[5.4] Brusalk's Destruction Warlock guide

[Brusalk]

destro best spec since 5.2? it was good on a whopping 2-3 fights in ToT

It was good on most fights for the first few weeks of progression. After meta plus gear Aff/Demo pulled ahead.

[Robo88]

It was good on most fights for the first few weeks of progression. After meta plus gear Aff/Demo pulled ahead.

Hey Brusalk sorry for spamming your thread. Anychance you can look my character over and help with some stat weights.

Been trying to work out this SimC it is impossible to understand for me. Could be because I just started using it lol.

Anyway, i'm at ilvl 557 at the moment. us .battle.net/wow/en/character/arthas/Nuggetnips/simple is my armory. **Can't post links at the moment**
I can't figure out what stat weight's to go with I see some people having really good dps with mastery > crit > haste -- Some with Mastery ~= Haste > Crit. SimC told me to go with 11% hit rating at one point tonight so not really quite sure what is going on.

Any help would be awesome. Thanks.

Character name is Nuggetnips on Arthas.

Thanks again.

[Deleted]

I've had lots of problems with SimCraft since 540-4.
I could be that it is caused in fact by the unnerving popup on battle.net to download the beta launcher.
what I did was a full delete of all version + reinstall of the new version.
I'm starting simcraft with Run As Administrator (not sure why it is needed, and it is potentially dangerous but it does the trick for me).

Anyway Robo88 with your armory I get Nuggetnips : 265753 dps
Scale Factors for Nuggetnips Damage Per Second
Int SP Hit Crit Haste Mastery
Scale Factors 7.26 5.51 6.91 4.40 4.41 4.66

[Deleted]

destruction was overall the best spec during progress since 5.2 and the spec with the least weaknesses. strong on add fights, good single target dps, very high burst (aoe and single target), insane survivability. besides the needed soul leech nerf nothing changed with the basic destruction mechanics.
i have to ask, what "awesome niche" are you talking about?

on ptr destruction got almost 0 attention and the long anticipated UVLS changes werent implemented during almost 3 month of testing. after blizzard decided to do the classbalancing during hc progress destruction became competitive (with bindings/4pc even stronger than the other two on most fights).
as long as destruction isnt more than 5-10% dps behind the other specs on single target fights it will be in a good place during progress.


edit: talking about 10man.

you gave yourself the answer by enumerating what destro brings in 1 package on the table at the begining , besides single target fights wich are few in number , any other type of fight with constant clave oportunities , aoe burst situations or just constant aoe this spec brings cutting edge advantages for 10 man groups running with an above decent destro lock , FnB and havoc situations makes the destro lock a must have in my opinion in the hardcore 10's fighting for each second of progress.

[Robo88]

Thank you sir. Very close to what currently running. I have never quite had 265 sustained damage tho. Usually around 200k. Going to start doing logs and see if I can get some help with that.

[gahddo]

Herro, most of you probably have only seen me once or twice posting every month or so around patch days to spew out information to bounce off brusalk's giant head. Thought I'd formally introduce myself as the lead warlock developer for simulationcraft. Also do a lot of work over at Icy Veins in the warlock forums/guides, which is partially why I more rarely update things via the mmo-champion forums.

Hey Brusalk sorry for spamming your thread. Anychance you can look my character over and help with some stat weights.

Been trying to work out this SimC it is impossible to understand for me. Could be because I just started using it lol.

Anyway, i'm at ilvl 557 at the moment. us .battle.net/wow/en/character/arthas/Nuggetnips/simple is my armory. **Can't post links at the moment**
I can't figure out what stat weight's to go with I see some people having really good dps with mastery > crit > haste -- Some with Mastery ~= Haste > Crit. SimC told me to go with 11% hit rating at one point tonight so not really quite sure what is going on.

Any help would be awesome. Thanks.

Character name is Nuggetnips on Arthas.

Thanks again.

You have to understand how scale factors work in simc before you try to put them to good use.

Put simply, running your scale factors in simc adds 1k rating to each of your stats (by default), measures the difference between current dps and dps after the rating has been added, and then divides the dps gained by the rating added.

So to get a mastery scale factor for mastery of 5, you gain 5k dps from that 1 rating. The scale factor is simply the amount of dps gained PER RATING.

