The current state of Affliction theorycrafting and guidelines for gearing

[Deleted]

And even if you are in melee range, the Haunt still lands at a random time in between DoT-Ticks because timing this is just not possible.

[Deleted]

i get your point, but in theory, it is possible, as haunt has a steady travel time(afaik it doesnt slow down and speed up at random intervals), you can calculate the amount of time it takes for it to travel to the target and use that time to SB:SS so that you basically get your dots and haunt up at the exact same time, since your dots have no travel time, but you're right, not that it is impossible, but that it is very difficult to do.

[Deleted]

Even with SB:SS this is not going to work, because unless you SB:SS to a new targets without any DoTs present SB:SS will not actually change anything about when the DoTs tick just about how much time is left on them. So yes, you could time it by having all your DoTs expire and then reapply them with SB:SS which would then have your desired effect. This is certainly possible it just is... stupid as you can obviously agree.

[Deleted]

unless ofc you do so as an opener at the start of a fight, to maximize dps output at the beginning of a fight, but yeah, i agree, while it is possible to do during an encounter, it is, as i mentioned in a previous post, very difficult, its the timing of the haunt that makes it difficult, the rest is fairly static.

[Jessicka]

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. Also because of this we will rarely get all ticks from our dots so the haste plateaus in reality become broader. I guess we can probably say that we in general need 2 extra ticks from a dot to reach next plateau. However, since we don't always aim to refresh dots at the same duration left because we can buff the dots with procs/CDs we can safely say that on a single target fight there is no reason to ever care about haste plateaus (maybe on a perfect rotation Patchwerk fight style, but we're probably never gonna be able to do that seeing how slow we are at figuring out this spec). Some might suggest that if we try get the longest possible duration on our dots we could try put us close to haste plateaus. This we can ignore with the argument that a shorter base duration makes the dot tick faster (which we could get from a higher MG uptime of course, but as of now we should ignore playing around with base durations because it's simply too complex to handle atm).

Not arguing with the statement, but the reasoning. Pandemic doesn't mean we cast our DoTs less often, it means we can cast them when it's more convenient in terms of not loosing the overlap between Haunt and Malefic Grasp uptime.

Edit: Apologies if that's already been pointed out, didn't notice this was a 5 page thread already.

[Deleted]

I refuted that point on page 2, he has just not found the time to update his original post or whatever...

[Bonkura]

Yeah I've been busy/lazy. I wanted to make it properly once I get it done. I'll start writing a new OP today.

[Bonkura]

Wrong thread, bro.

Speaking of that addon. I haven't wanted to test it myself during progress since I didn't want it to take my focus away from the encounters (which these addons tend to do before you're used to them). I do have intentions to check it out though and might bring it up here for discussion to evaluate if it should be recommended for everyone to use.

Here's the thread for it btw: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...k-of-dot-power


PS. I'll update the first post later tonight or tomorrow. Just going to go through the thread again and polish my draft for the update a bit.


And oh, some things I've been thinking about but not confident about handling myself that I can throw out for discussion:


1) During execute (sub 20%) the general recommendation in these forums have been to only use Haunt to keep up the debuff. However by checking the BiS profile and adding up the numbers I can see that the DPS from the average Haunt cast and DS tick are roughly the same. It made me thinking that we might want to dump some excess soul shards. What first came to mind was to always launching ~3 Haunts at the same time when we are about to refresh the debuff. Thoughts on this?

2) Another thing that I think has been discussed is the value of procs over Dark Soul. A good example when this scenario could happen this tier is when we get our 2nd trinket procs from LotC and RoY (which usually line up well together). If we assume we have refreshed our dots so we can use 3 soul shards to keep up haunt for 20~21 seconds (or whatever it becomes), will it be better spent on the dots buffed from our trinket procs or during Dark Soul? With only the trinket procs and the dots only having been buffed with 30% haste for each example.

I'll try do some math for this after I've finished updating the first post, but as I said I'm not confident I'll get it done properly by myself.

[Deleted]

I wanted to ask (hope I won't miss thread again) if we take into account that it's always better to refresh dots on more power and let them go near the end before refreshing again + using Haunt on INT procs to bet the most benefit of it all then current simcraft values regarding hastemastery may be very questionable?
Since simcraft models it purely on pandemic and Haunt on status of debuff and shard regardless of int procs.

[Ridcully]

2) Another thing that I think has been discussed is the value of procs over Dark Soul. A good example when this scenario could happen this tier is when we get our 2nd trinket procs from LotC and RoY (which usually line up well together). If we assume we have refreshed our dots so we can use 3 soul shards to keep up haunt for 20~21 seconds (or whatever it becomes), will it be better spent on the dots buffed from our trinket procs or during Dark Soul? With only the trinket procs and the dots only having been buffed with 30% haste for each example.

