What is our destro lock doing wrong?

[Deleted]

People who main a pure but insist on sticking to one spec instead of switching between are a burden to our WoW playerbase and should be convicted to a life sentence of LoL.

Unfortunately this fellow isn't even able to master the one spec he is playing. On your kill on Twins, which is more or less a target dummy fight with your gear and on 10 normal, he managed to:

* Use Shadowburn a whoppin' 3 times!
* Never used Havoc. I didn't even see him use it anywhere that evening.
* This also implies he doesn't know how to use DS.
* Do some silly things, like applying CoE twice on the same target within 0,5 sec, activating F&B.
* Play destruction, his only raiding spec, with the Shado Pan trinket. He should've hunted the Dark Animus trinket ages ago.

I'll give him that he started out on Lu'lin, but that won't change the verdict. If this is his main he is terrible. It'd be the typical PuG I'd play with on my alts though (and beat to pulp with less ilvl). How to solve?

First, he will need to learn to master Shadowburn and Havoc. You can do that in LFR, for example on Horridon. He needs to learn you can (and should) spam Shadowburn and can abuse it with Havoc on either the boss or high health targets. Second, he can learn to use Chaos Bolt with Havoc. Third, he just needs to start playing a little bit better if you want to progress through heroic 10 man. Four, as a pure you're expected to play all specs and at his ilvl the other 2 specs can do some amazing stuff (he should've started hunting UVLS ages ago). Unfortunately, since he cannot even master a simple spec like destruction -a spec he plays all the time in raiding, on his main character no less- I have severe doubts this fellow can improve his standards much.

[Deleted]

What bothers me is how you are talking about a class without actually knowing whats happening behind. Crit and mastery both shine, specially for the reasons you are giving without actually thinking carefully about them. Meta and trinks proc? guess what, it means nothing because you are already bellow the 1sec GCD. THIS is why haste gets really bad for a lock in higher levels.

Here exactly you prove you aren't fully up to speed with everything. Whilst incinerate may go under the GCD, the value of haste is not diminished completely due to the fact that RoF, which is around a third of our ember generation (for single target), still scales with haste. Brusalk and I think many others have stated that the value of haste is still superior for them up to around 20k.

Good for you that you're 13/13 heroic and have a decent ilvl, cheers for showing us your armoury, but summer hasn't been kind to all of us. Checking your wow-heroes/logs shows that you still have a way to go before you can claim your unorthodox strategy should be taken as gospel, and you should probably take the advice of what people are saying here if you want to improve further.

[Chrispotter]

Going haste for destro? lol, are you serious? And dont missinterpret what im saying. for destro there are 2 builds, Crit or Mastery, Crit favors single and double target. Mastery AOE target. its not about the Ads, its about how YOU use the ads. Try Horridon in a crit build by constantly shadowburning horridon with the low hp ads. your damage will skyrocket not because of the add killing but because of horridon getting raped by burns and chaos bolts. It depends on the fight composition. but suggesting Haste is just plain retarded. Care to show your lock gear and progress to support your claims?

So much ignorance in all of your posts .
Haste is a much better stat for Destro in most single target situation. You either want to go High haste or High Mastery build as destro, high haste for pure single target (over 12-15k+ haste though it starts to diminish in how great it is because GCD capping is a bitch) or High Mastery for Fights where you are having unlimited Embers/are cleaving alot. For instance, Horridon would be a perfect example of a time to go full mastery because omfgz so much shadowburns. Crit is not a bad stat, but Haste/Mastery are just much better options. Generally, if I am opting to play destro on a fight ( Durumu, ra den, horridon) its probably a fight where a high mastery build is favoured .

[Deleted]

People who main a pure but insist on sticking to one spec instead of switching between are a burden to our WoW playerbase

This made me lol kinda hard, it has nothing to do with sticking to one spec aslong as the spec performs, unless your pushing top 50 (this is a stretch imo) the content is not designed to be done in one spec.

Also the haste vs crit arguement is partially retarded they are both good stats for different reasons (crit is better for shadowburn cleaving, haste is better for Rof ember regen) but the value of haste is greatly diminished by the player a lot of the time because the shorter the Rof duration the more likely you are to clip and miss embers or lose uptime due to it ending in the middle of a cast.

Side note - Mastery > All ofc =)

[Deleted]

4 shadowburns on primo is criminal! There are going to be SO many opportunities to snipe adds for more embers. If he were to keep RoF up on the adds and snipe them under 20% hp he would have endless embers to use on chaos bolts on the boss.

