My guild is not at full end game yet (4/5 Hyjal, 0/9 BT), but my experience is that Affliction does excellent DPS. I haven't really got any experience of a well geared well played Destruction Lock, but our top dpser in the guild is an affliction lock and he puts out obscene numbers - saying that Affliction trades damage for raid benefits seems to be underselling the spec somewhat.
Also, I'd guess that the reason Malediction is only a yellow flag, is that depending on how many locks you have, not *all* of them need it. We often raid with 3+ warlocks, mostly affliction specced, and there's no reason for them all to take it.
I'm not convinced, for a couple of reasons. First, unless the fight involves a lot of movement (eg. Supremus), our destruction warlocks beat our affliction warlock, even when he puts up Curse of Agony instead of his untalented Curse of Shadows. The theorycraft says destruction should beat affliction by 5% to 10% and in my guild's experience, it does.
10% is more than the margin between Mutilate and Combat rogues, by the way, and Mutilate isn't considered raid worthy at all. I'm NOT saying affliction isn't raid worthy because it provides a crucial buff to the raid, something mutilate doesn't do. But not taking that buff makes the spec no better than mutilate. You'll do decent damage, but you'll still be well below your potential.
Second, even if you bring three affliction warlocks (more than you need or want), 2/3rds of them should have Malediction. That's pretty close to required.
Third, you can get every other increased damage and raid utility talent as a warlock and still have points leftover for Malediction. Check out this PvE oriented spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
It's got all kinds of wrong in it, like too many points in Suppression for the likely amount of hit gear. It spends a full 5 points in shadow embrace, something most affliction warlocks skip (but shouldn't). It has improved curse of agony when they should be casting curse of elements or shadows. It has curse of Exhaustion and Amplify curse, two spell that will almost never be used on bosses, and it STILL has 5 points left. Malediction is only 3. You could easily trim points for 5/5 Demonic Embrace and still have points left for Devastation and 3/3 Malediction.
Honestly, in my experience there are only two kinds of affliction Warlocks who don't want to get Malediction. Either they want Improved Howl for PvP or they want to boost their personal damage meters by casting Curse of Agony instead of Shadows or Elements. The first kind needs to weekly respec PvP and PvE like the rest of us do. The second kind should respec destruction.
Out of curiosity, what exactly is the check you used for "deep frost"? Is it something like "frost talents >= fire talents and frost talents >= arcane talents"?
Most talent checks only check to see if you have enough points in the tree to reasonably get the talent. In this case, it's just an increase from 5+ points in the tree to 21+, so people only going 11-14 points in won't be flagged.
As far as malediction goes, I'll consider it for the next version.
Originally Posted by Gearknight
Scrub has been updated and a number of my hunter peeves weren't addressed, so I'm going to post a reminder about them one last time and then I'll just shut up from now on
Sorry Gearknight, some of your comments must have been lost in the crowd. I'll look these over and they should be in the next version.
My guild is not at full end game yet (4/5 Hyjal, 0/9 BT), but my experience is that Affliction does excellent DPS. I haven't really got any experience of a well geared well played Destruction Lock, but our top dpser in the guild is an affliction lock and he puts out obscene numbers - saying that Affliction trades damage for raid benefits seems to be underselling the spec somewhat.
Also, I'd guess that the reason Malediction is only a yellow flag, is that depending on how many locks you have, not *all* of them need it. We often raid with 3+ warlocks, mostly affliction specced, and there's no reason for them all to take it.
Keep in mind the environment of 4/5 Hyjal. Plenty of targets to DoT, if not use Seed of Corruption. Most of the trash through SSC/TK also offers multiple targets at once. These significantly boost Affliction DPS. If your Affliction lock beats the Destro locks on single target, something is horribly wrong with spec/playstyle/cast rotation/brains. The Class Mechanics forums have much more information on Warlock DPS.
