Troffel

With the build 8905 Blizzard should really anwser the question, why shadowbolt is still a destruction spell.

From my point of view: It is the perfect time to switch shadowbolt fom destruction to affliction.
The talent "improved shadow bolt" and the shadowbolt part of bane should move to the affliction talent tree by replacing the "inproved corruption" talent. The spell "corruption" became instant by default. Something like the "ruin" talent can be in "pandemic" talent.

The only remaining talents, which are shadow based are "shadowburn" and "shadowfury", which switch to fire or to affliction either.

Finally, affliction and destruction are pretty selfcontained, so that for affliction it is not necessary to take talents from the destruction tree.

 

Flamingcloud

From a logical flavor standpoint those changes might make sense, from a balance standpoint giving affliction the first 21 points of destro(minus the crit talent) for free would be incredibly overpowered. Not to mention they would need to add a whole new set of destruction talents.

Affliction has already most likely surpassed destruction in dps(and almost certainly at 70 with a 51/0/10), the scaling really isn't there still, but it is hard to imagine they don't start way ahead with two extra +20%s on their dots, in addition to what were already stronger dots than before, and superior glyphs, and the new super dark pact vs the new horrible lifetap.

 

Roywyn

I'm trying to hack something together that pretends to be able to guesstime affliction DPS.
Needs some more info/input though.

1) What's the coefficient of Haunt? Last thing I heard was 2/3.5 (~57%) but that was months ago.
2) Corruption/UA get multiplicative 20% Haunt, 10% SM, 20% SE and 15% ISB (if up) multipliers, for ~+82% total?
3) Does Dark Pact scale with spirit now, or still with spell power?

Also, what does an Affliction Lock actually cast?
Immolate, UA, Siphon Life and Haunt only seem to take up 1/3 of the cast time, is that it? Rest is Lifetapping and Shadow Bolting?

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

Soulzar

Did you mean to put 20% for SM?

I am borderline on Immo since its a lonely fire spell in a world of shadow and only part of its dmg is buffed by Haunt and SE. Chances are it will still be worth casting, especially if you have some destro locks so they have a bufer immo up when using conflag.

 

◊ Kyth

If they continue with three class tokens, you're actually (in your posts about gear) making the case to [i]minimize/i] as many warlocks and mages as possible in a raid because class tokens are never a limiter. (note: the hybrids are actually spread out amongst the tokens too and that will never change substantially because they want hybrids to be able to get multiple sets easily, so they need them spread out. So looking at Sunwell, Druid/mage/rogue -- doesn't matter which of them you bring, you're still adding a person from that token.) Here's why:

You will always want holy priests, so that's ~2 people using the "cloth caster" style of gear. Each moonkin/eleshm you bring, yes, adds competition in their area -- but it's only the third moonkin that is adding as much gear competition as the first warlock (because the holy priest wants that gear too.)

Moonkin/eleshm were always in a good, unique position due to their armor class, and that's been very strengthened in WotLK -- as you argue effectively: bring the best spread across the armor types as you can. That means if you're bringing 9 between Moonkin, eleshm, mage, lock, and shadow priest, you're best bringing 3 moonkin, 3 eleshm, and 3 mage/lock/spriest -- and even then that makes 5 when you count the two holy priests, for cloth caster gear. And due to how armor type works, even if you brought zero holy priests and casters, the gear wouldn't be wasted: your leather/mail users can use it with merely a loss of AC, not something they ever need in a raid.

In summary: due to gear competition, you want to minimize the number of mages, locks, and spriests you bring, and increase the number of moonkin and elemental shaman, if you want ranged caster dps. The oft-unspoken-of other hybrid advantage: armor type.

As it's shaping up, since so far they're putting useless mp5 on the so-called healer gear, it will be direct competition between cloth casters and healers (holy priests, and the other healers if that's the best-in-slot regardless of armor type) on most non-set pieces. (But even if they weren't, you still have three times as many people who want it -- the only people who you get to shed are the holy priests.)




