I feel like my DPS is fairly decent, however I know I could improve. Help?

[Toonic 0]

Overall, I feel like I do a decent amount of DPS, being at the top of my semi-casual guild for a longest period of time (New DK recently over-took me/keeping up). Though, I feel as if I could improve by a fair bit. I was wondering what could I do to improve?

 

You can find our world of logs here

 

And my armory here.

 

Any help/advice would be great.

[Zagam 1,982]

Armory looks solid. 

 

It's interesting you did more as Destruction on Sha of Pride than you did on Protectors as Demonology.  Methinks you didn't super charge your Doom to make it hit for a ton.  Since we lost UVLS, the primary focus as Demo is to make Doom hit as hard as possible.  While it won't compensate for the Imp nerf and loss of army of Imps, it will help lessen the nerf by boosting Doom damage.

 

Protectors - no reason to use Aura of the Elements when you can easily glyph Curse of the Elements to hit all 3 targets.  Lots of DF cost to keep that up.  Shadowflame uptime is only 17%, so that can bump up a bit.  Other than that, DoT uptimes, Soul Fire use, and other stuff looks good.

 

Sha of Pride - your Chaos Bolt ALMOST beat your Incinerate damage, so you're on the right path.  Successfully timing your Chaos Bolts with procs will almost always make CB hit harder than Incinerate.  You're likely held back by your LFR trinkets.  Immolate is at 78% uptime...this can be brought up.  Other than that, everything looks good.

 

You're a good example of a solid player held back by gear alone.  250k+ DPS on Sha of Pride with shit trinkets is good.  When you upgrade some slots, you should easily push 300k on a fight like that.  Keep up the solid work, and don't let some success stop you from trying to get even better.

[zombiecurse 0]

I'm looking at this guy's logs, and he has fairly comparable gear to me, but he's doing roughly 30 per cent more damage than I am (speciflcally comparing the Spoils of Pandaria kills). I consider myself a decent player, but this shows me I can improve a lot. I think I know some of what I'm doing wrong here, but would love some feedback. I'll throw out what I think some of my problems were below, and if anyone has anything to add then I'd like to hear it. Give me shit.

Log

Armory

Some things I think contribute to the number disparity:

• First time we've done the fight. Very hectic fight, not used to switching targets so often.
• Flex vs normal might mean adds are trickier for me to havoc onto the bosses since they die faster. Also possible I'm just being skittish with havoc and not optimizing it.
• On the same note, I think i'm using immolate a lot on adds when I should be using fel flame or incinerate, as immolate isn't going to tick on a lot of those adds for full dmg.
• I didn't use dps potions at all. In all honesty, I never made a point of using dps potions because in the past all I did was LFR and it didn't seem worth the trouble, but i'm likely going to start doing normal soon and am probably going to be stocking up.
• I'm .12 per cent below hit cap. In the past I've let this slide because the miss chance was so low, but now I'm thinking it's likely costing me dps.
• Inefficient use of fire and brimstone. Used it in some places where I probably shouldn't have, didn't time big ember uptimes correctly to use it effectively when I should have.
• Also noticed he's gemming/reforging for mastery and crit, while I'm using 9778 haste cap (main spec affliction atm)

Edited October 9, 2013 by zombiecurse

[Zagam 1,982]

I'm looking at this guy's logs, and he has fairly comparable gear to me, but he's doing roughly 30 per cent more damage than I am (speciflcally comparing the Spoils of Pandaria kills). I consider myself a decent player, but this shows me I can improve a lot. I think I know some of what I'm doing wrong here, but would love some feedback. I'll throw out what I think some of my problems were below, and if anyone has anything to add then I'd like to hear it. Give me shit.

Log

Armory

Some things I think contribute to the number disparity:

• First time we've done the fight. Very hectic fight, not used to switching targets so often.
• Flex vs normal might mean adds are trickier for me to havoc onto the bosses since they die faster. Also possible I'm just being skittish with havoc and not optimizing it.
• On the same note, I think i'm using immolate a lot on adds when I should be using fel flame or incinerate, as immolate isn't going to tick on a lot of those adds for full dmg.
• I didn't use dps potions at all. In all honesty, I never made a point of using dps potions because in the past all I did was LFR and it didn't seem worth the trouble, but i'm likely going to start doing normal soon and am probably going to be stocking up.
• I'm .12 per cent below hit cap. In the past I've let this slide because the miss chance was so low, but now I'm thinking it's likely costing me dps.
• Inefficient use of fire and brimstone. Used it in some places where I probably shouldn't have, didn't time big ember uptimes correctly to use it effectively when I should have.
• Also noticed he's gemming/reforging for mastery and crit, while I'm using 9778 haste cap (main spec affliction atm)

 

Self diagnosis - you're learning!  Spoils is a gimmicky fight...if you get to land Shadowburns and Chaos Bolts, you'll be higher.  One week my Ele Shaman did 220k while I did 190k.  Following week, I did 245k and he did 209k...it almost feels like you have to snipe kills.  I'm sure in Heroic it'll be a different story...

 

Immolate should be used on anything where it'll tick 3 times.  I would make sure you always have Immolate up on the medium and large adds, but for Sparks and Stone Guardians, just CB them for one shot kills.

 

Get a Potion master, grab some Green Tea Leaf and some Silkweed, and go to town.  I always carry 100+ potions on me.  Potions should always be used just before combat (affectionately called prepotting) as well as during Bloodlust or other time of needed DPS.

 

Being at 14.88% Hit isn't going to create a DPS loss for you MOST of the time.  .12% chance to miss means you're going to miss 12 out of every 10,000 casts, or 1 every 1,000.  That'd be HORRIBLE luck to miss a CB or Shadowburn, but it's VERY unlikely to happen on any one particular pull.  Over the course of a night, you might see a miss or two.

 

Mastery and Crit will give better Destruction numbers.  If you're MS Aff, keep the Haste.  Otherwise, dump it.

[zombiecurse 0]

I went through your post about analyzing logs and took a pretty long look at mine and at a few of the other players I'm raiding with.

 

Just comparing myself to the other lock in our group, it looks like I was definitely right about not using F&B effectively. F&B Incinerate was one of his main sources of damage, while it definitely was not for me. I can also see that I cast single-target immolates much more often than he did, but didn't have anywhere close to the rain of fire dmg that he was doing. My use of Shadowfury and Howl of Terror is non-existent. My curse of elements usage is also just fucking awful. Bad lock.

 

On the upside, I maximized my use of dark soul and archimonde's fury, but that's fairly basic stuff.

 

So notes for next time:

 

- No reflex spam casting immolate on low-hp single targets

- More F&B incinerates and rain of fires

- Prepot

- Don't forget about howl of terror, shadowfury and curse of elements

- Also going to adjust my focus bar to make it easer to havoc chaos bolt and shadowburn onto the bosses.

 

Thanks for the help.

[Brown 14]

 

- Also going to adjust my focus bar to make it easer to havoc chaos bolt and shadowburn onto the bosses.

 

 

Can honestly just write a macro to make this easier.

 

/cast [@focus, harm] Havoc; [@mouseover, harm] Havoc

 

Prioritizes focus target as Havoc target then mouseover (for when you forget early on to set focus pre-pull).

 

EDIT/SIDENOTE: I also find it highly amusing that 9 times out of 10 when I click on a post in recent posts about improving dps, it's a warlock post on a site named after a mage ability.

Edited October 9, 2013 by Brown

[zombiecurse 0]

Havoc macro is a good idea. Probably going to need to practice with it a bit so I don't accidentally cast it on adds, but I'll work it out. Thanks.