Well to me, since this is a "leveling" blue it's using the agility/ap method so it can be a hunter's statstick as well, and we'll see strength weapons once we hit Level 80 5mans / Naxxramas 2.0.

After some experimentation on my part both the current WoW client and the WotLK client work better for me with SLI disabled as opposed to enabled. Or in other words, no notable improvement in the WotLK client for SLI. Anything I have that does make use of SLI does perform better with it enabled, so it isn't an overheating issue or something like that either.

You're assuming they don't do raidwide shouts like they said they were considering, though. If they do that, suddenly it makes a lot less sense to hang out with those rogues.

As someone with a 5 year old computer, that troubles me. I hope you can turn those shadows off.

They're entirely optional as with all new graphical stuff Blizzard introduces. Actually, the only way to enable them right now is through console commands, also leading more credence to them being unoptimized right now.

Looking at all the discussion about dots/hots scaling, I think a simple way to implement effective scaling would be to allow haste to allow the hots to tick faster with haste, and allow the initial effect of the dot to crit, increasing the damage of the hot by extending the length of time the dot is in effect by w/e damage modifier they decide to use.

For example, for a standard crit modifier of 1.5x, increase the dot length by 1/2 of the normal length. This would (IMHO) be an intuitive way of increasing the scaling of dots, and making both haste and crit useful to dot/hot based casters.

Sure, it would require paying more attention to cast timers, but any good hot/dot caster uses them anyway. It would also make rotations more complicated, but I think rotations on the fly would make things more interesting, while also giving more benefit to skilled players.

A crit dot that extended length would allow you to do more with your time not casting, in addition to scaling better with haste though. In addition , I would think a dot having a chance to crit every tick would be a bit too much, especially with the possibility of having large amounts of crit on gear with gear being compressed to be used by all casters.

Having dot that can crit on each tick would be overkill imho. A crit on the initial cast that added the crit dmg multiplier in time would keep things from getting out of hand, though having significant amounts of haste and crit would be quite nice if it worked in that fashion.

Consider a crit corruption lasting twice as long, all you gain is 1.5s. 1.5s is the same as 60% of a shadowbolt.

Assuming a 44/0/17 raidspec right now, corruption receives 130% of your spell damage, with 15% more damage. Shadowbolt receives 85.7% of spelldamage, plus 10% from shadow mastery. For nice round numbers, let's say 1000 +dmg.

If a corruption "crit", you get 1.5s more seconds of casting. A shadowbolt hit would go for 1571 avg before raid debuffs (let's leave them out since both spells would be affected equally). Now you really only gained 60% of this from the crit corruption, so you gained 943 damage.

Your corruption itself would have done 2530 damage over the course of it's duration. So your "crit" corruption would only account for 37% more damage before accounting Shadow Bolt crits. Not overwhelming at all.

It would also royally screw up affliction/shadow priest rotations even more than haste already does. At least passive haste is predictable.

How is a 50% crit multiplier on DoTs any more overpowered than a 50% crit multiplier on any other spell? You'd need to scale down base damage, yes, but that's not a new, earth-shattering realization.

Perhaps spriests have rotations, but Affliction never did. Each DoT has a different length (except Corruption/UA), so a crit adding to the duration is a nice bonus.

Affliction priests and shadow priests do not have rotations (well, bad ones do, but that's not particularly relevant). They have priority queues, and as long as addons like ClassTimers or DoTimer or whatever were able to pick up the crit-length duration it would not particularly alter the difficulty of playing the class. (Haste is far more disruptive because it speeds up the rate at which decisions must be made.)

Edit: To clarify what I do when I'm playing shadow, I watch my timers and cooldowns and I'm usually thinking 2-3 GCDs ahead of the present. I only ever pay attention to timers that are down to 4.5-6 seconds remaining, so if my VT unexpectedly lasted longer than normal, it would simply not come to my attention until it was about to expire, and when it was running out I would recast it. I don't think in terms of rotations at all, except that I know how the fist half-dozen or so casts of any engagement go since I've done them so often.

The default UI shows a number over the DoT, so a crit DoT would just increase the number.

DoT's critting on application is bad because then you wait for it to tick once (or not, depending on how it registers in the combat log) and start fishing for crits, so that most of your DoT ticks run constantly at +50% even for low crit rates. Your crit rate would mostly boost your uptime and your filler time.

^ This - Thinking in terms of an affliction warlock, a few dot crits would increase the amount of time you have to spend shadowbolting for max dps. I would also think it could positively effect shadow priests w/ more time to mindflay, or give druids a chance to get out of the 5SR on lifebloom application crits.

30% crit chance on a druid would give you a pretty decent chance to have the longer duration on a lifebloom full stack, which would be what, about 10.5 seconds, which would allow more stacks in a pinch, or some time to regen some mana.

