Has anyone found Death's Embrace to not work at all? Did a ZA earlier and while the last 35% on bosses only lasted about 20 seconds, I didn't see any increase in my DoT ticks, and the few times I did was credited to an ISB proc.

I remember reading this talent was bugged in beta. Is it still bugged?

I was using a 2/13/46 on Brutallus and pulled 2961, which is below my personal best pre-patch. So we are basically a tiny bit below where we were before, if there was a long 6+ minute fight i'd imagine a higher life tapping ratio would be used in addition to a lower heroism uptime.

Still.. puts me from #1 or #2 pretty much every meter to almost middle of the pack.

You must be doing it wrong. I am also 56/0/5 with similar gear and put out 2100 WITH 2 burns. I was the cookie cutter destro spec on Monday and agree that you simply cannot make a smooth transition from a one button spec to watching 6-7 debuffs and refreshing when necessary. Tuesday after respeccing I spent 2 hours on Dr. Boom trying out rotations and subbing in/out Imoolate. After 12 tests, I found that with Immolate in the rotation the change is like +15 dps (however I did not have misery on boom so was not destro hit capped). Immolate does improve dps but leaves a much smaller room for error (.ie letting Haunt fall off for more than 1 sec).
Anyway point is you need to practice rotations and keep haunt up as close to 100% of the time as you can. I know its hard since youi pretty much have to cast it IMMEDIATELY after CD is up.

Hey cloud I’m assuming you speced something like This and just used a Incin/immo/conflag rotation with the imp out. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

I am still working on my rotation and remembering to manage my pet and my natural finger locations as well as keybind memory has to get sharper. As for my DPS on Brut i was just under 2100, on felmyst i was at 2400 but that was due to AOE with Rain of Fire in phase 2. Once I get my mind trained to automatically remember cool downs, know where my pet is etc etc I am sure my damage will go up. Also, fine tuning my spec will probably correct this too.

I am not tapping as much now..a huge plus.
I am busier in raid now both with awareness and different rotation..another huge plus.

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

Casting immo, coa, corruption and incin. Casting immolate isn't terribly important if other people are casting it too, I think I was under 1 second immolate during heroism so I just didn't cast it.

After doing Sunwell last night, Blizz are really go to have to make fundamental structural changes to Destro because the issues already highlighted became patent in a raid scenario.

Firstly, Backdraft. The net benefit of haste from Backdraft is seriously eroded by existing haste on gear, haste buffs from others classes, trinkets like the Skull and then Bloodlust/Heroism. Given that Immolate is at the GCD cap just with Backdraft, and Choas Bolt hits the GCD cap with other haste effects, only Incinerate has any hope of getting full benefit from Backdraft. However with Incinerate only getting full benefit when Immolate up, and Backdraft relying on Conflag which eats Immolate, the paradoxes in this build are significant.

Between being haste-capped and latency, I found I was losing a significant amount of the benefit of Backdraft in a raid scenario. When added to the cooldown juggling of Conflag and Chaos Bolt, speccing for and using Backdraft seems to be fairly pointless. Does anyone have WWS of a raid with both a Backdraft and non-Backdraft 51-pt destro lock going head to head?

In terms of this being level 70 and we need to see what happens at 80 with extra talents and gear, I remain to be convinced. The only DPS boost you get at 80 in destro is basically the 30% boost to fel armour, plus spirit on gear with 30% SP increase. I'm not sure how much that will close the gap, but given it's a percentage of a stat, it shouldn't scale that well.

If they don't change Backdraft's mechanics, then they need to decouple it from Fire & Brimstone. Not only is F&B a very lacklustre talent for a deep talent, but the fact that it boosts optional abilities not core abilities like equivalents for other classes (like mages getting school crit or core skill damage boosts).

The other thing they need to do is make Molten Core proc off a core destro talent like Incinerate or Immolate. Casting Affliction spells that will scale very poorly for destro and just further complicate the juggling of CB and Conflag cooldowns is just counterintuitive, especially when the sister skill of ISB procs off the spell that it benefits. Just terribly inconsistent.

I suspect that locks will be OK at the beginning of level 80 given that all stats will be low so talents will work better, but they will scale poorly (until they deal with crit/haste issues for Affliction and redesign destro completely)

Ask and yea shall recieve.

This web site parses 3.0 log files and strips out the new stuff so WWS can read it.

