[Help Me!] The "Fix My DPS" Thread (Read first post before posting)

[gherkin]

5 Dooms + 1 Agony = Minimum 5 minute, 24 second fight. This is 384 seconds. Thus you should have 34-38 Conflags. You only have 26.
You should have had 29 - 32 Chaos bolts, you only have 19.

Your immolate needs work too - 28 casts means 150 ticks, but you only have 106. Either that means you were casting Immolate on adds or you were clipping a lot.

Don't Immolate the adds, just rain of fire. If Conflag comes off cooldown, switch back to XT and use it, then switch back - you're fishing for Pyroclasm buffs, which increases your dps by 6% x (Crit % + 30). Not using Conflag means less uptime meaning less damage from other spells.

Everything looks good numbers wise, for your gear.

[rfarris]

I have a couple of questions. Had I managed to get 38 conflags and 32 CBs, can you tell how much dps I would have had?

Secondly, wrt Rain of Fire. I use ForteXorcist. I am always confused about when to begin recasting RoF. Should I begin recasting between the last two ticks of RoF, or should I wait until the casting bar is completely gone? When I wait until the bar is completely gone it always seems like there is a delay before the rain starts again.

Thank you.

[Jasdevi]

Frankly im at a loss as to what to do about my dps, i think i should be doing alot more for the gear i have, see other classes and other locks do the same/more dps as me with the same or worse gear im not sure if im stacking something wrong? or if im using the wrong rotation. I hit a dummy for about 2 minutes and it averaged out around 4.3k, peaked at 4.7k I used CoE, Immolate > Conflag > Lifetap > Chaos bolt > Incinerate till i need to reapply immolate. http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...7jin&n=Jasdevi

does anyone have any suggestions or advice?

[rfarris]

...im using the wrong rotation. I hit a dummy for about 2 minutes and it averaged out around 4.3k, peaked at 4.7k I used CoE, Immolate > Conflag > Lifetap > Chaos bolt > Incinerate till i need to reapply immolate. http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...7jin&n=Jasdevi

does anyone have any suggestions or advice?

From the first page:

WHAT THIS IS NOT:

-Fix my spec plx???
-What is my next upgrade???
-What rotation should I use???
-HALP!


WHAT THIS IS:

-You have no clue why your (or someone elses) dps is so low
-You want to improve in general
-You are not satisfied with "Do X, Y, Z in that order" answers
-You want an answer better suited to your playstyle


WHAT WE NEED:

We can't help you if you don't help us. "I do 2500 dps in TOC25 HALP!" only shows us that you can't read this post. There are several tools out there that will help us analyze your output and thus be able to say exactly what the problem is. This is what you need to provide in your post.

Recommended: Combat Log Parse

[Modez]

Im running ForteXorcist, which gives me nice popups whenever CB or Conflagrate are off cooldown. Knowing when to cast what is not the problem as far as I'm concerned, but please let me know if I've missed something in the combatlogs (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/C...um/damageDone/). Like I said, the other locks just seem to get more Incinerates in, but 20%-30% more Incinerates strikes me as a lot. I can hardly imagine such a percentage being just skill, unless I'm a worse player than I thought.

Onyx (http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sh...+of+Hellscream)

Hey, sorry I never got back to you. Extensions for tax returns are due, so I've been busy.

Gear analysis
Hit Rating: 369 - just right
Crit Chance: 21.25% - a little low
Haste Rating: 389 - about 150 low
Spirit: 787 - too much

The first thing that jumps out if the spirit on your gear. While it is true we get 39% of this as spell power, it has a lower stat weight than haste or crit. Your haste is pretty low. Once you get in the 500's+ you can sneak in extra incinerates every so often before re-applying immolate. This goes a long way to upping your DPS. Crit will factor in higher also, as haste and crit have a synergy to them. So, if given the opportunity with drops, I would start heading in this direction.

Trinket usage
You may or may not know this, but I would recommend splicing your trinket use into incinerate. You can make a macro like this:

type /macro
select the '?' icon. I name my macros '.' The reason I name them . is because you cant see the name when you put it on your action bars.
in the macro box copy and paste this:

#showtooltip Incinerate
/use Living Flame
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Incinerate

What this will do is try to pop your trinket every time you cast incinerate. If it can't cast it, it will clear the error of 'That item isn't ready yet' or whatever so you don't get spammed with that every time you press the button. While it may be advantageous to 'hold' your trinkets sometimes, typically using them every time they are available outweighs that. It also uses it damn near the start of the fight so it is available asap.

