Need Some Help with Fundamentals of Aff

[Biomega]

You should always dump UA during concordance and Soul Harvest in my opinion atleast down to one Soul Shard or even empty your shards. If you're lucky with 2 set and fatal echoes the reward far outweighs the potential marginal dps loss.

Do you have anything to back up that statement other than "I feel it"? I'm not saying you're wrong. I just want more to go on.

[Sartre]

the guys who run the affliction discord also math out what yip suggested and it’s a DPS loss. meaning the rotation previously posted is still correct.

Also PS does not tag mobs for WoC, fyi

You mean the end result of the math dictates a play that's like the old MG/SC build, but instead with SL?

That playstyle seemed like a dps loss to me versus my mid-high ilevel 4p t20 friends' results with SC*. But I could keep up or beat them with a method like Yipz's. On the other hand, SC and rng...

*They mostly had 920-930ilvl t20 pieces, wheras I had 930-940 t21 pieces previous 2 weeks.

[Ichology]

Do you have anything to back up that statement other than "I feel it"? I'm not saying you're wrong. I just want more to go on.

I mean, his logs show he's pretty competent at getting the most out of the spec on any given fight, and I can say that while I have no spreadsheet to prove what he's saying, Soul Conduit shard dumping during Argus trinket proc/concordance/SH has yielded consistently higher dps for me than the old standard two drain cycle, or the Siphon Life setup (Siphon obviously puts up better numbers if you get a really terrible rng pull with SC, but i've found it to be consistent enough to be considered on par or better). Three Varim's with the t20 MG playstyle, and three with the dump and pray for 2 piece activations/fatal echoes procs favored the latter by an average of almost ~200k dps. The nutty golden parses came from insane fatal echoes procs off the bat. Small sample size I know, but I've been messing around with the different playstyles since I dropped t20 4 piece for t21 4 the first week.

All that being said, for progression I personally use Siphon Life despite all of that. For parsing weeks ahead, given my personal experiences I'll likely be using the mentioned play style.

[Deleted]

Do you have anything to back up that statement other than "I feel it"? I'm not saying you're wrong. I just want more to go on.

Your shard regen with head is usually so high that you're rarely don't have one shard availble. My playstyle is pretty simple on single target.
I dump all my shards down to 0-1 during concordance/cooldowns. When you don't have reap or any damage proccs up you only cast one UA at a time to build up 4+ Shard stack to do a fat dump.

Only way you'll parse well is when you get multipile 2 set fatal echoes proccs on 3-5+ UA's. If you manage to get this during BL with Soulharvest, gg, you're top 100 in the world.

[exjay]

You mean the end result of the math dictates a play that's like the old MG/SC build, but instead with SL?

That playstyle seemed like a dps loss to me versus my mid-high ilevel 4p t20 friends' results with SC*. But I could keep up or beat them with a method like Yipz's. On the other hand, SC and rng...

*They mostly had 920-930ilvl t20 pieces, wheras I had 930-940 t21 pieces previous 2 weeks.

I was mainly referring to the part where the video says to keep tormented agony up on the target with 1xUA (without reaps)

[Trend]

This is incorrect in two ways.

1. Killing adds does not generate a soul shard. Only when you are channeling drain soul into a mob as it dies do you get a shard. You will get a reap stacks for any add you had dotted or drained that then dies.

2. You are not dotting adds for damage on Portal keeper. You are dotting them so they give soul flame and a reap stack on death. So it doesn't matter whether you tag them with corruption, agony or drain soul. Tagging them is the main point/focus

1. You're right, I mispoke, thinking ahead to a separate point without realizing I was combining two entirely unrelated things.

2. So if I have a chance to tag with something that does more damage or I have a chance to tag and do less damage, I think the choice is clear. And you are incorrect, the adds do need to die, so I am dotting them for some damage. Why should I just depend on other ppl to kill them to proc my soul flame when I can easily contribute without any additional effort? And you also neglect to mention the method of applying corruption I mentioned is via seed, instead of wasting GCD's on agony. Now, if I had a couple of orange parsing arms warriors that stayed down below, then my approach would be a bit different. Then I could do a single whatever-kind-of-damage and boom goes the chain reaction. But, as I already stated, we go heavy on portal groups and stay light below so my damage is a meaningful part of setting off the chain reaction. Thus, you are incorrect that agony v corruption is irrelevant.

[Biomega]

Why should I just depend on other ppl to kill them to proc my soul flame when I can easily contribute without any additional effort?

It depends on your group makeup, but a lot of the time you're essentially wasting time DoTing the adds too much since they just die too quickly for DoTs to get good value out of their global. If you've got nothing better to do and/or the adds live longer then by all means go nuts.