World of Warcraft Guide to Warlock DPS Part 2

A damage cycle is made up of multiple components: casting time, duration, global cooldown, damage output, and mana consumption. A persons performance in any encounter can be broken down into these six factors. Together, they determine the overall damage output your going to achieve when the encounter is over. By considering our spells, the length of the encounter, and how much mana is going to be expended; we can determine not only a "Ideal" damage cycle but also consider factors limiting our achieving this "Ideal" cycle.

First though, a few things.

First I deliver to you the comparison of Ruin and UA that I promised earlier since the two most popular warlock builds are defined by these talents.

Ruin- Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your Destruction spells by 100%.

From Wowwiki.com "Ruin increases the critical hit damage bonus of your Destruction spells by 100%. A normal spell crit is +50% damage taking into account all other damage modifiers. Ruin doubles the crit bonus, so you get a +33% damage bonus on critical hits."

Unstable Affliction- Shadow energy slowly destroys the target, causing 1050 damage over 18 sec. In addition, if the Unstable Affliction is dispelled it will cause 1575 damage to the dispeller and silence them for 5 sec.

So the basic questions to answer between these two is which one gives you more damage for that talent point, and what am I sacrificing if anything for either talent? To answer them I will analyze each one WITHIN the context of a build. Since it does not matter if UA is superior to ruin if destruction is inherently better as a tree in someway and provides more damage or Visa-Versa.

For this comparison I will be using standard 41/0/20 and 0/21/40.

For each comparison the fight length is 450 seconds.

Infinite mana assumed. (yes this is unfavorable to the affliction build)

No life tapping or dark pacting.

Two sets of numbers one for destruction without ruin, and one for destruction with ruin to determine gained damage.

No full or partial resists.

No raid buffs/debuffs.

All numbers rounded.

I will use varying sets of statistics to determine effectiveness to make this even between the two. I will give them both a starting item budget of spell damage and a base crit of 10%. The affliction build will use the spell damage as is, the ruin build will convert some of it to crit rating based on blizzard itemization (which I'll explain in a future article in the series).

You may ask why must the ruin build reduce it's spell damage to gain crit? Well it's because each item when made has essentially a "budget" of points to spend on stats the more an item has on one stat the less it has of another. So if your itemizing for more then one statistic your not going to be able to achieve the same high number of someone who's focusing on one.

I did the math and put it at the bottom of this article if anyone wants to go over it, I've summarized the results here though:

UA = unstable affliction SD = Spell Damage C = Crit before talents S = Seconds

UA 600SD

51757D in 450S

Ruin 427SD 17C

26791D in 450S

UA 800SD

58778 in 450S

Ruin 627SD 17C

32159D in 450S

UA 1000SD

65798 in 450S

Ruin 827SD 17C

37528 in 450S

UA 1200SD 17C

72818 in 450S

Ruin 1027SD 17C

42896 in 450S

Ruin 904SD 22C

47930 in 450S

UA 1400SD

79838 in 450S

Ruin 1227SD 17C

48263 in 450S

Ruin 1104SD 22C

53455 in 450S

Ruin 609SD 32C

52016 in 450S

As you can see ruin, never seems to out damage unstable affliction in it's respective build. The bonus from ruin does grow better with crit then with spell damage though but that does not mean itemizing for a lot of crit is necessarily better for a ruin build, as seen from the results, often the crit will lower total damage numbers while increasing ruin bonus, while in one case actually reducing ruin bonus from the previous example!

Note: this is not an argument for which if either build is more damaging it is a strict comparison of UA and Ruin in their respective builds.

Now, on to casting.

There is no "perfect" cast order for your damage over time spells. This reason is primarily because all your dots have different durations except for corruption and unstable affliction causing them to end at different times. Second there are environmental factors (CC you might need to refresh, things you might have to activate, Area Effect attacks you may have to dodge) in any encounter that could prevent you from achieving this ideal rotation and in fact cause a drop in your overall output in just trying to reset it. Basically, that means not only do you need patience as warlock to watch your timers, but you also need the flexibility of mind to control your cycle even when it becomes chaotically unorganized.

Now, of course some may argue there is a perfect cast rotation because your arranging global cooldowns or durations to end at similar points. Sure, okay at the beginning, but again the environment will destroy even the best constructed cast rotation. However, for the sake of completeness lets discuss how you should open your cast rotation.

