Reeshet

I agree with your general prioritization there, but if you do those 7 spells in that order, Haunt will have fallen off the target. Then you lose 20% damage bonus on all DOT effects. (I'm also not sure if it applies to Immolate, but the way I read it, I think it would. I'll look at that tonight)

If you have a planned out initial cycle of those 7 spells, then you need to wedge Haunt in there at as close to 10 seconds as you can (again, this will be way easier when CD is changed to 8 seconds).

Haunt, SB, UA, Corruption, Immolate, CoA, Haunt, SiLife

Though personally, I don't feel like SiLife DPS is worth the GCD unless I'm taking damage or having to LT a lot.

 

• KingSpeedy

If you look at the Simulationcraft Parses, Siphon Life has a pretty high DpET, not as high as CoA, but pretty close to UA and Corr (and certainly higher than Immolate). It's definitely worth casting if the target will be alive for at least 20 seconds of the duration.

 

vanisher

Hmm, that spec looks very intriguing... Were you lifetapping left and right?

 

Sydane

It's currently impossible to judge the mana efficiency of specs due to the insanely high proc rate on Judgment of Wisdom. On a 1'56" Teron fight I got 17.4k mana back and finished with a full mana bar without lifetapping as demo. One of the other warlocks in the raid ran an affliction spec and got back 21k mana. Right now, mana is basically infinite for all dpsers.

Empathy does not imply approval.

 

Krathis

Keep in mind that at 80 Totem of Wrath will provide 280 spell power to the raid. So we'd need to be pushing over 2,800 spell power before Dark Pact would start to be worth the talent point investment assuming the raid has an Elemental Shaman.

I'd like to see this talent provide a damage increase to the warlock as long as a pet was active in addition to what it currently does to make it more viable.

On a another demonology note has anyone done the math on Demonic Empowerment? It seems to me like even with a fully raid buffed Felguard it's not worth the GCD.

 

Trickykid

Napkin math, go go!

20% haste for 15 seconds. Not sure what percent the FG is doing on a stand and nuke fight, but I was seeing it do anywhere from 1/5-1/3 of total DPS. Let's assume it's just 20% extra DPS for him, even though it's slightly better with respect to some of his crit uptime stuff.

Let's be gracious and say he does 1/3 of our DPS (anecdotal here for ballpark would be great!):
% of dps * %increase * seconds of increase=
.33*.2*15 = 1
Which means doing that gains you one second worth of "total" DPS, and if we're doing 2/3 of that, then that's 1/(2/3)=1.5. That means with a 1.5second GCD it's pretty much break-even with zero haste. That's if he does 1/3 of your DPS, so it gets slightly worse if that's a bad estimate.

 

Rothulian

Overall I must say Im generally disappointed in Warlocks right now. Perhaps with the inclusion of Spirit on our gear things will improve. But even gear problems aside...there are so many problems with each tree. This is what Id suggest blizzard do.

Affliction:
Haunt CD lowered, which I think has already happened.
UA needs to refresh CoA. Juggling 5-6 spells is just not possible. Haunt refreshes Corr, UA refreshes CoA.
Replace Improved Felhunter and Dark Pact with: Rotten Core: You fire spells and damage over time effects have a 5/10/15% chance to increase the damage of your shadow spells by 10% for 12 seconds.
Dots that crit. Even if they only crit for 150% and not 200%...they need to crit.

Demo:
I dont know much about Demo, but for sure, Meta needs its cooldown lowered by 1 min.
Demonic Empathy needs to be turned into Ferocious Inspiration. Why do Hunters get 10 seconds and we get 3 spells? Stupid.
Demonic Empowerment needs to increase the Felguard's damage more, somehow.
Demonic Pact needs to proc off of the Warlock's spells as well.

Destruction:
Chaos Bolt needs to do more damage. ~10% more damage than Incinerate on a spell with a 12 sec CD is not enough.
Backdraft needs to only apply to Shadowbolt and Incinerate.
Fire and Brimstone is terribad. It needs to increase the damage of Immolate by 5% (a nerf), Incinerate by 5%, and Chaos Bolt by 5%.

