• KingSpeedy

Simcraft is showing Immolate to be a dps increase over not casting it.

 

Sumbish

Wrong. Why is this myth perpetuated? Haste is poor for DoTs, and in fact any rotations that aren't chained perfectly. Too many locks raiding as destro for so long who never had haste gear when they were aff I assume :/

In 2.4.3 if your rotation chaining is *perfect* so that you negate lag to the point that you can ignore it, then UA spec gets about 0.7% dps increase per 1% haste. Destro gets 1% per 1%. (numbers vary slightly with raid buffs/gear but the proportion is pretty constant)

Don't believe me? Go try it on the spreadsheet.

But just to prove how wrong the quoted assertion is, set your filler spell to drain life (or any non SB filler really), change your haste by 10% and see how much your dps changes. OK, that's not real world but it highlights the DoTs themselves get almost no benefit from haste and all the DPS boost came from the fact that SB scaled well with crit and haste.

Another factor is the more complex the rotation, the more likely you are to screw up timing and negate your haste.

At some point the afflock community will work out how much haste is screwing them. It really needs to be applied to DoT duration.

 

dusters84

That is not entirely correct. Haste does have a good effect on DoTs, it is just a little bit harder to calculate exactly how much, and it depends entirely on the skill of the player. For players not used to the rotation, which is pretty much all of us right now. Why? Because with a complicated rotation, it is always good to have have a few extra tenths of seconds. No rotation is ever going to be perfect because of lag, movement and other factors, but haste can help players make sure their DoTs do not fall off. Now, haste may not have as big of an impact for destro as it did for afflic, but it is far from being bad for afflic.

 

nom

QFT. Before 3.0, an affliction lock with minimal crit and infinite mana did around 1.4 dps, normalized to his sb filler dps.

1% more haste = 1% more time = 0.01 more dps from filler (again normalized to sb) => 0.01 / 1.4 = 0.7% more dps.

(The exact same argument works for spell hit: 1% spell hit => 0.7% more dps.)

After 3.0, the same affliction lock does around 2 dps (normalized to the new, but weaker, shadow bolt). As a result, the value of haste (and spell hit) has fallen even further:

1% more haste = 1% more time = 0.01 more dps from filler => 0.01 / 2 = 0.5% more dps.

One way to fix the devaluing of haste is to have it make dots tick faster, in addition to the gcd reduction effect. Until they make this change, or have all dots (and drains, come wotlk) be affected by Pandemic, affliction locks will only scale well with just one of the four caster dps stats.

 

Revelations

Amen, Im changing 13 gems tomorrow to Runed Spinels plus the meta from Chatoic to Ember Skyfire Diamond.
Will also dump all my dkp on the "useless" int/sta/spi/crit/dmg parts of Sunwell, hopefully my caster dkp-competers wont think of this

 

Trickykid

More haste can lead to smaller DoT Gaps as well as allowing the Drain Soul execute to fit more ticks in before a DoT refresh.

Hit doesn't follow the same argument since a miss on a DoT means you're losing disproportionately more DPS on your high DPCT spells.

Faster ticking doesn't affect your DPCT, it just lets you spend more of your cast time in the higher DPCT "phases" when DoTs can be refreshed. You can try it out on the sheet if you're unconvinced.

 

nom

Whether you miss an immo or a CoA doesn't matter, it costs 1.5 secs of lost filler time - this is independent of the fact that CoA's dpct is larger than immo's.

This is how faster ticking will help. The most straightforward way to get 1% haste => 1% increase in dps is if 1% haste increased the rate at which time runs. This means gcds finish faster and dot durations finish faster - faster ticking.

 

Trickykid

While it cuts into the filler time it's doing more harm than just that. It's preventing you from having your DoT DPS running for longer, which hurts more since your DPCT is higher during that time. It's like missing during a trinket hurts more since the DPCT of your spells increases.

