The current state of Affliction theorycrafting and guidelines for gearing

[Bonkura]

A couple of weeks ago I made a rather aggressive post in the stickied Affliction guide thread started by Evrelia (link to post). This is a follow-up to again bring up some concerns I have and this time hopefully get a good discussion out of it. The post ended up longer than I had planned so I decided to make a separate thread for the discussion.

Updated at 2013/01/13

This first post has now been updated to reflect the general opinions and results of the discussion done in the thread. I've done this since the main intention of this thread was to provide the community with guidelines backed up by actual theorycrafting done by the users here and just not my own thoughts.

To make the post clean I haven't quoted everyone contributing to this so I'm just going to state that I don't take credit for all information provided in this post. There might also be misunderstandings from my side since the statements are written by me.

I'm also not using statistics to back up everything up because I don't feel comfortable providing you with it. If you want it added someone else will have to do the job, sorry. Just keep seeing this as general guidelines and read the whole thread if you want to find original sources for all the statmenets made below. This thread won't either get updated constantly so it's recommended that you keep reading through the discussion as this is mainly a summary of it.



Hit cap: The theoretical gain of not going for full hit is probably not worth it

It's been previously suggested as well as heavily defended by many users on this forum (including me) that it's not necessary to go for 15% hit. This suggestion should from now on not be used as a guideline for the general Warlock player.

The argument behind not being hit capped is that we will in theory not need it, mainly because of how Pandemic makes us most of the time not refresh dots before they expire so they would rarely drop completely if we missed them. SimCraft suggests that we'll gain quite a lot by ignoring hit, however this doesn't work as well in practice.

If we don't hit cap we will sometimes not be able refresh the dots with procs when we want to. Not only will we waste globals on misses but also will we get a lower uptime on the said buffed dots and have to start channeling Malefic Grasp with these procs up later. It just puts us behind a lot.

Another argument is that reacting to misses might take focus away from performing the mechanics of the encounter. We're only human after all.

The best argument for getting full hit cap might come from checking what the top Warlocks have done since the release of MoP. Even back in MSV most of the Warlocks in the hardcore progression guilds went for full hit cap. I think we can assume they are all at the skill level of being able to react to misses. Still they didn't think it was worth it and even if it might not be backed up theoretically we should probably assume they have good reasons for sticking to the hit cap.

Finally, it's been pointed out that as we get closer to full T14 BiS gear we are not losing more DPS from aquiring the hit cap. In other words it's likely that the value of hit gets higher with better gear and it's safe to assume that the gain of not reaching the cap will be very low in future tiers.

Secondary stats scaling: Mastery = Haste > Crit

Backed up by SimCraft we are able to tell that Crit isn't that great for us and should be avoided as much as possible. After that SimCraft also tells us that if we get Mastery or Haste too far from eachother we will start losing DPS. This is because these two stats scale synergistically. More mastery gives us more damage and more haste lets us deal this damage more often. We are not seeing this because haste plateaus only but also because Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul gives us extra ticks/damge from our dots and if these abilities channel faster we simply do more damage. Because of this we will always aim for keeping both values at a similar level. SimCraft seems to usually suggest mastery should be slightly higher, so we pick that stat when we can't keep them both completely even.

It should be noted that SimCraft will sometimes suggest that you go for more Mastery than Haste or the other way around. I personally won't support this for now since noone has been able to show the reasons for these suggestions. The gain you'll get from this according to SimCraft is usually pretty low as well. Another explanation by SirFlipper can be found here.

Pandemic is not a reason to ignore haste plateaus

I previously suggested that Pandemic lets us ignore haste plateaus. This should be seen as a misconception. SirFlipper pointed it out why in this post.

Basically, what Pandemic does is allowing us to refresh our dots as early as at 50% of the duration left of them. This does however not mean that we won't benefit from extra ticks. If we reapply the dots with some duration left, we will get all ticks from the new duration added if we let them tick. Let's say we always reapply our dots with the same duration in average, then we will always get use of the full duration of a dot application. What's left from the previous duration might not get used right away, but maybe later.

