I have to say this version of Chaos Bolt turned into an utterly lackluster 51 point talent. The x1 talent should be signature talents and basically Incinerate v. 1.03 with 12 sec cooldown is disappointing for a 51 point talent. At least with the rare instant soul fire proc it had some personality. And with the latest round of nerf hitting the mana efficiency of the tree I am sour on it. I always hated lifetap as a part of destro, even more so when they make the tree more cooldown based.
If only affliction has comparable damage and doesn't run into debuff slot hell, it sure is looking like a more entertaining and involving way to raid as warlock.
If only affliction has comparable damage and doesn't run into debuff slot hell, it sure is looking like a more entertaining and involving way to raid as warlock.
Affliction *does* do comparable dps now (at low crit ratings, on the order of 20% more than destro). And this is before you consider affliction's multi-target capability, predictable threat buildup, and dark pact (which is still based on spellpower, right?). For pve min-maxers who like affliction's loaded spell priority queues, WotlK must look like a dream come true.
Last edited by nom : 09/19/08 at 5:46 AM.
Reason: Removed irrelevant pvp comments about afflic
Here is a quick and dirty spreadsheet that compares incinerate spam to chaos bolt + incinerate spam at different haste levels. I have use Dimeron's calculated damage for both.
I don't have the time to included mana and immolate but it does give some indication of how the spells stack up and how haste effects how they weave together.
I just participated in a gruul raid on the 3.0 PTR.
Had a moonkin in the raid but only a shaman for the melee totem. Damage-dealers were a bunch of Mages and Warlocks, we had nobody for the new replenishment buff.
According to recount, I did 2500 dps with a 56/0/5 Affliction spec, casting Immolate and having the felpup attack the boss, not using dark pact. I ran oom several times, so Life Tap had to be used.
Considering the fact, that Death's Embrace doesn't work right now (it just does nothing), I am VERY happy with Affliction
To be honest, I messed around with the DoTs and Shadowbolts at the last 15% of Gruul, cause I didn't watch my Mana and I didn't use any consumeables. That could have been done better (a bit)
Spells used: CoA, Corr, UA, SL, Immo, Haunt, Shadowbolt.
Gear was T6 and some loot from Sunwell.
Affliction seems to be viable and it's fun as hell.
Something weird with the succubus on PTR, shows up with the buff Succubus Transform at all times, doesn't seem to do anything. Also, it's blue-ish instead of it's normal color scheme.
EDIT: When I log back in the buff is gone, and the succubus is back to normal color. Upon resummoning, it has the buff again and it's blue. Maybe a hint at color/model choice for our demons?
I know there's not too many Demonologists here, but 3/3 Demonic Brutality does indeed bump the Felguard's Demonic Frenzy up to +80% additional attack power at a full stack, which is pretty substantial.
What is the optimal cast rotation for affliction? I was on the PTR and although it was SUPER laggy I loved what I saw...
That's the thing about Affliction. There really isn't a cast rotation, since the durations of the DoTs differ. I suggest your opening sequence (in raids) to be CoE(A)-Haunt-Corruption-UA-SL. Put them back up as they tick out, but try to let them tick out (remember that Corruption won't need to be recast unless some combination of procs or triggers gives you better power on a new cast). Priority on the casts should be:
1) Haunt
2) Corruption if it falls (it shouldn't)
3) UA
4) SL
5) Curse
6) Shadowbolt
You will spend a little bit under half of your time casting Bolts. If you start a cast, do not cancel it to reapply something. The damage lost will not equal the time you save. It is always better to go over a timer than to cut one short.
Oh, almost forgot. I do not use Immolate myself, though some do. It comes after UA on both charts if you choose to use it.
To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.
Just futzed around with Immo/Incin/Chaos Bolt on PTR (specific spec here: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...00000000000000), using Chaos Bolt as an opener, Incinerate/Immo spam, Conflag with Backdraft when Immo had ~2s left on it (as best I could time it since PTR is laggy as fuck), Chaos Bolt, Immo/Incin, Conflag, etc... was still only seeing numbers around 1500-1600 DPS solo (CoE only debuff). Not sure how that would scale in a raid setting, but I'm beginning to think more and more that Destruction DPS in 3.0/pre-WotLK might gimped beyond repair. The Chaotic Mind buff doesn't seem to last long enough or have a high enough proc rate to be worth it, though it is a really cool idea to make Soul Fire useful. I was only able to fit in 1 Soul Fire about every 2 mana bars on average. I have also heard a rumor that they didn't intend to make Chaotic Mind a permanent addition and will be removing it in a future build.
Looks like they at least fixed Backdraft (it's rightfully affecting 3 spells instead of just 1), but now Ruin randomly resets itself to 0/5, pretty damn annoying.