Note: like others, I still think this is a good change. That doesn't mean I think things are perfect now with the plan (innervate+battlerez is a good example.)

But I'm developing a healthy hatred for everyone who (like an earlier poster) cause anyone a "bad" who points out flaws with the current plan, and assumes that they only dislike it because they think they can't compete without, and I quote, "twice the DPS of a hybrid."

To that poster: don't be so blind that you can't think for yourself and see advantages *and* disadvantages.




None at all. I've started 2-3 very pointed, clear threads and gotten zero response. Then again, they're responding to little on the lock forums these days.

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

 

Troffel

If you transfer the shadow bolt spell ceteris paribus, affliction will be to very strong (at the start of WoLK). But, when shadow bolt is absolved from being a destruction filler spell, you can adjust the scaling and the base damage, so that affliction scale pretty similar compared to destruction.

Simply, Shadow bolt become a affliction spell, the talent "improved shadow bolt"+"Bane" vanish and change the existing new talent "pandamic" to the following:

This ensures that all spells of affliction scale with the critical hit rate like destruction spells. After that change reduce the cast time and the affliction-"Bane"-talent of the new shadow bolt properly, that the resulting overall scaling with spell damage is comparable with the destruction tree. (Perhaps you have to modify incinerate to start with lower base damage, but increased a high-tier talent, to prevent, that incinerate takes over as the new filler for affliction.)

The new shadow bolt is better prepared for affliction, since for the dps cycle it is better to have a shorter cast time, because you are more flexible in recasting dots.

The problem is, that affliction has in WoLK the same theething problems like in BC. Affliction came in BC with a huge base damage but a worse scaling.

dps-wise for each normal direct damage spell scales (without talents) with 1 / 3,5 per spell power and normal dots with 1 / 15 per spell power. That means a dd-spell scales 4.29 times better than a dot (against a single target with only one non spammable/non stackable dot). So with plenty enough spell power the dd-spells will always win the dps-race.

I think it, that it is much easier to balance around a filler spell, which belongs to a talent tree, than a spell, which does not belong to the talent tree and have a different propose in a different talent spec.

 

PSGarak

Yes. It's the biggest concern with the "feel" of affliction play currently, but that's an accurate model. You might need to model the pet's mana supply for Dark Pact as well. With Shadow Bite and Improved Felhunter this may not be a concern anymore (I'm not in beta, cannot verify), but in Live, Dark Pact is hard-capped by your pet's regen, meaning you need to split your regen between as much Dark Pact as you can and as much Lifetap as you need.

Fantom: DoTs do not gain the full benefit from haste. 1% haste doesn't mean you get to cast it 1% more often, like it does for a nuke. The 1% extra cast time you get on the GCD has to be spent on a lower-DPS filler spell. DPCT is a tool for determining cast priority, it doesn't actually compute DPS. 1% haste is always strictly less than 1% DPS for a DoT build because if it wasn't, then the filler would be higher DPS and you wouldn't be casting the DOTs in the first place.

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

 

Roywyn

Yes, that was a typo. Still, that's a lot of modifiers for Shadow DoTs.

So, I stitched something together and tested low (Naxx 10) to high (3k, 3.5k spell damage, more crit/haste) level gear.
No using any Glyphs. No curse. Not using a pet either since I don't know what you'll use and how it scales.
Destruction uses an Imp for obvious reason, it's in the calculations.

Also, Destruction is incomplete due to Chaos Bolt and Fire and Brimstone missing. I'm also not using Conflagrate for simplicity, it was said to be only a very minor DPS increase if at all. The numbers include the Imp's damage, Emp. Imp synergy and infinite mana via ISL.


1) Affliction is a bit ahead of Destruction on low and high gear levels.
Affliction without a pet and infinite mana is up to 5% above Destruction, up to 5% below when taking LT/DP into account and likely up to 5% ahead when using a pet. Depends on how pets turn out.

