Trying Affliction Again

[Zagam 1,982]

God zagam how are u so clueless

 

Agony will always do more dmg than UA 

 

http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/ZX3rLdWDwcBQ67KF#fight=2&type=damage-done&source=78

 

here is a 1.5mill fallen protectors, im obviously snapshotting wrong right

A bit hostile, are you?  Using a fight like Protectors which can abuse the Soul Swap mechanic to make snapshotted effects last longer than intended isn't going to win you any prize tickets here. 

 

As an example, here's your Heroic Dark Shamans parse: http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/ZX3rLdWDwcBQ67KF#fight=15&type=damage-done&source=78

 

Note that your Agony did 49.00M + 4.01M.

Note that your UA did 47.28M + 4.26M. 

 

That means Agony did a total of 53.01M while UA did 51.54M, which is pretty close, and shows a much tighter variance than your original parse.  I'm not even sure what you're referencing saying that I'm clueless.  You might be snapshotting correctly, but you're arguing and making statements in English really incorrectly.  If you READ what I wrote in a post earlier in this thread, I said UA can and will hit harder, not faster.  Let's take another look.

 

Your average UA crit tick on Protectors was 211.5k.  Your average Agony crit tick was 190k.  The reason your TOTAL Agony damage was higher is because of a faster tick time multiplied by 3 since you're running DoTs on 3 targets which is multiplying the total effect.  Agony also has a longer duration so your total time spent with Agony covered by empowered effects will be longer than UA's which makes Agony EASIER to make a higher damage component. 

[Cardio33 3]

Hmm...It's Friday so I won't do my typical reaming.

 

360k is rather embarrassing for a multi-dotting class in any facet, especially Heroic.  You did well with your opener, but based on your graph look on Protectors, your DPS went DOWN during execute.  I don't even know.  Let's take a look under the hood.

 

First problem I see is that you're clearly not snapshotting properly.  This is evident by Agony being 30% of your damage compared to UA being only 25%.  UA can and will hit harder than Agony.  I see you're using the Multistrike trinket which only contributed 4.6% of your damage.  I see no pet - surely you weren't using GoSac as Affliction?  I'll find out soon.  Your Doomguard only got off 11 casts.  You only got 60% worth from him.  Yep, Grimoire of Sacrifice.  This is a HUGE mistake.

 

You had 16 procs of Tempus Repit for 24.22% uptime.  The procs are spread out enough that you shoulda been flying with good DoT tick speed.  You had 31 Shadow Trance procs, so that means you were working with 35 total Soul Shards (4 + 31).  PBI proc'd reliably for you, but Toxic Power gave you some cruddy RNG.  You shouldn't be using this trinket if you have BBoY, so not sure if this was used by necessity or mistake. 

 

I see you using Drain Soul at earlier parts of the fight.  This is typically frowned upon because MG does comparable damage.  In Protectors, nothing you kill replenishes your Soul Shards, which is the important part.  It looks like you were casting it quickly to replenish shards which is a mistake.  If you're going to channel it, channel it to get Soul Shards back, not for execute damage.

 

I see you were using your 4pc.  This is generally advised against unless you don't have better Haste/Mastery or higher item level pieces.  To give you an example, you got 3 procs out of 31 Haunts.  Worth it?  Nope. 

 

Speaking of Haunt, you got 31 free Soul Shards and you used them appropriately.  You had almost 1,000 ticks of Corruption and only got 31 Soul Shards back - your proc rate looks low, but remember you only get Soul Shards back from your most RECENT Corruption.  If you had a Tempus Repit Corruption ticking somewhere and you applied a shitty one somewhere else, you stopped generating your Shards.  If you divide your approximate ticks by 3, you'd see your proc rate from Nightfall was very close to 10%. 

 

Haunt uptime is nowhere close to 100% during execute.  Your Haunt uptime during your opener was pretty low, as well.  You HAVE to prioritize empowering your most powerful DoTs in order to play Affliction well.

