Something to keep in mind about Affliction PvP is that the whole premise of the talent tree flat out clashes with the way other classes PvP. As a tree is essentially has to keep people feared or it can't function for very long because burst damage just kills us so quickly(unless they stay feared) We fear or we die in most cases. Before the patch we could chainfear and win. Other classes hated us. This patch Fear is breaking after a brief moment in all but the most limited circumstances to Warlock with large amounts of +dmg(1100+) Before the patch my 3v3 team was at 1938. After one night of only a dozen games or so we had dropped to 1834, from what I believe to be my doing due to Fear simply not working.
There's a few solutions to this problem(keeping the current nerfed state of fear in mind)
1) Buff our debuffs, particularly CoW. Let us live longer without having to keep people feared. We can manage against casters with a Felpup out well enough, but melee just destroys.
2) Give us some way to actually *use* Drain Life in PvP. Using it is like a big blinking sign "silence me I'm using my shadow school!" For an Affliction lock especially, Shadow is essentially our only school. When Shadow is silenced we're out of the game. Fire offers no escape, no get out of jail free card, or anything aside from some weak-ass nukes. If we could have a talented or core change so Drain Life were usable without being an invitation to lose all our good spells it would work well...
3) Further nerf fear to break after 500dmg(just enough so maybe one DoT from someone else or a pet wouldn't break it) Drop the cooldown on Deathcoil to 30 seconds. Now we can gain some health and get away for a moment every 30 seconds instead of every 2 minutes.
4) Cut our losses. Just redesign the Affliction tree to be 100% PvE focused. Change Unstable Affliction and Contagion as appropriate to offer some extra PvE bonus, and removing the dispel related portions of these talents. We'll just have to respec to PvP like Prot Warriors do.
The amount of misinformation in this thread is staggering.
1/39/21 and 1/21/39 will always be better than 0/40/21 and 0/21/40. Corruption should ALWAYS be used, and should account for at least 15% of your damage. Immolate should also always be used and should account for at least 10% of your damage, depending on whether you have a lot more +shadow vs +all gear. You are doing something seriously wrong if your shadowbolt damage is higher than 80%.
On topic: Fear breaks a bit earlier, and has a higher chance of heartbeat resists, from what I've observed in battlegrounds. Note: Hadn't had a chance arena yet, as my healer is out of town. but I doubt it will change much. I've never really feared the target everyone was attacking, or feared anything with dots on it unless it was 1v1 anyhow, and you can still win 1v1 against any class at the end of an arena with all their cools down.
I've been affliction my entire time playing warlock and am interested in speccing 1/21/39 or 0/21/40.
My question is about the spells you should be using in your rotation. I know with 1/21/39 you should be using corruption and immolate in addition to shadowbolt, but what about agony? If my cycle is going something like Corruption ---> agony----> immo ----> sbolt spam is that incorrect?
Another question I have about 0/21/40 is how should I be gemming with the new +8 hit gem that is available? How does +hit scale in comparison to +dmg and +crit for a 0/21/40 spec?
Curses are always more damage per cast time. If you don't have to keep CoS / CoE / CoT / CoR up, start with Doom -> Corruption -> Immolate -> Boltspam.
And to whoever said "all raiding mages are fire and there's no other options" -- i've seen plenty of very solid frost mages. You act as if all warlock specs produce identical dps but mages have these huge vast differences in the dps of their trees. Fact is the warlock specs vary also (someone listed deep demo as on par with affliction earlier? heh... no.)
Providing you keep your felguard alive - Demonology is a slightly higher dps spec according to the spreadsheet. My guild isn't in TK/SSC, but we are on Magtheridon. (Small guild, joint raids). I'm consistently the top DPS in Karazahn, Gruul, and Magtheridon so I've been able to respec weekly to try out different specs and not only compare it to my own numbers, but against my raid group.
I ran Gruul, Mag, and Karazahn last week as 6/44/11 (pvp spec) and the numbers were very impressive. My dps fluctuated fight to fight more than it does as 43/0/18 or 0/21/40 but the results were solid. My varying numbers were mainly due to how long my felguard lived. Shadowpriests are wonderful as felguard spec. :p
Now, I don't have any "proof", but I think the spreadsheet is enough. Plugging in my own stats under optimal conditions I end up with 1193 dps as affliction and 1312 dps as 6/44/11. Of course this doesn't take into consideration mobility and threat, but I don't think you can just dismiss Demonology like that.
