I thought JC got three BoP gems with 1.5x as good stats and they're prismatic too. Did this get changed? IE you can get three JC-only spelldmg gems, or three haste gems, or three crit gems, or any combination.

At least the current database sites like wowhead list it that way. I assume manly was wrong. This would be 27 bonus dmg alone.
If you count with the prismatic bonus you should gain ca. 15 additional spelldmg (3 two slot boni you could not use otherwise).

Another interesting choice not mentioned would be herbalism:
Fire Seeds give 200 spelldmg for 10 seconds every minute.

JC currently lets you use 3 JC gems, even the same one 3x. Which means you could do 3x +32, or +27dmg, certainly not comparable with blacksmithing, enchanting or leather working(honestly the lw bracer enchants are mad op).

Then you'll be happy to see this recent message from it's author . . .

"No, DoTimer has not been forgotten. No, it has not been abandoned. For the past few months I have been rewriting the addon from scratch, utilizing all the relevant changes to Blizzard's UI (such as the combat log revamp) to make the addon better than what it was.

It will be out before WotLK is released, I hope. DoTimer, Cooldowns, Communication, and Notifications are working; I have not yet done PlayerAuras. In Communication, sharing timers is back! That's just one of the new features.

I apologize for my lengthy delay in updating the addon, but the rewrite was desperately needed, and I did not want to develop for the old version as I was writing the new one.

I'd show you what I have already, but there's no GUI for it yet, so you wouldn't get a whole lot of benefit from it. But trust me, it's going to be awesome. "

World of Warcraft (English) Forums -> A note from the author of DoTimer

The gems are also prismatic so it can allow you to make use of blue slots for set bonuses. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any blue slots on tier gear and only 1 or 2 on non-tier cloth. Heigan's chest, for example, gives 7 dmg so that could to increase the value JC by 7. If "hypothetically" three set bonuses were acheived and they gave you 7 per, that would put JC in line plus the potential for a good trinket/neck.

That isn't as important as it was in the past since there are blue gems with double dps stats (dmg/spirit for example) in lich king.

After the emberstorm nerf and isb made self only, it seems that provided the critical chance is high enough, shadowbolt and incinerate deal almost equal dps.

At 2200 spell power and 40% critical chance. ISB would have 1-(1-0.40)^4 = 87% isb uptime.

So, shadowbolt will deal (730 + 2200*1.057)*1.4 = 4277.56 without isb.
With 87% isb uptime, it is (1+0.15*0.87)*4277.56 = 4835.78 per cast, or 1934.3 dps with assume no haste.

Incinerate with the same stat and emberstorm will deal
(786 + 2200*0.9143)*1.1*1.4 = 4308 per cast, or 1914.6 dps assume no haste

So the two are very close, and shadowbolt will scale better with more crit and damage.

At same time, a fully raid buffed, the imp is still responsible for more than 10% of the total dps, provided the imp is affected by a spell damage raid wide buff, like demonic pact or flametongue totem, so I came up with this shadowbolt spam spec for wotlk.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft 7/13/51

Assuming backdraft is not nerfed to 1 spell only, the standard rotation would be:

Immolate->Sbolt-Sbolt->conflag->3xsbolt repeat. Theoretically, it should work pretty well.

The main difference this from the standard 0/13/58 is I completely skipped fire, and used the extra points to get suppression and improved life tap (which should help with mana). The last point is put into chaos bolt, which hopefully will have good enough damage to be worked into the rotation.

The direct damage will probably be slightly lower than the conflag->3xsb->immolate->incinerate rotation due to lack of molten core, but hopefully make up for it with superior life tap.

The following is the 3.0 variant.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft 7/3/51

I wouldn't count on spirit being a very effective DPS stat. It gives you damage via Fel Armour and mana via Life Tap.
Intellect gives you damage via crit and mana via Pool/JoW/Replenish, most likely more mana than spirit.

