PsyBomb

Thanks for the responses, though I'm going to call an end to that discussion until some numbers get crunched to keep it from going off-topic. Looks like a mission success from this POV, though.

One thing I did notice from the spec attempts was how successful Blizzard was in managing to convince non-Demo Warlocks to use their pets, though it seems like one of those "you can tell what tree his main spec is by his pet" situations at this point.

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.

 

PyroTEK85

We're talking about demonic empathy and not demonic pact, right? Demonic pact has been working fine for me, and seems to proc and refresh from all pet crits. Either way I believe you, it could just be quirky for me.

 

Lurker37

Yes, I remember because I didn't recognise the Demonic Empathy icon at first and I had to wait until it procced again to mouse over it and find out what it was. It definitely wasn't proccing as often as Demonic Pact, but that's as expected from the description.

Unfortunately I was more preoccupied at the time with why my mana was plummeting so rapidly in Demon Form, so I wasn't paying close attention to whether Empathy was proccing on every cleave crit.

 

PyroTEK85

Yep that's the immolation aura bug. Once they fix that I'll be pretty pleased with the form. You can use it to nuke down mobs/people with +40% bolts (with will especially hurt if you get ruin), or if the attackers close in immolation aura will make them think twice about it. The armor bonus is pushing me to about 57% damage reduction, not including soul link and the additional -5% damage taken with felguard MD. All in all I'm happy how it's turning out, considering how much I disliked the form idea originally.

 

Profanity

The following are my observations of the 3.0 Destruction talents and DPS testing.

I have been spending a good deal of time on the PTR testing out various builds and rotations with some very promising results. I'm actually pretty stoked on the upcoming changes as at the very least our rotations will become much more interesting and involved.

One of the main problems I have encountered in the pug raids I attended is the lack of survivability of the imp. I would like to see empowered imp to be modified in a future build to include additional avoidance.

After many different builds, this is the one I feel offers the most bang for the buck at level 70:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...00000000000000

Improved LT to help make up for the loss due to not having enough spirit (only really concerned with imp LT in the affliction tree), 3 points in the imp and 51 points in destruction to get CB

I found after hours of testing that Soul leech and Imp soul leech are worth less than getting imp LT.

FnB is worthless as well.

It should be noted that I was using Major Glyph of Shadow Bolt and Glyph of Imp

My rotation would go as follows:

Immolate -> Conflag (backdraft proc)
SB x 2
Chaos Bolt
Immolate
SB x 2
Conflag
SB x 2
Immolate
Chaos Bolt
SB
Conflag..etc.

The rotation would sometimes get out of whack a little bit due to the differing cooldowns of Chaos bolt and Conflag and would also get thrown off sometimes due to Quagg's Eye procs.

Group composition (used for DPS testing on Anachronos outside of CoT):
Spriest
Elesham 3% crit, 5% haste, 100 spell damage
Boomkin 5% crit
Fire Mage 10% crit
Tank (tank threat was amazing, I only managed to pull aggro once, when we decided to try and BL at 85% instead of 70%)
Healer

I was able to sustain 2.8k dps without a BL and over 3.1k with a BL every single time(once I got the rotation down).

ISB was up 100% of the time. Chaos Bolt benefits from both ISB and Emberstorm.

Crit% was close to 50% across the board.


Ran in a BT pug today as well and pulled 2350 DPS on Naj'entus.

Imp survivability really became a problem in the instances, ran first 3 of BT, first 3 of TK. The imp was dying a lot. At this point, I think the imp will be completely useless in SWP as is. Here's hoping that the imp gets 100% avoidance in a future build.

edit: for a bit more clarity

 

Splot

I'm just curious, but I would have thought that changing affliction a little would have given you better bang. By going

• 3/3 Suppression
• 2/5 Corruption
• 0/2 Imp CoA
• 2/2 Imp Lifetap

you would gain the ability to carry in less hit rating and more damage or haste. Has Imp CoA improved that much that it out damages CoD and is that worth carrying the extra hit for? I can't remember any recent discussion on this and CoE/CoA/CoD appears missing from your rotation.

 

PSGarak

Or for the mana-cost reduction, which while only a tiny DPS increase, nevertheless reduces the amount of lifetapping necessary.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Pyralissa

Blizzard seems to be really struggling with Fire and Brimstone. The talent has been redesigned more times than any other talent in beta, and even after significant reworking the numbers seem to indicate that Improved Shadow Bolt is still a stronger talent. Even if Blizzard has said that the depth of a talent isn't supposed to directly relate to it's overall power, the fact that the last five point talent is getting outdone by the first five points really feels like a problem.

