Ruin
From WoWWiki
| Ruin | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Usable by | |
| Class | Warlock |
| Properties | |
| Location | Destruction, Tier 5 |
| Affects | Conflagrate, Immolate, Incinerate, Searing Pain, Shadowburn, Shadow Bolt, Soul Fire |
| Ranks | 1 |
| Requirements | |
| Points required | 20 |
| Talent required | Devastation |
Ruin is a warlock talent, considered to be the cornerstone of the Destruction talent tree.
Functionality
Ruin increases the critical hit damage bonus of your Destruction spells by 100%. A normal spell crit is +50% damage taking into account all other damage modifiers. Ruin doubles the crit bonus, so you get a +33% damage bonus on critical hits.
An average Rank 10 Shadow Bolt hits for 561 without +damage from gear. This means that an average critical would be 842 damage without Ruin, calculated by average spell damage increased 150% (default for all spell Crits). However, with Ruin, the average crit would become 1122, which is 200% base spell damage.
Notes
Ruin is the talent that makes a destruction warlock so dangerous. The huge crits can demolish unsuspecting foes. However, tanks may have more trouble managing a player with a high critrate (Critical hits increase DPS by a percentage, but not reliably. A player may get lucky and have a long string of crits, which could pull aggro off a tank). Of course, in PvP this is irrelevant
Ruin is most commonly teamed with Shadow Mastery in a 35/5/21 build, which focuses more on the Shadow Bolt spell as the warlock's source of damage (Talk:Ruin). For any warlock seeking to get Shadowfury, Ruin is considered essential, as the Destruction line relies on spell critical hits for damage.
Ruin is often contrasted with Unstable Affliction as short-term DPS vs. long term. The argument revolves on how much +crit rating a warlock needs to get Ruin to proc enough time to make up for the consistent damage of Unstable Affliction. This value is reported to be enough to reach a 30% chance to crit, which can eat into a warlock's item budget for +spell damage. It's important to note, however, that a key component of this analysis is that the player's target remains alive long enough for the full duration of Unstable Affliction.
A formula to calculate how much of a damage boost to expect over a large number of casts can be found here: Formulas:Ruin.
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