Imp. Immolate just adds an 1.3 multiplier to the DD component. Fire&Brimstone looks like 15% of spellpower with the DD component receiving 33% and the DoT component receiving 67%.
Interesting. It looks as if they must have changed Fire and Brimstone to fix the DoT Coefficient portion. From a test I did back 2 patches ago, while the DoT portion was receiving SOME bonus for F&B, it was only 75 dmg difference between 0/5 and 5/5, with no change at all between 0/5 and 1/5. It did show that 15% coefficient was being added to the DD portion of the spell however. My test was done with Imp Immo and Emberstorm as I didn't think to reduce the complexity of the test results by excluding those talents.
If it is indeed now Splitting the bonus, and the DD portion receiving 33% vs 100% of the 15% coefficient.. thats not a good change as the DoT portion doesn't scale with Crit, and shifts the damage to the portion of the spell that gets 20% clipped off its total dmg for conflag.
With the continued absence of any adjustment to the hit chance of Soulshatter, Cataclysm is not looking particularly good, at least at higher gear levels once the hit cap is approaching.
Soulshatter is not going to be the same in WotLK for a few reasons:
- threat generation is getting much better in the expansion, according to reports. you also have a pet now to share threat with.
- there are new tools to manage spiking threat (Salvation, Intervene)
- even if you have say 10% more tps than your tank, the average chance to miss Soulshatter with Cataclysm is 3%, so the expected damage loss from not having Demo hitcapped is 0.3%. It's likely that you would get a better return gearing for other stats than those last 3% of hit.
- you can swap in some pieces for those few encounters if you are really desperate
Corruption is 18 seconds. Haunt has a cd of 10 seconds. If that is not enough, you must have created a very strange rotation. Basically you want to use Haunt close to as often as you can while not clipping stuff, but that should be no more than 12-13 seconds in the worst case.
I do agree it was completely absurd to remove Shadow Bolt as EA refresher just because they wanted to add Haunt. They could just have left Shadow Bolt there as well and there would be no complaint. But like many of the warlock changes lately it simply seems poorly thought out.
Perhaps they were scared that 50/0/21 would scale better and didn't want players to use it. They seem intent on pushing cooldown abilities on us at all costs. Conflag, Chaos Bolt, Haunt. Perhaps that is just the backlash from TBC destro rotation being so simple to use.
i'm aware of that, but every new rotation i try to use just doesnt work. i'm always under my initial 1.9k. it was very convenient and relaxing to be a little more loose on refreshing corruption. now its a pain in the ass
i'm aware of that, but every new rotation i try to use just doesnt work. i'm always under my initial 1.9k. it was very convenient and relaxing to be a little more loose on refreshing corruption. now its a pain in the ass
so whats your rotation? ill give it a go
I usually try to refresh it when it has like 1-1.5 seconds left on its duration. That way if I screw up with putting up an extra dot I'd still be able to refresh the corruption.
Using the priorities listed in SimCraft except for when I begin; Haunt > Curse of Agony > Unstable Affliction > Siphon Life > Nightfall Shadow Bolt > Drain Soul (<20% target hp) > Immolate > Shadow Bolt > Life Tap.
Just keep refreshing your dots and prioritize in that order. When haunt is getting close to it's full duration just refresh it, should be no problem getting it up every ~12 seconds unless your lag is unbearable. And yeah.. you won't be able to do any easy rotations anymore, but I just find it more of a challenge when the rotation changes all the time
Just a comment regarding SimulationCraft (which I'm only just working out how to use), it looks like the destruction simulation does not assume that you have a chaotic skyfire diamond or equivalent. This is a huge disadvantage to destruction, but not assuming a meta for affliction does not make nearly as much difference.
Fimotik - Thanks for the summary, in my perusal I didn't see a clear conclusion. Now that I'm working out simcraft, I'll do some more detailed comparisons of my own.
Add chaotic_skyfire=1 to the profiles of interest.
Given the ISB, MoltenCore, Backdraft procs, you may need more conditional controls than I have provided to make the AI behave the way you want it to. Take a look at the spells inside sc_warlock.cpp to see some of the conditionals currently available.
If they are insufficient, please let me know how they might be improved.
I usually try to refresh it when it has like 1-1.5 seconds left on its duration. That way if I screw up with putting up an extra dot I'd still be able to refresh the corruption.
Using the priorities listed in SimCraft except for when I begin; Haunt > Curse of Agony > Unstable Affliction > Siphon Life > Nightfall Shadow Bolt > Drain Soul (<20% target hp) > Immolate > Shadow Bolt > Life Tap.
