My notes on translating the theorycraft to how real play effects affliction dps:
1. Definitely a huge transition from SB spam. Calling it a rotation gives it too much credit. After the initial application, I felt like I was playing whack-a-mole on dot cd's. Having prided myself on being a quick reacter and an expert of staying out of the fire, I suddenly realized I had turned into the dps equivalent of a bad healer staring at health bars, oblivious to what was going on around me.
2. Once I added immo to the rotation, I found that I wasn't actually getting a lot of SB's in on any fight that didn't allow me to stand in one spot and cast continuously, particularly once you factored in LT. It may be sacriligeous to say so, but I'm seriously wondering at this point if affliciton locks may find their dps improves more in actual (non Dr. Boom situations) at level 80 with improved fel armor and improve imp than with ruin. The advantage with improved fel armor is it effects everything you are casting.
3. I was having a big problem reacting quickly to nightfall/glyph procs (which, admittedly may effect my analysis in #2). What's a good mod to tell me when they have proced without trying to catch it in the middle of 20 buff icons?
Mik's Scrolling Battle Text does a nice job. You can set audio triggers to Nightfall in order to be told when to Shadowbolt, instead of reacting to it.
The thing that upsets me most about this patch and blizzards take on it is that they felt lock damage got into crazy land but didn't say anything of that short about BM hunters or rogues.In my opinion hunter seems to have the best potential damage on stand and nuke fights with their pet out and from what I saw it was true. I liked the ideal of everyone being close in damage and skill would be involved more with more rotations and what not. But it seems hunter still spam the 1 button along with mages spamming the amount they did before and doing more damage.
I know this is meant for level 80 raids and I am still going to level my lock in the belief blizzard will fix this by then. It just seems w/e spec I try doesn't seem like it is enough.
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.
Despite how much you're beating yourself up over your uptimes they are still pretty good. Could I ask, what addon are you using to track your dots? I've been wanting to give Affliction a try but I can't find a good dot timer addon that I like.
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.
I was mostly pointing out that I hit below a theorycrafted minimum for the spell without a partial resist. I definitely think that's grounds for inspecting the scaling. Chaos Bolt scaling as a 2 second cast makes it near-useless.
I specced 0/21/40 using a sacrificed imp and CoA for Molten Core procs and did significantly better than any other spec I had tried out. Using Corruption increased Molten Core uptime but lowered DPS.
5 in corruption for 5% crit seed impact, aswell as the nightfall proc
- I am sure this is your preference but as destruction I can not see myself ever casting seed as my preferred AOE anymore. We cleared BT and Hyjal last night for fun. We had 1 tank and we AOE's almost all of the trash down. Both instances took roughly 3.5 hours.
On our Hyjal run there were points where I was pulling 8800DPS on AOE with Rain of Fire. Proper placement is crucial and of course our shaman we're having fun with their new spell too making it harder to keep them in AOE but you get my point from this post. Try Rain of Fire and I am certain you'll want to use that over Seeding for AOE.
I've been Destro spec for quite a while.
SB spam was good for dps.
I've switched back affliction(56/0/5) since the 3.0 patch.
I am used to toping dps meters for both trash and bosses.
What are the best cast/dot rotations for each of these circumstances?
Typically I am not responsible for CoE but that may change now that I am the only Affliction lock.
Plan on not topping the meters again unless your rogues, arms warriors, and hunters suck. Right now affliction needs another 10 points to make it a worth more and do the damage again.
there is no rotation that i have figured out for affliction... Basicly just keep your dots up dont let Corr go off, whenever haunt is up use it and keep Immolate, SS, UA up at all times.
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 Backlash and non-Backlash 51-pt destro lock going head to head?
I have been noticing the very same thing. Backdraft is very close to putting my Immo under the GCD cap and if latency swaggers even the slightest it was throwing my rotations off. Of course my muscle memory still needs to adjust to a rotation period. I ran last night in BT and Hyjal w/o using conflag in my rotation and felt a great deal more comfortable as the rotation was more fluid, however when I was on the move I would use Conflag. I was able to focus on Chaos Bolt more. I may change my spec to incorporate Fire and Brim Stone since Immo is running it's full duration now and see if I can squeeze a few points of DPS out next week since we have everything cleared.
I'd also like to comment. Comparing two locks in the same WWS would require both locks having similar gear and similar skill. Also, both locks would have to be equally consistent performers and be performing at their gear level (IE all the RNG must equal character sheet tooltips).
shouldn't conflagrate-crits do double damage with ruin?
on a short dummy test i get 1400ish normal hits and 2100ish crits. should'nt crits do around 2800 dmg?
and i noticed that my imp critrate is about 5%. really low... doesn't he share my critrate?
i think destro is really broken right now.
come on... we have to deal with low-dps pain and/or corruption for molten core.
and i barely notice a dps increase with conflagrate and its haste effect.
