Morwen

The Molten Core / Torture talents are a good first step from a general design perspective (even though the current text of Torture makes no sense). The aim seems to be create some kind of reactive spell diversity in a typical casting cycle. Ever since pre-TBC, warlock dps cycles has been condensed to the single principle of "theorycraft the highest dpct spell and then cast it as often as possible". Shadow destruction is so prevalent today because Shadow Bolt not only has the highest dpct for the spec but acts as its own buffet through ISB, so you never cast anything else. The shadow-buffs-fire idea was tried once (original 2T4) but failed then, hopefully it can be implemented properly in the expansion with new mechanics.

 

Flamingcloud

Do you remember what happened at the start of TBC? Affliction was by far the best spec, because dots are far better in entry level gear than nukes are. Eradication in its current form is worth around 15% spell haste, then the spec picks up ua or ruin(roughly another 10% overall dmg increase). 4pc t6 will eventually be obsoleted giving up another advantage destro had. Corruption will be ticking without needing to be recast at 150% spell coefficient, and siphon life at 120%(changing both these spells to be far higher dpct than incinerate), and +15% crit rate at <20%. Fire destro gains.. +10% crit damage, a very minor damage from spirit buff, and no recast on immolate(which to be fair is probably worth half as much as no recast on corruption). Not to mention if fire mages aren't the best mage spec for raid dps fire lock becomes completely useless automatically.

I am not advocating that destro locks would be unviable the entire expansion, but I don't think they will be at release.

 

Deathwing

Does this seem right for calculating Empowered Imp uptime:

1 - .4^(8*C)

Where C = imp crit chance

Gives me ~75% uptime.

 

Madlax

While at first sight these talents make me all warm inside a deeper look is needed:

Eradication(25 point) - Your Corruption, Siphon Life, and Curse of Agony ticks have a 5/10/15% chance to increase your spell casting speed by 20% for 8 sec. This effect has a 10 second cooldown.
It is indeed a slightly overpowered from the looks.

My guess is that WotLK will remove plain 1 button(2 in case of IC) nuking and move us towards 3-4 ability fighting PvE games.

Destro tree analyzed:
Molten Core (5 point)
This sounds interesting in combination of Immolate/Corruption/Haunt

Kindling Soul (35 point)
Hm, 10% of 177 spirit? This better scale in WotLK - a 17dam talent in tier 7 would be a major joke.

Backdraft (40 point)
I don't see a use in that talent, 10% on Immolate - ye. But Conflag still is a sucky DPS spell.

Torture (40 point, 3 ranks)
With the growing amounts of spell haste, this hardly keeps any viability imho.

Eternal Flames (45 point)
This sounds very interesting actually.
10% more crit on IC. No more IM casting.
Definitly a big need on this one.

Cataclysm - 5 points
Bane - 5 points
Devastation - 5 points
Intensity/Reach - 2x2 points
Molten Core - 1 point(20 total)
Ruin - 1 point
Molten Core - 2 points
Shadowburn(my preference) - 1 point
Improved Immolate - 1 point (25 total)
Emberstorm - 5 points
Backlash - 3 points
Kindling - 2 points(35 total)
Shadow and Flame - 5 points
Kindling - 1 point
Improved Immolate - 4 points(45 total)
Eternal Flames - 5 points

21 points remaining
Same sh*t in Demo tree as before.

As much as I'd love to not use that specc - from the first head-calc it still seems like it is gonna be a or even the top DPS one..

 

rooj

I don't understand why they have a 35pt destro talent that suddenly asks locks to go get some spirit. Why not have it tied to a different stat altogether, perhaps stam. A 5% stam converted to spell dmg with every crit temporarily increasing stamina seems to have much more of a lock flavor to me.

 

Deathwing

Eradication uptime(assuming you're putting up all three dots):

(1-.85^8) = 72.7%

Not sure how to scale it for the 10s cooldown...multiply by .8? Seems that would throw an artificial wrench in the mix that you can't really model mathematically. Probably can assume an average of 10% haste all the time.

 

Pintofbrew

Because Fel Armor now allows 30% of your passive regeneration to generate while casting.

 

Morwen

Basically all chance-per-second procs with fixed cooldowns can be reasonably modeled by the Exponential distribution shifted by the cooldown time, it is still fairly easy to model but you have to use an integral.

 

Kel S'jet

I believe Decimate will lead to some fantastic burst finishers by Destro locks, perhaps to the point where a pure nuke based destro lock build will be arena viable. (though there will still be the issue of survivability).

