Morakk

Except you can swap back to your real weapons during the Shadowbolt cast and not lose the extra spell damage.

 

PSGarak

He's talking about the shadowbolt before, not the shadowbolt after:
1. Cast shadowbolt, swap weapons so the cooldown is finished before the spell goes off: lose shadowbolt damage
2. Lifetap and swap weapons back: gain extra mana
3. Cast next shadowbolt: normal
It's the only way to swap weapons and get extra mana out of lifetap without losing a GCD in there, since the weapon has to be swapped before casting lifetap (unlike Evocation).

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

galzohar

You could also simply swap the weapons during the shadowbolt after the liftap instead of immidiately after the lifetap, eliminating possible "extra" GCD that could be caused by desync or whatever. Although it might not really matter (needs testing) the "safe" way would be to swap back the weapons during the shadowbolt rather than as soon as you lifetap.

Doing some very rough math it, looks like the dps gained by lifetapping for 2300 instead of 2000 will increase DPS by 0.75% but lose 1.5% dps due to 300 less spell dmg on shadowbolts before every lifetap. This of course could change in a noticeable way with different lifetap values (which seem to change every 2 days), different intelect gains from weapon swaps and different spell dmg / crit / hit losses.

 

Rublik

Hi everyone.
I wanted to ask for an advice concerning gear choices. To be precise i want to ask, what you EJ warlock community think about Hood of Hexing? I have hood of the corruptor with CSD. Will the hood of hexing outhweight the meta gem if i change gear/gems to be at 202 hit after i change headpeaces?
Here is my armory link:The World of Warcraft Armory

 

Roywyn

It's heavily dependant on your weapons. The poster mentioned having an [Amani Divining Staff]. If you have a [Zhar'doom, Greatstaff of the Devourer], you lose 42 (base) + 54 (enchant) damage, lose 5 (0.22%) crit rating, keep the 55 haste (since your Shadow Bolt cast already began) and gain 66 intellect (0.83% crit, ~18 crit rating).

So, you lose +96 damage on one cast, gain +13 crit rating on that cast and gain +218 mana on life tap.
Actually, the haste from Zhar'doom would be worth +70 mana from a life tap (in terms on mana/sec from lifetap). Zhar'doom also has a lot of intellect itself.

That feels like changing a lot with slight weapon changes.

 

galzohar

Even with that example it seems to maybe break even at best, and that example greatly favors the swap since you don't lose the haste (assuming there aren't any issues by swapping immidiately after the lifetap - which there might be depending on how it's handled by the server/client). It's close enough to warrant more accurate calculations but it just doesn't seem worth it.

 

wind

Speaking of new mechanics in 2.4, I am currently trying to figure out if the changes to incinerate warrant having all the destruction warlocks spec fire.
Quoting from the tooltip on the current ptr build, without haste gear:
Incinerate: 337 mana, 2.25 second cast, 488-566 base, + 122-142 if immo is up. That averages to 659 average damage, with immolate up. 292 DPCT, 1.95 DPM.
Shadowbolt: 399 mana, 2.5 second cast, 544-607 base damage. Averaging 575.5 average damage, 230 DPCT, 1.44 DPM.
With haste gear, the differences in favor of incinerate stack even more. As we usually try and stack haste to the point where spamming a spell with a decreased cast time would not make us go out of mana before being able to tap it back as part of our normal spell cycle, I see incinerate's lower mana cost and higher dpm as giving the potential to stack even more haste than a shadowbolt spamming warlock.

In a normally balanced raid, my guild usually has 2-3 mages, 2-3 shadow priests, and 4 warlocks, one of which is affliction.
I can perfectly see the single affliction warlock being both the maledictioned coe and the immolate "bitch", while all the destruction warlocks would be spamming incinerates.

I am, however, wondering how that will affect raid dps. Fire spells will benefit from the mages' improved scorch. The maledictioned curse will probably shift from cos to coe. The shadowpriest dps will drop (assuming an average 60% imp. sb uptime, shadowpriest dps will decrease by a maximum of 60% of 15% extra damage from imp. sb = 9%?) The lock dps and dps time will most likely increase, and the mage dps will probably increase as well, due to the maledictioned coe.

It seems to me that fire would become the superior build, and I was hoping you guys might come up with something that would debunk my assumptions.

