I disagree on the no priority system, I think it means your priority system as destruction needs to be very situationally aware. I'll have a look at putting up a priority flow for people to argue about when I get home from work this evening, but as a start to me it seems the questions can be built around:

1. Is corruption up? No, cast corruption
2. Is chaos bolt ready? Yes, cast chaos bolt
3. Is immolate down? Yes, cast immolate
4. Cast Incinerate
5. Has immolate just faded and do I need mana? Yes, lifetap

For a conflag built it gets a little more tricky and you need to add in will immolate fade in 2 seconds, conflag and then spam three fillers before putting immolate back up. For those of us on higher latency the conflag option is less satisfactory as we will miss more conflags than a low latency player.

The situational haste that occurs in a non conflag build shouldn't change the priorities too much, but I'll use the spreadsheet to work out a priority (based on maths and the thread so far) for arguments sake. So far I think that destruction requires a less focused play style than affliction.

Did I miss a note somewhere with regards to conflag / ruin issue being fixed? At last count, ruin was not applying to conflag. Did that get fixed?

Also, if you just "ate" the immo with conflag and are under backdraft, the reason to "not" put immo back up is due to the hasted immo clipping the gdc? Wouldn't that only apply if there is an immo up by another lock? Isn't the clipped GDC less dps loss then un-immo'd incins?

Or am I missing a piece of the puzzle here?

They did fix the Conflag/Ruin issue, here is my post from the Wotlk thread.

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t26024-w...56/#post942625

As for your other question, casting three Incins while under backdraft, without immo, has been shown to be less dps than using one of the backdraft charges on immo, even if it pings the GCD. It was also in the Wotlk preview thread somewhere, though I can't seem to find it. If there is another immo up from a second warlock, definately cast three Incins and then reapply immo immediately after.


On a related note, is there any plans to condense these two threads soon?

0/40/21?

I specced this last night and did some testing on training dummies....i got higher numbers SB spamming(~1600) with succubus that i did using a 5/3/53 destro spec(~1550), and 51/0/10 affy(~1450). I was at 44% self-buffed crit 1480 self buffed sp power in 0/40/21 and im way over hit cap now that im still hit gemmed from pre patch. so i could gem haste im betting and see a large increase in numbers.

I am not sure, but I suspect destro will scale with raid buffs better than sbolt spam.

I found it really hard to be raid aware and keep up my affy or destro rotations. Flame me for being a suck player if you must, but I have a hard time maintaining a perfect rotation and also watching for fire on the ground and call out event over vent and give instruction etc.

SB spam is great in that i can mash the sbolt key while being able to be completely raid-aware. Watching dottimers and worrying about shifting cast priorities with destro really consumes alot of my attention.

I don't recall seeing it in the patch notes, but Conflag does indeed now benefit from Ruin. 1400 hits, 2800 crits.

Today's Brutallus. 3440 DPS. My spec is PvE 2/3/56, and the gear in my armory is right. I'm thinking that unless there are major changes, this spec (+10 demo for Imp Fel Armor) will be the best come expansion, for a 2/13/56 spec. I have Conflag for the mobility. If anyone thinks affliction or demo can do any better, I'd love to see it or hear what you think.

Only one conflag, it's not part of my rotation (it was at the end).

Rotation goes Immolate and CoA up 100% of the time. I am keeping my own Immolate up. If Chaos Bolt is off cooldown, use it (prioritizing Immolate/CoA above that). Other than that, cast Incinerate.

Sadly I cannot open WWS at work, but if the OP only spams immol/incin without conflag and does not use conflag/backdraft, there's no reason whatsoever to go that deep into destro at lvl 80. On lvl 70 you do as you cannot get anything else worthwhile for your points. On level 80 you get 5% fire dmg/5% crit from master demon and that is guaranteed a higher dps increase then chaos bolt, which is all you use from the 40+ in destro if you don't use conflag in your normal rotation.

The thing is that this works for you due to almost absolute-end-game gear you have. Just like old 0/21/40 still works for Buzzkill.

With early SWP gear IMHO dropping conflag/backdraft is not an option yet : / Also the simplicity of rotation makes CoA/Immo/incin spam look pretty good dps-wise. The fact is that people are still learning the complex fire destro rotations and therefore the average output is lowered by quite a bit.

So to summarize, my experience shows that well executed backdraft with dots in non uber-endgame gear beats the 2.X-like old spam rotations.

I suspect we'll see better numbers from Affliction (and possibly Demonology depending on pet scaling) in the first raiding tier for the same reason that destruction only became viable once hit-cap was obtained and a decent level of crit. Of course, this is highly dependant on gear itemization.

