Help Needed...What can I do better?

[sercai]

Here are a couple quick notes on the Archimonde kill, only one I looked at:

-Havoc casts are still pretty low. You don't cast it at all until 0:56, which is late (it should be one of your first casts, then again when it's off CD - he uses doomfire and death caller early in the fight). After that, you don't cast it again until 1:21, when it was up at 1:11. If there wasn't a mob to cleave at 1:11, check your timers and pre-havoc to get more havocs in overall.

-Looks like you capped embers for about 22 seconds later on in the fight, even if you're banking for something that's too long and you're losing dps.

-Make sure you're generally working on cb dumps under your proc windows, you have a couple big procs like DSI in there where you don't do much for the later part of the proc.

-you noted this, but immolate drops for two pretty long periods of the fight

[sercai]

I know I said to dump under procs more but you're overthinking that a little with havoc here, just cast chaos bolt as soon as another target comes out to havoc the chaos bolt.
The point of pre-havocing is to get more havocs out overall. Think about it this way: you didn't cast it at all for about a minute, that's about 4 havoc cooldown cycles that you missed (15 seconds). It looks like your completely unbuffed chaos bolts are hitting in the neighborhood of 180 K, so even assuming you missed all your procs on every havoc bolt, that's 720,000 completely free damage you gave up in the first minute. Obviously you could get even more if you happen to get procs up, your average per bolt is around 240K so decent luck with procs and maybe we're talking a million free damage instead. But moving up from 0 free havoc damage in the first minute to 720K havoc damage in the first minute is more important than sweating the difference between 720K and 1M havoc damage in the first minute. If you're letting uncertainty about procs delay the cast, just hit the button, basically

[sercai]

Yeah I think i am hurting my DPS by trying to catch all the shadowburns/havoc combos versus using it on CBs, I will take your advice and just havoc and use whatever is the quickest available between CB and SB. I also notice dumping all my embers on a proc'd CBs is hurting me due to not having resources for SB when needed.

So this is moving you in the right direction. One thing (I am too lazy to look exactly how you are using sb so maybe you know this) though is that dumping on proc'd CBs is the right move. You should be using shadowburn as an ember generator sniper (so realistically only ever keeping 1 ember for it in a high shadowburn situation, and that's at the start because it will fill back up for you), or to havoc cleave where you can cleave multiple shadowburns. Otherwise, chaos bolt is higher DPET than shadowburn even without procs once you have your 2-piece. If you find yourself net spending lots of embers on shadowburn you're probably doing something wrong.

Thanks for the feedback, greatly appreciated (to bad things are getting turned upside down come spec wise come 7.0, but thats the life of a lock right?)

Yeah, 7.0 destro makes me kind of weepy.

[Heimgang]

Heh Keth, that is why I roll Afflic quite a bit. AoE is insane most of the time, but single targets seem to fall off in Onslaught.

[sercai]

You missed some opportunities for void fiend damage (some sets don't get havoced, for example, in addition to havoc being on the low side. Xhul is a fight where unless you're saving it for a fiend it should never be off CD). When V does xhul, it's a similar situation, the imps tend to get demolished, and I think the most useful thing to do is to stay destro and focus entirely on void fiend bursting. You can also generally pitch in something on imps even if FNB chaos bolt isn't going to make it. Shadowburn snipe low ones and fnbing a conflag will let you chip in some damage there, and also build embers.

Note that if Xhul is progression, or more generally if the adds are a problem, and people are assigned to different add jobs, being on fiend duty is an excellent destro job because we excel at cleave burst. In that scenario, doing top dps may well not be your most important measure of success.

If the void fiends are also exploding right away, although that is rarer in my experience, then I agree with Zuver, go affliction and multidot the big mobs.

Also, taking a closer look at the xhul log...

your shadowburn casts are low even for a high aoe situation. Xhul should be a very shadowburny fight: triple cleaves on the big guys, one on each pair of void fiends, and whatever you can snipe on the imps. Five shadowburns total in the fight when you had at least 4 sets of fiends is probably some missed shadowburns. Do you use health % indicating nameplates and a mouseover macro for sniping? It's a huge help.

Infernal is the wrong choice of guardian, even on Xhul. It's so bad (blizzard please, why is it so bad?). Use the other guy. You generally need 8+ sustained targets in his range for the entire duration of the guardian for Infernal to be the better choice, and that should not happen at any point here.

Your immolate uptime across the whole fight for all enemies was 71% which is pretty low, that's a lot of lost damage from ticks, and lost from lower ember generation reducing your cbs in the fight. This is another situation where the UI is a big help for me, since the xhul fight is such a mess. Mouseover macro + good boss frames that provide visually clear indicator of immolate = ability to keep high uptime without target swapping.

[sercai]

I'm glad I can be of some help! I agree with your sense you may be overextended, as Xhul is one of those fights where things other than overall damage are very important.

For what it's worth, I made a tell me when group with a visual havoc tracker that also plays a little pinging sound when havoc comes off cooldown. This helped me bring my havoc count up, it might help you with some of the missed ones on Xhul (you really don't want gaps as long as 30 seconds on this fight, it's havoc heaven).