We don't know if we will always get the extra tick but in the long run we should. The argument to ignore haste plateaus because of Pandemic is because of this considered false.

Reforging differently for multiple target fights has not been backed up in theory

It's been suggested before that on fights where we spam Seed of Corruption a lot over using Malefic Grasp we should stack haste over mastery. This is because SoC itself doesn't benefit from mastery at all while it has a cast time so haste will still benefit us.

Another suggestion is that on fights where our Malefic Grasp uptime is low because of heavy multi target dotting we want to stack mastery. While this might be true it's also something that hasn't been proven in theory yet. Especially not when we would want to do this.

Until we have been able to shed some lights on this topic it's suggested that you stick to the same reforging as you would use on a single target fight. We simply don't know how big the benefit would be or even if we would benefit from it at all.

Gemming: Start gemming out of Intellect when your secondary stat weights pull ahead

At some gear point (around 480-490 item level) the value of 2x Haste/Mastery will start pull ahead of 1x Intellect. At this point you should even see 2x Hit being close to 1x Intellect.

How to exactly deal with this is hard to say. The suggestion I personally would make is to start dropping Intellect gems when 2.1x~2.2x Haste and Mastery is worth more than 1x Intellect (according to your stat weights taken from SimCraft).

To find out how to choose from Haste and Mastery my personal suggestion would be to add how much you have of each stat without any reforging or gems at all on your gear. Then try achieve even levels of both stats through your gems.

Regarding socket bonuses it will be recommended that you grab all of them. Some might suggest that we can skip some of the bonuses but it still hasn't been pointed out or even proven when exactly this should be done.

List of pure secondary stat gems:

Red socket – 160 Expertise/160 Mastery and 160 Expertise/ 160 Haste
Blue socket – 160 Hit/160 Mastery and 160 Hit/160 Haste
Yellow socket – 320 Haste and 320 Mastery


More topics will be added to the first post when they've been dealt with. Please read through the thread to see what's currently being discussed.

[xskarma]

Well thought out post. I haven't really bothered much with simming lately, cause it was still such a clusterfuck with upgrades and my weapon spellpower not being implemented. (yeah Klaxxi sword, I've just had NO drops lately) This extra work to do a simple Sim has kept me back from doing them in general. I've just kept to your advise of keeping mastery/haste balanced, though through my gear it's actually turned out that my haste was slightly higher then my mastery.

[Micke]

Some of my general thoughts on gearing, not affliction specific per se, and not discussing hit rating (which seem to be more of a "how comfortable are you reacting to misses and how reliable do you need to be" level stat than anything), I have no math to back it up, just adding food for thought and discussion.


I've been thinking of the notion that since simcraft cannot be truly relied upon because of APL optimizations, then unless it is a stupidly big gap between secondary stats (like crit being so far behind for aff) and seeing how it's not really possible to model exact fights and that the weight of secondary stats will change depending on type and priorities in a specific fight, it is as likely to go wrong as it is to go right in terms of gearing.

However, would it not then be logical to assume that where mastery and haste might be weighted differently per fight, intellect will always be good for all cases? Would the proposition to focus on intellect gemming (while still aquiring all gem bonuses) as a happy medium, while keeping secondary stats lower (and so in turn will have less negative impact if you were to have wrong setup for a fight, but possibly also less positive one) be out of the question? It would probably also make spec swapping less painful if you do it on a per boss basis.

Now, it is of course entirely possible to go reforge/respec/regem for every fight, but this is not always something you can reliably do at all times as we all know and is not something you could use as a recommendation to all the people coming here for information.

Edit: Now of course this doesn't solve the main issue about secondary stats allocation, as there are only so many sockets and secondaries will play a much bigger role further into the expansion, but in general I would simply go with the advice to keep stats even unless there is that huge gap between stats, because while simcraft might not be flawless, it isn't THAT bad that with a different APL the worst stat could suddenly end up being the best one. And in reality at that point, the way you gear those close secondaries is not going to have any noticable impact on your dps tbh, I think some people put waaay too much reliance on the stats rather than fight techniques, when they're actually only around 1% dps gain when reforged optimally. Personally I'd rather be stable than a loose cannon either doing bad or good in raids because of how I geared.

