Destro Rotation: what works best

[Bromdor]

Alright so i have been currently keeping immolate up by only casting it when it is about to fall off. This forcing me to caste it during the backdraft buff. I have found it to actually be decreasing my dps. So what i wanted to bring a point to is that the back draft buff reduces you cd by 30%. My conflages and Chaos Bolts crit from 13-15k (depending on raid comp). immolate crits for what 4k at most i think, i cant remember at the moment. So why would u waste a global cooldown on a 4k hit, when you can be dropping your 13k bombs. dps is based on "damage per second" so if you caste your nasty spells faster your dps goes up. If you waste your backdraft buff on immolate arent you actually losing dps?

[Kelpie]

If you waste your backdraft buff on immolate arent you actually losing dps?

[/b]

The short answer: [b]No

The reasoning:

If conflag comes up but immolate will fall off before you have time to get 3 incinerates off you have 4 options:

• Incinerate even if immolate has fallen off
• Waste one charge of Backdraft refreshing immolate right after it falls off
• Clip immolate
• Don't use conflag until immolate falls off, then you refresh immolate and conflag

Clipping immolate will always be a DPS loss, no matter what, so its not a good solution.
Waiting to use Conflag at a certain time, even though its off of c/d and ready, is also a DPS loss, since in a given time frame (say the duration of a boss fight) instead of casting 30 conflags, you only casted 22 because every 3rd one you had to wait for immolate to fall off.
Using incinerate without immolate on the target is essentially just saying 'Yep, make my incinerate do 1/4 less damage' so thats not a realistic option either.

When it comes down to it: All 4 of the 4 aforementioned options result in a DPS loss than if Conflag + Immolate timed perfectly together, but using a backdraft charge on immolate turns out to be the least of all 4 evils, so that's what's 'best'

[Bromdor]

Alright cool thanks for the intelligent response

[gherkin]

Casting Immolate during Backdraft will only result in a DPS loss if you clip the GCD. Otherwise the difference is too small to notice.

Here's the details: (Edit: lol kelpie, you did short I did long)

Lets say you have 10 chaos bolts (2s) (for sake of simplicity) and two immolates (1.5s) and zero haste. This takes 23 seconds.

Now lets say you get 6 spells at 30% haste. The calculation for this is Time / 1.3 = New Time.
If you spent all 6 charges on Chaos bolt, your new time is:
4 x 2 + 2 x 1.5 + 6 x 2 / 1.3 = 20.231s

If you spent 4 charges on Chaos bolt and two on Immolate, your new time is:
6 x 2 + 2 x 1.5 / 1.3 + 4 x 2 / 1.3 = 20.461s

Total difference: .230s

Now lets assume you can sustain 5000 dps: 5000 x .230 = 1150 dps every 20.5s in this situation. This is a ~60 dps loss.

I won't even go into the details on what happens when you Chaos Bolt or Incinerate without Immolate up (10% damage loss to that cast) but suffice it to say, is at most a 60 dps loss worth it, especially considering you won't be benefiting from Fire and Brimstone as much?


When thinking "Wow my dps went down now that I'm casting Immolate during Backdraft" you have to ask yourself:
1) Did the haste bonus make me clip my last tick?
2) Did the haste on my gear + raid buffs + backdraft push me under 1s?

[Bromdor]

Yea what probably is happening is that for some reason i came to thinking that clipping it was a better option then spending a backdraft tick, so ive just been out of practice with it. I just wanted to make sure before i really went into using it as my rotation that it is the right way to go if im going to spend time perfecting it

[Firefly]

I chose to let immolate fall off b/c when you raid 25 man you usually have a 2nd or even more warlocks on your raid and incinerate does the same dmg no matter whose immolate is up and - how i expierienced it - normally at least one of them is up. but when i am in 10man i also 'waste' one charge, since immolate+2 incinerate does more dps than 3 incinerate w/o immolate. i tested this issue some time ago and i really found the best results in this option.

[gherkin]

I chose to let immolate fall off b/c when you raid 25 man you usually have a 2nd or even more warlocks on your raid and incinerate does the same dmg no matter whose immolate is up and - how i expierienced it - normally at least one of them is up. but when i am in 10man i also 'waste' one charge, since immolate+2 incinerate does more dps than 3 incinerate w/o immolate. i tested this issue some time ago and i really found the best results in this option.

Thanks for the clarification - I was unaware that the 2+ warlock immolate issue was still occuring.

[Bromdor]

i think the option i will go with is life tap CoD immo conflage chaosbolt inc (keeping immo conf and chaos bolt up when needed) i stopped clipping and have gotten back the hang of correct dot management. and have gotten back to the dps i should be at... Thanks for everyones help