 

Kobal

Assuming the individual DPS Gain of Fire Destro outweighs the loss to raid DPS contribution due to the missing ISB procs, I was wondering what the "correct" spec for Fire Destro will be. Since with Fire you have no filler the natural candidate would seem to be this spec.

However, there might be one option: To swap Cataclysm with Improved Shadow Bolt. Yes, Cataclysm is a DPS boost, albeit not a large one (my spreadsheet has it somewhere between 5 and 10 DPS). On the other hand with Improved Shadow Bolt you have basically all the talents needed for Shadow destro as well. This will largely improve your performance on mobs where fire damage is not an option, or only a subpar option, like

- Al'ar
- Phoenixes during the Kael'Thas Encounter
- Supremus due to his high fire resistance
- Mother Sharaz during the Prismatic Aura: Fire
- Illidan Phase 2

So what do you think, Cataclysm or Improved Shadow Bolt?

 

wind

The spec you linked is what I'm currently using on the ptr. As far as fire immune mobs go, I'd rather just respec if needed.

I guess it's all a matter of personal preference, in the end. If you're speccing for max dps, you'll get Cataclysm. If you just want to save respec costs, you'll get Imp. Shadowbolt.

 

• Emolate

You're not crazy.

I switch between 0/40/21 and 0/21/40 quite a bit. Having a 3/3 Improved Imp is a big bonus to party members, and the threat reduction makes for zero downtime waiting for a bigger ceiling.

In my experience it is awfully situational in terms of personal DPS. On a fight like Void Reaver sometimes I'll pop a trinket and then get targeted for two orbs and have to run away. Plus, he sheds some aggro on knock-back so that makes it all very exciting.

If you have more Warlocks, CoR helps on Void Reaver for threat. I've been able to get my DPS time on Void Reaver up from 60% to 70% or so. I think our Tanks are getting better at threat generation and the CoR helps. I lead off with that curse on most bosses, even (especially?) if I'm the only Warlock in the raid.

 

• Suggestive

There is never a good reason for you NOT to cast immolate as long as you're fire specced. This goes double if you have any amount of haste at all, since you want to minimise the chance of a missing immolate on the target. As long as ISB stays the way it is, you want the number of shadow destro locks to at least be equal to the number of shadow priests in the raid. I'm not sure where you were going with the haste comments, so i can't answer that.

You lose 55 haste if you swap during the shadowbolt after the lifetap, it might be worth it but the gains will be very marginal... You could also add another 42 damage from a weapon oil to the damage lost, but i guess you could oil both weapons. This would really only apply on a very static encounter, which is pretty much...teron or brutallus. If i have to move at all, or there is any downtime i can squeeze lifetaps into then it frankly won't make a hell of a lot of difference.

 

galzohar

Seems that even on some of the movement fights you still have long enough "nuke periods" where you can go from full to empty and need to tap, as well as sometimes the movement is time when you're actually taking damage as well and don't want to tap and die (like al'ar phase 2 for both patches and meteors possibly even after the meteor landed).

There are many situations where you could take advantage of no-dps times to tap, but there are also about as many situations where you can't.

 

• Suggestive

Yeah, something like council comes to mind as well. I'm not dismissing it out of hand, just sort of mulling over it. Its not really something you can put a number on since it will change by encounter, and possibly week to week on the same encounter based on RNG. At the very least its worth a little testing to see how it works out.

 

Trickykid

Yeah I think it's worth testing, but weapon-swapping always seems to have a mini-lag associated to it outside of any cooldown issue. Any DPS gains from more efficient life taps might go out the window if you lose even tenths/hundredths of seconds. I'll be interested to see what people report.

 

Redelm

I just had a quick thought at work and its a bit out there, but I am wondering if anyone has looked into the numbers. With the introduction of the 3 extra pieces of T6, and those pieces obviously allowing you to get the 4/5 (or 4/8) bonus. Is Demo spec, using 2/5 T5 and 4/8 T6 with the Solarian trinket, a viable option in SW raiding. I understand you are not using the best gear available for your 2 T5 slots and Trinket slot. Again this was just a quick thought and was wondering if anyone had looked into the numbers or am I crazy? The latter of the two is probably true

 

Cohren

Even with using those pieces I'm not sure that Demo is viable in Sunwell at least with the first 2 bosses. My experience with the fights was BM hunters were having trouble keeping their pets alive due to the massive amounts of AE dmg the fights entail which would mean it would be near impossible for us even with those items.

