I haven't seen any mention of the current PTR changes to Meta gem's so I figured I'd share what is supposed to be released next client side patch.
Now, wouldn't these changes(supposedly occuring same time as the reversion of Chaotic) change the recommended longterm gem? Seeing as based on the destro stat weights of Critical Strike vs Int, It will only require about 20 intellect to begin severely out-weighting the 54 Critical Strike.
Jewelcrafting
•Meta gems with the Chaotic and Relentless prefixes now have a requirement of 3 red gems.
•New meta gems have been added: Agile Shadowspirit Diamond (Agility/3% critical damage), Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond (Strength/3% critical damage), and Burning Shadowspirit Diamond (Intellect/3% critical damage). These new recipes are unbound and can drop from any Cataclysm creature. The new meta gems have a requirement of 3 red gems equipped.
The Improved Soul Fire change is something thats going to hurt Demonology/UA a lot, right now every raid spec uses that 15% haste buff and its by far the MOST important buff to keep on at all times, right now it gives 1920 haste. If there is a warlock out there wondering why his/her damage is low, the number one reason will be not keeping ISF up. This change makes warlock DPS'ing much easier, Im not too sure what other classes rotations are like but ours atm is heavily priority based and the most fun its been in a long time and VERY rewarding if you do it right.
If you ask me theres a huge gap between good warlocks and average warlocks right now, this lessens it. Destro atm is the best dps spec, but not too far ahead of UA and Demo is close by too because of the utility it brings, after this change its by far and away the best.
The 4 piece t11 change is nice and it seems as if it will make its way into our rotation when it procs, Im also glad that they reverted the change to Soul Swap Glyph. I still think something will have to be done as far as buffs for UA/Demo to stay competitive with Destro if these changes stick.
edited after Diemus comment, ty x)
Last edited by Demoniknegro : 01/11/11 at 3:49 AM.
The Improved Soul Fire change is something thats going to hurt Demonology/UA a lot, right now every raid spec uses that 15% haste buff and its by far the MOST important buff to keep on at all times, right now it gives 1920 haste. If there is a warlock out there wondering why his/her damage is low, the number one reason will be not keeping ISF up. This change makes warlock DPS'ing extremely easy, Im not too sure what other classes rotations are like but ours atm is heavily priority based and the most fun its been in a long time and VERY rewarding if you do it right.
If you ask me theres a huge gap between good warlocks and average warlocks right now, this eliminates it, destro atm is the best dps spec, but not too far ahead of UA and Demo is close by too because of the utility it brings, after this change its by far and away the best.
The 4 piece t11 change is nice and it seems as if it will make its way into our rotation when it procs, Im also glad that they reverted the change to Soul Swap Glyph. I still think something will have to be done as far as buffs for UA/Demo to stay competitive with Destro if these changes stick.
This isn't necessarily true. If the ISF buff that provides 8% dmg increase is procced only from keeping ISF up, as the haste buff was, then there will still be a tricky rotation to be had.
Regarding Havoc and RoF, on the training dummies Havoc is triggering off each target affected by RoF. Shadowfury and Shadowflame (including it's DoT) trigger Havoc off each target hit as well. 2 targets, 2 ticks on Havoc. 3 targets, 3 ticks on Havoc. Etc. Will be looking to see if this holds true on a fight like Halfus or Cho'gall.
Interestingly, the explosion from SoC does not produce extra procs from Havoc, nor does Hellfire. Not that either would be optimal as Destruction, but felt like checking anyways.
Havoc also double-dips on CoE. Make sure you apply it to both the Havoc target and the target you're actually attacking.
Demon Soul Imp effect has been changed to - Critical strike chance of your cast time Destruction spells increased by 30% for 20 sec.
Fiery Apocalypse now increases all fire damage you deal by 10.8% (up from 10%). Each point of Mastery increases fire damage by an additional 1.35%. (up from 1.25%)
Very positive change for Destro locks, as this makes Demon Soul all the more worthwile to cast while the change to Mastery seems kinda... well, does it really change anything?
