Too little chatter in this board for all the new warlocks we have. Here, topic of the day - what can you break down from these stats:
http://wowwebstats.com/zeqjzfbedfbli?s=bosses&c=wrl
To start off: One of the things I notice is that based off the spells used/damage out, Radiant probably has a different spec then the other two warlocks.
Pataraga was probably fighting closer to the mobs, as he has swing damage.
Pataraga and Telis probably have similar specs, though based off of the numbers, Pataraga has better stats then Telis because his spells are hitting harder.
In some part of the encounters, Telis probably lacked a buff, where the other 2 didn't. He shows 0% Arcane resisted compared to Pataraga's 10%, and Radiant's 16%.
There are 2 curses listed. Telis did not cast either of those curses at any points during the encounter. I do not know if Curse of Elements would show up on the meters since I don't know if it does actual damage....maybe he was the warlock designated for it, so the casters could benefit from more damage? Or there was another type of toon in the raid the provided the same benefit? Or Telis just forgot to cast a curse.
Maybe a warlock should be doing this instead of a paladin!
I notice two things:
Radiant:
a) Soulfire and Incinerate are usually not used with the affliction build.
b) Drain Soul is a little low. Maybe you're not switching to drain soul early enough (25%) or not continuing to apply the dots while draining?
Telis:
a) Conflag and Chaosbolts are doing less damage than they perhaps should (e.g. less dmg than your imp). Maybe you're still fine tuning the destro rotation?
Just my 2 cents.
Cheers,
C.
Quote from: Acree on Thu, 2009-07-23 : 13:29
To start off: One of the things I notice is that based off the spells used/damage out, Radiant probably has a different spec then the other two warlocks.
Pataraga was probably fighting closer to the mobs, as he has swing damage.
Pataraga and Telis probably have similar specs, though based off of the numbers, Pataraga has better stats then Telis because his spells are hitting harder.
In some part of the encounters, Telis probably lacked a buff, where the other 2 didn't. He shows 0% Arcane resisted compared to Pataraga's 10%, and Radiant's 16%.
There are 2 curses listed. Telis did not cast either of those curses at any points during the encounter. I do not know if Curse of Elements would show up on the meters since I don't know if it does actual damage....maybe he was the warlock designated for it, so the casters could benefit from more damage? Or there was another type of toon in the raid the provided the same benefit? Or Telis just forgot to cast a curse.
Maybe a warlock should be doing this instead of a paladin!
wtf are you doing in this thread... go back to the faceroll forums where you belongs!
Your deductions are correct. Telis was probably throwing CoE and it does not show on WWS for that summary page (or on any other page it seems).
As you can see, only Radiant cast Unstable Affliction. As this is an affliction only spell you can assume she was the only afflication warlock. You can identify the other two warlock's build by looking at their casts also. You see Conflagrate which is a destruction only spell so you can assume they are heavy destruction.
Your deductions on their gear/stats is only partially correct. How hard a spell hits is heavily dependent on what debuffs the warlock has up on his target at the time. It is also depedent on any debuffs other raid members may have up at the time. Also lastly it can depend on what the player is doing in a certain fight (for example standing in pools on the General fight). Because this is an overall raid summary that does not include any fights that contain huge damage buffs/debuffs we can throw the third possibility out for now.
Affliction is very dependent on the Haunt and Shadow Embrace effects on their targets to boost their DPS. These two effects will dramaticly increase an affliction warlock's DPS if they are used properly. Lets talk about these effects for a moment.
Haunt "increases all damage done by your damage-over-time effects on the target by 20% for 12 sec". You can imagine how this boosts an afflication warlock's overall DPS. Haunt should be kept up as close to 100% of the time as possible. It IS possible to even double stack the Haunt effect if you are close enough to the target and are quick enough to cast as soon as the cooldown is done.
