Warlock patch 5.4 discussion

[weakdots]

I honestly cant even take you seriously anymore, your 'Theorycrafting' is so full of bullshit its mind blowing, you are literally pulling numbers out of your ass and trying to sell them as facts.

Allow me to pick a few holes in the above post.

The 2 part - Increases the critical chance of incinerate and immolate for 10 seconds

As i stated in my post above, that is never ever going to have any impact on your standard rotation because the 4 part is stronger for refreshing immolate with, and you still wouldnt cast incin over chaos with int procs.

Haste vs Crit - Haste is stronger on live because of the potential ember regen you get from keeping up rain of fire, because this is removed from the single target rotation crit is now the second best secondary behind mastery because of the GCD issues with incin.

My arguement doesnt match my conclusion - Are you like new here or something, there are some incredibly good theorycrafters in this thread, you based this on me saying the 2 part was practically worthless, which it is and then proceeded to ramble on about some shit with chaos bolt.

That last part of your post is actually so full of shit i dont even know where to start.

TLDR - If you wanna start throwing the crap about here that you are posting above at least go back it up with something other than, ive went beating on dummies and this is my conclusion.

- - - Updated - - -



This part was amusing because i actually said above that critical will be yor second best secondary, if you are going to reply to someone's post at least read it.

glad someone finally said something, his posts about 'testing' just seemed like the biggest bunch of gibberish ive ever read on this forum, thought it might be a language thing, but every post i was just like 'what?"

if you actually posted some proof to back up your 'testing' you could get some credit or even have a basis with which people could start a meaningful discussion, but up to this smoothmeduso you have posted nothing of substance.

[Machinesoul]

Yeah unsubstantiated theory crafting can cause thread bloat

What are folks thoughts on Fel flame vs Incinerate in destro rotation? As suggested earlier in this thread, using Fel flame most of the time actually feels pretty nice. I've been switching back to Incinerate primarily for backdraft proc, meta/lust and FnB AoE scenarios. Damage and ember generation seems reasonable.

[Smoothmeduso]

glad someone finally said something, his posts about 'testing' just seemed like the biggest bunch of gibberish ive ever read on this forum, thought it might be a language thing, but every post i was just like 'what?"

The video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fip29LNV18E

if you actually posted some proof to back up your 'testing' you could get some credit or even have a basis with which people could start a meaningful discussion, but up to this smoothmeduso you have posted nothing of substance.

This test is based upon the destruction spec, It proves that one can reach 95%-100% critical strike chance every 2 minutes. To view it watch the opener and simply skip to 2 minutes, 4 minutes, and 6 minutes. This is not a standard rotation or even one that I made, this test was based solely on incinerate benefits. Potion of the jade serpent was not used. Gear was not optimized for greatest results. At the end of the test incinerate's crit chance had increased by 12% due to having a base of 30% crit and ending with 42% criticals. For the best results critical strike should be 35%. This test also applied chaosbolt when crit was at it's highest.

Applying immolate when crit is 90%+ can be performed every 2 minutes for optimal immolate criticals. Guys I know this video will not prove all that I have stated but I will continue to try to prove my theory. I know there are many awesome theory crafters on these forums, that is why I must prove what I am saying to be true.

[Deleted]

This test is based upon the destruction spec, It proves that one can reach 95%-100% critical strike chance every 2 minutes. To view it watch the opener and simply skip to 2 minutes, 4 minutes, and 6 minutes. This is not a standard rotation or even one that I made, this test was based solely on incinerate benefits. Potion of the jade serpent was not used. Gear was not optimized for greatest results. At the end of the test incinerate's crit chance had increased by 12% due to having a base of 30% crit and ending with 42% criticals. For the best results critical strike should be 35%. This test also applied chaosbolt when crit was at it's highest.

Applying immolate when crit is 90%+ can be performed every 2 minutes for optimal immolate criticals. Guys I know this video will not prove all that I have stated but I will continue to try to prove my theory. I know there are many awesome theory crafters on these forums, that is why I must prove what I am saying to be true.

