[5.4] Affliction Warlock and Encounter Specific Guides

[Deleted]

Agreed. Dropped H EoT / LotC in favor of Shadopan / Breath. With the recent change to procs, I've either been incredibly lucky, or the gain is much more than previously simmed. I did combinations of all 4 trinkets, and oddly, simc ranked LotC / Breath to be the superior of the 4. However, from this reset, and some sporadic testing, I'm quite the fan of my current combination. The 10 sec haste buff is of little concern when lined up with synapse / berserking.

Which recent change to procs are you referring to and how 'recent' are we talking about?

[Deleted]

Which recent change to procs are you referring to and how 'recent' are we talking of?

The new trinkets RPPM proc system on launch made them absolutely terrible, they were then modified to be more reliable and having a gradually increasing chance to proc to avoid huge dry periods iirc, they've since improved significantly.

At least, that's the change I'm presuming he's talking about.

[EvreliaGaming]

Are you at a point where you feel confident enough to claim any two are best? I'm learning towards Wushoolay's and Hydra - but I'm far from confident in that choice and haven't had any luck in ToT lootwise, so I'll probably be stuck with what I can get my mitts on (which so far culminates in a grand total of 3 items) rather than what's ideal.

Wushoolays and Hydra are best in theory, since Cha-Ye's is 0.77*(1 + spellcrit) ppm, which means you get approx 1 proc per minute with 30% crit (which, in terms of uptime, is the same as Hydra, and we'll never have that much crit). However, its preferable to have frequent short procs as a DoT class than infrequent long procs, which leans further towards Cha-Ye's. That, also paired with the idea of using it with Lei Shens presents some interesting combinations.

Wushoolys + Hydra or Cha-Ye's + Lei Shens will both be very strong combos.

[Ezzyo]

Which recent change to procs are you referring to and how 'recent' are we talking about?

Last weeks rppm change to increase the chance of the trinkets proccing earlier in the fight. I've yet to go through an opener without breath proccing exceptionally early.

[Palmz]

The way trinkets are right now, it's Cha Yes and Lei Shen by a mile.

[Sunkisttuna]

The way trinkets are right now, it's Cha Yes and Lei Shen by a mile.

Cha-Ye's doesn't have an ICD, so that means it is just constantly procced for the duration of your buffed dots from Lei Shens. Right?

[Deleted]

since Cha-Ye's is 0.77*(1 + spellcrit) ppm, which means you get approx 1 proc per minute with 30% crit (which, in terms of uptime, is the same as Hydra, and we'll never have that much crit).

Cha-Ye was 0.77*(1 + spellcrit) RPPM, but they buffed all caster trinkets by 5%, so now it should be 0.8085*(1 + spellcrit) RPPM I guess? this gives you 1 RPPM with 23.69% crit

[EvreliaGaming]

Cha-Ye's doesn't have an ICD, so that means it is just constantly procced for the duration of your buffed dots from Lei Shens. Right?

No, it doesn't work like that. None of the trinkets have ICDs. They just aren't guaranteed to proc.

[n0n3]

So we have 2 options atm http://www.wowdb.com/items/96413-wus...s-final-choice + http://www.wowdb.com/items/96455-breath-of-the-hydra or http://www.wowdb.com/items/96516-cha...-of-brilliance + http://www.wowdb.com/items/96558-une...on-of-lei-shen
Now we need some math or data to see wich combo comes ahead and by how much.

[Deleted]

Wushulay's has 22 sec ICD, it would be pretty bad otherwise

[Woz]

That's exactly what I meant. The only way to figure out which one is the best is using a non-bugged simc.
Can anyone confirm that it is definitely and 100% bug free/malfunctioning?

There was a line removed from the 5.2 SimC that was in the 5.1 version that checked for the new trinket buffs to reapply dots but hasn't been put back in for whatever reason. I posted it a few pages ago, I'll go look for it again once I'm home.

I would agree that even with the added line SimC does undervalue the trinkets but it shouldn't be a huge disparity. From tests I've run of my gear and with the T15H profile SimC is using and they came out pretty much even in terms of "ranking"

If you wanted to forgo anything SimC has to say about trinkets I would say that with proper use Wushoolay's and Hydra will be best for Affliction. Unerring Vision of Lei Shen might be very close if used on multidotting fights where you can get 100% crit dots on more than one target.

[Surutcra]

Would definitely need to investigate the proc rates of thoses trinkets to see if they match their announced RPPM. I calculated that the "unlucky streaks protection" should account for ~13% more frequent procs, but it's still nowhere near the ~1 PPM you seem to be witnessing on Lei Shen's trinket...

