In order to make the (hypothesized) new 21-point destro talent not repeat Ruin's problem of overshadowing 51-point talents, they need to make it do more for a destro build than an affliction build or demonology build. What jumps out to me is Haste. An Icy Veins clone would be thematic with destruction, and benefit destro more because its damage is all hasteable, unlike affliction (DoTs) or demonoloy (pets). Other options include fire-specific effects, or something about nukes in particlar (force-crit or PoM-clone, or something that gives shadowbolt/incinerate a proc).
With % Armor Penetration apparently happening and the lower base armor clothies have compared to leather, we won't be seeing any kind of numbers close to bears even with 600% modifier, but it will be nice anyway compared to what we have before (no modifier).
The only thing I don't like about the ruin change is cataclysm, it's basically impossible to max now as demo or affliction. This also devalues suppression, since you're going to need the same amount of hit regardless of whether or not you pick it up.
With % Armor Penetration apparently happening and the lower base armor clothies have compared to leather, we won't be seeing any kind of numbers close to bears even with 600% modifier, but it will be nice anyway compared to what we have before (no modifier).
Thats actually a very good point. Bumping the multiplier like they did gave us the desired mitigation, but it drastically increased the scaling of Arp at the same time.
As for the change to the armor buff.. its very interesting. 360% scaling vs 600% is a fairly drastic boost. While considering this is logical due to cloth having low total armor in the first place, we could abuse this to gain more armor than intended by item swapping before meta use.
Consider an item like Pillar of Ferocity which would add 3300 additional armor when morphed. A situational choice could be made to item swap for additional mitigation vs melee or not to vs ranged. I wonder what lvl 80 weapons with Armor on them will be like in this manner, I have not looked at any of the wrath gear.
I'm not sure how many weapons you'll find with both armor and spellpower. As a Moonkin, that weapon swap is very situational. It costs me 25% or more of my spellpower. For me (at +400% armor = 5x armor), the extra mitigation is not worth it except for special situations where mitigation is much more important than my ability to maximize DPS:
I pulled a mob off the tank in PvE.
I'm a focus target in PvP.
I'm using spells with poor damage coefficients (CC, MF spam)
Not using spells at all (CC'd, OoM and can't find Lifetap on my toolbar).
I agree that affliction generally looks really interesting now, and I can also see the whine about potentially huge corruption ticks, alas I dont think that QQ would be justified considering how many talent points we actually spend in buffing corruption if you go deep affliction.
I just kinda think they should spread the love around a bit instead of just having every talent in the tree buffing corruption. There is no reason why lets say shadow embrace couldn't have made dots increase shadowbolt damage by 20% instead, or some other dps talent instead of +20% corruption damage replacing instant corruption etc.
Swapping weapons is a huge tradeoff, but I could see a demonology warlock running with an AC trinket or other jewelry. [Badge of Tenacity] would give a good 1800AC, a nontrivial amount for the cost of one slot. You'd definitely want a clicky in the other slot though, cooldown stacking is too powerful to ignore.
I would be greatly amused if there are AC reductions that stack additively with demon form. Like if Mace Spec + Metamorphisis = 585% armor. I would not expect that to make it to live, if it happens at all. Please find some way of verifying it (mace spec + kick/gouge vs warlock?).
I think he's saying +13%[CoS], +20%[Imp Cor], +20%[SE], +20%[Haunt], +15%[Impr sb], +10%[SM]dmg, +66% spellpower [Emp Cor + EA]. But then Contagion is still missing, Pandemic + Death's Embrace for an extra 15% near death, and the occasional Nightfall.
Wondering how this percents add.Like SM was a 10% inc but it was applied to base spell not the final where DS was 15% after spelldamage was added. Anyone ran some numbers to see how those percents work with corruption?
I'm not sure how many weapons you'll find with both armor and spellpower. As a Moonkin, that weapon swap is very situational. It costs me 25% or more of my spellpower. For me (at +400% armor = 5x armor), the extra mitigation is not worth it except for special situations where mitigation is much more important than my ability to maximize DPS:
I pulled a mob off the tank in PvE.