Your whole 'theory' is structured on getting high ember regen out of immolate critting a lot.

Yet your video doesn't show, even once, how immolate performed in recount.

The only thing I see, is you are prioritising getting immolate cast while under crit effects over casting higher prio spells (e.g chaosbolt)
This is easy to deduce seeing as in an 8min30 fight, you should've cast no more than 25 immolates whereas in your video, you cast 31.

This is a DPS loss in all circumstances.

[Smoothmeduso]

Your whole 'theory' is structured on getting high ember regen out of immolate critting a lot.

Yet your video doesn't show, even once, how immolate performed in recount.

The only thing I see, is you are prioritising getting immolate cast while under crit effects over casting higher prio spells (e.g chaosbolt)
This is easy to deduce seeing as in an 8min30 fight, you should've cast no more than 25 immolates whereas in your video, you cast 31.

This is a DPS loss in all circumstances.

No my theory is not about immolate! Immolate and the 4pc set bonus is another person's theory, in fact I even challenged many of times the use of immolate under the 15% crit chance. I did state however because of the other person's theory if there were ever a time to use immolate it would to be used at 90%+ when under the effects of 4pc.

Yes like what is stated in the description of the video, the rotation is not the actual rotation, it was just to show the critical strike chance of incinerate(or substitute fel flame) under the effects of 2pc and 4pc. I withheld from chaosbolt on purpose to show the 12% critical strike chance increase of my incinerates. This shows how incinerate performed in recount, 66/5= a total of 13 embers generated through critical strikes from incinerate. The none critical strikes resulted in 8 total embers. 21 embers from incinerate were gained in all(this test can also be performed with fel flame).

I am trying to make sense of what you have stated of casting 25 immolates. It confuses me because this is the formula that I am using;
1.38(seconds to cast)+13.79(seconds the dot tick)=15.17s x 25s = 6min and 32 seconds. 6 minutes and 32s is shorter than 8 minutes and this is what has me confused. Using the same formula I plug in 31 and come out to 7mins and 50s. What am I missing? Is this what you mean by me prioritizing my up time of immolate? Are you saying to not refresh immolate?

Incinerate isn't the only spell that benefits from the critical strike chance, this video was just used as an example of how the other spells would scale with critical strike on an overall crit chance %. I hope what I am writing is making sense.

[Deleted]

Just to clarify - What exactly is your theory, and its not exaclty a science to do this.

30% base crit + 5% raid buff + 30% dark soul + 15% ember master + 10% destructive influence + god knows how much crit from 12k from bindings and 25k from BBoY + 5% stats + potion. (This would be over 100% crit while only having like 10k rating or something)

Guys look i can get tons of crit on immolate and incinerate(completely disregarding the fact that if you start overwriting when not in pandemic range its a dps loss), Trinket procs are a lot rarer in 5.4 so you want to aim to maximise the damage you can put out during them, you do this via stacking mastery and having crit from int procs / buffs / ds / 4 part.

The more you stack crit the less useful it becomes, and under those crit buffs you would want to be casting Chaos bolt and shadowburn over immolate and definetly incinerate as they are all temp buffs, but the buffs put your crit high enough that you wouldnt stack it as your main stat, you would take it over haste though because it is literally pointless for destro in 5.4 due to rof change / rppm change / meta gem / backdraft.

Cant really work out what your trying to show in that video either.

When doing a test you need to cover some seriously basic info like this.

Your item level

Your Intention

Your Conclusion

Your buffs used

From what i see in that video you dont have good gear cause your chaos bolt is hitting for absoloutely nothing, you are getting increased crit chance on incinerate by having crit procs, what is the point exactly.

I think on the PTR my toon has about 10k crit (its gemmed and reforged mastery) and im pretty sure i end about 50% crit on immolate and 40+ on incinerate, i dont by any stretch of the imagination need to stack crit to achieve this because of how much crit you will get 'by accident'

[Deleted]

No my theory is not about immolate! Immolate and the 4pc set bonus is another person's theory, in fact I even challenged many of times the use of immolate under the 15% crit chance. I did state however because of the other person's theory if there were ever a time to use immolate it would to be used at 90%+ when under the effects of 4pc.

