So, I used the posted new warlocks talents and skills available on blizzard's site to make a spreadsheet for warlock damage at 70. The few skills not listed at 70 I got from the thread on the EJ forums marked "The NEW BC TALENT THREAD v 1.1".

My simple spreadsheet

I added up the base damage available for 3 different builds: 41 affliction with 20 destro, 41 destro with misc talents, and 40 destro / 21 demo for DS. Talents that gave x % increase to a spell from spellpower gear were modelled as receving 1/2 x % more dmg, assuming that most dmg spells will roughly double when cast by a well geared epic warlock (this overpowers the talent somewhat for instant cast DoTs, however).

Other modelling characteristics: I assumed an 18-second cycle, and subtracted from those 18 seconds the time spend maintaining all DoTs (assumed 1.5 seconds per instant cast DoT) to determine the time spent nuking. For each build I found a total DoT DPS and a total nuke DPS (based on the nuke dmg for that talent build). The nuke DPS was averaged over the time spent available for nuking. For example, it was multiplied by 0.5 if 9 seconds out of 18 were spent maintaining DoTs. This weighted nuke DPS was added to DoT DPs.

For destro builds utilizing conflag and immolate, I subtracted 6 seconds from the available nuking time (in order to use these spells) and averaged the damage from two conflag and two immo (direct dmg portion) over 19 seconds to give the DPS from this segment of the cycle. Destro builds therefore had time spent DoTing and associated DPS, time spent applying immo and casting conflag and associated DPS, and time spent nuking (incinerate) and associated DPS. 19 was chosen as an easy number: one second of error from the application of DoTs 18 second cycle, and one second of error from the 20 second cycle allowing two conflags and two immolates being recast.

Destruction builds were assumed to spend 2 seconds each casting corruption and seed of corruption, because this is still efficient.

Imp SB was modelled as roughly 13% more damage from the DoTs. This number is assuming 10.75 seconds out of 18 are spent casting SB and a 15% crit chance. This leads to 0.7 crits per 18 second cycle, or 70% of the time the debuff is applied, leading to 0.7 * 0.2 = 13% more damage from DoTs.

Imp SB was not modelled for destruction builds utilizing Incinerate as the primary nuke.

No spell dmg gear was assumed, as I was more interested in relative differences than exact numbers.

My basic results:

41 affliction / 20 destruction: roughly 500 DPS
Shadowfury / misc: roughly 466 DPS (nuking incinerate)
Destro / DS: roughly 515 DPS (nuking incinerate with a sacrificed imp)

Drain life becomes interesting in the affliction build. Improving it with "Soul siphon" allows the warlock to drain at 153 DPS, and gain 734 life / 4 seconds, which is nice in addition to 134 life / 4 from Siphon life ( over /4 seconds was chosen to compare with DS voidwalker and felhunter).

Full destro suffers in comparison to affliction, or a pure dmg build as 40 destro + DS. However, there's better utility in 41/misc such as imp lifetap, instant corruption. Full affliction seems very desirable in the expansion.

40 affliction / 21 demo for sacced succubus was examined as well, but suffered from the loss of an additional 1k dot (unstable affliction), 5% fewer SB crits and a 3 second SB casting time. The additional loss of utility makes this build not desirable.

These numbers will change with spell dmg gear. Direct damage scales better with damage gear, but with 5 shadow based DoTs available affliction is starting to scale competively.

EDIT: changed destruction cycles to 19 seconds (instead of 18) and modelled two conflag and two immolate casts.
EDIT: clarified DoTs used by destro builds

Do people plan on using Seed of Corruption and Unstable Affliction in a raid setting? I can sort of see SoC as somewhat useful since it's the same damage per mana as Corruption, but still. Unstable Affliction will probably find most of its use in PvP.

One of the more interesting things I saw w/ destro builds is the ability to:
immol > incinerate > conflag

As it appears that incinerate doesn't consume the immolate, as conflag does. Tool tip for the lvl70 version of incinerate is:
Deals 429 to 497 Fire damage to your target and an additional 107 to 125 Fire damage if the target is affected by an Immolate spell.
It's a 2.5 second cast, so it's going to get some benefit of +damage, though it will eat up your global.

Yes, I assumed Destro builds would spend their nuking time (time not spent applying dots, immolate, or conflagging) casting incinerate, and I used the full dmg of incinerate because immolate would always be up (conflag, immolate, incin incin incin .... conflag, immo, incin incin incin ...)

Blizzard stole the opener -> bridge -> finisher mechanic from Vanguard.

The mana efficient fire-based nuking sequence will be: immolate -> incinerate x 5 -> conflag.

Having said this, I think 40affliction/21 destruction needs to be tested. It's unclear which talent adds more dps vs single targets -- ruin or 41 aff.

Affliction would likely be more mana efficient wouldn't it?

Plus it would excel in multitarget scenarios so going by preliminary numbers it seems it would be somewhat superior overall.

I was playing around with the new talents a bit, and I'll be going with something like 55 affliction / 5 demonology, no joke. With 4 debuff slots and more multiple target fights than ever before (paladin/druid tanks etc), I doubt I'll be doing many shadow bolts outside of Nightfall procs.

The Warlock talents were everything I had hoped for and then some, I'm very much looking forward to putting 6 dots on everything.