[Baconeggcheese]

Going haste for destro? lol, are you serious? but suggesting Haste is just plain retarded. Care to show your lock gear and progress to support your claims?

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...o%C3%B1/simple
http://www.wowprogress.com/guild/us/...ting.tier15_25

Haste is amazing for destro this tier, crit is easily the worst of the 3 in terms of practical use.

He should be going haste > mastery trying to keep them fairly close to each other for general purpose destro this tier. Technically pure single target you'd want to have a massive haste bias and aoe you'd want to have a massive mastery bias.

@OP: It looks like he's under using rain of fire like most novice destro locks. You're supposed to use rain of fire single target and I put a lot of stress on when people don't do that because its easily the biggest ember generator a destro lock has for a single gcd outside of shadowburning a target before it dies.

As an example on a random horridon parse I have around 1500 ticks of rain of fire, he has 112, even when you're single targeting the important mobs rain of fire should be up as close to 100% as possible for insane ember generation.

He's got 4 havocs cast for the entire raid, I had 13 on horridon alone probably not even using it as often as I should. That's really just shooting yourself in the foot with the amount of useful dmg you can put out for a .5s gcd by throwing out that extra chaos bolt or being able to triple shadowburn 2 targets at the same time or even just for the extra ember generation on a fight like megaera.

He's basically making the mistake most people make and over prioritizing incinerate and everything else over keeping rain of fire up, which means he's neutering his ember generation which forces him to incinerate more when he should be spamming chaosbolts like crazy. Couple that with under utilizing havoc and gearing for crit instead of haste / mastery you're looking at some fairly lackluster damage.

[Ichifails]

The OP described on the first post is failing because of the mechanics. Gems and enchants r fine. Talents and glyphs are not. However the issue is that he doesnt know how to use the class, and much less abuse the mechanics. And yes, ideally demo owns cuz of UVoLS.

My char is Nyanchan at Frostmourne

First, I don't really trust that warlock being yours. Second, my god those gems and enchants hurt my eyes. You have every warlock from World First to your rank and after your rank proving why crit is the worst stat but you chose to ignore it. Good job on dragging your guild down .

Haste provides better ember generation because of RoF. Even with getting Incinerate under GCD it still pulls ahead on single target.
Mastery pulls ahead when you swim in embers (Horridon, Primordius, Tortos, etc).
Crit is decent, maybe good but it's still the worst of the 3.

[FurtyIRL]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...o%C3%B1/simple
http://www.wowprogress.com/guild/us/...ting.tier15_25

Haste is amazing for destro this tier, crit is easily the worst of the 3 in terms of practical use.

He should be going haste > mastery trying to keep them fairly close to each other for general purpose destro this tier. Technically pure single target you'd want to have a massive haste bias and aoe you'd want to have a massive mastery bias.

@OP: It looks like he's under using rain of fire like most novice destro locks. You're supposed to use rain of fire single target and I put a lot of stress on when people don't do that because its easily the biggest ember generator a destro lock has for a single gcd outside of shadowburning a target before it dies.

As an example on a random horridon parse I have around 1500 ticks of rain of fire, he has 112, even when you're single targeting the important mobs rain of fire should be up as close to 100% as possible for insane ember generation.

He's got 4 havocs cast for the entire raid, I had 13 on horridon alone probably not even using it as often as I should. That's really just shooting yourself in the foot with the amount of useful dmg you can put out for a .5s gcd by throwing out that extra chaos bolt or being able to triple shadowburn 2 targets at the same time or even just for the extra ember generation on a fight like megaera.

He's basically making the mistake most people make and over prioritizing incinerate and everything else over keeping rain of fire up, which means he's neutering his ember generation which forces him to incinerate more when he should be spamming chaosbolts like crazy. Couple that with under utilizing havoc and gearing for crit instead of haste / mastery you're looking at some fairly lackluster damage.

Haste is a farcry from 'amazing' and haste > mastery for any fight is a pretty bad joke. Assuming you play destro on every fight there are maybe one or two where haste would be superior, and at high haste levels with meta you're hitting incinerate cap anyways so it's irrelevant. Even 'single target' (i.e. Jinrokh or Ji Kun) both feature damage dump phases where mastery is faaaar superior to haste. Most other fights destro is able to gen enough embers to make the real value of haste lose it's luster. While haste is certainly more valuable than crit, mastery is the clear winner in just about every situation.