 

Evilwilly

Does the change to haste rating make affliction spec viable again? It will scale much better with gear now...

Now that the global cooldown is being reduced in patch 2.4, has anyone given any thought behind the value of haste rating in affliciton spec?

I did some quick calcs on a modified spreadsheet, and it looks like 1 haste rating will go from being worth 0.2 spell dmg to 1.1 spell dmg for UA affliction spec.

Considering that Affliction spec gets outpaced hardcore by destruction mostly because of the itemization, now that haste rating is worth 1.1 spell dmg (if that's true), then perhaps affliction spec will scale well again, and maybe can out-dps destruction again? After all, we're talking about 3-5k DPCT dots!! Lowering the cast time, we could see 5-8k DPCT dots.

I looked back as far in this post as I could to see if this has been discussed, but couldn't find anything.

 

Evilwilly

I have another quick question for you guys...

Is there a dot timer where I can click on the dot timer and it will target the mob that the dot is on?

If not, what is the best way to ensure that in 3+ pulls that all your dots are being refreshed as fast as possible. What do you guys do?

 

Trickykid

Getting a 5k DPCT DoT to 8k DPCT would require 60% haste? This change simply means Affliction will scale better than 2.3 affliction. Destro still scales better on all the stats in the gear ranges I have seen on the sheet.

Tab target? You get 1.5 seconds every cast to target something else, it's not too hard to tab or even click the next target.

 

Morwen

As far as I know it is not possible to have a frame that dynamically updates while in combat such that you can click on it to acquire arbitrary enemy targets (being in combat locks certain functions). You can do it visually with the raid target symbols though.

 

Evilwilly

When you have 3 targets that will be tanked for longer than 30 seconds (or so), then dots will run off different mobs at different times.

For example, you can CoA/corr/UA each 3 mobs to start, then siphon them all, then immolate 1, by then Corr will run out on mob 2, so you can Corr/UA it, then Corr/UA the 2nd, then you have weird things like CoA going on mob 1, Corr/UA going on mob 3, followed by CoA on mob 2, etc...

It's 100% impossible to maintain less than 1 second dot gap on 3 mobs when you have to refresh the dots on all 3. I tab target, but what would really be cool would be if a dot timer could target the mob when you click on it.... or if you could set up 3 focus frames and the dot timers would appear under each one.

I guess that was more of my question... does anything like that exist? Right now i'm just tab/click switching targets and it works okay, but can be greatly approved upon. I was just wondering if any of the T6 guild locks have anything such as that to help maintain dot gap time low on multi pull long lasting fights.

 

◊ Kyth

Main tank targets. If your guild doesn't use them (e.g. Fusion doesn't) use oRA to set personal targets of all the possible tanks in your guild. Make sure you configure it to display raid symbols.

Officer of <Fusion>
http://www.stratfu.com/ - StratFu: Strategies, Guides, Movies, and Tips for Wrath Raiding

 

Lymphatik

You could use macro with mouseover. So you will gain the wasted time to clik but you would have to be carefull about those lovely turtle or sheep

 

Arelenda

Affliction is viable, and it always has been. Shadow Embrace is still pretty much worth it. Malediction softens the blow. Blood pact is less important than it used to be, with tanks running around in 20k hit points.

But affliction outdps destruction? I though it obvious that now better gear becomes available, Affliction will fall even further behind.

Affliction just doesn't scale well. It never has, and it probably never will. They'd need to change a lot of core mechanics for it to be even remotely competitive at end gear level. You say it's because itemization, but it really doesn't matter how you place attributes on gear. 0/21/40 simply gains more point for point from hit, crit, spelldamage and haste.

 

Trickykid

The fact that your uptime slips a little on multiple mobs is okay as long as you spend your cast time casting the highest DPCT spell available at all times. A mod to target isn't going to change that since you still have to deal with GCDs and cast-times. DoTimers aren't that hard to watch and see what you'll need to do in the next 5 seconds, if it involves switching targets be ready to switch. You get 1.5 seconds to switch, it's not that hard if you know what you're expected to do.