the grumpy troll smiles . I have spellbind and +2 dot ticks from the Dragon Tree, before i had the chains but that seemed to be ineffiecient just because of the points it cost, and Cast time was a little slow for me. im still using the Master Strike neck (still in heroic/ pot gear)and have the spec build for it, VERY nice. Efficiency wise seems to be the better option. Also on raids i take illy buffs 2 ticks and spellbind is pretty sweet. i had to macro a Time warp indicator message to my own personal illy so he can time my Focused Casting with 180 increment Caustic Detonations seemed to be the most effiecient method to improve dps. im loving the new aa's , im becoming more SELF sufficient like almost everyone else, instead of NEEDING 3 main utilities just to break even with the scouts im down to just needing 2, hopefully one day i will only need 1 main utility buff to compete with a scout/w dirge. Im not up to the 9-10 mil parse range yet but it won't be long just need gear now, Right now im sitting at 2-3 single target, 4-6 AOE. Not shabby for only having 3 raid pieces, and the only class beating me right now sporadically is a much better geared wizzy and a raid geared assassin.
this has a much larger priority when you start getting Raid pieces that have very VERY important potency and CB proc's (TOV raid) gear. Spell weapons give us a decent extra bit of damage. Plan your spell weapons stats based on what you'll have in raid. 1) Get Attack Speed to roughly 160-170. This will give you a 3.6 delay. It doesn't get better than this. From that point on up to 200, Attack Speed is worthless. 200+ converts to Flurry. 2) Get MA to 100-120 MA soft caps at 120ish, and anything beyond that is quite a diminished return. 3) If 1&2 are accomplished, DPS is the way to go. It stacks really nicely and can add up quickly. In my current gear with reforging and leveled green adornments, I can reasonably be at about 100AS, 500DPS and about 100MA. Overall, going way over 30k ability mod self-buffed won't accomplish too too much, because a lot of the smaller spells will start capping.
The neck is not as efficient as you think it is. Its decent but, I prefer the razorwing. That and, no reason why you wouldn't take chains over the dragon tree, unless you don't raid with a troub. Also, isin't 90% of that post what Mogrim said in the OP?.
well i had the razorwing and didn't see much difference in my over all dps, the master strike neck with aa points is not as in-efficient as you think though. its almost instant cast for 1.7 mil average makes an Awesome Cooldown filler if you pop it with your other 2 instant cast abilities. it seems the game is getting OVERLY dependent on swapping gear out for different situations i have a bag full of junk i have to swap depending on encounter...ridiculous i know but mechanics is so screwed up right now im just compensating. that last part was ment to be a Quote at the begining of my post...don't know what happened there.
Hey, I love some good dialogue. Here are my thoughts: 1) Upbeat Temo is always better than Ancient Fury. If I didn't have a Troub, I would drop spellbind to get Ancient Fury, but my overall potential as a dps would be significantly hurt if I had to do this. Also, if you always have Upbeat Tempo, that means a little more reuse that you don't have to worry about. 2) Avatar necklace and Grendish necklace are both significantly more efficient than Master Strike necklace. As a result, Master Strike doesn't find it's way into my cast order, ever. I think the Razorwing necklace is also stronger than the Master Strike necklace, but it would be closer. I hope they do more with this Master Strike concept in the future, but the necklace slot has too many better options, unfortunately. 3) In this way, combining 1 and 2, you should spec for Ethernere Chains. Chains is a really strong single target nuke, has a similar recast to Plaguebringer and Apocalypse, and makes for a great spell to finish out a Time Warp rotation with to send you plummeting on the hate list.
ooh..maybe turn this into a Ask Morgrim Anything thread! do you keep your auras and pets on cooldown? big ae/aoe fights i def. try, but fights with 3 mobs or less it seems like they slow down my increments. has something happened with caustic detonation vs. toxic assault? on derig fight, with 3 adds up plus derig not stoneskinned, it seems toxic detonation is putting out a little more dps than hitting all 4 mobs with caustic detonation (3.8m avg hit on toxic, 914k avg hit on caustic). i thought caustic was good once there were 3 mobs
I'll try and proxy as somewhat knowledgeable warlock for you herem. 1a) Auras I'm not entirely sure what you mean unless you mean temp buffs. If so Gift of bertoxxulous shout not be instantly recast as it comes up due to the duration being longer than the recast (assuming AAs and a troub in group running harmonisation and/or leftside spec). Curse of darkness I only recast when there are significant numbers of linked adds incoming. Eternal Damnation should be used for every add wave if possible on most fights. Mogrim will know more on the maths but depending on how long the adds last it will take different numbers to make it efficient or not, but 3+ will always be somewhat efficient. 1b) Pets are never kept on cooldown. Acid storm is the best one really in terms of aoe and so is generally cast before timewarp to benefit from the 100% SDA for the majority of it's duration on an add wave. Netherlord should be renamed to Neverlord for never cast. Dark Incubation is worth casting before adds spawn in hope of proccing them as adds do spawn as they aoe but most of the time it's not efficient and you should focus more so on cataclysm and/or thunderclap acid spam. 2) The thing is that it's still an aoe vs a single target spell and so if you have reforged for some ridiculous amount of ability modifier it is actually possible I think for it to reach a point where the single target spell is better than the aoe one. If only Nune were here. However the thing that has most likely caused this is timing with buffs and debuffs. It's entirely possible you have used toxic assault when a few things were or were not up or were unlucky or lucky with caustic detonation. For example SDAs do not have ability modifier in their damage calculation so if a spell never doubled it would have a higher average hit number than one that doubled every time. Then there is the fact that it is possible that during Focussed Casting you only used toxic assault or had more preference for toxic assault during spellbind/timewarp rotations due to add and timewarp timings. The real kicker however is the fact that adds are very often not debuffed properly especially when they're not linked (as I believe the Derig ones are not) due to the difficulty of going through each of them and debuffing them before they die. The named as it's always there will most likely always be at or near the debuff cap and so assuming you use toxic assault only on the named due to adds not being up it will also lead to a higher average hit. Hope that answered your questions and if you'd like to ask any others or for some further explanation /join butcherblock.warlockchannel (do this anyway, we won't bite hard) or /tell splitpaw.chronusxx.
