[6.2] Demonology Warlock Guide

[FurtyIRL]

That's what I'm saying. You don't have to and very rarely will enter a DS phase with 10 MC stacks and 1000 Fury. You use your MC stacks with your procs (DS, Archmage ring, BMC) and DS equally. You don't need to overspend your MC stacks since once your procs are done hitting SF without them is not worth doing.

If you lead into your DS dump with a shadowflame and then chaos wave once or twice during DS that all but guarantees you 2+ stacks during the dump. Usually I bank 5 stacks minimum, 8 maximum.

[Joryy]

Demonbolts power comes from Dark Souls 30% Mastery buffer, not from the Intellect (or Multistrike) buff you might get from any ring, trinket or enchant. Regardless there is still merit to doing a 2/3 Demonbolt cycle since CW is so strong right now under the same terms it gives you a buffer to do 3 Demonbolts while moving and having the option of casting CW.

Right. I'm talking about lining up both. Without the 4th bolt, you have a huge buffer to find a proc. Then you DS, bolt 2/3 times, probably CW as the proc ends, and then a soulfire or two under the rest of the DS. In my head it's pretty similar to the current style, you just DS+Bolt -> metaSF during GSR/BMC/Ring instead of metaSF. This spends slightly less fury under DS than the 4bolt style, but you will have better DPF, and nearly always get to bolt w/ a proc.

I don't have a lot of confidence that its better than Serv, I just think it's an unexplored area.

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You cannot really start fishing at 540 because you won't spend 540 fury on DS when you could spend 1000.
With less than 800 fury, I would say you better wait for DS and with more than 800 then you should use your fourth DB over SF.

Going for a 20s DS is a bad idea, because then you cannot spend more than 1000 fury every 2 minutes + 1000 fury during the fight.

I don't think you understand what I was proposing.

If the proc comes at 540, your DS is like: bolt bolt SF CW (proc ends) SF CW (ds ends)
If the proc comes at 800, your DS is like: bolt bolt bolt SF CW <something>

[Woz]

Right. I'm talking about lining up both. Without the 4th bolt, you have a huge buffer to find a proc. Then you DS, bolt 2/3 times, probably CW as the proc ends, and then a soulfire or two under the rest of the DS. In my head it's pretty similar to the current style, you just DS+Bolt -> metaSF during GSR/BMC/Ring instead of metaSF. This spends slightly less fury under DS than the 4bolt style, but you will have better DPF, and nearly always get to bolt w/ a proc.

I don't have a lot of confidence that its better than Serv, I just think it's an unexplored area.

That is 100% how I'd play it if that was the case as well.

[Deleted]

I'd say that will never be true in a realistic situation. You'll never be able to predict MC procs or reliably be able to sit at or near 1000 Fury for a DS phase in a real time situation that would ever be ideal.

This is why I mentionned a small margin. 7 MC stacks and 900 fury seems fine.

Say you have 9 MC procs, just casted your HoG stack and GSR procs but DS is 20s away - you're not going to just ignore the GSR proc in favour of DS that's 20s away especially when you can dump 4 maybe 5 Soulfires with GSR, and still have 10s to generate some additional Fury for the DS phase that's still another 10s away. Heck, even sitting at 9 MC procs after your HoG stack chances are you'll be wasting MC procs due to overcapping.

I would definitely ignore the GSR proc which is a 21% damage increase in favor of DS which is 66% damage increase. If I am close to 1000 fury, I would spend 2 MC procs in meta, otherwise I would spend them in caster form during the GSR to get the most from DS.

You're arguing the "simcraft way" of thinking/playing where all the ideal circumstances are happening at once on a completely stand still fight where you literally don't have to move even an inch and there are literally no fights like that and there hasn't been in two expansions so even if you "play perfectly" you should never see 10 MC procs and 1000 Fury ever, unless you have chain procs of HoG from Corruption being on 8 adds for the entire duration of the fight.

Everything is never ideal and I did not claim this is the way things should be no matter the situation.
However I do not understand why you could not get 10 MC procs and 1000 fury every 2 minutes.

So this kinda answers my question a few posts above, assuming I'm reading this right as you advocating prioritizing Meta SFs on procs rather than banking them for DS ?

If you have to choose between procs and DS, always favor DS.
However, if you have to move during DS you may not be able to spend 12 procs during DS or even 8 so you don't need to save that much.

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I don't think you understand what I was proposing.