WWS deconstruction
I am only going to review Koralon the Flame Watcher, as it is an ideal test due to the stand and nuke mechanics of the fight.

You cast (number of casts)
Chaos Bolt - 6
Immolate - 7
Conflag - 9
Incinerate - 42
CoD - 1
Corruption - 1
CoA - 1

You should have cast (125s encounter time):
Chaos Bolt - 10 (13.4s casting total)
Immolate - 8 (10.72s casting time total)
Conflag - 12 (16.08s GCD time used)
Incinerate - 19.95 (plug)
CoD - 2 (2.68s GCD used)
CoA - Unused
Corruption - Unused

These aren't going to be exact (due to clients coming in and interrupting my train of thought and lag), but I think you can see the difference between what you cast and the 'ideal'. Your Incinerate makes up 63.1% of your total damage. That should be closer to 48-52% with your levels of haste. This means you are spamming Incinerate more than you should at the expense of your other abilities.

Remember, your priority is always:
CoD > Immolate > Conflag > CB > Incinerate.

So, next time you do this fight try this to start off your rotation:
Run in right behind the tank until you get into range to hit it mob with CoD. Do so immediately, as any attack from the tank will do more than your 1 threat. Nobody will even notice if you do it exactly when the tank hits it.

While the GCD is counting down, start railing on your immolate button. As soon as it starts casting start railing on your chaos bolt button. As soon as it starts casting start railing on your Conflag button. As soon as it goes on the GCD, rail on Immolate (which is now popping your trinket) and start going to town.

Your Conflag will be up first. Hit it, then if Immolate will drop within 1.34 seconds, cast immolate. If it won't, start up your Chaos Bolt. Remember not to clip your Immolate (cast where the spell will complete before the next one lands), but if the immolate on the target has 1s left on it, you will not finish casting [and therefore not clip] until a split second AFTER the last tick of immolate on the target and it falls off. Remember that Immolate on the target increases Incinerate and Chaos Bolt damage.

Work on weaving your other abilities in more. Work on Immolate re-application timing. This can be done on a target dummy.

[gherkin]

I have a couple of questions. Had I managed to get 38 conflags and 32 CBs, can you tell how much dps I would have had?

Highballing it...
12 extra conflags and 13 extra chaos bolts... but since cast time is static, you have to back out an equivelent number of incinerates...(1.5s Conflag x 12 + 2.0s Chaos x 13) / 2.25 Incinerate = 20 Incinerates

Keep in mind that this number is averaged and does not include backdraft, which skews it a bit.

280,000 / 29 = 9655 average conflags = 115860 Damage
201,500 / 19 = 10605 average chaos = 137868 Damage
MINUS
686,000 / 78 = 8794 average incinerate = 175880 Damage
EQUALS
77848 Extra Damage, or around 200 dps assuming a 5:30 fight. This does not include more Pyroclasm uptime (another... 1% total dps increase) nor more Backdrafts (a big boost as you would cast more Incinerates)

If I had to guess, I'd say 500+ dps total.

Secondly, wrt Rain of Fire. I use ForteXorcist. I am always confused about when to begin recasting RoF. Should I begin recasting between the last two ticks of RoF, or should I wait until the casting bar is completely gone? When I wait until the bar is completely gone it always seems like there is a delay before the rain starts again.

Thank you.

I wait until the cast bar is gone. Other people might be able to chime in on this.

[vsop]

10fps is whats killing you. Turn everything down.
-Make sure Multisampling is set to 24x 24x 1x
-Turn off Shadows

What Video card do you have? How much RAM does your pc have?

Also, update your video drivers (Nvidia 174.74 or so caused "Windowed Mode" to run at 60% capacity). This sometimes fixes problems as WoW upgrades things but the old drivers don't work as advertised. Blizzard then complains, and the video card company jumps and asks "How high?" mid air.

WoW is driving 20% of their mid-grade card sales. They listen :P

yeah i'll try turning vid sensors even lower tonight.

vid card - geforce 9800m gts. 1gig. system = 4gig ddr3 the machine is a beast, and it shouldnt perform so badly, dont know why it ever dips that low. a mage in our guild has the exact same laptop, and he's always 60ish fps. might have to just reformat and start fresh.

as for the vid drivers, best place to go nvidia's website?

[gherkin]

Yes.

Try three things

1) Run in the same Resolution as your desktop
2) Turn off Windowed Mode
3) ~just~ disable Shadows. Your ram will fix the rest.


That ~should~ fix all your problems. If not, reply here again.

