Denjinmo

Even for the more complex and focus demanding fights, I believe the good players will adapt to Affliction's unique play style. It's just a matter of surmounting a new issue that we've seen to a very minimal extent in the past. A large part of adapting is going to be instinctively knowing when you're alright to look away from DoTimer, what to filter out, how to monitor CDs vs debuff timers, and knowing what DoTs you're going to have to refresh in what groupings (if that sounds right to you; I'm referring mostly to knowing that you're generally gonna have to refresh Immo/UA relatively close together, and CoA/SL which comes close to cutting the attention required in half...since you can view it as groups of DoTs).

I've been making tremendous leaps in that regard lately, especially when you apply some techniques healers use to avoid tunnel vision (an issue I also had at one point).

1) Jim's Cooldown Pulse is an excellent tool if for no other reason than watching for Haunt's CD to be up. The enormous icon allows me to both know when it's ready, and it allows me to keep track of my environment due to the size. It makes for one less bar you have to watch, which is excellent.

2) Filter our Corruption and Shadow Embrace. Two less bars to watch that you don't really need to see. While it is possible for Corruption to fall off due to a Haunt miss/poor Haunt up-time, it's far more valuable to just glance quickly at Demon with just Corruption added in than having Corruption on a bar grouped with the rest of your debuff timers. I find myself glancing for less than a quarter of a second at demon to make sure "Co" is still lit up green.

While it may seem basic, those 2 things alone have dramatically increased my performance over the last few days on any fight that requires a great deal of DPS and focus, as they afford me rather lengthy windows where I can do something other than stare at the timer bars. Try to constantly estimate how many seconds you have until either the next time you need to glance down at the bars after the first time, and react appropriately instead of staring at the bars until they hit 0 seconds. Middle of the screen - glance - "Oh, UA has about 7 seconds left, I'll look again and make sure my timing is right in 4-5 seconds" - middle of the screen, and back to timers a few seconds later.

While it might seem impossible, the large issue I can say honestly, beyond learning the new priorities, is one many healers deal with. There's not much intrinsic difference between feeling as though one needs to sit and stare without looking away at DoTimer, and sitting there staring without looking away at Grid.

With that said, I encourage everyone not to whine, not to give up, but to adapt, help each other out, make suggestions, and post constructive feedback for Blizz through the appropriate avenues.

 

Bismar

I'm curious, if you're specced Demonic Pact, what's the math in Firestone versus Brilliant or Superior Wizard oil? That 42 spell damage doesn't just help you, but it gives 4 spellpower to all your fellow casters too. Does anyone think it's enough to matter?

 

Chrysanthemum

I have problems with going affliction because there already is an afflict lock in my guild. I've already had raids where if I try to go destro mixing in corrupt + CoA for Molten core, one of my dots would fall off prematuraly. Any word on the debuff limit being changed? Also my top raid dps spec has been felguard ruin (I can top charts with spec if hunters slack)but my T4 rogue completely destroys my lock in damage/dps.

 

Daidai

Denjinmo, good idea with filtering the timer. I agree, after a short time of raiding it should be okay to handle the information input, when the "personel" timer got the right feeling.

 

Tauraherion

I have a few questions:

1- Whats your rotation/spell priority?
2- Do you keep casting your spells when metamorphed or do you use any of the unique spells besides immo aura?
3- What is your spellpower and spell crit? I believe that some of the gear your armory shows are not the ones you use to raid.

 

Sydane

The 10% Demonic Pact buff is per individual, not based on the source. It overwrites the Totem of Wrath buff, so if it drops off, Totem of Wrath picks back up and you only lose the difference for that period of time. As far as I know, if the Totem of Wrath buff is giving you more (as in your spellpower is 1440 or below), then it will be the one that affects you and Demonic Pact will drop off.

One of the reasons I stayed Demo is I've been Demo for a long time and it hasn't really changed all that much, except the gain of instant corruption. Moving into position CoD-> Corruption-> Demonic Empowerment then once stable Immolate and Shadowbolt, refreshing everything as needed except Demonic Empowerment unless I have to move. If possible, I just fight in melee range, since threat really isn't an issue.