 

Now, let's solve why your DPS sucked outside of all the above factors.  Your graph peaks 10 seconds in around 1.6M and then drops down below 500k after only 30 seconds.  You SHOULD be getting empowered DoTs up and running in the first 5 seconds and then re-establishing them before your major procs fall off.  It looks like you didn't refresh before your powerful procs faded thus limiting your opener.  This is Affliction's most important time frame BY FAR, and it slipped past you.  You also dropped WELL below 200k at one point which just should not be with 3 targets.  Make sure your DoT uptime is high on all 3 targets, not just that you have it up somewhere.

I tried to confirm via simcraft that breaking 4pc for a higher ilevel piece of gear would yield a dps gain but I kept getting a decrease.  Swapping the flex chest for crushing magma (548 to 559 ilevel gain) showed a dps loss of about 5-6k at 569 ilevel.

 

 

Does simcraft over-value 4pc bonus for afflic and if so how much?

[Lockybalboa 618]

I tried to confirm via simcraft that breaking 4pc for a higher ilevel piece of gear would yield a dps gain but I kept getting a decrease.  Swapping the flex chest for crushing magma (548 to 559 ilevel gain) showed a dps loss of about 5-6k at 569 ilevel.

 

 

Does simcraft over-value 4pc bonus for afflic and if so how much?

 

 

SimC is crap for warlocks to start with, so instead of trying to find why its wrong you might just want to scrap it and not put in the work. 

 

The aff 4pc sucks and isn't worth it. I don't have numbers to show you that it is a X% loss because of Y% value - it's just bad. I haven't found any good aff warlocks that can/have shown otherwise.

[Kazistrasz 216]

When you're at high haste levels, you're already getting a lot of Shards as is. But, to take your 4pc, you have to start introducing crit in your gear, which is the weakest stat for Affliction by a land slide.

 

Here's how it plays out.

 

Best case scenario (in favor of using 4pc) is you're using Mantle of the Horned Nightmare and Robes of the Horned Nightmare so you can use the legs from Iron Juggernaut. Even after reforging, it means having 1002 crit on your gear. 

 

That's 1.67% crit chance. Instead, that could be 5.17% mastery. When you account for the fact that not using 4pc for Affliction also means not having HWF pieces for that, you're adding a minimum of 250 extra secondary stats, which means you're taking 1.67% crit instead of 6.47% mastery plus the lost int from those 6 ilvls on two pieces.

 

Thats' a BIG difference that the 4pc has to outweigh, but it only gives you a shard from Haunt 10% of the time. With good RNG, this could mean infinite Haunts. With bad RNG, you just gave up 6.47% mastery and a handful of Int for 1.67% crit. On average, you're going to get probably 3 extra shards from it in a fight, which isn't going to make up the difference.

 

Edit: Forgot about PBI, make that about 6.90% mastery.

[Cardio33 3]

When you're at high haste levels, you're already getting a lot of Shards as is. But, to take your 4pc, you have to start introducing crit in your gear, which is the weakest stat for Affliction by a land slide.

 

Here's how it plays out.

 

Best case scenario (in favor of using 4pc) is you're using Mantle of the Horned Nightmare and Robes of the Horned Nightmare so you can use the legs from Iron Juggernaut. Even after reforging, it means having 1002 crit on your gear. 

 

That's 1.67% crit chance. Instead, that could be 5.17% mastery. When you account for the fact that not using 4pc for Affliction also means not having HWF pieces for that, you're adding a minimum of 250 extra secondary stats, which means you're taking 1.67% crit instead of 6.47% mastery plus the lost int from those 6 ilvls on two pieces.

 

Thats' a BIG difference that the 4pc has to outweigh, but it only gives you a shard from Haunt 10% of the time. With good RNG, this could mean infinite Haunts. With bad RNG, you just gave up 6.47% mastery and a handful of Int for 1.67% crit. On average, you're going to get probably 3 extra shards from it in a fight, which isn't going to make up the difference.

 

Edit: Forgot about PBI, make that about 6.90% mastery.

Not to derail this thread but it was already on page 2 when I took a look at it :D

 

Absolutely agree with what you are saying and it makes perfect sense.  My point is when I make these changes in simcraft my theoretical dps drops.  

 

Current armory:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/kiljaeden/Medschool/advanced

569 ilevel, 15.05% hit, 13,829 haste, 107.12% mastery

 

I have a large ilevel upgrade in my bags (chest, crushing magma warforged 559)

Also have a nice secondary stat upgrade at same ilevel (pants, shady silks warforged 559)

 

I play 3/4 of the fights afflic, only take destro for immersus, galak, and spoils.  We are 10/14 heroic.

