A few people have touched on Rain of Fire. Since SoC it has been a completely pointless AoE, but having played with it last night on Twins trash and M'uru, I'm wondering if it's to be preferred for full fire destro? Considering that:

Rain of Fire now:
(a) crits;
(b) benefits from:
(i) Ruin;
(ii) Emp Imp (so does SoC)
(iii) Emberstorm;
(iv) Molten Core; and
(iv) Intensity.

I used both to compare but in combat it's hard to guage and they seemed to be about equal. Any of the more mathematically inclined able to speculate?

Don't forget that Rain of Fire also hits all targets you aim it at instead of all targets - 1 like SoC.

Raided some with felguard in nax10 and was very impressed, thought the pet would just suck. It was not as good as someone claimed before here, but it did 750 dps on average. Not really sure how it's supposed to reach 1k dps, we had mostly all melee buffs avaible with a DK and dps plus prot warrior for sunder and BS and it had BoK of course. I also used dem empowerment on CD in boss fights.

In general with that spec (50 demon, 21 destro roughly, was not sure if meta beats devastation and was kinda in a hurry to get the spec done) I did 3000 dps vs single target nuking fights like patchy/gluth, more then I expected kinda. Some fights were obviously crap, although on grob the felguard survived much better then a hunter pet, but Heigan was not pretty.

On the AOE subject what stone you guys think that affects AOE spells like ROF/SOC/Shadowfury? Firestone(Direct damge), Spellstone(Periodic Damage). I have been using the Firestone seemed the obviously but then a fellow warlock asked me the question and now I have my doubts aswell.

I'm a bit confused as well. Thottbot lists the effects for hellfire and rain of fire as periodic triggers, whereas the actual damage dealt is phrased the same as a spell like shadowbolt. Seed of corruption is worded similarly, its trigger (not the dot portion) is worded like direct damage is.

Ultimately, I'm inclined to think that rain of fire, and the explosion on seed of corruption are direct damage, because they can both crit, whereas periodic spells do not. I don't think I've seen hellfire ticks crit before, but I can't say I've looked closely for it this patch.

I specced 0/21/40 with doomguard and pulled 2.3k dps on rage winterchill...

Doomguard did 30% of my damage... rest of damage was CoD or CoA corruption and SB spam...

:-/


Doomguard is 15 minute enslave with nobody dying on summon and lvl 70, 1k per hit, crits upto 2.5k

Correct. I'm glad they're revitalizing some of our old spells, when BC hit the moment I got SoC I just took rain of fire and hellfire off my bars, they couldn't compete at all. Though the change is largely due to the reworking of spell interruption mechanics, which I think were long overdue.

Wait didnt enslave demon get nerfed to 1 min duration?

I thought that, too, but found my Mechanar-bombdemon still at the 5 minute timer. This was just yesterday, post patch 3.0.2. Duration was definitely 5 minutes as we were used to. I was also surprised about that, but its either a bug (probably) or a reverted nerf.

edit: my "(probably)" in the last sentence is not really fitting, because i can not find that nerf in the patchnotes any longer for some reason. But i am pretty sure it was announced to be nerfed to 1 min.

Only the infernal that you enslave with Inferno lasts for 1 minute, and then disappears. The regular enslave demon spell was unchanged, as far as I can tell. However, it looks like there's a new effect that allows an enslave from a ritual of doom to last for 15 minutes?

Chaos bolt seems to have changed slightly. The tooltip damage range is a bit different (this might be due to a leveling effect I overlooked). The scaling seems consistent with a 2.5 sec cast + talents so far.

Tooltip with Emberstorm: 1139 to 1446
2011 spell power.
Expected damage range: base + ((cast time) * emberstorm * S&F * spell power)
Expected damage range (min): 1139 + ((2.5/3.5) * 1.1 * 1.2 * 2011) = 3035
Expected damage range (max): 1446 + ((2.5/3.5) * 1.1 * 1.2 * 2011) = 3342

Shooting level 70 dummy. (there is a level 60, 70, 80 and boss dummy now)
3169
3252
3221
3297
3235
3104
3259
6406 (3203)
3341
3047
3135

Looks consistent so far.

Something I noticed on the side; fire/spellstones increase tooltip damage by 1%. Lightweave bolt procs way more often.

