A DPS Cleric's Conundrum

Hey folks,

So I'm looking for some math gurus and what not to help out with some things.

I have two (ok, way more than that, but) DPS cleric specs.

One is a cookie cutter spec; it does the maximum single target DPS a cleric can hope for with the satyr pet. While it's nothing close to a rogue's output, this build is competitive dps.

The other is a spec I came up with that provides a unique 7% magic damage to the raid. It is useful during range, has better aoe, but it's single target doesn't scale as well as druids because it is hurt by movement and it lacks a pet (spotters orders :( )

The unbuffed DPS difference between the two has been about 50 for me in my current gear; raid buffed it's more like 150, depending on the fight.

That's a large DPS difference, but 7% magic damage is pretty huge to the raid. Thoughts?

That's the Inquisitor buffed Soul Drain right? The problem then is twofold: you need to virtually be in melee range to maintain it and it needs to be cast on CD (a 10s duration debuff with a 10s CD) which will really hurt your DPS as Soul Drain is not high on the priority list for Inquisitors in single target fights. On any fight where the target has to be moved by the tank you'll find the target out of range often for Soul Drain. I think if you were trying to bring that buff to the raid you's be far better off doing it as support/offheals through an Inquisitor/Justicar/Sentinel Hybrid. Then you aren't so much worried about DPS (although the dps of the build is great for support) but the buffs/debuffs/heals you have to do. To focus so much on keeping a hard to keep debuff which will severely impact your dps is not really what one of the DPS positions in the raid should be doing. It is a good offspec to have for those fights where you have to go ranged, or do AoE dps (SD on CD on AoE fights is good value - a Stormcaller would love to down things with you :-)).

The build I have that keeps it up is a melee inquisitor spec, which blows away typical inquisitor DPS by a ton for my level of gear so I don't really care about being in melee. This does mean frequent repositioning during boss fights but I do not mind that. The macro I have makes it largely a non issue, because I have only 2 casted spells: Soul Drain and Bolt of Judgment. Waterjet fills in nicely when I need to move for a second or two. IMO, if you have the debuff you have to keep it up , even if that means being in melee as an inquisitor. it is not a DPS loss for an inquisitor to be in melee keeping it up; quite the opposite really, it is a dps gain not only for you but for your group/raid. There are fights where this might be tough to do as a full inquisitor because you do cast quite a bit more than the melee variant but IMO if you are specced into inquisitor and nobody else is keeping the debuff up you have to. Adding another "support/offheals" spec to our raid composition is not an option on most fights but you are totally right that it would be the best way to bring this debuff. We have plenty of healers for most fights so that isn't really super needed (but I do use a healing variation on Hylas). My role is primary DPS, so I want to do that as well as I can. If my overall contribution to raid DPS is greatest with this buff being kept up, I have no problem being further down meters by switching to the melee inquisitor spec. My question is more between two DPS specs... I think the answer is that whenever magic DPS in a raid eclipses a certain value. If I did it right, that would be roughly when 7% of magical raid DPS was equal to 150 dps... If my napkin math I just did is correct, that looks to be at about 2200ish magic DPS. I'll have to see what our magic DPS is in bentmer's raids.

Zavrin, isn't there another magic damage debuff that a class provides that overwrites the Soul Drain debuff? I can't think what it is off the top of my head but it seemed to be mentioned frequently in the Cleric DPS spec thread on Trion's boards. The only reason I ask about that is that if this other buff is overwriting the Soul Drain debuff then the value of that spec drops (IMHO). I will try to track this down.

Censure, from a Justicar overwites it but is only 3% and there is no point for a justicar to use censure if a better debuff is being applied (censure is even less damage than SoJ). No other debuff overwrites it so far as I have found, but it does not stack with a mage's Neddra's Torture (3%) or Sabo's Ember's Charge (5%). I don't think our rogues use Ember's Charge, and the others are all quite a bit weaker than the 7%. Though if you do change the amount only to 4%, then you've got a ways more to go than 2.2k dps.