Decimate opens up really cool and interesting combos which could potentially change an existing step and/or strat in arenas. For example, we all know when dealing with classes like paladins and mages (immunities) that it is a gated step in flushing out the trinket and the immunity so that the paladin can be open to CC and/or more burst. With Decimate, this dynamic could change. No longer will we have to wait out the immunity (secs are worth thousands of gold in arena, and the fact that you have to essentially 'wait out' the immunity could mean all the difference when in an arena match). Previously, you were heavily dependent on a priest to mass dispel the immunity to be able to continue a burst.

But with Decimate, you can assure a successful burst on an opponent, depending on, naturally, when the paladin decides to bubble. If he bubbles too late (i.e his health is less than the damage done by, say, Soulfire) then you are guaranteed a successful burn, if he bubbles too early, then we are back to square one. Either way, it will force pally/mage teams to really think clearly about when/why they are bubbling during a focus burn, hence, dividing the skilled pallies from the non-skilled ones, even further.

Furthermore, it also adds an interesting dynamic to the warlock. Do you decimate cast a soulfire and have your shadow tree still available for fears and stuff? Or do you decimate cast a shadowbolt, effectively knocking out your shadow tree for the next 3 secs (hence, no fear, no deathcoil etc), but have the shadowbolt perhaps do more damage due to the benifits it gets through talents, curses, saccing pets etc (assuming a decimated sbolt will still get the extra benifits, even though its chaos damage).

Add to this the pew pew factor of a backlash procced insta sbolt, followed by insta soulfire. Its like burst on crack!

Seduce > sbolt > immo (while sbolt is on its way) > shadowfury > searing pain (during the stun) > shadowflame > conflag > shadowburn > decimated soulfire

Can you say "ouch!"? And imagine if you get lucky and have taken pyroclasm (26% chance to stun on soulfire for 3 secs, NB, even impact specced fire mages have less of a chance to stun!)

We're looking at some serious...destruction!

 

Darian_TruBlade

Bah at the cooldown on Decimate. 0/21/50 it is until they change things.

It definitely does look like they're trying to push Destruction away from being so reliant on Life Tap. You'll be choosing between 26% more effective healing or 240 Spell Damage and 39% mana regen while casting. Even without the mana regen, I think most Destruction Warlocks would choose the latter.

 

Flamingcloud

I am not sure I understand your eradication uptime formula you are gonna have more than 1 dot tick per second.


Shadowbolt base damage increase is +148, Incin +187

CoA base is +384
Corruption base is +180
Siphon base is +180
UA base is +330

Spell hit, spell crit, and spell haste values from rating will probably be cut in half. All of these things hurt destruction and help affliction. I am not saying affliction will be the best spec, just better than destruction at the current values. Most likely fire destruction will still scale better than affliction, but I don't think shadow destro will ever overtake affliction.

 

Kuradoberi

I was hoping Affliction got a 51 pointer makes us want not to get Ruin, just like the fresh start of TBC, 41/0/20 or any variants involving UA.

Seems in wotlk it all boils down to this : to Ruin or not to Ruin
Just like what other have said, 21 destruction is too damn powerful not to spec into. ( now with +hit talents )
If Atrocity is the 51 affliction pointer, Ruin has already won.
Metamorphosis, datamined as a 45sec buff with a 5min cd, hopefully works as a lock's "execution time".

Talents aside, I am very interested in the new possible spirit changes. Lifetap was always included in any rotation, reducing the amounts needed to lifetap = more time to dps.

Either the imp can dps in phase shift mode or some other change, I can't see Empowered talents working with an imp that will get 1shotted due to any aoe/splash damage. I doubt Blizzard will change their aoe damage in raid environment just to have an imp on 100% dps time duty :P

PS : Don't nerf Ruin, buff the other trees

 

Anexus

Demology + ruin looks interesting, but now that we can get both a felguard and ruin it doesnt make much sense to have your imp as a dps pet. Unless the imp gets some huge survivability buff (from the demon trainer) I dont see how we're suppose to keep it alive. The 2pt5 talent is great, and the extra amor and stamina, but I doubt that will be enough to avoid 1-shots on aoe abilities. With the added group buff I also think we'll get "doomed" to using this pet. But again.. dead pets cant buff. I find it all a bit strange.

 

Deathwing

I used an 8s window to see how many dot ticks there would be, which is where I got the exponential, 8.

Are you saying I should have used a 10s window instead?


BTW, an eradication/Empowered Imp build might be fun. More burst than you can shake a mage at.

 

Flamingcloud

My intuition is telling me the formula should be more complicated than that. It is possible that 10 dot ticks would occur in the 8 second window depending on how things are synced.


In response to some other posts.

Well the machine gun imp spec would basically use felguard (but with a bunch of wasted talents) in situations where it would die. Felguard isn't that brittle.. It would basically be getting 2pc T5, -5% dmg taken, and +1000hp at level 70 levels from the new talents.