[Ezzyo]

After that SimCraft also tells us that if we get Mastery or Haste too far from eachother we will start losing DPS

This is where simcraft is telling me otherwise. The highest point I've simmed over 6 parses, both in dps and reforge plots has my haste at 7860ish and mastery around 6168. I'll mess around with it before going back to a more balanced ~6800 haste /7000 mastery, but I'm liking the results thus far.

[Bonkura]

Well thought out post. I haven't really bothered much with simming lately, cause it was still such a clusterfuck with upgrades and my weapon spellpower not being implemented. (yeah Klaxxi sword, I've just had NO drops lately) This extra work to do a simple Sim has kept me back from doing them in general. I've just kept to your advise of keeping mastery/haste balanced, though through my gear it's actually turned out that my haste was slightly higher then my mastery.

I wrote a reply to this but somehow lost it. T_T

Thanks, it did take quite some time to finish. I think we can safely say that as long as you keep haste/mastery somewhat balanced you are doing better than people who listen to sites like Noxxic.com that are suggesting that you should go 4717 haste and then all out mastery. I've even had a Warlock in my guild following this and stacking mastery to well above 8000. Then he complained about me doing more damage because I had slightly more mastery when I was also sitting at almost 2000 more haste than him. This at Sha of Fear HC progress... sigh.

I'm hoping this thread can develop better guidelines so that sites that have a big influence on the community don't give suggestions that noone really have ever backed up in theory at any point.

However, would it not then be logical to assume that where mastery and haste might be weighted differently per fight, intellect will always be good for all cases? Would the proposition to focus on intellect gemming (while still aquiring all gem bonuses) as a happy medium, while keeping secondary stats lower (and so in turn will have less negative impact if you were to have wrong setup for a fight, but possibly also less positive one) be out of the question? It would probably also make spec swapping less painful if you do it on a per boss basis.

I'd only agree with this if you're at the gear point where 2x Haste/Mastery is close to 1x Intellect. SimCraft might have a bad APL and showing weird results from time to time but the rotation it's using is still "fine". The biggest flaw the APL used has is that it doesn't react to procs and to be honest if you don't you're probably gonna save a lot of globals, which will make up a bit for what you lose when not powering up your dots properly. Especially when we reach full BiS with 4p etc it's really easy to start messing up your rotation because we will almost always have something up so it will be hard to tell exactly when to reapply dots. (I've also noticed I have to life tap more with the 4p, which also adds more complexity to our assumed optimal rotation)

This is what we mainly want from SimCraft right now IMO. If we can get an almost complete APL to work with it will help us out with finding the optimal rotatation by comparing different methods with small tweaks etc. Something that can be done by anyone really and thus making the theorycrafting so much better. We're not lacking the knowledge/devotion for theorycrafting as much as we are lacking the proper tools.

Anyway, with your suggestion it might be safe to say that people should compromise a bit. I'm not sure what we should settle on but maybe it's better to suggest switching to pure secondary stat gems when these stats are at 2.1~2.2 of what 1 int is worth. This of course assumes we don't completely trust SimCraft as it is right now (which I've argued for already).

Now of course this doesn't solve the main issue about secondary stats allocation, as there are only so many sockets and secondaries will play a much bigger role further into the expansion, but in general I would simply go with the advice to keep stats even unless there is that huge gap between stats, because while simcraft might not be flawless, it isn't THAT bad that with a different APL the worst stat could suddenly end up being the best one. And in reality at that point, the way you gear those close secondaries is not going to have any noticable impact on your dps tbh, I think some people put waaay too much reliance on the stats rather than fight techniques, when they're actually only around 1% dps gain when reforged optimally. Personally I'd rather be stable than a loose cannon either doing bad or good in raids because of how I geared.