» Edited on: 2011-07-03 17:04:03

Well, you say "For the gear I have" like you have crappy gear compared to those of us that you are asking... And have you played a 51 Inq until it has %50 Spell Crit? Game changer... just getting close to it is. And the massive amount of AOE it can do in other roles.... ehh.... I can tell you are Melee :) I will go back to my Marksman now that I am getting to 50.

For the gear that I have was not meant to be in reference to quality of the gear, but my choice of stats... because different gear choices can greatly change how different builds end up comparing to one another. I am not sure what you mean by "I can tell you are melee." I have raided as inquisitor and cabalist in addition to running my melee specs. The two builds in question are cookie cutter druid/shaman/inquisitor and 40 inq/21 shaman/5 warden. I was mostly curious what people thought of raid contribution versus overall damage output for non-pure support when it came to single target DPS.

» Edited on: 2011-07-03 22:22:04

The thing with Inquisitor damage, if relying on the BoD procs, is that the damage starts to vary wildly the less Bolt of Judgement/Sanction Heretics that you cast. In a 10s window, assuming you keep vex up, you have 5 more spell casts to trigger a free Bolt of Depravity (7 spells at 1.5s, 1 Vex, 1 BoD). The chance of this is 83.2%. Fitting in a Soul Drain reduces this to 76% - technically less due to the extra cast time of SD. On the non-vex cycles of 10s this is 88.3%/83.2%. This is what I mean by the fact that keeping it up is costing you dps. Also, the 10s CD will not line up nicely with the other cooldowns, so it will only have 90% uptime at best unless you delay casts (lowering DPS further). So I think your personal DPS loss will be much higher trying to keep it up. Other than that, yes you just have to see if the fully raid buffed dps that you lose - which may be higher or lower than self calculated values - is less than ~6% (I wouldn't assume 100% uptime) of the magic damage in the raid (excluding your own). Best way to test it is on farm content if you can get comparative parses with the same groups.

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» Edited on: 2011-07-04 01:34:34

When weighing the value of Soul Drain's debuff in your inquisitor rotation, do not forget that L&DC puts a 10s CD on Bolt of Depravity after it is cast instantly. There will be many times in your rotation where you can not use BoD despite having an instant proc, so you will be spamming BoJ with no real gain. BoJ alone is awful DPS really... While Soul Drain does take longer than BoJ to cast and does not proc BoD, it does do slightly more damage - so it is not dead DPS time, even if it's main purpose is the 7% damage increase. I ran two quick(6 min) parses on the PTS, both using a 51/10/5 build. The first did not use Soul Drain, the second did. The first build came out to be 900 DPS (keep in mind this is full raid gear & relics), and the second came out to be 960. Both builds were in melee range, so that was not a complicating factor. In looking through the parse, both builds had an equal number of dot ticks of SH and Vex and an equal number of BoD casts, despite the fact that the second trial had far fewer BoJs. This is because many times, Soul Drain's debuff can be refreshed during a time when you would otherwise be spamming BoJ with a L&DC proc up. Soul Drain's debuff is actually 15s, despite what the talent says, so it gives you some leeway in up time. It is very possible that in different gear than that, the results might be different though... so if you are finding it a DPS loss, by all means, don't use it :)

I have re-read this several times and am guess I am just missing the base specs you are asking about. I see you mention having 2 DPS specs you are running, one of which you discrib as a "cookie Cutter" spec and the other as a 41/21/5 Inqui/shaman/Ward, what is the other spec you are questioning? Is it the 51/10/5? What in your mind is a Cookie Cutter spec? The real question for me is exactly what are the specs in question so that we too can run comparisions to answer you questions. Lotapias

The cookie cutter melee build is 31 druid/24 shaman/11 inquisitor. The melee inquisitor build is 40 inq/21 shaman/5 warden. The cookie cutter inquisitor is 51 inq/10 sent/5 warden but it's dps is less for me in melee. If you are curious about any of the three of them I can share macros and play experience, but I wasn't looking for much of a DPS comparison between the builds, I was looking for opinions on what people thought of a build that lost say 150 personal DPS in a raid to buff the raid magic damage by 7%. I understand I wasn't entirely clear on that from my original post so, my apologies :)