Shadow Embrace is a debuff that gets applied to a target hit by a warlock's Shadow Bolt when they have the Improved Shadow Bolt talent. The effect increases "all periodic damage delt to the target by you by 5% and reduces all periodic healing done to the target by 15%". This lasts for 12 seconds and can stack up to 2 times. This is also be kept at 2 stacks for as close to 100% of the time as possible.
Rotation for affliction ultimately comes down to juggling your cooldowns and keeping the two aformentioned effects up. In a raid you always start with your instants (CoA and Corruption) and move on to your other spells. There can be some debate as to the starting order. I personally use CoA, Corruption, Haunt, Unstable Affliction, Shadow Bolt x2. There are two reasons I like to cast Shadow Bolts last. This is partially because of Nightfall and partially because of the long cast times. Nightfall is a talent that Afflication warlocks usually take that allows your Corruption/Drain soul/Drain Life ticks to proc a Shadow Trance buff. The Shadow Trance buff makes your next Shadow Bolt cast time instant. As a general rule when you have Shadow Trance, you use it as soon as you're done your current cast (aka next immediate opportunity). Because I cast Corruption early, alot of times I will get at least one Shadow Trance before I get to the Shadow Bolt part of my rotation. the second reason is because the long cast time of an Affliction warlock's normal Shadow Bolt allows more time for the Haunt spell to cooldown. After the initial setup rotation it is all about casting when cooldowns are up and keeping your DoTs up.
Destruction is not as dependent on debuffs to boost their DPS and instead depends on crit and haste. Destruction requires more setup than Affliction however and has a few key things that must be kept up as much as possible. A Destruction warlock's rotation is focused on keeping Immolate up and casting Conflagrate and Chaos Bolt every single time they cooldown. For example, my rotation is CoA/CoE, Immolate, Conflagrate, Incinerate x3, Chaos Bolt. This rotation can change a little depending on my current haste rating (ie: adding more Incinerates during Bloodlust). The key spells for Destruction warlocks are Immolate and Conflagrate. Lets talk about them for a moment.
Immolate is a hybrid spell that has a direct damage element followed by a DoT effect. What makes it the absolutely most important spell for Destruction warlocks is it is neccessary to have it applied before being able to use Conflagrate (yes Shadowflame works but 99% of the time warlocks fight at range). It also increases the damage of the Incinerate and Chaos Bolt spells when they are cast on a target affected by it. That is really all there is to Immolate.
Conflagrate is the second most important spell for Destruction warlocks. Aside from the large amount of direct damage delt there are several talents that make this spell especially important. These talents are Backdraft and "Fire and Brimstone". There are other talents also that help make it a very powerful spell but lets focus on the talents I mentioned.
Backdraft is an awesome talent that gives Conflagrate an after effect of reducing the next 3 destruction spell's casting time by 30%. For example this effect lowers the casting time of my Incinerates to less than 1.5 seconds (sometimes as low as 1.2 seconds or even 0.9 seconds during Bloodlust). This allows a Destruction warlock to hit more often to be obvious. That's all there is to it. Along this note, remember that haste is very desirable for warlocks.
Fire and Brimstone increases the critical strike chance of your Conflagrate spell by 25%. This is HUGE to be blunt. This talent is one of the reasons that crit is not a more important stat for Destruction warlocks. This talent also "increases the damage done by your Incinerate and Chaos Bolt spells to targets afflicated by your Immolate by 15%". This is another reason why Immolate is so important in a Destruction warlock's rotation and also why Incinerate is used during the Backdraft effect (and during Bloodlust as a filler while waiting for cooldowns).
Ok so now that I've gone over the basics for Affliction and Destruction rotations and key talents we can look at the numbers a little more closely. I am going to be as impartial as possible so no hard feelings. First we'll look at Pataraga and Telis because they have comparable builds. It is silly to compare a Destruction warlock to an Affliction warlock. It is akin to comparing a melee to a ranged in usefulness for this case IMO.
