When to use chaos wave?

[Nyang]

Please explain to me what is the difference between single target and multiple targets.
If on single target, it's not worth it to trade the amount of fury you lose for the extra damage, then why is it worth it to trade 4 times as much fury for 4 times as much extra damage? If the HoG dot hits multiple targets, you get fury from each of them.

Because demonology's AoE fury spenders(aka Immolation Aura) are so weak that fury becomes less important in comparison to pure damage as the fight has more targets, since you are spending fury mostly on single target skills anyway.

The extra ToC/SF casts you would get with the fury from HoG don't compensate the damage you would get from a CW that hits all targets for much more damage.

[Tramzh]

Do this if you want to have terrible damage.

ppl have tried it for bosses like twins with good success. I think rank 2 or 3 on that fight prebuff tried a rotation with 0 HoGs, works better without specing DB as Nyangs sims points out though.

[Karigg]

Since CW scales with meta mastery, it deals much more damage than HoG at higher gear levels and/or during DS.
SP coefficients for both:

HoG - 132% main damage + 103,68% DoT
CW - 200% damage

Since you can roll HoG into 2 stacks, the true value for the dot is around 155,52% SP, since you get 3 stacks of the DoT for every 2 casts, more or less depending on how close you roll the stacks together. Assuming you have 0 mastery rating, the values for both are:

Normal
HoG - 287,52*1,08=310,5216
CW - 200*1,2528=250,56

With Dark Soul
HoG - 287,52*1,38=396,7776
CW - 200*2,4288=485,76

So even without mastery, CW deals more damage than CW during DS. However, since HoG gives fury, it's still better for single target. But for multiple targets, the extra damage compensates the loss in fury because CW becomes by far the most damaging spell on our arsenal.

This simulation is with 2 targets, using CW only during dark soul:


For demonbolt, the CW profile is tied with the HoG one, but it isn't optimized for use with procs. So you'll still probably get more mileage out of CW even with DB. It's a clear gain to use it with cataclysm, though.

Fantastic post, with actual substance, thankyou

How did you calculate the coefficient that I highlighted?

[Deleted]

Please explain to me what is the difference between single target and multiple targets.
If on single target, it's not worth it to trade the amount of fury you lose for the extra damage, then why is it worth it to trade 4 times as much fury for 4 times as much extra damage? If the HoG dot hits multiple targets, you get fury from each of them.

My understanding is that, while HoG gains (fury generation and damage caused) will grow linearly with the number of adds as you have pointed, CW's damage also increases linearly, but it's cost per target reduces. So it's not that HoG becomes worse, but that CW becomes better, since it will do more damage/fury spent.

Also everything else the others have said about being fury capped at the end of Tectus fight.

[Soulzar]

Koragh - I prefer HoGing the adds for the df to do more demonbolts, but if you wanna cheese wclogs you can cata/chaos wave like that one guy did

Wonder what generated more DF, HoG dot ticks, or 200df per killing blow on those adds.

[Nyang]

Fantastic post, with actual substance, thankyou

How did you calculate the coefficient that I highlighted?

It's 1,38(base mastery plus the 30% from dark soul) multiplied by 1,76, which is the meta damage increase.

One thing I didn't account for on my calcs is that the HoG dot scales with haste, while CW doesn't. So on a fight like tectus, where most of the AoE is with BL/Hero up, HoG might be better, especially if you have Shards of Nothing and/or lots of haste on your gear.

[splosher]

My parse has been linked here a few times, so I guess I'll explain why chaos wave on that fight in particular. The reason I used chaos wave over HoG is because our extra adds die so fast that HoG will never tick fully on them and Chaos wave does its full damage without having to tick. Seems better to me to use Chaos wave in the situation that you have 4-5 adds up in the 2nd phase than HoG unless for some reason your guild isn't completely nuking the small adds like mine was. And in the last phase I used chaos waves because I had a trinkets potion and darksoul up which makes Chaos Wave really good, and the last chaos waves I did because the adds were about to die and I wanted them to take full damage from chaos wave as opposed to HoG being able to tick maybe 2 times.