Just keep refreshing your dots and prioritize in that order. When haunt is getting close to it's full duration just refresh it, should be no problem getting it up every ~12 seconds unless your lag is unbearable. And yeah.. you won't be able to do any easy rotations anymore, but I just find it more of a challenge when the rotation changes all the time
that got me 1300dps vs the 1900 i could get.. i dont know why haunt and corruption turned out to be a headache but i dont think i can handle staring at a counter during a fight and refreshing random dots. i guess thats the end of affliction for me hehe.
and its the end of these forums too. my first 2 posts got me 2 warnings for not capitalizing the first letter of my sentense? give me a break
So I just did 25 man patchwerk as demo.
It was pretty good dps, around 3600 without a bloodlust, still lower than the lusted 4300 that affliction can do, but not by much at all.
I could pop meta twice in the fight, once off the bat, and then during.
The absolute best part of demo though, was when I popped meta the second time, charged in for Immolation aura with 24k hp, took a hateful and lived with 7k to spare!
i'm aware of that, but every new rotation i try to use just doesnt work. i'm always under my initial 1.9k. it was very convenient and relaxing to be a little more loose on refreshing corruption. now its a pain in the ass
so whats your rotation? ill give it a go
I don't really understand this story of 'rotation'. You have :
- 1 * 30s dot (siphon)
- 1 * 24s dot (CoA without glyph)
- 2 * 18s dot (corr & UA)
- 1 * 15s dot (immolate)
- 1 * 10s cd direct damage (haunt)
So you have at least 5 different cd length to manage, while having to lifetap and shadow bolting in between, and/or moving if the fight requires it.
How come would you ever be able to have a nearly fixed "rotation" ?
The only way to dps efficiently is to just follow a good priority order.
Each time you cast, you look at all your dot's, your CD's, your mana, the boss's hp and your position, and you just decide what will be the 1 to 3 next spells you will have to cast : it's purely situational.
The priority list :
Haunt > Curse of Agony > Unstable Affliction > Siphon Life > Nightfall Shadow Bolt > Drain Soul (<20% target hp) > Immolate > Shadow Bolt > Life Tap.
.. is a good basis, but not perfect.
The reality is more complex, and i don't know if it's possible to make a complete priority list of it like the one above.
One possible algorithm without Drain Soul would be :
if (we have to recast Haunt/CoA/corr/UA/Siphon/Immo in less than gcd)
if (nightfall) : cast SB
else if (we can LT without wasting mana) : cast LT
else : cast SB and prepare your mind because you're wasting ~1s uptime of CoA/corr/siphon... or, worst of all, Haunt
else
if (Haunt's CD is up) : cast Haunt
else if (boss is dead in less than 15s)
if (mana is ok for 10s) : cast SB
else : cast LT
else if (Corr faded) : cast Corr
else if (CoA faded) : cast CoA
else if (UA will fade in less than gcd or has faded) : cast UA
else if (nightfall) : cast SB
else if (Immo will fade in less than gcd or has faded) : cast Immo
else if (we are not > 70% mana) and (we can LT without wasting mana) and (boss is not dead in 2s) and (we don't have to move soon) and ((eradiction icd is soon finished) or (a trinket is soon up) or (bloodlust will come soon) or (anything like the previous statments)) : cast LT
else if (mana < 30% and boss is not dead very soon) : cast LT
else : cast SB
It's probably far from perfect, but using it to dps made me be near the maximum theorical dps output from my tests.
The principle is quite simple, you always use LT as a "buffer" to smooth your dot's/cd's reapplications, and you anticipate your trinket/buff CD's by Life Taping to get a good amount of mana that you'll use to chain cast during them, limiting to a maximum the LT count during them.
Each time you'll finish a cast, you just have to think like the algorythm. Concretely, you anticipate it by 2 or 3 casts.
What we can immediately observe, is that if you have an excelent mana regen, you will more often be in the situation where you have to cast an SB when one of your dot will fade, or the worse, haunt CD will be up very soon.
One thing i did notice, is that a whole bunch of spell haste helps a lot to minimize those situational crises, because you can limit a lot more the impact of a small shift in your dot's/cd's reapplications.
It's probably possible to just make a mod that tells you what are the next 3/4 cast you'll have to do using an algorythm like this. So the only thing you would have to do is simply performing some DDR dance with your fingers.
One last thing which helps a lot the dps in afflication with all those gcd limited spells (far more than for destruction), is a g15 keyboard or ahk, to be sure that you'll lose the minimum possible time between each gcd spell.