2) Affliction seems to suffer from tree bloat. So it might lose 1/2/3% if you can't take all you want.

3) Shadow Bolt is cast 2/3 of the time and has horrible DPS, doing ~40% of your total damage.
UA and Siphon have 3-4 times the DPCT. Using Immolate is pretty much a sidegrade, use it if you can Glyph it.
Shadow Bolt however is important to keep ISB up for you, it deals a lot of damage indirectly.

4) As far as damage goes, Affliction and Destruction pull well ahead of Balance Druids and Elemental Shaman by about 20%.
Fire mages with glyphs and optimistic infinite mana from raid buffs are about 10% behind with Naxx gear, but get a bit closer with more crit on gear.


It's looking quite good for affliction now. It requires you to to DoT and keep up Haunt and use Shadow Bolt to keep ISB up for maximum efficiency.
Destruction has the advantage of starting with high crit and haste due to raid buffs.
Affliction now scales competitively well.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

nom

By my calculations destro rotations with a conflagrate backdraft gain about 5% (accounting for the mana cost reduction it gives), if the backdraft cast time reduction also speeds up instant cast spells (was this ever settled?). Doesn't really make a difference if you conflag every 15 or 10 secs.

I also get that as of the new shadow embrace, UA, and EA changes, affliction with infinite mana spends about (58%, 42%) of his time casting (sb filler, haunt+dots) which do a fraction (30%, 70%) of his total damage.

Too bad the effects that increase dot dps to this degree (Haunt, Shadow Embrace) don't easily apply when more than one target is dotted at once.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to plug my request for someone with a lvl 80 beta char to post the exact mana cost of Create Healthstone, to anchor the mana cost of all these "% base mana" spells : ).

 

Drakh

At Patchwerk in Nax25 Destro is doing 33% more DPS than Affl.
(ImageShack - Hosting :: patch25manbd6.jpg

The rotation that is used is :
CoD,Conflag immediately after, SB x3, Immolate, Incinerate until Conflag cd is available again, Conflag, SB x3, Immolate.

Spec :
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This is of course only one DPS-Chart (seen at the off. Forum).
Has someone else seen or heard of Affliction or Destro DPS in Naxx25 ?

 

dakalro

Well, from other accounts, with CoE used and pretty much no support it's under 3k so I'm guessing there's something wrong with something there, crit most likely (our imp still exhibits wildly varying crit rate). Can't say for sure with just 1 dmg meter. Remains to be seen in the next few builds, still some issues left to fix with our talent trees. Hoping they test hard on our focus pass.

 

Vagabond

One of the Boogie men keeping Affliction lacking is this exact principle (the other being mythical PvP where dispels don't happen in a timely manner).

Unless Blizzard removes the blinders, the only way we're going to see increases to get us on an even footing with Destro is through single target only abilities.

 

Sardaukar

Take that with a house sized gain of salt: apparently there is some bugged ap to spellpower buff/talent that is turning ALL of a raid buffed warlocks AP into spellpower, instead of just 10% of it. The result is that the casters in those screenshots are getting something like 1500+ extra spell power (although the rogues are evidently using broken poison damage, so perhaps it evens out). You may be able to extrapolate relative position on the meters (destro lock a decent chunk ahead of the mage, who is just ahead of an elemental shaman) - its also worth noting that the warlock reports his WWS crit rate as being in the mid 40%'s for incinerate/shadow bolt while wearing mostly sunwell gear. This really shows the power of the new emp imp talents and the huge amount (15%+) crit rate that is being passed over to the warlock.