Currently int procs can go much higher than 30% damage increase, close to 50% I think, if you are tailor+engineer.
Haste - MG/DS will gain benefit from haste increase only for duration of proc/Dark Soul.
Int procs - MG/DS will gain benefit for duration of the proc and full duration of extended dots.

[Deleted]

Currently int procs can go much higher than 30% damage increase, close to 50% I think, if you are tailor+engineer.
Haste - MG/DS will gain benefit from haste increase only for duration of proc/Dark Soul.
Int procs - MG/DS will gain benefit for duration of the proc and full duration of extended dots.

I can confirm int procs go up to 64% increase with me, I'm tailor and I got LotC + RoY both 2/2 upgrade

[Bonkura]

Yeah, well, what I would like to find out is at roughly what level of SP with procs all our damage from MG/dots becomes stronger than only the 30% haste we get from DS. This to take us a step closer to figuring out proper soul shard management. I'm well aware that this wouldn't gain us that much in practice since it's hard to estimate what procs we will have for our next Dark Soul (assuming it's always used on CD) so I thought we'd start with those two trinket procs and compare the two.

As it is now with the current tier where we have 80s CD on Dark Soul with the 4 peice bonus I often find myself with close to no Soul Shards when DS is up the second time. I just feel I'd rather use them for my 2nd RoY+LotC procs than end up with a situation where I'll have to dump my Soul Shards when my dots are weak. This is probably the easiest approach to take but the reasoning behind it is more common sense and assumptions rather than facts.


So, yeah, if we take for example the BiS gear profile used by SimCraft and then make up a scenario where we are sitting with 3 soul shards and at least 20s remaining on our dots (powered up by either SP procs/30% haste), at which level of buffed spell power from procs do we benefit more from it than just the 30% haste? The APL we'd use would be starting with a Haunt and just maintain the debuff from it with a 20s fight duration and channel MG all the time outside of that. I hope that's clear enough.

[Deleted]

For that I think best would be to develop a proper simcraft action list and then we can see real values of haste vs mastery and int. And then play with it untill we have a solution.

[Micke]

by that reasoning, the opposite is also true, you cant have a discussion about mastery without taking haste into account.

anyways, you're still wrong tho when you say "haste plateus changes realistically nothing about the amount you get out of haunt, because it does not increase the dps of the dots" as haste does increase the dps of dots, math proves that, ofc i dont know if it was just sarcasm, and im inclined to believe that or you have no concept of how haste works.

About your first statement; obviously.

About your second statement; I said haste plateus does not increase your dot dps, not haste, there is a difference.

---------- Post added 2013-01-12 at 12:09 AM ----------

1) During execute (sub 20%) the general recommendation in these forums have been to only use Haunt to keep up the debuff. However by checking the BiS profile and adding up the numbers I can see that the DPS from the average Haunt cast and DS tick are roughly the same. It made me thinking that we might want to dump some excess soul shards. What first came to mind was to always launching ~3 Haunts at the same time when we are about to refresh the debuff. Thoughts on this?

2) Another thing that I think has been discussed is the value of procs over Dark Soul. A good example when this scenario could happen this tier is when we get our 2nd trinket procs from LotC and RoY (which usually line up well together). If we assume we have refreshed our dots so we can use 3 soul shards to keep up haunt for 20~21 seconds (or whatever it becomes), will it be better spent on the dots buffed from our trinket procs or during Dark Soul? With only the trinket procs and the dots only having been buffed with 30% haste for each example.

I'll try do some math for this after I've finished updating the first post, but as I said I'm not confident I'll get it done properly by myself.

1. Considering that everytime we interuppt DS we lose some time even if we try to time it just after a tick, there will be some lost channeling time. So we want to interuppt DS as few times as possible, we do this if we refresh our dots and use all our remaining shards on haunt together each interuppt. The extra haunts will increase it's duration (up to 2 ofc) and will generally take time off of the fight for even less DS interuppts. This is assuming haunt dps > DS dps.

2. This is pretty easy to figure out since 30% haste is around 13k haste rating (it does scale with your current haste too it seems (if anyone can confirm?)) Just compare this to your procs via the stat weights.

[warder]

1) During execute (sub 20%) the general recommendation in these forums have been to only use Haunt to keep up the debuff. However by checking the BiS profile and adding up the numbers I can see that the DPS from the average Haunt cast and DS tick are roughly the same. It made me thinking that we might want to dump some excess soul shards. What first came to mind was to always launching ~3 Haunts at the same time when we are about to refresh the debuff. Thoughts on this?