The things to remember are:

Cast Speed

Global Cooldown

Duration of the spell

These are of course all time-related things, one essential of coming out with a higher damage total is time management; converting the time you have at your disposal to damage as quickly as possible. Let's look at what spells are available to a warlock, and we'll also examine if they're worth casting. In my opinion, any spell that does more damage for the time you must contribute to it's casting then your filler spell, Shadow Bolt or Incinerate, is worth using in your rotation. That is, Damage over casting time: D/CT. I find that spell durations such as on dots are generally worth ignoring even though a shorter duration (without lowering the coefficient!!) would do more damage. The duration of a spell does not affect your own ability to keep up a constant damage cycle so long as its casting time is also short and your target is going to last long enough to see it's full potential.

Spells we'll consider.

I'm going to use two sets of statistics for each one all spells will be set with a 10% critical chance. I'm going to use 700 spell damage for the first value and 1200 for the second value, and no other modifiers as this is just an example for you to make your own determination based on your build and gear. An additional note, for this example we're not going to determine the effect of mana on your damage that will come later. Numbers rounded. In the case of instants GCD of 1.5 is the casting time. (Shadow Bolt 3 seconds, Incinerate 2.5 seconds, Immolate 2 seconds, Soul Fire 6)

Unstable Affliction

1. Average Hit - 1889
1. D/CT - 1259

2. Average Hit - 2489

2. D/CT - 1659

Corruption

1. Average Hit - 1555
1. D/CT - 1037

2. Average Hit - 2022

2. D/CT - 1348

Immolate

1. Average Hit - 1554
1. D/CT - 777

2. Average Hit - 1983

2. D/CT - 991

Curse of Agony

1. Average Hit - 2195
1. D/CT - 1464

2. Average Hit - 2795

2. D/CT - 1863

Curse of Doom

1. Average Hit - 5595
1. D/CT - 3733

2. Average Hit - 6600

2. D/CT - 4400

Siphon Life

1. Average Hit - 1329
1. D/CT - 886

2. Average Hit - 1830

2. D/CT - 1220

Soul fire

1. Average Hit - 2011
1. D/CT - 335

2. Average Hit - 2609

2. D/CT - 435

Shadow Bolt

1. Average Hit - 1218
1. D/CT - 406

2. Average Hit - 1663

2. D/CT - 554

Incinerate (w/immolate)

1. Average Hit - 1142
1. D/CT - 457

2. Average Hit - 1879

2. D/CT - 605

Shadow Fury

1. Average Hit - 838.36
1. D/CT - 1677

2. Average Hit - 940

2. D/CT - 1879

So based on this information, you want to be casting these spells every time duration/cooldown is up: Unstable Affliction, Corruption, Immolate, Siphon Life, Curse of Agony, Curse of Doom, Siphon Life and Shadow Fury.

You don't want to be casting: Soul Fire

This is because, replacing any cast of Shadow Bolt/Incinerate with any of the spells that do more D/CT is using that time, normally spent on the casting a filler, more efficiently. Using this information we can determine what order to apply them in initially before beginning to use our filler spell. First we must look at casting times (going to be working with unrealistic rotation here for example since you cannot get both Shadow Fury and UA together.) UA 1.5, Corruption 1.5 Instant, Immolate 2, Siphon Life 1.5 Instant, Curse of Agony 1.5 Instant, Curse of Doom 1.5 Instant, and Shadow Fury 0.5 no GCD (Global Cooldown).

For this I think it would be good to open with Shadow Fury as it only triggers it's own special 0.5 second cooldown, and it's on the longest cooldown. Immolate next being the shortest and having a casting time. UA followed by Corruption since they have the same duration and cast time this will allow them to end at the same time. Then clump those horrible GCD triggering instants in at the end. However, I will mention, if your VERY GOOD AT TRACKING YOUR TIMERS cast order will make very little difference. No matter what order they're in they have to be refreshed sometime. No matter what order they're in you have to deal with their respective GCD's. Organizing them in a manner similar to above only really makes them easier to track early on. I guarantee if you stick to your initial rotation, in a majority of fights you'll do less damage then if you stay fluid and flexible.

Mana

Ok, now for the mana component of your damage cycle.

For other casters, I believe mana is important if you, end an encounter at zero damage you have perfectly distributed your mana as a resource.

(Credited to Arawethion http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t14250-math_two_cycle_theorem_spell_selection/)

Warlocks have to look at mana differently as a resource then other casters. As we are the only ones who have "Infinite" mana by using Life Tap and Dark Pact. But don't think it doesn't have a cost, you still have to use Global Cooldowns any time your waiting that 1.5 seconds for your global cooldown to end your not casting and your filler spell is producing zero damage for 1.5 seconds. So, in my opinion it's best to consider mana expenditure (mana per second) and the mana you gain (mana gained per second) and for your damage cycle to be perfect you want neither deficit or surplus to be anything other then zero. As, anything lower means you cannot sustain yourself on life tap while anything higher means you are using life tap too often and casting less because of it.

