Devestation Damage?

Okay, so ever since 10.1 I feel like I struggle more to do damage. I know part of what kept me above other ppl in my raid was the fact that I out ilvl’d them by a lot, and now that everyone has caught up, they do more damage easier than I do (not saying dev is hard, I clearly am garbage)…but I feel like this is more than that.

For the last week or two my damage is like, ATROCIOUS. I do less damage than some tanks in AOE M+ outside of Dragonrage, and I just walked away from my raid because I was like bottom of the damage chart with the tanks in raid.

What’s going on? Can someone help me figure it out?
I know when I got a bunch of gear changes over the past couple of months, I lost some mastery. I used to be at like 99% Mastery, and after 10.1.5 I’m at like 69% mastery which jumps to around 73% when I use food + rune. But would my damage REALLY drop that low just from mastery?

Idk what to do, any help or insight is appreciated.

Granted not many people Log Mythic Plus but, without logs no one is going to have a magic ball to see whats exactly is going on.

Will say this tho when you have multiple Talent layouts. Make sure you are in the Correct Layout for the Content you are doing. If you run your active talents now into a Dungeon you will find you are falling behind in AOE because you aren’t Rocking Volatility. For Instance 7/27 on that Assault Fight, you didn’t pick that talent and that other Evoker 13 ilvls below you took you to task for it.

Sim your Character, make sure you are using the best gear you have. .

without digging too deep, looks like you have a pretty standard talent build. presuming m+

Keep in mind with tier, you need to apply obsidian shards and THEN empower. I keep messing that up. In large pack pulls just launch a pyreblast out and then full power fire breath/eternity surge them. With Iridescence make sure you’re getting the same color spells out after the given empower spell.

Pack pulls → pyre blast to obsidian shard everything, fire breath everything, then spam out pyre blasts till out of essence, eternity surge at full power if more then 4 mobs remain or at whatever amount given the amount of enemies going into shattering star, spamming azure strike when you don’t have essence for pyre. Repeat ad nauseam.

Single target → Disintegrate to apply obsidian shard, then fire breath at like level 1 or two. This is because with the dot on the target, disintegrate will cause it to double tick while casting with Catalyze. Also burnout procs. Throw in an eternity surge->shattering star->disintegrate where you can.

This is without touching on Dragonrage, just when you use it make sure to get out empowered spell abilities fast as you can to extend the duration. Generally you wanna use it on cooldown, but try to get a feel of when to pop it on pack pulls so that you have it on initial pull of boss (or at least 10 secs in).

Definitely not a be all, end all recommendation, but that’ll get you into consistent 100k-200k dps on large packs and 90-100k dps on bosses. At least, what works for me.

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I haven’t taken a look at your logs but just anecdotally, I feel strong af playing devastation currently. It’s especially synergistic with Aug too which makes it feel even better in raid.

Happy to chat if you want to hit me up in game or if you have a particular log you want to look at.

From a cursory glance, you’re using pure mastery gems and pure haste gems at 73% mastery. I’m not sure what your sim would tell you, but my gut tells me that’s far from optimal. That’s where I’d start, at least.

You’re also using hailstone treads, which may be on for an Aug set so I won’t make assumptions, but you certainly don’t want them for devo. You probably have plenty of sparks unless I’m missing a lot of crafted gear in your bags, you could get a lot of value from maybe crafting a belt and a few rings with ideal stats as well. Again, I don’t see your sims but I’d guess you’re leaving a lot of DPS on the table from gear before even getting into rotation.

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Thank you so much for this!!! I was NOT taking this into account at all! I really appreciate this advice and advice for packs and ST. I always just immediately start a pull with my trinket + pot + DR + empowered spells and then use disintegrate for ST and pyre spam for AOE, I almost never us Azsure strike anymore outside of getting DR procs.

Thanks so much for the response! What gems do you think are better? I thought Mastery to like 100% was the way to go. I also thought my haste was too low, but honestly I’m not sure what percentage is right for crit vs haste. Right now I’m at 73% Mastery, 27% Crit, and 18% Haste.
People always say to run a stat weight, but I have no idea what this even means. All it does is shoot out numbers…what do these numbers mean and what do I do with them? Like I don’t understand how I’m supposed to use these weights below to improve?!:

Stat Weights

Intellect - 10.93

Mastery - 6.16

Haste - 6.14

Versatility - 5.73

Critical Strike - 5.53

Are these good, bad, up , down. I have no idea what to do with this lolol

I read in a guide that Hailstone was good for dev, before aug was even a thing. So I went for it and every boots I sim after getting them, don’t beat them.

Thanks for your advice btw.

