Grimoire of Service vs Grimoire Sacrafice

[Duracells]

I just speeced to Demo from destruction because of Demo's capability of small burst windows with high damage. I picked up service from the start to increase my DF regeneration, and it seemed like a good starting burst. I was wondering what capabilities sacrifice has over Service, and damage output it has over Service. Im currently geared with 2 piece and have UVLS.

[Deleted]

well some ppl swear by sacrifice while others swear by service and they have both been simmed very very close but it really comes down to the fight. on any fight where you can have multiple crit dooms rolling, sacrifice is your best bet coz sacrifice also increases the dmg of your wild imps, and since you'll have multiple crit dooms rolling you'll be able to summon a lot of wild imps that does increased dmg, a fight like council is a perfect example of such a fight, horridon hc as well to a degree. on fights like lei shen and iron qon, service will prolly give you the best results as you cant take full advantage of sacrifice's advantages and on a fight like lei shen the extra fel storm from your fel guard and service: fel guard can really help with getting those ball lightnings down. Atleast thats my take on it.

[Deleted]

It might be just me but the opener as sac tends to be a bit more tricky as you are fury starving

[Brusalk]

It might be just me but the opener as sac tends to be a bit more tricky as you are fury starving

Don't quote me on this, but I think that if you have your pet out and sac it in combat that you'll get a fair amount of Fury. At least that's what I've been noticing when I play Demo for council and stuff.

[Khadjid]

Don't quote me on this, but I think that if you have your pet out and sac it in combat that you'll get a fair amount of Fury. At least that's what I've been noticing when I play Demo for council and stuff.

I wasn't aware of this undocumented feature, so I spent a few minutes on the dummies and in the log browser to do some more research on it. My findings:

Sacrificing my minion in combat granted ~100 Demonic Fury, however I wasn't always able to get the fury gain and I would need to do more testing to figure out the exact conditions needed.

The majority of my testing after confirming a fury gain went to figure out how to best abuse it. I used the felguard due to his ability to instantly get in range and deal damage, I also tested with the imp but I couldn't reliably get the fury gain from him. The questions I wanted to answer is: 1) Is it worth starting combat with a pet out, and 2) is it worth resummoning a pet with Demonic Rebirth?

The logs from which I made my calculations: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/6...log/?s=45&e=88
And the log query to filter the interesting parts (my pet Rivinshril and spells affected by GoSac):

[{"eventTypes": [1], "actorNames": ["Rivinshril"]}, {"spellNames": ["Fel Firebolt", "Shadow Bolt", "Soul Fire", "Touch of Chaos", "Hand of Gul'dan", "Grimoire of Sacrifice", "Summon Felguard"], "eventTypes": [1, 6]}]

In all my calculations I normalized crits to normal hits to remove some of the RNG (except Soul Fire which always crits), however I didn't unequip gear with procs which means those procs can have skewed the numbers in either direction.

To answer my first question, yes it's definitely worth it to start combat with a pet out. On the pull I did 29827 damage with GoSac spells before gaining the buff, which is a loss of 7456.75 damage, in return my pet did 106,327.5 damage on the pull. GoSac is off the GCD and costs no mana which means I lost nothing from using it after the pull but I gained a total of 98,870.75 damage and ~100 Demonic Fury.
For reference, the starting rotation I used was HoG -> Corruption -> Imp Swarm -> Dark Soul/Blood Fury/GoSac -> HoG -> Doom -> Touch of Chaos spam.

The second question requires a little bit more thought and calculations and I'd encourage any theorycrafters to try figure this out as I'm not very well versed in this stuff myself. This part starts from when I summon a new felguard at the end of the Demonic Rebirth buff, which conveniently is at the same time as my DS runs out and the imps from Imp Swarm finishes up. At this time my pet will be out for 10 seconds until the cooldown of GoSac is up again. As for the damage numbers I doubled the wild imp damage in this time frame as I lost one imp from not having a UVLS proc on the pull.

During the 10 seconds of not having GoSac I dealt 741,811.5 damage with GoSac spells, a loss of 185,452.875 damage. In the same duration my pet dealt 219,318.5. In total I have a gain of 33,865.625 damage and 100 Demonic Fury, but at the cost of ~1.75 GCD (Summon Felguard + Life Tap to make up for the mana loss). I won't make any conclusions of whether the second pet summon is worth it or not as I'm not absolutely certain about the worth of the DF and GCDs, but my intuition tells me it's a small gain.

A third question that could arise would be whether it might be worth pet twisting later in the fight.

Edit: I didn't use Felstorm in this test as in my first tests I tried using it on the pull but experienced that I then wouldn't gain fury from the second Sacrifice, I then forgot to try using Felstorm during the second summon.

[Dietrik]

It might be just me but the opener as sac tends to be a bit more tricky as you are fury starving

I hadn't tried the sacrificing in combat, i might do that... but for fights i go Sac, i take off my 2 offset pieces and go for the 4pc it seems to help.