Tedv, that spec is also missing 7 nearly mandatory points in Destruction as well, not to mention there aren't good places for all 15 of the points in Tiers 1-3 of the Affliction tree. A pure raiding Affliction build does not have points for Demonic Embrace (except 1) as there are 37 points of DPS/Raid utility required in Affliction, plus the 6 filler points to get past Tier 3. 15 points in Destro is required, 17 is preferred (if you're taking Grim Reach, you should have Destructive Reach). The only exception would be if you skip both range talents (and given the number of 30-35 yard abilities encountered, that's foolish). Reference: http://elitistjerks.com/596269-post869.html.
I would not red flag Malediction. Yellow flag is for the "are you sure you know what you're doing" questions, which is appropriate, since Affliction competes much better for damage until you hit T5 and Destro gear catches up with +crit. At that point, you can have multiple Affliction locks, and they sure don't all need Malediction, probably only one, maybe two, depending on the status of Mage T5 for Arcane spec.
Keep in mind the environment of 4/5 Hyjal. Plenty of targets to DoT, if not use Seed of Corruption. Most of the trash through SSC/TK also offers multiple targets at once. These significantly boost Affliction DPS. If your Affliction lock beats the Destro locks on single target, something is horribly wrong with spec/playstyle/cast rotation/brains. The Class Mechanics forums have much more information on Warlock DPS.
Yeah, I deliberately posted my situation so you'd know the context - that said, I wasnt referring to Trash, in Hyjal or otherwise. Through SSC and TK, our affliction warlocks put out consistently high damage, and the one I referenced in particular was usually #1 on all fights bar Solarian (which really favours me as a warrior). Even on a single target like Void Reaver affliction still posts impressive damage (probably due to being hurt less by having to move).
Does BT really feature that many stand still and DPS fights?
Anyway, I guess this has gone offtopic, but I'd agree that Malediction should be yellow, not red. There seem to be quite a few people here who are of the opinion 'The optimum spec for class X is Y, if someone off class Y has spec Z != Y, then red flag them'.
As far as I understand it, the idea is to red flag stupid/horrendous/pvp talents, and then yellow flag questionable ones. A red flag = they shouldnt be raiding with this spec, a yellow flag = they better have a reason for raiding with this spec.
One of our rogues got red flagged for "Lacking Ruthlessness", and looking at his spec, he had 2/3, and the check is for 3/3. Talent Spec - (15/41/5)
He's combat daggers, and maybe it should be a yellow, but I don't see anything in that spec that jumps out as worthy of Red for dropping one point in Ruthlessness.
I tried this on the raid last night and only spotted one real issue. Apparently our Affliction warlock has been raiding without Malediction. Scrub only listed it as Yellow (Warning):
But I'd like to make the case for it being a red flagged talent. Malediction is a raid-wide increased damage buff. In that regard it's no different from expose weakness or hemo. The tradeoff for taking an affliction warlock instead of destruction is the same as having a survival hunter instead of beast mastery: lower personal DPS but higher overall raid DPS. You wouldn't take a survival hunter to the raid if he didn't have expose weakness. It's a flat out miss-spec. The same is true of an affliction warlock without Malediction. Malediction is the whole point of the tree, from a raiding perspective.
I don't play a warlock, but it was my impression that guilds with multiple affliction warlocks usually coordinate on who should pick up Malediction since the raid gains no additional benefit from multiple warlocks taking the talent. So in that case the yellow flag seems appropriate...it's basically saying "Are you sure (that another warlock in your raid has this talent)?" I think your point is that a guild should only have one affliction warlock and the others should be destruction, but from what I read in the warlock raiding compendium, it's only in the high endgame where destruction really pulls away in terms of DPS, so I'm not sure if it's safe for this addon to assume that an affliction warlock will be the only affliction lock present in a raid at all progression levels.
