Beyond the simcraft. Real Experience questions.

[Shodan30]

Hi all,

I've been maining my lock since beta, and have had periods of hardcore guild raiding and casual play. Simcraft is all well and good for helping you pick the best equipment type, the rotation order, and such but its all just numbers. Like war, the best battle plan only lasts until the first shot. So what I'd like to discuss here is the nitty gritty of the fight. The things that can and have happen and how you compensated or how you should have.

Disclaimer: I've been destruction for a long time, but last night i switched to affliction to try and up my damage. also it was getting a touch boring. So I'm going to focus on affliction at the moment.

General issues and questions: So, generally while i was raiding last night I felt I was doing a few things wrong. Even being on top the damage meters i felt I had alot of room for improvement.

First, when do you use the jade spirit pot? I've been using it in conjuction with dark soul, flashfrozen resin trinket,and Relic of Yulon proc, but should i be saving this for execute or just when the stars all align?

Next, Do i want to dark soul on top of the shaman haste buff? Should I be spacing out my cooldowns, or pop them all at the same time as above. (That is, should i dark soul, then when its done trinket, then pot after for longer sustained damage cause stacking them is hitting some kind of cap).

Dots. When you get into a situation where you have to let something fall off in exchange for something else, is agony always going to be the priority to keep at max stacks? Seems a no brainer question but I just want to be sure. its not that difficult to keep things up but for instance when Fing is doing his epicenter, suddenly every spell is missing like crazy, and im spamming the button to try and get through the hit reduction. Right now im very much aware that im refreshing dots earlier then i should, and Tonight im going to try and make a real effort to slow down my casts, and only make sure agony never falls off, to try and find a middle ground. Right now im spending too much of my screen attention to my dot timer and not enough on my character. (As destruction this was not an issue).

Malefic grasp. The wording on the spell is a little confusing. if i multi dot something, or soulburn a seed of agony to corrupt a pack, then malefic grasp one mob, do ALL the mobs that have any of my dots on them get the bonus damage or only the one your grasping?

Please ask specific questions or share info about encounters, lets get a good dialog going instead of just looking at numbers.

[Huevos]

You have a lot of pretty basic questions, which I think some of the other threads around here, especially Evrelia's stickied affliction guide can answer.

Stacking cooldowns is always good, so yes you want to pop DS on top of bloodlust, which is also a great time for a potion, if it's more than a minute into the fight (assuming prepot). I'd recommend trying to do some general reading up on the spec and then coming back with more specific questions about optimization, rather than "how do I play affliction".

[Screwtape]

*Jumps in to knock down the low hanging fruit*

-You should use a potion immediately before the pull. You generally want to use the in-battle potion during Bloodlust.
-You generally want to stack cooldowns. The exception to this is when you are hitting caps, namely haste. Unless you are hitting the haste cap for MG, there's no reason not to use the CD during Bloodlust. Most lusts occur at the beginning of the fight or the end of the fight. If it's at the beginning, you can use both, if it's at the end, you should be using Dark Soul on CD. Unless you think you are super gosu and know to wait 15 seconds for lust.
-Yes. CoA is #1 priority because of how long it takes to build in power. You don't want to lose those stacks.
-It only applies the debuff to one target. Otherwise, warlock would be best cleave.

I'm not sure what these questions have to do with simcraft, though.