Yes like what is stated in the description of the video, the rotation is not the actual rotation, it was just to show the critical strike chance of incinerate(or substitute fel flame) under the effects of 2pc and 4pc. I withheld from chaosbolt on purpose to show the 12% critical strike chance increase of my incinerates. This shows how incinerate performed in recount, 66/5= a total of 13 embers generated through critical strikes from incinerate. The none critical strikes resulted in 8 total embers. 21 embers from incinerate were gained in all(this test can also be performed with fel flame).

I am trying to make sense of what you have stated of casting 25 immolates. It confuses me because this is the formula that I am using;
1.38(seconds to cast)+13.79(seconds the dot tick)=15.17s x 25s = 6min and 32 seconds. 6 minutes and 32s is shorter than 8 minutes and this is what has me confused. Using the same formula I plug in 31 and come out to 7mins and 50s. What am I missing? Is this what you mean by me prioritizing my up time of immolate? Are you saying to not refresh immolate?

Incinerate isn't the only spell that benefits from the critical strike chance, this video was just used as an example of how the other spells would scale with critical strike on an overall crit chance %. I hope what I am writing is making sense.

I don't get it... What you're saying is so strange to me.

You are saying that in your testing, you managed to get Incinerate up to 42% crit though you had a base crit of 30%.
You then say that you didn't use chaosbolt as much, so you can focus more on the impact 2/4set has on incinerate...

When 4set procs, you WANT to cast chaos bolt... Each time you use 4set for incinerate, you're losing DPS, so you are losing dps from Chaosbolt and putting it into casting an incinerate.

If you used chaosbolt during your crit buff, your incinerate would have a lower crit chance.

P.s. Ignore my numbering for immolate, I assumed the length of your video was the length of the testing and I had the timing for immolate slightly off. Doesn't change the fact that your incinerate crit % is inflated as you're using incinerates instead of chaosbolts during the set proc.

[Deleted]

@Smoothmeduso

Just walk against the wind, spare your time, dig it and don't try to convince others now. It was the same for me in the 3.3 patch when Haste outscaled Intellect, in affliction, I was the bad stupid guy saying crap coz nothing could outscale the Intellect GOD ( armor pen too for melee)...

That's why devs have completely nerfed, for Cata, the Second stats possibilities...

Good luck and have fun with your " pet swap like " idea.

[Smoothmeduso]

Just to clarify - What exactly is your theory, and its not exaclty a science to do this.

30% base crit + 5% raid buff + 30% dark soul + 15% ember master + 10% destructive influence + god knows how much crit from 12k from bindings and 25k from BBoY + 5% stats + potion. (This would be over 100% crit while only having like 10k rating or something)

Guys look i can get tons of crit on immolate and incinerate(completely disregarding the fact that if you start overwriting when not in pandemic range its a dps loss), Trinket procs are a lot rarer in 5.4 so you want to aim to maximise the damage you can put out during them, you do this via stacking mastery and having crit from int procs / buffs / ds / 4 part.

The more you stack crit the less useful it becomes, and under those crit buffs you would want to be casting Chaos bolt and shadowburn over immolate and definetly incinerate as they are all temp buffs, but the buffs put your crit high enough that you wouldnt stack it as your main stat, you would take it over haste though because it is literally pointless for destro in 5.4 due to rof change / rppm change / meta gem / backdraft.

Cant really work out what your trying to show in that video either.

When doing a test you need to cover some seriously basic info like this.

Your item level

Your Intention

Your Conclusion

Your buffs used

From what i see in that video you dont have good gear cause your chaos bolt is hitting for absoloutely nothing, you are getting increased crit chance on incinerate by having crit procs, what is the point exactly.