I used this spec with roughly this casting priority (brackets for start of fight / after long gap in combat only):
(Chaos Bolt -> CoA -> Corr) -> Chaos Bolt -> Immolate -> CoA -> Corr -> Incinerate -> Conflag in last 3 seconds of Imm.
I missed a few conflags (nub) and wasn't quite CB on cooldown. I pretty much failed at trinkest all night, destro now takes way more concentration than it used to, need to make a trinket pop macro.

My guild is mostly T5 equivalent geared, and only got 3/5 T6 bosses. We only had one replenishment in the raid , and I got no totem or water ele love.

I'm Zeruel.

This is terrible, with 56/0/5 I'd find difficulty in threat. The hunters were pawning in highest dps with only steady shot but warlocks had so much dot spell rotations to keep up yet lagging far behind them with the difference of dps in 500dps?

It's just poor design. Blizzard thought they had dumbed the class down too much since we've been spamming SB for an entire year now without a care in the world, so they decided to kill that spec and force us to use more spells in our rotation. That's a noble plan - the problem is, our others spell simply.can't.scale.enough. Not with the current haste mechanics, anyway.

They did a relatively good job in Affliction by letting UA and Corr 'crit', and it looks like the recently implied changes (your %crit translates into %dmg for your dots) will go a long way into fixing that aspect of the spec. However, there's still a glaring hole into our scaling since dots can't get the full benefit from haste. With affliction getting ~60% of its damage output by cast times of 1.5sec and instant spells, this doesn't look too good. They have to make haste affect how fast the dots tick after being applied - the spec is salvageable with this change, however I suspect the pvp repercussions won't let that happen.

Demonology suffers from not having any spells of its own. You nerf shadow bolt to bring Destruction into line, Demonology takes the full blow from it. You nerf dots to bring Affliction into line, Demonology again pays the price. Demonic Pact isn't powerful enough to warrant having a lock spec into Demo, a lot however depends on what kind of uptime can be achieved when we have enough Spell Power to overcome Totem of Wrath.

As for Destro, Fimotic mentioned the main problem with it already - forcing us to use shadow damage dots doesn't work that well with a tree that's skewed in favor of Fire nuking. Don't get me wrong, I like Molten Core as an idea, and it will probably work well early in Wotlk, however there's scaling issues to be adressed.

We are in the unfortunate position of having both nukes AND dot spells that simply can't scale together. And while I trust crit scaling will be satisfactorily adressed, I can't see the same happening with haste.

I managed a measly 2787 dps tonight on Brutallus (dmg/time, not activity based, Recount was 2890). 56/0/5, totally messed up casts, pet bugged not attacking so 0 pet damage (pet did 185 dps on KJ, only other fight where it dps-ed full time). Pandemic procced on 24% of my DoT ticks.
100% uptime for Corr
86% uptime for UA
78% uptime for Immo
81% uptime for CoA
82% uptime for SL
Haunt was up for all the fight with 2-3 drops for max a couple of ticks each.

Overall it seemed like I messed up a lot on the rotation and uptimes show it. Biggest mess was 524 haste + Wrath of Air + Moonkin Aura (41%+). Top it with Skull, some drums (only from myself), Heroism it made casting everything pure hell, double casted both UA and Immo a couple of times each at least (tapped keys maybe 3 times, oops can't stop 2nd cast now), had SB cast looking sort of stuck and instead cast 2 of them making me delay the next Haunt. Not to mention new kb for LT meant I forgot to do it, losing precious time spamming stuff while oom. Had to Life Tap 5 times.

In conclusion if I wouldn't have to actually also stay out of the fire dps-ing as affliction would be awesome. With a lot more practice and functional pet and properly working Pandemic this dps could actually be closer to 3.1-3.3k which would be in a decent spot if none of the other dps would improve their 3.0 routines, but would have to be in a perfectly done fight, 0 movement, 1 target. There is no more movement friendly affliction or multi target friendly.

For comparison Hunter ~4k, mage 3.6, rogue 3.5, hunter 3.4, mage 3.2, warrior, retri, moonkin 3-3.1, rogue 3 then me.

