Sebalot

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Warlock -> Talent Calculator

A 27/0/43+1 build with a SB+corr+CoA rotation should be a decent shadow seminuke build. I guess the last point could be used on Siphon Life and Immolate be used but then you are probably limiting shadow bolt time too much for it to shine. If Improved Soul Leech had not been nerfed this build would have looked much better though.

I suspect in the end a Haunt/Ruin build will be better dps since there are some very synergy effects deep in the affliction tree and ruin is the (now accessible) jewel in the destro crown. I am sure things will be changed a few times more so it is hard to draw any meaningful conclusions.

Overall, the feeling I have is that Blizzard has come up with some creative and fun spells and abilities but they have implemented them in an awkward manner that makes it hard to find a spec that fits really well. Of course it may be that shadowbolting for a year have dulled my mind and I don't see the beauty of our class in its current state.

 

Mica

Forgive me posting on the wrong account.

So taking into account that CoA gets some very nice buffs and the fact that Affliction locks do not "need" to use CoD (on a fight by fight basis), is it worth keeping up CoA over CoE in a 10 man raid perspective? If there is 1 lock and 1 mage, how much DPS is lost in giving up CoA?

 

PSGarak

Depends on whether you have an unholy DK or a boomkin around. Both of them can keep up the CoE equivalent as part of their rotation, and can't turn it off anyways, so you should always favor dropping it instead of them. As far as damage? 10-13% of the magic damage of the raid, however much that is. CoA used to be around 10-15% of an affliction warlock's damage so it was worth dropping at one caster. It's since been buffed, but not as much as the rest of the affliction tree, and certainly not doubled. If you're running you and a mage, and you're both at around the same damage (which you should be if blizzard does their job right), CoA would need to be ~25% of your damage to beat out CoE. That's not happening anytime soon. It may not even be worthwhile in the unlikely scenario that you're the only caster, but we'll need some finer numbers for that, which will only come out after the next polish pass and the numbers pass.

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• Maels

I've never, ever seen a Haunt resist in beta, and with the current bugged ability to use all 4 ranks, I've cast a fuckton of Haunts.

I took off all my +hit gear and started shooting at a Heroic Training Dummy (Level 83, 17% miss rate).
I used rank 1 shadow bolt to save cast time (doesn't affect results), and all ranks (bugged) of Haunt for the same reason.

100 Rank 1 Shadow Bolts = 20% miss rate

100 various ranks of Haunt = 0% miss rate

Crit rate was still ridiculously low (for no misses) on Haunt, I still believe something's up with Haunt crit %; I might be mistaken.

Rose-colored glasses speculation: they did the same with Soulshatter, since of all 10 (ten) Soulshatters I've used in the beta, I've had none resist. I could be ridiculously wrong on this.

Edit: Haunt is the knife to Cloak of Shadows' butter.

 

Scrufola

Now that ISB and Molten Core are self buffs. Do they have to be up when you start casting a spell, when the casting of the spell ends or when the spell hits to get the effect? That's especially important on the very short Molten Core buff.

What about the Immolate DoT? I would assume it does affect the DoT part but only as long as Molten Core is up and rank down afterwards but not up if it procs again?

 

Shai

It works like trinkets and other buffs in that regard, afaik. Spells you cast (ie. the cast finishes) while under the effect get the bonus. DOTs keep the bonus for their duration if they were cast while under the buff, but running DOTs on a target are not affected.

 

Zed

I haven't had a shatter resist for ages now, on live. Not even with an absent ele shaman in the grp resulting in 12.x% +hit. This made me wonder why people keep bringing up "+hit% talents are all useless because of shatter being Demonology" in this very topic. I know this is no more than an urban legend to you but I plan to remain quite convinced that this was changed to be unresistable a while back, at least until someone shows me the screenshot of their recent resist and subsequent getting gibbed

 

Roywyn

I ran a few instances together with an affliction lock, spec was something odd as 53/13/5.

When I checked Recount, Haunt seemed to have a 200% crit modifier. 2.1k average hits, 4.2k crits.
I've never seen that mentioned here or anywhere, so I'd throw that in here since it's helps Affliction crit scaling.

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.

 

• Maels

I believe that too, for what it's worth. I just don't say it out loud, for fear of being lynched!

 

Medu

I was on PTR with 55/0/5 and with 14.5% crit. After about 10 minutes of dps'ing a blasted land servent recount had showed that i had a 2% crit with haunt. I then went around killing random mobs with haunt and got no crit in ~30 casts. After that i put my last point in death's embrace to give me 1/3 in it. As he was at 1% i was getting the +6% crit for most of my casts and i ended up with 8% crit, 4 out of 50, for haunt and 18%, 18 out of 100 for shadowbolt. And yes all crit's were 200%.

 

Trey

Windows says that this screenshot was created on Tuesday, July 8th:



Here is the WWS of the night it happened, two days earlier:
Wow Web Stats

 

dedmonwakeen

So.... Everlasting Affliction essentially increases the coefficient by ( Num_Ticks * 0.01 ) for each of those spells.

I wonder how glyphs and/or set bonuses that increase the number of ticks will affect the coefficient....

http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft

 

Johnneke

WWS Log from 1 week ago setting the record straight on the anti believers of soulshatter having normal miss mechanics:
Wow Web Stats

 

Sydane

If you raid 4 nights a week, and Soulshatter 4-5 times per night, you should only get roughly one resist per month, something that is exceedingly easy to not notice. I usually only notice the resists because it always seems to happen right when an abomination is about to smack me in the face.