I think on the PTR my toon has about 10k crit (its gemmed and reforged mastery) and im pretty sure i end about 50% crit on immolate and 40+ on incinerate, i dont by any stretch of the imagination need to stack crit to achieve this because of how much crit you will get 'by accident'

My theory is simply to increase overall damage from all spells and to increase dps and damage. The way I want to do this is by raising the crit chance of all spells because each spell will do double the amount of damage on critical hits than non critical hits, a 2 for 1 if you will. In turn critical hits from all spell speeds up the process of generating embers allowing for more chaosbolts. I believe Mastery is a strong stat and that it will out weigh crit chance after reaching 35%.

My theory is based off many questions such as, who determined that 100% was the absolute scale cap for chaosbolt? How would crit benefit conflagrate and fel flame due to movement? Will a trinket proc happen when I have to move, and if it does would my fel flame crit so that I lose the minimum amount of damage possible? With the nerf to KJC will I really be able to cast chaosbolts in the best of situations? Would the dot from chaosbolt+ 15% damage increase from Grim:Sac applied to destruction spells except chaosbolt do more damage than a pet? If I crit more with fel flame or incinerate as my filler will I be able to generate embers faster?

What I have been writing in this thread are my results to these specific questions.

I have stated that 30%-35% is where one needs to get crit chance while playing destruction. You will on occasions gain enough critical strike/intellect to reach 100% crit strike chance or even reach beyond 100%. Being over 100% seems to make a lot of people uncomfortable. This makes them overlook the fact that when not at 100% crit chance their spells would crit less meaning less damage per spell. Pepsimax my ultimate goal is not to reach 100% crit, my goal is to generate more embers while critting with secondary spells to increase overall damage.

[Jessicka]

Why are you spending so much time theorycrafting a spec we know is going to suck? It's not like there's enough buttons to figure out an all new optimal rotation, and even if it did magically come good with the set bonus, it's probably a bit late for progression to be relying on it. Past that point all that matters is WoL at which point cheesing encounter mechanics is way more important than anything else >.>

[EvreliaGaming]

Why are you spending so much time theorycrafting a spec we know is going to suck? It's not like there's enough buttons to figure out an all new optimal rotation, and even if it did magically come good with the set bonus, it's probably a bit late for progression to be relying on it. Past that point all that matters is WoL at which point cheesing encounter mechanics is way more important than anything else >.>

It's not going to suck. I can think of at least 4 encounters where it wins hands down. Unless you mean single target, in which case, yes, it will

Also, your new avatar totally threw me.

[sasofrass]

The video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fip29LNV18E

I really don't understand the point of this video, especially since you were only doing ~120k dps. Is this good? What is the purpose because I literally don't understand. Are you ignoring all procs purposely to just cast incinerates to have them crit? Your chaos bolt damage was very low, your overall dps was low, and this video doesn't do or explain anything. Overall, the rotation you did in the video is very bad.

[ZaneBusby]

I have stated that 30%-35% is where one needs to get crit chance while playing destruction. You will on occasions gain enough critical strike/intellect to reach 100% crit strike chance or even reach beyond 100%. Being over 100% seems to make a lot of people uncomfortable. This makes them overlook the fact that when not at 100% crit chance their spells would crit less meaning less damage per spell. Pepsimax my ultimate goal is not to reach 100% crit, my goal is to generate more embers while critting with secondary spells to increase overall damage.

Reaching over 100% crit rating makes people uncomfortable for good reason, because it's purely wasted stats.

I can't think of the maths right now, being that it's 1:30am, but it's similar to an inverse of the probability of seeing an item drop. For example a mount that has 3% drop rate always has a 3% chance to drop, but the probability of you seeing said mount in X number of kills increases each time you kill the boss. (Better explained here).

Imagine it coming from the other end of the spectrum. If you have 80% crit, getting up to 90% from that point is less valuable than going for a different stat. It would change you from getting 8 out of 10 spells as crits into getting 9/10 spells as crits, but what if you had that 10% worth of stats placed into say, mastery, which would increase the damage of all 8 of those crits, and both of the 2 non-crits instead, rather than just buffing 1 of the spells from a non-crit into a crit. The higher your crit gets, the less valuable it becomes. Once you get above 100% crit, you're wasting stats, because you're already getting 10/10 spells as crits, anything higher than that doesn't somehow magically make you get 11/10 spells as crits, because that's not possible. The only bonus of getting crit above 100% is to Chaos Bolt, purely because CB damage scales off crit.