As far as the armor type penalty for playing a warlock/mage/priest, this is nothing new really. Anyone who has done 25 man raiding knows about the problem to a degree. Every Leggings of Calamity or Amice of the Convoker that drops is desired by 1-2 priests, 2-4 mages and 2-4 warlocks. No other armor type suffers from having potentially over a third of the raid interested in one specific type: +damage cloth. Now that holy priests will be able to use the same gear, it will only get worse. The ability to use downgrade level armor (elemental shaman only compete with other shaman for their spellpower mail, but are able to use spellpower cloth and leather) will be a very powerful tool in wotlk raiding it seems - especially if the early tier raid instances are pretty straight forward for sunwell experienced guilds, it will allow guilds with a good amount of elemental/resto shaman and boomkin/resto druids to gear up faster than a guild that relies heavily on warlocks/mages/priests. It might not be a HUGE difference, but it could mean moving on a few weeks sooner because your raid is better equipped across the board.

On a slight aside, has anyone done the math on the spirit gear? Looking at the Naxx stuff, I can't seem to find any real pattern in their gear. Cloth seems to have some random combination of either 3 green stats (spell power, hit, crit, haste or mp5) or 2 green stats + haste (everything has int and stamina). I can't help but wonder if the 3 green stat ones with (spellpower and either haste/crit/or hit) and no spirit will end up being better. Beyond the 30% spirit into spellpower what kind of regen is it really providing? The only thing worse than competing with all the other cloth wearers for limited cloth would be competing with all the mages and other warlocks over the handful of spirit-less armor pieces.

 

F4nt0m

1) With a 200% dark pact, and shadow bite restoring the Fel Hunter's mana, my guess (keyword guess) is that you'll be able to dark pact a LOT.

2) That's why I never said it was 1% more DPS in my post. I only said it was 1% more damage per second casting.

Lifetap is based on spirit now. You also get 30% of it in spellpower. I assume Demonic Aegis will scale up the regen AND spellpower gained from spirit.

It's worth it.

How is this keeping Affliction lacking? It's not like Destro can shadowbolt/incinerate multiple targets at once. (Besides AOE spells which are similar for all specs)

Good observation, but that's the way it should be, for several reasons. 1) All your talents buff DoT damage, why would you spend talent points in them if all it did was bring your DoTs up to the same DPCT as shadowbolt? 2) If it WAS the same DPS as your DoTs, you wouldn't cast your DoTs, because you could do more damage just by shadowbolting with no clipping or downtime.


I'm trying to work out what your second paragraph means right now. After a few passes, I decided you weren't attacking me, but attacking the people that I also attacked. I was planning on writing a scorching response belittling you for still being opposed to buffs not stacking and hybrids doing competitive DPS, but I guess that's not going to happen.

Anyway, to elaborate on your points, and to respond to the guy talking about forcing hybrids to cast heals once in a while, it's not going to happen. It would have to be an *extremely* gimmicky fight for something like that to pop up, maybe your raid gets split up, and small groups have to alternately DPS stuff down and then stop and heal/tank it for a while. And you would have to set it up so you couldn't guarantee a healer with each small group.

A pointless task in my opinion, because you would only do that for ONE fight, then sub people back out for real DPS. I can't really think of a way to change the current raiding scheme enough that hybrid DPSers in *GOOD* raids would have a major healing role every fight. Why? Because there's a variable number of DPSers. If you need more heals, just drop DPS and pick up another full time healer.

If you can think of what radical changes would be needed, go ahead. I'm sure blizzard will listen, but don't expect them to come up with complex changes of that nature for no reason, all by themselves.



----------

And on the subject of armor types. Honestly, with the token system in Wrath, I don't think it will be a big deal. I guess you guys didn't play druid early BC. I was resto for most of my raiding history (back when the expansion was new), though I tried to collect moonkin gear. Half my gear was cloth simply because NO LEATHER DROPPED for those slots.

Moonkin leather in TBC:
1 Bracer from Attumen
1 Boot from BT
1 Belt from Hyjal
1 Bracer from BT
1 Pants in ZA
1 Pants from Sunwell (can be exchanged for healing version)
1 Head, Shoulders, Hands, and Chest from Sunwell (only if bought in exchange for healing version)
Set Pieces
Badge Gear
PVP gear

That is all of the spell damage leather in TBC. It was ABSURD before Badge gear, Zul'Aman, and Sunwell came out. Hell, before BT/Hyjal were released, there was ONE drop in the entire game.....