Affliction is surely far better than it was before, but I still feel improved shadowbolt and bane are key raiding talents. Ruin is harder to justify now. Demonic sacrifice has gotten a lot stronger now that voidwalker sac is usable with the new lifetap mechanics, and warlocks can nuke both fire and shadow.

I'm really liking a 7/10/44 build for warlocks:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...51220051351351

Big explosions for everyone and it looks like that rarest of rare creatures: a build that's equally viable in PvE and PvP.

When I was playing around with the Talent Calculator I actually realised I’d just put _all_ my points into Affliction… And when I started with Destruction I almost did the same. They are both extremely strong trees now and I really like the idea of being a damage over time power house. Demonology still suffers from the non-scaling dross that has always made it so unattractive for the most part, but they made an effort to be fair.

In addition to Warlocks being more viable through these changes, remember the Warlock pets themselves have some interesting little gimmicks thrown on top of them. Though there’s no saying they will work in raid, the Voidwalkers Suffering now reduces chance to hit by 10% for 15 seconds (big cooldown on Suffering, but it’s AoE) and soothing kiss reduces attack speed by 10%. Not going to change the world, but I thought they were ‘neat.’

I imagine some of the stuff in there (like Nether Protection) isn't going to make it out of Beta alive, though.

I just realized that not only will Warlocks continue to be screamed at by casters for CoE/CoS, they're going to get screamed at by Warriors to take Bane and daze stuff constantly too.

You mean aftermath? ;)

Who needs Shadow Bolt?

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000

I'm going to enjoy the whining from the people who have spent the better majority of the last year doing nothing but casting shadow bolt and lifetap when they realize they're actually going to have to utilitize some of the huge arsenal this class has at it's disposal :)

Man, the warlock trees are the hardest to understand. Mages are obvious -- since they moved cold hearted to fire, you spec fire for pve. Warlocks are not obvious at all. The only must have talents are imp. shadowbolt and bane. Beyond that, I am really at a loss. I guess the key questions are:

(a) how competitive is the fire attack chain (immolate -> incinerate x 5 -> conflag) compared to spamming improved shadowbolts with bane-shortened casting times.
(b) how much dps does one gain for plausible amounts of +spelldamage gear with all the +dot damage talents in affliction
(c) how much damage do the non-scaling pets add? (felguard with the rage mechanic or the machine gun imp with the pet mana recovery talent might be a non-trivial dps boost even if it doesn't scale)

Dark Pact got buffed too:

Rank 1: 305 Mana
Rank 2: 440
Rank 3: 545
Rank 4: 700

Check the tooltip on the Talent Calculator :)

I'm thinking Bane will still be a great asset for single target fights.

Full Affliction should hopefully be viable with the debuff limit.

The DD-enhancing talents make Destro look awesome too, but like Beef said I don't think it'll hold up at all in multi target fights.

I'm looking at going 42/8/11 or 41/3/17 at the moment.

I won't like losing Demonic Sacrifice :\ But Soul Siphon and Drain Life will hopefully be very potent. With the 42/8/11 Build Dark Pact might be enough for situations where losing life is dangerous.

I'm leaning towards a 39/1/21 (1 point in Imp HS for HS stacking) spec for raiding. It has great single and multi-target viability and damn near endless mana. I've never been so happy to be a warlock.

A deep Destruction build looks pretty fun, too, but I'm too lazy to do the math for a Immolate->Incinerate->Conflag chain.

The real question is: Can Seed of Corruption crit?


YOU ARE THE BOMB!

40/0/21 looks too interesting to pass up. Soul Siphon is a nasty talent for just being in the Tier 3 and the buffs to corruption just cant be matched...Im loving these changes the more I look at them.

Hmm, has anyone noticed the change to mana feed?

Everytime you lifetap, the pet gains that mana too.

Looks like we won't have to worry about the pet running out of mana issues. Should be interesting with a machinegun imp.

You can bet I'm speccing 7/43/11 in the expansion, for reals. MD Fel Guard is +10% damage just like the Succubus; with the big guy out, I'm getting 18% extra damage to all sources, as is my pet. If the Fel Guard's arsenal is what people are claiming (Carbon copies of Mortal Strike, Cleave, AoE Resist), then I'm expecting some pretty fun stuff as far as actually pulling my weight in damage.

If that fails, I was thinking of some gimmick spec like 0/21/40 and using Immo/Incinerate/Conflag as my main attacks so I can work with Fire Mages at last.

also because you can't use dark pact on a sacrificed pet.

I agree. I think ill only get 39 or 40 points in affliction and get ruin instead of seed of corruption. One question. does soul siphon benefit from only the number of your affliction dots on a target or the total number of affliction dots on a target?

I like how they improved the usefulness of dots (mainly with the debuff limit) but i still think pets will be broken in pve as in not scale with gear and die from aoe. Not to mention you will still probably have to have imp out as there will only be spots for 2-3 warlocks in a 25 man raid. I'm thinking affliction for pve, demonology for survivability pvp, and destro for dps pvp. For example, a 41 demo spec with felguard will rock hard in 2v2, but 41 destro will shine in a 5v5 or higher fight because of shadowfury.

Also, the non talented new spells are pretty good. Seed of corruption seems pretty overpowered as with fel armor. Also, with ritual of souls and the ability for locks to get different values of imp HS we're going to see everyone in the raid with 2 or 3 healthstones (of different hp value of course).