Granted, hit cap will be much easier to reach with the raid buffs provided, but you definately won't have the required hit when you ding 80, and hit is much more detrimental to destro than Affliction.

Having said all of that, I do recall seeing better numbers for Destro than Affliction against the lvl83 dummy on my PvP premade lock... but the testing wasn't conclusive at all.

I did some calculations. First, I estimated that the Imp casts once every 1.8 seconds (6% haste Totem + 3% Auras) and that a Warlock lands a crittable spell every 2 seconds on average. I was trying to be conservative with these numbers, to overestimate the effect of Emp. Imp. With these numbers, I came up with an Emp. Imp buff about once every 3.6 casts, or a 5.6% crit buff.

So it's about the same as the crit buff of Master Demonologist (though the Imp itself DOES have 5% higher crit with MD).

Then I calculated 5% fire damage vs. Chaos Bolt, using Presarc/Blickz' WWS.
Incinerate was 67% total with 364k total.
Immolate was 9% total with 47k damage
Imp was 8% total with 46k damage
Chaos Bolt was 10% total with 55k damage.

He cast Chaos Bolt 11 times, and at 2/2.25s cast time of Incinerate (haste cancels out) that's 9.78 Incinerates. Using his average Incinerate damage, I came up with 9.78 Incinerates being 48.8k damage, a damage loss of 6,200.

Changing the Immolate and Imp numbers for F&B, Emp. Imp, and Unholy power, we get:
Immo: 40k
Imp: 47k
add the new Incin total (+9.78 casts) and we get:
500k total Fire damage, multiplied by 1.05:

525k fire damage, versus 512k with Chaos Bolt. A clear advantage of 81 DPS in the 160 second fight in his WWS.

The Master Demonologist build I was comparing the Chaos Bolt build to is 0/30/41. (Shadowfury is pure personal preference, I love having it available for any AOE situation, but it can go anywhere.)

Why won't you be hit capped? 3% from buffs and 3% from talents is 11% hit from gear. Ratings approximately doubled from 70->80, so 24 hit per point is 264 hit to cap. That's obtainable with level 70 gear easily, seeing as we've been working with a 202 hit rating cap for years.

And I don't think it will be hard to have a decent crit level (though with Fire that's not especially important compared to haste). 8% crit from talents puts you at about 13% crit naked, along with 18% crit from raid buffs is 31% crit with 0 rating from gear.

Obscure questions, not sure if it was answered.

I know Death's Embrace is bugged in that your currently applied DoT's do not immediately increase in damage sub-35%. Rather, you would need to reapply them.

So question 1 is: Is it better to just refresh these DoT's when they expire, or start refreshing immediately at 35%
Question 2: When Haunt reapplies Corruption, is the newly refreshed Corruption affected by Death's Embrace or do I need to separately cast it again?

Shadow Fury is great to have overall as there are a lot of aoe situations and it procs MC which then makes RoF a lot more powerful. Plus the stun is very helpful in a few encounters, mainly Gluth but comes in handy in a few others.

Nether Prot gives a ton of survivability and you don't really have the points for imp soul leech in a 41/30 spec. If you have those points avaible, I'd take that. If not, SL is hardly worth it while NP is very useful in general and shines in some fights where Warlocks tank, like 4h. Soul Link plus Nether Protection plus Master Dem buff from felhunter (-10% spelldmg taken) is some serious damage reduction vs casters. Not sure how it stacks up exactly, but in some way it certainly does multiply and you are not taking much damage, I can assure you that.

Cataclysm, I dunno how you are 'easily' hitcapped, but my warlock on beta with mostly lvl 80 epics is using some hit gems and is not exactly hit capped at all. You still need 265 or so hit rating to cap out WITH 3% hit debuff on mob (spriest, druid) and the talent. And then you will be doing 10 men raids without spriest/moonkin, at least I don't plan to stack raid setups for stuff like nax10 or OS. If you talk about lvl 70 raiding, my apologies, I am not really thinking about that any more. At level 80 with the current avaible early raiding gear there I don't see how you can skip that talent for at least a few weeks to come.

In almost all the posts I have read CoA is listed as part of the rotation for destruction warlocks. I personally chose to spend the points for Improved Corruption and use it in my rotation instead.

I did this for a few reasons. Currently mobs in raids die really fast so CoA doesn't get the time to fully cycle. On bosses I have the responsibility to use other curses. With 5 points in Corruption I also gain +5% crit for my SoC, which I am using alot due to a great pally tank. I anticipate switching to CoA as well as adding Conflag into my spec when Wotlk comes out however, so this comment is only applicable for another week.