Once heroism pops I hit Meta, then charge if needed, hit trinket, immolation aura, then return to the normal rotation. I haven't checked the damage well enough on the cleave to know if it is worth it but I don't think it is against a single target. It's pretty basic and since pet survivability is a non-issue (I'm currently healing him for 30% of my damage, plus his own avoidance) he's basically a fire and forget DoT that does 550 dps. If anything, Demo is probably the easiest spec to play now.

My gear is mid-T6, nothing special. Unbuffed 1400 or so damage, 22% paperdoll crit, and about 11% haste. I was at 27% crit for the fight but ranged around 30-35% for the night. I did 2k dps in the two minute Teron fight with my pet being 31% of that. However, due to the broken JoW I never had to lifetap even once.

Empathy does not imply approval.

 

Krathis

I agree with most of this post. Immolation Aura alone was running 4% of my dps on boss fights last night and 6% overall for the run. On top of this you have 20% increased damage for thirty second during a bloodlust which is a pretty hefty dps gain, especially on fights that are lasting just over two minutes.

I have to question the Demonic Empathy uptime though considering it only procs off cleave currently (for the felguard) and only lasts for three casts. Three bloodlusted Shadow Bolts will eat through the Demonic Empathy buff before it can possibly refresh and a renewed dot cycle will do the same, keep in mind that cleave is on a six second cooldown and no amount of haste will change that. At 32% melee crit you're looking at an average of one Demonic Empathy proc once every 18 seconds. Unless I'm missing something here the uptime is way lower then you're assuming from your wws reports. More likely you only saw two gains because A) there was some overlap or B) because you got very unlucky with cleave crits over the course of the fight and it really only procced twice. I suppose there's a third possibility in that you got very lucky and it procced more then it should have statistically but I find examples A and B far more likely.

As far as Demonic Pact I agree that it's probably worth the talent points if you're pushing enough spell power and that the uptime is great. That said I did notice some strangeness when testing the proc on a target dummy in that I wasn't gaining quite 10% more spell power. I'm guessing this was due to certain spell damage buffs not counting for the proc such as dark moon card:crusade and possibly trinket pops.

Also does firestone still proc melee fire damage?

*edit*

Did some further testing with Demonic Pact. At 1546 bonus damage and 1153 bonus healing I was gaining 89 bonus damage off of Demonic Pact procs. Not sure what's going on but the talent is not working as advertised by the tool tip.

Okay at 1471 bonus damage I was gaining what I should. The numbers above I had a spirit buff still rolling. So apparently the bonus damage from the spirit buff now counts as a spell damage buff and won't stack with Dark Pact.

 

voln

0/46/15 here. Do you have any combatlogs or WWS of your raids with metamorph? I would just like to look at numbers. I tried a raid as metamorph but did not have great results with it. I want to believe it works out better but with around 40% crit raid buffed and with ruin on no cooldown, I just have a hard time justifying the spec. Also my Demonic Pact was getting overwritten by totems on a regular basis so it felt like a waste of points for me.

 

Sydane

You are right, I went back and compared the WWS and 2 procs corresponds to 2 Cleave Crits, which means the talent is pretty much completely worthless. I had thought I'd seen the buff up but in 4 rows of buffs I must have been looking at something else. I'll probably pull those three points and two from Fel Synergy and pick up ISB.

Firestone melee procs were 240 damage average with 150% crits. I would assume whatever mechanics it has always had for melee remain the same.

Wow Web Stats

My effective SB crit for Teron was 27% but it was usually closer to 35% on the other fights. On Council I was stuck on the priest to maintain CoT and of course moving a lot but I left my pet on the paladin the entire fight, as a result he did 45% of my total damage. Creo is somewhat better geared than me and ran an experimental affliction build, Hiro was destro but has significantly worse gear. Meta is condusive to short fights and cooldown stacking, I'm sure in longer fights felguard/ruin would be more individual dps, but Demonic Pact is currently quite potent. It will never get pushed off by Totem of Wrath unless the caster's spellpower is below 1440.

Empathy does not imply approval.

 

Krathis

Further testing on Demonic Pact revealed that the spirit based spell power we get from Fel Armor is not considered base spell power for the purposes of calculating the Demonic Pact damage increase but does seem to stack fully with Demonic Pact.