Edit: WWS on Gruul kill. This is only my combat log so I'm missing a bit of the total damage from others - Blotter and I were actually within 500 damage of eachother according to SW Stats. So take everyone elses numbers with a grain of salt - but my numbers on the fight are very solid. My felguard actually died twice so I spent time resummoning twice, so he went without buffs for a majority of the fight.
The amount of misinformation in this thread is staggering.
1/39/21 and 1/21/39 will always be better than 0/40/21 and 0/21/40. Corruption should ALWAYS be used, and should account for at least 15% of your damage. Immolate should also always be used and should account for at least 10% of your damage, depending on whether you have a lot more +shadow vs +all gear. You are doing something seriously wrong if your shadowbolt damage is higher than 80%.
At high enough +dmg levels and maxed hit this is not the case. Without empowered corruption, S+F bolts out scale corruption rather quickly and actually catch up and pass on a per cast time ratio. The range issue is also pretty big. Of course on mobile fights Corr is worth casting though. The fight I was quoted on as 85% was Alar. I was not using immolate due to immunity and corruption due to range issues. Simply SB and Doom.
Now, I don't have any "proof", but I think the spreadsheet is enough. Plugging in my own stats under optimal conditions I end up with 1193 dps as affliction and 1312 dps as 6/44/11. Of course this doesn't take into consideration mobility and threat, but I don't think you can just dismiss Demonology like that.
Many people have pet bias, since many people likely have bad memories of pets causing wipes.
The another Warlock dps spreadsheet doesn't have dodges accounted for (last time I looked a week ago), so the Felguard's dps is higher than actual conditions. The Felguard does about 200 dps fully buffed with the crit talent.
FG spec can be competitive if you are in a Shadow Priest's group, but without it lowers your dps (since you have to resummon the FG when it dies).
A note of your dps, Curse of Doom >> Curse of Agony and Soul Link's damage is just padding the meter .
Yeah... CoD is higher DPS... It's a bad habit I need to break. I'm paranoid about CoD getting pushed off.
This might be a better estimate for a Felguard build. We just did Kara start-finish today and I recorded it all and got someone elses logs as well. It should be pretty accurate. I haven't looked through it completely though. If you see anything out of whack let me know, I'm pretty new to the whole WWS thing.
Alot of the fights I was threat-capped or unable to dps fully... you guys know how Kara is. I think if you look at our prince kill though you'll see that even though we had low group dps making the fight last longer, I still averaged 910 dps. I looked at the top 10 kills or so on WWS for prince kills based on group dps and only saw a couple locks reaching that, and they had shadowpriests. I wasn't fortunate enough to have one in the raid. /shrug. Demonology is a real dps spec.
Last edited by Daefuin : 05/26/07 at 10:31 PM.
Reason: forgot to put in link lol
Something to keep in mind about Affliction PvP is that the whole premise of the talent tree flat out clashes with the way other classes PvP. As a tree is essentially has to keep people feared or it can't function for very long because burst damage just kills us so quickly(unless they stay feared) We fear or we die in most cases. Before the patch we could chainfear and win. Other classes hated us. This patch Fear is breaking after a brief moment in all but the most limited circumstances to Warlock with large amounts of +dmg(1100+) Before the patch my 3v3 team was at 1938. After one night of only a dozen games or so we had dropped to 1834, from what I believe to be my doing due to Fear simply not working.
There's a few solutions to this problem(keeping the current nerfed state of fear in mind)
1) Buff our debuffs, particularly CoW. Let us live longer without having to keep people feared. We can manage against casters with a Felpup out well enough, but melee just destroys.
2) Give us some way to actually *use* Drain Life in PvP. Using it is like a big blinking sign "silence me I'm using my shadow school!" For an Affliction lock especially, Shadow is essentially our only school. When Shadow is silenced we're out of the game. Fire offers no escape, no get out of jail free card, or anything aside from some weak-ass nukes. If we could have a talented or core change so Drain Life were usable without being an invitation to lose all our good spells it would work well...
3) Further nerf fear to break after 500dmg(just enough so maybe one DoT from someone else or a pet wouldn't break it) Drop the cooldown on Deathcoil to 30 seconds. Now we can gain some health and get away for a moment every 30 seconds instead of every 2 minutes.
