Conflagrate is rather different, as Abominatus_DMF says pure Destruction rotation is elegant. For every Conflagrate you cast Immolate which is doable even in form of simple /castsequence macro. Chaos Bolt should probably reside in that macro as well. On the other hand I agree that additional stress of maintaining rotation may cause more harm than help.

Conflagrate damage is very low, so movement is going to be hell for Destruction. Depending on actual situation you won't have F&B crit bonus and will have Backdraft expire before you can use it. Think about getting Archimonde's Air Burst. Conflagrate is not that bad idea if its damage exceeds remaining Immolate damage, but that's a tiny gain. On the other hand Affliction has a bunch of instantly refreshable DOTs and Nightfall Shadow Bolts.

What I was trying to imply is that you can cast Conflagrate on time even when moving (or even flying through the air, subject to not going out of range). You then have 15 seconds to get your 3 spells cast once you regain a stable position. You should need considerably less than half of that time to cast your three hasted spells.

Destruction has always been hit comparatively harder by movement than is the case with affliction, because affliction is ticking damage regardless, and most of the dots can be refreshed while moving.

The point I'm making here is that destruction loses only the time spent in transit while moving, and does not subsequently have to try and pick up the pieces of a "rotation" which has fallen apart.

For example, as an affliction warlock, you are in motion when haunt expires. Additionally, one or more other dots expires as well. Do you renew the dots while moving, not having the haunt bonus, or do you wait until you can stop in order to re-apply haunt before re-applying the dots? Does this not depend on how much longer you're going to be moving? How achievable is this kind of management in real-time?

There is no Affliction rotation, recast intervals are just one big mess so there is nothing to lose and nothing to pick up. Why would you not want to refresh DOT if we consider that our mana is generally infinite. If you really need to recast it under Haunt you recast it next time before DOT expires. It can be modelled and a smart addon can suggest what to do, so it's not all that bad.

Haunt would need a longer cast time, or Aff will run into scaling issues again, and very quickly.

Exactly.
Affliction casting may seem complex for the first week or so, but raiding after that will become pretty easy.

I've been watching DoTimers (or debuff bars) throughout vanilla and first half of TBC, that's way longer than 0/21/40's reign of domain.
It hasn't been a problem in the past, and isn't a problem in beta. It feels a lot more interesting to me now. With pet control, we're the most interesting class to play IMO. We take the most skill to play out of all the dps casters. People that complain about this; I don't know what to tell you.

You should never have to clip DoTs or anything of that nature. Refresh dots when they go down, Haunt ASAP and Shadowbolt in between, that's all it is.

Indeed, there's already many such spell priority addons for Shadow Priests that suggest what to cast next (FaceMelter and Darkness come to mind).

I'm sure such addons will become increasingly popular for raiding Affliction Locks. Ripped in particular seems like an interesting concept (not sure if it works on Beta yet).

shadowpriest.com - New spell rotation / spell priority addon: Ripped

Sample Suggestion of next 15 spells from Ripped:

Raw damage I would do this:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...00000000000000
Switching out Suppression points into Improved Drain Soul depending on gear.

Time between ticks is always three seconds.


I'm having problems with Chaos Bolt mechanics / resist mechanics. In its current state, Chaos Bolt cannot miss. But when shooting at lvl80 training dummies with lvl70, I (always?) get partial resists. Ok, seems normal level based resists mechanics are in place.

Neglecting the tooltip being at least misleading, my hits don't fit in the 0/25/50/75 pattern we are used to on live. Is there something special with training dummies? Is it a problem with Chaos Bolt? Or are resist mechanics being changed?

Here is a sreenshot of my combatlog. I was using Chaos Bolt(Rank 2) with 1199 fire damage and took Shadow&Flame and Emberstorm, so the damage range shoult be 2064 to 2296.

Just to clarify for us muppets who can't understand something unless you twist it twice, this is how it's working:

00:00 Corruption is cast on the target
00:03 Corruption ticks
00:06 Corruption ticks
00:08 Haunt hits, refreshing Corruption
00:09 Corruption ticks

So Haunt doesn't reset the Corruption tick timer, as in it doesn't "apply" the spell again, it merely prolongs it?