EDIT - Kalku, there is test data on various destruction rotations in the last 10 pages. The result was Backdraft > Immo > Incin > Incin was the highest DPS rotation (as against Incin x 3 and no conflag/backdraft). The problem with trying to Backdraft Chaos Bolt is the 12 second cool down v. Immolate's 15 second duriation + cast time and + Conflag GCD & CD. It just gets too messy, and your mana efficiency drops if you keep Conflagging early.
Molten Core seems to be an OK talent as long as Corruption competes in terms of DPCT. As gear progresses, Corruption for deep destro locks will start to lose relative DPCT so the value of Molten Core drops. The other problem with Molten Core is its RNG nature. I would think it would be better just to maintain a rotation than the try to react to MC procs otherwise it would just get too messy. Too often on PTR I've seen it proc at the end of a rotation just as I'm about to reapply Corr or CoA or life tap etc. On fights with lots of movement MC would be of marginal benefit.
I think the bigger problem is Immolate MUST be there to Incinerate. So what if you have all your DoTs up, Chaos Bolt on cooldown, and 2 seconds left on Immolate? Seemed to happen to me a lot while doing testing on dummies (mostly when I lifetapped, because I had a lot of mana at those times and couldn't LT again). Maybe I'm just more used to shadowbolt spam, but any other Dot can easily be ignored for a second or two while you finish your current cast. Not Immolate. Other than that I could weave the 12 second and 15 second cooldowns together well enough. Wasn't using backdraft though.
Oh, and I have never reacted to MC procs, and the DPS is fine. Just follow your rotation and take the boosts as they go. Especially if you have Corr/CoA in your rotation and 80% uptime. I didn't bother waiting to LT until it was down just because it's almost always there.
Originally Posted by Sebalot
That is a tedious discussion. Mages and locks have always had similar utility. They have similar utility now. It is pointless trying to downplay your own classes utility in an appeal to get more damage and thus top damage meters. Because that is where this kind of reasoning always lands. Same with rogues claiming "you have so much utility", when in fact they are delighted to have none so they can argue they should have the highest dps.
I think this is one of the main reasons Blizzard is have decided to spread out utility and increase dps for hybrids. They simply got tired of the sense of entitlement from mainly rogues and mages, but also warlocks and it made it hard to balance hybrids in a meaningful way. When utility is seen as a burden and not an asset, it is time for change. I can fully understand it.
10% crit that no other class gives, vs. lowering your DPS to cast a curse that boosts damage by 10%, less than TWO other classes' abilities that work WITHOUT lowering their DPS.
Originally Posted by dragon12
No, they didn't. They actually said something along the lines of "Utility will no longer be a substitute for dps, all classes will do roughly the same amount of damage regardless of utility" (heavily paraphrased).
No, they did say that classes that sacrifice utility to spec into DPS will do more DPS than speccing into Utility and not DPS. I can't find the blue post on mmo-champion anymore, but it was fairly prominent for a long time.
Originally Posted by dedmonwakeen
Does the Imp have any passive regen inside the 5SR?
Does its spirit regen behave exactly like a player class?
I'd love/kill to see some reports of mana regen ticks for an Imp.
I think the bigger problem is Immolate MUST be there to Incinerate. So what if you have all your DoTs up, Chaos Bolt on cooldown, and 2 seconds left on Immolate? Seemed to happen to me a lot while doing testing on dummies (mostly when I lifetapped, because I had a lot of mana at those times and couldn't LT again). Maybe I'm just more used to shadowbolt spam, but any other Dot can easily be ignored for a second or two while you finish your current cast. Not Immolate.
It's not that dramatic a difference. It's about a hundred damage to the base and nothing to the scaling. It makes immolate worth casting, but it's not absolutely necessary. There's an offchance it makes Shadowbolt worth casting instead, but I think that band of preference is pretty narrow. The extra damage on Incinerate is not worth the half-tick of Immolate you would lose by refreshing.
So I just did 25 man patchwerk as demo.
It was pretty good dps, around 3600 without a bloodlust, still lower than the lusted 4300 that affliction can do, but not by much at all.
I could pop meta twice in the fight, once off the bat, and then during.
The absolute best part of demo though, was when I popped meta the second time, charged in for Immolation aura with 24k hp, took a hateful and lived with 7k to spare!
How is mana working overall as demonology, ie is Replenishment, JoW, BoW etc enough to prevent constant life tapping. How much mana do you gain from an average life tap?