Now, if you look at how simc does this, it simply ADDS the rating to each statistic one by one to check the gain. So when you have 15k mastery/8k haste, its likely to tell you haste is more valuable than if you had 15k haste/8k mastery, because the difference between 8k haste and 9k haste is more dps than the difference between 15k haste and 16k haste.

TL;DR Simc's scale factor option takes a snapshot of your CURRENT stats, and tells you which statistic would give you more dps AFTER YOUR CURRENT RATING. Aka if you change the stats on your gear, it changes the scale factors.

If you want to get a more detailed picture of how the stats scale versus each other in the long run, checkout the reforging/stat plot section of the wiki: https://code.google.com/p/simulation...aling#Plotting

[Robo88]

Here are logs from our Garrosh attempt tonight. w ww.worldoflogs.com/reports/5yzjhq78cds35di9/ not sure how to seperate by pull. Seem's my immolate is not up as much as I thought not sure if that bugs.

Thanks for responding gahddo, so what your saying is the stat weights they give me would be the best dps for my gear?

Thanks again.

[gahddo]

Here are logs from our Garrosh attempt tonight. w ww.worldoflogs.com/reports/5yzjhq78cds35di9/ not sure how to seperate by pull. Seem's my immolate is not up as much as I thought not sure if that bugs.

Thanks for responding gahddo, so what your saying is the stat weights they give me would be the best dps for my gear?

Thanks again.

Not for reforging/gemming your gear, but if you just magically got 1k free rating that you got to chose where to place. That is why blindly using scale factors for something like AMR/reforgelite, and then resimming scale factors can DRASTICALLY change your scale factors.

The idea is that scale factors are only accurate for your current gear. If you change ANYTHING about your gear, then the scale factors change with it.

In general I take in game experience (which I'm working on making more realistic in simc as we speak) as to which statistics are best, in this case mastery > crit >= haste, look at my scale factors for a general number, and then change those numbers to fit what I know to be true better. So if I get 6.8 crit/7.4 haste/7.13 mastery, then I just put something like 7.4 mastery/7.13 crit/6.8 haste into AMR/reforgelite.

[seam]

So, forgive me if I'm asking kinda dumb, but do I want to chaincast Chaosbolt with 4 embers+a CD?

I mainly ask because I've heard conflicting stuff, some people telling me to cast em as soon as I get an ember... And I tried asking the guild warlock, but they ignored me and then left guild ;-;

And if I do chaincast, do I want to cast an unbuffed chaos bolt if I have 3.75 embers?

[Mazda]

herro, most of you probably have only seen me once or twice posting every month or so around patch days to spew out information to bounce off brusalk's giant head. Thought i'd formally introduce myself as the lead warlock developer for simulationcraft. Also do a lot of work over at icy veins in the warlock forums/guides, which is partially why i more rarely update things via the mmo-champion forums.

amg it is le gahddo.

[Deleted]

So, forgive me if I'm asking kinda dumb, but do I want to chaincast Chaosbolt with 4 embers+a CD?

I mainly ask because I've heard conflicting stuff, some people telling me to cast em as soon as I get an ember... And I tried asking the guild warlock, but they ignored me and then left guild ;-;

And if I do chaincast, do I want to cast an unbuffed chaos bolt if I have 3.75 embers?

Mainly you only want cast CB only when you have good INT/Crit buffs.. I wouldn't recommend cast CB without buffs unless you are just about to cap 4 embers or need burst dmg..

[Deleted]

Hi guys i just dinged my alt lock(i choose the destro spec) and im gearing it but i'm only 484 for now.
Reading this guide i noted that the observer was the pet doing more dmg, but i proved each pet on the target dummy and the imp was doing like twice the dmg of my observer...

What am i missing??

p.s. im using grim of supr and currently im going mast>crit>haste

[gahddo]

Mainly you only want cast CB only when you have good INT/Crit buffs.. I wouldn't recommend cast CB without buffs unless you are just about to cap 4 embers or need burst dmg..

Namely you want to use it if dark soul is up or an intellect/crit/mastery proc is up. If a proc/ds isn't up, you pool embers until you're near cap, 3.5+ ideally, though for a beginner you can aim for 30-32+, and then use one chaos bolt so you don't cap, do normal rotation, and either wait until you're near cap again, or you have a proc/ds.

