Fire has more talents in destruction than shadow does... so I'm not sure how you figure that. The rationale for making it viable (in raids) could be that they want to add more options along the spectrum of Raid-utility<--->Personal-DPS. As it stands now the best personal DPS also still benefits the raid quite a bit with ISB. I could see them adding a purely selfish spec to the "right" of that that helps the raid zero, but does more damage.

I think the emberstorm change is there to buff PvP, making a destro arena build a bit less stupid.

Unless of course the ISB nerf is added, then the above statement becomes null, as ISB synergy is alot of the raid-buff reason to spec destro in the first place.

Lets hope they don't nerf ISB; a talent that has been all but unchanged in the 3 years I've played (expect for the buff that made dot ticks no burn a charge) and otherwise a mainstay of the raiding spec. And for more than one class.

Emberstorm (Rank 5) reduces the cast time of your Incinerate spell by 10%, that is now in the patch notes.

This is great for those that like the animation plus helps Destro PvP, plus maybe Mage buff. A lot of Mages say their squishiness and lack of utility would be fine if they had CoE, buffing Incinerate may make a CoE end up on the mob.

This still isn't gonna change PvE Warlocks. ISB is invaluable to the raid, Aff is still as weak as ever on the DPS front. I guess its another few months with 21/40 or bust!

Newest change on the PTRs.

How much will this obvious PVP change effect the sustainability of raiding locks. It seems like the less health, and more mana, the more efficient that it will be.

I hope it's not intended, but I wouldn't be surprised. If it is, it's a horrible change. You'd want to sacrifice a lot of Stamina, but with the amount of AoE/Raid Damage in encounters, sacrificing too much would get you killed quickly, and on top of that Life Tapping would be even more dangerous than before.

Actual ISB is very easy to value as it adds an expected %increase to shadow damage. And if that increase isn't greater than a potential DPS increase from switching to fire, it's not valuable enough to keep.

Its actually at 26% of health into 26% mana on the PTR o.O...and doesnt appear to be doing that even. Obviously bugged.

That wording of the talent makes the cast time 2.5*0.9=2.25. I thought it was "increases casting speed by 10%", which woudl be 2.5/1.1=2.27.

Can tweak the sheet by changing the incinerate cast-time lists to
list_filler:

[top](2.5*(1-0.02*ember))/(1+haste/100)+lag
list_filler_haste:

(2.5*(1-0.02*ember))/(1+tns_haste/100)+lag

The actual tooltip in-game says 2.25 seconds.

New lifetap change is really going to gimp us so bad. I went on PTRs and my lifetap gave me 850 mana compared to my original 1700+ mana on live

edit: tapping for 1290 now, forgot to get talents

after a couple restarts on the PTR it seemed to be fixed, now it actually gives mana back when low.

Scaling Life Tap and making SPriests viable were the two huge TBC buffs to Locks.

I tested with PvE gear (1400 shadow damage) 1600 Taps.

With S2/S3 gear (1000 damage) 1680 Taps.


My tooltip said 26% of health into mana.

Pardon the fact that this post is gonna blow some poor 17" away

I took the liberty to run let emberstorm run through my calculation bot.
Setup: 21/40 SB vs 21/40 Incinerate
SB with ISB, no cataclysm
Incinerate with cacatlysm
All possible raid buffs + t64part
10000 base mana
360 seconds duration
1000 cycles(to get average DPS)
Warlock is getting all his ISB for himself(granted he hits)
Immolate is up the whole time(from another warlock, NOT self cast)

Y-axis is DPS, X-axis is spelldamge scaling from 0-1800
(Yes for the theorycrafters, for each point in spelldamage it does 1000 cycles of 360 seconds)

I don´t dare to say that my calculation is 100% flawless, but it looks very close to reality.

