Torment ranks

[Cazic]

So while leveling a warlock, eventually Voidwalker mana begins to be one of the limitations to your grind speed. I also noticed that at level 20, when you get R2 Torment, the ability's mana cost doubles and your pet starts going OOM halfway through fights. It still doesn't really keep aggro effectively, in fact it doesn't feel like R2 Torment is significantly better than R1. But once you've trained R2, it overwrites R1 and you can never use that again. So, any merit to not training R2, at least for a while until the Voidwalker's mana pool is bigger?

[hearthbreak]

You could always just toggle torment off and keybind it or macro it into your rotation so that VW isn't spamming it on cd.

[Numi]

So while leveling a warlock, eventually Voidwalker mana begins to be one of the limitations to your grind speed. I also noticed that at level 20, when you get R2 Torment, the ability's mana cost doubles and your pet starts going OOM halfway through fights. It still doesn't really keep aggro effectively, in fact it doesn't feel like R2 Torment is significantly better than R1. But once you've trained R2, it overwrites R1 and you can never use that again. So, any merit to not training R2, at least for a while until the Voidwalker's mana pool is bigger?

There's probably more merit to toggling autocast on torment than there is to not learn R2, because your voidwalker would hold aggro better with the frontloaded threat of R2 rather than the backloaded threat of R1.

What I did, was to have a macro to toggle autocast, use about 2-3 torments per mob and that was usually enough for void to hold aggro long enough.

[Noselacri]

Regardless of what the tooltip might suggest, Torment isn't a taunt, it just generates x threat. If rank 2 generates less than twice that of rank 1, there could be a case for not upgrading. In my experience, VW loses aggro halfway through the fight, so frontloading the threat doesn't help very much as autocast will do that anyway. Fights generally don't last longer than VW could cast 2-3x Torment anyway, whether on autocast or manual.

As long as VW struggles with aggro, there's not much reason to toggle autocast off, assuming you want it to keep aggro. There doesn't really come a point where it's enough for it to just pop one Torment at the start of the fight, because something as simple as Corruption+Drain Life will often take aggro. So there's really no mathematical reason to have VW cast Torment less often if you want it to hold aggro as much as it can.

[Numi]

Regardless of what the tooltip might suggest, Torment isn't a taunt, it just generates x threat. If rank 2 generates less than twice that of rank 1, there could be a case for not upgrading. In my experience, VW loses aggro halfway through the fight, so frontloading the threat doesn't help very much as autocast will do that anyway. Fights generally don't last longer than VW could cast 2-3x Torment anyway, whether on autocast or manual.

As long as VW struggles with aggro, there's not much reason to toggle autocast off, assuming you want it to keep aggro. There doesn't really come a point where it's enough for it to just pop one Torment at the start of the fight, because something as simple as Corruption+Drain Life will often take aggro. So there's really no mathematical reason to have VW cast Torment less often if you want it to hold aggro as much as it can.

From my experience, you'd gain aggro at the last ~30% of a mobs health, but this was short enough that they didn't do any serious amount of damage, and since your limit is voidwalker mana, it's a reasonable price to pay for that.

Frontloading the threat makes all the difference though, keeping rank 1 means you're doing less threat until you would stop casting rank 2 torment and most likely 1 or 2 torments after that as well. This means you'll spend less voidwalker mana, but the voidwalker would do much less threat.

Assuming the mana per threat is roughly similar, upgrading torment is always better, as it allows you to stop casting torment to allow mana regen, without losing threat and without losing efficiency.

[Noselacri]

OP's point was that it doesn't seem that Torment's threat generation doubles when its mana cost does, and my experiences were similar, although I never considered not training the next rank. And if that is indeed the case, it might be valid to leave it a rank below its max, on autocast, rather than juggle with manually pressing the key when you think it's necessary. Taking aggro doesn't happen at the start anyway, it happens after a while, and if 2x rank 1 is better than 1x rank 2, it makes sense to keep it there.

On autocast, the second Torment will go off five seconds into the fight, so if that's more threat, you've gained nothing by front-loading a single higher-ranked Torment. Front-loading would only be relevant if you're losing aggro in the first five seconds, before a second Torment could land, and that's not really the case unless you open by chaining Shadowbolts for no reason. You generally DoT+wand and take aggro halfway through.

[Numi]

OP's point was that it doesn't seem that Torment's threat generation doubles when its mana cost does, and my experiences were similar, although I never considered not training the next rank. And if that is indeed the case, it might be valid to leave it a rank below its max, on autocast, rather than juggle with manually pressing the key when you think it's necessary. Taking aggro doesn't happen at the start anyway, it happens after a while, and if 2x rank 1 is better than 1x rank 2, it makes sense to keep it there.

On autocast, the second Torment will go off five seconds into the fight, so if that's more threat, you've gained nothing by front-loading a single higher-ranked Torment. Front-loading would only be relevant if you're losing aggro in the first five seconds, before a second Torment could land, and that's not really the case unless you open by chaining Shadowbolts for no reason. You generally DoT+wand and take aggro halfway through.

I'm not sure what your experience is, but me, running full spirit gear while leveling I still overaggro void with 2/3 dots and wand, even with latest rank trained, even if he's spamming torment 100%, so that wouldn't work.

Front loading is better until you'd STOP casting torment, so if you're doing 2 torments with rank 2, the third one is where the rank 1 might CATCH UP. So until then, the void would be behind on aggro. Which is exactly what you want to avoid, since you pull ahead so easily. Rather it keeps aggro a bit easier in the start and then tank the mob the last 30%.