Anyway, JC gives you 3*32 damage from gems which replace a +23 dmg gems and two +12dmg/+10spi gems (2 blues for CSD meta).
SO, JC is "+49 dmg, -20 spi" for all purposes.

After some PTR testing, I found affliction casting very awkward. Haunt, while useful, is just another spell you have to squeeze into small pockets of time. And then you have to try to fit shadow bolts into the rotation too. This was without even trying to squeeze CoA in there. Granted I had no proper dotimer, which makes it more annoying.

I raided as affliction in TBC and felt the dotting had a certain flow to it. I did not get the same feeling here. I guess dropping Immolate (and possibly beg to use CoE) will clean up the clutter a bit but I think overall I would have much preferred a passive 51 point talent for affliction. Then everything would have slid neatly into place.

It's not so bad, especially with everlasting affliction. I have raided a bit on beta now with full affliction. Immolate doesn't seem to be worth it, I ended up using CoE almost all the time and that means you only keep up UA, SL and Haunt as Cor gets auto-refreshed. Haunt in general is higher dps then Sbolt and also costs less mana. You are probably safe if you just use a macro that casts Haunt whenever it's up and shadow bolt otherwise and keybind that to your nuke key. It could lead to issues with refreshing Cor though, especially as if you cast the original Cor with the use of a spellpower trinket you really want to keep that one going.

Generally I would start the fight with CoE, Ua, Cor, SL, haunt, sbolt and then refresh the two dots and cast sbolt/haunt whenever avaible. That gives plenty of time for shadow bolt, actually in all boss fights the dmg breakdown is something like:
40% sbolt, 20% UA, 15% Cor

For DoTimers, there's a (new?) addon called Ellipsis on wowinterface that seems exactly the same thing, looks identical, has CDs as well and similar/same config. Only that it is maintained and avaible for beta (and with that PTR I would guess):
Ellipsis (Multi-Target DoT Timers) - LIVE : WoWInterface Downloads : Beta-version AddOns
Ellipsis (Multi-Target DoT Timers) - WOTLK : WoWInterface Downloads : Beta-version AddOns

Spirit is still way better than int, even without the passive regen. +49 dmg -20 spirit isn't bad, it just isn't as good as +46dmg from rings, or +46dmg from blacksmithing, or +50dmg from LW.

eh, only mostly dead. It's still better if the boss has timed vulnerability phases, and it works out better than CoA when you use a trinket, due to its insane coefficient (remember that only one of the CoA casts will get the trinket benefit, so this is not true with static spellpower increases). Honestly, that's what I thought the spell was originally supposed to be, so I'm not too concerned

I believe it has been suggested before, but change CoA into a non-curse so it doesn't take up a Curse slot. That leaves curses as debuffs only, with CoD as an exception for times when a warlock finds he does not need to apply any of his debuffs.

I've suspected that Immolate would eventually fall out of use as gear progressed*, but at my gear level (T4+) there's significant benefit to using Immolate. Even with Immolate it isn't too hard to get a rhythm going, but the DoTs aren't actually the problem.

Haunt is the core of the problem. I had previously stated that theoretically one could line up Haunt, UA, Immo, SL and even CoD without collision. This is actually true for all of the aforementioned except for Haunt. I made the mistake of seeing a 10 second CD and assuming 10 seconds between casts (the Lava Burst fallacy if you will). The minimum gap between Haunts is, in actuality, 10 + GCD seconds.

As a result Haunt interferes directly with your rotation. Even if you alternate your dots to provide GCD gaps for Haunt to squeeze between it inevitably collides with your DoTs. At that point the question has to be asked, which is more important? Is it better to delay Haunt or the DoT (perhaps plural)?

At this point it isn't unworkable, but it does create a number of awkward moments. I've been working under the principle that priority should roughly fall along the lines of Haunt, UA, Immo, SL, SB.