So yea, moonkins can "gear up faster" with a grand total of 5 items directly dropped in instances Pre-Sunwell, and 5 Sunwell items that they share with resto druids. Other than that and set pieces (a whole different story, and certainly not useless to other classes), and badge gear, which clothies get just as fast.

Compare that to the number of cloth caster drops in TBC raids. I don't think Warlocks will have many problems with sharding leather caster drops that if the raid had taken a moonkin instead, could have been used. It DEFINITELY won't make a difference of "weeks."


----------

And lastly, my 2 cents on the "move shadowbolt to affliction." I HIGHLY disagree with this. All the affliction locks keep going on about this as if it would be a great thing, but what about the destro locks? They would lose of their spell schools. I don't think Blizzard will ever do this because Destro isn't just about Fire, and taking away their shadow spells entirely would be a bad move for diversity in that tree. What's wrong with spending talent points in another tree? Other classes do it all the time.

For example in BC:
Moonkins and Feral druids spec 11+ points into Resto
Combat/Sub Rogues spec 11+ points into Assassination, and Mutilate rogues spec 20 points into Combat.
Holy priests spec into Disc
Fire/Frost mages spec into Arcane, Fire mages spec into Frost too.
Paladins spec into Prot for BoK
Ele Shamans spec 20 into Resto for 5% crit
BM/SV Hunters spec into Marks (afaik)

 

Scrufola

Let's compare the T4 sets of the cloth wearer*:

• Every other class gets more crit than warlocks, mages get the most.
• Even shadow priests get more crit.
• We get most haste, by far.
• We get the least amount of spirit.
• Moonkins get a lot more spirit than warlocks despite the fact that they might have a problem spending the points in the restoration tree for mana regeneration while casting and warlocks get if for free plus Life Tap scales with spirit.
• Moonkins and shadow priests get a bit more spell damage than mages and warlocks.
• Warlocks get a "comfortable" amount of additional health out of our T4.

*) I doubt there will be enough useful spell damage leather drops for moonkins to not be forced to use cloth because leather spell damage items can really only be used by druids (restoration and moonkin) which is 2/30 specs. Spell damage leather would probably often get sharded, especially in 10 mans.

 

Nve

The guy posted a report of this raid here
Patchwerk : Malakai

If you look at those stats, the imp is doing absolutely insane damage. The imp ends up doing 25% of the damage out of the 3 main nukes (shadowbolt, incinerate, imp's firebolt) which is ludicrous considering hunter pets don't even come remotely close. Granted that he's fully specced for imp damage and the imp got full raid buffs, there is NO WAY that the firebolt (which does 199-223 base damage) could scale to those ranges (1500+ hit, 2000+ crit) without some serious bug action.

Assume for a moment that the imp acts like a caster and has 1000 spellpower (which is ludicrous considering they currently get like, what, 200-300 spellpower, tops?). A firebolt doing 199-223 base damage, at 1000 spellpower, with full talents (30% with 3/3 improved imp, 15% with 3/3 empowered imp) and maybe a 10% damage raid buff like CoE would be doing ~1550 damage firebolts.

Now that's assuming the imp gets about 800 MORE spellpower by itself than it currently does in TBC live. Unless Blizz completely botched their design somewhere, we can assume imps still get the same coefficient from their warlocks' spellpower (15%). If that imp is getting 800 more spellpower from the master, then the master must have over 5000 spellpower... (which is just... for lack of a better term, fubar).

Obviously the warlock in that Naxx raid didn't have 5000 spellpower (I'd armory if it worked...) considering his shadowbolt crits top out at a little over 10k, which is already doable in maxed out Sunwell gear. That must mean the imp is getting that bonus 800 spellpower from some other source, which, to my knowledge, must mean it's getting that bugged BoM buff.

