[6.2] Demonology Warlock Guide

[striderZA]

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

The baseline is about planning, sure, but the skillcap will always be due to maximizing everything you possibly can, and that most definitely includes taking advantage of procs optimally.

[FurtyIRL]

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.

That's exactly what you're doing. You have to plan proactively so that you can afford to play reactively. Sitting there scratching your head and waiting for Dark Soul every 2 minutes isn't planning.

[Deleted]

The baseline is about planning, sure, but the skillcap will always be due to maximizing everything you possibly can, and that most definitely includes taking advantage of procs optimally.

Optimally sometimes means not using ressource that could be better used later.

I think we can all agree that there is not a big difference between ToC and Soulfire in terms of damage.
Now you only have my figures for it but there is still no big difference between ToC and Soulfire with procs up (why should there be ?).
Therefore there is no reason why you should change the way you play during procs (not true for haste proc, ofc).
The only exception would be caster SF and SB because obviously if you would be casting some SF in caster form you should definitely do it during those procs as caster SF does a lot more damage than SB.

[Wexler]

Furty, I watched your Demo workshop which was great and really taught me how to evaluate performance through logs, so thank you very much.

However, I have to question how down you are on ToC. Your opinion is basically to only cast is as a movement spell, but many of the top parsers use it much more than that. The top ten for Gruul Mythic cast it 28, 1, 29, 38, 15, 40, 12, 29, 23, and 51 times respectively. My concern is in situations where you don't have enough MC stacks to fill out a DS or another period of powerful proc uptime, are you saying here we should go back to caster and cast Shadowbolt over spending fury on ToC while still under DS?

It seems to me the goal for achieving the best DPS is to cast every MC stack as meta SF under DS/good procs, and as long as you have enough fury to do that, it doesn't matter if you spend it on ToC or not. In fact, given the variability of ToC casts among the top ten, it seem to not matter very much at all whether you cast ToC or not.

[FurtyIRL]

Furty, I watched your Demo workshop which was great and really taught me how to evaluate performance through logs, so thank you very much.

However, I have to question how down you are on ToC. Your opinion is basically to only cast is as a movement spell, but many of the top parsers use it much more than that. The top ten for Gruul Mythic cast it 28, 1, 29, 38, 15, 40, 12, 29, 23, and 51 times respectively. My concern is in situations where you don't have enough MC stacks to fill out a DS or another period of powerful proc uptime, are you saying here we should go back to caster and cast Shadowbolt over spending fury on ToC while still under DS?

It seems to me the goal for achieving the best DPS is to cast every MC stack as meta SF under DS/good procs, and as long as you have enough fury to do that, it doesn't matter if you spend it on ToC or not. In fact, given the variability of ToC casts among the top ten, it seem to not matter very much at all whether you cast ToC or not.

If you run out of Soul Fires/CWs during DS you should cast Touch of Chaos for the remainder of Dark Soul, though if you're playing optimally this really shouldn't happen. Basically the only time you should cast Touch of Chaos is if you are at risk of fury capping and have no procs to pair with a Molten Core proc. In that situation I usually siphon 100-150 fury at a time with ToC just to make sure I'm not wasting fury. A lot of warlocks have a bad habit of overcasting ToC which is just poor play on their part. My most recent Gruul where I did almost exactly 50k DPS I only cast ToC 8 times (you can see screens of that log on page 169 of this thread).

Basically casting ToC for Warlocks is like casting Scorch as a Fire mage; only if you ABSOLUTELY have to.

[Deleted]

and as long as you have enough fury to do that, it doesn't matter if you spend it on ToC or not.

You kind of answered your own question here. If you can't cast Soul Fire or CW then of course you cast ToC when Dark Soul is up.

[Wexler]

If you run out of Soul Fires/CWs during DS you should cast Touch of Chaos for the remainder of Dark Soul, though if you're playing optimally this really shouldn't happen. Basically the only time you should cast Touch of Chaos is if you are at risk of fury capping and have no procs to pair with a Molten Core proc. In that situation I usually siphon 100-150 fury at a time with ToC just to make sure I'm not wasting fury. A lot of warlocks have a bad habit of overcasting ToC which is just poor play on their part. My most recent Gruul where I did almost exactly 50k DPS I only cast ToC 8 times (you can see screens of that log on page 169 of this thread).