4) Cut our losses. Just redesign the Affliction tree to be 100% PvE focused. Change Unstable Affliction and Contagion as appropriate to offer some extra PvE bonus, and removing the dispel related portions of these talents. We'll just have to respec to PvP like Prot Warriors do.
Really? That's weird because I actually prefer Affliction over any other spec for battlegrounds- I haven't done much in the arena because I've been too busy levelling other toons, but I have over 40k kills logged, almost all as Affliction and almost never using fear (dc/ihot is another story). In AV, if you just tab/spam siphon life (with a few UA "landmines" for good measure), you can get basically infinite life and mana. I think a lot of people make common mistakes with Affliction in general, especially in pvp. They tend to think of siphon life as a weak dot instead of a stackable hot, or simply stand there and dot targets instead of using one of Afflictions best strengths- its mobility, to their advantage. You're absolutely right that it's the "annoying spec," so instead of focusing on annoying just one person, try to spread it out a bit and annoy the whole raid.
At high enough +dmg levels and maxed hit this is not the case. Without empowered corruption, S+F bolts out scale corruption rather quickly and actually catch up and pass on a per cast time ratio. The range issue is also pretty big. Of course on mobile fights Corr is worth casting though. The fight I was quoted on as 85% was Alar. I was not using immolate due to immunity and corruption due to range issues. Simply SB and Doom.
How high damage levels are you talking about? I currently have 1250 damage, and every spreadsheet/testing I've done shows 1/5 corruption > the last point in S+F. I've haven't done Al'ar yet (will be doing it tonight, as we just downed Vashj), but in any other fight I can't see corruption's range having any bit of an issue. However, I didn't see you were talking about Alar in your shadowbolt : damage ratio, my apologies.
EDIT: Killed Al'ar, and although I was affliction, I really don't see the range thing being a problem whatsoever. When he rotated I used life tap/dark pact on the move, and got within 30 yards to shadowbolt anyhow. So in all honestly, 30 yard range hasn't been an issue for any boss I've fought so far to use it as an excuse for not corrputioning.
Kyth, pardon the interruption but I really hate this metric. You do not lose overall damage by casting CoS or CoE presuming you do so intelligently. You lose personally-assigned damage perhaps but no officer worth his salt looks at personal WWS stats in a vaccuum. I look at marginal value and frankly, I can't see why anyone would look at a raid slot for other purposes. If there were a class that increased all damage to the target by 50% and did no damage or healing at all themselves, they'd still be the best raid class in existence.
As far as e-peen waving meters goes, yes it's "losing" damage.
Honestly I know a whole bunch of hot-headed mages on my server, and they all wave their fingers at the (top dps, damage-curse casting warlock) and point out how amazingly zomg overpowered warlocks are. But the only reason that warlock is the top is *because* the other two curses have been covered.
But you can't just look at the 4th warlock on a raid and declare that to be the warlock damage is my point. More realistic is to take 1/3rd - 1/4th of the dps of CoA/CoD and assign it to each lock. The debuff limit is also a harsh reality, which I'm not sure mages really grasp completely, having never had to truly deal with it. That said I don't think the debuff limit should be used as a justification for warlock dps -- I'd rather see no debuff limit at all, and it not being a factor in the class's balancing (i.e. we shouldn't do more dps just because we can conceivably be limited by the debuff limit.)
And you can disagree with me on the 3% hit from talents . I think it's a case of those without being overly jealous, and those with being overly dismissive. The truth is certainly somewhere in between -- I'd still kill for 3% hit from talents because I'm frustrated that every other class in the world gets a useful +hit talent and we don't (suppression really doesn't need to exist, since you need 16% hit for soulshatter and shadowbolt to be useful. +hit is so not-helpful for dots the way it is for nukes it's just sad.)
My point on frost-versus-fire is the black or white attitude many seem to have, of all classes and specs. They totally dismiss the other mage specs, and then act as if all warlock specs are identical (or vice versa). I'm not saying frost=fire. In fact, we finally have a strong fire mage and I'm hoping he pushes our frost mages into respecing fire because it'll make our dps better. But it's not a useless tree, and there are variations in the warlock trees that get glossed over by mages trying to prove warlocks are this amazing class and mages are the shit blizzard came up with when they had a bad indian dinner earlier that night.
Frankly the strength I see in the warlock trees has nothing to do with equivalent dps (because they aren't), but how differently they all *play* -- and it's why I get so passionate about the problems affliction as in gearing. I love that we have 3 different trees, two of which are decently raid-useful, and all three of which play so very differently. It's a well-designed class in that respect, even if the "all or nothing" defense (aka fear) and afflictions gearing are incredibly poorly thought out.