For my example I will use a damage cycle consisting only of UA, Corruption (Instant), and SB (2.5 second).

UA consumes 400 mana at 18 second duration resulting in 22.222 mana per second. Corruption consumes 370 mana at 18 seconds duration resulting in 20.555 mana per second. While Shadow Bolt consumes 420 mana at 2.5 seconds duration resulting in 168 mana per second. Your total mana expenditure is 210.777 mana per second. We'll have Life Tap at 1000 spell damage so it restores 1380 mana at 1.5 seconds resulting in 920 mana gained per second; which is surplus. You only need roughly 25% of that to maintain your cycle. So that means we'll have to life tap once every six seconds, and in six seconds the above rotation causes you to expend 1264.662 mana, and life tap restores 1380 your still in surplus but not so much as previously. The closer one gets to having neither a deficit or surplus in his mana expenditures the more efficient the distribution of your life taps. Knowing this information also allows you to determine how efficiently your life tapping or dark pacting was over the course of the encounter. By taking the time of the encounter say ten minutes, and converting it to seconds; in this case 600, we can then divide it over the "ideal" frequency we see we'll need to use 100 life taps to maintain our damage cycle. The closer you come to this number the more efficient you are as a player.

Note: If you thought 100 life taps for a 10 minute fight seemed like way too many you'd be right. You have to take into consideration that this is done only by the numbers, and that the life tap in this example is done with only 1000 spell damage and without 2/2 improved life tap. Also this is the mana expenditure of an encounter where you have the liberty of just constantly spamming the target without worrying about environment or dealing with lag time. Also, that while the amount you restore with life tap goes up, the mana expenditure stays the same regardless of your gear, allowing you to significantly reduce your life tap frequency as your spell damage increases.

How does life tap affect your damage? I like to think of its effect on your damage as the spam time of your filler spell, minus the time you spend casting life tap. Well if we use the above example, we'll assume a cycle of just say 60 seconds, never mind the excess duration of your dots. Then life tap being cast every six seconds to maintain this cycle is consuming 10% of your filler spam time. Therefore, you may consider life taps effect on your damage as the same as reducing your filler's dps by 10%!

Now, as any experienced warlock will tell you there are a few tricks one can use to maximize his or her efficiency this is a list of the ones that come to mind:

- Curse of Shadow and Curse of the Elements will almost always provide more damage to the raid as a whole then Curse of Agony or Curse of Doom. No one cares how long your e-penis is.

- To minimize the reduction in damage caused by life tap and dark pact, then cast these spells outside of your regular frequency when forced to move, this is highly effective when forced to move a lot. (Like in al'ar only life tap or dark pact when moving between platforms or when he's flying into the air to become a meteor)

- To maximize the effectiveness of your Dark Pact, always take your imp out of phase shift while being raid buffed and bug the paladins to put Blessing of Wisdom on him. (DO NOT forget to phase shift him again.)

- If your rather under geared in regards to spell damage, then saccing your felpuppy over your succubus gives you better results in a long fight, combine this with mana pots and you may only need to life tap a few times saving you all the time you'd lose to those life taps. (As you gain more spell damage the frequency you must life tap goes down, so the time you save by using your felpuppy becomes less and less making this boost to your damage eventually drop below the succubus' 15%)

- Do not lose any ticks of your DoT's when refreshing them, this causes you to lose D/CT and makes you less efficient.

- 95 times out of 100 Conflagate will cause you to lose damage, as it's costing you the last tick of immolate + 1.5 seconds of your filler spell. Do not use it.

- Download a mod that records your cast latency (like quartz) make sure under the latency heading that the embed box is unchecked. Then macro ALL your spells into macros that say the following:

/stopcasting

/cast

Replace the standard spells on your bar with there macro equivalents and watch your cast bar as it fills and reaches red, start casting your next spell this will shave off any latency you experience in your casting.

- If your investing more then five points in affliction always get Improved Life tap.

- Never get cataclysm, always get improved shadow bolt instead. First of all cataclysm means plus one casts of Shadow Bolt or Incinerate every 20 standard casts. Secondly, the first is true if and only if you have the time to cast those extra shadow bolts, and if you actually do run out of mana normally...somehow.

- Shadow is better then fire. This has been argued many times because Incinerate benefits from emberstorm while shadow bolt cannot get shadow mastery in a full destruction build. From the Elitist Jerks forum "Shadowbolt will normally provide higher DPS than Incinerate unless you stack the crap out of fire damage gear with a sacrificed Imp." http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t12855-working_theories_theorycrafting_2_1_a/ Besides that, Improved Shadow Bolt benefits all shadow users not just you, and fire damage does not apply to your corruption and curse of agony. Also "stacking the crap" out of one stat like fire damage carries it's own penalties within the blizzard itemization framework which we'll discuss later. Use fire if you like fire, don't ever use fire cause it's better; because it is not.