We're all just trying to get the most out of our characters to come as well prepared for a raid as we can. You're bringing up a good point about many people putting too much effort in min/maxing their chars when they still have a lot to work with when it comes to actual skill. There's however just that much time you spend raiding so outside of that we'll focus on things like theorycrafting because we find it interesting and are tired of playing so much.

[Deleted]

though through my gear it's actually turned out that my haste was slightly higher then my mastery.

My sim shows the same thing. Im currently running 5036 haste and 3767 mastery, with haste still superior to Mastery. Starting to question Simcraft a bit.. :/

[Deleted]

Pandemic makes haste plateaus (almost) irrelevant
We have been able to figure out that because of Pandemic we will almost always try to refresh our dots when they have 50% or slightly less left of their durations. This allows us to spend less time applying dots and get a higher uptime of MG/DS.

This is the only thing I have any inclination to even attempt to dispute, agreeing with everything else (hopefully this will put an end to the "haste to x then stack mastery" thing). Are we really saving any cast time by casting it close to the 50% mark? It's going to add on 50% of the dot duration, but it's also going to be cast 50% of the dot durations earlier than usual. You're also potentially replacing "buffed" dot with unbuffed ones.

Isn't it a better rule of thumb to refresh as close to the end as your hit chance allows without the possibility of it falling off, unless you have procs up that make refreshing it earlier make the dot stronger, in which refreshing it earlier is better.

I might be completely off on that and missing something, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

[Bonkura]

This is where simcraft is telling me otherwise. The highest point I've simmed over 6 parses, both in dps and reforge plots has my haste at 7860ish and mastery around 6168. I'll mess around with it before going back to a more balanced ~6800 haste /7000 mastery, but I'm liking the results thus far.

These results are to me just more proof of how odd SimCraft acts from time to time. Just remember when you do this the actual results you are seeing could have to do with RNG from using a small sample of iterations (even 50k iterations can show 100-200 DPS difference).

It's too bad we don't have a SimCraft developer here or at least somene who can explain the results we are seeing. So many times we end up guessing when we see results in posts like yours.

At the end of the day it's up to you whom/what to trust. The only thing I can tell you for sure that SimCraft has all the time since MoP was released shown haste/mastery to scale synergistically, while ignoring haste plateaus. Keeping the stats even is then the only suggestion we can support as a general solution for stat priorities. Especially when we can't explain choosing haste over mastery by logic and while the SimCraft APL is as bad as it is right now.

[Viggers]

the only reason i can see haste plateaus being worth it, are so that you can get additional ticks from buffed DoTs, but then cos its likely to be 1.5x base duration, the actual plateau is likely to be different than the ones we are using :s

[Bonkura]

This is the only thing I have any inclination to even attempt to dispute, agreeing with everything else (hopefully this will put an end to the "haste to x then stack mastery" thing). Are we really saving any cast time by casting it close to the 50% mark? It's going to add on 50% of the dot duration, but it's also going to be cast 50% of the dot durations earlier than usual. You're also potentially replacing "buffed" dot with unbuffed ones.

Isn't it a better rule of thumb to refresh as close to the end as your hit chance allows without the possibility of it falling off, unless you have procs up that make refreshing it earlier make the dot stronger, in which refreshing it earlier is better.

I might be completely off on that and missing something, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks for pointing this out. You're right and I'm sorry about this miss. I had a better explanation in mind to support refreshing earlier (like using the Haunt debuff and extend buffed dots easier) so I'll work on that before I change the first post.

In short we'll start wasting either globals or DPS (another assumption) when we can't fully utilize our procs by getting a maximized uptime on them.

If our goal is to first power up our dots as much as we can and then keep maxed buffed dots as long as possible to both get undisturbed MG time as well as applying Haunt it will probably in general be better to refresh closer to 50% to avoid reapplying something just so we can put up Haunt. Soul Shard management also comes in here so it becomes more complex and that's why I have to spend some more thought on this. ^^;

the only reason i can see haste plateaus being worth it, are so that you can get additional ticks from buffed DoTs, but then cos its likely to be 1.5x base duration, the actual plateau is likely to be different than the ones we are using :s

As I see it haste pleateus will likely be worth it when we are able to understand when we can gain the extra ticks. How much we will gain is another question, though.

