turturin

What we wanted, in general, was to have the potential to be at the top of the dps charts based on skill. We hated 21/40 because it allowed the former but not the latter. They have given us affliction scaling to make that possible, with the skill factor included (a difficult rotation to max/manage). Destro can also pump out the dps, but some skill is required to maintain that rotation as well.

What exactly is the problem here?

Good warlocks will figure it out and be right at the top. Bad warlocks won't and will QQ. I'm looking forward to the challenge, looking forward to seeing how well I do, and knowing that if I do well, my skill as a player will have had a lot to do with it. The tone this thread has taken with respect to semi-whining about rotations being too complex really confuses me...

 

alhill

What do we know so far about the talent upgrades to fel armor? Is the 30% only on the base damage increase, or does it also improve the spirit-based increase in spellpower?

With the changes to Everlasting Affliction and the nerf to ISB, I'm starting to wonder if there are builds that can basically avoid the destro tree altogether. That would avoid the need for bane, but of course it would also preclude ruin.

Improved Fel Armor would scale fairly decently if the 30% improvement also effected the spirit base portion of the spell damage buff. With 1k spirit. the additional damage from the talent would be 54 (180 times 30%) plus (9% of spirit), which at 500 spirit would be 45 additional damage.

Doing the math, I don't think there's anyway to make it add up, but I was wondering if anyone had come up with a viable SB-free affliction build.

 

Deorcnes

deleted

 

Kalle

Are you sure? I tested it in build 9014 and it didn't.

EDIT:
The tooltip changes to 39% of spirit with three points, but I didn't check it.

 

Hearteater

This isn't a viable solution.

If not using Soulfire puts a warlock at 100% of the DPS of any other damage dealer, and using shards increases that amount, then a full raid of warlock DPSers using Soul Shards will put enough extra damage that bleeding edge content will run with just that.

If not using Soulfire puts a warlock below 100% of the DPS of any other damage dealer, warlocks will be required to use Soulfire thereby using many more shards per attempt. This will result in a much larger delay when learning a boss for farming, and it is very likely warlocks (or at least those that must use Soulfire) will not be accepted on any non-farmable content just because no one wants them holding up the raid just so they can deal the same DPS as everyone else.

 

Skellum

You may have missed the point, or I just didnt make it a very clear point. I would like to see the confusion with coefficients fixed, all dot coefficients scaling is based on the time it takes a dot to run its course. Our dot coefficients are finagled from the 2.0.2 patch. I'd also like to see our tree stand on its own abilitys, a mage DPSs with fire, a Moonkin DPSs with Moonkin spells, a warlock DPSs with two different trees, three if hes demo.

Basically, a long time ago warlocks legs got broken and set but improperly. I would like to see them set properly and have us standing on a good solid foundation.

I will say, I will miss 0/21/40. Its not going to be possible to watch predator and raid anymore.

My Name Is Skellum, And I wear a Silly Hat.

 

SageoftheTimes

A couple of things I've been wondering about: What does Simulation Craft have to say about Incinerate as filler over Shadow Bolt for Affliction?

Also, due to the recent nerfs to Improved Shadow Bolt, this means that it's an increase of 10% to, lets say 25-35% of our damage, thus making it .5% damage per point at a 100% crit rate. Does this mean that the talent is utterly pointless now, and based on that, would a 66/0/5 (MMO-Champion's Calc) build be better?

Clams. Now. Stack. 9.11.2008 m/d/y

 

dedmonwakeen

People are going to rack up a ton of infractions if this thread starts to fill up with generic SimulationCraft help requests. As someone who has already acquired a few, I wouldn't wish that on anybody...... and I don't want to get nailed with guilt-by-association.

If you need basic help, feel free to PM me here or post on the forum link you'll find by clicking through my sig.

To answer your question: If you are just double-clicking on the app it doesn't work that way. I'm an old-school Unix developer with absolutely no idea how to create a GUI. The tool is run from the cmd-line. The top of the config file shows an example invocation. If that is not your problem, feel free to contact me through the methods above.

http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft

 

PsyBomb

While I agree wiht your build, I heavily disagree that Incinerate could ever overtake SB as filler for Affliction. We just have too many shadow-school buffs and literally none for Fire.

To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.

 

whitch

Well I'm absolutely not up on the exact numbers, the percentages I suggested were almost random picks. I probably lost myself in my words, what I meant was to have Soul Fire be sort of a default use of a backdraft proc. With the 30% + 20% haste from gear it would take it down to 2 second cast, reapplying Immo's Dot in the process and using the right numbers for damage making it at least on par or better than the wasted, GCD pinging Immolate after BD. Outside of the proc it would still be much less useful than any of the other dest spells.

