Originally Posted by
Alarinth
Hi.
Rain of Fire and Embers
Looking at your log from the Jin'rokh kill, I see that you cast Rain of Fire 5 times. That's a quite low uptime (11%), and making that higher would yield you more embers to spend. Due to the nature of the fight, I'd suggest you to try and build 30+ embers before entering the Fluidity pools so that you can make the best use of it from the get-go. Also, while you are in the pools with embers, keep a 100% uptime on Rain of Fire for the entire pool duration, so that you will have ember return at the highest state possible for that duration. If your haste is low (I'd say below 5400 rating), you will have difficulties keeping Rain of Fire up all the time, so you'll have to set a threshold for when you can cast it. When I was in 502 ilvl, I kept this threshold at 65% of my mana if I had no haste buffs, and 50% if I had some minor ones - obviously you can set this even lower during bloodlust. Remember, it's all about fueling those chaosbolts and shadowburns.
Stat Weighs
Regarding your question about stat weighs, the reason you see so much different information on these forums is becaues the stat weighs change according to your playstyle. If you're a player who always reacts perfectly to your buffs and try to fill them with chaos bolts, obviously mastery will be in your favor. However, some people simply don't play that style optimally, and for those you may be better off with crit as the secondary stat after haste. Also, if you have the UVLS trinket, crit will be devalued for you, and haste even more valuable. This is because you'll almost always be able to fill an immolate into the UVLS window, which will grant you a highly increased ember regeneration rate for the duration of said immolate.
CDs and Procs
Looking at the combat duration (03:55), mathemathically you'll be able to fill 2 Dark Souls in that duration. However, looking at your log, I only see one. Synapse Springs has a 1 minute cooldown and 10 second duration, which should have put you at 30s total uptime, but you only used it twice. The important thing to remember about active procs like that is that it is only good if you're able to use it consistently. Whenever you start dropping in up-time on such effects, you effectively reduce the value of that proc. Let me break this down into a brutally honest piece of math.
1920 intellect for 10 seconds with a 1 minute cooldown is equal to 16,67% uptime given that the time measured is in whole minutes. If you use it constantly on CD, it'll keep that % uptime, and you can say that it's average passive intellect gained is 320, equal to any other profession (because 1920 divided by 6 is 320).
HOWEVER, when you cast it 2 times in a fight lasting almost 4 minutes (8.4% uptime), you cut the effect in half, reducing their passive gain from 320 to 160. That's the equivalent of picking Enchanting and only using one ring enchant instead of two. I know that this is an unfair comparison for a destruction warlock, given that most of our damage comes from Chaos Bolts during short windows of burst. However, this is where you can make a big improvement. If you can improve your planning of ember useage, you'll be able to give it a better uptime and make better use of it. For instance, when you see it has 10s left of the CD, you better start planning your mana and next spells cast, because you cannot afford to go OOM at this point - that would force you to cast a chaos bolt, which would mean you'd not be able to pack that bolt into the Synapse Strings instead.
And this is the way you gotta think for all of your procs, not just synapse strings - every second you delay their on-use effect, you effectively diminish their total effect.