The damage pass still hasn't been done. Consider that the devs have the right "feel" for the talents right now, but they still need to change values up and down to get everyone in line, and to get every talent tree (dual-specs too) raid/arena viable).

As to Nether Protection, it should be pretty viable for any magic tanking situation, Sapphiron, and okish for other fights.

As far as I know (I'd love to be proved wrong about this), Commanding Shout and Blood Pact both have 20 yard ranges. So one for Melee, and one/two for Casters.

As for Affliction utility, unless CoR gives more then Fairie Fire, it wont be used, unless you're in a 5-man or some 10-man situations. CoE is still up in the air, however, because we still don't know how valuable -resist will be. Demonology gets some spell power buffs from pets, so I'd expect it to be at or above Totem of Wrath in mid to late Naxx 2.0 .

As to SS and HS, you undervalue them. With potion sickness, 2/2 Imp. HS will be a staple for the raid (so Demo yet again looks attractive, and 13/58 Desto could swing it too). SS is a resurrect controlled by the person who died, so less complexity = more power.

Utility is supposed to be something cool for the raid IN ADDITION to getting the people you want in the raid.

I sincerely hope that we'll see as many Warlocks as the raid wants in there. There's a lot of flexibility now with debuff condensation, so the aim here is to allow for better social cohesion. It almost feels like Christmas is coming.

I did some PTR testing of affliction last night on the 4pcT5 bonus as affliction on Dr. boom. (btw, T5 is a really cool-looking set. I had almost forgotten.)

Cast sequence was corruption, then sb over and over and over, as i wanted to test only how the bonus was working with the everlasting affliction mechanic.

Result:
1st tick = 747
2nd tick = 787
3rd tick (and all ticks after) = 814 (a couple times ticked for 815)

Notes:
I can't be sure what debuffs may have been applied, as there were multiple classes wailing away on him.
I didn't write down my spellpower in that gear...was around 1500 with fel armor iirc

Conclusion:
Even ignoring my somewhat sloppily applied methodology and not being sure exactly what caused the first two increases in the ticks, it seems clear that the 4pcT5 bonus is broken. I'll give the devs the benefit of the doubt and say this is probably intentional, as a working bonus + everlasting affliction would be OP (and the OP-ness would scale with length of boss fight =D).

On another note....to weigh in on our 51pt talents: both haunt and chaos bolt seem very strong for pve now. haunt provides meaningful scaling to affliction and decent dmg, chaos bolt provides great dmg and dpm to destro (183 mana, 1.93 sec cast, critting for ~6k totally unbuffed and no debuffs on mobs in barrier hills above shat). I think the cooldowns on both are fine. I'm more PvE oriented, but it does seem that they are a little weak in PvP:
If you have 1.5 secs to cast as affliction, wouldn't you rather put UA up?
Doesn't the double-school lockout possibility of casting CB make it more likely you'd go for incinerate as destro? Would adding CB to the backlash proc fix that, be OP, or not go far enough?

Chaos Bolt seems powerful enough for my tastes. It benefits from Emberstorm, Molten Core, and ISB, with tests to be done for Physical and Frost debuffs. It's also really cheap (7% of base mana) and a quick cast.

Even with Backdraft Soul Fire is a 2.8 second cast. You won't be chain casting those, over following it up with Shadow Bolt > Chaos Bolt, if you even get it off. If by matches you instead mean raids I doubt we'll see Soul Fire used for anything except mana efficiency. Soul Fire only scales barely better than Shadow Bolt (assuming Imp ISB) so the damage difference is probably only enough during burn phases or situations where mana efficiency is extremely important. Then again, maybe Warlocks should stack endless shards in their bags and thus make it a big enough issue for Blizzard to fix.

On a related note, I'm wondering if Backdraft doesn't scale negatively with Haste. In theory you want to cast slower spells in order to keep the buff longer and thus benefit longer. By that logic Haste works against Backdraft. I'm not sure if it pans out mathematically, but I've noticed during testing that Bloodlust didn't confer as large a benefit as I would have expected.