I figured I'd be down in the dps meters without ruin & being switched to functionality.
(56/0/5)
The rest of my guild tends to be lazy on trash though so I would like to try and keep up there.
I think that probably Corr and UA would be good for trash they tick a bit harder for shorter fights.
then just sb spam after they are up (and other targets are doted)
Is Immo worth using as it is front loaded dps?
for the long fights are there any dot that are good to leave out of the rotation?
what is a good rotation to get started? (minimize GC problems)
Nope. Both tests were on target dummies in Orgrimmar while ungrouped.
PTR=imp 30%+ crit
Live=imp 5% crit
I'd just like to second these findings. I was seeing ~25% Imp crit on Beta (not PTR), now on live I get like 8% crit. It's very disappointing, I had been hoping that the Imp would scale a bit better than that.
I've been 7/3/51 since the patch, but I think I'm going to change. The Imp. Life Tap really isn't helping, and while the increased dot damage helps, I think the talent points can be better allocated.
If the Chaos Bolt coefficient really is bugged (and I think it might be, mine was barely hitting harder than my Incinerates in raids tonight.) then I think speccing Demonic Aegis could provide a better overall boost. The spec then would be something like 0/13/48. I'm not sure if you can spare points for 2/13/46 (Imp. CoA), but the spec I worked out only had 1 free, so I didn't bother.
That spec also drops backdraft. I've done some raiding with and without it, and I'm still undecided. Right now I'm leaning toward dropping it. I think in today's gameplay, with all the zerging that goes on, that having a complicated timer like conflag isn't going to work out. I did use it for a little extra right before trash mobs died, but on the other hand it required a lot of watching timers, and missing out on what was going on.
Part of that is the dot timer I have installed doesn't work for some reason, so I'm estimating based on the timer I see on my target's debuff slots.
The other thing is both Immolate and Chaos Bolt don't benefit from haste during backdraft. And if you don't waste a charge on Immolate, you miss the extra Incinerate damage. Sure, it's better than not using it at all as that spec, but is it better than letting your Immolate run its full duration and just keep on incinerating? (In addition to using those talent points elsewhere.)
Conflag also is still not benefiting from Ruin, which kills its DPS even more. And since we've seen the projected 3.0.3 changes already, with no mention of ANYTHING for Destro besides Shadowflame changes, I don't think we're going to get fixed before 80.
That's why I'm going to try a 0/13/48 build as soon as I can, with no Backdraft, Conflag, Fire & Brimstone, or Chaos Bolt (Added advantage of better Spirit scaling and more Intellect for the Imp, so longer periods of time before he goes OOM). I just wish I could fit more Nether Protection points into only 48 Destro, but unfortunately the 3 points I "dropped" going down from 51 Destro were Chaos Bolt and 2 points in Nether Prot.
The question about a spec like that becomes Molten Core. Keep using CoA and Corr? Just one? None? Spec into more DPS instead of Molten Core? Can you even?
If you manage to drop Molten Core and CoA and Corr, that simplifies your stat allocation because you can make full use of Cataclysm. Otherwise unless you spare points for Suppression, you will be missing dot casts or not using the spell hit in Cataclysm. Also, I found CoA/Corr to be utterly useless on anything except bosses. Mobs die so fast they don't even have time to tick.
--------
On the subject of our non-DPS talents, I love them! The new Nether Protection is crazy good. The duration and the fact that it applies to all spell schools is huge. I don't care about aggroing casters at all, ever. It also makes warlock tanking even more trivial. And after only two days with Shadowfury, I don't plan to give it up, ever.
A huge focus in the new 3.0 raiding scene is AOE. You should ALWAYS be AOEing trash where you can, nothing hits hard enough anymore to warrant otherwise, and CC is mostly unnecessary. Thus a key AOE tool like Shadowfury can be a huge addition to your arsenal. Lay some Seeds, then Shadowfury to blow every single one of them at once. It can also save your ass when you pull aggro from the insane AOE dps that you do.
I have also been using Rain of Fire a lot more. I've always been a huge fan of Seed of Corruption, but RoF is making a comeback. My ticks went from like 600-700 in 2.4 to 900-1000 in 3.0 for one thing. With the pushback changes, you can Rain of Fire and be guaranteed 3 ticks no matter how many mobs are on you. This also makes it much more mana efficient than Seed of Corruption (less life taps = more AOE dps), and it hits all targets, Seed hits one less than all targets (for 3 mobs RoF is usually strictly better, no matter what the aggro).
RoF's DPS doesn't change when you are taking damage, and as Destro you don't have Affliction pushback, so you will have a 3 second Seed of Corruption cast most of the time. Compare the tick of RoF every 2 seconds with the tick of SoC every 3 seconds and see who wins (also subtract 1 target).