Just futzed around with Immo/Incin/Chaos Bolt on PTR (specific spec here: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...00000000000000), using Chaos Bolt as an opener, Incinerate/Immo spam, Conflag with Backdraft when Immo had ~2s left on it (as best I could time it since PTR is laggy as fuck), Chaos Bolt, Immo/Incin, Conflag, etc... was still only seeing numbers around 1500-1600 DPS solo (CoE only debuff). Not sure how that would scale in a raid setting, but I'm beginning to think more and more that Destruction DPS in 3.0/pre-WotLK might gimped beyond repair. The Chaotic Mind buff doesn't seem to last long enough or have a high enough proc rate to be worth it, though it is a really cool idea to make Soul Fire useful. I was only able to fit in 1 Soul Fire about every 2 mana bars on average. I have also heard a rumor that they didn't intend to make Chaotic Mind a permanent addition and will be removing it in a future build.
Looks like they at least fixed Backdraft (it's rightfully affecting 3 spells instead of just 1), but now Ruin randomly resets itself to 0/5, pretty damn annoying.
I just had a similar experience.
Backdraft has no effect on the GCD. Thus, Immolate is a clear waste (really annoying) and even Chaos Bolt pings it a bit. There's not much room for haste scaling if you're going Backdraft.
It was really hard to measure my DPS because Blizzard wonked out the training dummies. Even the ones in Azeroth are level 80/83. Dr. Boom became quite the commodity, so DPS was in mere 30-45 second intervals. In that time my DPS was only 900ish, when I can normally do ~1100 live. After fumbling around with Affliction and coming up with higher numbers, I was extremely disappointed to see that Destruction was the complete opposite.
It doesn't seem likely that Destruction will be raid viable, at least in the first few Tiers.
Temptation is growing to report everyone who complains about the dps of spec X. Go read Blizzard's posts: they've said very clearly
- the DPS pass hasn't been done
- the goal is that all specs of all classes give equal dps
- your choice of spec will be what buffs/debuffs your raid needs plus personal preference
We really don't need pages and pages of disappointment about spec X. Focus on whether the mechanics are good, whether the playstyle is attractive (or too busy, or too boring), whether the trees allow good/interesting builds, etc.
To make this a semi-constructive but still slightly off-topic post:
I put together a fun video of SL+SM/FG leveling in Wrath (film has snippets between levels 73 and 79). It's a short 4 minutes (narrated by me), but hopefully enjoyable (or maybe I'm the only nutter who loves watching multiple mobs beat on a warlock with impunity or watching locks solo group quests):
And finally, to actually be on topic and hopefully avoid getting this post infractioned for offtopic, backseat moderating, or insufficient warlockery:
Just keep respending the points in Ruin each time you log in or zone. They work, they just don't "stick."
The CoA/CoD thing vaguely disappoints me for reasons that are hard to put my finger on. Maybe the same reason TBC destro disappointed me. CoD has so much going against it: can't recast if resisted, you have to know the mob will be available to have damage dealt to it in a minute's time... it feels that CoD should be stronger and CoA be the filler for a second/third/etc. mob or if your CoD resists.
Does anyone else feel that Eradication is a little too bursty for Affliction's already complicated casting list (lets forgo rotation here)? Also, with the new changes to Improved Felhunter (4/8% of max mana restored from Shadow Bite), is it still a gigantic mana machine?
Does anyone else feel that Eradication is a little too bursty for Affliction's already complicated casting list (lets forgo rotation here)? Also, with the new changes to Improved Felhunter (4/8% of max mana restored from Shadow Bite), is it still a gigantic mana machine?
Though it may look like it, don't mistake Eradication for a burst ability. It isn't one by intent, it's purpose is to ease the priority casting rather than make it more complex. In essence, this will allow shadowbolts to be cast within significantly smaller cast gaps, or perhaps allow a second cast to go off before you need to start with DoTs again. Combined with Nightfall and the Corruption glyph, it can turn a 4-second gap into literally three shadowbolts. As for Improved felhunter, he's generating much less mana than before the change... but it's still quite a bit. You'll need to use Lifetap on occasion now, but that's acceptable to me.
And Kyth, MANY thanks for that video. Though I'm not big on Demonology, I may not be able to get groups for quests when Wrath comes out. You're a lifesaver.
To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.
And Kyth, MANY thanks for that video. Though I'm not big on Demonology, I may not be able to get groups for quests when Wrath comes out. You're a lifesaver.
Neither am I, but I'm a whore for anything that lets me level quickly and at odd hours (I am PST in an EST guild on a small EST server.) If that's felguard, then I'll go felguard .