If the proc comes at 540, your DS is like: bolt bolt SF CW (proc ends) SF CW (ds ends)
If the proc comes at 800, your DS is like: bolt bolt bolt SF CW <something>

If you use DS with 540 fury, then this is a big waste. I would rather spend 1000 fury with a 66% damage increase, than for example 540 fury with a 100% damage increase (DS + GSR), while I would definitely go for the 100% damage increase at 800 fury.
If you have 800 fury or more though, 4 DB + something will be better than any other combination.

[Rayaleith]

Man... They really should make 3 charges HoG baseline at T18. Someone mentioned this and it will feel horrible.

[striderZA]

Man... They really should make 3 charges HoG baseline at T18. Someone mentioned this and it will feel horrible.

I would like to see a return of the T16 4PC, free chaos waves all round! But yeah, only 2 charges and no free charge procs is going to suck.

[mauserr]

Any reason to still use DB over Serv?

[Rayaleith]

Any reason to still use DB over Serv?

Please not again. Read the last few pages, there are.. *cough* opinions for both talents.

[mauserr]

Please not again. Read the last few pages, there are.. *cough* opinions for both talents.

Not really feeling like reading through pages of bullshit and trolling accusations and whatnot. Figured I'd just ask someone who has unfortunately gone through the trash already.

[Woz]

Any reason to still use DB over Serv?

Yes and no.

It has a very high upside if RNG goes your way but it has a very low downside if it doesn't.

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I would definitely ignore the GSR proc which is a 21% damage increase in favor of DS which is 66% damage increase. If I am close to 1000 fury, I would spend 2 MC procs in meta, otherwise I would spend them in caster form during the GSR to get the most from DS.

Doesn't make sense to ignore the GSR proc under the situation I outlined though, for example;

1:00 - GSR procs and you have 8 MC stacks
1:00 to 1:10 - Spend 3 procs + CW in GSR (you now have 6 MC stacks)
1:10 to 1:20 - Generate Fury/MC procs (There would be a HoG stack between this time, not always but most of the time)
1:20 to 1:40 - DS phase (Even if you get 0 more MC stacks before the start of your DS phase, you can CW for a guaranteed SF at least once during the DS phase leaving you with 7 MC stacks, bare minimum)

There is plenty of time for both dumps with more than enough procs for it as well.

Everything is never ideal and I did not claim this is the way things should be no matter the situation.
However I do not understand why you could not get 10 MC procs and 1000 fury every 2 minutes.

You certainly can and will generate 10 MC stacks and 1000 Fury every 2 minutes but in a real world situation you're going to have procs in between that 2 minutes which will take it's toll on your Fury and MC situation. You'll be able to generate far more than just 10 MC procs and 1000 Fury every 2 minutes considering back in the DB days you were able to generate 860+ Fury in a minute or so and we had worse gear.

You will have to make the decision to spend your MC stacks on your procs and "risk" not having 10 MC stacks and 1000 Fury going into a DS phase. Getting people to practice what you're preaching will turn them into bad players who sit on 1000 Fury or get to 1000 Fury exactly, waste some of the passive Fury generation you have going on, cast 2 Meta SF to drop to 840 Fury, drop out of Meta, continue building and then overcapping Fury waiting for DS phase.

It's a horrible thing to suggest people start doing because I guarantee it's going to lead to worse DPS.

[Tramzh]

This soul fire vs ToC shit again...

First of all, it's not correct in any real situation to cap any of your resources EXCEPT if you are within less than 10 seconds of a heavy burn and need every inch of damage you can possibly dish out, I.E. maidens last phase, blast furnace elementalists (which happened due to incorrect play in the first place, but whatever).

2nd, there's not a single boss fight in entire brf except gruul and oregorger (which are rather irrelevant) that will allow you to get off 10 soul fires every DS and never soul fire outside of meta above 25% boss health unless you got aspect of the fox as your personal cool down. Also my personal conclusion on a fight like twins or iron maidens (and many others) is that aggressively using soul fires in caster form,sparing around 5-7 stacks for DS or really heavy proc lineups is a dps gain unless you are standing in the bombs because of the lower cast time and mobility gain of using ToC, at least if you do blade dash soaking. It is simply not affordable to soul fire in meta outside of DS or big proc lineups on a lot of fights with movement as it limits our mobility drastically and it's overall a very minimal difference (we are talking 1-2% less dps here) for a major mobility boost.

And like with every single X vs Y on the last few pages it seems as if you people don't have anything better to discuss so better provoke each other and follow up with weak responses that barely goes over infraction level or random try hard claims and "facts" that only matters in vacuum just to keep it going.