I stand by my opinon that as long as the shard mechanic is the way it is, Soul Fire can never realistically be used in a boss-fight type situation. Apart from maybe on a pull (M'uru for instance).

PS: I edited the original post on the blizz forum by slashing and burning 19/20th of the BS, in the hope that someone actually responds and it starts a discussion which could lead to a change for SF

 

Darian_TruBlade

You, and whitch, are absolutely right. I had overlooked that aspect of balance. It can obviously be said that any spell we wish to place into play for PvE DPS can not have a soul shard cost for its use. So either the shard must be removed outright, or some mechanic which removes the shard cost under certain conditions must be put into play. I enjoyed Chaotic Mind, but that's not the simpler solution.

A man's IQ, yearly income, sexual prowess, ingenuity, physical appearance and generally every other aspect of his character can be condensed down to four digits: his Arena rating.

 

LockApologist

Thanks. Have you looked at how Corr interacts with Haunt as far as refreshing ticks? i.e.

T = 0 Corr ticks
T = 1, Haunt hits, refreshes Corr
T = x Corr ticks

is x 3 or 4? Or does Corr tick immediately as Haunt refreshes it?

 

Drundia

Drain Soul always had "drain penalty", and I doubt (though not sure) it had 4.29 during TBC beta, more likely 2.25, and as I remember 0.5 pre-TBC.

How about playing a game to relax and have fun and still be able to experience content since it's part of fun. Now what about skill when addons define skill. If rotation is too complicated and requires too much attention to maintain you won't just QQ, you will bug addon authors, and addon authors who are stressed by maintaining their rotations as well will probably start to make addons that will suggest what spell to cast and what button to press. Not all that skill-based any more is it? The real result is just that more classes will absolutely require some addons. Luckily it is now possible to get rid of misses, so we can safely predict that DOT won't need recasting due to miss.

And yes the problem about too complex rotations is explained in first sentence. You want to experience all the content while being able to relax. However ability to relax and have time to make quality decisions is closer to turn-based games and pause-able single-player games. Another problem is that there is so many spells as it is, people are already "out of binds". I would add that it;s golden mean, when it requires a moderate amount of focus, and allows a moderate amount of relaxation. Requiring more focus puts more stress as if there isn't enough of it in real life.

In the end maintaining complex rotation perfectly will take more focus than it returns in damage. Example is simulated addition of Corruption in a Destruction rotation, Molten Core and Glyph of Corruption procs are nearly not worth it in damage, but are making rotation more complex up to making have no repeatable components over long period of time, while the one without Corruption has around 15-second period and is quite stable.


About Soul Shards, Soul Fire and Shadowburn: I think an effect somewhat similar to potion limitation can be used. When you use Soul Fire or Shadowburn, Soul Shards cost is removed from these spells until you leave combat, alternatively can be limited per target. So if the spells are worth using, you can use them at a cost of just 1 shard per try. So to say you can only burn shards as fast as you can drain them, that is 1 per mob.

This is what I think about Warlock WotLK talents (mostly Destruction): http://www.war-tools.com/t56849.html

 

SageoftheTimes

CoA is a great curse of Afflic, but you'll notice the rotation is a lot more unstable. Cut CoA out of the equation, as well as immolate, and the rotation is beyond easy. Sure, Sim. Craft says 198 additional dps for maintaining CoA. Is that hassle worth maintaining CoA, and how will we know that the additional stress doesn't cause the loss of that DPS? It's ~4% above the Afflic CoE rotation, so is it worth it?

In my mind, it's just like conflag, really.

Clams. Now. Stack. 9.11.2008 m/d/y

 

Abominatus_DMF

I don't think anyone is complaining all that much about the new rotations. The new destruction rotation (sans corruption confusion) is quite elegant and reasonably challenging to time accurately. What appeals to me is that the critical timing component of it is instant cast, which means that everything doesn't immediately fall down in a heap when you have to move. Affliction, on the other hand, is slightly overcomplex and could do with a slight simplification to make it more practical to do for 5 hours straight. Also, because of the radical reduction in DPS that occurs if anything gets jumbled or out of sync, it will make mobility fights pure hell. Plus, Haunt's casting time, combined with it's unforgiving cooldown, makes it extremely unlikely that Affliction will be able to match Destruction in an actual raiding environment, as opposed to in theory.

I'd like to thank everyone who gave feedback on my request regarding off-tree talents for other classes, you've improved my understanding of the situation significantly.