Some very minor disagreement - I find that Dark Infestation is worth using as a filler spell, and if you're hitting more than 1 target, it is solid, so you're going to throw it pretty often. Essentially, if the broodlings can hit more than 1 target, never cast dark pyre or distortion OVER Dark Infestation. **As long as it doesn't die** Netherlord is massively efficient if cast ~25-30 seconds before Time Warp - the tail end of his lifespan he actually does a lot of damage. If you time casting him so that add spawns happen in the last 10 seconds of his life AND Time Warp is active then too, you'll be at your peak efficiency. Acid Storm should be cast ideally right as the illy alerts you that he is throwing Time Warp, followed by mashing your self temps (charm clickies, and spellbind) and then queuing up Plaguebringer to land right as TW activates.
Again, would like to emphasize that my statements are pretty much only extremely minimal disagreements w/ Chronus. If you're not using Netherlord at nearly the perfect time, it really should NOT be used period. If he is dying during the fight, he should NOT be used (except against a special mob in wing 2, for an entirely different reason)
i macro my illy letting him know when i have max increments so he saves his first TW of a boss name. i cast sanguine, effigy (tho sometimes i cast effigy 20s before), scale of sontalak, spellbind, then FC. i follow this with rift, apoc, increment dump, then whatever's up - plaguebringer, ec, tc, etc. your post here suggests that you might have two separate rotations - one with FC, one with spellbind/tw - is this correct?
No, but FC has a much longer reuse than spellbind and unless you're the guy who averages out my lack of resets spellbind will be used way more than FC. Also I'd never ever get full control of a TW from our illy, the first one is usually before I can even get 100 increments. This means that's down to me try and scramble for increments as spellbind comes up signifying TW is coming.
Can't double check because I am at work but I notice in the warlock tree you have 5 points in enhance netheralm but in the prestige tree you spec eternal damnation. I'm sure when I checked in the past that enhance netheralm didn't seem to improve the cast and duration of damnation? Or are there times where it's better to cast netheralm still? My spec largely doesn't change, the only real change I regularly make is the sorcerer tree where most of the time I have the int dehate line with kinetic blast but I sometimes change to the battlemage line for the physical mitigation which is handy for duoing the old raid zones with a boxed healer for a bit of coin. But how effective is the defense attribute from the int line? I've only ever played mages, with the spec I have when in battlemage spec I have 3 AA skills that can increase stats... Deflecting staff in the str line - Caster will parry 10% of attacks Battlemage armor in the sta line - Increases physical mit Kinetic evasion in the int line - Increases defense Deflecting staff makes perfect sense but whats the difference between physical mit and defense? The sites I check seemed to all have different answers.
1) It does improve the duration of Eternal Damnation. Keep points in netherealm when rightside. No it is never better to cast netherealm. 2) The defence from int line is negligible difference. Concussive blast is still awesome. The parry from str is somewhat useful but the difference is hard to notice. Physcial mit is good if that is the thing that is gating you from doing something, for me it's focus damage. if I were you I'd go Empyrean cipher on an alternate cloak, maybe get the stoneskin neck from SGx4 HM and grab a con man's bounty if possible. 3) Defense is part of the avoidance check, phsyical mit is for when you get hit and is also the resist checked for trauma aoes.
I tried switching, maybe I am missing something with this spell. It doesn't reduce cast speed but that's to be expected as it's just cast speed and not base cast speed. It reduce the duration from 30 to 20 in my test but the animation when it's ongoing seems to cast at the same interval. Wouldn't you want increased duration rather than reduced (unless it hits, reapplies more often) I had points in dark pyre before anyway which seemed pretty ineffective so will play around with this a bit more with test dummies or something. Eternal Damnation Without Eternal Damnation with AA
Basically, the original spell gives you a proc every 5 seconds. If you reduce the duration, you get the same number of procs, but you get them over a shorter time period (20 seconds) and thus every 3.3 seconds rather than every 5 seconds (look at the power cost).
And due to the way add waves work in raids (i.e, they get blown up rather quickly) having the procs this way makes it a much more reliable spell to use and a lot higher dps. It also means it goes on reuse 10s earlier meaning you get more in a fight, which is good on a fight like commanders.
I'm curious to know why you think its a good idea at the start of a fight for the Illy to wait on TW for you to gain increments? Would this be best for you? Yes. is this best for the raid? No. There are 3 other mages with you in the mage group. Waiting 30 seconds for you to build increments means less TW overall during the fight and less raid wide DPS which can mean another round of aoe's or more adds. If there is an item that increases your DPS by 7% and another item that increases the whole groups DPS by 3% each, which do you think is better?
Because a Warlock does more DPS during their "spike phase" than Summoners do. By a long long long shot. And because chances are, if the Warlock wants the illy to wait, the Wizard does too. It isn't even remotely a close call. I've tested both ways. Its not close.