 

Ideally, I was hoping to setup two gear options, 4pc for destro and afflic set w/ those two pieces I just mentioned.  My point is that simcraft does not back up this change as a dps gain.

[Notoris 3]

While we are at it.. Inspired by this thread I looked over some warcraft logs to see how much Dark Refund was refunding me for my Haunt casts.  I don't have off-gear except for trinkets so I use 4-set as affliction.

I looked at 5 random boss kills. What I noticed was first of all that the refunds compared to haunt casts was most of the time way below the promised 20% from tool tips. Top refund was 12,5% lowest was 4,8%. That makes me wonder if the Haunts actually have to expire before you have the chance for a refund. If that is the case then you can't get refunds if you keep refreshing Haunt on your target. You'd have to delay Haunt for just a bit to let it fall off and time your casting time, flying time and debuff-remaining-time to land a new Haunt instantly. Does anyone know any details on that?

Seems like a lot of effort and maybe DpS loss to make it work that way.

[Lockybalboa 618]

 That makes me wonder if the Haunts actually have to expire

 

 

Have you read the tooltip?

 

Dark Refund: Haunt has a 20% chance to refund its Soul Shard when it expires

[Kazistrasz 216]

Interesting that those two tooltips are opposite (the actual 4-set listed on items and the spell for it).

 

I'd go and do more looking into it, in that case, but it would be too much effort to find a sufficient number of logs of locks using 4pc as Affliction to be able to rule RNG out of any observed results.

[Lockybalboa 618]

Interesting that those two tooltips are opposite (the actual 4-set listed on items and the spell for it).

 

 

Are you talking about the 10%/20% or the expiring part? Because the 4pc tooltip on the gear clearly states: "Haunt has a 10% chance to refund its shard when EXPIRING"

 

Am I the only one that reads tooltips?

 

No matter what, the 4pc is shite. Total shite. I don't know what fool made the 4pc but even when 5.4 was in PTR we all knew that it would be shite. Adding RNG in to the most RNG dependent spec is exponentially stupid on Blizz's part. This is why we can't have nice things or snapshotting.

[Notoris 3]

Well it could also have meant that it would also proc when the spell was overwritten with a new one. Tooltips are not always to be taken literally. It would not have been a surprise if the refund actually had happened when the old debuff ended beacuse of a new spell overwriting it... That would have made the 4 set more useful.

And calm down. You are not the only one reading tooltips. But you are the only one 'shouting'.

[Lockybalboa 618]

Well it could also have meant that it would also proc when the spell was overwritten with a new one. Tooltips are not always to be taken literally. It would not have been a surprise if the refund actually had happened when the old debuff ended beacuse of a new spell overwriting it... That would have made the 4 set more useful.

 

*Normally* it can be assumed that tooltips are literal until proven otherwise, some that had to be proven otherwise include the destro 4pc with its hidden ICD. *Normally* when they are doing a when it ends/expires/dispelled mechanic then they list the exact happenings of the mechanic. I think Doom used to have a "when dispelled or expires" I know Spriests had a few over the years, etc.

 

Blizzard isn't full of English majors or if we judged them by the quests text in Uldum they aren't even staffed by people that know English is a language, but they do know that what they say in tooltips are read, reread, and theory crafted over to a huge degree and so they do put some effort in to making them accurate. There are always exceptions to this but they are outliers, not the norm.

 

 

And calm down. You are not the only one reading tooltips. But you are the only one 'shouting'.

 

I'm very calm. THIS IS SHOUTING. This is highlighting what I am trying to point out so that it isn't missed. I never shout at people that can't hear me. Sorry for the confusion.

[Kazistrasz 216]

Doom's old function was when it killed a mob, but Living Bomb is another good example of an expiration-based event with the detonation. 

 

But, you're spot on: tool-tips are usually WYSIWYG for mechanics. Sometimes there's an extra circumstance not listed, like the ICD on our 4pc or the HP-based cap on Execute for warriors. But, I can't think of anything that just ignored its tooltip's description altogether.