Ewwwwww EF is 10% critical strike dmg,I missread and thought it was 10% more crit... That is quite shitty.... basically EF is a 5 point talent that has 1/10 the effect of ruin a 1 point talent? ( not including the fact it refresh immolate but it still doesn't make up for that).

I agree Kyth, the destruction tree is incredibly insulting. I think the only way an imp build would work(even in 5 mans) would to make him able to attack when phased. Make it not work in PvP, whatever. All the demo buffs are dependant on pets surviving, which I have no faith in blizzard doing correctly after many tiers of raiding.

At this point, I'd rather play my feral(or even as Moonkin, that tree looks outstanding now) than my warlock.

[quote=Kyth;757129]
I haven't analyzed the other trees in depth, but I'm deeply suspicious of anyone getting excited about a build that involves your imp attacking, since that's going to be obscenely situational (felguard spec already struggles, and it has a pet with real HP and avoidance.)

QUOTE]

I've said it before, Empowered Imp ought to be renamed to Empowered Patchwerk Attempts. Let's be serious, the imp has no more than 4k hit points raid buffed at level 70. It wouldn't survive any fights in BT/Hyjal unless you were lucky with current mechanics. Once in combat, you can't make it go phase shifted again. I feel like I'm missing something here, like they are boosting the imp's HP or something substantially and giving it avoidance..or something.

Except:

1) We know nothing of the upcoming raid encounters.
2) The pet scales with your stam (30% of your stam)
3) The new rank of Blood Pact grants 133 stam untalented, or 172.9 talented.

However, as far as I can tell, the imp only gets 2.732 hp/stam. So he's pretty squishy in that sense. But if they merely gave him more hp/stam he'd actually scale far better.

As far as the spell strings go, there doesn't appear to be any new pet scaling spell strings, so I couldn't say if there is a change or not.

So, assuming he would scale slightly better (6-7k hp at 80 maybe?) he would actually be pretty viable.

I'd think we might just be better off without Demonic Sacrifice... Tune the other trees so there's no DPS loss, adjust pets so we can do something more interesting with them than having imp give a passive stamina buff (Get the risk vs reward right, and people will do it.)

If they improve pet scaling and possibly AI as well, (a command for "go over there" with area selctor, a command for having the imp stand at your feet, attacking when you do, move when you do, having them move out of the fire automagically, I'm sure these are possible and there must be more possiblities out there.) then imp might be usable on encounters with low and/or avoidable aoe on the raid, while felguard would be the pet of choice on the rest. A good opportunity for player ability to shine.

Destruction definetly need some help. The "shadow makes fire gooder, fire makes shadow stronger" talents are (mostly) about numbers, get those right and I bet they will be used (another way to distinguish the "better" players).
Now, Eternal Flames and Immolate. If Etnernal Flames where changed so that an incinerate hit within 4 seconds of your immolate dissapating from the target (either through dispel, conflagrate or simply expiring) would cause it to re-ingite, draining an appropriate ammount of mana from the warlock (I'm thinking half of the orignial cost) but incurring no GCD or anything. Then, take Conflag off the GCD (perhaps up the mana cost ever so slightly, and hey! free pvp buff for destro?) thus making it quite worthwhile to use without even increasing it's scaling. Suddenly, having stuff buff/proc off Conflagrate isn't such an moronic idea... if, say, it could proc a buff called "Big Strong Shadow Bolt" lasting, perhaps, 10 seconds, you would shoot an incinerate (if conflag is off the GCD, a conflag/incin macro would be a smart thing, perhaps) to get immolate going again, then use Decimate. Either shoot a soulfire, then cast a regular shadowbolt or decimate the shadowbolt and go back to your scheduled incinerate spamming. Remeber, Demonic Sacrifice got scrapped, so you can have Decimate! (to be useful it would be nice if even though it does "chaos" damage, it could benefit from any debuffs/buffs benefiting the the base spell.)

Flamingcloud, could you link(if you did it already) or show how eternal flames is that much of a boost? I can see from the warlock spreadsheet, quite easily enough, by turning off immolate, incinerate's dps goes up 13%. But you're probably losing 50% of immolate's dps by not refreshing it, which amounts to about the gain you get from not having to refresh it.