 

Sydane

The 1/3 estimate is pretty sound, on Teron mine did 30% but it was short fight, on most of the others he did around 35% with a spike of 45% on Council because I could leave him dpsing the whole time (which was amazing, last week he'd almost always die within a minute) while I had to move around and keep up CoT on the priest. However, a chunk of that is cleave, which isn't helped by Demonic Empowerment, so typical white pet dps is closer to 25% of total damage.

However, it's a good skill to pop when you are on the move, especially if corruption is already up and you don't need to life tap, so I think it will prove to be more useful in most fights than it spreadsheets to be. But on a standard tank and spank fight, it's not worth the GCD.

Empathy does not imply approval.

 

cerra

There seems to be several talent points you can throw around in the 56/0/5 build. I haven't seen anyone invest into Frailty, which removes the AP increase from CoR. Is there a reason for this?

And, if I may be forgiven for bringing only questions to the table, I haven't had any success finding information regarding itemization priorities. Crit is obviously much more useful to affliction than previously, so has anyone published the numerical relationships between crit/spellpower/haste as it applies to 56/0/5?

 

TangoDigital

I had the guard bash a dummy on a batch of 5 minute tests without me doing anything. Using my trash gear he hovers around 300dps (measured with Recount). Adding DE he clocked in at ~340. So if this is correct the spell's dpct seems to be way too low. From this perspective you're better off throwing a curse/dot/bolt.

Imho they should move the spell off GCD.

TangoDigital

 

Vindra

Blizzard has posted in numerous threads on beta that they are reluctant to remove things off the GCD. If Blizzard just takes it off the GCD warlocks will just macro it in with shadowbolt/incinerate. Mashing abilities on every CD such as the warrior shield block was a move they wanted to get away from. The approach more likely to be taken by Blizzard would be to significantly increase the DPCT but have a longer cooldown such as 2 to 3 min.

 

DiamondTear

Lowering haunt CD is enough to make keeping up a good rotation bearable, at the moment the window for refreshing it is too small. UA refreshing CoA would also cause problems with CoA damage going up towards the end.

Posting your own spell suggestions is frowned upon.

CoR doesn't stack with faerie fire and most raids probably have a dps druid to keep it up.

The spreadsheet at WoW Warlock DPS Spreadsheet has been updated. I haven't had a chance to use it yet myself, but you could use it to compare stats.

 

TangoDigital

You're right. If they raise it too high however the guard might become too bursty in PvP. We'll see what they come up with, hopefully.

Something I'd also really like to know but can't test right now is *where* that buff finds its way into the damage calculation. Injected at the right spot in the formula it might be a much higher bonus in a raid scenario than you'd expect from solo tests. It would be nice if some of you could test this and post some numbers. Monitor guard dps during the fights and write down just how much of a difference DE makes.

TangoDigital

 

Laggerbear

Anyone tried 0/21/40 fire or shadow specc @ 3.0?
I am too retard to keep dots up and sbolt spam was ideal for me :< I may try fire destro since all the locks that currently raiding in my guild are either 56/0/5 or /0/3/58 .Imho the (nerfed) Demonic sacrifice is too good to not have .

 

klkl

I used a 21/40 spec on our first night back and performed absolutely terrible. I think my numbers were around the 1600s. I found that my crits were a lot less than they used to be even though my rating was higher (what I mean is that I was definitely critting more often, but the numbers just weren't there due to my average crit being a lot less than it used to be). I believe there's a post in the other warlock thread about someone changing up the spec a bit and achieving greater success.

The following night I tried a deep fire spec with conflag/backdraft and a beefed up Imp. On Brutallus my DPS was underwhelming after screwing up the rotation a bit. Then on Felmyst I was able to pull off around 1800 DPS on the first phase. My rotation was Corruption -> Immolate -> Incinerate x 6 -> Conflag + CB/Incinerate. This was only after speaking to another lock and adapting his rotation. I was casting CoE as my curse. I think my rotation is flawed as I have read other locks putting out a significant increase in DPS. I'm trying a straight up affliction spec now, but I'm open to any feedback.

 

Deathnotes

On the 0/3/58 note (10/3/48 seems to be better imo) The rotation is REALLY dependant on keeping your Conflag on cooldown, anytime its up pop conflag for that bonus 30% haste and just reapply it, It gets old but the DPS jump is tremendous.