I found that with 20% passive haste (including the wrath of air totem) I was able to keep all of my nukes backdrafted except for maybe one - two per rotation. Two when I didn't LT and one when I did. I would squeeze a LT after casting immolate while waiting for the conflag cooldown to complete.

During Blood lust, I believe it would be more beneficial to cast only Shadow Bolt and Chaos Bolt.

edit: a bit more clarity

It doesn't scale negatively with haste, it just doesn't scale at all, unlike crit and whatnot with which it scales positively. Assuming homogenous cast rotation, you get 90% of a spell from backdraft. Haste doesn't change that at all. It doesn't make the spells smaller, except by opportunity cost of other stats, it just fails to make them bigger the way that backdraft would scale with any other spell damage stat.

A few corrections. I'm not sure about the yard ranges, but based on Fel Intelligence (in Aff), the range is much longer than the tooltip says.

CoR and FF will be balanced to be exactly the same armor reduction and not stack, that's the whole point of having interchangeable buffs in the new system.

And totem of wrath is 280 spell power. If that's less than 10% of your spell power, you would have to have 2800 SP. I doubt that will happen in the entry level raid of Wrath (for the majority of the raid).

With the healthstones, unless it's been changed, you can't have multiple healthstones at the same time of the same rank. (In other words, no more 3 HS per person.) So that's something only the first warlock brings.

I don't understand how "less complexity = more power" though. Battle Res seems much more flexible and powerful to me, because you get one chance every 30 minutes to predict who's going to die with a Soulstone. (Besides fights like Azgalor and Teron where you are forewarned.) With a Battle Res, you see "Oh, that person is dead on the ground, let me Res them."

Do you have a present (maybe still under the tree) which raises the debuff limit? ;-)

Curse, UA, Corr, SL, Haunt - maybe even Immolate. That's a lot of debuffs. And I don't know if Drain Soul has to be added for the last several percent, or if shadow bolt delivers more dps.

I think debuff slots will become even more difficult to manage than in BC. Could some beta raiders please share their experience?

I was wondering abount Demonic Pact, I assume it doesn't recalculate when it refreshes itself? So you don't get the 10% of the 10% and so on?
Also, what if there is a Totem of Wrath around, and you have 1450 spellpower before the totem (at level 70)? You would have 1600 sp with the totem, but then the buff would override the totem effect, which was calculated in the buff, but it won't be there the next time your pet crits... has anyone any experience with this?

Hmm.. I don't think I got my concept across clearly, or I'm misunderstanding you guys. The problem I see isn't that we will be casting spells that aren't affected by Backdraft, but that Backdraft's power is directly related to its duration.

Consider a situation where you have two hypothetical spells A and B with identical DPS X but cast times of 2.5 and 4 seconds respectively. Under Backdraft their cast times drop to 1.75 and 2.8 seconds respectively.

It takes, obviously, 8.4 seconds to cast all three of spell B, and in that same time period we cast spell A ~4.26 times. The math for the DPS works out as follows.

Spell A: 2.5 * 4.26 * X = 10.65X
Spell B: 4 * 3 * X = 12X

Spell B comes out ahead because it takes advantage of the Backdraft buff longer. Obviously haste would affect both spells evenly, but that's not what I'm pondering. The question I have is whether there's a point where Backdraft is no longer worthwhile due to haste. So we're not comparing two spells during backdraft, but a single spell versus its DPS without Backdraft.

There are two components to the problem, one mathematical and one human. I'll address a mathematically extreme case first.

Shadow Bolt is a 2.5 second cast at X DPS. Backdraft has 3 seconds of overhead, a 10 second cooldown and does Y damage from casting Immolate and Conflagrate. The equations for damage at 0%, 30% and 50% haste look as follows.