Overall I would really love to see a slight simplification of dps style for both affliction and destruction, they may have removed the 1 button spec but there sure as hell isn't any kind of cycle to warlock dps (not quite sure for destruction yet). At least alignment of some durations/cooldowns (Haunt in line with UA/Immo would be perfect). For destruction, in a full Corr/CoA-CB/Immo/Inci/Conflag spec there's again the odd cooldown for CB and 3 DoTs each with its own duration which makes it weird at some points.
They're all manageable with practice, not extreme but they do take 7 buttons + trinkets, pot and no easy to memorize order in which to hit them, actually I am unsure if such a thing exists even.

To add to this my experience on Beta, Affliction goes up nicely, it gets a big boost from Ruin at 80 (to the order of 5-10% probably, depending on luck mostly), hit% for destruction making it possible to skip some hit especially with how threat is at the moment. Still I'm not exactly sure if at the moment level 80 affliction is even getting close to the classes that top the charts, not from what I've asked around. But I don't really see anything good coming for destruction. And with a dps style like it currently has, it's a shame, destruction should really not have to rely on bad scaling dots.

Hm, overall things do not seem to be as bad as I was suspecting it. Did BT yesterday with a 56 destro emp imp/backdraft spec, in general hunters were destroying the dps meter, as expected, but I was not so far behind. On teron a mage won with 3.6k, two hunters were sitting on 3.4/3.5 and I was on 3.1k with a normal crit rate for a 3.0 raid. In general I beat our very well geared ret paladin on most bosses and was ahead of 1 or 2 of the 3 hunters a couple of times. I thought I was in for a much rougher awakening at least.

The rotation I used was Immol/Cor/CoA/Incin until Immol was running low, then CB + conflag to not have incin hit without immol on. After that thee shadow bolts and then start with immol again, while refreshing the dost whenever needed.
With a 2nd warlock in raid later on, I just used CB on CD. Not sure if the superior DPS of CB makes it correct to just use it every CD and risk having to conflag while an incin is in the air.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I definitely find this one of our easiest and most damaging raid spec at the moment. Definitely lagging behind hunters, mages and rogues (no real solid fury warriors in my guild y et)

I suspect Felguard with Ruin + full raid buffs is best though.

Also I wonder with my 2/13/46 if Corruption is even worth casting? I already skip conflag but I thought the coefficient for corruption made it too inefficient even for molten core?

Have they done something with imp crit rate? On PTR my imp seemed to crit 30%+ but now when I test on live it crits 5-6% over 200 casts on a dummy. Obviously that makes empowered imp pretty much useless.

Perhaps that is part of the explanation of the lackluster dps figures we see for locks.

Is it because you might have missed
5% crit elemental shaman/moonkin
3% crit elemental shaman
10% crit fire/frost mage
?

Nope. Both tests were on target dummies in Orgrimmar while ungrouped.

PTR=imp 30%+ crit
Live=imp 5% crit

Maybe it was just lack of habit from SB spamming for the past months but my DPS on last night's Hyjal was subpar at best.

Fire destro didnt work, damage done was rather low(1400-ish on Kaz'rogal and 1200 on Azgalor but Silence really messed me up) and i was constantly life tapping.

Affliction sort of worked. I was 5th on Rage but only did 1200 DPS on Anetheron due to target switching with the Infernals messing up my rotation. It did work rather well on Archimonde simply due to the fact that it was dishing out damage while i was moving away, so that's always nice.

Now, looking through a few pages to try and find SOMETHING to make me viable again, i've seen quite a few threads about people suggesting that it's not possible for any of the trees to pull out their best damage simply because there's missing synergy with the talents in only one tree(like Shanice, above me, pointed out). They say that the key talents on other trees would be what would add up and bring us back to the front.

Then, i saw this guy that went with ye old SB spam build(with only a few differences). Only big change was the Glyph of Corruption proccing Nightfall, which is always nice. Showing us recount meters, he managed to stay at the 6th position on Brut and topping the meters on M'uru.

Here's the thread if anyone wants to be the judge: 0-21-40 @ 70 still the best

What do you guys think?

We did a BT run in 2 hours then zerged Hyjal. I speced 0/3/58 for the whole run and my dps was way off pre-patch. Here is the WWS if anyone is interested:
Wow Web Stats

I placed pretty high in the charts, but i busted by but to pump out as much damage as possible. I was going to try it as affliction, but after seeing these T6 zergfests, there is no way on trash you could go through full dot rotation. Maybe on bosses you could push 3-4 rotations, but the fights are barely lasting 2 mins. Even Council which usually pushed 10-12 mins was <5 min kill. I'm the lock tank for Illidan and he never went to Demon Phase because the DPS was so quick. The encounters in those instances don't promote a dot based spec, it's a zerg, you pump out as much burst damage as you can and you will NOT go OOM with the new raid wide buffs. I barely had to lifetap in most fights.