- Immolate is worth casting even if your shadow.

- Curse of Doom is better then Curse of Agony in the long-term. 1440 second cycle of damage. Curse of Doom gets cast 24 times with 1000 spell damage resulting in 148800 damage for 36 seconds of GCD on casting it. Curse of Agony is cast 60 times with 1000 spell damage resulting in 153360 damage for 90 seconds of GCD on casting it. 4133 Curse of Doom D/CT vs. 1704 D/CT of Curse of Agony. Not to mention Curse of Doom is a ton more mana efficient.

- Do not cast Curse of Doom if it's not going to have enough time to pop. Use Curse of Agony instead at that point.

- Last but most important of all: DO NOT DPS AS A WARLOCK IF YOUR A LAZY PLAYER if all you want to do is spam a single button, auto attack or in general not care about your damage output then save yourself time and roll another class.

Next article "A World of Warcraft Guide to Warlock DPS: Part 3 - Building Your Warlock"

Math for the UA vs. Ruin comparison

Unstable Affliction 600 spell damage.

10% from Shadow Mastery

7% average bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt procs.

Total damage in 450 seconds: 51757

Ruin 427 Spell Damage; 17% crit

14% average bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt procs

+8% crit from talents for a total of 25%

+20% coefficient on Shadow Bolt

+30 spell damage from talents totaling 457 Spell Damage

Total damage in 450 seconds before ruin: 241123

Total damage in 450 seconds after ruin: 267914

Total damage from ruin: 26791

Unstable Affliction 800 spell damage

10% from Shadow Mastery

7% average bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt procs.

Total damage in 450 seconds: 58778

Ruin 627 Spell Damage; 17% Crit

14% average bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt procs

+8% crit from talents for a total of 25%

+20% coefficient on Shadow Bolt

+30 spell damage from talents totaling 657 Spell Damage

Total damage in 450 seconds before ruin: 289436

Total damage in 450 seconds after ruin: 321595

Total damage from ruin: 32159

Unstable Affliction 1000 spell damage

10% from Shadow Mastery

7% average bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt procs.

Total damage in 450 seconds: 65798

Ruin 827 Spell Damage; 17% Crit

14% average bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt procs

+8% crit from talents for a total of 25%

+20% coefficient on Shadow Bolt

+30 spell damage from talents totaling 857 Spell Damage

Total damage in 450 seconds before ruin: 337750

Total damage in 450 seconds after ruin: 375278

Total damage from ruin: 37528

Unstable Affliction 1200 spell damage

10% from Shadow Mastery

7% average bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt procs.

Total damage in 450 seconds: 72818

Ruin 1027 Spell Damage; 17% Crit

14% average bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt procs

+8% crit from talents for a total of 25%

+20% coefficient on Shadow Bolt

+30 spell damage from talents totaling 1057 Spell Damage

Total damage in 450 seconds before ruin: 386064

Total damage in 450 seconds after ruin: 428960

Total damage from ruin: 42896

Ruin 904 Spell Damage; 22% Crit

15% average bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt procs

+8% crit from talents for a total of 30%

+20% coefficient on Shadow Bolt

+30 spell damage from talents totaling 934 Spell Damage

Total damage in 450 seconds before ruin: 367465

Total damage in 450 seconds after ruin: 415395

Total damage from ruin: 47930

Unstable Affliction 1400 spell damage

10% from Shadow Mastery

7% average bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt procs.

Total damage in 450 seconds: 79838

Ruin 1227 Spell Damage; 17% Crit

14% average bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt procs

+8% crit from talents for a total of 25%

+20% coefficient on Shadow Bolt

+30 spell damage from talents totaling 1257 Spell Damage

Total damage in 450 seconds before ruin: 434378

Total damage in 450 seconds after ruin: 482641

Total damage from ruin: 48263

Ruin 1104 Spell Damage; 22% Crit

15% average bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt procs

+8% crit from talents for a total of 30%

+20% coefficient on Shadow Bolt

+30 spell damage from talents totaling 1134 Spell Damage

Total damage in 450 seconds before ruin: 409811

Total damage in 450 seconds after ruin: 463266

Total damage from ruin: 53455

Ruin 609 Spell Damage; 32% Crit

17% average bonus from Improved Shadow Bolt procs

+8% crit from talents for a total of 40%

+20% coefficient on Shadow Bolt

+30 spell damage from talents totaling 639 Spell Damage

Total damage in 450 seconds before ruin: 312097

Total damage in 450 seconds after ruin: 364113

Total damage from ruin: 52016