I'm a focus target in PvP.
I'm using spells with poor damage coefficients (CC, MF spam)
Not using spells at all (CC'd, OoM and can't find Lifetap on my toolbar).
I don't see it as "abuse."
You just Paraphrased my post so I am unsure if your agreeing or disagreeing, however your correct, "abuse" was not the word I was looking for.
Meta is looking like its main PvP aim is to be more of a Melee counter which could mean the situational swap may become more comon than not.
Originally Posted by PSGarak
Swapping weapons is a huge tradeoff, but I could see a demonology warlock running with an AC trinket or other jewelry. [Badge of Tenacity] would give a good 1800AC, a nontrivial amount for the cost of one slot. You'd definitely want a clicky in the other slot though, cooldown stacking is too powerful to ignore.
I would be greatly amused if there are AC reductions that stack additively with demon form. Like if Mace Spec + Metamorphisis = 585% armor. I would not expect that to make it to live, if it happens at all. Please find some way of verifying it (mace spec + kick/gouge vs warlock?).
Yeah, you lose a ton of spell damage by swapping your wep out, but if your goal is to stay alive through a melee asisst train thats not something to worry about. The 40% damage buff could be viewed as an offset. Poping Meta for mitigation purposes? sawp wep... poping it for its otehr abilities? dont swap wep.
The only real reason I specified wep in general was since it can be swapped out in combat (unless thats changing) so you could pick between some added armor or not.
As for you second part, I was thinking about that on my way home from work. Static Arp on gear or procs shouldnt be any different, but applied effects like Sunder, FF, CoR can still easily mean 600% of nothing if applied before you change forms.
The 600% vs 360% was IMO to account for clothies having a lower multiplier on armor values, though I am curious if the negative scaling factor was concidered as well. Meta having its own base AR value that added to your own before the multiplier is applied could be a way to circumvent that and keep it in line with the 360% standard for other classes.
Wondering how this percents add.Like SM was a 10% inc but it was applied to base spell not the final where DS was 15% after spelldamage was added. Anyone ran some numbers to see how those percents work with corruption?
Fairly certain the only difference between how SM and DS are handled(other than sm not affecting doom) is that since SM is permanent they update the tooltips to reflect the damage shown. Both are still multiplied into your dmg in the final calculation ([base+spelldmg*coeffient]*sm*ds*isb, etc) as far as I know.
Shadow Mastery hasn't worked like that ([e]: "that" being "not affecting damage from spellpower") for years. I'm not sure it's possible to accidentally code the talents to work that way anymore. The only question is whether the talents stack additively or multiplicatively.
Affliction is the leveling spec of choice.
Destro has ridiculous downtime (every 3 mobs), Demo is a sort of middle ground with very little buttons to press and Affliction is non-stop dot fest. Use a Felhunter with 2/2 Imp Felhunter. Use Dark Pact (returns around 4k mana at 70, 4.6k with level 80 gear, costs half as much to the Felhunter).
So what happened again? Did mob health go up by some ridiculous amount? Otherwise "every 3 mobs" simply makes no sense.
Originally Posted by Hearteater
They've said many times you can't always compare talents between classes.
But it creates some feeling that Destruction has no proper 21-pointer, while Affliction actually has 2. Anyway the general feeling that we had relatively weak per point Devastation, but it was prereq for a powerful Ruin, now we have it other way around.
The fact that they put even more power in early Destruction doesn't help either. It will probably leave out many late Affliction and Demonology talents, except for PVP where those crit-oriented talents may be simply undesirable due to resilience.