Basically casting ToC for Warlocks is like casting Scorch as a Fire mage; only if you ABSOLUTELY have to.

That makes sense.
I'm probably playing at a different level since I'm not a mythic raider and I don't even have 2-pc yet, so I probably proc a lot fewer MCs than you guys. I just find a lot of situations where I'm out of MCs when I need them, and I only cast SF under meta with procs. Or I try to anyway.

[Woz]

I think we can all agree that there is not a big difference between ToC and Soulfire in terms of damage.
Now you only have my figures for it but there is still no big difference between ToC and Soulfire with procs up (why should there be ?).
Therefore there is no reason why you should change the way you play during procs (not true for haste proc, ofc).
The only exception would be caster SF and SB because obviously if you would be casting some SF in caster form you should definitely do it during those procs as caster SF does a lot more damage than SB.

Honestly I don't think that's true at all, for an example if we look at the current #1 parse for Gruul this is how their opener looks with the procs, etc - while yes they do cast 3x more ToC than SF, the average damage of their ToC is a little bit over half of the average damage of SF. And those SF are casted outside of a Howling Soul (GSR) proc.

If you reset to view the entire fight you'll pretty clearly see that the difference of average damage between SF and ToC is just over 2x higher in favour of SF. So I'm not sure how you can say that there is no big difference between ToC and SF. Even with procs up the damage difference between them is nowhere close to the same.

During the second DS phase he gets no procs outside of DS so if we look at damage again during that range ToC is still just barely over 2x less average damage than SF.

The third DS phase is the same thing (except this time they have Blood Fury), damage ranges again for the 3rd DS phase.

Last DS phase is during execute so you'll see (obviously) there's not really any reason to ToC. Even still the one time he did cast ToC under DS it was almost 1/4th of the average of SF.

This is just outlining DS usage, honestly they got pretty bad RNG on the Howling Soul and even the Archmage Incandescence proc during their DS phases so if we look at those procs a little bit closer on the overall view you can see there were times where either the Legendary proc happened or Howling Soul happened where they casted either SF or ToC. I added in there Mark of Bleeding Hollow too since there were times where there was "nothing" procced but still casted SF or ToC (imagine that). So overall damage breakdown looks a little like this with SF still doing 2.29x more damage on average than ToC and you can see that there was only one situation where there was actually nothing procced and he casted ToC or SF (or both) just to burn Fury and MC stacks (around the 3:30 mark).

With that being said - yes this is only 1 log and 1 example of this being the case but it holds true to the testament of "use SF during procs, it's definitely worth doing and is better than using ToC" and it also shows that they aren't anywhere close to the same average damage ASIDE from the opener where if you have all the stars aligned you may possibly do more with ToC since you don't have the procs to support SF the whole opener. If I had more time to do this to the other top DServ/Serv logs I would but honestly this was annoying to do and to do it for all of the logs would make me fall asleep.

Edit:

I also didn't put in CW since Khyra didn't use it at all (only twice) so it doesn't impact this really at all. Log with the pins for reference.

[Deleted]

A lot of warlocks have a bad habit of overcasting ToC which is just poor play on their part.

Basically casting ToC for Warlocks is like casting Scorch as a Fire mage; only if you ABSOLUTELY have to.

Have you ever considered that maybe you might be wrong about ToC ?
Because basically, you are saying that most warlocks on the top 10 DPS are terrible players and that they managed to rank nonetheless.
Since at this point, your only argument for dismissing ToC without any further discussion is your Gruul log, there may be some contradiction...

As a gesture of good faith I will also share my latest Gruul log :
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...translate=true

- - - Updated - - -

Honestly I don't think that's true at all, for an example if we look at the current #1 parse for Gruul this is how their opener looks with the procs, etc - while yes they do cast 3x more ToC than SF, the average damage of their ToC is a little bit over half of the average damage of SF. And those SF are casted outside of a Howling Soul (GSR) proc.

