Sha of Pride Help (and Destro help please)

[Hound02]

Hi!

I did post this on the fix my dps thread 3 times before, but didn't actually get an answer or any tips / help - specially for Single Target DPS, so just done a little copy / paste work to see if I can grab some more advice, please dont redirect this to that thread as its like a dead thread with little to no helpers

Our Warlock was demo for the most part and the nerf to it hit her hard. She has recently changed over to destro and I know shes willing to try her best to improve her dps which was once number 1 by miles to now low-mid of the pack of our DPS'ers, so I can only know how frustrating something like this can be and to change your spec to try and improve your dps once again for heroics. I haven't mentioned her DPS to her yet, as I don't want to hurt her feelings in any way as shes always been willing to learn and to play at her best possible so I'm just trying to grab some tips I can give to her to help her improve faster.. In terms of mechanics and stuff, she is one of the best - just needs her dps again to back her up!

These are our logs - http://worldoflogs.com/guilds/271528/

I've done it so you can choose which bosses you'd like to look up more and hopefully I can receive some helpful points I can give to her, please keep in mind that she hasn't had much practice with this spec so is relatively new to it!

Tips for both Multi-Dot and Single Target fights would be most appreciated.


Now regarding to Sha of Pride we've put our warlock on imp dispelling duty on our progress as seen in the last log - is it normal for it to plummel her dps even more then usual? So extra tips on this would be appreciated and thank you

[Deleted]

Sorry to post something negative.. but i've defenently seen quite a few answers to this, most of them beeing that if shes not willing to post herself, most will not be willing to help her out.

Other than that Sparkuggz got some great pointers @ www sparkuggz com

[Deleted]

Best guide there is http://sparkuggz.com/

And as i saw her chaos bolt numbers are incredebly low on your sha fights. And i don't get it how single target Immo can be top dmg =/

[Hound02]

In my defence, i only got 1 reply mentioning her expertise/mastery gems and that they play affli and not destro - thats only reply i ever got and was not useful to me at all

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Is there any way for her to improve her chaos bolt usage? She was demo main spec before the imp nerf, dont know if its still as high dps as before but yeh.. Destro does seem to come out much higher but i dont understand the sha of pride, does dispelling with imp lose that much dps?

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Oh, just thought to add she has just replaced the uvls trinket to the bloodbrood of garrosh normal after she changed specs - i think i saw on sparkuggz guide that demo is very close to destro with that trinket switch but i believe that was just single target and not aoe? Wish i knew more about this spec - since my post ive told her about it and i know shes working on it now, just seemed low on protectors and sha of pride again

[Deleted]

I am by no means an warlock expert. But i can't understand at all how she can only get that dps with that gear...

My warlock (my 3rd alt) did way more than that in 530 gear. One weird thing i can see from just checking three of your 5 min wipes is that her top spell is immolate.
Has she checked any guides at all on how to play destro or did she just try to wing it? You really need to talk to her. She should be up around 300k+ with that gear as destro.
Also, if she's new on destro, i hope she's pugging LFR or flex, or even 5 man heroics. Anything to train her rotation. Training a new spec on a progress boss isn't the best idea.

Now, since her immolate is highest for some reason, i can only think that she's not using embers... at all. Tell her to never get capped. Use 1x chaos bolt before you reach 4 embers, and keep the other 2-3embers pooled up for when you get a trinket proc, then throw like 2 off (3 with meta proc). Rinse and repeat.

In all seriousness, ask her to check guides and practice on her free time. (Sorry if it came out as harsh but underperforming that much on a progress boss annoys me.)

Oh and also, checked some more. She's barely using shadowburn. She had 1x shadowburn on 2 of your 5 min fights. On the other 5min fight she had 0.
Shadowburn is an execute ability that gives you 2 embers if an enemy dies shortly after you've used it on em.
With the amount of adds on that fight, she can easily havoc the boss, spam shadowburn on adds, then use all the embers to nuke chaos bolts, then shadowburn some more, then chaos bolt, then shadowburn some more etc etc. She really needs to start looking at what her spells does. (and check guides)

[Deleted]

I'm willing to help if that posable. Check you personal msges.