0% (SB Only): 10 * X = 10X
0% (Backdraft): 7.5 * X [3x Backdraft Casts] + (10 - 3[Time spent on Immo/Conflag] - (2.5 * 3 * .7)[Casts during Backdraft CD]) * X + Y = 9.25X + Y

30% (SB Only): 10 * 1.3 * X = 13X
30% (Backdraft): 7.5 * X + (10 - 2.3 - (2.5 * 3 * .7 / 1.3)) * 1.3 * X + Y = 12.25X + Y

50% (SB Only): 10 * 1.5 * X = 15X
50% (Backdraft): 7.5 * X + (10 - 2 - (2.5 * 3 * .7 / 1.5)) * 1.5 * X = 14.25X + Y

The results clearly show PSGarak's point of haste not affecting Backdraft's portion of DPS. Given these results much depends on the value of Y versus X. A rough calculation of Shadow Bolt versus Immo + Conflag puts Y = ~2.4X.

So Backdraft edges out pure Shadow Bolt spam by 16.5% at 0% Haste and 11.0% at 50% Haste.

That, however, brings us to human error. Being a more complicated rotation Backdraft is more prone to mistakes and more susceptible to human error. It's relatively easy for someone to develop a familiar rhythm with Backdraft and their current Haste level, but Bloodlust/Heroism can throw that off. The obscenely short cast time of Backdraft + Bloodlust doesn't particularly help either. For those who can't adapt instantly and without error, or who have unstable connections, it's probably not worth trying during those times.


Edit: I figured out my math mistake. Because I calculated Immo + Conflag's damage to be approximately the same as Shadow Bolt's I set Y = X, forgetting that Shadow Bolt's damage was = 2.5X. I marked the change in bold and revised the paragraphs that followed.

It calculates your spell power with all buffs/talents/armor minus the 'group spell power buff', if one is present. So it won't factor a totem of wrath, or a preexisting demonic pact into the 10%. No exponential spell damage buffs I'm afraid

Just ran some more DPS tests on Anachronos.

Group makeup:
2 eleshaman
spriest (2.2k dps...wow)
fire mage
disc priest
prot paladin
2 affliction warlocks
2 destruction warlocks(one being me)


This parse was with a BL
screenshot right after taking Anachronos down to 20%:

ImageShack - Hosting :: wowscrnshot092308075510dd3.jpg

screenshot showing spell breakdown:

http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/763...8075948no9.jpg

Yes, it was the same spec.

I'd like to note that the rotation is starting to get much easier to maintain now.

Everything revolves around the conflag cooldown and maximizing backdraft.

After casting the second immolate in the rotation, you can either squeeze in 2SBs or Incinerates or 1 nuke and then a LT to make the most of backdraft.

For instance:

Immolate -> conflag
SBx2
Chaos Bolt
Immolate
SBx2 or Incinerate x2
conflag
SBx3 (CB cooldown is not up yet)
Immolate
(Lifetap)
Chaosbolt
Conflag

repeat from here

At lvl 80, dark pact returns me 2675 mana. Talented lifetap returns 2760 mana. My char screen shows 1617 shadow damage with fel armor active and 270 spirit. With my current gear it's clearly not much point to spec dark pact at all. I'm guessing it's mana return might exeed imp lifetap when i get more spirit, though i will also be getting more spellpower.

I'm still not convinced that Conflag/Backdraft is a DPS increase over Immo/Incin rotations with CB thrown in when up. Just looking at your parse (which is too small to give us steady figures but it's something) Conflag is terrible DPCT compared to Imm and Incin, which in turn are better than SB, especially when you're consuming Imm before its final tick. [EDIT - not to forget DPM, Conflag is a dreadful use of mana]

Are all the destruction talents working properly yet? I still feel that Destruction is lacking, F&B seems like a terrible waste of points but skipping it and putting points elsewhere doesn't seem to yield anything useful. Backdraft seems a waste given its reliance on Conflag which is a terrible spell for raiding, only decent for PvP burst. If you skip Backdraft, do you try to toggle SB and Incin for Molten Core procs or is that not worth it? It just seems like it's a clumsy RNG game for MC and ISB procs in the hope that you get some max rotation.