 

nom

Oh, oops. I forgot about the effect missing has on dot uptime. So there is an additional penalty of roughly (1.5 sec lost uptime / about 18 secs) ~ 10% of the dot's uptime, so:

(1% * 10% uptime penalty * f) = f * 0.1% dps loss from loss of dot uptime

where f is the fraction of your dps that comes from dots.

EDIT: another caveat, Haunt cannot simply be recast if it resists... Add a penalty of

(20% haunt effect) * f * (9.5 sec haunt cast & cd) / (12 sec haunt duration) = f * 0.16%

So in sum:

1% loss of spell hit => (0.5% dps loss due to lost filler) + (f * 0.1% dps loss due to dot uptime) + (f * 0.16% dps loss due to haunt gap)

With an f of about 66% (f increases if there's lifetapping involved):

1% spell hit => 0.5% dps from filler + 0.066% dps from dot uptime + 0.106% dps from haunt gap

Any more corrections?

 

Villeraz

An interesting albeit not immediately useful change is that ticks of hellfire can be resisted by the warlock channeling it. Not sure if it's intentional, but it struck me as immensely odd when I noticed it. Might mean that other effects that were previously not resistable might have been altered, as the unresistability was sometimes tied to it being a self-inflicted source.

 

Nathiren

Since Nether Protection has been changed from immunity to absorbation, this talent will no longer reset the aggro you have on Illidan? Can anyone confirm this?

 

Bahkauv

There was never an aggro reset, Illidan just didn't attack a target that was immune to his attacks. As you are no longer immune, he shouldn't switch targets.

 

Woonz

I just left Sunwell. We did everything but KJ and I ran using the 0/3/58 build.

1. My imp never ran out of mana and was on machine gun mode the for most of the encounters.
2. Imp survivability is rather impressive but normally doesn't take much to kill him if you do not manage him during movement. The only time he did die was on a Felmyst gas cloud. He was easily replaced after AOE was done and did survive the rest of the fight. He never came close to dieing on Brut. and was easy to keep up during all the trash including the two pulls prior to KJ. I tanked on Twins to I kept him on passive and used Demon Armor as my buff. On Muru he was never close to low health and was rarely if ever hit by any Muru/Entrop abilities. It is important to note it is a hassle getting him buffs since pets are not getting the SWP area wide buff.
3. Tanking with full Nether Protection on twins was a cinch and actually made it easier on the Warlock tank healer. I never lost agro and combined with Demon Armor tanking was pretty much a joke.

 

Braiinchild

What was your sustained DPS on brutallus and such?

Also what cast rotation were you working with?

 

kaib

If the version of current JoW from beta goes/went live, all this speccing into imp life tap is completley useless as long as you have that ret paladin. On beta I have to lifetap 2-3 tops in 5 min fights and my imp stays permanently on near-full mana. On my hunter on PTR I actually never fall below 90% if that stuff is up. I would think that affliction and full imp-fire specs are the way to go on lvl 70.

 

Shodan30

Heres something new to chew on....

Over in the Shadow Priest forums : Blue post


Shadowform -- we're adding the rest of the adjustment here. Your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague and Vampiric Touch do an additional percentage damage equal to your critical strike chance. Basically if your crit is 25%, your SW:P does 25% more damage. This has the side effect of making crit a little more useful for Shadow priests.

Since Affliction locks and other classes with many dots might ask, we think long term that a good thing to look at is making dots crit. We're not sure yet if we'll do this by just making them actually crit or adding more talents that do neat things with your crit rating, but it is definitely something we're looking at.


This is a very odd comment coming 1 month before live. not that its not a welcome thing to hear, but i do wonder how this would be implimented with the current wrath changes. I wonder how different the damage output would be if instead of pandemic, this crit rating = % more damage thing would be. I have to admit that just applying that to all dots would likely make affliction way OP.... UNLESS...it turns out that level 80 raiding we dont put the numbers out that we need. In which case, they could apply this to our top rank Dots only, which would give the buff we want but not OP.