On the other hand i can't understand how are they gonna get away with such a big nerf to Demo/Affi (am i missing something here? They are basically removing loads of haste rating from them) without giving back anything at all? Were those specs so heavily overpowered? I sure didn't think so. I guess we'll have to wait and see how this turns out.
Well, there is the buff to Mastery for Demo (and strangely Destro, but not Aff), but as Mastery is fairly low priority stat. It will in no way make up for losing 15% haste.
but as Mastery is fairly low priority stat. It will in no way make up for losing 15% haste.
This is very true and I predict that we'll see destro climbing the dps ladder as the change to ISF, while not being equal, at least doesn't penalize us as much. 8% damage increase is still a damn lot for keeping the buff up.
After this change, if you renewed the dot while having the ISF fall off you only lose the 8% buff for only 1 tick, because next one will recalculate itself without the reapplying.
Unless something has changed in the last week or so, player buffs that increase damage done don't update on each tick, despite what Blue posts have claimed in the past. When you apply a DoT, the damage buffs from talents and player buffs, and the crit chance, haste level, and mastery level are all calculated based on their values when you apply it. Each tick follows those same levels. The only thing that updates tick to tick as far as I know is debuffs on the target.
Edit: Also, some napkin math shows that the ISF change is going to be a bit more painful than seems to be predicted so far. 15% haste is roughly a 12-14% damage increase. The mastery change will be somewhere around a 1% increase in fire damage done, depending on your mastery, and the Demon Soul effect won't be more than about a 2% increase in damage done, since it only applies to cast-time spells and only has a ~11.1% uptime (I'm also not sure if it'll apply the crit modifier to the DoT portion of Immolate either). The new ISF is an 8% buff. Total, that's only a ~11.2% increase in damage, meaning Destro will be losing a good 1.5-2.5% total DPS will this change.
This seems to be confirmed by the latest Simcraft results as well, which show a 2.63% reduction in Destruction output at the T11_359 level, though I'm not sure how many of the changes are taken into account by it yet.
Unless something has changed in the last week or so, player buffs that increase damage done don't update on each tick, despite what Blue posts have claimed in the past. When you apply a DoT, the damage buffs from talents and player buffs, and the crit chance, haste level, and mastery level are all calculated based on their values when you apply it. Each tick follows those same levels. The only thing that updates tick to tick as far as I know is debuffs on the target.
Edit: Also, some napkin math shows that the ISF change is going to be a bit more painful than seems to be predicted so far. 15% haste is roughly a 12-14% damage increase. The mastery change will be somewhere around a 1% increase in fire damage done, depending on your mastery, and the Demon Soul effect won't be more than about a 2% increase in damage done, since it only applies to cast-time spells and only has a ~11.1% uptime (I'm also not sure if it'll apply the crit modifier to the DoT portion of Immolate either). The new ISF is an 8% buff. Total, that's only a ~11.2% increase in damage, meaning Destro will be losing a good 1.5-2.5% total DPS will this change.
This seems to be confirmed by the latest Simcraft results as well, which show a 2.63% reduction in Destruction output at the T11_359 level, though I'm not sure how many of the changes are taken into account by it yet.
Thanks for your math. If I am correct we should continue hardcasting Soul Fire to keep the new ISF buff up. With the haste buff being gone the cast time of Soul Fire is 2,7 seconds. Does this influence our DPS directly?
Unless something has changed in the last week or so, player buffs that increase damage done don't update on each tick, despite what Blue posts have claimed in the past. When you apply a DoT, the damage buffs from talents and player buffs, and the crit chance, haste level, and mastery level are all calculated based on their values when you apply it. Each tick follows those same levels. The only thing that updates tick to tick as far as I know is debuffs on the target.