I'm curious as to why you cast Chaos Bolt during Backdraft. With 0% haste you're losing .1 seconds of cast time to the GCD. That's not much at that point, but it'll only get worse as we stack raid buffs and improve our gear. Do you feel that this rotation is better than a third Shadow Bolt and casting Chaos Bolt outside of Backdraft?

Conflag/Backdraft is at least an increase over CB/SB rotations. The math I did earlier should demonstrate that clearly. Even with the glyph Conflagrate will have poor DPM, but being able to choose between a high DPS/mana inefficient rotation and a not so high DPS/mana efficient rotation isn't necessarily a bad thing, particularly now that we can't downrank to accomplish the same thing where necessary.

Keep in mind that Chaos Bolt benefits from both Molten Core and ISB. At the very least Fire builds will be casting Corruption for Molten Core, but I'm not sure that's going to keep them competitive.

F&B is pretty horrible, and will remain so until Immolate is exempted from Backdraft or Backdraft lowers the GCD for Immolate (ala Nature's Grace/Wrath). With that change it will at least be potentially useful for Fire specs, but without it you're expending a lot of mana to accomplish very little.

Which spell you should be casting comes down entirely to DPCT. Clipping the GCD means that Chaos Bolt's effective cast time never gets reduced below 1.5 (at 0% haste; hasteful situations are equivalent). Nonetheless, CB does such tremendous damage that its DPCT can remain superior to other nukes even while under a smaller haste effect. A smaller amount of haste on a CB is worth more than a larger amount of haste on an incinerate or SB, up to a point. The dead-time of casting is regretable, and it lowers the theoretical gains, but under some conditions it's still superior to using an inferior nuke that benefits 100%. I haven't run math to find out whether those conditions are realistic, but if backdraft makes CB non-useful, then one talent or the other will be changed to rectify that.

I tried to read all the posts since this one, but didn't see anyone talk about that... I may be mistaken, but I was quite sure that Life Tap didn't generate any aggro in live (at least that was the case back in August 2006, when I quoted Motive on that in wowwiki).
I won't ask if you are sure that Life Tap does generate some aggro on the beta, but rather do it generate aggro only on the beta ? It seems quite weird to me, and even if it may not be a big deal with the boost to tank aggros, it may be a problem when you are trying to tank a long aggro-sensitive fight with a voidwalker...

My target dummy testing shows the best Destro rotaion is CoD > corruption > immolate > chaos bolt > incinerate until immolate has less than 3 secs left > conflag; repeat. Shadowbolt when nightfall glyph procs.
Glyph of Conflag is almost mandatory.
Glyph of Corruption and Glyph of Imp used.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Just curious why 2 in Imp. CoA and 3 in Imp. Corruption? Just filler spots to get down to Imp. LT?

And I know this is the Lock thread, but can you expound on this? My friends so disillusioned with his SP, and when I told him about what you said he flipped out about how it couldn't even be possible. Just what type of gear he's rocking and so on.

I've searced all over and can't find a definite answer on this, does the Glyph of Corruption stack with the Nightfall talent? If I have both, will it be 4% or 8% (well, 7.8%, but whatever) chance to Shadow Trance?

Backdraft screws with my brain. Everytime I think about the talent I forget that Haste reduces the GCD.

The "dead time" on CB will always be 7% of the total cast. That never changes until you actually hit the 1.0 second mark and beyond (incidentally requiring more than 50% haste). As such, I can see why CB would be a no brainer to cast during Backdraft. You only lose 7% of the effect, which isn't enough to make Shadow Bolt better.

I highly doubt that there is any theoretical situation where Backdraft makes CB non-useful. Even if there's a reachable point where CB is inferior to SB during Backdraft we have to remember that we do not spend 100% of our time in Backdraft. We will need to cast spells outside of the effect, and CB will always be better than any other spell for that job.

I'm fairly certain they stack, but I never measured the proc rate so I can't say what the % chance will be. I can say that they both give/refresh the same buff ala Executioner.

That is obviously something they need to adjust. Dark Pact always have to outperform life tap or it is completely pointless. I would prefer it being removed from gcd as solution. Affliction has so much duration/cooldown-dodging as it is.