The fact that you can only have 1 seed on a target then need to tab can also slow you down. For one thing tab doesn't always change targets, sometimes it takes two key presses. And also you have a chance of going back to a target you've already hit, and wasting more time. Doesn't matter how fast you do this, it's gotta be slower than just clicking on the ground for RoF once every 7-8 seconds.
Personally I use a mix of the two, along with Shadowfury. I try to use Seed early on in the pull, and once stuff starts dying I start RoFing and blowing Shadowfury. RoF has the advantage of instantly hitting everything 2 seconds after you cast, while if something dies between you casting the seed on a different target and the seed going off, you've lost that damage.
I'd just like to second these findings. I was seeing ~25% Imp crit on Beta (not PTR), now on live I get like 8% crit. It's very disappointing, I had been hoping that the Imp would scale a bit better than that.
I think it's been posted quite a few times here. The imp never had 25% crit, there was no stat or scaling that could have made it scale that good. It was just bugged, at least that was the assumption and it's a lot more likely than the imp getting crit scaling from somewhere. Imp is pretty much dps capped once you get decent amount of level 80 Naxx 10/25 gear, for the rest of the expansion.
I think it's been posted quite a few times here. The imp never had 25% crit, there was no stat or scaling that could have made it scale that good. It was just bugged, at least that was the assumption and it's a lot more likely than the imp getting crit scaling from somewhere. Imp is pretty much dps capped once you get decent amount of level 80 Naxx 10/25 gear, for the rest of the expansion.
Which most likely in return means, eventually our gear will mean that 10% fire dmg from imp sac is superior to imp dps + emp imp. I prefer to have my pet in my buff bar anyway. :P
Didn't try destruction much yet but that would mean imp would be reduced to about 4% of our damage on most fights, for Sac to be better than dps-ing imp. Since we're also using shadow spells.
Our WWS from Twins/Muru/Kil'Jaeden i'm Farthammer. Managed to pull almost 2.3k dps on twins, lower dps then usual on muru since he died instantly well it was chaos. Kil'Jaeden I only did orb duty when the last one spawned(you know the one high in the roof) pulled 2.1k dps then. But I also messed up with only 2 CoD's instead of 3 or 4.
All this was done with affli specc 56/0/5 with a regemmed gear to only 12 spelldmg gems.
That's good to hear. Would it be possible to test Chaos Bolt to see if the scaling issue is still present?
Also, Backdraft doesn't currently affect Rain of Fire or Hellfire on Live, is Beta different? I think it might be an intentional change, but it isn't reflected in the tooltip and if Blizzard is going to be picky about what Backdraft affects I think we can all agree that excluding Immolate would be a huge boon.
What I lack in intelligence I make up for in verbosity.
Both of these formulas get violated several times in just this small sample size, so unless my math is wrong (totally possible) Chaos Bolt isn't scaling as a 2.5s or 2.0s spell, but actually somewhere in between.
I ran both BT and Sunwell this week as 0/3/58 Conflag/Backdraft and I had another, similarly geared lock run 5/5/51 using only Corr for MC, Immolate, Incinerate and CB off cooldown.
My rotation was Immo, Incin X7, Conflag, CB, Incin, Incin, Corruption, Immo, repeat. My Backdrafted incincerates were benefitting from him Immolate, so I used them over SB.
For BT on tuesday, our WWS got messed up, so I only have anecdotal evidence, but what I saw on Brutallus and Gorefiend was me at 2600 and him around 2400. On fights where we actually had to move around a little, he did about the same and I dropped, mostly due to missing some timers.
Our third lock went Haunt, and his numbers were about the same as ours.
All of us also sucked at getting Corruption glyph procs as the massive amount of buffs we had was a little daunting.
Chaos Bolt was hitting for me at 2440, with a high crit of 5950 (51% crit, though, for the whole night. Ouch). Incinerates were averaging 2230, with a high of 5300.
Overall for the raid, the Ret Pally, a sub-par BM Hunter and a Moonkin domintated the meters. On Brutallus, with my 2600, I was 11th on the meters.
As an aside, I find it amusing that to get near the numbers we used to get, our rotations got massively complicated while a Moonkin druid can hit Moonfire at the beginning of the fight and spam Starfire the rest of the night and his Moonfire never goes away and he crits with Starfire for 8600.
I have messed around a bit with the dps dummies in IF and seen that 0/21/40 seems to still be a decent build as lvl 70. I have noticed about a 50 dps loss but overall spamming the SB seems to do decent. What spec seems to be the best for lvl 70 SWP raiding? Everyone seems to be either in afflic or Destro but seems to always mess with the newer talents. Is that the way to go or the old stuff still viable?
I've been running 5/3/53 and while I'm in mainly crafted stuff I'm still pulling off around 2000-2100dps
I'm using a CoE, Immo, Corrup, Chaos Bolt, Incinerate( get like 3 or 4 off before immos almost up), and then repeat from Immo. Doing this I've been beating locks way better geared then me using various specs.
10/17/08, 12:36 PM
Similar Threads