If anything in that video is unclear, I also wrote up a strat page on it after I sent that video to some friends and they complained that they couldn't figure out where to put the talent points or where to begin: WarlockLevelingWotLK - FuStrats
Does anyone else feel that Eradication is a little too bursty for Affliction's already complicated casting list (lets forgo rotation here)? Also, with the new changes to Improved Felhunter (4/8% of max mana restored from Shadow Bite), is it still a gigantic mana machine?
On my Gruul raid a few hours ago, I had 3/3 Eradication and liked it. The proc also affects my global cooldown (well, it's haste) so there was no problem to just keep casting my dots and bolts. I only felt like it sucks a bit with the standard UI, cause I only noticed the Buff like "whoops, that last gcd was fast". With scrolling combat text telling me "+ Eradication" in big letters on live servers that wouldn't be a problem.
Regarding the Improved Felhunter and Dark Pact.
Since DP still scales with spellpower it yields more mana than improved Life Tap at level 70 solo play. 1750 vs 2050 Mana with my spirit lacking Sunwell Raid-gear. However, as i entered the gruul raid and got some standard raid buffs, Life Tap suddenly gave well over 2000 Mana. Therefore I would assume, that Dark Pact (and therefore imp felhunter) won't matter anymore as soon as we happen to get some spirit on our gear.
By the way, the felpup seems to get along with his Mana for quite a long time (several minutes) even without imp felhunter. Maybe we won't need to spend any points on that talent at all. He seems to regen a little bit of mana before each shadow bite, I guess that happens because of the 6 sec cooldown.
I'll try and get a healer to heal himself while dueling my Felhunter and check how long his mana will last exactly.
@Quintessa: I wasn't talking to you. Look at the post directly above mine and stop being so defensive. It's lines like this that I was addressing (emphasis added):
"After fumbling around with Affliction and coming up with higher numbers, I was extremely disappointed to see that Destruction was the complete opposite.
It doesn't seem likely that Destruction will be raid viable, at least in the first few Tiers."
I read your post as discussing the scaling (which is separate from current damage) rather than the dps.
But seriously, thanks for the slam there at my attempt at levity and cheer. Class act.
Last edited by Kyth : 09/19/08 at 2:36 AM.
Reason: edited to be less cranky
Backdraft has no effect on the GCD. Thus, Immolate is a clear waste (really annoying) and even Chaos Bolt pings it a bit. There's not much room for haste scaling if you're going Backdraft.
It was really hard to measure my DPS because Blizzard wonked out the training dummies. Even the ones in Azeroth are level 80/83. Dr. Boom became quite the commodity, so DPS was in mere 30-45 second intervals. In that time my DPS was only 900ish, when I can normally do ~1100 live. After fumbling around with Affliction and coming up with higher numbers, I was extremely disappointed to see that Destruction was the complete opposite.
It doesn't seem likely that Destruction will be raid viable, at least in the first few Tiers.
Perhaps a better implementation of Backdraft would not just be a reduction in cast time but a flat increase in haste rating or haste % so that GCD no longer becomes a factor (except maybe in the case of Immolate still since any increase in haste could drop it's cast time below 1s). It definitely seems like the benefit of it still doesn't make Conflagrate a worthwhile part of a Destruction DPS rotation, and maybe those points would be better spent elsewhere. I'll hopefully get to play around with a few tweaked specs tomorrow, and hopefully the PTR will be less laggy so I can get some more precise numbers.
Perhaps a better implementation of Backdraft would not just be a reduction in cast time but a flat increase in haste rating or haste % so that GCD no longer becomes a factor (except maybe in the case of Immolate still since any increase in haste could drop it's cast time below 1s).
This might just be an oversight on their part -- it seems an odd thing to design in ("And George, make sure this is wasted on Immolate ok? They'll be casting it right after conflag.") If you haven't already, I'd throw up a post on the beta forums, it seems an easy thing to fix if it was indeed an oversight, as long as someone points it out.
Even if it ends up, with haste, dropping immolate below 1s, that's still a far better implementation than what it is right now. I'm not sure what other options they have, other than making it only a haste increase on our next three nukes (which could also work.)
Playing around with my priest as shadow now on PTR was a blast. The tree is amazingly well designed and everything makes sense. It had a cohesion affliction lacks. It had much less of a whack-a-mole feeling than affliction has when it comes to squeezing stuff in, despite juggling quite a few spells at the same time (2 dots, MF, SWD and MB) with three of them on cooldowns. Granted the cooldown on Devouring Plague is the same as duration so for single target fights it makes it easier if anything.
I think the mix of haunt+shadow bolt is a poor marriage. Haunt in particular with a cooldown of 10 seconds and a duration of the debuff with 12 just adds many extra layers of complications to the tree. It would be better to just remove the cooldown and have it be the sole filler for 51p talent affliction and change whatever coefficients that would be needed. Then you could focus on dot uptime with just one filler spell that makes sense for the tree. And it would let us spec into demo instead of destruction for the extra points. The demo talents have much better synergy with affliction to start with. Balance as needed to account for demonic aegis and soul link.
