On the Warlocks Den forums, I found an interesting post the other day that got me thinking. The forum post is found here: http://wowmb.net/forums/showthread.php?t=26423&highlight=Affliction. Essentially, CanadianPimp talks about using WWS to work out where you are lacking in a fight, what you missed out on doing, etc. I wanted to focus on one point that he made, and that is: DoT Uptime.

(Using my WWS Report thats found here http://wowwebstats.com/qe1yqf4ls4zdk) as a working example.

Looking at the above image, we can see that my DPS time was 4 minutes and 45 seconds. This translates into 285 seconds.
All DoTs tick every 3 seconds, so we divide the number of seconds by 3 to see how many ticks we should have.

285 / 3 = 95

Now we look at the actual amount of DoT ticks I had, per DoT:

Corruption: 89 [93.6%]
Siphon Life: 92 [96.8%]
Unstable Affliction: 87 [91.5%]

In a perfect world, all these DoTs would have had 95 ticks, however, circumstances do change. Two Dots might finish at the same time, one might finish in the middle of a ShadowBolt cast, or during a GCD. I am happy enough with these results, even though I do understand that they are not a real world example. I will be recording all Boss Fights from here out, and will attempt to analyse them in the same way.

What is a good number to aim for? I can’t really answer that, since I haven’t collected any actual boss-fight data, and I dont want to use just my Dr Boom test. Currently, I am going to be aiming for a 90% DoT Uptime, since that’s my bread and butter as Affliction. I won’t cancel a current SB cast to refresh a DoT, nor will I refresh a DoT that hasn’t expired yet. I was fortunate in this test in that I rarely got two DoTs finishing at the same time. I will see tonight before shutdown what happens when I introduce Immolate into the equation.

Something wrong with my math? Did I assume and make an ass of myself? Let me know!