So as much as I'd really like to do 5000 standing DPS in a burn fight, the numbers just wouldn't make sense in a patched, non-buggy setting. Even assuming the DPS charts are accurate, it's really a contaminated, unusable set of data given how rogues are bugged (I don't know the specific math on this so w/e) and how overpowered the imp is with BoM.

The faulty imp data aside, the numbers seem to be a little strange when comparing warlocks to mages. The warlock did about 850000 total damage (excluding all imp damage) and the highest DPS mage did a little less than that. The damage output from the mage's mirror images looks AWFUL and I really hope they get some better tuning with that spell. Granted the destruction warlock offers no raid utility to speak of, it's still disturbing to see him beat the arcane mage by such a margin.

 

Miim

Fantastic idea.

I really really like the idea of having a Shadow tree (affliction) and a fire tree (destro). Both can then use demo as a support tree.

They should then move all pet skills to the demo tree.

 

Nve

Honestly, I'd rather just see Drain Life crit and have that be the main nuke for affliction locks. It's a spell that any drain-tanking warlock is totally familiar with. When did you EVER cast shadowbolt while you were leveling as affliction unless you got a nightfall proc? And now suddenly at 70 or 80 this is supposed to be the main filler spell?
Drain life is based on the idea of gradual damage, which is fundamentally what "affliction" is. A hard hitting blast like SB is a nuke and just naturally belongs with the destruction playstyle.
An even better option would have been to change Haunt into a channeling spell that's tuned to match SB damage. It has the effect of increasing DOT damage which just makes it FEEL like affliction with its DOT-synergy. And if it could scale with crit and haste properly, it could go toe to toe with destruction. IDEALLY, an affliction warlock should beat a destruction warlock in any boss encounter with some decent movement involved, and a destruction warlock should beat an affliction warlock in any boss encounter with just a stand-and-nuke strat (and ideally, half the bosses should be the former and half should be the latter). But... that's really demanding a lot from Blizz.

The new spell rotation (switching SB/IC between Immo/Conflags) is at least INTERESTING in comparison to the old ones (SBx100 or immolate, ICx5, repeat).

Spell rotations aside, warlocks were built on shadow magic and I really do enjoy shooting black death out of my hands. Fire just feels... bleh... simple and mage-like.

 

Scrufola

I did not see that officially confirmed before but there was some discussion in that thread if the last percent can be removed or not.

 

Miim

I disagree that drain life should be a valid filler. Its a "utility"spell cause of the healing it does.
With the added healing for drain life it has a horrible coef compared to a damage spell. If you want somehing like this they should just add a new damage only channeling spell to be used as filler. Or like you said change Haunt into this. The problem again then would be that the ISB proc would still stack with Haunt so its to good to pass. But yeah, I agree if they can work around this it would be cool.

But for it too be better than SB it would have to have some kind of damage debuff as well like the 15% damage increase that ISB gives.

Its thoose two factors that makes SB so superior to DL today.


On another note... I tried Fire on my lock today (not beta).
Just to get used to it etc.. Since I more or less assumed I would have to go Fire to stay destro. And to be honest.. I hated it. I hate the looks, the feel BLEH.... I want to use Shadow.

So I am currently looking into some affliction/destro shadow builds. Still unsure what would be the winner though. 53/0/18 or 50/0/21

I want a build that is competative on low HP targets like trash as well, so maybe 50/0/21 is better then.. Unsure. Any data or info people have would be greatly appriciated.

Another factor that people seem to ignore is that Blizz seem to be heading towards more AOE content. Since they are buffing many classes AOE ability.

And Aff/Destro will have a superior AoE advantage over Fire Destro. Just wonder if SoC will still be AoE King...

 

Vetinari

BoM was apparently giving ~600-700 spell power.

