ISB Vs. Scorch (Help Please)

[venomex]

Alright. There have been plenty of times I have bounced something off one of your member's shoulders, and have been presented with amazing feedback and information. This time, I have to up the level, and really dig for what I want.

The argument at hand;

"When considering a Warlock and a Mage(2) in terms of DPS loss, which comes out ahead when faced with who to assign ISB/Scorch?"

Its been a long standing argument between our Mages and Locks. Currently we have a warlock who specs into ISB to provide the debuff for our casters. Now, from what I am seeing he is either plagued with one of the following;

Parse below is with our ISB warlock (Forsakensake).
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/Dig7WuC9uFj1lzD6/sum/damageDone/?s=946&e=1189

1) Lowered DPS due to a gimped spec (Is that possible with ISB or should he still be putting out significant numbers)
2) Just a bad player.

Now I am under the assumption that the mages lose less DPS than a warlock when speccing into the equiv (Scorch). I should also add we currently run with three mages. Having 1 spec into scorch would not be a terrible idea. However it is also an option to have them rotate.

Now, this all came to light when I compared Fosakensake's performance as destruction (Which will always come ahead of ISB I am assuming) to his performance as ISB.

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/mkY5zLOkFsd4g1F9/sum/damageDone/?s=4103&e=4689

Questions I am looking to have answered;

Is it possible for him to do better as ISB?
What losses do the mages suffer from speccing into scorch?
How does it compare?
How do you guys handle this debuff, and what were your experiences in figuring out which was more beneficial?

[Kyth]

Mages spec into scorch anyways. Their loss comes in that scorch is the lowest-dps nuke in the entire game.

We scorch because our warlocks say it's a big deal for them to go destro. They can probably reply with the numbers here, I'm willing to just believe them.

It also wasn't a big deal because we ran with 3 mages for so long. Now we're down to two and it's a bit more annoying. If it were only one... that's obnoxious. Luckily it's not.


It's also fight-dependent. Scorch is flat out horrific on Freya or Yogg. It's even nasty on XT: spending 7.5 seconds to put a debuff up on the heart which is only alive for 30 seconds? sigh.....

But keeping scorch up on, e.g., Iron Council mobs isn't that big a deal -- you just have to restack twice in the fight because you switch mobs.

Ignis is a bigger loss since you have to refresh before flame jets but still not that big a deal.

et cetera.


It's around 70 dps/mage to simply maintain the buff. The more you have to restack it, the higher that loss gets.

The problem with scorch really is the "restack" part. It'd just be an easy 70 dps loss if we only had to cast it once every 30 seconds -- and only one mage would maintain it, rather than now where you really do need multiple mages paying attention in case someone is indisposed and the stack drops.

But we have to drop a high-dps glyph to glyph for it, which is a bad decision everywhere except, well, Yogg and Freya.

[Rottenapple]

Just looking at the Warlock Simcraft thread on EJ, there is around a 400 dps gap at BiS Ulduar gear between Destro and an ISB aff spec, the difference is about 300 dps at BiS pre-Ulduar gear. This is just from a quick look at the Simcraft thread only so take it for what it's worth. I'm not really up on these things that much these days.

http://elitistjerks.com/f80/t48311-simulationcraft_post_3_1_specs/