I mean the tl:dr is that you should trust your sims over me. That said, whoever is telling you to run stat weights is probably using very old habits, because stat weights are a bad sim measure and are in constant flux. Running top gear or the gear compare tool will give you better ideas of how changes will affect your DPS.

With the changes to mastery last patch, I’d be interested if you want to push even remotely close to 100%. We’re obviously geared differently so this isn’t apples to apples, but mastery is my least valuable stat at 72% currently.

In terms of haste, I personally wouldn’t let mine drop below 18% even if it meant dropping a little DPS because the spec plays like sludge below that point imo.

At any rate, you get more overall stats for the combined gems so if weights are this close, I’d suspect a mastery/haste gem would still provide more DPS.

As for the boots, they aren’t bad per se, but keep in mind that simming a boot with an embellishment is always going to far outperform a regular boot. You’d have to do a side by side comparison with another setup that has two embellishments.

Last I checked, for a two DPS embellishment setup, adaptive bracers and a shadowflame on the chest were ideal (this is the worst statted tier piece). Part of the reason for this is that the damage from shadowflame patch will proc your bracers reliably. This may have changed… Again, you’d have to sim. I personally prefer adaptive plus sporecloak, it’s a game changer for survivability, especially since we’re doing mythic rashok prog.

I’m not at a computer that can easily do a sim setup, but I could play with it and see what it spits out when I am.

We’re on the same server and I can make any mail gear at 447 so if you find a better setup for yourself, feel free to send me a personal order, no need for a big commission.

My suspicion though is that there may be a gap in the rotation, since your gear as it stands wouldn’t make your DPS “bad” by any means. If you have a fight you were particularly frustrated with I could peep the log.

This is not accurate. You’ll want to have scarlet adaptation maxed and pre-cast a living flame on pull.

From here, if you’re talented into Eye of Infinity you will dragon rage, fire breath, THEN disintegrate, followed by your potion,spoils, eternity surge, and back into the rotation with disintegrates.

If you’re running Event Horizon, you will skip the disintegrate after the fire breath altogether and won’t cast it until both empowers are out and you’ve hit trinket and pot.

The main decider of whether you go EH or EoI is basically your stats and the fact that your can get more dragonrage extensions with EH if you’re receiving a PI.

Either way, you aren’t ever leading with a disintegrate.

Other than that, the only thing to keep in mind about tier is that outside of dragonrage windows, you’ll want to space out your empowers ~5 secs apart so as not to override the tier.

Cool. Not trying to give perfect advice, just tips on where things might’ve gone wrong based on personal experience. There’s videos and things to dig into for perfect rotations, but if they’re just trying to figure out why damage is so incredibly low then just pointing out where some improvements might occur without needing to min max every little thing.

I mean I get it and respect for helping, but the applying obsidian shards first thing is going to reduce his overall damage vs the proper opener, not increase it, that’s all.

So you start with “this is not accurate” ? Kind of a rude thing to follow up on a friendly advice post. Just say “If you wanna get a little more dps out” or something. Based on experience I was suggesting what had worked for me to get more dps out of the rotation, not “you have to do exactly this or otherwise you’re wasting your time”.

Saying something that isn’t accurate is inaccurate isn’t rude in the least.

I didn’t insult you and if you were offended by being corrected I don’t know what to tell you.

Not sure why you’re putting words in quotes when I didn’t say them nor is it remotely close to paraphrasing what I said.

He asked for help with his DPS. Regardless of your good intent, the advice you gave was simply not going to help increase DPS and I offered the best rotational advice to actually do that.

Again, any feelings that were hurt in the process of correcting you were not hurt intentionally.

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Obviously what I was saying wasn’t perfect, it was just a nudge forward. I even made it clear I knew what I was saying wasn’t perfect. ‘Correcting’ me is just being pedantic at that point. Its fine to offer deeper advice, but you really have to enforce min maxing?

Sarcasm’s lost on you huh?

Look just, whatever.

It’s likely not a nudge forward to suggest that someone who is blue parsing and probably doing the opener close to correctly would benefit from completely changing to a worse way of playing the spec.

Correcting you is not pedantic when the literal reason for the post was that they wanted to learn to play the spec better.

Min/maxing is where anyone that’s trying to optimize DPS is moving towards. Offering the wrong advice that is likely hurting, and not helping (regardless of intent) is going to result in the OP being frustrated further.

I’m sorry that you’re being sensitive about being criticized/corrected, however, I never insulted you by correcting you. That’s a you problem.

Randomly putting words in quotes in a text format on a forum where there’s no context to discern intent is not sarcasm, lol.

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