Plus, the amount of time you sit near 100% crit is so minimal, it doesn't mean that your incinerates are giving double the ember regen that they normally would, it works out to a far lower AVERAGE amount of crit, which is what you would base the number of embers gained off of.

[sasofrass]

I thought chaos bolt can only be multiplied by up to 100% crit? No? Hmm, thought that was the reason the more crit you had the worse UVLS was for destro? (I know in general it's not great but I thought that was the reasoning)

[Deleted]

I've been following the discussion all day and I think I somewhat understand what Smoothmeduso's theory is all about. He wants to use DS,procs etc. to power up spells other than Chaos Bolt, so he can cast more Chaos Bolts in the end. I personally think this is a dps loss, though I'm a noob warlock. And also, it's entirely possible I didn't understand a thing from his posts

[Jessicka]

It's not going to suck. I can think of at least 4 encounters where it wins hands down. Unless you mean single target, in which case, yes, it will

Also, your new avatar totally threw me.

All general purpose theorycrafting is single target. After that, it's about cheesing encounter mechanics which Destro has to be fair generally been pretty good at this expansion. Guess they just balanced around cheesing.

[ZaneBusby]

I thought chaos bolt can only be multiplied by up to 100% crit? No? Hmm, thought that was the reason the more crit you had the worse UVLS was for destro? (I know in general it's not great but I thought that was the reasoning)

Crit rating =/= Crit chance. I'm not sure specifically how much of his 100% crit is rating vs chance, and whether or not the crit gained from int (procs) is crit chance or crit rating, and I can't find the in-depth formula for Choas Bolt right now, but it's something a long the lines of...

edit: accidental early post. Hunting down the formula atm, give me a minute >_<

Edit: I do believe I may actually be wrong. I though I recalled seeing a formula somewhere which stated something along the lines of
(2,682+(279% SP))*(0.1*crit chance)*(1+crit rating)*(1+mastery) (though that's a very, very rough idea of what the formula was), however all I've been able to find was that of (2,682+(279% SP))*(1+crit chance)*(crit mutliplier), which throws me a mile off the mark anyway. My mistake. You would be right about it not scaling above 100%.

Which only adds further to the point that getting above 100% crit is useless.

[JV Chequer]

Crit rating =/= Crit chance. I'm not sure specifically how much of his 100% crit is rating vs chance, and whether or not the crit gained from int (procs) is crit chance or crit rating, and I can't find the in-depth formula for Choas Bolt right now, but it's something a long the lines of...

edit: accidental early post. Hunting down the formula atm, give me a minute >_<

1% crit/mastery = 1% chaos bolt damage.

600 crit rating per 1%
200 mastery rating per 1%

They only factor mastery into the tooltip, so you won't see it change if you alter your crit, and its also why the tooltip doesn't match the actual damage (plus the 3% crit meta, the fact that it crits means its 2x damage, and the 5% spell debuff if you have it.)

( ( 2.25 * my spell power ) + 2164 ) * 2 * 1.03 * 1.05 * crit percent * mastery percent = chaos bolt damage. 2x multiplier from it critting, 1.03 from the 3% crit damage meta, 1.05 from the 5% spell power debuff.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/8517691875

[Deleted]

All general purpose theorycrafting is single target. After that, it's about cheesing encounter mechanics which Destro has to be fair generally been pretty good at this expansion. Guess they just balanced around cheesing.

Maybe, but there are 2 single-target fights in the whole tier. At that point you have to wonder if your ''general purpose theory'' is really more valid than all this ''cheesing'' on multiple targets.

[walp]

So the new Imp Swarm is a dps loss? I mean in theory(simmed dummy test).
Should I use it on pull with meta proc and forget about it for the rest of the fight?
Probably it is worth using on specific encounters when boss gains +% incoming damage.