[Bartimaeus]

This allows us to spend less time applying dots and get a higher uptime of MG/DS. Also because of this we will rarely get all ticks from our dots so the haste plateaus in reality become broader.

As long as you refresh a DoT under under half it's base duration this is wrong. You will never lose a tick from doing this. The strongest argument for haste thresholds has already been said. You refresh a DoT when it's just below 50% of it's base duration AND have stronger procs then what you did when it was first applied. If your procs/buffs are not stronger, you refresh the DoT between its very last tick and expiration so you can maximise the buffs.

The real argument comes in when you start comparing Haste to Mastery, 'is it worth getting 1 extra tick of a DoT rather then increasing the damage of all my DoT's and my MGs?'

In addition to this, an extra tick of Corruption is an extra chance at a Soul Shard. Assuming a duration of 18 seconds and a 5 minute fight, that is ~16 extra chances at a Soul Shard. So furthermore, it's not just about the base increased damage of Corruption but also Soul Shard generation and how much extra damage could be done with extra Soul Shards.

List of all gems we can consider using: 320 Haste, 320 Mastery, 160 Hit/160 Mastery, 160 Hit/160 Haste, 80 Int/160 Haste & 80 Int/160 Mastery.

Forgot the Expertise/Mastery gem.

[Deleted]

My sim shows the same thing. Im currently running 5036 haste and 3767 mastery, with haste still superior to Mastery. Starting to question Simcraft a bit.. :/

this is purely conjecture, but I think this is the kind of dynamic scaling you see in the reforge plots. mastery and haste are constantly changing positions in stat priority by tiny amounts. in this situation, mastery seems to be less valuable because you have low mastery.

personally, simming after every gem/reforge change according to my reforge plot to gain less than 1% of my DPS is not appealing to me. I am keeping Mastery and Haste equal and as a result their scale values in Simcraft have remained virtually parallel. try sitting your haste at 4717 and putting the rest into Mastery then check Simcraft.

[Cebel]

I will never go under 15% hit cap in a raid dungeon. Im a progression oriented raider, and id rather have consistent results and not have to rely on "reacting quickly" to a missed dot application, or the worst scenario, a missed haunt. I can also see from the large majority of other locks in top guilds, that they agree with me based on their hit %. Everything else you posted I agree with enough to not bother arguing against it.

[Bonkura]

As long as you refresh a DoT under under half it's base duration this is wrong. You will never lose a tick from doing this. The strongest argument for haste thresholds has already been said. You refresh a DoT when it's just below 50% of it's base duration AND have stronger procs then what you did when it was first applied. If your procs/buffs are not stronger, you refresh the DoT between its very last tick and expiration so you can maximise the buffs.

When did I say something about losing dot ticks? And I don't understand where you are seeing extra ticks when arguing for haste plateaus. I think my argument was clear that if we can't tell where we are getting the extra tick we have no reason to grab it. You probably also need to take into account future buffs when letting a dot fall off. I don't think it's that simple.

The real argument comes in when you start comparing Haste to Mastery, 'is it worth getting 1 extra tick of a DoT rather then increasing the damage of all my DoT's and my MGs?'

It seems you don't understand how haste works for us. The main reason it's so good for us is because it lets us channel Malefic Grasp and Drain soul faster.

In addition to this, an extra tick of Corruption is an extra chance at a Soul Shard. Assuming a duration of 18 seconds and a 5 minute fight, that is ~16 extra chances at a Soul Shard. So furthermore, it's not just about the base increased damage of Corruption but also Soul Shard generation and how much extra damage could be done with extra Soul Shards.

Again, you are arguing for extra ticks we are not guaranteed to get because of how we refresh our dots. But I should probably add the Nightfall part as another reason that Corruption is our go to dot for multiple target fights if we have to pick one.