I am personally of the idea that ruin(and most of the talents like it) should be removed from the game and spells should crit at 100% by default. It is just too powerful, especially later in an expansion (as shown by 0/40/21 becoming the best demo spec)

 

Deathwing

How could you get 10 ticks in 8s? it would take 3 dots 9 seconds just to get 9.

 

Flamingcloud

Curse of Agony ticks every 2 seconds.

0 CoA ticks, Corruption ticks, Siphon ticks, 2 CoA ticks, 3 Cor/Siph tick, 4 CoA ticks, 6 All three tick, 8 CoA ticks. 11 in exactly 8 seconds actually.

 

Deathwing

Heh, shows how much I use that spell. I would still just average it out a typical 8s period

1 - 0.85*(16/3+4) = 78%

Though, I don't get why people are saying it's overpowered. With the 10s cooldown, you can assume it's around 12% haste over time.

For a fire destro build, I would say emberstorm is better than that.

 

Kuradoberi

Demonic Empowerment with felguard sounds rather fishy...
Only comparative talent I can find is Bestial Wrath, 31 pointer in Beast Mastery Tree of Hunters, 2mincd + lasts for 18s.

2.0 base weapon speed. 18s = 9 white hits
20% haste = 2.0 / ( 1+ ( 20/100 )) = 2.0/1.2 =~ 1.67.
1.67 base weapon speed. 18s =~ 10/11 white hits.

So every 1min, felguard can gain up to 2 more white hits IF Demonic Empowerment last 18s.

With my gear and a 6/44/11felguard spec, according to leulier, in a solo environment :
White hit = 474 damage.
Pet dps = 335 dps.

+1 white hit per minute = 474/60 =~ 8 dps. 8/335*100% =~ 2% dps gain for the felguard.
According to leulier, pet dps = 25% of your own dps. 2% gain over 25% is not a whole lot :P

I have no idea how hard a felguard hits in a raid environment, so take this fishy math with a pinch of salt.

 

Flamingcloud

Empowerment is 15 second duration (so 25% uptime) I updated it in the post... It may not even be worth using if it triggers your global cooldown, I think it's main purpose is for the anti-stun/slow.

 

Kuradoberi

With a 15s duration, it still only gains up to 2 more white hits. ( 7.5 nonhasted hits without and 9 hasted hits )

 

Flamingcloud

It is only one talent point, and it would give 21dps to me in a raid situation on leulier, plus it would also increase the likely hood of demonic pact remaining up at 3 stacks. This is ofcourse assuming pet scaling remains the same.

I asked a hunter and bestial wrath triggers global and both are written in a similar fashion (instant cast with mana cost). So likely this talent is nearly useless in raids.

 

Ruaduun

Just checked last Hyjal Logs:
Swing: 1090 Hits/427 avg/1249 max
Cleave: 382 Hits/506 avg/1310 max (loads of sheep that night so had to turn off cleave quite often)
And he did roughly 13% of my dmg (Hyjal trash with all that SoC spam might account for that low number)


Ruaduun

 

Flamingcloud

Well since your armory links to a rogue and I can't check your gear level, and the majority of that data is on trash with no cor/sunder/faeriefire/retpaly etc it isn't all that useful of information. Regardless demonic empowerment is not really a raid talent unless pet scaling is buffed significantly and you can find a way to get empowerments off while moving or when losing a global isn't a problem.

 

ninielin

Mmmm as far as I m looking at talents, its UA for leveling and early raiding then switching to full destro ( sound like deja vu eh). Demo spec has way too many pvp talents currently to be interesting for raiding apart from using a felguard ( which is already the case in live wow). Demonic emp looks cool on paper then you realize its made for arena and clearly not for raiding. The improved imp stuff got me interested but right now its not viable unless the imp can dps thru phasing ( which won't happens for pvp reasons). The imp will get destroyed in any raid situation (atlhought fully talented he could do some serious dmg and the crit talent is really neat).

If I was level 80 with my current stats ( including rating scaling), a 0/21/50 would totally decimate any other kind of spec. The only talent I m dubious about is the ont that increase immo/conflag/shadow crit by 10% looks like a pvp talent mostly considering you're never going to cast conflag in a raid cycle and that you won't have to refresh immolation so the 10% crit is mostly useless.

For the people saying spirit talents suxx etc, you need to take into consideration the fact that blizzard want to use generic cloth armor for every single casters so they are trying to make spirit usefull for warlocks. Indeed right now you have 177 spirit ( I actually have 300 in raids so will give me 60 + dmg with improved spirit from priest and 78 after a crit) right now but at level 80 in wotlk you'll probably be closer to 400 + unbuffed because there ll be spirit on every single piece of gear and a free + 40 dmg ( 56 after a crit) on top of mana regeneration ( thanks to the fel armor change) is nothing to sneeze at.


Ps: my apologies if my english is