Last edited by Kyth : 05/27/07 at 4:59 PM.
Reason: removed rant; posting while drunk is never a good idea
OK, my main is a warrior but I do have a warlock alt (tho not 70) but here's my 2ยข.
1) The worst thing about fear (and I mean this for every class that has 1) is the lack of control. If instead, fear worked like it does on the main target of a warrior's Intimidating Shout (basically freezing them in place), it would be much more fair while still remaining a solid ability for all classes.
2) Warlocks don't seem to have the checks and balances that other classes do. Mages (usually) beat warriors; warriors (should) beat rogues, etc. Killing a warlock isn't that difficult if he's a dotter and runner but it's still a pain. Warlocks need some kind of Kryptonite.
3) Dots are a warlock's bread-and-butter but they are OP, imo. If a warlock ioes, his dots should fade. Dots should give rage or something to keep them potent but to have some kind of Achilles' heel.
4) Warlocks seem to have no weaknesses in PvE, farming or PvE. Ask a Holy Priest or Protection Warrior about farming, or a Ret Pally, Arms/Fury Warrior about getting into raids.
5) With all the strengths of warlocks and few weaknesses (Mages too, to a degree in my opinion), you have lots of people who don't play well play one and still be competent in-game, able to kill, kite, CC, heal themselves, offer group benefits and even off-tank.
Solution: No need to nerf, Blizz seems to have a mindset that it's better to nerf one class at a time rather than re-balancing everything out as much as possible. And with the endgame focus so caster-centric, there seems no end in sight.
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OK, my main is a warrior but I do have a warlock alt (tho not 70) but here's my 2ยข.
1) The worst thing about fear (and I mean this for every class that has 1) is the lack of control. If instead, fear worked like it does on the main target of a warrior's Intimidating Shout (basically freezing them in place), it would be much more fair while still remaining a solid ability for all classes.
I think the thing that drives me crazy about fear is warlocks perpetually claiming fear always breaks early, when all of us have experiences saying otherwise. The other thing that drives me crazy about fear is not so much the fear itself, but the fact that everytime I am feared, the time lost is actually the duration of the fear PLUS the 2-3 seconds it takes to reorient myself.
I am never feared and then can immediately counterspell the refear. I am always backwards wedged into a stall at stables in AB. Or upside down in the bushes midfield in WSG. Or stuck backwards in a crevice in the terrain and unable to move in EOTS. Or fearedinto a wall in a tower in AV.
That is what drives me insane.
On the upside, I am now speccing frost on the weekends for pvp and eating locks for lunch. In fact, they are the first thing I target now. It feels good.
A mage can only cast fireball over and over. A warlock can lay down 3-5 dots and then cast shadowbolt at the same time.
For every spell damage warlocks get like 2-4 effective spell damage. It will be disgusting once people start hitting 1500-2000 spell damage months from now.
Nukes scale 50% better than dots. Dots if anything are underpowered (they should be increased some, and the nukes decreased some)
If you spent 15% of your time lifetapping, that means you are using 1 GCD every 10 seconds to lifetap, you are getting 1.5k mana/10 seconds, or 750 mana/5. That's 9000 mana/minute just from lifetapping, without counting JoW/BoW or anything.
A mage has a harder time running OOM than a warlock due to better mana-efficiency, but when they do run OOM they have absolutely no way to recover. A very very well geared mage might have 150ish mana/5, using mage armor and high spirit gear. That means that a mage would have to be over 5 times more efficient than a warlock in order for their damage/mana * mana regen to be superior to yours, on a longer fight.
Warlocks are insanely nice because they do not rely on other classes to provide them with mana, mages require a shadowpriest to do serious damage. If you have only warlocks, you can afford to put your shadowpriests with your healers/hunters and other classes. Requiring no-help to do your best damage is a pretty damn nice perk.
Boss fights are not designed around mages (or healers) going OOM at least, until right around when the boss should be dead. This kind of 'point of argument' is meaningless.
Well, I noticed few comments appearing in several posts that I do not agree with:
1) Warlocks do NOT scale better with +dmg compared to mages
I do not think that warlocks scale better with +dmg gear compared to mages. To confirm that I compared DPS gain for warlock and mage with same gear (similar to what i have now, 1100dmg+, 11%crit, 8%hit, without talents) when +dmg is increased by 100, to 1200 .