Being able to follow/alter your priority cast list on the fly would just further separate the amazing players from the good players :o

So I have some concerns currently about the scaling on items in WoTLK, Currently melee scales far to well in PvP due to ArP etc and casters do not, this is much less of an issue in PvE.

Currently you see a balance of ArP and the butter stats not being introduced until late in the expansion, however in Wrath they are tossed into the mix as early as 75. What will this do to melee vs caster scaling? Namely warlocks, I have faith blizzard is aware of such an issue occurring but it is a pretty big concern for me currently.

If melee does scale as well as it does and casters don't I will just level my rogue instead of my lock.

I'm pretty sure that over-writing a fresh DoT by recasting it to try again for a crit would be inefficient whether crits amped the damage or extended the duration. In fact, the only time fishing for DoT crits would be worthwhile would be for Corruption or SW:P with the upcoming refresher talents.

Aside from concerns about interactions with DoT-refreshing talents, amping the damage with a crit makes affliction/shadow scale much better with +crit than the duration method. Crits are supposed to be more damage per second, not just more damage over time. It's hard to visualize a critical disease, but a Critical Rupture is easy to envision: the victim is bleeding out quicker! DoT classes aren't asking for ways to make DoTs last longer so that they can throw more filler spells, they're asking for their DoTs to scale better and benefit from stats so that, for instance, end-game Warlocks don't become Shadow Mages.

What do you do after you put up your DOT spells? You spam Shadowbolt.

Shadowbolt is an important part of Affliction. Especially with Improved Shadowbolt proccing 20% more DOT damage.

Improved shadowbolt won't be proccing 20% more DoT damage in Wrath. (It won't be worth any DoT damage at all.)

I don't think you can get away from filler spells though. You have to have something spammable, and it has to be weaker than your DoTs or cooldown-limited spells, because if it wasn't you would never use the DoTs or cooldown-limited spells. For shadow priests the filler is mind flay and for 'locks it's shadowbolt. There have been ideas tossed around about making drain life the warlock filler but it comes down to the same thing, except you're using green lazers instead of purple skulls.

The alternatives to non-DoT fillers are either having so many DoTs that you can never keep them all up (which would be horrendously complicated) or having a stackable DoT where each application expires individually. So far as I am aware this latter mechanic does not currently exist in WoW.

While I certainly wouldn't mind something like this... that's not the point I was trying to make. Shadowbolt isn't a bad thing per se. It is indeed filler and filler is a necessity. My point is talents in the Affliction tree should not make you use your tree defining spells less. If anything is going to be done to the duration of a spell it should decrease the duration offering more opportunities to refresh it- not less.


Say 1000dmg 18 second base corruption. 1167 if the duration were increased by one tick (21 seconds). DPM goes up, sure, but Affliction isn't exactly what we'd call a "mana needy" spec. You can wait 3 more seconds before you have to refresh it netting you more time to Shadowbolt, which as we stated before is simply filler.


Vs 1000 damage over 15 seconds. DPM goes down compared to the 21 second Corruption(but again not much of an issue due to Dark Pact and Lifetap+Siphon Life), but DPS goes up for Corruption, you cast Corruption more often and your coefficient is inflated artificially due to the shorter duration, much like how Bane works for Shadowbolt.

Now, comparing the two- Which of these examples seems most appropriate in maintaining the playstyle and identity of Affliction? I think it's rather easy to see which is most cohesive with the design of the tree.

You're confusing game mechanics with spec identity. The point at hand is that we don't want to spam shadowbolts. As an affliction warlock, I use shadowbolt as a filler spell, and only as a filler spell, and I do so begrudingly. I would love to see an affliction filler become available instead of shadowbolt. I don't see it as an important part of gameplay, I see its necessity as a flaw in the class, much like demonic sacrifice. Plus, in raid situations, my shadowbolts remove the 20% DoT buff more often than they proc it because my crit chance is then everyone else's, meaning that spamming more shadowbolts actually lowers my DoT damage. That lowering my DoT damage increases my overall damage is a contradiction I would love to see resolved.

I'm with Draele, I don't want the answer to affliction to be more and better ways of fitting non-affliction spells into the playstyle. It's pretty much the same reason that Shadowmend got ditched as the 41-point shadow priest talent during the TBC beta: we speced away from that crap for a reason, go back to the drawing board and give us something else.

From a "spec identity" point of view, what Affliction needs is for Drain Life to somehow become raid-viable. Perhaps a high level talent that significantly increases the damage/coefficent, but also reduces the amount of healing recovered.

This bears emphasis. I have no clue why affliction doesn't emphasize Drain Life, or if the devs are worried about the health return overpowering a strong Drain Life, Drain Soul. Add a talent to increase the tick rate on Drain Soul to 3 seconds, increase the coefficient, whatever. Make Affliction spam Affliction spells as filler instead of relying on Shadowbolt, venerable standby though it may be.