If you cast a haunt with a haunt debuff still present on the target, it will benefit from the 25% damage bonus, it doesn't matter if the debuff falls during travel time, as long as the haunt debuff is present by the time the 2nd haunt "leaves your hands" it will do 25% more damage.
I usually dump (n-1) shards under 20% and just leave 1 up if I need to refresh dots.

On a vaguely related issue, lets say you are rolling extremely buffed dots under 20%, for the sake of the example lets consider tailoring+eng, RoY, LotC, jade spi and a int pot for good measure, after few seconds all your procs/pot are over, and your UA is about to drop, do you SB:SS anyway?
I usually refresh UA with a hard cast in this situation and roll buffed corr and agony few seconds more, seems to provide better results, but I didn't do any math to back it up.

[Kael]

If you cast a haunt with a haunt debuff still present on the target, it will benefit from the 25% damage bonus, it doesn't matter if the debuff falls during travel time, as long as the haunt debuff is present by the time the 2nd haunt "leaves your hands" it will do 25% more damage.
I usually dump (n-1) shards under 20% and just leave 1 up if I need to refresh dots.

On a vaguely related issue, lets say you are rolling extremely buffed dots under 20%, for the sake of the example lets consider tailoring+eng, RoY, LotC, jade spi and a int pot for good measure, after few seconds all your procs/pot are over, and your UA is about to drop, do you SB:SS anyway?
I usually refresh UA with a hard cast in this situation and roll buffed corr and agony few seconds more, seems to provide better results, but I didn't do any math to back it up.

I was talking with a new guildie the other night about dots over time, and ran into questions revolving around the following points in time on a patchwerk fight (tailor/engineer, heavier haste) - still feel "new" to warlocks if something here seems obvious:

1: 0:04: Ideal start around having all procs up after opening? I've been using SB:SS (ideally with 4 shards from the 10-0 SB buff range) and I'm curious about the best way to pull those to maximum power. Been popping FF and Agony immediately to rebuff them, then hard-casting UA/corr for duration directly before cloak/trinkets stop, but I'm not sure at all this is best.
2: 1:00/1:20: Engineering trinket to empower the dots leading up before DS or save it to buff with DS, although you should be able to haunt/MG under DS with the old "empowered" dots still active?
3: ~1:40: is there a "best way" to manage the application of dots directly before CDs come back up, or do we know the point where "enough" procs are up to justify FF when UA and Corr are both still several seconds from Pandemic range?

I could swear I had more questions, like "is delaying DS ~4-5 seconds so the end of it lines up with the beginning of an int proc worth it?" but I think that becomes a fight-length question, or just "no" because you'd have to plot the NEXT DS vs. int procs... but I get about this far before realizing I should become better with charts.

Warder: hard-casting the weak UA instead of losing massive corr/agony buffs is correct unless I'm really far off my mental math.

[Bonkura]

OP finally updated. I was going to make it fancier but my computer crashed today so I had to use a draft I had luckily saved in a PM the other day. I might get around to fixing it later on. Just let me know if you think something should be added.

I'm going to try get some job done for the questions I brought up earlier (as well as replying to the feedback I got). I got caught up in something else I'm trying to figure out atm that I want to finish first. Hopefully it will be discussion worthy.

[Deleted]

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.

Why say like this if nothing has changed in the hit cap discussion here, and such new developement has not come to existence after a situation where someone had this kind of thing as some guideline.

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.

Start over if you think this is the only argument. First simulate a profile without Pandemicing by changing

actions+=/agony,cycle_targets=1,if=ticks_remain<add_ticks%2&target.time_to_die>=8&miss_react
actions+=/corruption,cycle_targets=1,if=ticks_remain<add_ticks%2&target.time_to_die>=6&miss_react
actions+=/unstable_affliction,cycle_targets=1,if=ticks_remain<add_ticks%2+1&target.time_to_die>=5&miss_react

into

actions+=/agony,cycle_targets=1,if=ticks_remain<=1&target.time_to_die>=8&miss_react
actions+=/corruption,cycle_targets=1,if=ticks_remain<=1&target.time_to_die>=6&miss_react
actions+=/unstable_affliction,cycle_targets=1,if=ticks_remain<=1&target.time_to_die>=5&miss_react

In T14H default profile this pre-90 refreshing causes on my 510-9 version a ~7k dps loss and changes the scale factors like this
Pandemic - int - hit - haste - mastery
Yes - 4.81 - 2.36 - 2.27 - 2.78
No -- 4.58 - 2.22 - 3.13 - 2.62

Ignoring that haste stuff (that will probably fix itself with ticks_remain<=2 for UA, or MG interrupting), the mastery minus hit is stil 0.40, or dropped by only 0.02.