On a demonology build, I tried a 0/56/5 build last night, and was running about 2000 dps but seemed REALLY low on the damage overall... I'm not too sure about rotations or anything and am leaning more towards the build of 0/46/15 (anyone have any feed back on this build...?) As I've heard demonic pact does not stack with Flametongue/Wrath of Fire totems. The only thing about this build is I feel Meta is a big chunk of our DPS...but yeah...anyone try this build out?

As for Affliction, a question comes up...Is the spell power bonus on Malediction worth taking and using CoE over an Improved CoA? I have to yet try an affliction build in a raid enviroment and any advice/comments would be appreciated.

 

Evidicus

I was recently asked by other Warlocks in my guild what my impressions have been about our class post-patch and looking ahead. I thought I'd share it here.

New new thoughts on locks given some "hands on" time is as follows: "We suck."

Keep in mind this isn't just "QQ people do more damage than me". I don't think any of us have a problem with that happening. Blizzard set out to do two things with our class for Wrath imo. #1. Boost the raid viability of Affliction and #2. Make sure no talent tree reduces our rotation to a single spell again. I imagine we're all ok with that in theory because Shadow Bolt spamming was boring as hell, and having different specs in the raid adds a variety and the idea of "Hey. I am contributing something unique to the raid".

The problem is that the way they decided to "fix" us was pretty stupid.

Affliction is probably ok for level 80 raiding since they've boosted the DoTs and they're ability to double proc via Pandemic and their overall damage via Haunt. The other great thing about Affliction is that all of the damage it does lies mainly inside the Affliction tree. What this means spcifically is you can load up the Affliction tree with your talents since the vast majority of your damage dealing abilities will be based in that tree. You may use Shadow Bolt as a filler, but it isn't going to be much more than that. Now there are talks of even giving DoTs the ability to crit. If that ever happens, then Affliction will be closer to being on par with what we're seeing with other classes and their current 3k DPS output. The problem is that 2-3 Affliction locks in a raid will eat up a ton of debuff slots, making it impractical at least until the debuff cap is raised even further.

Destruction is just FUBAR. ISB doesn't work with DoT damage, and our tree is centered around fire nukes, making ISB 5 talent points in our tree that aren't really meant for Destros to even use. Chaos Bolt and Conflag have issues in that they are counterproductive to having an actual rotation. Conflag kills Immolate (cutting off at least a tick of it, if not 2) which kills Incinerates. Backdraft looks like a decent benefit of using Conflag except that one of your 3 Destro spells is wasted in a sense just putting your Immolate right back up immediately. F&B is pretty weak that deep in the tree. While it does boost your Immolate damage and Conflag crit rate, it still nets less DPS than just ignoring Conflag in the first place (at least that has been my experience). It is just underwhelming for where it is located in the tree, especially compared to say Everlasting Affliction. Last, but certainly not least, we have Molten Core. MC sounds interesting at first, especially with Corruption being instant now and Imp CoA being a couple easy points, but doesn't really make too much sense in practice. Not only will you using up GCDs to put up shadow DoTs to proc it, they'll be weak DoTs unless you put +40 spell damage on your weapon instead of Sunfire. Doing that loses you 10 fire damage from your main damage nukes - not critical, but counterproductive. Not only that, but in order to make those DoTs even somewhat effective you'll need to pick up the +hit and +range talents in the Affliction tree as well. If you don't, then you may as well not have the Destruction based +hit and +range talents either (but good luck putting together a decent build without them). Having 36 yard range on half your spells and 30 on the other half is again just stupid if both spell types aren't optional for your rotation. There just isn't any flow to our talents or rotation; no cohesiveness behind it where you're building towards a central idea. Instead we're split down the middle like that half-Santa, Half-Frosty freak from Robot Chicken. Scaling isn't going to matter imo, since I'm still hit capped without talents atm, and have the crit, haste and spellpower you'd expect from an end game raider. If I'm 600-1000 DPS behind other people with my how my gear is relative to theirs now, then I don't think we'll see anything down the road to make up that gap.