Picture 1:
202hit, 0 crit, 0 haste, OLD emberstorm
http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/6421/warlock1pl8.jpg

Picture 2:
202hit, 600 crit, 0 haste, OLD emberstorm
http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/6317/warlock2md4.jpg

Picture 3:
202 hit, 0 crit, 300 haste, OLD emberstorm
http://img184.imageshack.us/img184/2710/warlock3dn7.jpg

Picture 4:
202 hit, 600 crit, 300 haste, OLD emberstorm
http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/2831/warlock4vv2.jpg

Picture 5:
202hit, 0 crit, 0 haste, NEW emberstorm
http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/2982/warlock5fc2.jpg

Picture 6:
202hit, 600 crit, 0 haste, NEW emberstorm
http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/2038/warlock6cz8.jpg

Picture 7:
202 hit, 0 crit, 300 haste, NEW emberstorm
http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/9357/warlock7id9.jpg

Picture 8:
202 hit, 600 crit, 300 haste, NEW emberstorm
http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/3569/warlock8aj3.jpg

Picture 9:
202 hit, 600 crit, 300 haste, NEW emberstorm, NO mana used
http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/9166/warlock9wb6.jpg

Picture 10:
202 hit, 600 crit, 300 haste, NEW emberstorm, SB without ISB
http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/6...rlock10zc0.jpg

I´ll check for errors and see if I can tune the Mp5 into it next, or the Life Tap changes.

Conclusion?
From what the calculations give away it doesn´t seem to matter much whether you use SB or IC in endgame.
ISB is what pushes SB slightly ahead(mind a calculation with cataclysm might change values a little).
Both scale equally with haste, SB scales better with crit(what a surprise).
The margin that keeps SB ahead seems to be ISB - but this calculation is not done with shadowpriests and other warlocks in mind.

Note: Compare #8 and #10 and you will see that ISB accounts for roughly 400 DPS at 1800 spelldam.
Feedback is welcome
#Edit - pictures removed for new calculations

The new 2.25 Incinerate is really very nice for leveling with emberstorm, with cheaper mana cost plus similar SB damage you do better than live's fire spells.

I wonder how incinerate's buff works with haste.
It is 10% off the casting time so 0.25 seconds off normally. With haste making Incinerate 2.42 (with 55 haste rating) it would be a 2.178 cast time, so it looks as you gain more haste Emberstorm doesn't give the same benefit as with 0 haste.

This doesn't really mean anything since most locks don't raid in these circumstances. It might have been better to model 15% ISB against the change to emberstorm, but we all know how that will work out anyway.

If the 15% isb with charges only usable by you happens, there won't be a shadow lock left.

Perhaps a dumb question, but why would you assume this? Casting your own Immolates after they tick out should be more damage than continuing to Incinerate, even assuming that there are Immolates present for the bonus to Incinerate. Assuming a 30% crit rate, it's 1.5s to deal 409 + .25 * SD * 1.3 + ..65 * SD versus 2.25s to deal 923 + .91 * SD * 1.3, or (409 + .25 * X * 1.3 + .65 * X) / 1.5 = (923 + .91 * X * 1.3) / 2.25.



According to my math, with 30% crit at any level of SD above ~1100 you should gain some damage by throwing your own Immolates in there after it's ticked out. I understand it'll make some of graphing more of a pain (most likely, the way in which you reference haste) but you're ignoring a fairly key part of the difference without factoring that in.

Just to transfer some info from the 2.4 thread to here, regarding new lifetap:
It's 15% (or maybe 16%). 26% is a display error. If you link the spell to a non-warlock they will see the correct value.
Mana return is currently working off of current mana, not maximum mana. Health cost is still max health. We assume this is a bug and will be fixed. Please keep in mind when reporting numbers from the test realm.
Reports are that improved lifetap is functional at the moment.

My hope is that the two percents become decoupled. Something like 15% health for 20% mana seems appropriate for a normal warlock's health to mana ratio. That depends on what the actual reason for the change is though, because I can identify at least three posibilities. Changing how lifetap scales with gear, an arena PvP nerf, or making INT more desireable for warlocks. On that note, what will it take for leulier's spreadsheet to include INT as a DPS stat, in terms of lowering time spent lifetapping?

I just wanted to thank the OP for this post. My lock hits 70 soon and it's nice to have all the stuff - even the obvious crap everyone should know - laid out in a very simple, easy-to-read post.

Unless i'm missing someting, both of these are semi-unrealistic scenarios,

Adding the new formula would take maybe 2 mins and maybe another 20 mins of work adding a sheet in to calculate TNS for INT. The custom life tap frequency setting would ignore the adjustments but all of the other options would adjust accordingly automatically as soon as the formula was updated.

You are not missing anything, both of those assumptions are skewed towards incinerate DPS considerably.