Was hoping to get a warlock perspective on gearing and the hit cap.
Our raid groups warlocks are “under-performing” and after going through our log’s i’ve noticed a massive amount of shadowbolt “misses”. I know locks don’t have a welfare 6% that mages do but just how important is hit rating for them as I’ve noticed alot of the BiS lists focus purely on + shadow damage over other stats.
Is this something that will work itself out with more raid gear? Please note I don’t expect them to be rocking the meters on any fight where they have “jobs” to do and I ignore trash damage.
With no armory to compare other locks against them I’m having a hard time figuring out exactly what is wrong.
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There isn’t really any hit gear yet. you can get the neck out of strat live and the belt from either kirtonos or brd arena for 2% spell hit, that’s it. MC doesn’t help much either with almost no +spellhit gear besides the felheart robes which are not very good for PvE. However even with the lack of hit when I have a shadoweaver and 3rd warlock in my raid for curse of shadow I’m usually in the top 1-3 caster dps.
Feel free to look me up, I only run 1% hit from banthok and still parse orange(missed 30% of shadowbolts on rag 95 percentile)
Really it just comes down to casting more shadowbolts, if they are keeping their curse up and casting the same amount of shadowbolts as top warlocks on WCL there is little they can do beyond consumables/prebis.
What curse are you using if you do have a third lock?
Warlocks are going to miss more than other casters until later in the game. We have no inherit plus to hit in our talents and Most of our BiS Gear that is currently available have little to no hit on it.
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What are their specs? If they are still in affliction leveling specs, then ya.
Even with resist spam they should be parsing decently if their spec is built for shadowbolting.
2 are running SM/ruin the other is running DS/ruin.
@Pelican @Lschariah After running a brief comparison their uptime is less than optimal and they’re hitting for alot (nearly 40%) less.
CoE and CoR first off since we have a lot of melee and mages, then CoS when we have a third lock. Been really low on locks since we are running 3 MC groups.
So really the #1 job is curse uptime on main target, so that is priority one.
Second is getting their pre-BiS, enchants and consumables. I only have 2 nemesis pieces for raid loot and I can compete with 99% of other warlocks.
Once those two are out of the way, just make sure they are casting shadowbolts.
Most of the dps comes from preparation, if they don’t have 30 spell power, flask etc they aren’t going to be parsing very high.
I’m not worried about the lack of pretty coloured numbers.
What I am worried about is when they’re doing less dps than the tanks who arn’t tanking anything.
Think I might have to have the ole “this is how you spam shadowbolt all fight” conversation with them.The consumables etc can wait abit as theres no point slapping a bandaid over a detached limb.
Corruption uptime is pretty big atm since you should have the spare debuff slots for now. However that’s another thing thats temporary as later on when we have tanks with thunderfury and an enhance with nightfall there will only be one corruption slot.
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If they’re not maximising corruption uptime is it better for them to just drop it from their rotation?
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If they are sm/ruin they really need to keep it up. Say its a double giant pull, they should put their assigned curse on both giants, then corrupt both giants, then start SB spamming the kill target while refreshing corruption only when you think you’ll get most of its ticks. No point recasting it if the targets will be dead after the second tick.
If they are SM, they should have Nightfall. If they have Nightfall, they should be spreading corruption to everything and anything they can, debuff slots allowing.
If they are DS/Ruin, then they can just drop corruption from their rotation and spam only shadowbolts.
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So a general consensus is
A) They need to move less.
b)pick up more useful gear
c) work out their dotting abit better.
Awesome, thanks peeps!!!
Make sure they use gear with plus shadow power. Tell them to look at the Warlock pre-raid BiS list. Make sure at least one of them is using curse of shadows. Then tell them to just shadow bolt
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As others have said it’s quite normal.
They are brought for utility more then pure damage.
A usual 40 man will only have 3 warlocks 1 SM/ruin for the tank group, and 2 DS/ruin.
They are used for their curses, which buff all the DPS in your raid
One curse of elements increases the damage of the rest of the raid by a substantial amount.
That’s all bonus damage that isn’t being shown on the locks damage meter, but is a direct result of the warlock.
They’ll miss a lot, but will also Crit a lot to make up for it.
If you want your locks to do more DPS, your raid lead should be assigning debuffs around the party to max them out. If their are any free spots left, they should be given to the warlock.
theres little to no hit gear , and no talents that help
untill bloodvine you will just miss alot
With Curse of Shadows and Shadow weaving from a priest, warlocks are doing okay on damage if they play it right and itemize correctly (prioritize +shadow dmg gear)
We wont be on par with rogues/warriors on most fights but I haven’t had much of an issue keeping up with the mages and some of the melee on most fights.
If you look at some of the “top” parses for warlocks on fights that favor us over melee like magmadar, golemagg and rag, you will see lots of chain power infusions and maybe even the lock using CoA.
If your warlocks are doing poorly, start with their gearing. If they aren’t stacking +shadow/spell dmg gear they are doing it wrong (for pure dps output)
Then check their spec. There is really only 2 PvE specs for warlocks, SM/Ruin and DS/Ruin (many variations of these since there are a few random points that are more about play style outside of raids)
If their gearing and spec is okay, check if they are using any consumables as there are 2 elixirs that benefit warlocks greatly (no point in flasks yet unless you are trying to get a high parse)
Then check the uptime of their corruption and how many shadow bolts they are casting. If your top warlock is casting 25 shadow bolts and your warlock with less damage is only casting 20, see if you can figure out why. Maybe its due to RNG fire on magmadar or knockbacks on rag. Golemagg is a good fight for this as the ranged will LITERALLY just stand in 1 spot and nuke the entire fight.
If there is any movement required, check to see if the warlock is using his/her instant casts, Deathcoil/Shadowburn.
There are many reasons why warlocks have a hard time keeping up with other dps at this stage of the game but you can work around not having +hit and still do well.
DS/Ruin WITH corruption is still better damage (if the debuff slots allow ofc)