Demonology is the redheaded stepchild of Warlock talent trees. I love it personally because demons are cool, but it is putting out the worst DPS of all 3 trees currently (not that it matters at 70 anyway - every tree just offers degrees of mediocrity now at this content level). The problem at Demo's core is that you spend all your points in the Demo tree only to have the majority of your DPS abilities be spread into either or both of the Affliction or Destruction trees. When ISB was nerfed to hell, it was probably Demonology that suffered the brunt of the impact. Metamorphosis is fun, but it is primarily a PvP talent 51 points deep into your tree. It has situational use for emergency off tanking I suppose, but it is laughable to consider that for anything more than an "Oh Shit!" button for 5 mans. The 20% damage buff is neat, but again it only lasts for 45 seconds every 3 minutes. If you really want to help Demonology, then eliminate the cooldown crap and just make this a permanent form like Shadow Form or Tree of Life. The PvP balance comes into play since Demon Form is banishable just like Trees are. Unfortunately there is nothing on the table about doing this. Finally, by the time you get finished with your Demo talents, you don't have enough left over to grab the +hit, +range and threat reduction talents of both Affliction and Destruction which leaves you with a whole other set of potential problems.

I apologize for the length of the post, but I think it is important to address the issue clearly with people so they know this isn't just a whine about not topping DPS meters. This is about not even showing up on the meters at all because of class design in a raid setting where the "utility" we offer is either redundant (one Healthstone at a time my ass), or unnecessary in the first place (CoE is a waste to apply since a Boomer can do the same thing as part of his damage rotation - Aff locks should be using CoA instead to boost both personal and raid DPS). Remember as trivial as our KJ kills may seem at this point, we did it with a lone Warlock in the raid (me) whose most valuable contribution was keeping CoR up so the "real DPSers" could kill the boss. This is a complete 180 from last week when even attempting M'uru without 2-3 Warlocks would have been unthinkable, not to mention KJ.

To top it all off, the only glyph I was really happy about just got nerfed as well...

"Glyph of Souls - Reduces the mana cost of your Ritual of Souls spell by 70%. (Old - Your Ritual of Souls spell no longer requires a Soul Shard.)"

Right, because I'm always so concerned with my mana usage BEFORE a pull. It isn't like we're dropping this thing in the middle of Brut saying "Oops! Sorry. Forgot to give you guys healthstones.... errr... healthSTONE."

Hate to add to the gloom and doom of this thread, but I'm looking for a reason to justify my raid spot and not finding one. If I were leading our raids at this point, I'd see no reason to have anything more than perhaps a single warlock in the raid - and that one would be there just to provide a healthstone, and perhaps a utility curse that a druid wasn't already covering somehow.

 

Flamingcloud

Ya I find it funny that druids keep motw/brez, paladins get the amazing blessing of sanc, wisdom, and kings, mages get a 10% crit buff unique, priests get fort, shamans get wrath of air and heroism, and the rest of the classes basically get nothing. So much for removing mandatory buffs from classes, you could definitely run no locks, or no rogues, but you could never run no paladins or no mages. It may be better this way, the less classes with mandatory buffs the better, but it is still fairly strange design in my opinion to leave any in.

 

voln

Just wanted to reinforce this spec, 0/46/15 is working out pretty well for me as well...better than affliction or destruction specs at 70. I was typical 0/21/40 pre-patch and tried a bunch of things after the patch trying to regain the DPS I lost. 0/46/15 did it for me. This is the actual spec I used Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

My rotation is pretty simple. I send the felguard in early and pop demonic empowerment at least at the start. I throw on COA/Corr/Immolate to start and just shadowbolt spam. Sometimes I will refresh COA and/or Corruption if I am moving around but most of the time I just spam shadowbolt like 0/21/40. I did a ZA the other day, I am voln Wow Web Stats

Note I got mostly t5 equiv or higher gear, with 1p t6 gloves. My DPS typically was around 1,000 pre-patch in a 10man raid setting. I am doing 300dps better than I did with no gear changes.

 

Trignite

Your damage did not get nerfed and you "don't suck". The pre - 3.0 destruction warlock build (00/21/40) was not intended to do as much damage as it did originally. Blizzard has stated that the old destruction raid spec's multipliers were just too high and were not intended to cause that much damage. The core point of this paragraph is basically: warlocks don't now suck, you were just rolling Godmode with 00/21/40 in raids before.