If you look at the top damage spell for Patarage and Telis you will see that it is Incinerate. You will also see that they each cast it the most out of all of their direct damamge spells. This is good because it means that they are casting it often, probably during their Backdraft portion of their rotation. If you compare the number of ticks for each of their Corruptions you will see roughly the same number. This is because it means they are both keeping it up the same amount of the time (lets hope that is close to 100%). The same does not hold true for Immolate. Since Immolate is such an important spell for Destruction warlocks this is not good. Telis has 334 ticks compared to Pataraga's 369. This means that Telis is not refreshing his Immolate as often as he should OR Patarage is refreshing his too often. It is hard to tell which is the case but we can look at their numbers for Conflagrate and see that Patarage cast 61 to Telis's 47. Telis's low number could be because he wasn't refreshing Immolate as often as he should and so he wasn't able to cast Conflagrate as often. Both of them have Shadow Bolts listed which is strange. Shadow Bolts aren't something Destruction warlocks use typicly except for fights where fire damage is not as effective. The number of casts are very low and I guess can be ignored. Rain of Fire is an AoE and really can be ignored unless we're looking at trash DPS or specificly damage on adds. It looks like Pataraga was using CoA whereas Telis was not. As I said before this is probably because Telis was using CoE. The number of CoA ticks for Patarage is very low however so he probably was using another curse or not refresh nearly as often as he should have. Looking down further we see some CoD hits so we can assume that is why there are so few CoA ticks. But if we compare the number of ticks/hits for his CoA and CoD to Radiant then we can see that he wasn't nearly as effective in keeping these two spells up as she was. Although they are different builds and so completely different rotations there is still no reason for such a large difference in their numbers. He could have been trying to use CoE also but we can not tell with WWS. This could be a problem if two warlocks are trying to use CoE on the same target (aka the boss). There should be some communication in the raid to make sure that only one warlock is using CoE and the others are not wasting time in their rotations on it and also wasting the chosen warlock's time by making him recast it. Communication is also neccessary with some death knight builds because they have abilities that will overwrite CoE. These numbers tell us that this communication was probably lacking. Pataraga also has some Shadowfury hits which is considered AoE IMO so we can ignore it IMO. The number of hits is high but probably because it is an AoE and could have been used on a group of adds. Shadowflame is also listed for Pataraga but the number of hits is low so lets ignore it this time around. It was robably used to get off a quick Conflagrate while in melee range of the boss or on adds. Swing is also listed but has low numbers so we'll ignore it. I think I should mention though that normally if you see a caster with a high number of swings it could be because of a situation in a fight where they are out of mana (not normally going to happen to a warlock lol). But if that isn't the case then the caster is wasting precious GCDs.
Now lets look at Radiant. As affliction the majority of her damage should be from DoTs IMO. This should also hold true for number of hits/casts. We see Incinerate at the top of the list, but this is only because it is the most commonly hitting spell for warlocks in this summary. She has only 1 hit with Incinerate so we'll assume it was a miscast and ignore it. So moving on to Corruption we can see that she had a total of 293 ticks/hits. This is one of the only spells that we can compare to the other warlocks. Her total number is a little lower than Pataraga and Telis but within range so we can assume it was kept up effectively enough. Looking down the list we can see that her numbers for Unstable Affliction are fairly high also, which is good. We can see CoA and CoD listed so we know that those were the curses that Radiant used. The numbers are fairly high so we can probably assume that she was not using CoE (which we cannot see on WWS). Haunt is also listed but the number looks low compared to the other afflication spells. This is because Haunt does not actually have a DoT effect as most people think and actually has only a single piece direct damage delt when it is applied so each cast is considered one hit. Some math can be used to determine what the uptime for each of the DoTs mentioned so far so lets try some of it next.
We'll stay pretty basic. So what we can do is pick a boss fight were the caster is not required to move around alot. For this summary we'll pick XT-002. I will start with Corruption because we can compare all three warlocks with our numbers. The fight lasted 4 minutes and 35 seconds. First we will determine what is the maximum number of ticks that we can have in that time. Corruption lasts 18 seconds and does damage every 3 seconds. Lets do some math.