Edit: Also, some napkin math shows that the ISF change is going to be a bit more painful than seems to be predicted so far. 15% haste is roughly a 12-14% damage increase. The mastery change will be somewhere around a 1% increase in fire damage done, depending on your mastery, and the Demon Soul effect won't be more than about a 2% increase in damage done, since it only applies to cast-time spells and only has a ~11.1% uptime (I'm also not sure if it'll apply the crit modifier to the DoT portion of Immolate either). The new ISF is an 8% buff. Total, that's only a ~11.2% increase in damage, meaning Destro will be losing a good 1.5-2.5% total DPS will this change.
This seems to be confirmed by the latest Simcraft results as well, which show a 2.63% reduction in Destruction output at the T11_359 level, though I'm not sure how many of the changes are taken into account by it yet.
While personal dps may take a slight hit for a fight's total duration do not overlook the DPS gain we will receive during burn phases. 8% extra damage during blood lust/heroism is a considerable increase on fights where a hard burn phase is required. Like I said personal dps may not be as sexy but providing more damage in a phase that could help the raid more long term sure beats the old ISF which did nothing during the same time period.
While personal dps may take a slight hit for a fight's total duration do not overlook the DPS gain we will receive during burn phases. 8% extra damage during blood lust/heroism is a considerable increase on fights where a hard burn phase is required. Like I said personal dps may not be as sexy but providing more damage in a phase that could help the raid more long term sure beats the old ISF which did nothing during the same time period.
So you are implying that Soul Fire should only be hardcasted during the burn phase?
Unless something has changed in the last week or so, player buffs that increase damage done don't update on each tick, despite what Blue posts have claimed in the past. When you apply a DoT, the damage buffs from talents and player buffs, and the crit chance, haste level, and mastery level are all calculated based on their values when you apply it. Each tick follows those same levels. The only thing that updates tick to tick as far as I know is debuffs on the target.
Edit: Also, some napkin math shows that the ISF change is going to be a bit more painful than seems to be predicted so far. 15% haste is roughly a 12-14% damage increase. The mastery change will be somewhere around a 1% increase in fire damage done, depending on your mastery, and the Demon Soul effect won't be more than about a 2% increase in damage done, since it only applies to cast-time spells and only has a ~11.1% uptime (I'm also not sure if it'll apply the crit modifier to the DoT portion of Immolate either). The new ISF is an 8% buff. Total, that's only a ~11.2% increase in damage, meaning Destro will be losing a good 1.5-2.5% total DPS will this change.
This seems to be confirmed by the latest Simcraft results as well, which show a 2.63% reduction in Destruction output at the T11_359 level, though I'm not sure how many of the changes are taken into account by it yet.
Since ISF's inner cooldown seem to be reduced to 6 seconds, wouldn't this push our dps a bit while we spend less time casting soul fire, regarding empowered imp?
In the long turn, I expect Destruction to scale better after this patch, since our main filler won't be on approximately 1s cast time in the first raiding tier anymore with backdraft up.
You are correct in assuming that Destruction benefits greatly from the new tick of immolate gained at high haste levels. It should be obvious but the reason many warlocks are reforging to crit is because they do not have the gear to reach the 50% haste threshold. They reforge all of it to crit while staying at/above the 30%.
I've been wondering (and spending untold thousands of gold regemming, reforging, and re-enchanting) about this. I've seen good locks (top 20ish from WorldOfLogs parses) do this both ways--prioritizing haste over crit and vice versa. Initially, I figured that, because the haste threshold was essentially unreachable (at my gear level for the foreseeable future), I should just focus on stacking crit over haste. However, when I ran my own personal profile through simcraft, it was showing me that haste was a substantially better stat for me than crit. So, I regemmed and reforged haste over crit even though I was nowhere near the haste cap.
This confuses me somewhat as I should be somewhere between the pre-raid and BiS (closer to pre-raid profile) profiles which grant crit a stronger scale value from the simcraft thread. It seems like the discussion of haste has been focused on reaching the threshold (which will grant a big bump) versus the innate value of haste to the destro-lock (i. e., faster ticking dots--even if that doesn't lead to extra ticks, faster SF, INCIN, CB, etc.)