It will be tough to choose between Demonic Empowerment and Shadowfury. Although the two specs don't synergize very well (since you cant have Demon Emp and Empowered Imp), I would be willing to bet that the global for Demon Emp is worth it in PvE DPS. Shadowfury will be nice situationally, but I will probably lean towards whatever is more DPS on Patchwerk.

Demonic Empowerment does not trigger a global.

In terms of affliction, I think I've worked something out that will allow very good DPS output, without much of the current affliction hassle of having to tunnelvision your DoTimer. This is done by using a very loose rotation system. I'd like to stress that this is not an exact rotation, as an exact rotation will never work with affliction due to movement issues, changing haste(bloodlust/heroism for example), nightfall procs, ect. Rather, I set up a "framework" of DoTs in which I tried to optimize DoT uptime for as many as possible, would be easy to manage in order to be practical, and still preserve plenty of freedom for situational changes. This is what I came up with:

First, im assuming you open with some combination of a shadowbolt, a haunt, and corruption. After that, I used this general 30 second "framework:"
t=0s:UA,Immo,CoA,SL
*filler*
t=15s:UA,Immo
*filler*
t=30s:UA,Immo,CoA,SL

This might look a little bit odd, in that it does not follow an exact DPCT order. This is intentional however, because I am grouping DoTs by duration rather than DPCT. If executed perfectly however, it will ensure 100% uptime for everything but CoA. With the current level 70 version of CoA, it is capped at 80% uptime. (It's only up for a possible 24 seconds out of 30) This might seem to be a major flaw with my framework, but once the level 80 glyphs become available and the duration of CoA is extended to 28 seconds, the issue will be significantly smaller. At 80, using this framework, you will be able to maintain 100% uptime for everything but CoA, and CoA will be capped at a respectable 93.3% uptime. Alternatively, one could substitute CoD for CoA and get a 100% uptime, but I think that would still be a DPS loss. (I'll do some napkin math soon to figure that out) Rotation with CoD would be: UA,Immo,SL,CoD or CoD,UA,Immo,SL

While the numbers are nice, what I'm finding to be the biggest benefit to this framework is that it greatly reduces the number of things you need to concentrate on for affliction. Knowing exactly when to refresh DoTs allows me to focus my attention more on other things. Having the nice filler sections is good for this. Because they're consistant, and fairly long, you could use that time to be more reactive on a new encounter, or micromanage Haunt/Shadow Bolt/Life Tap to maximize DPS on a familiar one. By freeing the player of the need to constantly prioritize 7 spells at any given time, reducing that number to 3, I believe that overall DPS will be higher than trying to exactly nail every DoT exactly when it ends, with no specific order. I think that 6.7% CoA downtime is worth this significant simplification.

Thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

Edit: Thought I'd post some observed DPS numbers I've been getting using this. All tests are done on Dr. Boom, only buffs are Fel Armor and Master Spellstone (havn't had the chance to test in a raid yet.) My spec is 55/0/6. Using 1 point in Molten Core to boost Immo damage:

Wow Web Stats
Wow Web Stats <- 2 attempts
WWS Loading...

When you add in the paltry DPS cotribution of the Imp (look at total Raid DPS,) I'm hitting roughly 2k DPS unbuffed. Now I just need to test it in a raid environment.

Because with Master Demonologist you can't get Imp. Soul Leech and Shadow and Flame at the same time.

Certainly if you want to maximize your Patchwerk DPS that's what you'd do. Personally I like to enjoy my spec a little more than my Patchwerk DPS, so I put it in Shadowfury. Like I said, it's up to you what to do with that last point. The defining talents are the build are Master Demonologist & Shadow and Flame, not Shadowfury or DE. Just think of it as a 0/30/40 build and do with it as you will.

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Some more WWS calculations:
Demonic Empowerment is +20% crit 30 seconds out of 1 minute, that's 10% overall.
Blickz's Imp had 29% crit in that WWS, and these stats:
Avg Noncrit: 524, Avg Crit: 790, Avg Total: 601.14

Bumping that up to 39% crit gives us an average total of 627.74. With 76 firebolts cast in 160 seconds, that's an increase of 2021.6 damage, or 12.6 DPS.

More abstractly, it increased his Imp's damage by 4.425%. With his Imp being 8% of his overall DPS, that's an increase of 0.354% damage overall.