 

Shodan30

BTW guys, if you have working warlock type UI mods, please list them here. I logged on late last night to find not a single ui i have was working. in many cases it was breaking things. so i need to start fresh. (yes i updated them btw).

 

PyroTEK85

I had been hoping that they would do something like this before pandemic had been introduced. Any spec should have dots that scale well with crit, not just deep affliction. Without it, dots tend to become outpaced by nuke spam, which I feel worsens gameplay as a whole.

On another note, did they buff health funnel again? On ptr, mine went from 400ish to 600ish per tick (talented). Now on live its healing over 800 per tick talented. Coupled with the felguard's hp boost and the redesigned avoidance skill, I don't see him ever dying in a raid unless the boss specifically targets him.

 

Walbelber

I went 7/3/51 last night while we did BT to test new specs and rotations. I did Immolate, corruption, incinerate until immolate was about to expire then CB and repeat. My dps seemed ok but not great. For those of you that went 0/3/58 how did you spec and what roation did you use?

 

richard

ForteWarlock should be working. There's a 3.0 version out but I can't check because EU realms are still down.

Forte Gaming / Forte Warlock/Class Addon

 

• KingSpeedy

DoTimer is also updated.

 

erragal

Since this is the only thread really discussing it I thought I'd mention the one thing about this that could be an issue. Right now destro/demonology locks, balance druids and even fire mages are balanced around current dot mechanics. If they make a game mechanic change that makes all dots crit or scale with crit they will also have to rebalance the DPS of those specs downward to compensate. (Although demo might still be too low anyway from what I've read/seen)

There are now three talents for three different classes that add to dot scaling based on crit. The next most DoT DPS reliant caster is moonkin, and they've been tuned almost perfectly at this point. I just see them staying with talents (Or even glyphs) in the forseeable future with long-term implying more of a "In the next expansion" type promise when they have the time to put into globally balancing a change like crittable dots.

 

Villeraz

Perhaps it got rolled into the spellpower changes that happened to most healing spells. Before our +healing was around the same as our +damage. Now they use the same stat, but I wouldn't be surprised if healing spells used a higher coefficient of our +spellpower.

 

PyroTEK85

I agree completely, making fundamental changes to dot mechanics at this point would be no small undertaking. I figure they were more or less acknowleding that they see a scaling problem, but I don't really expect any major changes any time soon.

That is probably it, though I had thought health funnel used spell damage to scale to begin with. Whatever the case, no complaints here, solo'ing elites in wrath should be easy.

 

Larkin

This is what I thought would happen last night:

I would raid 52/0/9 and my rotation would be SB/Corr/UA/Immo/haunt/ SB etc, or something similar, there were a few variations, keeping up COE or COR.

What actually happened:

My guild cleared Sunwell in sub-2-hours, which is nothing special from what I saw. The fights are now horribly tuned, mobs die as soon as you target them, and affliction locks have no hope of seeing what they can do at lvl 70 - any fight that lasts longer than 2 min (and only Brut (3.2) and KJ (5ish) lasted longer than 2 min) usually involves you doing something like switching targets to seed on M'uru and KJ etc, which kills your rotation.

Fire wasn't that much better, because of the number of spells in rotation and the need to switch targets frequently. I think there were a total of 3 Darkness casts on KJ last night, it was ridiculous.

A build that might have a cast sequence of, say, corr, immo, incinx3, cb, conflag, repeat or a variation, just has too many casts in it to be workable. If I do it again it's going to be as close to nuking spam as I can get, something like immo/incin/incin/conflag repeat, it's all you have time to do.

Rogues were pulling 3.7k dps, enh shammies around 3k, locks....waaay under 2k.

With the current horrid nerf to content, there aren't any long fights that let you test out affliction builds, and any DoT-based damage, incl mechanics with Immolate, are untestable to all intents and purposes on live.

Others' thoughts/experiences would be welcome.