I don't think there is any formula that will be able to determine an A or B result for you. It is my opinion that the base DPS role is going to be more useful, and therefore more helpful to the group, under a broader range of circumstances. Therefore, I personally would run with that the most. Keep the debuff role handy for those times when you and your group are willing to experiment.

dps spec i run. 46 inq / 10 sent / 10 cabalist a lot of people will complain that it is not the standard but let me explain a few things. spamming BoJ builds and other things one mana recharge may not keep you going and it is horrible on the dps if you have to stop any kind of rotation on a boss. especially dps races. 46 inq - Pick up everything but the BoD DoT. i personally find it not worth 5 points Cabalist - 5 point spell power 5 point spell damage. but why not dot damage you ask?? because spell damage covers everything just like if you went 5 points in warden. while it covers everything instant. won't cover your BoJ Also 10 points gets you another mana regen and tyranny. while tyranny is very low damage at low spec if obliterate is on cool down for your mana regen sigil and you are aoeing tyranny is a good filler to use it. Sent - 5 point spell power 5 point walk in the light 20% crit damage Buffs - Typical buffs out of Inq - I use Armor of Devotion the stats on myself barely able to do T2 work out a lot better than armor of awakening. with just that armor i am sitting on 1034 spellpower and 491 crit. but spam the dummy though the other might work better for you. but the mana regen on it is useless. 10% is nothing Rotation Vex, Fanaticism, Sanction Heretic, BoJ, (If no BoD insta up), Life's Vengeance as soon as BoJ starts flying they will land in the same time stamp. total of 5 spells i use. i don't get fancy but this dps rotation just works for me and the added spell power from cab will help newer people getting geared up versus some extra damage in my opinion.

» Edited on: 2011-07-07 06:02:16

Actually you can generate some expected numbers and then compare those numbers to actual raid dps to see if the theoretical numbers are the same in practice. Let's use some very conservative numbers to calculate expected dps increase in raid. We'll assume that the average magic dps per person is around 800 dps. I know, that's really low for boss fights but let's just use that for a baseline. Now a 7% increase would be something like 56 dps but let's round it down to 50 dps. Your expected dps loss is 150 dps which means we need 3+ magic dps in the raid to compensate for your dps loss. In any given raid, we will have 4+ magic dps not including yourself and hybrid dps like archons, inquisicars, chloros, etc. So the answer in theory is if you have 3+ magic dps, then yes it's better to have the debuff. As long as dps is the only consideration of course. That being said, the duration of the fight and the number of targets in a fight would affect the effectiveness of the soul drain debuff. If you're not targetting the same mobs as the magic dps, that would seriously change the numbers. Also, in many of the so called dps race encounters, we probably will have at least one inquisicar who can also handle the soul drain debuff.

@Trammer: The BoD DoT is a gigantic DPS gain even if you are spamming BoJ. I would seriously suggest finding a way to pick it up for PvE. For PvP, not a huge deal. Other than that, your build is the cookie cutter BoD spam build that is theoretically top DPS for ranged clerics in very good gera :) Play it how you want, enjoy it! It's fun. @ Bentmer: I am not sure if Noir maintains the debuff at all in her inquisicar spec so I will have to ask her. I know that Lumina and I both do - and luckily on Plutonus Lumina kept it up, but I know that when he's purifier the buff isn't usually up if I am not using it. Also, this buff benefits the magic damage that melee clerics and warriors use, as well. A decent chunk of warrior damage is actually elemental when they have any points in riftblade because the finisher they use is fire damage. For rogues, it would benefit bards and many other specs, but not the sabos we run with I dont think. I think that is just gravy though and you are right that any time we have more than a small number of magic DPS, even if they aren't doing a ton of DPS, it's usually better to have it up. Before I ran the numbers I was using it on Greenscale to speed up add phases. Our first kill I was this build, but I switched away from it in later attempts when our single target DPS started to slow down for whatever reason. Last night I kept it up on adds and I noticed a gigantic increase in the speed at which adds died once I started keeping it up. There is no doubt in my mind that the melee inquisitor spec is better for any encounter with time-sensitive killing of adds if we are short on add DPS as it's AOE DPS is incredible.