Forgot the Expertise/Mastery gem.

My bad, adding that.

I will never go under 15% hit cap in a raid dungeon. Im a progression oriented raider, and id rather have consistent results and not have to rely on "reacting quickly" to a missed dot application, or the worst scenario, a missed haunt. I can also see from the large majority of other locks in top guilds, that they agree with me based on their hit %. Everything else you posted I agree with enough to not bother arguing against it.

Well, I did say 15% is fine and why. It's hard to argue against the RNG part because I can't prove it. From my own experience it feels like a lot of players in top gulds overestimate it. I've rarely gone for full hit cap this tier (probably less than 20 boss pulls) and the only times I've been really bothered by RNG in MoP is when I've had few Nightfall procs, not after missing a lot.

[Micke]

I'd only agree with this if you're at the gear point where 2x Haste/Mastery is close to 1x Intellect. SimCraft might have a bad APL and showing weird results from time to time but the rotation it's using is still "fine". The biggest flaw the APL used has is that it doesn't react to procs and to be honest if you don't you're probably gonna save a lot of globals, which will make up a bit for what you lose when not powering up your dots properly. Especially when we reach full BiS with 4p etc it's really easy to start messing up your rotation because we will almost always have something up so it will be hard to tell exactly when to reapply dots. (I've also noticed I have to life tap more with the 4p, which also adds more complexity to our assumed optimal rotation)

Anyway, with your suggestion it might be safe to say that people should compromise a bit. I'm not sure what we should settle on but maybe it's better to suggest switching to pure secondary stat gems when these stats are at 2.1~2.2 of what 1 int is worth. This of course assumes we don't completely trust SimCraft as it is right now (which I've argued for already).

The problem is those stat weights might not be accurate for a specific fight, haste and mastery will swing up and down far more than intellect will.

We're all just trying to get the most out of our characters to come as well prepared for a raid as we can. You're bringing up a good point about many people putting too much effort in min/maxing their chars when they still have a lot to work with when it comes to actual skill. There's however just that much time you spend raiding so outside of that we'll focus on things like theorycrafting because we find it interesting and are tired of playing so much.

I never said you shouldn't try and maximize your character, the issue I'm having is that it is easy to actually LOSE dps while trying to minmax, because while one fight might favor haste/mastery at even, another favors more haste or more mastery (which, to be fair, is not even minmax unless you do regem/rechant/respec/reforge/retalent/reglyph on a per fight basis), if we want something you can simply stick to that will work well in all fights then intellect is the only stable stat truthfully, but in that case that means you're either doing farm content or normalmodes or simply not dedicated enough to change everything up per fight or it simply not being feasible for you to do because of how your guild runs, which is fine too (I usually vary depending on situation), but it feels slightly rediculous calling it minmax when in truth it is about a convenient compromise we're talking about here, which is a noble thing in its own right, which means we should find the stats that works best for the majority of fights.

Otherwise the only true way to minmax would be a detailed analysis on each boss fight and determine stats, talents, spec and glyphs to use (which is not an easy thing to do and have it work for everyone) at the end of the day the greatest power will be in the player him/herself and what works best for him/her. Not to mention data collection usually take a long time and will most likely be finalized when the specific fight already is obsolete. Adaptation and things you know for a fact works for all cases is what gets you through hardmode progress. I usually got whispers from my LFR runs asking what stat to choose from, then I looked at his dps and it was near bottom with good gear :P.

You can give math to the people, but if they don't understand it it doesn't really do a hell of a lot of good.

[Drobo]

Thanks for the thoroughly informative post! For me personally, regardless of if I reforge all mastery or all haste, my sims always show haste worth just slightly more. While currently sitting at 5494 haste and 8299 mastery, my reforge plots are telling me to reforge 1500 mastery to haste, but for all for a measly 500 dps increase. Are you suggesting mastery and haste interact even more synergistically than Simcraft suggests, and therefore by keeping the two values as close as possible I would see higher than the aforementioned 500 dps increase?