I don't understand what is your point... ToC is half the fury cost of SF, of course it does half the damage.

[Deleted]

I don't understand what is your point... ToC is half the fury cost of SF, of course it does half the damage.

I knew you'd make this counterpoint.

It comes down to how efficiently you can spend your Fury, and was part of the reason why Demonbolt was so powerful.

You want to spend as much Fury under Cooldowns / Procs as you can. ToC is cheap and weak, Soul Fire and Chaos Wave are expensive but strong.

[FurtyIRL]

Have you ever considered that maybe you might be wrong about ToC ?
Because basically, you are saying that most warlocks on the top 10 DPS are terrible players and that they managed to rank nonetheless.
Since at this point, your only argument for dismissing ToC without any further discussion is your Gruul log, there may be some contradiction...

As a gesture of good faith I will also share my last Gruul log :
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done

- - - Updated - - -


I don't understand...
ToC is half the fury cost of SF, so what is the problem ?

They're not 'terrible'. Incidental use of ToC is fine, I have plenty of logs where I use it anywhere from 5-25 times in any given encounter depending on how unlucky I am with procs. What's terrible is use of ToC on procs, big no-no (especially the multistrike proc — "wooo my 20k hit multistruck twice!!")

[Octa]

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.

Who here is arguing that you should bleed fury on trinket procs OVER using them during DS? You plan around your DS windows and make sure you've got the resources there, outside of that you use fury efficiently on procs. Who in their right mind ignores DS dumps in favor of a random trinket dump?
The entire spec is based around proper planning so you can allow yourself to react to procs. The two are not mutually exclusive ideas.

[Deleted]

I knew you'd make this counterpoint.

It comes down to how efficiently you can spend your Fury, and was part of the reason why Demonbolt was so powerful.

You want to spend as much Fury under Cooldowns / Procs as you can. ToC is cheap and weak, Soul Fire and Chaos Wave are expensive but strong.

If you look at my spreadsheet, you will see that I assess the efficiency of spells by looking at a metric that I call EDPF which stands for Extra Damage per Fury.
Basically, it gives you the damage you are able to get per point of fury compared to a situation where you would be spamming your filler.

Demonbolt is powerful because it allows you to spend 800 fury in 8 / (1 + haste) second, which gives you plenty of time. It also makes the most of DS, allowing you to spend 1000 fury every minute in it.
A lot of players on this thread, including Woz, were looking at just damage / fury which led to the conclusion that using 2 DB instead of 4 was optimal.

Of course, spending fury under the better condition is key to maximize your DPS. This is why I strongly recommend using a lot of MC stacks on DS rather than spending them prematurely and ending up doing ToC under DS (which is still efficient use of fury, but not efficient use of DS, because it will run out with some fury left).
However, with procs, the same reasoning does not hold anymore, because the limiting factor would be the fury and not the duration of the proc.
Weither you use ToC or Soulfire, you cannot spend fury for the full duration of every proc you have.

- - - Updated - - -

Who here is arguing that you should bleed fury on trinket procs OVER using them during DS? You plan around your DS windows and make sure you've got the resources there, outside of that you use fury efficiently on procs. Who in their right mind ignores DS dumps in favor of a random trinket dump?

You want names, because I have some .

[FurtyIRL]

However, with procs, the same reasoning does not hold anymore, because the limiting factor would be the fury and not the duration of the proc.
Weither you use ToC or Soulfire, you cannot spend fury for the full duration of every proc you have.

Right, which is why you want to spend fury on something that actually hits remotely hard and not waste fury during a proc on wet noodle of chaos.

[SpikeySquad]

FurtyIRL thanks very much for the Demo video; I found the log analysis really helpful. I'm sure it's probably written somewhere before but I cannot find it so what is warning you that your pet is inactive? Thanks

[Deleted]

Right, which is why you want to spend fury on something that actually hits remotely hard and not waste fury during a proc on wet noodle of chaos.

ToC and SF have roughly the same fury efficiency. If you only spend fury on procs, then it does not matter which one you pick.
Simplifying things a lot, if on a fight you spent 2000 fury outside DS, then it does not matter if you did 25 SF rather than 50 ToC.

