that I can think of, but the possibility exists.

[shags the penguin]

Only time it could sort of be viable is when a fight has burn phases that spread over 2 mins 20 seconds, now naturally the issue is when you are saving your Cds for something you are going to really want max burst so losing 10% would say suck But maybe if you have adds phases on a boss which don't require the dps as much. One day there will be a fight in which this gives like 200 dps increase or something.

But once we get 4 set 14 it pretty much becomes a very short Cd so it makes waiting time to use it risk missing one off the end of a long fight.