This means that a fully buffed Demo Lock using Demonic Pact needs to subtract Spirit*.39 spell power from the total they're seeing on their Bonus Damage in order to determine how much of their spell power is actually going towards the buff (assuming they took 3/3 Demonic Aegis).

Trinket pops, spell damage food and oil, and flasks (at least supreme power I didn't test with pure death) all appear to be adding to Demonic Pact effectiveness correctly.

 

Peppermort

Ah right, yes, I remember the maledicted CoE and Improved Blood Pact examples now, thank you. To confirm, I did a test when I got home against the attack power reported in the pet tab of the character display, and the felguard's attack power was increasing by exactly 80% for 10 stacks, so the talent is working as advertised.

 

s[orc]ery

I just did Brutallus with 0/46/15 using a doomguard pet and felguard sac, did 3167 dps with the Doomguard being 565 of that.

Recount
CoA/Corr/Immo/Shadowbolt.

Based on this i am actually pretty optimistic about warlock DPS at the moment. On that fight my dots were constantly dropping off from the debuff cap, my destro pot and 1 trinket were out of sync with lust due to a bad call on vent, and I think I didn't have the demonic knowledge buff (not confirmed). My crit rate on the above fight was also only 3% above normal.

The doomguard is obviously not a sustainable practice but with the 15 minute duration and not sacrificing a member i don't see why it wouldn't be used at every opportunity.

I'm also keen to see how i would have done given a felguard and just Shadowbolt spam with CoA.

 

Kabale

In this build, is Mana Feed a requirement with the current "bugged?" JoW? It would be nice to be able to put that one point into Demonic Empowerment for the times when Doomguard isn't being used.

When we did Brutallus yesterday, I noticed that my Imp was doing significantly less damage than others that I have seen. Link is Wow Web Stats. Max crit was at 700, average somewhere around 450~. When compared to a WWS of one of the top10 kills on WWS, Wow Web Stats the difference is quite significant (crits of 1k). I've been trying to figure out what the differences in raid setup were as the gear difference isn't huge (same spelldmg, less haste from my side at least). The only obvious differences I can think of is no Ferocious Inspiration in our raid, no moonkin, and no Demo Lock. My imp was not properly buffed as well as he had been phased, but I don't see how all of this adds up for the substantial difference in Imp dps.

 

Chrysanthemum

Well considering his level of gear and his idea that prot warriors are "gimped", it's very likely your suspicion of his lack of knowledge and that of his guild's to be correct. His post was more or less the equivalent belief of many other's that "Hey your lock topped charts in X dungeon so they're fine". Here are some points to address for the errant prot warrior:

1) AFfliction DPS is highly luck dependant if matched side by side assuming mobility is any issue. Lag plays a severe part in keeping dots up as well as missing GCD's can be huge.
2) Debuff limit (while ZA probably won't see the debuff limit, it's also possible due to huge amounts of debuff slots afflict takes up)
3) Several talents are bugged in the tree itself. Uncertain of whether shadow embrace is fixed or not but there have been varying reports that it only works for one player regardless of how many stacks it.
4)Gear, Considering your main is in ZA/T4-early T5 gear, I'm assuming your guild isn't well geared across the board. as a result, the gear disparity might not be too different between his lock and yours. (My rogue for example outgears a few main rogues in my guild) Add that on top of your warlock being geared towards destro and your lock probably freshly tuned to afflict and that can explain a lot of the dps difference. Especially since you more or less suggest the lock in question is a newb to his class.

Ghostcrawler did recently post though (in the BETA) forums that lock dPS arent' quite where they would like it to be so here's to some hope.

IMO, the biggest problem so far has been Demonic Sacrifice. Gear and such was previously based around Demo Sac and shadow bolts (see T6 to reflect this). Now it's being radically shifted to another direction without really shifting the gear to compensate.

I think Blizzard is taking WArlocks in the /right/ direction. (I don't look forward to another 10 levels + year of raiding hitting shadow bolt) However, the idea isn't very fine tuned IMO.

 

Flamingcloud

Fairly certain doom guard with a pet sacced being the best warlock dps build is not working as intended.

 

blarnie

Sorry if this has already been addressed, but I was unable to find it...

Is Pandemic currently working on live servers?