Hit rating is not strong if miss events themselves are of small damage decrease. Main reason for this is not the existence of Pandemic, but probably the amount of times MG/DS have to be applied compared to their uptimes. As hit rating is also not increasing the damage much if you dps only by applying dots that are cast or hitted with for only few times for huge uptime.

However what you could call as the main argument, following a simc default dps comparison, is that mastery and haste are really strong stats for Affliction. Compared to demonology for example the crit/mastery scaling is much weaker there, by 0.5 to 1.0 points lower than hastery. At the same time Demo's hit scaling is only 0.5 to 1.0 points stronger than in Affliction. Good argument in demo gearing is that hit is your best secondary stat.

So one would then only have to argue to the end about why hastery is too good to let go for some hit's sake. First you can say that first mastery is good because when you have sacced a demon, every damaging ability other than Haunt and DG are getting improved by mastery. It is not something that Blizzard was probably balancing the Afflition's mastery effect alone for. Second, haste is awesome, because many of the spec's abilities are not getting gcd capped, while often fillers and nukes do not benefit from haste while BL or big haste buffs are up. Affliction is again in a good place with this when Blizzard balanced the haste rating (for all classes) so that 425 points -> 1 %. You have to have a very broken ability list, for haste effects, before a stat that is so cheaply gained, and then multiplied with raid buffs, would become bad for you. Haste does not for example increase the dps from short cooldowns, like pre-MoP Haunts and Shadowburns, or Mop Conflagrate. There is nothing like that in Affliction now.

How do you argue for reducing stats that are awesome?

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.

Yes sometimes the lock can have a proc running out, and a dot that has little over 0.5 duration remaining, where 0.5 is the legit max after which he can refresh. If he has one miss event, there after 0.5, he does not get a buffed dot. This will happen in default action list.

Sometimes the lock can have no procs on yet, and his dot is running out. He would wait until he is between last two ticks hoping for the proc to pop. Proc may not come before first cast. But if he misses the dot first he can get the proc during the wasted gcd. Damage may not be higher than what one gcd can do, but this miss event is with certainty a lesser damage loss than a typical miss. Situation was made possbile by the playstyle or action list that watches procs.

Sometimes the lock is under 0.5 and a fresh proc appears. He has alot of time but refreshes immeadetly because that often makes more ticks (n) affected by the buff. However if he can miss, then a second proc can pop during the wasted gcd and he gets double procs on n-1 ticks. With certainty less dps is lost than in one wasted gcd. It was not always made so by the playstyle or action list that watches procs but is partly default.

To have any good ground for your hit theory, you must estimate how frequently the "sometimes" happen because they do not have any weight otherwise. Also theese events are not alike in how much you can adjust them. In first part 0.5 duration can be overruled with one tick, if you see a proc running out with so annoyingly synced with the dot. Also in the default the situation continues so that dot is recast as soon as possible, while a proc watcher would use the remaining 0.5 time to wait for another proc instead, and "sometimes" does not loose much buffed ticks.

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.

Talking about this what you pointed alone yourself, without any data?

page 3

One would have to check your reforging decisions throughly atleast, because for some reason you do not seem to be on map with them.

[Deleted]

The thing about this thread is noone actually take Encounter design into consideration.

Really Theorycrafting for warlocks is like guessing the lottery numbers if you dont know what kind of fight you are faceing.

Almost all encounters in Tier 14 have options to dot more than 1 target at some point. which is why Mastery is "scaleing" so well. Haste become better the more time you have to dps on a single target.

Also for the Hit, there is so many variables that makeing it not worth skipping the hitcap most of them lay in the encounter designs sotherefore you cant calculate it with a number generator.

when you start to get heroic gear your are stuck with a certain amount of haste and you just cant convert it into mastery. so you are pretty much choiceless anyway

[Deleted]

hit rating is also not increasing the damage much if you dps only by applying dots that are cast or hitted with for only few times for huge uptime.

Almost all encounters in Tier 14 have options to dot more than 1 target at some point. which is why Mastery is "scaleing" so well. Haste become better the more time you have to dps on a single target.

Also for the Hit, there is so many variables that makeing it not worth skipping the hitcap most of them lay in the encounter designs sotherefore you cant calculate it with a number generator.

Variable known as 1 more target will lower the worth of hit rating, relative to the larger total dps, because dots do not need it. What happens for your other stats... does not have to be the way you say it ofc, but rather unknown. But if you think you were correct first and if all encounters at the moment have one extra target then non capping for more mastery could be pretty nice.