With the unification of gear in Wotlk, enabling me to play both as a healer and dps when needed, switching main looks like a more appealing prospect. Especially since the dps gap between lock and shadow priest should be much narrower if I understand Blizzards intentions correctly.
I was playing around with a few different specs on the PTR and decided to put together a short video displaying some of the numbers I was seeing with an imp based spec I came up with.
I'm by no means saying these are the kind of numbers you can expect in a raid as...
a) The only buff applied here is Curse of Elements which I'm putting up myself. The option of using doom would add more dps of course
b) I messed up a couple of things with my rotation.
I'm taking a second shot at destruction on the Servants in the badlands, and it's not as bad as it was trying to compete for attention on Dr. Boom. My numbers were higher in general, and I'm not sure how much of that was the level of the mobs.
However, one thing I noticed very clearly was that Backdraft wasn't worth the effort. I was easily 10-20% better avoiding it entirely. It ultimately doesn't seem to be worth the effort for a Fire Destro build. I can't say at the moment how well a Shadow Destro build would fare.
Corruption is, however, totally worth casting. I'm thinking a spec along these lines will be optimal for Fire Destro.
I'm taking a second shot at destruction on the Servants in the badlands, and it's not as bad as it was trying to compete for attention on Dr. Boom. My numbers were higher in general, and I'm not sure how much of that was the level of the mobs.
However, one thing I noticed very clearly was that Backdraft wasn't worth the effort. I was easily 10-20% better avoiding it entirely. It ultimately doesn't seem to be worth the effort for a Fire Destro build. I can't say at the moment how well a Shadow Destro build would fare.
Corruption is, however, totally worth casting. I'm thinking a spec along these lines will be optimal for Fire Destro.
I like your builds, only change I think you should look at is your level 80 build with 1 point into soul link, put that last into back lash for an additional 1% to crit.
I been playing myself with chaos bolt, conflag, demo sac builds and this one seems to be my favorite as well.
Chaos Bolt is a lot of fun. I was goofing around in battlegrounds, and the spell helps put a lot of extra pressure on healers, especially priests. With a lot of the healers getting damage absorbs or shunts in the expansion (Spirit Link, etc.) I think Chaos Bolt is going to be a valuable PVP tool. As a PVE spell, it's a hard-hitting, fast-casting nuke. I like it. It scales well, it's not terribly complicated and it's something that just works.
I'm still disappointed/concerned in the Backdraft/Immolate line for the reasons everyone has echoed here. I do like Backdraft conceptually, thematically it makes sense and the game mechanic would work well if the talent wasn't tripping over itself. Really I think all of the Immolate anchored spells are fine, Conflag is the problem. Eating Immolate really isn't just working, and hasn't been working from the begining. Blizzard seems to be stuck on Conflag eating an immolate as a counter-balance (i.e. you trade extra damage for a smaller amount of damage) but that's difficult to really pull off; and that's why people are simply skipping the entire operation and coming away a lot more satisfied. Either a glyph that stops the consumption, or simply removing it from the base spell seems almost necessary to make Destruction as a whole. However to the question of "is the talent spec fun" I would say yes, without qualification. It's just not very intuiative because of the counter-synergy of Immolate and Conflagrate.
On a related but different note, the imp is great, and the pet talents are a great change for the entire class. Empowered Imp is just a lot of fun to play with, especially with raid buffs. And while Improved Soul Leech is still a very good talent, I wish it scaled with your crit in the way it did when it was based off damage. If critical spells generated say 4% of your maximum mana it would not only make crit worthwhile, but create better synergy with improved imp with his crits giving you better crit chance, thus giving him more mana. Still though, just lovely to be actually using minions instead of killing them off every 30 minutes.
I tried the different specs vs the test dummies on beta yesterday and was really disappointed. Seemed like destro lost dps instead of gaining some.
I tried a demon/destro spec (fel knowledge being quite powerful as it scales well with lvl 80 pets etc), kept up CoE, Cor and spammed sbolts. Did around 1500 dps.
Next up was haunt/ruin, CoE, UA, Cor, SL, Haunt, Sbolt. Did about 1800 dps with that.
Finally imp fire/shadow destro. I barely kept up 1200 dps with that, dunno if I fucked something up, but I did more dps with that spec before the last patch. Was there some nurf that I did not see?
Anyway, destro dps seems really sad atm, not exactly competitive. Another problem is that you cannot bring multiple Affliction warlocks to a 25 men raid due to 40 debuff limit. One of those locks uses up 5-6 alone.
09/18/08, 9:40 PM
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