 

Katinsha

Not worth casting Corruption with that spec?

Another thing: I was on EU PTR and found the strange thing that Corruption damage enhancing talents on their own did what they were supposed to do (Shadow Mastery +10%, Contagion +5%, Imp Corruption +20%, etc) but in conjunction I lost a few % on them. If I calculated all the percentages I got a higher number per tick than I was seeing on the mob. This was seen every time after multiple respecs and with constant spell power. Couldn't figure out what was happening.

 

Bammor

Not to dumb-down the topic, but as a raid leader, I'm interested in what to expect from our raiding locks in WOTLK.

I hear talk of multiple specs boosting each other, but wondered if I could get a basic perspective based on what info/talents are currently in the public domain, as currently we have 4 Dest spec Warlocks.
For instance will the fact that our mages seem to be favouring fire in SWP, and the 'nerf' to Shadow priests effect raid composition for Warlocks drasticaly in peoples opinion?.

(If this is in the wrong thread please delete/move)

 

Medu

Well blizzards masterplan would suggest that it shouldn't matter. All classes should end up with similar dps. Fire mages will now buff all schools of magic, not just fire so shadow/fire doesn't really matter. In fact mages are 1 of the few classes that will be essential in raids as nobody else brings +10% crit to spells, which is strange as the "debuff spell caster", aka warlock, abilities have been given to Druid/DK.

A lot of deep talents are weak, probably because the ~35-40 were so strong. Affliction got a good 45-50 talent as their 35-40(well 30-35), was very weak only been 5% on a few dots leading to 2-3% dps increased compared with the huge boost from S&F. Any talent that buffs an ability with a cooldown, either a hard cooldown or duration based spell, won't have a huge increase in PvE DPS.
Warlocks are also pretty unique in that core talents in destruction need to be available to the other trees to make them viable. Bane is essential and ISB is very important, especially to demo where a large % of dps will be SB.

 

Lurker37

From further testing on the PTR, both Demonic Pact and Demonic Empathy are proccing from autoattack crits. To verify this I disabled all autocasting and let my felguard swing - every crit procced both buffs for me.

 

Darian_TruBlade

The sense I get is that F&B is supposed to encourage a Fire Destruction spec using Backdraft. The problem is that such a spec is the most awkward and least effective of any 3.0+ Destruction spec. It would be far less awkward if Immolate was exempted from Backdraft, but for the time being specs going full Fire or Fire+Corr are better off ignoring Backdraft.

Right now it seems that specs similar to Profanity's are the way to go. My rotation was different from his when I tried it out (I didn't cast Chaos Bolt during Backdraft as its cast time is reduced below GCD and I cast Corruption*), but it's extremely easy to blow away rotations trying to focus on Fire spells. More importantly you have more than one option for a rotation. You have your full out DPS rotation maximizing Chaos Bolt and Backdraft, you have your mana efficient rotation skipping Backdraft, and you have your hybrid that lets Immolate tick three or four times before hitting Conflagrate. Being able to reduce DPS without resorting to doing nothing is a compelling mechanic.

*Corruption was roughly 7-9% of my damage from my tests with 4 points in Imp Corruption. Given the minor increase in overall damage the talent represents I'm thinking it's not worth putting talents into unless you're aiming for Imp Life Tap. Otherwise the points would be better spent elsewhere.

Imp Life Tap seems to be competing with Demonic Aegis and Soul Link for talent points. The two currently seem roughly even in worth, but a fair amount of the decision may depend on where F&B goes. A spec with Imp Life Tap probably has no reason for any points in Demonology past Imp Imp, freeing up points for more direct DPS talents (such as a revamped and useful F&B, or Backlash).

 

PyroTEK85

Demo warlocks will bring Demonic Pact, which is a spell power buff. It should eventually beat out other buffs of the same type as it equals 10% of the player's total spell damage.

Alright, I'll check again when I get home, it's probably on my end somehow. Now that I think of it, I do only have 2 points in the talent and not the full 3, maybe that's it.

 

Dimeron

The highest totem of wrath gives around 280 spell power. Which means the demo lock needs around 2900 spell power for demonic pact to be considered better. I know wotlk scaling is crazy, but 2900 spell power seems to be pushing it. Like moonkin/uDK vs malediction CoE, I think demonic pact's use will be questionable when you have elemental shaman in the party.

