Thanks for this. Can you give me any more direction as to where on the discord?
I think I can actually answer a lot of this myself on reflection.
CR: One additional combat res is probably about the same utility as an additional soulstone so can be ignored when comparing against warlock. On that note, I also going to assume there’s already enough warlocks to cover curses, so taking an extra warlock instead of the first boomkin doesn’t add any curse utility.
Innervate: Again, there’s probably already a few innervates so this is 1 extra innervate. Let’s say this adds equivalent of 25% of a player for either dps or healing.
Moonkin Aura: 5% crit = about 16% of a warlock worth of damage (5% damage boost to 4 warlock’s direct damage - 80% of total dmg)
EDIT: Moonkin aura will also increase the uptime of Improve Shadow Bolt procs from crits by up to 5%, so that’s up to 1% increase in raid shadow damage caused. Not huge, so I’ll leave the number at 16%.
Improved thorns: Based on my guild’s logs that adds about half a percent to tank damage and threat. Worth having I guess, but doesn’t significantly contribute to raid damage. Maybe counts as 2.5% of a dps player because it increases the threat ceiling (assuming 5 of the dps players are threat capped).
EDIT: Somebody below noted that imp thorns can be done by restro druid, so perhaps this can be discounted.
Improved Faerie Fire: Assuming the tanks and melee dps can efficiently swap out gear this is a 3% damage gain to all physical dps, including tank threat. Realistically let’s say it’s 2% dmg and tank threat increase, and assume the raid has physical dps equivalent of 5 physical dps (including tank dps). The raid utility of this is then 10% of a player in pure dps and another 10% in increasing threat ceiling (again, assuming 5 threat capped players), so 20% of a player worth of raid utility.
EDIT: this also does not consider that having the boomkin keep fairie fire up means somebody else doesn’t have to keep track of and spend GCDs on it.
Insect Swarm: 2% reduced damage from boss attacks. Let’s say damage affected by insect swarm is about 60% of damage taken by the raid = 1.2% less damage taken and healing needed.
Total raid utility of first boomkin instead of 5th or 6th warlock:
25+16+2.5+20+1.2 = 64.7%. The numbers aren’t precise, so it’s around 55-70% of an average warlock’s worth of raid utility.
Given that the last warlock picked is likely to be below average then, the boomkin actually only needs to be doing something less than 35-55% (maybe as low as 20-40%) of the damage of the last warlock picked, in order to be worth taking.
Any thoughts on these numbers? Did I miss anything or get anything wrong?