Sophie's Choice: Immolate's last tick

I know I've been posting a lot, but this is mostly a great deal of fleshing out the information on the blog - as I cover the high points and common questions it'll taper off. Then Cataclysm will hit and I'll have to start from the beginning.

Tonight we're talking about immolate and the destruction rotation. There are two cardinal rules in destruction: Never clip immolate, and never cast another destruction spell on an unimmolated target. But what happens in that last two seconds of immolate? Sometimes the remaining duration is less than the cast time of your next incinerate, but longer than immolate's. So you have to break one of the rules. Which one's more important?



We'll, let's run some numbers (Ideal raid, my armory profile):

Incinerate hit average: 6380
Incinerate crit average: 13319
Incinerate overall average: 10569

Now, the 10% loss from fire and brimstone would be:

Hit: 638
Crit: 1332
Overall: 1056


Incinerate also does an additional 174 to 203 damage on immolated targets that we also lose. We'll use topend, and 412 for crits (accounting for Chaotic Skyflare Diamon's increased damage):


Hit: 841
Crit: 1744

Immolate tick average 1831

As you can see, regardless of whether incinerate crits or not, you'd rather lose the immolate bonus than clip immolate.

Now, what about Chaos Bolt? Going back to my table:

Average hit: 7815
Average crit: 16330
Overall average: 12989

The flat 10% immolte bonus:

Hit: 782
Crit: 1633
Overall: 1299

Just as a note of curiosity, yes, incinerate loses more without immolate than chaos bolt does in my gear. Incinerate gets 10% plus extra base damage accounting for just over 3% of it's total damage. The higher your gear is, the smaller that base damage is going to be, of course. The Fire and Brimstone bonus scales, incinerate's base bonus does not. That's just an aside though, you can still see it's better to eat the weaker nuke than clip immolate.

This is a pretty rare situation, but it's still something you're likely to deal with often enough over the course of a raid week. Remember, if incinerate or chaos bolt leaves your hands while immolate is up, it will get the benefit even if immolate falls before the spell lands. It's also possible to precast immolate so that it falls during it's own cast time. There's a very narrow window of time in which you have to make Sophie's choice on which spell to take the hit on.

Worst case scenario, we're talking about 200 damage every 15 seconds - 13.333 dps (repeating of course). That's nothing. Literally. Don't sweat the small stuff.