Also, I believe that what blizzard is doing is trying to put more procs into the game to use in PvE so skill (or the closest thing to it because WoW is obviously hard) does make some difference. [Ex. Mages use Brain Freeze or Hot Streak Procs, etc]. While some of this did exist pre-3.0, I think now it's been largely upped in frequency and variety. I happen to agree with the theory that using procs artfully and timely should be a major part of your raid DPS, because for one it makes you not fall asleep during raid, and for two it just helps the people who are skilled but a bit undergeared for the progression level they're doing.

Lastly, while I don't exactly approve of the sobbing overality of this post, it does somehow strangely have a valid point. I have not looked around these forums extensively, but it seems every classes damage has gone up (possibly a stable multiplier, possibly scalable) by 1.2x (Warlock?) to 3.0x (Ret) of what it used to be [just reference numbers, not factual]. I do however think that warlocks have had the smallest overall raid DPS increase of all classes with the coming of 3.0. Anyone that can confirm this suspicion with some solid data?

 

Arelenda

I wish I could, but I'm not raiding at the moment, so don't have solid stats to back it up.

Here's my overall findings (as also stated by others):
A. other classes seem to have had a large increase in dps. Retri paladins dps has increase to absurd levels (I have one, it's a blast).
B. our destro tree doesn't pack the punch it did, which is odd considering every other class got boosted. Affliction seems to have been fixed. Demo still has some oddities.
C. None of this matters for raid success until WotLk since mob health has been reduced significantly. I've never seen them change hit point numbers this much before. Everything seems to die incredibly fast.

When you're dying to Brutallus enrage because your dps is too low, you want to maximize it. When Brutallus dies in 4 minutes, it's hard to care much about 100 extra dps.

I'm kind of hoping they'll make other trees viable again, so it's not clear cut what to take. In 2.3 us warlocks did incredible amounts of damage with the one tree and the one spell. It is indeed better for the game if that didn't happen again. With a few tweaks this can become reality without us sucking. And they have time until WotLK to do so.

As mentioned before, there will be no updates by me on the compendium until WotLK, when I'll start playing again. I appreciate all the input and feedback that we get from raiders, so people can still get an idea of what us warlocks are capable of. Thank you all for contributing.

 

Troffel

For me affliction has only be fixed from the theoretical point of view.
Practical there are a few points, which have to be resolved before affliction is useful in a 25-raid-environment:

1. A affliction-warlock allocates six permanent debuffs on the target. (+ ISB, which is a proc). It is likely that the dots are knocked from the target, which lowers the practical dps by a large margin.
2. The cast rotation is far from being simple. Even at a static test dummy it is not simple to keep a perfect rotation. In a dynamic raid environment. where you have to move and to react, the rotation will definitely suffer. Even if all dots are up, it is difficult to decide what spell to cast next, since it depends on how long the next dots will disappear on the target, because shadow bolt needs such a long cast time. If the dots are not all up, the decision to cast which next dot is very difficult, because for maximizing dps you have to think about how to avoid that dots dropping from the target simultaneously. Mathematically the problem is in fact a complex knapsack problem. Without an addon with a very clever algorithm, you a very certainly suboptimal in dps.

 

Evidicus

Surprise. A Mage who thinks we did too much damage before the patch. I think you've mistaken "sobbing overality" with "observations based on actual raid experience". It is a common mistake among armchair theorycrafters.

There was nothing amiss with the damage output we had as 00/21/40. The main issue with raiding Warlocks was that we required no rotation at all to perform at that level. That, coupled with the incredible synergy we had with shadow priests, contributed to make us perhaps too popular in raids at the expense of other classes. Lastly, while I don't approve of the baseless arrogance of your post, you do somehow strangely make a valid point in that indeed raiding Warlocks have not benefited even remotely to the degree that other classes have when it comes to our DPS in a raid setting.

The solid data I base this on is last week's Brut kill in which I sustained around 2100 DPS (which is in the realm of that I would consider normal for me pre-patch). Unfortunately, 2100 DPS was not enough to even break the top 10 on our Brut kill, and several classes were easily above the 3000 DPS mark; classes I might add, that were performing at or near to the same level I was pre-patch.