It would be nice to see a glyph that added something like 5-10% to hit for Soulshatter to offset the lack of a talent, much the way they are giving tanks glyphs to bridge the gap between the melee hit cap and the spell hit cap for taunts.

Empathy does not imply approval.

 

gospel

Wait, demo > destro for raiding now? O.o

It "seems" backdraft would be worth it, but is there any data/calculations to say it is/isn't? MC =worthless talent?

Jesus: "I can offer you eternal Salvation."
Disciples: "Can I get Might or Kings instead?"

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Sydane

Oddly enough, yes, quite a bit, in a way. The most significant is the ability to get rid of the last 1% spell miss with gear, eliminating that RNG aspect. Many other RNG abilities like spell knockback and mace stuns have either been altered dramatically or removed completely. There is a clear effort with this expansion to remove some of the more chaotic and potentially disastrous random factors of the game.

Empathy does not imply approval.

 

Darian_TruBlade

There's a theoretical cast cycle that is technically elegant, but has problems being put into practice.

The cast cycle begins with Corruption > UA > Haunt > Immo > CoA > SL > SB etc. If you can perfectly time your DoT refreshes, and refresh Haunt in the same way (treating it like a 12 second DoT) there are no collisions. It's a lot more like juggling than it is like a cycle, as the goal is to keep each DoT and debuff "up in the air" 100% of the time.

Practically speaking it is difficult to make it work, and even if it does there are other issues. Eradication has a large potential to throw off the cycle. There are numerous GCD length gaps that need to be filled, with LT and DP being the only reliable fillers (barring Shadow Trance). Lastly, Shadow Bolt doesn't fit into the cycle cleanly.

At least for me, Affliction isn't my cup of tea, it quickly devolves from the elegant theory into a gibbering mess of frantically trying to regain tempo.

 

Fulgurite

Data is almost impossible to obtain at this point because Devastation AND Backdraft are bugged in Beta for now. So you lose 5% crit, Ruin (+100% crit damage bonus), and 2 charges of Backdraft (it only hastes your next spell, not your next three).

So any conclusions right now are purely conjecture. It would be really nice to see, but it's hard to do the math on whether the 9 points required for Backdraft are worth it without any in game proof.

As soon as they fix Ruin and Backdraft, I'll try some Destro specs out on my premade, but it's hard to feel motivated with 150% crits.

My unfounded opinion is that it will be worth it, but it will be a hassle in practice. Seems like if you have the points, a shadowbolt build with backdraft could be handy. Then you don't have to worry about 100% immolate uptime, you can just shadowbolt x 3 on every backdraft.

 

Septus

As affliction, I expect to be using Curse of Elements, and would probably not use immolate. My rotations ended up being UA and haunt together, and a SL refresh every other UA/haunt cycle, and the intermediate time was filled with shadowbolts, or a dark pact when necessary.

 

Pyralissa

Blizzard's goal seems to be that all three specs will have parity in raiding. One spec might have better utility and lower damage, and another higher damage and lower utility but all three should remain balanced against each other. People are talking about Affliction and Demonology right now because they both have been significantly reworked in the last few data patches, while Destruction went through a "rebudgeting" pass which weakened the spec.


The "best" spec is going to either be the one you enjoy playing the most, since all three specs now have different styles, or the one that fills a hole in your raid's buff patterns.

 

• Maels

This is exactly why I really want Affliction to be a viable (if not the best) spec for raiding.
Tempos are boring, I can keep rhythm with no metronome. Cast cycles are boring. Cycle-less dps is almost like playing a healer, an almost reactive playstyle. Fuck rotations, long live unmacroable maximum damage.

Your damage should fluctuate, depending on how much effort you put into keeping the hottest debuffs up.
Your damage shouldn't max out when you've figured out the best rotation and keep doing that until the next expansion.

I might be alone in this train of thought, but hopefully not.

 

turturin

even if it continues to increase per tick, the average effect will still be lower per tick that it was when the talent was a flat % coefficient increase

 

turturin

you are not alone...../amen

I think many of us here would agree that most ludicrous aspect of 0/21/40's dominance was that it required no effort/skill/timing (i don't want to have the "which spec is most skillful debate") during the fight. Gear the toon correctly and press: 2222222222222222222222222222.

There were an awful lot of epeen-strokers willing to point out how leet they were in BT-gear with a 0/21/40 spec who would also admit that they couldn't dominate karazan meters in quest blues and crafted epics as affliction. To me that speaks to the absolute heart of the problem. FOTM warlocks were ridiculously common and the conditions I described made that both possible and prevalent.

My hope is that all three specs in expansion require thoughtful gear choices as well as good play in order to maximize dps potential.....this idea also fits in with the Blizzard "we want you to bring your 25 best players" design tenet that they've shared with us as a goal for wotlk raiding.

 

PSGarak

No it won't, the redesign is a strict buff. That's 1% per point per tick, not 1% per tick at 5/5. Maxed, that gives UA 25%, corruption 30%, and SL 50%, significantly more than the previous 20%. You would need a DoT shorter than 12 seconds to be losing damage.

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gospel

It sorta feels like they're taking the uniqueness out, though. With a DK or a Shaman w/ Wrath sorta takes away our most attractive debuff/buffing.

Jesus: "I can offer you eternal Salvation."
Disciples: "Can I get Might or Kings instead?"

http://www.xckd.com/318/