[theburned]

In my defence, i only got 1 reply mentioning her expertise/mastery gems and that they play affli and not destro - thats only reply i ever got and was not useful to me at all

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Is there any way for her to improve her chaos bolt usage? She was demo main spec before the imp nerf, dont know if its still as high dps as before but yeh.. Destro does seem to come out much higher but i dont understand the sha of pride, does dispelling with imp lose that much dps?

expertise/mastery gems are not bad they are better than int/mastery, in some cases full mastery gems will be better, but it won't affect the outcome this much, the 2 main properties that seem to keep her dps down by far is her use of chaos bolt, you see them hit for 1.3 million damage, but she never seems to use them, which is the first thing. (she has 60 chaos bolts over around 20 tries, might be due to fight length of some of them, but in 5+ min fights I only see 4 chaos bolts being cast)
Use chaos bolts with trinket procs and cd's, using them alone is a waste, but also keep in mind that going full out on burning ember is a waste, so throwing one when you have 3.5 burning embers without a cd is a dps increase.
at sha of pride really a 2nd dark soul is not better than movement incinerate on this fight. Seeing as her fel flame does about half the damage of an incinerate and she uses it half as much as incinerate, if 1 extra dark soul can compensate for the damage lost by fel flame it's worth it, but in this case it clearly isn't.

then assuming she knows how to use trinket procs as she played demo well before.
Refreshing immolate with 10 stacks of black blood of y'shaarj is really strong, also using 1 or 2 chaos bolts when it builds up tends to give good results too.
when you can't manage this refreshing them with random trinket procs and set bonus is a good 2nd.
the purified bindings should proc together with dark soul and burn off all burning embers is a good idea.


you said she was dispelling with the pet, not entierly sure, but dont you need the demon training glyph to use the imp without losing out on lots of dps?
I seem to think the imp does way less damage than the observer, I think it is just barely behind and it's somewhat ahead on target swapping fights, will look into to this.
Looked into it and it seems the glyph increases imp dps minorly, nothing too big, but still 10%~for pet. should only be 1-2% total damage though.
Ok tested the glyph for myself, and realised it is not very useful especially when on dispel duty, as he sometimes goes out of energy, the initial burst is way stronger though, so just based on that it should be somewhat better, and I believe he benefits greatly from BL. The initial burst should somewhat make this glyph stronger. swapping out unending resolve and getting soul link might be suggest in this case.
imp did 13.1k dps over 5 million damage, imp glyphed did 13.3k dps over 5 million damage, this is unbuffed, this will differ greatly depending on uptime, the glyph will become increasingly better with lower uptime, as it allows him to cast more after downtime.
The observer did 11k, but has been proven several times that it does more damage in raid situations due to buffs and such.

Also what sanktas said about shadowburn, it really helps out, and does lots of damage.

[Hound02]

Thanks a lot for the feedback guys, going to forward her here to this thread to give it a read for herself - Any more feedback would be greatly appreciated also Because I'm also still a little concerned on her AoE (Like protectors for example) which still seems low for warlocks currently.

[Shodan30]

I'm not in a heroic progression guild, I just do 10 Normal, but AOE on protectors from a destruction lock is not really something you should be looking at...The three bosses are typically kept far enough away from each other that aoe is only really used at the end when you pull them together or incidentially during Sun's shield when youve got little adds in the shield, but the warlock should be focused on the adds outside the shield not inside it.

She definately appears to be immolating way too much. Try not to expect a lot from the shadowburn for a bit. Proper timing on havok/shadowburn is a royal pain in the ass to get right unless you have a specific macro and frankly i find i am spending time waiting for mobs to fall below 20% and not dpsing in the meantime because say we get reflections, i RoF, Shadowfury the adds, then start aoe'ing. I have to pick just the exact time to havok the boss and have minimal downtime between the havok cast and when the first add falls to 20%.

If everyone is on the ball and aoe'ing they die too quickly to get multiple havoks SB's off.

[Hilltopperpete]

If she feels like she has to swap, I'd still recommend she stay Demo on fights you're progressing on and just use Destruction on farm fights to work on getting better at it. Her damage isn't pathetic by any means, it just takes a while to get used to fishing for intellect procs for Chaos Bolt and properly using Havoc/Shadowburn/etc. Affliction is also incredibly strong at higher ilvls, and it's incredibly easy to manage dot strength with addons like Affdots.

It isn't "go destro or go home", there are lots of warlocks getting great results from all three specs, a lot of people dropped Demo completely after the UVLS nerf, but others, like Shinafae from Blood Legion, are still Demo all the way (she ran Destro for their first Garrosh kill and immediately dropped the spec).

[Perrydtf]

On a few logs that I looked at, Immolate up time is terrible and needs to be brought up substantially, on 1 log in a 2 minute fight 3 chaos bolts, I do about 6 in the first 30 seconds of a fight in the opener, so that means she must be Ember capping hardcore which is a big no no. Just a few things I saw at a quick glance.