Now, for some theorycrafting: (using malakai's stats)
Warlock spell damage: 2000 self buffed. ~300 from buffs (160 totem of wrath, 80 flask, 36 ZG oil, 40 new food).
Warlock crit ~17%, haste 8%, hit cap.
Imp spell damage = 2300 *0.15 + 160 totem of wrath = 505
imp base crit chance = 5%

buffs/debuffs:
haste = 8% (wrath of air, improved moonkin aura)
Damage = 13% sun and moon, 2% retribution aura
crit = 10% imp scorch 5% moonkin, 3% totem of wrath

Imp: 211 base firebolt damage + 505 *2/3.5 (the imp still gets the 2.0 speed coeffienct, despite the changed cast time (this can be confirmed by looking at the damage ranges on malakais imp, had it been 71%, the imp would have been hitting for over 2k.) *1.3 *1.15 *1.13*1.02 = 860 average hit. average crit = 1291. crit rate = 23% haste = 8%.

imp dps = 860*(1+0.23*0.5)/2 * 1.08 => 518 dps (with raid buffs, without bugs)

Rotation used: conflag, sb*3, immo, incin*2 (obviously, the first cast will have immo first). (assuming multiplicative stacking of backdraft, bloodlust, and haste from gear.)
GCD/immo cast time = 1.5/1.16 = 1.293 seconds.
SB cast time = 2.5/1.3/1.16 = 1.658s
incinerate cast time = 1.72s
total rotation time taken: 11 seconds. 7 spells per rotation
firebolt cast time = 2/1.08 = 1.852s.
firebolt crit period = 1.852/0.23 = 8.05s.
On average: 1.366 procs every rotation. This means that every spell has a 1.366/7 chance of having a 100% chance to crit. this is identical to have a 1.366/7 increased chance to crit, which works out to being 19.5% additional critical strike chance for the warlock.

Now, for the warlocks dps:
improved shadowbolt uptime: assumed to be 100%.
molten core uptime: 3 shadowbolts, therefore, 1- 0.85^3 procs per rotation, proccing on average after the second sbolt. this works out to be ~3.5% fire damage increase for the fire spells in the rotation.

immolate damage: (460 + 0.21*2300)*1.25*1.1*1.13*1.02*1.035 = 1546 average immolate initial (hit). (2300*0.126 + 157)*1.1*1.13*1.02*1.035 = 587 tick.
conflag damage = (860 +1.5/3.5*2300)*1.1*1.13*1.02*1.035 = 2422 hit
sbolt damage = (730 + (3/3.5+0.2)*2300)*1.15*1.13*1.02 = 4190 hit
incinerate damage = (786 + (2.5/3.5+0.2)*2300)*1.1*1.13*1.02*1.035= 3791 hit.
curse of doom damage = (7300 +2300*2 )*1.15*1.13*1.02 = 15773 damage = 262 dps.

critable damage per rotation = 3791*2 +4190*3 +2422+1546 => 24120 => 32562 average damage including crits (without empowered imp) => 37265 with emp imp
non critable damage per rotation = 587 immolate tick

dps per cycle: 2986, 3387(with empowered imp) + 518 imp dps + 262 cod dps = 3766 (4167 with empowered imp).
(blood lust allows for an extra 2 incinerates in each cycle, causing dps to be 4879 during the blood lust (5455 with empowered imp)
Conclusions: empowered imp is broken as hell. destro (even without any bugs), is also OP.

suggested solutions: not going to bother, although i will add a suggestion: empowered imp = 1/2/3% chance on the imps firebolt hits, that your next 2 spells will have a 100% crit chance. this works out to be ~6% crit for the warlock, and has the added luxury of the warlock being able to choose 1 of the spells to have a guaranteed crit. (since currently, since it almost always procs while you are casting, the buff is consumed almost immediately.)

NB: things disregarded: lifetapping requirement assumed to be non existant, due to the power of improved soul leech, mana potions/dark runes and the replenishment buffs. Also ignored the dps loss due to having to cast CoD, but this is likely to be negligible anyway. Also assumed no delay between casting spells. (a g15 really helps with this, and helps avoid carpal tunnel too. WTB the ability to queue up the next spell to be cast)

Clearly intellect is not your primary stat.

