Stats & Gearing

Stats

Intellect:

Intellect now converts to Spell Damage, which makes all spells stronger. A number of factors determine how much benefit they receive, such as the spell co-efficient, as well as talents etc. However, all spells benefit in some way.

1 Intellect provides 1 spellpower and 0.00154% crit, as well as 17.53 mana.

Hit Rating:

102.45 hit rating gives 1% to hit with spells. Until Hit Cap (17% or 1742 Rating). Once the Cap has been reached, Hit becomes useless.

Haste Rating:

128.05 haste rating gives 1% spell haste. Haste rating scales multiplicatively with other sources of haste - and haste cannot reduce the duration of the global cooldown below 1.0 second.

To calculate the 'new' cast time of a spell, use the following formula:

New.Cast.Time = Normal.Cast.Time / ((1 + (Haste.Rating / 12805)) * 5%.Aura * Dark.Intent)

Where 5%.Aura = 1.05 and Dark.Intent = 1.03.

Example, if we take a 2.5 second Normal.Cast.Time and a 950 Haste.Rating, we will get the following:

New.Cast.Time = 2.5 / ((1 + (950 / 12805)) * 1.05 * 1.03) = 2.152 sec

Due to the changes to DoTs introduced in 4.0.1, and the way certain DoTs interact with certain talents and abilities (like Conflagrate), haste has become a much more advanced stat, see the Advanced: Haste section for more information.

Critical Strike Rating:

179.28 crit rating gives 1% to crit. With a Burning Shadowspirit Diamond, crits will do 2.06 times the damage of normal hits. Due to changes made to DoTs in 4.0.1, all DoTs can now crit innately.

Mastery Rating:

179.28 mastery provides a 1.35% increase to all fire damage we do. As 90%+ of our damage comes from fire spells, mastery is not a bad stat, however, the increase per point is low enough that we will not prioritise mastery over crit or haste until much higher gear levels.

Stat Priorities

It is recommended you download the Simulationcraft or Warlock spreadsheet tools and base your decisions around your individual character. However, the below order should be correct in most situations.

Int >> Hit (to cap) > Haste > Crit > Mastery

Since patch 4.0.6, haste is now consistently higher than crit at any gear level and should be prioritized as such

Reforging

How you reforge will be based on the following rules:

Are you hit capped?

Yes: Reforge any extra hit to haste where possible.

No: Reforge mastery/crit to hit.

Does it have haste on it?

Yes: Goto the next rule.

No: Reforge mastery/crit to haste, leave hit has it is.

Reforge mastery to crit if the above has been done.


Haste

With patch 4.0.1 the way DoTs work has changed. In addition to all DoTs now benefiting from haste innately, haste now reduces the time between ticks, only reducing the DoTs duration until an extra tick is received.

This is important for us, as it means we now start to have haste "thresholds" that we should be trying to achieve in order to gain extra ticks on our DoTs. This becomes even more important to Destruction Warlocks, due to the way Conflagrate interacts with the overall damage Immolate does.

This applies to all of our DoTs except BoD, however, the haste required to achieve this extra tick will differ between DoTs. To calculate the required haste to achieve an additional tick, we would need to calculate the time between ticks, specific to 3 decimal places.

Tick.Speed.Required = (Base.Frequency * Base.Tick.Speed) / (No.of.Ticks - 0.5)

Where No.Of.Ticks is the number of ticks you would like to achieve. For example, if we wanted to apply this to Immolate (5 sec Base Frequency, 3 sec Base Tick Speed), wanting to achieve 2 additional tick (7), we would do the following:

Tick.Speed.Required = (5 * 3) / (7 - 0.5) = 2.307 seconds

From here, we can calculate the percentage of haste required to achieve this tick speed, using the following formula:

Haste.Percent = (Base.Tick.Speed / (Tick.Speed.Required + 0.00049999)) - 1

Therefore:

Haste.Percent = (3 / (2.307 + 0.00049999)) - 1 = 0.30010835

So what haste rating does that translate into?

Well, Immolate gains extra ticks at 9.99908%, 30.00108%, 49.9625% etc. So to determine the haste required in a raid situation, with all raid buffs including Dark Intent, we will use this formula:

Haste.Rating = ((Haste.Percent / 5%.Aura / Dark.Intent) - 1) * 12805.701

For example, the haste required to gain 2 addition ticks (30% haste) is as follows:

Haste.Rating = ((1.300108 / 1.05 / 1.03) - 1) * 12805.701 = 2589

Therefore, the haste thresholds are (raid buffed):

Extra Ticks % Rating Goblin
1 9.9% 218 90
2 30% 2589 2437
3 49.9% 4951 4776
4 70% 7326 7127

In addition to Immolate, our other DoTs benefit heavily from gaining extra ticks. The haste thresholds for our other DoTs are below:

Corruption

Extra Ticks % Rating Goblin
1 8.3% 21 0
2 25% 1993 1846
3 41.7% 3970 3804
4 58.4% 5945 5745

A full spreadsheet of haste required for each DoT can be found here: Warlock DoT Haste Calculations - Thanks to Keldion for this spreadsheet.

Spell Rotations

[top]Spell Priority

* Improved Soul Fire (Keep this buff up!)
* Immolate
* Conflagrate
* Bane of Doom
* Corruption
* Soul Fire (Empowered Imp)
* Shadowflame
* Demon Soul
* Chaos Bolt
* Shadowburn (Sub 20% HP)
* Incinerate


Basically, you should always open with Soul Fire, generally an instant cast through Soul Burn, and continue to keep the buff up as much as possible, this includes hard casting it. In addition using Demon Soul on cooldown is important, preferably with on "Use" trinkets. After that it is simply a case of keeping Immolate, Corruption and Bane of Doom up as much as possible, while using Conflagrate and Chaos Bolt on cooldown.

If safe, using Shadowflame while in melee range will provide a DPS increase, however it is not worth going "out of your way" to do this, running a long distance into melee range would be a DPS loss. If all of the above is done, revert to Incinerate.

When the boss reaches 20% HP, using Shadowburn on CD will result in an increase in DPS, it is also great when used on adds to replenish your Soul Shard supply.

http://elitistjerks.com/f80/t111390-destruction_cataclysm_demonic_mage_4_0_6_updated/