- - - Updated - - -

Hi guys i just dinged my alt lock(i choose the destro spec) and im gearing it but i'm only 484 for now.
Reading this guide i noted that the observer was the pet doing more dmg, but i proved each pet on the target dummy and the imp was doing like twice the dmg of my observer...

What am i missing??

p.s. im using grim of supr and currently im going mast>crit>haste

Imps beat other pets on dummies because recount measures active dps not effective dps. The difference being down time. The imp has down time unlike other pets, it isn't always casting because of the fucked up way it pools energy. So basically, it casts off 4 firebolts or w/e, sits there for 3 seconds, and does that again. Because recount doesn't measure the downtime, it just adds the dps.

In reality, all of the pets are tied for destro/affliction and just come down to utility/preference. For demonology, felguard is the obvious choice.

- - - Updated - - -

Btw, doing a big update for destruction aoe/cleave in simc that will make it 100000x more realistic, lot of things were broken previously. I'll be doing a ton of sims with the new code and checking for rotational changes and statistic values. Hoping to make a giant dissertation on the subject sometime this week!

[Nutri]

What would be the (if you may call it that way) Intellect breakpoint before you start swapping int gems with mastery gems for Destro?

I'm using MrRobot for optimizing my char (I dont raid so I don't really want to go too deep into it with simcraft, I just want to be in good shape) and of late it started giving me mastery gem options over int ones.

http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear/eu/aggramar/neqael

[gahddo]

What would be the (if you may call it that way) Intellect breakpoint before you start swapping int gems with mastery gems for Destro?

I'm using MrRobot for optimizing my char (I dont raid so I don't really want to go too deep into it with simcraft, I just want to be in good shape) and of late it started giving me mastery gem options over int ones.

http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear/eu/aggramar/neqael

For affliction/demo its much lower, but I'd say hold off on it until you get into 535+ ilvl from flex raid and such. It really didn't get good until heroic last tier gear, so it probably isn't ideal for your 522 ilvl.

[Deleted]

What would be the (if you may call it that way) Intellect breakpoint before you start swapping int gems with mastery gems for Destro?

I'm using MrRobot for optimizing my char (I dont raid so I don't really want to go too deep into it with simcraft, I just want to be in good shape) and of late it started giving me mastery gem options over int ones.

http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear/eu/aggramar/neqael

If I were you, i would go like this:
Red socket: expertise 160/mastery 160
Blue socket: hit 160/mastery 160
Yellow: 320 mastery

Just like all gear item levels... MR. Robot don't know nothing TBH... If you want to be exact what to do, use sims (it gives you som sort of info) or then try by yourself.. But dont trust MR.Robot...

www.sparkuggz.com if you need rotations and tooltips for warlock..

[Deleted]

Namely you want to use it if dark soul is up or an intellect/crit/mastery proc is up. If a proc/ds isn't up, you pool embers until you're near cap, 3.5+ ideally, though for a beginner you can aim for 30-32+, and then use one chaos bolt so you don't cap, do normal rotation, and either wait until you're near cap again, or you have a proc/ds.

- - - Updated - - -



Imps beat other pets on dummies because recount measures active dps not effective dps. The difference being down time. The imp has down time unlike other pets, it isn't always casting because of the fucked up way it pools energy. So basically, it casts off 4 firebolts or w/e, sits there for 3 seconds, and does that again. Because recount doesn't measure the downtime, it just adds the dps.

In reality, all of the pets are tied for destro/affliction and just come down to utility/preference. For demonology, felguard is the obvious choice.

- - - Updated - - -

Btw, doing a big update for destruction aoe/cleave in simc that will make it 100000x more realistic, lot of things were broken previously. I'll be doing a ton of sims with the new code and checking for rotational changes and statistic values. Hoping to make a giant dissertation on the subject sometime this week!

Actually i compared not the dps but how much dmg the pet was doing in 2 min...and the imp was still higher

[Grizelda]

What debuffs were on the dummy for your test?

[Deleted]

What debuffs were on the dummy for your test?

no debuff just pet attacking

[xskarma]

no debuff just pet attacking

And that's the problem. In a raid environment (where you would normally be using SimC for) you have various debuffs that make other pets' attacks do more damage.