 

Zed

This is a vast oversimplification. The warlock has a crit chance of his own, so the benefit is closer to 12-13% crit at a level of 35% raid buffed crit (which is easily achievable with +18% coming from buffs). Subject to further diminishing returns as the Warlock's gear gets better.

Quite strong assumptions there. I'd be happy with 80% ISB uptime, seems a more reasonable estimate.

As for mana, I wouldn't expect ISL to cover more than 1/3 - 1/4 of your mana consumption. At 3k affected dps it yields 450 mp5, while I don't have an exact base mana value for lvl80 (someone?) I'd say a haste-heavy build like backdraft is going to operate around -1500-2000 mp5. You could make more conservative guesstimates with ~5% life tap downtime.

Emp. Imp yields around 12% crit and 15% pet dps (between 50-100dps with your numbers) for 3 points. One of the strongest talents but not exactly broken, could be "normalized" not to overly benefit from the new +crit raidbuffs, and be somewhat more useful outside of a raid environment. Whether destro is op or not - we shall see, classes are not nearly finalized yet. But I can agree that it is perhaps too synergetic even at early gear levels (massive +haste and +crit) and this might be causing problems.

 

Chupavida

I know that Drain Soul has been proposed as a filler in the past, but I've been thinking about it the last couple days and I came up with an idea.

What if Drain Soul did no damage itself, but significantly enhanced DoT damage? It could be something like:

Drain Soul: Drains the soul of the target, disabling their immune system and increasing damage taken from damage over time spells by X%. If the target dies while being drained, and yields experience or honor, the caster gains a Soul Shard. Soul Shards are required for other spells.

Instead of spamming SB, the affliction lock would want to always have Drain Soul up as a damage enhancer.

Something would have to be done for destro/demon shard farming, but that was terrible anyway and already needed fixing.

 

Vetinari

Eh, you are correct in this, but 12-13% crit from a 3 talent point investment is still "over budget". and yes, it does diminish significantly with more haste/crit on the warlock. works out to be ~7% crit with 35% unbuffed crit, and 20% haste.


I assumed ISB to be 100% for the sake of simplicty, though an 80% uptime will remove ~1.5% damage anyway.

~guesstimate 1000mp/5 passively, from 450 isl, 100 fel armor, and 350 replenishment (15k mana), and 100 from BoW, mana spring, etc. 3500 base mana (its about 3.3k for mages, and probably lower for warlocks, but anyway.) 391/sbolt, 394 conflag, 559 immolate, 460 incinerate. = 2586 mana per cycle == 1293 mp/5. therefore, shortfall of 293mp/5, or 58.6 mana per second. you would run oom at 15000/58.6 = 255.9 seconds, so after 4 minutes and 15 seconds. A single mana potion extends that by over 70 seconds. In other words, 1 lifetap a fight


12% crit, and 15% pet dps is still well in excess of 300 dps. Thats ~10% damage from 3 talent points. Then again, emberstorm is more than that, but destro's damage is still too high. Especially since ghostcrawler confirmed that noone should be doing 4k dps. Can't find link, but it was approximately "if we buffed everyones dps to 4k, we would soon come to crazy land"

Clearly intellect is not your primary stat.

 

dakalro

You missed the part where without bugs and those few 1-2% reductions in dmg he'd be somewhere near the rogue and the mage on the 3rd place, which is pretty much what Roywyn got in his sim with starting gear. That's with using CoD. Doesn't sound too far fetched yet, especially since the imp pretty much refuses to scale, most likely giving you an extra 1% crit and 30 dps for itself in what might be Wrath end game (out of my nose 800 extra dmg from gear).

As for 4k, well, since they're doing 4k, so should we I guess. Btw, you missed your mp5 usage by about 350 or so, SB is the same cost as Immolate. Assuming all the spells are that cheap at 80.