There's one aspect of the timing that concerns me more than the current awkwardness. Very often I'll have a free GCD before refreshing a DoT/Haunt but no Shadow Trance. These make for excellent times to hit DP/LT, but if our mana regen improves through progression it begs the question as to what we will do with the extra GCDs.

One thing to note, the Corruption Glyph grants the same Shadow Trance buff as Nightfall. I don't know whether it functions as a 14% chance or separate 10% and 4% chances or something even more confusing. All I know is that I haven't once seen a doubling up of Shadow Trance buffs.

*Assuming Haunt and Shadow Embrace affect the DoT portion of Immolate, would the Immolate Glyph provide clear incentive for its use in Affliction specs of all gear levels?

Curse of Doom probably remains better for Destruction than CoA if only for the fact that CoD takes up 1 less GCD. The damage lost from the extra CoA GCD has to be accounted for, as well as the less tangible disruption of Destruction's tight rotation. If Destruction's numbers for the curses are similar to Demonology's, Destruction only needs to lose 2k damage from the 2.25 additional seconds spent casting DoTs in order for the two to pull even mathematically.

If CoA procced Molten Core it might be a different story.

I think destruction/fire builds are now broken or, at least, unfinished.

With the recents changes, i really don't saw any fire build as competitive as afliction to dps at 70.

Anyways, is there anyone here that had already tested any fire/destro build with consistent numbers, after the recent changes?

I'm having trouble finding the blacksmithing and leatherworking enchants you guys are talking about. Also, since enchanting/blacksmithing/leatherworking all seem virtually equal after reading Flamingcloud, does herbalism seem worthwhile at all with that fireseed?

To the best of my knowledge current testing has verified that the spell miss rate is unchanged from TBC but the hit cap has been raised 1% to 17% by removing the previously unmitigateable 1% miss rate on +3 mobs.

If they make chaos bolt the highest dmg/dps spell for a destro warlock, it stands to reason you'd want to:
a) get emberstorm...10% extra scaling is good
b) use backdraft procs on your Chaos bolt casts
c) you'll probably want to free up talent points, meaning ISB is probably not for you

While the change doesn't guarantee destro dps at current numbers is competetive, it definitely suggests that the intent is for fire destro to be alive and kicking as a raid build.

The spell miss tables have not been changed. However, you will be able to gear out of the last 1% of miss, effectively making the spell hit cap versus a boss 17% (215 at 70, 446 at 80).

In raiding, I expect the felguard to be nearly indestructible, even without the survivability talents in Demo (which you could spec into if needed). In pvp, a pet is just never going to be able to hold up long against focus fire, it would be too strong if it could. It should however be better than it has been.

The devs have stated several times that the intent is for deep destro to be fire. While I'd like to see a viable shadow alternative, it's almost certainly going to be a lower dps spec whatever is come up with, and with the apparent removal of class specific damage gear, you won't even be able to gear your way into it either.

Source
Full-destro builds will be fire. Shadowbolt builds, if they exist, will not be deep destro. Probably 30/0/40+1, and they will involve spells other than shadowbolt. All the extra nukey spells are fire, all the extra shadow spells are non-nukey.

With the way things are shaping up right now I have to disagree with Koraa.

Right now, shadow bolt and incinerate scales pretty much equal at higher end. If you don't count molten core, shadowbolt actually scales slightly better than incinerate with enough crit and spell power.

With the way conflag works, using one of the backdraft to cast immolate is still too much of a dps waste, so for this reason I don't think the tree will ever become truly pure fire. Perhaps shadow and fire (with either fire emphasis or shadow emphasis), but IMO pure fire simply do not work with backdraft/immolate/conflag mechanism

Of course, if there is a glyph that make conflag not consume immolate or refresh it, then it is fire all the way, so there could very well be some changes in the next build that change the standard backdraft rotation. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Remember a big part of the bonus to Backdraft is the mana reduction, Immolate is a mana hungry spell so cutting down on it's cost could be as big a boost as losing the extra time saved by casting Incinerate.