Oh, and Imp. Soul Leech is something that should be considered against my 0/30/40 spec. Blickz gained 6,126 mana from ISL in 160 seconds, with a 32.1% proc rate. I think this will have less of an impact at 80 when we have decent spirit, but with his spirit of 145 + buffs (159 with kings?) he had life taps of 1264, which is 4.85 more Life Taps. This seems like the largest effect ISL can have, it will only go down at 80. Demonic Aegis/Chaos Bolt level 80 builds *do* have access to Imp. Life Tap though that 0/30/40 doesn't.

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And being over the Hit cap at 70 seems a poor reason to not take a Hit talent. For one, the hit cap is going up, and we will also be replacing our gear. You don't have much MANDATORY hit on gear (head enchant). Personally I try to keep 2 good items for each slot, one with hit and one without. Call it loot whoring, but I just consider it my offspec, and it allows me to mix and match very easily to maximize my Spell Power, Spirit, Crit, and Haste while just barely hitting the Hit cap. You can also regem/enchant to lower Hit usually.

Good post about Affliction, cleared up a lot for me. I've been having a lot of discussions lately about the relative difficulty of Affliction vs. Destro (after Ghostcrawler posted that Aff's DPS was balanced because it was harder to pull off than Destro). It's interesting though that both talent trees can have their rotations simplified.

Destro starts with Immolate, Incinerate, Curse of Agony, Corruption, Chaos Bolt, and Conflag in the mix.

Aff has Curse of Agony, Immolate, Siphon Life, Unstable Affliction, Shadow Bolt, and Haunt (plus Corruption once per fight).

Here I am dropping spells out of the Destro rotation to streamline it (that's half of my goal with this 0/30/40 spec) and you're doing something similar for Aff. Restores a little bit of my faith in Blizz's Warlock changes.

Edit: How about this for a macro for that rotation?

/castsequence reset=6 Unstable Affliction, Immolate, Curse of Agony, Siphon Life;

You press it 4 times at t=0, after 6 seconds it resets (that doesn't have to be exactly 6), press it 2 times at t=15, resets 6 seconds later (t=21), press it 4 times at t=30, repeat....

You'd probably also want individual hotkeys for movement fights, but this macro could streamline your timers.

Interesting that wou would mention that macro.. as I was using that exact macro for my DPS tests. Ive found it works very well in a relatively static fight, and probably would still be effective even if the fight required some movement.

Another note that I havn't seen much mention of, and found surprising while I was experimenting the other day, is the change to how On Use trinkets affect DoT damage. Under the new system, it makes sense to use these differently than they've historically been used pre-3.0. Instead of popping them before applying DoTs, you get a better return popping them during a filler spell, that way all your DoTs are up and ticking to recieve the benefit.

I'd like to do some testing with Backdraft to see what is actually the best for it, for a variety of things, like

A) Is it more effective to conflag after immolates second to last tick, or is it better DPS to conflag as soon as it's off CD due to the potential DPS backdraft might add?

B) Are 3 incinerates really the best filler spell (assuming you're the only one putting immolate up) or would it be better to get immolate back up and get two more incinerates in?

C) Since fire locks can get some crazy fast casting with backdraft and bloodlust, so much that it wastes some GCD time, during bloodlust is it better DPS to just stop conflagging entirely (Perhaps that because of the nature of having so much haste, it would be better just to incin/immo during it)

D) Or is conflagging even worth it at all?

I'm sure some/most of these could be figured out with some simple deduction on my part, but I'm kind of in a homework crunch right now, but they all seem like valid inquiries that aren't entirely clear to me yet. In addition, I'm not on beta server so I don't even know that these questions are worth figuring out at 70 since the answers will probably be nulled in a week or so, I'm not familiar with common 80 gear levels yet, I suppose with some theorycrafting of level 80 gear I could start on it, but that's much different from reality.

So since 3.0 I have still kept with 0/21/40 shadowbolt spamming shadowbolt and saccing the Succi and it seems to still be decent. But now i am looking at is a fire lock better now? It has emberstorm which might be better then ISB. Not sure if the moltencore procs from immolate either. If this is a good dps spec is it better to use the conflag and always keep immo up?

I have been doing 0/46/15 since 3.0 and I find the DPS to be just as good as yours. I am pushing 3500 DPS Wow Web Stats on Brut and I am planning on giving 0/50/21 a real good look at 80. I expect the DPS to be on par with the spec you stated as I will be picking up talents that directly affect my damage ( Devastation / Demonic Empathy ) and you are only getting Demonic Aegis.

I hear good things about Affliction and Destruction at 80 but I don't see alot of talk about Demo from what I am seeing its doing quite well at the moment and I see no reason it will be different at 80.