[Deleted]

1:00 to 1:10 - Spend 3 procs + CW in GSR (you now have 6 MC stacks)

You cannot be serious... You would really use a CW outside DS just because you get a proc ?
Maybe you missed some of my earlier posts, but outside DS, CW does less damage than HoG and you lose 100 fury in the process.

You will have to make the decision to spend your MC stacks on your procs and "risk" not having 10 MC stacks and 1000 Fury going into a DS phase. Getting people to practice what you're preaching will turn them into bad players who sit on 1000 Fury or get to 1000 Fury exactly, waste some of the passive Fury generation you have going on, cast 2 Meta SF to drop to 840 Fury, drop out of Meta, continue building and then overcapping Fury waiting for DS phase.

It's a horrible thing to suggest people start doing because I guarantee it's going to lead to worse DPS.

I must be a horrible person, I thought this thread was about the most efficient way to play warlock.

[FurtyIRL]

You cannot be serious... You would really use a CW outside DS just because you get a proc ?
Maybe you missed some of my earlier posts, but outside DS, CW does less damage than HoG and you lose 100 fury in the process.

I must be a horrible person, I thought this thread was about the most efficient way to play warlock.

Can't you please stop typing things. Reading them is starting to legitimately hurt my brain You can't just say things like they're facts when you have zero logic, math/sims, or credibility and expect anyone to give a shit

[Woz]

You cannot be serious... You would really use a CW outside DS just because you get a proc ?
Maybe you missed some of my earlier posts, but outside DS, CW does less damage than HoG and you lose 100 fury in the process.

Ok sure, so don't do that CW and you'll have 5 stacks of MC, leaving you (bare minimum) to have 6 MC stacks to use, plus any others that you will generate in the process of HoG before your DS phase or CW during it.

But I guess you must agree with the rest of that scenario then because CW is the only thing you seemingly had an issue with - meaning that's how you would handle that situation? Because that's how it should be handled.

I must be a horrible person, I thought this thread was about the most efficient way to play warlock.

It's not about you as a person. I said it would be a horrible thing to start telling people to do because it will lead to very poor gameplay and overcapping of two resources we frequently use, Demonic Fury and MC stacks.

[Soulzar]

To be fair, what I get from Wormie's post is that he's trying to point out that demonbolt may be competitive again for single target short duration fight. He thinks that the ilvl buff helps out demonbolt more because it may have better scaling than other spells we currently have in our arsenals.

He's simply asking people to try it out on a fight such as gruul so that we may have more parses to compare with and I think it's a great idea. Simcraft is decent but obviously it's not the best nor the only options we have.

At this point in time, I imagine that any decent warlock in a slightly competent guild would already have this boss on farm already so why don't we just play around with it and use demonbolt for one time. I'm pretty certain that plenty of people, myself included would play a less than optimal spec in a farmed fight just to make it a bit less dull.

His log alone certainly isn't enough to make any claim that demonbolt is #1 but it is certainly adequate to spark my interest in demonbolt again. I'll probably try it out myself next week.

I personally feel these is nothing wrong with highlighting a No1 rank and opening up discussion on how the talent may be performing after recent changes. A 25% reduction and the community/Simcraft preaching GoServ/Serv is more than enough for many people to just blindly follow the pack and never ask questions or do personal evaluation.

Unfortunately, his wording of his final sentence IMO was a trigger for people receiving this negatively. It was not "Hey, DB performed extremely well for me this week after the ilvl bump. Here is why I think this may be. Request anybody farming to give it a shot so we can have more parses to compare to". Instead it reads and feels like "Guess everybody will be copying me and going DB because I got rank one parse"..

Personally, I have been using DB on Kromog and Thogar and its doing very well for me for the needed burst on Prio targets. It most certainly still retains that neish. I'd actually been considering the past few weeks to give it a try again and see how it compared given its performance on the aforementioned fights. Seeing how this has turned into a hot debate, I'll make sure to run it for next weeks Grull kill. I'm not exactly a top parser and I got a bunch of upgrades this week, so will be hard for me to compare personal results to this weeks, which was not my best pull.

All in all, the topic of discussion has my interest... however the approach from both sides could use a bit of fine tuning

[FurtyIRL]

I personally feel these is nothing wrong with highlighting a No1 rank and opening up discussion on how the talent may be performing after recent changes. A 25% reduction and the community/Simcraft preaching GoServ/Serv is more than enough for many people to just blindly follow the pack and never ask questions or do personal evaluation.