I suppose I'd like to know if anyone else is noticing that when they run simcraft on their specific toons whether they are seeing similar results. Also, I'm wondering if I'm misinterpreting the simcraft output. Please do correct me if I'm wrong about what I'm reading, but for me, the clear answer seems--at my current gear level--to prioritize haste over crit.
With a couple top 20 parses myself, and the 2635 haste rating unobtainable, I found it optimal via many simcraft runs to gear for haste to the 1782 rating to get an extra corruption tick. Then begin stacking crit while maintaining hit cap and 1782 haste rating, until the point you can reforge to 2635 haste rating. Interestingly enough, when manually adding the 808 haste rating to my current gear to reach 2635, I only observed a 250dps bump over adding 808 crit rating.
One great thing about haste that cannot be measured in Patchwerk sims is the extra mobility it gives you. The faster your casts, the higher chance you can safely finish your current cast before being forced to move for raid mechanics. This may be slightly counterbalanced by the longer GCD provided by stacking crit, but as useful GCDs are not always available, high movement favors haste.
With a couple top 20 parses myself, and the 2635 haste rating unobtainable, I found it optimal via many simcraft runs to gear for haste to the 1782 rating to get an extra corruption tick. Then begin stacking crit while maintaining hit cap and 1782 haste rating, until the point you can reforge to 2635 haste rating. Interestingly enough, when manually adding the 808 haste rating to my current gear to reach 2635, I only observed a 250dps bump over adding 808 crit rating.
One great thing about haste that cannot be measured in Patchwerk sims is the extra mobility it gives you. The faster your casts, the higher chance you can safely finish your current cast before being forced to move for raid mechanics. This may be slightly counterbalanced by the longer GCD provided by stacking crit, but as useful GCDs are not always available, high movement favors haste.
Good, I'm not crazy then. I agree with your note on the Patchwerk sim. I understand why it's an important baseline, but when I'm calculating scale values for myself I like to run the Helterskelter option.
Based on the latest simcraft numbers it seems like you might be right about gaining the extra tick of corruption, as well. Looks like for the pre-raid set haste comes out ahead but starts losing value and becomes less valuable than crit at about the full 359 level. Probably because it's easier to get the extra corruption tick. Then, oddly enough, it picks back up in value toward the 372 level when the extra immolate tick is obtainable.
I'll enjoy knowing this until the next patch when my 15% haste buff goes away...
Good, I'm not crazy then. I agree with your note on the Patchwerk sim. I understand why it's an important baseline, but when I'm calculating scale values for myself I like to run the Helterskelter option.
Based on the latest simcraft numbers it seems like you might be right about gaining the extra tick of corruption, as well. Looks like for the pre-raid set haste comes out ahead but starts losing value and becomes less valuable than crit at about the full 359 level. Probably because it's easier to get the extra corruption tick. Then, oddly enough, it picks back up in value toward the 372 level when the extra immolate tick is obtainable.
I'll enjoy knowing this until the next patch when my 15% haste buff goes away...
Haste does some other kinda neat stuff for us as well. For example, it makes our Imp cast faster, which in turn makes us proc more Insta-Soulfires.
Additionally, one of the main reasons to stack Crit before was so that Demon Soul could be fully utilized (Even stacking crit I would sometimes see the buff fall off without using it all up). With the new version, Haste will actually be the stat that affects it more since it will give us more casts within the 20-second timeframe.
Haste does some other kinda neat stuff for us as well. For example, it makes our Imp cast faster, which in turn makes us proc more Insta-Soulfires.
Additionally, one of the main reasons to stack Crit before was so that Demon Soul could be fully utilized (Even stacking crit I would sometimes see the buff fall off without using it all up). With the new version, Haste will actually be the stat that affects it more since it will give us more casts within the 20-second timeframe.
Great point about haste and demon soul.
I believe it was Spellman in another thread who calculated that we only needed to put 2 points into Dark Arts to get the fastest cast time for our Imp. Is this still the case with the changes to ISF? Or was this ever true?
01/11/11, 12:52 AM
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