[Bartimaeus]

When did I say something about losing dot ticks? And I don't understand where you are seeing extra ticks when arguing for haste plateaus. I think my argument was clear that if we can't tell where we are getting the extra tick we have no reason to grab it. You probably also need to take into account future buffs when letting a dot fall off. I don't think it's that simple.

Also because of this we will rarely get all ticks from our dots

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, that's where you said it. If I did read it wrong sorry, but that's how I read it and responded as such.

It seems you don't understand how haste works for us. The main reason it's so good for us is because it lets us channel Malefic Grasp and Drain soul faster.

I'm not disagreeing with this, but I would like to see where you're getting this information from. It's obvious that Haste will affect this, since the extra DoT damage is based on when MG/DS tick so if they tick quicker it's more extra DoT damage. But to what extent? As Haste has always been the go to stat for a DoT class, well before this interaction existed, I'd like to see some information backing it and showing just how strong the interaction is.

EDIT: Just so you know, I'm not championing for going to haste thresholds and stopping. Just bringing everything to the table since it looked like you wanted an in-depth theory crafting thread. And not looking at everything will give skewed results.

[Bonkura]

The problem is those stat weights might not be accurate for a specific fight, haste and mastery will swing up and down far more than intellect will.

The question for you if you want to argue Intellect over secondary stats is will it ever be better? Because it feels like your argument is based on haste/mastery being so bad at certain fights it will drop enough for Int to catch up. I've never seen this theory before so it's hard to react to it.

Basically you are trying to dismiss secondary stats because we can't prove what they are worth. The problem is you say I'm trying to compromise but what you are doing is taking it to even another level. A level that IMO goes below common sense.

If you're serious about this it sucks because we can't prove each other wrong. I don't know where to go from here. Sorry.


Regarding min/maxing it's certainly nothing we are aiming for here and I was just mentioning it as a general thing people are trying to do. Let's just forget about it for now.

---------- Post added 2013-01-03 at 08:51 PM ----------

Thanks for the thoroughly informative post! For me personally, regardless of if I reforge all mastery or all haste, my sims always show haste worth just slightly more. While currently sitting at 5494 haste and 8299 mastery, my reforge plots are telling me to reforge 1500 mastery to haste, but for all for a measly 500 dps increase. Are you suggesting mastery and haste interact even more synergistically than Simcraft suggests, and therefore by keeping the two values as close as possible I would see higher than the aforementioned 500 dps increase?

I'm glad you liked it.

The only thing I'm suggesting is that we shouldn't pick either if we can't tell if one of them are better. We can't rely on SimCraft being able to tell us this while there's obvious flaws in it so I see no reason to not stick to the belief that haste and mastery will stay close to each other most of the time.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, that's where you said it. And maybe I jumped the gun because I've seen it said a lot throughout the years and it seems to be a misunderstanding that's passed on each time.

I'm not disagreeing with this, but I would like to see where you're getting this information from. It's obvious that Haste will affect this, since the extra DoT damage is based on when MG/DS tick so if they tick quicker it's more extra DoT damage. But to what extent? As Haste has always been the go to stat for a DoT class, well before this interaction existed, I'd like to see some information backing it and showing just how strong the interaction is.

EDIT: Just so you know, I'm not championing for going to haste thresholds and stopping. Just bringing everything to the table since it looked like you wanted an in-depth theory crafting thread. And not looking at everything will give skewed results.

It's all good.

Why I dismiss haste plateaus has already been explained. After doing this we have to find out why haste is still good compared to mastery. This gets explained simply by us being able to cast/channel faster and by doing this our mastery gets better too (intellect and crit too, for that matter). It's all very basic but I still tried to explain it so people will be able to understand why we value haste so high now (since haste plateaus are not important). I think the real question is why mastery scales better than int/crit.



Unfortunately as I think many of you already can see by the pattern in this discussion we get stuck very fast when trying theorycraft. Without statistics we are going to have a hard time to prove anything to anyone. I'm not able to convince you that I'm right about my statements made in the first post and to be honest it makes it hard to even convince myself.