I like Quack's idea for Eternal Flames. Reignite immolate(initial damage and all). MAYBE take conflag off GCD. Destro warlocks can already put out a scary amount of burst damage, that might be too much.

Imho they are heading in the right direction with Warlock talents, but they still seem flawed in it's execution. Still going to have to maintain a 16% hit cap when you can't afford those Shatters to resist, top end Destro talents being counter productive, increased crit on Immolate only to not ever use it in a rotation other than an opener, wtf?

The way Im looking at things at his point in time is 21/50 Shadow Destro with a Immo refresh->Shadow Bolt Spam rotation for Molten Core/Kindling procs. Although it would be heavier on the mana consumption, with enough Spirit/Mana Regen it seems likely that you could keep it up consistantly with possibly a higher DPS potential than pure fire nukes whilst keeping up ISB for teh raids benefit.

Damn, and I had to register just to post these lines of crap.

Guys are we perhaps assuming the worst and not being inventive enough? Granted, immolate is best cast when it's expired, but assume a full-destro spec, by and large...

What if you spec 10% crit on Conflag/Immo, and you spec Eternal Flame, and you spec that silly Molten Core...

Fight starts, curse-up, Immolate, spam SB. Proc Molten Core, immediately, Conflag-Immo, resume SB.

To Ele, since I didn't see an answer to his comment...

The way I read Atrocity was that it's a talent that is actually a spell, not a passive talent. Therefore, only the Corruptions that were initiated by this spell get the nice little 'boom' at the end. To the best of my knowledge, any spell that you have to talent into never gets you a passive benefit in the nature that you're talking about.

It also is quite counter-intuitive with the "shadowbolt refreshes Corr on target" talent. Seems quite silly if one talent ensured you only cast a DoT once, and another talent gave you a big, fat bonus whenever it ended, no?

Eternal Flames

I have no clue how you're getting 12-14%. Maybe you forgot to subtract the dps loss from not casting immolate? It's about an 8-9% dps increase, with the math I came up with here. I might be wrong of course, and someone didn't catch it.

Not to mention the basic issue that it negates the value of Improved Immolate and you have no other place to *put* those talent points. At least you can dodge Backdraft (although it'd be nicer if they gave us a talent worth taking.) I'd have more respect for the designer of these trees if he'd changed improved immolate to affect the dot portion at the same time these trees went out (they changed other stuff, clearly they are willing to do that.) As it is, it just shows a lack of a comprehensive examination of what this actually did to the class.


Molten Core

Molten Core is useless not because of the talent per se but because of the design of the trees. I have no clue how you'd "fix" it to account for the fact that corruption is terrible and demonic sac shouldn't exist. Molten Core is bad *because the design of our trees is bad.* As I said, I cannot think of any set of coefficients on that which would make it worth using.


Backdraft

Fix... how? Just add more crit to everything? Again same problems as Molten Core: even increasing all of that stuff to a 75% crit chance for those spells won't fix it. Conflag is even worse now since it reduces the value of Eternal Flames to use, Immolate crit is STILL bad even at +75% because eternal flames negates the talent, and no one in their right mind is going to get +crit on a non-spammable AE spell (put it on SoC and we can talk.)

The talent doesn't need to be fixed, Immolate needs to be redesigned or the talent needs to be *removed*.


+5% hit on destro spells

How am I exaggerating the statement "+hit from talents is useless when it cannot affect our deaggro." This goes right back to the whole discussion we've had since WoW started about Affliction's +hit talents. Since it doesn't affect your deaggro, much less all your spells, there's no point in taking it.

All of this *could* be okay, we could just spend twice as many talent points to get increased range, +hit, and -threat if they solved the demonic sac problem. Except they didn't, that talent still exists, and more important even if they did soul shatter is neither affliction nor destruction.

There's no exaggerating here, +hit is useless if it doesn't include your deaggro (unless that deaggro is on a 30 second cooldown rather than 5 minute.) I will not accept a raiding lock with us who doesn't have their deaggro hitcapped, that's just asking for problems. (6% of the time on bosses I can't drop threat! But that's okay, I'm making use of this amazing talent I got.)