It now seems to me that the logical solution would be to modify Haunt to be the filler spell for affliction. Obviously some change would be required to the health-return mechanism to prevent it being absurd, but otherwise it strikes me as an elegant option:

- Rotation simplified and the 0.5 second window for maintaining haunt uptime radically extended.
- Effect of being required to be mobile on DPS reduced, although not eliminated. (Is this something which Blizzard would want to give us?)
- Points in Destruction can be moved into Demonology if desired.
- Shadowbolt remains relevant via Nightfall and Glyph procs.

It could be argued that this is restrictive during levelling, but frankly I don't find myself shadowbolting much while levelling as affliction anyway.

 

Aaryndon

On the earlier subject of Lvl 70 raiding builds, I've been doing a lot of DPS testing myself on the PTR, trying to answer that very question.

So far, my base testing finds that a heavy affliction build and heavy Destruction build can both perform mostly even solo on a test dummy.

However, I think that when you begin adding raid buffs and taking scaling into account Destruction edges out affliction at 70 because of the huge gains from the 18% crit. In particular, the Empowered Imp build because much more potent because of the crit buffs on the imp.

Some other notes of interest based on my tests:
- Corruption is barely worth casting solo, maybe not worth it once you are in a group where haste and crit are increased. Jury still out.
- Demonic Power runs your Imp OOM very fast. Without it, a constant Replenishment buff (possible if you have 3 mana batteries in your raid) + Judgement of Wisdom + Improved Soul Leech will keep him going for about 4 minutes, give or take.
- Agony is a great way to keep up MC and a major contributor to DPS, so try to get someone else to cover utility curses if you go Destro.
- Backdraft and its pre-requisites are worth having as long as you time your conflagrates well.

Remember, all this is based on solo DPS with no buffs aside from Fel Armor and no debuffs on the mob. The most successful build I found was:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...00000000000000

The rotation I used was CoA->Corr->Immo->CB->Incin. Once your immolate ticks at the 12 second mark, conflag (you can safely do this while an incinerate is in "flight" to the mob, as noted earlier in this thread), then on your Backdraft you Immo, CB, refresh shadow dots if needed, then back to Incinerate spam.

It's actually a pretty easy rotation to run. You can refresh your dots whenever, the only thing you need to think about is making sure that you conflag right after the 12th second on your immolate, then immediately refresh and CB before you do anything, otherwise you run into issues with wasting your CB cooldown waiting for immolate or vice versa.

Affliction is probably close enough in DPS to this to manage for lvl 70 since there's only going to be 4 resets' worth of raiding anyway. But this build is the one I've had the most success with in terms of a stable rotation and good DPS that will react well to raid buffs.

 

Drundia

Conflagrate is rather different, as Abominatus_DMF says pure Destruction rotation is elegant. For every Conflagrate you cast Immolate which is doable even in form of simple /castsequence macro. Chaos Bolt should probably reside in that macro as well. On the other hand I agree that additional stress of maintaining rotation may cause more harm than help.

Conflagrate damage is very low, so movement is going to be hell for Destruction. Depending on actual situation you won't have F&B crit bonus and will have Backdraft expire before you can use it. Think about getting Archimonde's Air Burst. Conflagrate is not that bad idea if its damage exceeds remaining Immolate damage, but that's a tiny gain. On the other hand Affliction has a bunch of instantly refreshable DOTs and Nightfall Shadow Bolts.

This is what I think about Warlock WotLK talents (mostly Destruction): http://www.war-tools.com/t56849.html

 

Abominatus_DMF

What I was trying to imply is that you can cast Conflagrate on time even when moving (or even flying through the air, subject to not going out of range). You then have 15 seconds to get your 3 spells cast once you regain a stable position. You should need considerably less than half of that time to cast your three hasted spells.

Destruction has always been hit comparatively harder by movement than is the case with affliction, because affliction is ticking damage regardless, and most of the dots can be refreshed while moving.

The point I'm making here is that destruction loses only the time spent in transit while moving, and does not subsequently have to try and pick up the pieces of a "rotation" which has fallen apart.

For example, as an affliction warlock, you are in motion when haunt expires. Additionally, one or more other dots expires as well. Do you renew the dots while moving, not having the haunt bonus, or do you wait until you can stop in order to re-apply haunt before re-applying the dots? Does this not depend on how much longer you're going to be moving? How achievable is this kind of management in real-time?

 

Drundia

There is no Affliction rotation, recast intervals are just one big mess so there is nothing to lose and nothing to pick up. Why would you not want to refresh DOT if we consider that our mana is generally infinite. If you really need to recast it under Haunt you recast it next time before DOT expires. It can be modelled and a smart addon can suggest what to do, so it's not all that bad.

This is what I think about Warlock WotLK talents (mostly Destruction): http://www.war-tools.com/t56849.html

 

LockApologist

Haunt would need a longer cast time, or Aff will run into scaling issues again, and very quickly.

 

Maels