It's not that dramatic a difference. It's about a hundred damage to the base and nothing to the scaling. It makes immolate worth casting, but it's not absolutely necessary. There's an offchance it makes Shadowbolt worth casting instead, but I think that band of preference is pretty narrow. The extra damage on Incinerate is not worth the half-tick of Immolate you would lose by refreshing.
Actually this is one of the first things I checked when ISB got reduced to 10% and in my tests I found that even without Immo up, Incin was doing better average DPCT than SB. Final nail in the coffin for me on SB in my rotations which was sad since SB being as good a DPCT as incin or better made it worth casting for the MC proc alone, but not anymore as those 5 points dont even put it on par.
* Molten Core duration has been increased. Your Shadow spells and damage over time effects have a 5/10/15% chance to increase the damage of your Fire spells by 10% for 12 sec. (Up from 6 sec)
Affliction
* Improved Corruption now Increases the damage done by your Corruption by 6/8/10% (Down from 12/16/20%), and increases the critical strike chance of your Seed of Corruption by 5%
One tooltip change to reflect how it's been for quite a while and one reduction in the number of points needed for Improved Corruption. I really don't see that making any difference. I usually had no good spot to put point 14-15 for early affliction.
It has been a long time since we had any real mechanic change despite all the problems pointed out and 3.0.2 should be feature frozen in a handful of days. Not looking all that good, I'm afraid. We will have a lot of problems going live. Guess that is why they nerf all boss hp with 30%. So we can brute force our way past any patch problems.
One tooltip change to reflect how it's been for quite a while and one reduction in the number of points needed for Improved Corruption. I really don't see that making any difference. I usually had no good spot to put point 14-15 for early affliction.
It has been a long time since we had any real mechanic change despite all the problems pointed out and 3.0.2 should be feature frozen in a handful of days. Not looking all that good, I'm afraid. We will have a lot of problems going live. Guess that is why they nerf all boss hp with 30%. So we can brute force our way past any patch problems.
Both of them are tooltip fixes. Improved corruption was wrongly showing as 2/4/12/16/20% and this has been corrected. I'm pretty sure it still requires 5 points.
Add chaotic_skyfire=1 to the profiles of interest.
Given the ISB, MoltenCore, Backdraft procs, you may need more conditional controls than I have provided to make the AI behave the way you want it to. Take a look at the spells inside sc_warlock.cpp to see some of the conditionals currently available.
If they are insufficient, please let me know how they might be improved.
I was just making sure that people looking just at the charts realized that destruction is not really as far behind as it looks .
There seem to be all the conditionals I was looking for, but if I come up with something that's not there, I'll let you know .
Edit: That was fast. I'd like to see how a molten core check on chaos bolt would work out.
Also, a question: When it checks to see if the buffs/debuffs are up (MC or ISB for example) does it check if it is up now, or if it will be up when the cast happens?
Both of them are tooltip fixes. Improved corruption was wrongly showing as 2/4/12/16/20% and this has been corrected. I'm pretty sure it still requires 5 points.
That's even more depressing. The thing is, a lot of things about the class is broken, is working poorly and is annoying. But at the same time I have no doubt we will have two specs that will do very competitive damage when the patch goes live. And being a dps class... But it still feels so much like a work in progress (which of course it is in a MMO) that it is hard to get excited.
If I was into PvP I would get really annoyed because all of the problems that made us drop behind melee a year ago are still there. There is a freak chance Destruction PvP will somehow prove to work of course.
I really feel sorry for those who put their hearts and souls into the beta to try to make warlocks a good (but not overpowered) class. Only to be met by practically total silence and having all their good ideas ignored.
I was just making sure that people looking just at the charts realized that destruction is not really as far behind as it looks .
There seem to be all the conditionals I was looking for, but if I come up with something that's not there, I'll let you know .
Edit: That was fast. I'd like to see how a molten core check on chaos bolt would work out.
Also, a question: When it checks to see if the buffs/debuffs are up (MC or ISB for example) does it check if it is up now, or if it will be up when the cast happens?
The buff has to have been present at least "reaction_time" seconds for the conditional to be true, where reaction_time is a global parameter that defaults to 0.5sec.
EDIT: This reaction_time delta is only necessary for "proc-based" buffs. For example, some Destruction spells have a "backdraft" conditional. Since the proc of Backdraft is (nearly 100%) under the control of the user, I do not require a reaction-time check.
Last edited by dedmonwakeen : 10/03/08 at 11:39 PM.
With all my PTR cast rotation testing I was casting Backdraft Immolates that were at .88 seconds that did not seem to ping the global cooldown at all.