[Brusalk]

Haste is a farcry from 'amazing' and haste > mastery for any fight is a pretty bad joke. Assuming you play destro on every fight there are maybe one or two where haste would be superior, and at high haste levels with meta you're hitting incinerate cap anyways so it's irrelevant. Even 'single target' (i.e. Jinrokh or Ji Kun) both feature damage dump phases where mastery is faaaar superior to haste. Most other fights destro is able to gen enough embers to make the real value of haste lose it's luster. While haste is certainly more valuable than crit, mastery is the clear winner in just about every situation.

Incinerate hitting the GCD cap under meta w/ backdraft is largely irrelevant in terms of Haste's true value for Destro, which is mainly from RPPM and RoF.

[Belloc]

What bothers me is how you are talking about a class without actually knowing whats happening behind. Crit and mastery both shine, specially for the reasons you are giving without actually thinking carefully about them. Meta and trinks proc? guess what, it means nothing because you are already bellow the 1sec GCD. THIS is why haste gets really bad for a lock in higher levels. And please get your facts straight, RoF is not being nerfed because of the ember regeneration, it is being nerfed because it was never supposed to be used for regeneration in single target dps. It has been stated multiple times in blue posts how it just feels akward. fights in tot do not favor aoe, per se. I can think of 3 only, Primordius, durumu and lei shen. (For a lock) They favor multidotting which is NOT the same thing, and which is the reason why demon with UVoLS is doing ridiculiously good, and which is the reason both RPPM initial proc pool and the everlasting glyph are BOTH getting changed. And I aggree, ilvl means nothing, but progression DOES matter, because to actually progress you would have to have already studied the fights which r harder to just get carried by. Tried multiple strats, etc etc. from the 13/13 ive learnt fairly good what works well on every case. Im not saying im the best, but i know very well how a crit build would excel if you time correctly for single fights, and snipe the burns. or if you go for a mastery for aoe fights. But going haste is just horrible. Even the warlock bonus boosts regeneration. Destro locks must make their hits count, not focus on baster hitting (as affli does by stacking haste making dots hit faster and reaching breakpoints)

You can type that shit all you want, but it doesn't make you right.

Haste = more embers. Haste = more Immo ticks and more Rain of Fire ticks. Haste = more RPPM trinket/meta procs. Haste = More Chaos Bolt casts per Dark Soul. Etc.

[FurtyIRL]

Incinerate hitting the GCD cap under meta w/ backdraft is largely irrelevant in terms of Haste's true value for Destro, which is mainly from RPPM and RoF.

I understand that, and duly noted - but are you saying you would value haste over mastery on any fight at all? Sure maybe on a patchwerk haste wins out but in practice that's hardly the case.

[Brusalk]

I understand that, and duly noted - but are you saying you would value haste over mastery on any fight at all? Sure maybe on a patchwerk haste wins out but in practice that's hardly the case.

There's a big difference between the statements "in theory" and "in practice".

Haste/Crit is extremely good for Destro "in theory" for single target and 2-target-cleave fights where there is no temporary damage buff phases to dump embers.

"In practice" there's no such fights in the current tier. All of the remotely single target fights (Jinrokh, Ji'kun, etc) have mechanics which provide temporary damage buffs allowing us to dump embers for more damage at specific times and thus makes the "I HIT HARD" strategy catch up and usually better.


Give me patchwerk 2.0 with the same mechanics and more health and I'll go Haste instantly. Along that note; Give me a fight where boss damage is all that matters and there's a few adds spawning every once in a while and I'll probably stay with Haste.

[FurtyIRL]

There's a big difference between the statements "in theory" and "in practice".

Haste/Crit is extremely good for Destro "in theory" for single target and 2-target-cleave fights where there is no temporary damage buff phases to dump embers.

"In practice" there's no such fights in the current tier. All of the remotely single target fights (Jinrokh, Ji'kun, etc) have mechanics which provide temporary damage buffs allowing us to dump embers for more damage at specific times and thus makes the "I HIT HARD" strategy catch up and usually better.


Give me patchwerk 2.0 with the same mechanics and more health and I'll go Haste instantly. Along that note; Give me a fight where boss damage is all that matters and there's a few adds spawning every once in a while and I'll probably stay with Haste.

Pretty much exactly what I said in the first place.

Yes I agree with your logic and in such a situation I'd go for more haste too, but that just doesn't matter the way things are now.

[Brusalk]

Pretty much exactly what I said in the first place.

Yes I agree with your logic and in such a situation I'd go for more haste too, but that just doesn't matter the way things are now.

From your questions it seemed like you were wondering what I'd do theoretically. I apologize.

[FurtyIRL]

From your questions it seemed like you were wondering what I'd do theoretically. I apologize.

Yup all good