I know they were planning on changing the graphic/animation to not be just the simple shadowbolt proc similar to Timbals Focusing Crystal - but I have yet to notice any Pandemic procs since 3.0. Does anyone know if they changed the mechanic and I just didn't realize or what the deal is with Pandemic?

 

Morwen

It's working fine*, check the combat log and/or Recount and/or the various WWS logs that have been posted.

*In the sense that it does proc at least at your base crit rate, but doesn't seem to benefit from the +crit raid debuffs -- I might be wrong on that assertion, but over a sample of several hundred ticks it procs less than 30% for me whereas raid crit rate should be 40%+.

I'm also not sure what the deal with doomguards is, they are quite powerful while up but if they stay as is, eventually there's going to be a min-maxed fight were you'll say, "Let's wait an hour for the next pull so warlocks can all summon doomguards."

 

• KingSpeedy

Pandemic was accounting for ~5% of my dps when I ran SWP as 56/0/6. Not bad for a 3pt talent you don't really have to worry about.

 

rochan

Rain of Fire is finally an alternative to seed of corruption now. It ticks for about 1k and can crit (for double!). With haste it's deadly and you get 10% threat reduction from the destro tree. My only complaint is you can't backdraft it (that would probably be OP).

 

Melchior

So, GC's last post on the beta forums indicated that we will see the following buffs to help boost Warlock PvE DPS:

Emberstorm: +5% Fire damage
Shadow Mastery: +5% Shadow Damage
Demonic Tactics: +5% Critical Strike chance

On top of that, it wasn't mentioned in that post but Demonic Empowerment is being taken off GCD.

 

Chrysanthemum

I will post this again since apparently you need the TLR version. Most warlocks here KNOW how to play their class. Your lack of experience with the actual class and simply saying "chin up" doesn't help with the fact that there are clear flaws addressing warlocks in both PvE and PvP.

 

• Juice

Don't participate in flame wars. If someone can't disagree without being disagreeable, report them and the mods will handle it. If you get down into the dirt with them, we'll consider you part of the problem.

 

Presarc

I'm noticing that a lot of people are saying that 60% and 70% crit rates are ridiculous. While this may be true, it is significantly less true than it was pre-3.0.

There are a good amount of stacking crit buffs at this point that the warlock can use. Let us assume a 30% baseline critical strike chance.

+10% Improved Scorch = 40%
+5% Boomkin = 45%
+3% Ele Shaman = 48%
+3% Focus Magic Mage = 51%
+20% Empowered Imp Buff = 71%

Obviously the Imp buff isn't up all the time, but I haven't seen any consistent uptime numbers. Let's assume conservatively on the Empowered Imp Buff that the uptime is only 5%. This still brings the warlock that is fully buffed up to a 56% critical strike chance. My understanding is that the Imp's Fire Bolt chance is based on the caster's chance, in this case in the 40-50% range. This would lead me to believe that the uptime is higher than 5%, probably closer to 10% or more (since there is no internal cooldown), bringing us up to and above a 60% crit rate.

 

Fimotik

My understanding is that the imp has a base crit rate of about 5%, so with raid buffs it hits about 25% (which is what my parses are telling me anyway.

 

s[orc]ery

Mana Feed was merely a filler though it should be taken in any ordinary raiding situation. Demonic Empowerment was reportedly not worth the gcd, but it has since been taken off the GCD in beta and will be useful in the future.

This i think is a much more valid concern for warlock design than whatever our relative DPS happens to be at 70. Both the Doomguard and the Infernal are incredibly potent DPS cooldowns in their 3.0 incarnations. Infernals, for the minute they are up, deal 500 DPS completely unbuffed. Their immolation aura ticks for 300 as well. If at some point a raiding guild finds itself not able to reach an enrage timer, there will be a heavy dependence on DPS cooldowns such as these and they be forced to wait for the cooldowns of these abilities to come up again.

It is analogous to the design flaw of protection warriors who could only shield wall once every hour; an ability needed to survive many encounters. Fortunately the major warrior cooldowns have been reduced to 5 minutes. I hope at some point this occurs for the Doomguard/Infernal as well, or for the two pets to be redesigned for some niche purpose not provided by current pets (such as, for instance, decursing, or any of the rarer 'required' raid buffs)