It looks like Blizzard normalized all the other class DPS, rogues are back to #1 for single target damage, competing directly with mages. Hybrid classes (Boomkin/Elemental Shammy) will do more damage in most cases which I have a bit of a problem with. I'm not really sure what Blizzard's intention was with this patch for us. We've been basically demoted to a DPS class that can't beat a Hybrid's DPS.

I use a similar build

5/5/51

5 in corruption for 5% crit seed impact, aswell as the nightfall proc
3 in imp imp and 2 in demonic embrace for some extra health
51 in destruction BUT
- no mc
- no chaos bolt
- no emberstorm
- no fire and brimstone

I have maximized what I would think beneficial to SB!!!

Cast sequence

- coe
- corruption
- immolate
- sb until immolate nears end
- conflagrate
- quick sbs on backdraft
- rinse and repeat from corruption

I found this rotation was simple, and worked efficiently, being able to grab the immolate for the improved backdraft haste was beneficial for quick kills (IE: you can consume it quicker if you have the mana and want those quick sbs)

Realistically, you could just repeat before the quick sbs, as corruption does not consume the backdraft tick, and getting immolate back on might be beneficial.

I used against Gruul and ZA, it was "OK" (shakes head in disbelief, crying), and will use on Hyjal tonight and BT on Saturday, so we shall see what happens.

I am finding mobs die so quickly, that it is almost impossible to judge anymore.......

Here is a link to my build Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I've done a few tests with a 56/5 build but im finding it is taking me some time to get back into the 'keep everything up' mindset of affliction. I think the thing thats causing me the most grief is unstable affliction...its duration seems...off and its throwing off my timing. I know they reduced it and this might be part of the problem. My DPS has been about 1100, which is a bit low for me and it may be because my uptime isnt the best yet... but its all been solo testing... Im expecting a large difference with raid debuffs stacking up on the mob, but my guild kinda stopped raiding a month before the patch or so due to poor attendance and we havent gotten the numbers back yet for a 25 man.

Can some people post some 'solo' dps stats vs 'raiding' dps stats? Id like to see what the disparity is I'd be curious to wonder how blizzard could fix a spec whos main problem is that the majority of its dps is based on raid debuffs to be compariable.

On Wednesday for the SWP raid up to KJ, I used the 3.0 version of the 21/40 spec, and it was ok. I was getting beat by rogues and the moonkin druid (2100 dps or so for each fight, 2200 for Brut). The other locks included an imp-spec, 56/0/5 affli, and meta. I got beat by the haunt lock on Brut by about 100 dps or so.

Last night, I decided to spec the felguard/ruin (0/45/15) spec and I was hitting 2700 dps on Gurtogg and was consistently #3 or #4 in dps all night and I was the highest dps'ing lock out of the ones I mentioned above. At the end of the night, we did KJ and I did the most damage on the shield orbs and #4 overall dps (the bow dropped for us too!)

I popped demonic empowerment everytime it was up. Since we had an enhance shammy, BM hunter, and a fury warrior, my felguard was doing crazy damage.

My rotation was just CoA/CoD->Corr->SB Spam->Demonic Emp. It's nice having an affli lock with malediction so I didn't have to worry about support curses.

Most of you probably have 21/40 related gear, gems, and enchant choices like I do. This spec seemed to be complimentary to that spec more so than affli or fire destro specs. I highly recommend it.

Your math seems correct.

It's difficult to determine what's going on with only one data point and test setup, but I suspect that Chaos Bolt's damage is being calculated with a coefficient of 2.0/3.5 rather than 2.5/3.5. The math looks like this.

x + 1.1*(1561 * (2.0/3.5 +0.2) = 2332
x + 1.1*(1561 * 0.771) = 2332
x + 1.1*(1204) = 2332
x + 1325 = 2332
x = 1007

The math works out, but again it's impossible to reach a definitive conclusion with just one Chaos Bolt/spell power value. We'll need to get min/max Chaos Bolt values for multiple levels of spell power.