Regarding the rogue multiple weapon spec stuff:
There are only a few valid multi-specs. The rest are definitely bad and wrong. Fist/Sword and Mace/Sword are the only real dual-specs. If you have daggers, use ONLY daggers. If you don't have daggers, you MUST have a sword in your OH with sword spec. MH can be Sword, Fist or Mace (in that order of preference) as long as you have the spec for your MH as well. You should never have more than 2 specs.
Used scrub for the first time on last night's raid, and was really surprised when i got a red flag myself.
I'm using a 0/49/12 protection build, and it seems that anything with 11 or more points in the retribution-tree gets flagged as "Partial Retribution Spec (RED)".
I would argue to change this check to 15+ points in ret, since you will have 10 points for deflection, and it is not unreasonable to take improved judgement for higher single target threat and/or improved SotC for higher raid-dps.
Masnie: Sorry, I thought I had fixed that, it's not supposed to flag unless you have more than 18 points in Retribution, as our prot tank for Hyjal regularly goes down to Crusade for additional threat vs. the mobs. It should be fixed in the next revision.
One of our rogues got red flagged for "Lacking Ruthlessness", and looking at his spec, he had 2/3, and the check is for 3/3. Talent Spec - (15/41/5)
He's combat daggers, and maybe it should be a yellow, but I don't see anything in that spec that jumps out as worthy of Red for dropping one point in Ruthlessness.
I am specced 15/41/5 as well. This should not be flagged at all. You need the 41 Points in Combat, same for 5 Points in Subtelty, leaves you 15 Points for Assassination.
You will want the Tier 2 Skill Relentless Strikes and Lethality, and of Course Imp. Backstab, that leaves you with 2 Points in Ruthlessness. Depenting, where you raiding you can consider spending points in stead of Ruthlessnes in Murder. But not having all 3 Points in Ruthlessness ist definitively not a Red flag.
Last Time I checked the DPS Speadsheet, folowing Specc has been the max DPS Specc (2 pieses T4 bonus)
Malice: 5
Ruthlessness: 2/3
Imp. Backstab: 3
Relentless Strikes: 1
Lethality: 4/5
Good point on the Ruthlessness stuff - Combat Daggers is fine with 2/3 Ruth. That said, it is the ONLY spec which should be at less than 3/3, and it should be at 2/3.
Perhaps yellow flag it.. since the rogue is CB Daggers already (and therefore not a great build overall). It would definately be wrong for a Sinister Strike, Hemo or Mutilate rogue to be less than 3/3 Ruthlessness.
This is great! The idea had occurred to me to write something similar, but it seemed like quite an undertaking for having never written an addon.
Have you considered extending this to be sort of an "all-inclusive", very invasive, raid management addon? I envision something similar to the old ct_raid, where you could check to see how many mana pots, flasks, etc your raid members brought and chastise them before they go OOM during a boss encounter. As I understand it, such functionality would require everyone in the raid to have at least a lightweight version of the addon for synching, etc.
This is great! The idea had occurred to me to write something similar, but it seemed like quite an undertaking for having never written an addon.
Have you considered extending this to be sort of an "all-inclusive", very invasive, raid management addon? I envision something similar to the old ct_raid, where you could check to see how many mana pots, flasks, etc your raid members brought and chastise them before they go OOM during a boss encounter. As I understand it, such functionality would require everyone in the raid to have at least a lightweight version of the addon for synching, etc.
Anyway, great work! I will keep my eye on this.
That functionality already exists in other mods. You can do the item check with oRa2, like you said everyone needs the addon. You can use Big Brother to see if people are actually using the flasks/elixirs.
I haven't bothered to go over the templates suggested - I've just smiled and gritted my teeth as random suggestions are made. At this point I would like to submit a feature request:
Could we please design an in game method to create our own filter sets?
I envision a simple wizard that looks much like "Talented"'s side-by-side talent tree display, and then via a series of prompts asks the user to:
Choose a name for this template (This could be form driven, if you just want to limit it to PVE/PVP - Class - Primary Tree - or it could be a text box, your choice).