4'35" = 275"
275 / 18 = 15.2777 casts (we'll round to 15)
18 / 3 = 6 ticks per cast
15 * 6 = 90 ticks over 275 seconds
So ideally if you're refreshing corruption immediately every time it drops off the boss you should get roughly 90 ticks/hits in a 4'35" fight. If we look at their numbers we see 59, 69, and 49. These numbers are all low so we can assume that all three warlocks were having trouble keeping their Corruption refreshed during this fight. This could be because of things that happen during the fight. For XT-002 we know that there is very little that needs to be done besides AoE some adds periodicly so we can say that this could be a problem area for the warlocks. The missed at least 3 full casts each during this fight which means their Corruptions were not ticking for at least 54 seconds during the fight (almost a minute!).
Going down the list, lets do Immolate next. Immolate lasts 15 seconds and does damage every 3 seconds.
275 / 15 = 18.3333 casts (round to 18)
15 / 3 = 5 ticks per cast
18 * 5 = 90 ticks over 275 seconds
So our ideal number for Immolate is roughly 90 ticks/hits. Pataraga had 80 on our summary, which is good. Telis had only 45 though. This tells us that something was preventing Telis from refreshing his Immolate effeciently. This could be a rotation problem or any number of things. Regardless this is an area for improvement. Radiant didn't use Immolate which is good, Unstable Affliction and Immolate are mutually exclusive so Affliction warlocks will never use the latter.
Now lets do Unstable Afflication. Unstable Afflication lasts 18 seconds and does damage every 3 seconds. Since we already did the math for Corruption which starts with the same numbers, we'll use the same results. Radiant hit 55 times with this spell and our estimate is 90. This means that she was not keeping it refreshed enough. This points out an area for improvement in rotation maybe. We can dig deeper and see if she was at least casting them on the boss. By clicking on Radiant's name we can bring up her details for the fight we are looking at. Then clicking Unstable Afflication will show us who she casted the spell on. Only 1 hit was not on the boss (or his heart) so that is good at least.
Next is Haunt. Haunt lasts 12 seconds and has an 8 second cooldown. This means ideally it should be cast every 8 seconds during a fight. Since it only hits once per cast, we can determine the number of cast for Radiant was 11. Now lets do some math.
275 / 8 = 34.375 casts (round to 34)
That was easy. Now we know that it should be possible to cast as many as 34 Haunt's during a 275 second fight. Radiant only cast 11. This is bad. As I described before Haunt is extremely important to an Afflication warlock's DPS. Lets do some additional math to determine how many Haunts can be cast if we waited until it dropped to refresh it.
275 / 12 = 22.91666 (round to 22)
We can still cast as many as 22 Haunts if we ignore the cooldown. So now we know that this is not what Radiant was doing. This identifies as problem area for Radiant in rotation or something else. This could be because she was not able to easily tell when Haunt needed to be refreshed or when it's cooldown was up.
Ok so that's some stuff. I'm aware that I skipped some things like Death Coil. I am sick of writing at the moment so I'm done for now. This was just one way to read the statistics and use them to determine performance and problem areas.
One thing I forgot to point out: Soul Fire is something only Demonology warlocks use.
EDIT: I would have been the 3rd poster but it took me two hours to write this.
EDIT: Fixed some math for Corruption, I was way off lol
EDIT: I was way off on Unstable Affliction too.
http://wowwebstats.com/zeqjzfbedfbli?ab=47865&s=bossdown (http://wowwebstats.com/zeqjzfbedfbli?ab=47865&s=bossdown)
Curse of Elements
Quote from: Dave on Thu, 2009-07-23 : 19:13
http://wowwebstats.com/zeqjzfbedfbli?ab=47865&s=bossdown (http://wowwebstats.com/zeqjzfbedfbli?ab=47865&s=bossdown)
Curse of Elements
ah yes, there it is, thanks! i didn't think to do that. that confirms what i thought
-BUMP-
I edited my large post because some of my math was wrong. This changed my analysis on Radiant. Erin you should read it, it may help you.