[Micke]

The question for you if you want to argue Intellect over secondary stats is will it ever be better? Because it feels like your argument is based on haste/mastery being so bad at certain fights it will drop enough for Int to catch up. I've never seen this theory before so it's hard to react to it.

Basically you are trying to dismiss secondary stats because we can't prove what they are worth. The problem is you say I'm trying to compromise but what you are doing is taking it to even another level. A level that IMO goes below common sense.

If you're serious about this it sucks because we can't prove each other wrong. I don't know where to go from here. Sorry.


Regarding min/maxing it's certainly nothing we are aiming for here and I was just mentioning it as a general thing people are trying to do. Let's just forget about it for now.

It's not about wether I am serious about it or not, it is just food for thought that could possibly open ones mind to gain a deeper understanding of how complicated this game really is, and that giving advice like "keep mastery/haste at even and dont gem int" is in that scope relatively simplified. But as we are both saying sometimes there aren't any answers to find within a useful time frame, or for a useful degree of work, so at some point we will just have to accept we will never reach 100% efficiency and that we're only really here making somewhat educated guesses. Since you can't exactly prove "I gained 500 dps on that fight by reforging to more mastery" (too many variables) other than simcraft (which has its own flaws and does not model that fight), then the point of this debate turns somewhat moot other than saying that haste and mastery are both good stats.

Personally I'd thought you'd find it refreshing seeing the majority of the posts here does not really bring anything new.

The type of threads I'd consider most useful would be a fight technique type of thread pointing out tips and tricks each spec has on each encounter, as well as what talents/glyphs per spec are strong for it, that would in my opinion yield far greater results for the average warlock coming here for information. Not in the sense of what I outlined above with heavy math detailing the ONE spec and the ONE talent, but rather pretty broad with more options that people can choose to take to suit their playstyle better.

[Deleted]

These results are to me just more proof of how odd SimCraft acts from time to time. Just remember when you do this the actual results you are seeing could have to do with RNG from using a small sample of iterations (even 50k iterations can show 100-200 DPS difference).

It's too bad we don't have a SimCraft developer here or at least somene who can explain the results we are seeing. So many times we end up guessing when we see results in posts like yours.

At the end of the day it's up to you whom/what to trust. The only thing I can tell you for sure that SimCraft has all the time since MoP was released shown haste/mastery to scale synergistically, while ignoring haste plateaus. Keeping the stats even is then the only suggestion we can support as a general solution for stat priorities. Especially when we can't explain choosing haste over mastery by logic and while the SimCraft APL is as bad as it is right now.

I disagree with the first part of your post where you say that the post you quoted shows how Simcraft behaves oddly at times. I see our DPS as a function
f: lR x lR x lR x lR x lR x V ---> lR.
(intellect, spell power, crit, haste, mastery) and a big random vector which models things that can happen in a raid event, be it the spell critical strikes, random player reaction to events and so on.

The role of Simcraft is to provide enough iterations of a raid event so that what can be put in V can be neglected because averaged, resulting in us being able to focus on our gear's various attributes (the lR x lR x lR x lR x lR bunch of the DPS function's domain). From there, especially considering a point so far from the normal "path" most people take when it comes to stat balancing, I don't see why these results show anykind of odd behaviour. There's nothing preventing a function from having several times same or close to the same values.

Even if someone took the time to make the several thousand sims it would take to plot such a function from simcraft, on a large enough domain so that it is representative of all the gear levels attainable right now, we would'nt be able to tell for sure that there is some fishy behaviour involving Simcraft.

Now I'm no Simcraft fanatic either. My biggest grip with it is that their docs doesn't have anything detailed (at least last time I checked) on to how they are modeling the various game mechanics. And as far as I'm concerned, diving into a big bundle of unknown code to find out what does what has to be one of the things I hate the most on this planet. Still I trust it and assume the devs behind it know what they are doing.