There's no problem with it being shallow in the tree. I think the person who did it (a) forgot about soulshatter and (b) expected something like 21/0/50 -- not realizing that will never happen with demonic sac existing (and destruction not getting enough of a buff to make up for not having demonic sac.)



Err... so. I guess you have a succubus sacrificed then since you're spamming SB? That means that Conflag, which isn't even worth casting with an imp sac'd (+15%), you're casting with only +10% from the talent?

Not to mention SB is a weaker spell anyways, and is designed to be *even* weaker in WotLK (see the nerf to ISB with no corresponding personal boost to the spell.) And without the imp sac'd your immolates are weaker. And of course with that build you'd never pick up the only other decent new talent in the tree (Eternal Flames) since you'd lose the (minor, but existant) benefit from fire nukes.

It's not about not being creative enough here.

I'm willing to bet an awful lot that whoever designed these trees literally is not at all familiar with the raiding builds or with all of our spells. Otherwise they'd have realized the position that demonic sac puts them in when it comes to Molten Core *ever* working out (due to Molten Core's low coefficient, and that you can't get the affliction buffs to affliction spells -- which still don't make corruption worth casting unless you can get 18 deep, but it's at least a slight boost.)

I did manage to come up with a Molten Core build, it just looks weaker than anything else you can do. It turns out to actually be far far harder than you think because as I said in my post, our trees are designed quite poorly, making it hard to spend points. You can build a 7/21/41+2 build, with the last points going in either imp lifetap or kindling soul, whichever adds more dps. The trick here is dropping shadowburn and soul leech both to pick up molten core and sorta hope it doesn't suck as much as it looks like it does (plan is to keep corruption up, but ignore the +shadow procs -- don't ever cast a shadowbolt, it's not worth it.)

(Keep in mind the affliction points in that build really are a waste. Improved corruption has the same problem it always did: 5 talent points to remove 0.5 seconds effectively from the spell. But at least you can pick up -threat for your corruption, and it opens the window to improved lifetap if it's more dps than Kindling Soul in WotLK-level gear.)




And while technically it's true, we haven't seen the raid encounters, and maybe our imps will have 50,000 HP in the expansion...... be realistic. You're not going to respec for patch in naxx 2.0 just to use your imp just for flavor.

Raid fights have AE damage. This isn't going to change just because some designer forgot how bad pets are in raid encounters. The imp is not going to be viable.


Ignoring the deep felguard builds right now since I don't know enough about demo to offer an opinion (for a pet class I'd rather play my hunter), the two good builds I can see are:

0/21/50 is far weaker than it's TBC counterpart because you're literally spending 7 talent points that you will use once or never on a boss fight (currently you spend one: shadowburn), and because the new talents just don't add that much. But unless magic happens (i.e. dots benefit fully from more than one stat), it's where we'll be just due to how gear works.

29/21/21 gives up UA assuming you have enough crit rate to make ruin mostly viable, and hinges on whether Eternal Afflictions (is that what affl 45-50 is called?) is worth +13% dps or not (you lose 2% off of shadow mastery and gain +15% succubus sac.) Unfortunately you're stuck using shadow nukes to take advantage of shadow mastery, which are weaker than they were with the ISB change, and I haven't felt like doing that much math on trees that will probably change yet.


Granted this *all* depends on whether or not fire mages exist.

Unless dots get completely overhauled to benefit from crit and haste sufficiently (via a fundamental change or a talent), they will not scale as well as nukes do in the end game. Which means you will still end up back at the destruction tree no matter how terrible they manage to make the tree. Since they've killed the viability of shadow destruction, this makes me uncomfortable: If fire mages don't exist for some reason (if they end up arcane), this will kill lock dps; similarly if shadow priests aren't on raids, instead replaced by disc priests.

We're very very dependent on two external class *specs* for dps. They may complain they're dependent on us for curses, but at least our choice of spec doesn't affect them.




Incidentally, CoE/CoS need to be tossed ASAP, CoMagic needs to exist, and CoR needs to have 5 minute effect. Then raids aren't forced to bring three of us.

And affliction should have a deep talent (40+) that lets you cast two curses, so if you want to run with only one warlock you can.



Amusing side-note: they want to make us be spirit casters, but said that our sunwell gear will last us until "well into" the expansion. I wonder if that can actually be the case with no spirit on any of our Sunwell gear.