Edit: Crosspost from the beta forums;
If you don't have Immolate up on a target, but another warlock does, you can Conflagarate. It does not eat their immolate, it does proc backdraft.
Maybe you can even conflag others' Shadowflame, I don't know that yet.

We had a similar experience, a boomkin was #1 and our glaive wielding rogue was #2 by a wide margin.... all the locks were at the bottom of the DPS'rs. Blue posted that we "catch up" at 80, but I have my doubts, especially given the complications around our rotations and the number of DOT's affliction needs to maintain..

I can't see how destro is going to get any better between 70 and 80, the talents just aren't there. Affliction has imp SB/ruin and a quad damage drain soul which seems to bring it in line with other classes but at the cost of been over complicated.

Well if it makes anyone feel any better, GhostCrawler stated this yesterday:

"Balance dps is really high both at level 70 and 80. We're concerned that we made too many big changes and made their dps too high.

The issue at 70 may be only on big AE pulls because of Hurricane. Lots of groups seem to just be AE tanking everything and AE'ing it down and Hurricane is actually really good for that now. "

Source

Rogues should be up there, but I wouldn't be surprised if they knocked hybrids down a notch. I don't like seeing anyone getting a nerf, but Blizzard may have overdid it.

Retadins just got a nerf. Balance druids are likely next. Given how easy balance is to play atm + the coming dual-spec option with apparently no time limitation (/sigh, horrible idea) on changing specs, I think we'll have a new FoTM class pretty soon.

I'm not too worried about lock dps right now. The last 10 talent points for us are fairly significant (i.e. ruin) for demo and affliction especially.

I guess I'm a little worried about affliction and the stress on the debuff limits, and a little worried that Demo's overall dps will continue to suck, but we'll see. To me, at the moment it seems more like we just need to get used to the complex rotations, and that well-played warlocks will still do well at 80.

I'm not really concerned about lvl 70 anymore. With the huge nerfs to bosses since the patch, I don't consider raiding fun, challenging, or remotely balanced. In three weeks, literally no one will care, so take the current lvl 70 raiding results with a grain of salt.

It's the debuff slot that really has me worried. Within my own raiding group it's already been mentioned that affliction locks are going to be a hindrance to the raid because of the useful debuffs being knocked off for our dps and suggestions of rerolling are coming thick and fast from people. I don't even mind the rotation after a few days practice so some kind of acknowledgement of the issue would in my opinion go a long way to lifting the cloud over the warlock community at the moment.

I have not seen this "catchup" at 80 on the beta. Maybe it's the p.v.p. (player versus player) gear, not certain, but it still is sub par to 70 raiding geared equivalents now. This is of course in my honest opinion.

Does anyone know offhand what the threat modifier on Searing Pain is? Since tank threat is through the roof ATM, I wonder if a 0/40/21 Imp spec for 70 raiding would be viable at all. The idea is you apply Corruption and CoA for Molten Core procs, and then just spam Searing Pain. You get +10% crit to Searing Pain from talents, and can get Glyph of Searing Pain for +20% crit damage.

Glyph of Imp is also available, so you could probably combine this with some decent DPS out of the Imp with Improved Imp, Unholy Power, Glyph of Imp, Master Demo, and Demonic Tactics. Demonic Empowerment also lets your Imp have an extra +20% crit for 30 seconds out of every minute.

Pre talents, 1.5/3.5 = 42%. Pretty mediocre.

Before you worry about threat, let's worry scaling and damage.

Searing pain is a 1.5 second base cast, meaning its base scaling is only ~42% of spell power. +10% crit and 20% crit damage are unlikely to make up such a large scaling issue (Even without ISB, Shadow Bolt will have 34% scaling per second, while Searing Pain with those factors will have ~32% per second).

I meant the threat modifier, not the spellpower modifier.

The spellpower mod isn't bad. It's only 42%, but it's 42% of your spellpower every 1.5 seconds. For comparison, Shadow Bolt is 86% of your spellpower every 2.5 seconds with Ruin. That's obviously better, but Shadowbolt doesn't get the benefit of Molten Core, +10% crit, or +20% crit damage.

As an affliction lock you aren't using SB as much (even with nightfall and the glyph) and haunt doesn't benefit from Ruin so I don't think it will be that pivotal. Basically I think we are boned, but that's based on the current build and scaling issues we've had with pets not scaling.