Submit a sample build for the talent spec your template would most closely match: (For instance, a prot warrior would probably submit the standard 8/5/rest)
Display the sample build and ask the user to identify talents which are mandatory if the user spends sufficient points to get there (flag red any retard without shield slam but with 31+ points in prot)
Display the sample build and ask the user to identify talents which are never to be taken (flag red any retard who takes wand specialization as a mage)
Display the sample build, with the talents marked above highlighted red or green as appropos, and ask the user to select any talents that are acceptable filler talents to meet prerequisites (for instance it's ok if a fury warrior takes unbridled wrath or improved demo shout to get to tier 3, they're both filler to get 10 points spent.)
Display the sample build, with red/green/white (retard/mandatory/filler) talents highlighted, and ask the user to select which talents are desirable while not being mandatory (flag any user missing these as yellow).
Display the sample build, with red/green/white/yellow talents highlighted, and ask which talents are undesirable yet acceptable (flag any user having these yellow.)
Save the template by name.
You could very easily let raid leaders go through and generate their own filter sets this way - and if you had an easy way to export you could then compile the results. Additionally, this gives a very good way to examine the filters in game. I think a fair bit of harm has been done to the original idea for the addon by not codifying what each level of flag is intended to show, and I think a similiar amount of harm is being done to it by poor theorycraft being submitted willy-nilly in this thread.
My proposal for what red flags show:
This <playername> is a retard - they either took talent <xxxxx> that is completely awful, or they failed to take talent <yyyyy> that is crucial to their spec/class.
My proposal for what yellow flags show:
This <playername> made a non-standard choice - they either took situational talent <xxxxx> over a superior choice, or they failed to take useful talent <yyyyy>
By having a template wizard in game, and letting players flag or display their templates on talent trees with Green (mandatory) Red (Verboten) Yellow (Desirable) Orange (Discouraged) and White (Filler) highlights, the tool becomes much more user friendly when actually generating templates or understanding why your build is being flagged. By having a cohesive set of meanings for the flags generated, we will produce more coherent filter/flag sets.
I don't think this will replace the need for sensible templates to be generated - I do think it will make the tool more useful in the future, easier to support, and far easier to document.
Last edited by Anias : 01/11/08 at 3:33 PM.
Reason: Formatting to make it cleaner.
First star to the right, and straight on till morning.
While the above would be ideal, I'm sure that requires significantly more work.
If you are still wanting to handle individual changes, I noticed some issues with the Prot Pally check. There are basically two cookie cutter prot pally specs, both of which go about 12 points into Ret, which gets them flagged red for "partial ret spec," it should be pretty clear to see that these paladins are prot as they are taking increased parry chance, and reduced cooldown on their judgements.
Is one example, they might take benediction over Imp. Might, but that isn't what is being flagged anyhow. I don't claim to be an expert on paladins by any means, and I'm hoping someone else can give a more elegant way of wording the filter, but I am rather certain it should be possible to have a prot pally without a red spec.
I started writing this a couple of days ago, and have only just come back to it to see that Moshne has just covered pretty much the same ground, but I'll post anyway since I was a bit more expansive on the subject and went into a few other topics.
Yay, I'm in red!
As a prot paladin, I'd dispute this:
check("Partial Retribution Spec", RED, function (talents) return (talents:spent(3) >= 11) and (talents:spent(3) < 41); end);
There are prot paladin builds that are reasonable that go deeper into retri than that; assuming that any prot pally build already has 10pts there to get full deflection, Improved Seal of the Crusader (3 points), Pursuit of Justice (3 points) and Improved Judgment (2 points) arguably have their uses and are within easy reach.
Contrarily, if the build is *not* prot, I don't think they'd necessarily need to go as deep as 10 points into retri - maybe 5 points for imp BoM if they're looking for synergy with the other paladins.