I think Devastation could make it nicely at 10% extra crit (for Destruction spells only as it is right now). Considering that in Affliction build Shadow Bolt is doing only around 30% of total damage as some people said, it would add pretty low amount I guess, certainly less than Ruin considering 18% crit coming from raid buffs. Balancing it against Metamorphosis may be harder, but still it is easier as it isn't scaling its returns. To avoid too much crit Backlash 3% crit could be changed into something like chance to proc when you cast spell (in addition to when being physically hit), or extra crit damage modifier (Fire Destruction seems to be a bit lacking on it, seeing that it's just 2x crit multiplier and no procs on it or anything, also from PVP POV, where resilience eats crit damage, and many classes have procs when being crit, so that it may be better to not crit than crit)
Some talents are "inherent" and some work through buffs or debuffs. Generally speaking, how warlock talents have worked in the past is:
* First, inherent bonuses to the coefficient are added to the base coefficient, and the result is multiplied by spell power and added to the base spell damage.
* Then, inherent bonuses to the damage are added up and the result is multiplied in.
* Then, bonuses from buffs or debuffs are multiplied in individually.
So, for instance, with all of the affliction talents, curse of agony would receive 10+15+10+5=40% inherent damage bonus from imp CoA, amplify curse, shadow mastery, and contagion. If the buffs and debuffs for Improved Shadow Bolt (+15%), Haunt (+20%), and Shadow Embrace (+10%) are up for the full lifetime of the dot, then curse of agony would do 1.4 * 1.15 * 1.2 * 1.1 = 2.13 times as much damage as the untalented spell.
(At the moment, for Improved Shadow Bolt it's only important whether the buff is up on you at the time of the cast. That's a somewhat "mathy" mechanic so it might get changed, or it might not.)
Caveat: this is based on my memory of past testing in TBC, not on recent testing in the beta. I could be full of it.
But it creates some feeling that Destruction has no proper 21-pointer, while Affliction actually has 2.
After 3 years of having the 21 point Destro talent outperform every single 31, 41 and until recently, 51 point talent from Demo and Affli, I'm more than happy with the way things are shaping out right now.
A lot of nerfs in the new build according to mmochampion. Dark pact back to 100%. CoEx changed back to 30% snare. 30 second internal cooldown on eradication. Death's embrace down to 3% crit pet talent. Demonic empathy down to 1% per talent. Empowered imp 20% increased crit chance on proc down from 100%.
Amplify curse slightly buffed, .7 off of gcd instead of .5.
Fel armor was also changed to this:
Surrounds the caster with fel energy, increasing spell power by 180 plus additional spell power equal to 30% of your Spirit. In addition, you regain 2% of your maximum health every 5 sec. Only one type of Armor spell can be active on the Warlock at any time. Lasts 30 min.
Ruin/devastation, corruption, and metamorphosis changes don't seem to be implemented yet.
After 3 years of having the 21 point Destro talent outperform every single 31, 41 and until recently, 51 point talent from Demo and Affli, I'm more than happy with the way things are shaping out right now.
I agree, I feel that single change fixes so much, as it's going to be even harder to avoid +crit on items due to gear homogenization. Now we won't run into the Ruin vs 31/41/51/etc each expansion.
A lot of nerfs in the new build according to mmochampion. Dark pact back to 100%. CoEx changed back to 30% snare. 30 second internal cooldown on eradication. Death's embrace down to 3% crit pet talent. Demonic empathy down to 1% per talent. Empowered imp 20% increased crit chance on proc down from 100%.
Amplify curse slightly buffed, .7 off of gcd instead of .5.
Fel armor was also changed to this:
Ruin/devastation, corruption, and metamorphosis changes don't seem to be implemented yet.
Also improved soul leech gives 2% total mana on proc now, which is roughly 40% of what it did before, so its pretty bad now. It is hard to imagine destro being ahead at this point after 5-6 patches of nerfs in a row, and now with affliction/demo being able to get their 51 point talents and ruin destro is probably dead.
Dark Pact is worth a lot now as the only remaining good mana talent.
Last edited by Flamingcloud : 09/11/08 at 12:08 AM.