Unfortunately, his wording of his final sentence IMO was a trigger for people receiving this negatively. It was not "Hey, DB performed extremely well for me this week after the ilvl bump. Here is why I think this may be. Request anybody farming to give it a shot so we can have more parses to compare to". Instead it reads and feels like "Guess everybody will be copying me and going DB because I got rank one parse"..

Personally, I have been using DB on Kromog and Thogar and its doing very well for me for the needed burst on Prio targets. It most certainly still retains that neish. I'd actually been considering the past few weeks to give it a try again and see how it compared given its performance on the aforementioned fights. Seeing how this has turned into a hot debate, I'll make sure to run it for next weeks Grull kill. I'm not exactly a top parser and I got a bunch of upgrades this week, so will be hard for me to compare personal results to this weeks, which was not my best pull.

All in all, the topic of discussion has my interest... however the approach from both sides could use a bit of fine tuning

Speaking for myself only I've tested all three talents pretty extensively in-practice since the nerf. Don't really trust simcraft so generally I rely on empirical data; given we were still on Blackhand at the time and I had hundreds of pulls to see what was best I personally have a pretty good idea of what is best in *most* situations. Not going to speak for everyone here but I hardly ever rely on what the forum says and I just do my own thing based on my own testing. I think that people are equally misinterpreting DB to be this completely unused talent since 6.1 as well; there are still plenty of locks who run it at an only slight damage loss. I stand by what I said at the start, which is that if you play Serv/Serv poorly you are very likely to get better results out of DB since there is little to no optimization to be had. I think what gets my hackles up is people making sweeping generalizations and preaching stuff like facts with absolutely no data or math to back it up (see "scales better") and then they have the gall to be condescending about it. I think Octa had a very reasonable response when he just asked for any form of meaningful data but nothing was forthcoming.

[Deleted]

You can't just say things like they're facts when you have zero logic, math/sims, or credibility and expect anyone to give a shit

You just did. Please stop quoting me if you don't want to bring this constructive argument I have been waiting for since your first post.

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Ok sure, so don't do that CW and you'll have 5 stacks of MC, leaving you (bare minimum) to have 6 MC stacks to use, plus any others that you will generate in the process of HoG before your DS phase or CW during it.

If I want another stack of MC, then I will use CW during DS, when it will do 66% more damage, obviously.

But I guess you must agree with the rest of that scenario then because CW is the only thing you seemingly had an issue with - meaning that's how you would handle that situation? Because that's how it should be handled.

What do you want me to have an issue with ?
I already disagreed with the use of MC stacks during procs over DS, and I think you realize now that you can't have both.
The only remaining thing I could disagree with would be 1:10 to 1:20 generate fury/procs but I believe you figured this part right.

It's not about you as a person. I said it would be a horrible thing to start telling people to do because it will lead to very poor gameplay and overcapping of two resources we frequently use, Demonic Fury and MC stacks.

You should really stop being obsessed about this overcapping thing. As stated before, I believe something like 7 MC stacks and 900 fury is enough. This is what you should aim for. If you have less MC stacks, this is not a big deal.

[Deleted]

snip.

Out of curiosity, could you post some logs of how you fared with this "ignore all trinket procs" approach.

[Woz]

What do you want me to have an issue with ?
I already disagreed with the use of MC stacks during procs over DS, and I think you realize now that you can't have both.
The only remaining thing I could disagree with would be 1:10 to 1:20 generate fury/procs but I believe you figured this part right.

You can have both, I just outlined a situation where you can (and often) do have both. If your logic so such that you won't be able to generate a single extra MC stack either through HoG, CW or an Imp in 20s that's crazy.

I gave you a scenario where you start with 8 MC stacks, use 3 on a trinket proc - left with 5, have 10 more seconds to generate at least one more stack of MC before your DS phase giving you 6 before DS, then using a CW or just randomly generating another stack giving you 6 or 7 MC stacks which you just said in this same post that you think "it's not a big deal".

As stated before, I believe something like 7 MC stacks and 900 fury is enough. This is what you should aim for. If you have less MC stacks, this is not a big deal.

[Deleted]

Out of curiosity, could you post some logs of how you fared with this "ignore all trinket procs" approach.

Many players here seem to completely ignore what trinkets procs are actually worth, which is not much compared to our major DPS cooldown.
I would call rather it not panicking over trinkets procs.

Besides, what was discussed lately was only the case when DS phase is close.
The original discussion was about weither you should only use meta SF during trinket procs or it depends on the situation.

In my opinion Demonology is more about planning than reacting to things.