Since Patch 2.3 there is a bug that in a spellcasting chain global cooldown for spell may start before actual spell casting, this allows to ignore up to 0.3-0.4 seconds of GCD.
Anyway as I say we could get rid of all the GCD issue by simply changing Backdraft to simply reduce global cooldown of Conflagrate.
As for Fire and Brimstone, taking the same idea with slightly different implementaion could be nice as well. Every time Immolate deals damage (includes initial damage) Conflagrate critical strike (or damage) is increased. As a bonus Conflagrate should make next Immolate instant either as its base feature, or as a part of F&B (later Conflagrate reduces cast time of Immolate more).
This generally combines Immolate, Conflagrate and Chaos Bolt as some nice heavy DPCT burst, which I believe is what they want to aim for, so that extra trouble of having more spells in rotation is actually worth it.
Originally Posted by PSGarak
Blizz has said they're not hand-tweaking coefficients anymore, so all spells have the coefficient of their untalented cast time. However, Chaos Bolt was added to Shadow & Flame, meaning for every scaling benefit that shadowbolt or incinerate recieves, it recieves the same thing or better.
Now it would be great if they treated melee abilities in the "same" way and removed all weapon damage coefficients other than 100% *cough*, another step against spells that don't get cast time reduction or increased coefficient talents. Maybe if they don't want to hand-tweak coefficient they should adjust the formula standing behind coefficients.
i tried on PTR on Dr. Boom without my felhunter dpsing but just parking it beside me, i only got to 1k dps perhaps i havent got my dotimer uploaded and i was losing some uptime in dots..
worked our my rotations as Haunt, CoA, UA, Corruption, Siphon Life, Shadowbolt..
i just wanna know when 3.0.2 comes, will most destro specs ppl be respeccing? zzz no more lazy spams anymore
Anyone know how Conflag crits work? They usually end up being 160-170% of a Conflag non-crit for me (~1500 non-crit and ~2400 crits). The only explanation I can think of (apart from a pure bug) is that there is two separate parts to the damage. A Conflag part that can crit and a 'consume Immolate tick' part that can't.
This is of course one of the reasons why Fire and Brimstone is such a horrible talent. Increasing critrate on a spell that does puny crit damage won't really make much of a difference.
I've been pondering demonology rotations some more. I'd really love to play it thematically, but keeping two dots up and spamming shadow bolt is far too boring compared to affliction and the new destruction. I wonder if demonology's problem of being overly passive doesn't stem from a lack of its own damaging spells, so you're pretty much stuck using nothing but base warlock abilities. Felguard aside the tree doesn't feel like it gets anything unique to play with. Obviously meta changes that, but a 3 minute cooldown isn't a very exciting play-style change.
Maybe it'd be more fun if they were to introduce some more summon-y type cooldown damage abilities as deeper demo talents. Call a meteor down to strike an enemy, infernal-style? Summon a blast of void energy to strike your opponent (think the effect some BC voidwalkers have when they die). Then they could have these effects empower your demons attacks to have chances to give you buffs that you'll be reacting to. Increased fire damage, or an instant cast shadowbolt, etc. The most disappointing new talent in demonology to me is easily demonic empathy. Sometimes you get a proc, sometimes your demon gets a proc and... it changes nothing. You continue on with your rotation exactly as it was before.
This is of course one of the reasons why Fire and Brimstone is such a horrible talent. Increasing critrate on a spell that does puny crit damage won't really make much of a difference.
I think the problem they got themselves into with destro was that they needed to add new talents to it, but it was already pretty much doing exactly the damage they wanted. If they make F&B as powerful as you'd expect for its placement, the spec will be doing too much damage. I don't quite understand why they haven't nerfed SnF, to address this.
Bad news for Affliction warlocks, ISB officially no longer affects periodic sources (Source). The thread itself has since been deleted, so I can't get any more context here, but the post seems clear enough.
Anyone know how Conflag crits work? They usually end up being 160-170% of a Conflag non-crit for me (~1500 non-crit and ~2400 crits). The only explanation I can think of (apart from a pure bug) is that there is two separate parts to the damage. A Conflag part that can crit and a 'consume Immolate tick' part that can't.
I just tested it myself, and Conflagrate is definately not critting for 200% damage.
This must be a bug, and if not, I'd love an explanation. Maybe someone should write a thread about it on the official beta forums?
By the way, was my warlock just being bugged or can anyone else confirm that Soul Drain does not do 4x damage in the newest build when the target is below 25%?
10/03/08, 10:54 AM
perhaps i havent got my dotimer uploaded and i was losing some uptime in dots..
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