Right.

The Haunt at 00:08 resets the corruption duration to 18s.
So without a haunt or drain life it should end at 00:26. The last tick will be at 00:24 though.
Will the debuff drop at 00:26 (duration end) or 00:24 (last tick) ?
Or in other words: Will a haunt that hits at 00:25 keep the corruption up?

As much as I'm rooting for demonology to be raid viable, that surely is not the way I, or anyone else wants it to be. Though 5% crit > meta by THAT much seems off, are you sure you have all the variables entered correctly?

edit: Also, wouldn't moving one point from demonic resilience to demonic empowerment increase dps?
edit2: If it's a bitch to model, I apologize :P
edit3: I read that you said it doesn't seem to be worth the gcd, but raid buffed I find that very hard to believe.

If you don't Dark Pact, Felhunter doesn't run out of mana.
Moreover, Felhunter dps is quite low (on PTR at 70) even with 4 dots on target. The Imp does more until OOM.
Removing Imp Felhunter and Amplify Curse and taking 2/2 imp Drain Soul for aggro reduction:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...00000000000000

*edit*....the sim I was running bugged out on me I guess. Nevermind all that. /sigh

*edit2* It appears that Demonic Empowerment is still lowering the DPS...I'm getting 4077 with and 4030 without. Maybe I need to go to sleep and go at this again later.

I'm crap with that text file, it confuses me to no end. Does it grant the felguard any buffs besides what the master gives him? I mean buffs granted by other classes, mainly your usual melee buffs.

It's more than unlikely to gain +25% dps by moving a few points around.

Meta is 1/5*1/6=+3.33% to your personal damage, even more when lined up with other CDs and BL. I am not sure about theworth of the Immolate aura.
Devastation =+5%*(1-crit rate before Devastation) in your SB spam model, that could be around +3% in a 25man environment, and even less when you use Immolate, Corruption and a damage curse, though you gain a little ISB uptime.

I am not sure where that damage increase is coming from in your simulation.

Okay I'm not on beta nor have I been on the PTR so I can't see for myself what is happening to gear stats as you transition into 3.0.2 and beyond.

So basically, say you have gear that is specifically +shadow damage... on the PTR and in beta, does that stat revert to +spell power? If it does, is the exchange rate equal or less than the original value? For example the Lost Pendant from KZ carries +51 shadow damage. Does it still carry +51 shadow damage on the PTR or is it now say +20 spell power? I would assume that the stat if altered, would have to be lower as spell power applies to all schools, not just one. I carry quite a bit of gear that with school specific damage since it made sense to do so pre-patch. Obviously post-patch we will be itemizing based on the new system, but the question is whether the current itemization will remain the same or get nerfed with the coming patch?

Perhaps enchants such as Soulfrost are no longer the best enchants come the patch, that one of the lesser enchants actually translates to more damage when all is said and done.

If anyone knows the answer to this, and forgive me if it has been said before, I'd appreciate any reply they can give

Shadow is going to Spell. Your Lost Pendant lost its +51 shadow and was replaced with +42 spell. This applies for all school specific gear that I have found.

The change was only made to gear, not to enchants or flasks (Soulfrost and Pure Death remain the same). You can use wowhead to compare the changes [Nethervoid Cloak] vs Nethervoid Cloak for example. Basically all the low tier stuff like FSW, Pendant, and so forth that remained good because of all the shadow damage is no longer nearly as competitive.

I know, I was confused. I closed everything and went back to the original file and did the same thing I did before and I couldn't recreate the DPS I was seeing the first time. I guess it bugged out on me.

Yesterday I introduced a bug into the sim: Master Conjuror is broken right now.

Insufficient testing FTL.............. Bah.

Thanks (again) to Scrufola for his continued review of the code.

Ah ha! When you spec into master conjuror, the simulator adds 1k damage to your shadow bolt. Heh. If only it was like that in real life eh?

Oh you beat me to it.