Increase by +100 dmg resulted in:
- 5.45% DPS increase for fire mage ( i guess majority raid mages are fire)
- 5.19% DPS increase for Afflic lock
- 4.97% DPS increase for Demo lock (only 4.1% if pet DPS included)
2) Demo warlock build is NOT inferior in raid DPS
Both in my XLS calc from above, and from my raiding practice as demo lock, I can see that demo lock can have better DPS than similary geared afflic lock (or destro lock). Basically, both in XLS numbers and on SWS numbers on boss fights, demo lock always end up noticeably lower than afflic/destro, if you do not cound pet damage. But when you add pet damage, Demo lock gets almost always above afflic/destro.
Aside from XLS showing same (even if afflic lock would use imp for DPS, which they rarely do), it holds true in majority of boss mobs that I experienced... even those where pet can die sometimes due to AEs, like Gruul (where being in SP group helps), and even with recasting pet. And pet usually can live and do DPS in 19 out of 20 boss fights from my experience.
Add to that fact that Demo lock use much less debuff icons on raid, and fact that it is most viable PvP build.... I'm suprised we dont have more raid demo locks ;p
Few drawbacks for demo locks are that +dmg scale sligthly less (as noticed above) and that it requires more overhead/care to manage pet.
Boss fights are not designed around mages (or healers) going OOM at least, until right around when the boss should be dead. This kind of 'point of argument' is meaningless.
Mages require a shadowpriest to sustain their damage for longer than 5 minutes. The average fight is much longer than that.
Mages require a shadowpriest to sustain their damage for longer than 5 minutes. The average fight is much longer than that.
Elemental Shaman are in a worse boat than this longetivity wise post 2.1 in that they require a shadow priest.
Regarding warlock changes, High HP and the fact it is very easy for me to lose control of my character is pretty much the only problems I have as a Shaman, that and DoTs persisting through death.
Fixing wise it has already been said but stationary fear, DoTs being wiped on the warlock dying and a change to demonic embrace would put them on a good footing PvP wise, PvE wise the problem is more on Shadow Priests than warlocks
OK, my main is a warrior but I do have a warlock alt (tho not 70) but here's my 2ยข.
2) Warlocks don't seem to have the checks and balances that other classes do. Mages (usually) beat warriors; warriors (should) beat rogues, etc. Killing a warlock isn't that difficult if he's a dotter and runner but it's still a pain. Warlocks need some kind of Kryptonite.
I'll have to disagree with this point. Rogues having Cloak of Shadows is huge against Warlocks. We cant blink away to get distance. We basically have to sit there and eat the damage then they vanish and finish us off. Another check an balance is the pet dynamics. A felpup does nothing against a warrior however the succy allows me to seduce nuke. Conversely the succy does little against a mage or another caster but the felpup provides some advantages.
I do agree that the fear mechanic needs to be adjusted. I recently respeced into affliction and chain fearing has become so ridiculous I feel dirty doing it. However it seems to be the strat of choice as I have it done to me on my druid all the time. My dots rarely break my fear and when they do I reapply fear immediately. But when you are affliction and lack high dps nukes there seems little other way to survive.
Mages require a shadowpriest to sustain their damage for longer than 5 minutes. The average fight is much longer than that.
So? Shadow priests are good, bring them so that your mages out damage your warlocks. It's not like your going to cut down on your shadowpriest numbers because you have warlocks.
I'll have to disagree with this point. Rogues having Cloak of Shadows is huge against Warlocks. We cant blink away to get distance. We basically have to sit there and eat the damage then they vanish and finish us off. Another check an balance is the pet dynamics. A felpup does nothing against a warrior however the succy allows me to seduce nuke. Conversely the succy does little against a mage or another caster but the felpup provides some advantages.
I do agree that the fear mechanic needs to be adjusted. I recently respeced into affliction and chain fearing has become so ridiculous I feel dirty doing it. However it seems to be the strat of choice as I have it done to me on my druid all the time. My dots rarely break my fear and when they do I reapply fear immediately. But when you are affliction and lack high dps nukes there seems little other way to survive.
Why Demonic Embrace? The key to warlock survivability is stacked HP + damage mitigation (resilience, soul link). Warlocks lack the escape abilities of mages like blink and block/b. speed (depending on spec).
05/26/07, 5:19 AM
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