[Jenerena]

Frankly im at a loss as to what to do about my dps, i think i should be doing alot more for the gear i have, see other classes and other locks do the same/more dps as me with the same or worse gear im not sure if im stacking something wrong? or if im using the wrong rotation. I hit a dummy for about 2 minutes and it averaged out around 4.3k, peaked at 4.7k I used CoE, Immolate > Conflag > Lifetap > Chaos bolt > Incinerate till i need to reapply immolate. http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...7jin&n=Jasdevi

does anyone have any suggestions or advice?

Ok, first off, why are you using life tap straight after a conflag? Complete waste of backdraft. You need to use life tap as soon as you enter combat, before you throw CoE so that your spells will benefit from it from the start. Your rotation should be more like this:

Life tap (rank 1 preferably) > CoE > Immolate > Conflag > CB > Incinerate.

I'm guessing you logged out in your pvp gear/spec? Can't really comment on your gear as it looks to me you have some pvp gear equipped?

As for the dummy dps, don't worry. I only do about 4.5k dps on the dummy yet in 25man raids i push out over 6k.

[gherkin]

Ok, first off, why are you using life tap straight after a conflag? Complete waste of backdraft.

Backdraft only gets used by Destruction spells. Life Tap is Affliction, as are all Curses.

[DreamOfTheRood]

Yeah, he's not wrong per se. It's a good idea to life tap right before entering combat if you've got the glyph, because you'll get that extra +sp boost. But backdraft only works on destruction spells, so it's not a big deal.

[gherkin]

I thought the same way he did for a month or so - if I can correct a mistake I made then I will do so.


By the way, to everyone up until now and yet to come, thank you for making this thread a success. I've enjoyed it and look forward to more problems to solve.

[dmrazor]

Firstly, thanks for this extensive response. I never realized my spirit was too high so that's a point to start changing. As for haste, I was aware that it's low and I'm working on that. Kinda depends on the drops you get though.

Trinket usage
<snip>
#showtooltip Incinerate
/use Living Flame
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Incinerate

What this will do is try to pop your trinket every time you cast incinerate. If it can't cast it, it will clear the error of 'That item isn't ready yet' or whatever so you don't get spammed with that every time you press the button.

I have a question about this one. Doesn't trying to use the trinket cost you a GCD each time it's *not* available? If so I'll be losing a lot of GCD's here. It's something I can easily try out though and I will.

These aren't going to be exact (due to clients coming in and interrupting my train of thought and lag), but I think you can see the difference between what you cast and the 'ideal'. Your Incinerate makes up 63.1% of your total damage. That should be closer to 48-52% with your levels of haste. This means you are spamming Incinerate more than you should at the expense of your other abilities.

Ok, I must have read the logs wrongly then. I was under the impression the main thing that made the other lock beat me were Incinerates. If I compare myself with the top lock for that fight:

Onyx the other guy
Inc. 42 51
Conf 9 7
CB 6 9
Imm. 7 10
Imm. 17 ticks 18 ticks


BTW, I'm a bit stumped by the Immolate uptime calculations in worldoflogs. 17 ticks for a 2:15 fight would calculate to 37.7% uptime, according to worldoflogs my uptime is 53.6%. For the other guy, with 1 more tick it's 79.7%???

Your point is taken though.. keep Immolate up all the time! Btw... Gherkin, my dps on Twins ended up around 7.9K this week, less movement is more dps. And so we learn

Thanks again,

Onyx.

[gherkin]

Re: Trinkets
Trinkets require that the GCD be up (ie not waiting for the gcd) but do not consume the gcd itself.

Re: DPS Increase
Grats on Twins ^^

Re: Immolate uptime.
That's fucked up. I'll take a peek a bit later unless someone beats me to it.

[Jenerena]

Firstly, thanks for this extensive response. I never realized my spirit was too high so that's a point to start changing. As for haste, I was aware that it's low and I'm working on that. Kinda depends on the drops you get though.

There's nothing wrong with having all that spirit really but that's only if you take the life tap glyph (which you should have). BUT since your haste is low don't prioritise spirit over it. Your crit is fine to be honest, don't worry about crit too much.

I have been having trouble on the Twins too, though my problem is just getting hammered by the orbs or not switching colour. It's a pretty complicated fight to understand and it's easy to get very mixed up. Hopefully i will get it soon enough, seem to find it easier in a lag free 10 man raid...

[Kuriozal]

Hello I have a problem with my dps. I dont know why but it is very low.

Here is my gear and build http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sh...gion&n=Gynvael

I know that i lack with haste and i'm thinking about changing my gems with crit to gems with haste. What do u think about that?