[ZaneBusby]

I'm not at home right now, so can't go through all the logs in great detail, or check out her gear, but to be able to pull that kind of DPS whilst under-performing, and the fact you guys are on heroics, I'm going to guess she must be pretty decently geared. Just going to pick at your latest set of logs for now, will take a closer look when I get home, but attempt #10 on H Sha, 4:30 fight, she had 83% uptime on immolate, and unless she was getting banished or prisoned a whole lot and not getting broken out, that should be closer to 100%. Maybe 90% at least. Immolate is one of Destro's highest DPCT spells, you want to keep it up as much as possible. She also only casts 5 Chaos bolts on this attempt. FIVE. In 4 and a half minutes. That is ABYSSMALY low. If she uses WeakAuras I might recommend that either you or she check out the Warlock WeakAura forum and pick up a few to tell her that she's capped her embers. You never want to be sitting on capped embers. She also casts 32 Fel Flames. That's actually quite high, and unless she's spending 1/2 the fight running around (which I know is kinda the case for Sha anyway), it seems like she might be incorporating it into her regular rotation, which I wouldn't recommend. Maybe she might be better off playing using KJC instead of AD, assuming that's what she's using. If she IS using KJC on this fight already, then she shouldn't really be casting Fel flame, ever. She also only casts 16 conflags, where you can cast 22 over the course of a 4:30 fight. Means she's sitting on 2 conflag charges and not using them, which is not ideal. Conflag isn't like Hand of Gul'dan for demo where you sit on charges til you can clip the shadow flame DoT, it's something you want to, more-or-less, use on cooldown.

To the person who said the fel imp was a DPS loss unless you use the Demon Training glyph, that's incorrect. The Demon Training glyph only increases burst DPS, but over the course of a long fight, will come out pretty much equal to not using it. GoSac is the ideal talent for Destro, but GoSup isn't far behind at all. Fel Imp is a pretty much exact equal with Observer, or any other Sup pet really, there's only a few hundred DPS between the best and worst pet.

Again, I'll look into it further when I get back home, but in the mean time I recommend she read both Brusalk AND Sparkuggz Destro guides, fully, and get a better understanding of how to play Destro.

[darkminaz]

I normaly play affli on this fight, mostly because well why not ^^
seed on boss (and if the dk's don't fail) boom , copy dot on the big add
and else nuke the big fella

since igot everything there i cna't try a destru fight there once to give any real tipps
but for try 22 for example .. is he/she afk? 4 chaosbolts thats like .. my first 30sec
try 15 even less .. 2 in 4min .. so i realy don't get what you lock is pressing .. but not the right things for destruction

e: if she/he is that much better as demo .. why not just let her play that spec? i run affli on a few destru encounters and get my top spots, if i had to spec to demo i'm probably just somewhere in the middle. Rater have a good demo in your raid then a average destru. Simcraft is not 100% right :P

[theburned]

Rather have a good demo in your raid then a average destru. Simcraft is not 100% right :P

That is a pretty awful destro, I am an average destro player, I know what to do, but miss trinket procs and not always burning off embers, I don't play my class to around 85% capacity. She fails at the parts that make destro shine. But yeah I would tell her to go demo, while she try to learn destro on other fights. Rather have someone play a weak specc at 97% capacity over playing the best specc at 55% capacity.

[Ridania]

Pretty much everything I want to say is up there on the replies.

Tell your warlock to get either a mouseover macro or an ordinary macro for focus target, along with a havoc focus target macro. Good use of Havoc is essential to a great destrucion warlock and on Sha of Pride it can really shine with havoc on the boss and shadowburn on either the reflection adds or on the manifestation of pride.

At the moment she really should go demonology on progress fights while learning destruction on farm fights. Encourage her to try and master the destruction specc as it's a great specc that really shines on several encounters in SoO.

[Deleted]

Hi, i am going to give my vision... for me is strange that a warlock with her gear gives this performance on that boss.
in that log hesr numbers are terrible, i know. but for me is strange that if you see your owns logs at October 6th sure with less gear in the same boss (sha of pride) but in normal mode ,.. , she was the top 1 dps making 248K ... playing destruction!!!

then for me is clear that she knows the spec. .. but what happen to her in that log? i don't know , but i think that she knows how to play destro. In that kill for 5 minutes she hit 21 chaos bolt, and CB was her most damaging spell, her immolate uptime was 83% (not good but not terrible) and she hit 10 shadowburns... then normal numbers and she was the first dps..

then in 20 days she has forgot to play destru?? i don't know, the problem sure is not in her knowledge about destru.

and at the end. if you didn't want that she felt embarrasing... you are giving her name and her "problem" in a public forum? xDDDDD
and now you are going to tell her that come here to see??