Fire and Brimestone, and Chaos Bolt, no longer have the [NYI] tag, and F&B is down to 15% of your spellpower (it was 20% before, right?). I would love to know if Chaos Bolt's pierce effect is in this build, and if so, which things it pierces.
Fire and Brimestone, and Chaos Bolt, no longer have the [NYI] tag, and F&B is down to 15% of your spellpower (it was 20% before, right?). I would love to know if Chaos Bolt's pierce effect is in this build, and if so, which things it pierces.
Fire and brimstone was 25% spell power on immolate before.
I don't really understand blizzards intention with the spirit/cloth homogenization anymore. Most of the DPS caster gear we've been seeing doesn't have spirit on it, and locks will essentially only want it for life tap now? Non-arcane mages don't seem to want spirit either.
Fire and Brimestone, and Chaos Bolt, no longer have the [NYI] tag, and F&B is down to 15% of your spellpower (it was 20% before, right?). I would love to know if Chaos Bolt's pierce effect is in this build, and if so, which things it pierces.
Also chaos bolt and haunt have rank 4 at level 80 and they are doing the damage the previous rank 1s were so I am sort of worried about chaos bolt viability.
I think they're trying to jam too many stats onto the same gear, and make them useful for all casters. It doesn't seem to be working out well with the item budgets. Maybe they should just remove the spirit stat altogether and make mana regen int based? Spirit has always seemed to be a tertiary stat at best, I don't really see what the point is.
Emp Imp is +20% now, down from +100. Emberstorm is also 0.25s reduction, instead of 0.5s.
Sad day for destruction.
This change puts shadow bolt way ahead of incinerate again, perhaps even when molten core is procced. Not really any reason to go below 40 destro anymore, atm anyways.
Emp Imp is +20% now, down from +100. Emberstorm is also 0.25s reduction, instead of 0.5s.
Sad day for destruction.
The change to Emp imp is quite a big one. I do think however that it may be a good change for us. Reported "bonus crit" from them, while buggy was still extremely high. When I think about the tree as a whole your 45-50 point talent compensates for the fact that the tree has been designed to lower the DPCT to one of its main spells (thanks) and now a 15% bonus to a spell that has a fairly pitiful Coeeficient to scale with in the first place.
So all in all, the only real scaling factors I saw above S&F were imp SL (toned down) and Emp imp (decapatated.) With such a drastic reduction on Emp imp, this means in order to bring destro back up to match the changes we see in the other trees that it will probably get it in other talents. This could remove having all our eggs in one basket, incase we find situations a pet cant work, or he gets killed at a bad time.
I think the change to corruption just complicated things for upper destro as well. Before it was my belief that there was not enough scaling in lower affliction to make casting a dot to proc MC worth it, however now? F&B is only worth taking to make Conflag/Backdraft even viable which means if you drop Conflag/backdraft you gain 9 points. I've seen conflicting reports that Immo/Incin was pathetically close to Conflag/backdraft rotations, so will trading off the CGD and DPCT of conflag for that of corruption and filling as much incin as you can to benefit from MC make anything past S&F worth it?
The reduciton back down on emberstorm lowers this some and I think brings shadow affliction/destro hybrid a lot more in line with deeper fire destro builds. I am very curious to see if they do more tweaks to F&B which seems weak and what they do to CB to get us excited.
TBH a lot of the changes are not suprizing in terms of what I viewed as potentially better than intended talents, but I am very curious what they have left in store for destro because it seems quite lacking in comparison to our otehr 2 trees as of tonight lol
The balance team did a sweep of the talents and made modifications they felt necessary to keep the talents and abilities in budget. We've since done a second pass of what they came up with (which you see in this build) and made further changes. Our latest changes are not in this build you have now.
Some of the changes will stay, some will be reverted, and some will be re-designed.
That was posted as a reply to Hunter concerns with the most recent patch, but that seems to be what's happened to Warlocks as well. It's possible they have other changes to Destruction in the future patch (the one with the improved corruption change) that make up for these changes.
09/10/08, 5:33 PM
Similar Threads