I use rotation: CoE(or CoD, depends on raid setup) - immo - cb - conf - inci inci inci

All the time I have life tap buff on me.

[Jenerena]

Yes, please, get rid of those crit gems. In your chest, get a 23xsp and 12sp/10haste gem, put a straight 23sp gem in your gloves (you don't need the bonus), put two spellpower gems and one sp/spirit gem in the cord and straight 23sp gems in your legs. Change the enchant on your bracers to the +30 spell power, change the enchant on your cloak to +23 haste, run Totc normal and grab the Abyssal rune trinket (alot of haste), ditch the darkmoon one. Do the daily heroic and any totc raids you can get into (or do with guild), save up badges and buy the wand, shoulders (non hit) and ring (emblems of triumph).

You are also either over the hit cap if you raid with a boomkin or spriest, and under if not (17% if not).

[Modez]

@ DMRazor

Looking back I had a brain fart when calculating your total CB. I based that off a 1.5 sec cast (calc'ed off immolates cast time not CB, clients were coming in the office) so that number should be slightly lower and incinerate should be slightly higher on number of casts.

Twins is not the best fight to check against other locks. While yes, there are many stand and nuke portions of the fight, there are also things which severaly limit your casting compared to another person.

- You may have needed to grab some balls since none have happened along near you
- You may have had to color swap more than someone else depending on the strat used
- The shield may have gone up on the target you are not already on more often and you had to switch depending on the strat used

Try to look at fights like Ignis and Flame Watcher. If you are not on shatter duty then these are two good encounters to really nail down what you may be doing compared to others.

As others have said, it will not eat your GCD to try to pop a trinket that is unavailable. Macroing it in with the macro I listed (and you can add/change the Living Flame to something else as you get it, like Trinket of the Badass On Use Proc) will do nothing to hinder you.

Drops are drops. Sometimes they are had to get.

Can you provide a link to the other locks WWS and armory? I'll be more than happy to look into this - or is it a lock included in your WWS.

[Modez]

Rain of fire usage (maximizing)

I wait until the cast bar is gone. Other people might be able to chime in on this.

I don't use Forte, I just use quartz. In the same vein though, it works like mind flay in quartz or forte.

When you cast rain of fire, there are ticks based on the % of the cast. The first tick is at 75% cast time remaining, 50%, 25%, 0% (therefore haste decreases time between ticks, never total number of ticks). Why people see low numbers on RoF it is due to clipping the last tick to recast early.

EX: My rain of fire takes 6.7 seconds to complete the channel.

6.7s remaining cast starts
5.025s remaining and first tick, I hit the Rain of fire key again to get the target reticule up and place it where I will want to recast it once my channel has finished
3.35s remaining and 2nd tick, I am still holding the target reticule on screen to where I will want to cast it (have not recast it yet)
1.675s remaining and 3rd tick, I am still holding the target reticule on screen to where I will want to cast it (have not recast it yet)
0s -> 6.7s remaining, I wait until I see the 4th damage tick and then IMMEDIATELY cast it again (reticule was already in position)
5.025s remaining and 1st tick, repeat from above

If you do it in this manner you will not clip your rain of fire, and will see significant increases in DPS from it. The most common mistake of using the spell is the clipping of the last tick. You must let it happen and be ready to click (already have next reticule up) immediately following it. You can practice this timing on target dummies - there is an art to it [as it depends on your connection speed, mod usage (where to cast in the current cast bar or after and how long after) and local system latency (read: graphics card)], but everyone can learn it for their system/situation.

To see if you are doing it right, practice on a dummy while looking at your combat log. There should be only milliseconds of delay between the last tick and the recast. Get this number as low as you can without clipping the last tick, and you have then mastered rain of fire.

[Kuriozal]

Yes, please, get rid of those crit gems. In your chest, get a 23xsp and 12sp/10haste gem, put a straight 23sp gem in your gloves (you don't need the bonus), put two spellpower gems and one sp/spirit gem in the cord and straight 23sp gems in your legs. Change the enchant on your bracers to the +30 spell power, change the enchant on your cloak to +23 haste, run Totc normal and grab the Abyssal rune trinket (alot of haste), ditch the darkmoon one. Do the daily heroic and any totc raids you can get into (or do with guild), save up badges and buy the wand, shoulders (non hit) and ring (emblems of triumph).

You are also either over the hit cap if you raid with a boomkin or spriest, and under if not (17% if not).

ok done with gems. Should i use firestone or spellstone?