[Gobuchul]

Most of the examples posted here wouldn't even have been affected by the bad luck protection.

Most of you guys seem to be stuck in the mindset of the old ICD trinkets - they had extremely high proc chances compared to anything these RPPM trinkets ever get, and the resulting proc pattern was very predictable. With these RPPM trinkets it's perfectly expected for plenty of people to see "unbelievable" pulls with procs every 40 seconds or whatever, because of the big variance caused by a large number of events each having a tiny chance to cause a proc.

If you're looking to "investigate" or "confirm" the RPPM rates, you're going to need a huge sample size, not a few people posting in a thread about how they got X procs in a Y minute fight and omg it procs constantly.

[Surutcra]

If you're looking to "investigate" or "confirm" the RPPM rates, you're going to need a huge sample size, not a few people posting in a thread about how they got X procs in a Y minute fight and omg it procs constantly.

While I agree that you cannot draw conclusions from just two or three quick procs in a row, you're wrong saying that there's nothing you can conclude without a huge sample size.

If we consider the case of the Lei Shen's trinket (0.525 RPPM base rate after the 5% buff) and assume a reasonable level of 25% haste buffed (yielding ~0.656 PPM).

I simulated 100k 8-minute-long fights and here is how frequently (y-axis) you get how many procs (x-axis).

Note : Since this is assuming you just got a proc at the beginning of the fight but not counting it and given trinkets will proc at pull, it is reasonable to simply add 1 to all n values on the x-axis.
Note : The average number of procs is 1 + 5.75, which is consistent with the theory : 0.525 * 1.25 * 8 * 1.13 = 5.25 * 1.13 = 5.93 ~= 5.75. The 13% factor is to account for "unlucky streak protection".

The chance of getting 14 or more procs is ~0.3%. While 0.3% is something that can happen once, but if we notice that say 3 or 4 parses out of 10 have 14 or more procs over 8 minutes, then we can conclude with extremly high confidence that there is something wrong somewhere.

Now this could be a server-side bug with the RPPM system or with that specific trinket, or an error somewhere in my math. But my point is we can detect a deviation from the expected performance of a RPPM trinket over a sufficiently long fight even with little data, provided that deviation is not too tiny (and something like "Guys, Lei Shen's trinket seems to be proccing twice as much as it should" is probably big enough to test for with a reasonably sized dataset).


Reference to the math : http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...gn-proposition

[Gobuchul]

The chance of getting 14 or more procs is ~0.3%. While 0.3% is something that can happen once, but if we notice that say 3 or 4 parses out of 10 have 14 or more procs over 8 minutes, then we can conclude with extremly high confidence that there is something wrong somewhere.

Hopefully people understand you mean that "out of 10" in an aggregated sense, not literally. You may not agree that the sample size needs to be "huge", but it certainly needs to be bigger than 10.

Anyway, I really really don't think we've seen anything indicating that 30-40% of parses have 14 or more procs over 8 minutes. Nowhere near that.

[Deleted]

Quick question about DoTs and player buffs/debuffs. Does DoTs dynamically scale with debuffs like Fluidity (Jin,rokh the Breaker, 40% more damage) or buffs like Primal Nutriment (Jin-Kun, 100% more damage). Should they be refreshed when you get the debuff/buff or not?

[Woz]

Quick question about DoTs and player buffs/debuffs. Does DoTs dynamically scale with debuffs like Fluidity (Jin,rokh the Breaker, 40% more damage) or buffs like Primal Nutriment (Jin-Kun, 100% more damage). Should they be refreshed when you get the debuff/buff or not?

They don't scale dynamically. You should reapply them any time you get any kind of damage modifier like that.

[Deleted]

They don't scale dynamically. You should reapply them any time you get any kind of damage modifier like that.

Are you sure? Pretty sure I've read the opposite somewhere on more than one occasion. Also, AffDots doesn't light up when you get/lose these sorts of buffs.

[EvreliaGaming]

Are you sure? Pretty sure I've read the opposite somewhere on more than one occasion. Also, AffDots doesn't light up when you get/lose these sorts of buffs.

It would if you downloaded the latest version. This is an example of why you shouldn't rely entirely on addons like Affdots. It's good, but its not enough.

[Ridcully]

Are you sure? Pretty sure I've read the opposite somewhere on more than one occasion. Also, AffDots doesn't light up when you get/lose these sorts of buffs.

AffDots does not know about those buffs. Had some issues, turned off until I can figure out how to fix them and have enough free time for testing (40 minute lfr query times).