[Octa]

You want names, because I have some .

I have not seen anyone argue that, so sure. I might have missed it, the last 10 pages of this thread have been a mess, but I didn't see anyone saying trinkets are more important than having a proper DS burn.

[Woz]

I don't understand what is your point... ToC is half the fury cost of SF, of course it does half the damage.

Ok sure, so if we took the average damage on the overall log for ToC and doubled it from 29239.5 to 58479 it's still almost 10k average damage below SF at 67058 (8579 average damage in favour of SF to be exact) to account for Fury costs being the same, ToC will still fall behind every time.

Even taking the figures from your log...
ToC: 23033.8 doubled to 46067.6
SF: 72198.1
Difference: 26130.5 in favour of SF

It's even worse in your log where you have 1.6x more ToC casts than SF.

Now this doesn't take into account any type of scaling ToC might get if you doubled the Fury cost of it (which I'm sure would be the case) but still goes to show that even with you having far more casts of ToC than SF, SF still did far more average damage and you could have done even more damage if you had shifted more priority into SF. You don't even take full advantage of SF in that log since at 25% you can start chain casting SF because MC effect kicks in you cast 5 more Shadowbolts once 25% hits, but that's not even the kicker. Look at your usage of ToC or SF (or lack thereof) during the orange (legendary proc) and the emphasis you put on the green (BMC proc) for ToC. Going off Armory (so it's not super accurate since the 5 ilvl bump isn't there yet) 15% of your Int is 786.15, that's double any trinket (except for Mythic BMC) gives passively and you almost completely ignore it, even ignore it for ToC in favour of building up to your DS phase. Even if you adopted the use of ToC during those procs you would see a damage increase. But anyway, all this is being said to say - you could still do better (even if you adopted the use of ToC over SF, but even more so if you used SF with procs and not only [almost exclusively] with DS).

[Count Zero]

I think it's important to remember that while ToC of course does about half the damage of SF, at about half the Fury cost, ToC has slightly more than half the cast time of an MC'd SF, meaning it's simply not as efficient a Fury spender ... not to mention that ToC does not scale at all with haste, and SF will never get screwed by Crit RNG. If it was exactly half the cast time it'd be a lot closer, but still not equal due to the haste scaling (raid haste buff, trinks, lust). I'm not intimately familiar with the rate at which SF damage scales with crit chance so I can't comment on that off the top of my head.

I don't think it's quite as bad as some are making it out to be, but MC'd SF really is superior in every way except for flexibility for movement and squeezing a cast out if you don't have time for a full SF.

[Deleted]

Ok sure, so if we took the average damage on the overall log for ToC and doubled it from 29239.5 to 58479 it's still almost 10k average damage below SF at 67058 (8579 average damage in favour of SF to be exact) to account for Fury costs being the same, ToC will still fall behind every time.

Even taking the figures from your log...
ToC: 23033.8 doubled to 46067.6
SF: 72198.1
Difference: 26130.5 in favour of SF

It's even worse in your log where you have 1.6x more ToC casts than SF.

Once again, this is what you should have expected if you had taken the time to think. DS is the highest DPS increase and I used SF under DS and ToC under other procs. So SF doing more damage on average is... perfectly fine.

Look at your usage of ToC or SF (or lack thereof)[/URL] during the orange (legendary proc) and the emphasis you put on the green (BMC proc) for ToC. Going off Armory (so it's not super accurate since the 5 ilvl bump isn't there yet) 15% of your Int is 786.15, that's double any trinket (except for Mythic BMC) gives passively and you almost completely ignore it, even ignore it for ToC in favour of building up to your DS phase. Even if you adopted the use of ToC during those procs you would see a damage increase. But anyway, all this is being said to say - you could still do better (even if you adopted the use of ToC over SF, but even more so if you used SF with procs and not only [almost exclusively] with DS).

I never said anything about my in-game abilities. I have done a lot of mistakes on this log and could definitely have done better.
For the legendary ring proc, 15% intelligence is 15% damage, I don't know what you expect to achieve by comparing it to the passive bonus from my trinket but it is definitely a weaker proc than GSR or BMC.