Only time i have a problem is when my UVLS doesn't proc during my opening, but that messes all sorts of things up.

[Brusalk]

I wasn't aware of this undocumented feature, so I spent a few minutes on the dummies and in the log browser to do some more research on it. My findings:

Sacrificing my minion in combat granted ~100 Demonic Fury, however I wasn't always able to get the fury gain and I would need to do more testing to figure out the exact conditions needed.

The majority of my testing after confirming a fury gain went to figure out how to best abuse it. I used the felguard due to his ability to instantly get in range and deal damage, I also tested with the imp but I couldn't reliably get the fury gain from him. The questions I wanted to answer is: 1) Is it worth starting combat with a pet out, and 2) is it worth resummoning a pet with Demonic Rebirth?

The logs from which I made my calculations: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/6...log/?s=45&e=88
And the log query to filter the interesting parts (my pet Rivinshril and spells affected by GoSac):

[{"eventTypes": [1], "actorNames": ["Rivinshril"]}, {"spellNames": ["Fel Firebolt", "Shadow Bolt", "Soul Fire", "Touch of Chaos", "Hand of Gul'dan", "Grimoire of Sacrifice", "Summon Felguard"], "eventTypes": [1, 6]}]

In all my calculations I normalized crits to normal hits to remove some of the RNG (except Soul Fire which always crits), however I didn't unequip gear with procs which means those procs can have skewed the numbers in either direction.

To answer my first question, yes it's definitely worth it to start combat with a pet out. On the pull I did 29827 damage with GoSac spells before gaining the buff, which is a loss of 7456.75 damage, in return my pet did 106,327.5 damage on the pull. GoSac is off the GCD and costs no mana which means I lost nothing from using it after the pull but I gained a total of 98,870.75 damage and ~100 Demonic Fury.
For reference, the starting rotation I used was HoG -> Corruption -> Imp Swarm -> Dark Soul/Blood Fury/GoSac -> HoG -> Doom -> Touch of Chaos spam.

The second question requires a little bit more thought and calculations and I'd encourage any theorycrafters to try figure this out as I'm not very well versed in this stuff myself. This part starts from when I summon a new felguard at the end of the Demonic Rebirth buff, which conveniently is at the same time as my DS runs out and the imps from Imp Swarm finishes up. At this time my pet will be out for 10 seconds until the cooldown of GoSac is up again. As for the damage numbers I doubled the wild imp damage in this time frame as I lost one imp from not having a UVLS proc on the pull.

During the 10 seconds of not having GoSac I dealt 741,811.5 damage with GoSac spells, a loss of 185,452.875 damage. In the same duration my pet dealt 219,318.5. In total I have a gain of 33,865.625 damage and 100 Demonic Fury, but at the cost of ~1.75 GCD (Summon Felguard + Life Tap to make up for the mana loss). I won't make any conclusions of whether the second pet summon is worth it or not as I'm not absolutely certain about the worth of the DF and GCDs, but my intuition tells me it's a small gain.

A third question that could arise would be whether it might be worth pet twisting later in the fight.

Edit: I didn't use Felstorm in this test as in my first tests I tried using it on the pull but experienced that I then wouldn't gain fury from the second Sacrifice, I then forgot to try using Felstorm during the second summon.

That's what I figured. Thanks for the confirmation and the effort in testing it all out!

I'm half wondering if pet-twisting purely for DS would be the best strat again, like it was for a time on 5.2 PTR. Have your Fel Guard out all the time, and then Sac when going into DS for an even more powerful DS burn.

I wonder if the fury gain is based off of pet energy? (Just a hunch, probably not the case. It might explain the somewhat sporadic results you were seeing.)

[rijn dael]

Interesting thoughts, kind of wishing I had known about the sac counting as a 'kill' earlier this tier. (Killing blows grant 100 fury, it is part of the passive somewhere associated with demonic fury).

It would give minor boosts every time you have 'gaps' in combat, assuming they are >45sec apart. Nazgrim has these, not sure about the other SoO fights. In current content, lei shen transitions spring to mind (every 30sec during the transition, until you get to 1k fury? ). Twins during 'Nuclear Inferno'. Magaera if you have beam on you, and don't fail at kiting. Possibly if you were extreme about it, jikun as you fly / fall between platforms.

Of those current fights with 'gaps', I only use sac on jikun, and that is for pet mechanics. I doubt the gain would be enough to push sac above service on the others. It would be a nice gain on council, because your felstorm would hit multiple targets, and then you (hopefully) sac it in time for the fury gain in your opener dooms.

With regards to 5.4 though-
-it could make for a nicer / longer opener with double AD darksoul, and lust off the bat.
-UVLS nerf incoming, meaning our imp damage going down, I am not sure if sac will be comparable even on aoe doom fights.

[Rabiddog]

The fury gain is a bug . We get back fury when we deal Killing blows while in meta , saccing the pet is counting as a killing blow , hence the fury gain when we sac it .