Again, the fact of the matter is a person only has two ways to justify his raid spot.
1. High DPS, Healing or Tanking ability
2. Unique buffs, debuffs, or other aspects that all fall under the term "Raid Utility"

Both of these traits have been reduced greatly for Warlocks as a class since this patch was introduced. Raids that consistently fielded 4 to 6 Warlocks before at the expense of other classes was a problem, however the way to fix that problem isn't to create a scenario where we're 1000 DPS behind other classes, and the raid utility we have to offer can be covered by 2-3 other classes as well. I'm sure any mage out there who was benched in BC raiding, or who was seen as little more than a waterboy at the start of the raid and a taxi after would understand a little of what I'm talking about.

 

dakalro

Thing is, it's not as bad as people make it. Pre-3.0 warlocks were below hunters, way below legendary bow hunters, on par or slightly above dual-glaive rogues (haven't seen too much of full dps buffs as a warlock so far so can't say much, as in rogues/hunters usually either got full buffs or no buffs, as a warlock I haven't seen a fight with druid, ele shaman, spriest in my group).

My top dps pre-patch on Brut was a bit below 2800 with just an ele shaman, a few less pieces of gear (rings/chest, used T6) and only about 2% crit below theoretical. Now I am confident I could possibly reach 3.1-3.2k as affliction with working Pandemic and pet and actually doing a proper rotation. I very much doubt that is doable as a destruction warlock which kind of means at this level destruction got somewhere between nothing and - upgrades to dps, but that was expected, they removed ~39% direct scaling (sac + misery + scorch, going by fire now) and added a pet with a minor crit buff and a ton of other crit buffs.
What I am glad we did lose is reliance on shared ISB. I have seen fights with more landed SBs, same crit, 43 dmg lower from gear and 200 dps lower simple due to ISB usage and partial resists difference (200 less avg non crit SB, 700 less avg crit SB).

In the end something will have to be done. I don't know how affliction does in Heroic/Naxx10/Naxx25 gear but it does get Ruin which is at least a 5% more dmg. But destruction gets nothing on the way to lvl 80, well, 100 extra dmg or so for taking Aegis. And if Blizzard keeps their word on equal dps they will be doing something for a lot of classes/specs.

I don't mind doing bad dps if I do end up sucking but I want to see people posting they beat rogue/mage/hunter(s) without being the luckiest person on the planet for that boss fight, I want to see good rotations bringing locks above all hybrids, even if by just 50 dps, I want to see some warlock topping meters because he played it very well.

But as things stand we had a badly geared (half the gear was smth like 2nd best in slot) retri paladin breaking 3k and admitting he mostly facerolled (the good geared retri overaggroed and got himself killed right at start ). This is nothing close to what Blizzard said they wanted to achieve. But they do have until Ulduar gets launched to fix their new system, I'm not expecting overnight miracles.

At the moment we still have a few fixes to wait for.
1st is JoW. On the Brutallus kill this week I only got 7k mana out of it (avg 1 proce every 4.47s) but hunters got 4x as many procs, so it's anything but fixed.
2nd we have Pandemic with crit buffs on the mob.
3rd, Shadow Embrace with multiple affliction warlocks.
4th Conflag with Ruin.
5th Weird CB scaling. There is very easy proof on it. It normally does around Inci dmg, try it on a Vulnerable mob in BWL and see it do double the damage of incinerates. It is weird to have a CD spell do about same damage as the normal nuke. Atm the only use it has is using it when Immo is about to fall off so you don't get a cast of Inci right as it went down on the server.

 

Arelenda

It's also my opinion, actually. Our class scaled the best of all casters (6/7+20% per spell power) pre patch and had super synergies (10% malediction, 10% shadow weaving, 20% ISB, 15% DS) that were always on. No other class came close.

We also had only one pve tree (aside from the gimpy Malediction/affliction build). I'm looking forward to seeing that change, but I'd like to see some of the issues resolved before wotlk. Destro's damage seems a bit lowish, and affliction has a lot of disadvantages as previous poster pointed out. Ideally all 3 builds should have comparable value in raiding, preferably with a unique flavor to each. Right now, you'd want to bring just one warlock, for curses.

Let's keep it constructive, shall we?