.......

[Baconeggcheese]

Sorry for the massive post, I was trying to be thorough about the logs at first and then I ended up writing an essay. oi.

Just looking on your longest pull on 23 - 10 (try 18) she's actually 2nd on boss dmg barely beating out naelea and everyone is behind your rogue by a fairly large margin.
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/v4wu6...9741&target=69

She's also not aoeing reflections AT ALL while propheit is soaking up almost ALL of the dmg on reflections with naelea and divine pretty much soaking up the remainder.
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/v4wu6...9741&target=72

Those 2 things alone mean she isn't doing as bad as you think she's doing since you're probably just looking at overall dmg and not separating out the padding that's going on. That said she is messing up quite a few things rotationally.

Using the same pull as an example: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/v4wu6...9741&target=69

#1 most obnoxious thing in the world to me right now is she's spamming felflame quite a bit while using KJC, there's literally no reason to use felfame while using KJC. She has 52 fel flames which are inferior damage and inferior mana usage, you can think of a destruction locks mana a lot like a rogues energy. So think of it as her dumping large amounts of energy on a spell that does half as much dmg.

She only gained the backdraft buff 10 times over the course of your entire pull even though she used it 21 times. To begin with, with the duration of that fight she's already not spending all of her conflag charges (she should be), 2nd the only reason you would see someone gain backdraft all of 10 times is because she's allowing the buff to stay up and the charges are just getting refreshed. From the looks of things she's probably sitting on conflag until it hits 2 charges and then using both at the same time and spamming incinerate or something reminiscent of that. This also goes hand in hand with her spamming felflame instead of using incinerate, if you take a look at the number of conflags she uses and the number of incinerates she casts over the course of the fight you'll notice

21 conflags x3 charges per = 63 backdraft charges.
37 incinerate hits + 26 incinerate crits = 63 incinerates cast.

coincidence? She's ONLY casting incinerate when she has backdraft charges and then filling the gaps in with felflame. On top of that she isn't using all of her conflag charges where she should have around 31 conflagrate casts over 5:54, she has 21. That's wasted backdraft procs which is wasted potential incinerate damage AND wasted mana AND wasted ember generation on top of using felflame which is your least mana efficient spell which is wasting more damage, mana, and ember generation.

These are basics of her rotation she could very easily fix and see a decent dps bump, she's fine on immolate up time but she NEEDS to be spending her conflag charges and NEEDS to stop using felflame and spam incinerate a LOT more.

Now on to burning ember abilities!, she's not using her embers effectively *at all*. She at minimum had 26 embers over the course of that fight including the one you start with (I cant see the 15% rng gains from conflag and incinerate) and she only spent 13 of them. She spent 4 embers on ember tap, which she shouldn't NEED to do unless she's taking unnecessary damage or your healers aren't getting people topped off. Looking at your logs you guys took 26 million damage from mark of arrogance, the average 10 man heroic raid takes around 4 million. You guys need a better dispelling solution. Aside from that she wasted at least 13 entire embers worth of chaosbolts / shadowburns / aoe to just sitting there letting them rot.

Until she gets comfortable remembering to spend embers properly she should as a hard rule spend an ember on chaosbolt every time she hits 3 embers. and then spend ALL she has whenever she has strong procs or dark soul up.

That fight also has a lot of opportunities to use shadowburn to generate embers, she used shadowburn once the entire fight where she should be trying to use it on corrupted fragments, a reflection or two if you aren't ember capped after aoeing (or if she's not aoeing at all), and manifestation of pride. Shadowburning an add just before it dies gives you a free ember so it's not just padding but a decent dmg increase every time for a single gcd.

She also used havoc once the entire fight. She needs to be using havoc at every opportunity, on sha of pride this is usually when a fragment or manifestation is up. You can havoc the boss and then chaosbolt the add or if you have enough time try to get a few shadowburns off. You can also havoc a reflection and then shadowburn a different one and generate 2 additional embers from a single cast.

ANYWAY that's pretty much all I got for now. If you actually bothered to read through all that kudos! I hope it helps.

[Vyncent]

Other than that Sparkuggz got some great pointers @ www sparkuggz com[/B]

Best source for help with this matter. Cannot be recommended highly enough. Sparkuggz is a member of the guild Method, and in a recent Youtube video was pulling over 1 million DPS on Garrosh Hellscream. One shot alone that I played back at least four times to make sure that I was not imagining it, was 1.9 million in damage.