I'm not sure I've necessarily got the lingo right, but I think what I'd think is correct would be something like this:
Simple version, only increasing the lower band for any spec:
check("Partial Retribution Spec", RED, function (talents) return (talents:spent(3) >= 17) and (talents:spent(3) < 41); end);
Complex version - more likely to be coded wrong - increasing the lower band for prot and decreasing it for holy.
check("Partial Retribution Spec", RED, function (talents) return (talents:spent(2) < 25) and (talents:spent(3) >= 6) and (talents:spent(3) < 41); end);
check("Partial Retribution Spec", RED, function (talents) return (talents:spent(2) >= 25) and (talents:spent(3) >= 17) and (talents:spent(3) < 41); end);
There's also a priest in our guild who has a bunch of yellows and a red, but I don't know enough about priesting to know - I know she's a very good priest, so I imagine the choices weren't made completely randomly. She's 26 into Disc, which I gather from here is a wee bit too far, but I'd better handle it delicately - I like getting heals!
I'm slogging through the backlog of the thread as I note this, and I've seen other comments that some of the yellowing seems a bit overzealous. Is it worth making this a bit like lint, and have normal and strict modes? Perhaps a PvP mode too?
While we're on the subject of (extremely unreasonable, but hey) wishes, some sort of synergy check would be great, but
possibly far out of the scope of the mod, I'm not sure. If there's >1 priest with imp divine spirit, or multiple paladins with Imp Blessing of Wisdom (for instance) stick a flag somewhere. Given that raid makeups change it's not necessarily going to be bad, but it might at least be something worth taking notice of for a minmaxing raid leader if you are aiming for maximum co-operation between characters.
...
There's also a priest in our guild who has a bunch of yellows and a red, but I don't know enough about priesting to know - I know she's a very good priest, so I imagine the choices weren't made completely randomly. She's 26 into Disc, which I gather from here is a wee bit too far, but I'd better handle it delicately - I like getting heals!
I'm slogging through the backlog of the thread as I note this, and I've seen other comments that some of the yellowing seems a bit overzealous. Is it worth making this a bit like lint, and have normal and strict modes? Perhaps a PvP mode too?
Exactly 26 into disc is generally a very poor choice. The theorycrafting shows that for any fight over a couple minutes, you're much much better having 3/5 empowered healing than 3/5 mana talent. Unless you have a glut of priests and the "4th" priest is filling a role that would better be filled by another class, you're best having one IDS priest (23/38) and one CoH priest, with the 3rd tailored to suit (most likely Pain Suppression or 2nd CoH)...but 26 is a extremely sub-par spec.
Just like the missing 1h spec for Prot warriors, I don't see a problem with Disc spec getting yellow flagged. This tool isn't perfect, and cant accurately and perfectly quantify the needs of the individual raid. The "full defensive build" is only better if you have no other warriors, or for some reason they can't be bothered to pick up either of those talents for the raid and keep them up themselves. The yellow flag in each of these cases, as has been postulated from the beginning, means "further investigation warranted", to make sure that the person knows what they're doing, and in this specific instance for these specific circumstances the choice is acceptable.
Just like the missing 1h spec for Prot warriors, I don't see a problem with Disc spec getting yellow flagged. This tool isn't perfect, and cant accurately and perfectly quantify the needs of the individual raid. The "full defensive build" is only better if you have no other warriors, or for some reason they can't be bothered to pick up either of those talents for the raid and keep them up themselves. The yellow flag in each of these cases, as has been postulated from the beginning, means "further investigation warranted", to make sure that the person knows what they're doing, and in this specific instance for these specific circumstances the choice is acceptable.
I'd disagree with the characterization of 1h Weapon Specialization. Any warrior with Improved Demoralizing Shout is very likely getting those points at the expense of 1h Weapon Specialization.
Quite simply, you should always have at least 1 warrior with Improved Demoralizing Shout, and thus flagging the most common (and arguably correct) place those points come from makes very little sense, because it'll be noise far too often to be useful.