 

Flamingcloud

2800 spell power should be reachable either in full naxx 25 or mid-expansion at the latest, people are already rocking 2050+ as demo at level 70 in 3.0.

 

Pentamorfi

Yes and no. Malediction CoE will be better than the Deathknight version due to also reducing boss resistances. CoR will be better than Faerie Fire if you spec for Frailty, giving double the amount of ArPen FF gives, while you can get the spell hit part of FF from a Shadowpriest's Misery.

We have to spec for it, but we are able to retain our raid debuffs (and maybe, to an extent, our place in a raid).

 

Flamingcloud

CoR is the exact same as FF, all Frailty does is remove the +AP part on CoR. Almost no bosses have resistance and even if they did you could put up untalented CoE ontop of the druid/dk version. So no, the bonuses are not retained.

 

Pentamorfi

You're absolutely right, my apologies.

 

Zed

Bringing a Moonkin for debuffs allows 2 of your Warlocks to use a damage curse, that is +3-500 dps for the raid in itself. Therefore I expect a Moonkin present in every minmaxed raid (as Unholy DKs do not seem very popular in raiding).

So the question remains if the devs balance our damage on the assumption of casting a damage or a utility curse. The former would be quite clumsy, I can't remember any other class having to give up competitive dps for utility that can be brought by other classes. The latter would mean we gain a slight edge on other classes if we are able to cast CoA. Perhaps the one curse restriction should be reconsidered.
However I'm not convinced Blizzard can pull off this "everyone should do the same dps on the same gear level" trick in the first place, so I expect to be benched/stacked from tier to tier and patch to patch. This added to the fact that hybrids are becoming even more valuable to every guild out there than before doesn't look very promising for the class in my opinion.


On a different topic: I'm worried about the new Soul Fire with shard requirement and no cd. With a Backdraft build I would more than likely want to cast it after a Conflag for the stun chance and massive damage, and this could mean a lot of shard farming between matches.

On Chaos Bolt: I'm on the opinion that the cd of this spell is too long and the power too small. If a talent point should be around +1% increase, end talents are more like +3-5% or provide some great utility. CB does neither. The ability to pierce a shield that you will most likely have to burn through later anyway is pretty minor utility in my eyes.
For starters it could be included in Backlash to prevent being locked out from all schools and giving it more flexibility (as you would want to use this ability after your opponent used a defensive cd it would be nice to be able to do it without much trouble). For PvE I agree we should wait for the final numbers, luckily for CB the 21 pointers in the other trees are not competitive anymore.

 

BeerBelly

Did some affliction PTR testing tonight (remember this is level 70 and mediocre gear - 1300 spellpower, 21% crit and 3% haste). Tests were done on Dr. Boom who lasted just about 40 secs with everyone beating up on him, so the tests are far too short to prove anything, but still I thought I'd share this.

First I went with the rotation of using: CoA -> Haunt -> Corr -> UA -> SL

Highest DPS I achieved with the above rotation was around 1500 DPS. It felt awkward and a bitch to keep dots on the target at the right times.


Second round of tests I used: CoE -> UA -> Corr -> Haunt -> SL
This rotation was much more flowing and easy to keep up. The timers were in sync most of the time and nightfall procs didn't cause too much disturbance. The DPS was also significantly higher, peaking at around 1750 DPS.
--edited in--
I did some more rounds with the Focus Magic buff from a helpful mage and I constantly clocked in at over 1850 DPS, highest being 2k. Pandemic jumped from about 7-10% of the dmg done to around 12-15%. Would be nice to see what raid buffs could do.


Third round was same rotation as before, only I added Immolate after Haunt. Again timers felt awkward and DPS fell to about 1550.

Spec used was this: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...00000000000000

This was without felhunter's DPS since he got owned pretty quickly at Boom's melee range. I also tried to use Drain Soul when below 20% (if Haunt was refreshed) and it resulted in an increase of DPS, even with dmg being split into 3 second ticks (highest tick I saw was just over 6k).

One more thought about Haunt: it feels lacking as it is now. With the spell dmg coefficient reduced to 1.5 sec cast and it's crits normalized (150% damage) it feels weak. I wouldn't even use it if it wasn't for the dot buff. Heal is something to laugh at since it heals for about 200. It needs a change for the better (my opinion).


Anyway, tests were too short to conclude anything definite, but I think they do point in the right direction.

 

Profanity

I highly recommend to anyone who can manage to get a decent group together to test DPS on Anachronos outside of CoT.

He despawns at ~20% and has 1.9 million HP.

Respawn timer is about the same as Dr. Boom