It's just as optimal, if not moreso, to have a fury warrior spec Imp Demo. This gets your Imp BS for your rogues, Imp Demo for your healers and your tank keeps 1h spec. I don't really want my tanks picking up Imp Demo at the cost of lowering their threat ceiling.
You're right in that it's a logical place for the points to come from, but if your fury warriors aren't picking up something that helpful because they can't bear to part with UW, they need to get on board with the word "Team".
Originally Posted by Brookston Beer Bulletin
“Beer brewers shall sell no beer to the citizens, unless it be three weeks old; to the foreigner they may knowingly sell younger beer.” — German beer law, 1466
It's just as optimal, if not moreso, to have a fury warrior spec Imp Demo. This gets your Imp BS for your rogues, Imp Demo for your healers and your tank keeps 1h spec. I don't really want my tanks picking up Imp Demo at the cost of lowering their threat ceiling.
You're right in that it's a logical place for the points to come from, but if your fury warriors aren't picking up something that helpful because they can't bear to part with UW, they need to get on board with the word "Team".
As has been said before:
Originally Posted by Quigon
That talent does not exactly behoove a DPS warrior to take - and having 3 prot warriors in a raid is absurd. Increasing your threat by 50 TPS (max) is worth giving up 2000+ DPS?
Furthermore, there are plenty of situations (such as tanking Archimonde) where you simply cannot rely on others (due to mechanics like Airburst) to keep Demo Shout up for you.
just installed the latest build I could find on wowace.com updater. found it redflagged my protection paladin build 0/46/15 for being ret heavy, missing BoK and spell warding.
I believe that this should be downgraded to at most a yellow flagging (for missing BoK) and/or missing spell warding while NOT taking Pursuit of justice (4% less spelldamage taken vs 3% spell resist). there should be no yellow flagging for a partial retribution build (with say a 49/12 cookie cutter setup).
4% less spell damage is better than 3% less chance to hit you with spells even if you have 0% base spell resistance. So in my opinion, Pursuit of Justice red flag is justified.
BoK red flag can be downgraded to yellow, as only 1 paladin has to have it.
Partial Retribution Spec is being revised, as far as I know.
Pursuit of justice is well justified over spell warding for many fights. 15% run speed increase is vital for:
- chasing down warlock in HKM
- getting back into melee range on gruul shatters
- chasing down leotheras on a missed AS or overeager DPS
- chasing down naga on vashj P2
- chasing down adds on alar P2
it allows a tank to forgoe boar's speed (thus gaining 3 stamina) and also get the edge on dynamic fights (pretty much any fight worth talking about in BC)
let us now reflect on spell warding
- useful on eating warlock deathcolis (HKM) (as is PoJ for regaining distance)
- no use in gruul
- useful in hydross
- no use in lurker
- no use in morogrim
- no use in karathress (assuming hunter tank role)
- no use in leotheras (assuming human form tanking)
- no use in vashj
- useful in VR
- useful in solarian
- useful in alar (as is PoJ)
I'll admit to not knowing enough about BT content, but for SSC/Tk content. PoJ is far more useful than spell warding.
4% less spell damage is better than 3% less chance to hit you with spells even if you have 0% base spell resistance. So in my opinion, Pursuit of Justice red flag is justified.
Your logic here is wrong - you say it's better [b]even][/i] if you have 0% base resistance, but that is actually the *best* case scenario for spell warding. The more base spell resistance you have, the better additional resistance will be (for reference, check the Protection Warrior thread and the discussion about returns on stacking avoidance). If you had 50% spell resistance, adding 3% more would be 6% less damage, whereas the 4% less damage would still be 4% less damage. If you had 96% spell resist, adding 3% more would be a 75% reduction in damage. Now, I think this is pretty irrelevant for the matter at hand, since base spell resist for a tank is probably very low (I don't know the numbers), but I thought I'd point out the whole in your logic.
01/09/08, 1:03 PM
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