Again this all depends on whether EF makes you crit 2.3 or makes you crit 2.05. It may be mages that need to weigh raid dps vs personal epeen and be the scorch mage even if that isn't their top spec. Regardless I do think it is unlikely that early on we will have nothing but destro locks like we do now.

Case Study: 'Gains to DPS from EF in the current spreadsheet'

Lets begin with the current version of the warlock spreadsheet: warlock_dps_v24
Link here: WoW Warlock DPS Spreadsheet

Let's start with a baseline DPS from decent in game gear:
1. On 'DPS' set build to '0/21/40 Fire' in the drop down and hit load
2. On the 'Gear Buffs' sheet select 'T6'
3. On the 'DPS' sheet set OOM time to 360 secs
4. On the 'DPS' sheet set Life Tap to 'oom_time'

Record DPS: 2186.51

5. Hack in EF update cell F20 from:
to:
Record DPS: 2372.75

Absolute DPS gain: 186.24
Relative DPS gain: 8.5%


This sets the immolate cast time using the current calculations given bane and haste and divides that cast time by the total time spent DPSing. We set the time spent DPSing to 360 secs or 10 mins for this test. The gains would be smaller in a shorter fight, the shorter the fight the greater the percentage of cast time of immolate makes up.

Let's take a shorter fight of 120 secs:

No EF DPS: 2381.69
EF DPS: 2564.71
Absolute gain: 183.02
Percentage gain: 7.68%

Additional notes:
The result is roughly 36 DPS per talent point just from the refreshing immolates. This is merely the DPS gains as a result of less casting time spent maintaining immolate and more time left over for incinerates. It does not even consider the gains that could be realized due to the shift in difficulty of play style or from the other half of the talent. Making sure incenerate lands while immolate is up is basically a non issue with EF and that could have an addtional impact not seen here.

Even without factoring the other half of the talent or the gains from easier play style EF is, point for point, superior to several DPS staples already in deep destro builds (devestation and backlash). After adding in the other factors as well it's sure to be a pretty massive boon to fire DPS. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why it is being dissmissed so readily by several posters here.

I have to say I'm not impressed or really excited by the current talents or even spells for warlocks.

Why can't they just pitch Demonic Sacrifice. It is nothing but a failed design that heavily restricts raid builds and effectively locks out half of a warlock's spell list due to school-specific damage boosts. If I could see any one change to existing warlock talent trees in WotLK, removing DS would be it.

I think that the "criticals" that people remember from years past are a result of the negative shadow resists that came with the pre-nerf CoS. CoD hitting for 200% normal damage made for some impressive numbers back in the day. As far as I know, CoD has never been able to crit.

edit: I see what you did: Are you factoring in that you are refreshing only the DoT part of immolate, which is just a part of the damage from casting immolate--you don't get the front end damage. Burnout has 3x the crit gain, but at a cost. The question becomes whether it can become sustainable in a stacked group.

I personally (and i think a lot of other warlocks feel similarly) don't want it to. Give affliction reasonable DPS and great raid buffs, give demo full pet scaling, useful upper tier talents and dmg similar to hunters (along with demonic pact party buff), and I'll be very happy.

Every raid will still have 2-3 warlocks, and these raid spots will be taken by the best players available as top dps efficiency will measure more than the ability to mash a single button.

Let the mages have frostbolt or fireball spam and massive epeens, i don't care, and at least they'll stop complaining about us full-time. They'll be too busy arguing whose nuke spam is king.

Nothing was better than opening eyes with what demo was capable of when i started playing it in gruul's just before 2.2. I top meters now at destro, but its not like anyone is impressed or cares. It's the expected and easily obtainable result.

Seconded. The last thing we need is more AoE in Atrocity. We talk about single target damage vs Mages, but honestly we should be equal in that department. Mages, however, should unequivocally be the AoE kings.

I think everyone's going to have to get over the idea of "Class X is the Y king". Making 10-man encounter design interesting, incorporating as many elements as possible from 25-man design, simply won't allow for it. If you want to include a heavy AOE design element in a 10-man encounter, you need more than one class that can dish it out really well. You're going to see a spec in each of several classes that can pump out AOE, I suspect -- most likely Fire Mages, Affliction Warlocks (I expect the increased coef on SoC will help a good deal), maybe balance druids, maybe we'll see something nice for Hunters/Pallies, Prot warriors are getting their frontal cone AOE, warlocks in general are getting a new frontal cone AOE, etc.

That method simply takes the current value of DPS from immolate and assumes it is up full time and reduces the cast time required to maintin it to one cast per fight.

So, no, I did not take into account the loss in average DPS from immolate as a result of only getting the direct damage portion once but I made some addtional modifications to the sheet to come up with a more accurate value and produced the following results under the same conditions:

Without: 2186.51
With: 2267.76
Absolute Gain: 81.25
Relative Gain: 3.7%

It does look much worse under those conditions but this is still only half the talent and does not factor in how much easier fire is to play when you do not have to bother with immolate uptime.

For those interested in the details:
I removed the direct damage portion of immolate from the equations in cell B60 so that immolate damage was calculated as only damage done from the DoT. I replaced the cast ratio for immolate in cell F20 with the same equation as the one i used earlier. This leaves the sheet with a cast ratio for immolate that reflects the fact that it is cast only once and with a DPS average that refeclts the fact that the DoT is ticking at all times with only the DoT damage included. Lastly I added one direct damage tick from immolate to the DPS equation for immolate in cell G20 to include the initial damage portion form the initial cast.

If the talents are released before the xpac (like last time), anyone have thoughts about 4 piece Corruptor Raiment + Everlasting Affliction?

I agree there.
Give me superior utility via debuffing or debilitating the enemy and I'll take lower DPS gladly. I didn't roll a Warlock at gamestart to be a glasscannon after all

Although I suppose Destruction should be nuke-centric, that's not a reason to make it damage-centric

Oh man...I need to go back to SSC to pick up two more pieces of corrupter.

Seriously, if talents go out before WotLK as is..I'll be quite upset. While we all know PvP balances would be thrown into the wringer, some Sunwell encounters will get really nasty if not impossible. Warlocks will still go 21/40 SB spam I imagine, as I don't see deep destro making up for the 15% from demonic sac. There are nerfs and changes to current abilities that could adversely effect raiding performance like the priest CoH cooldown and VT nerf, but we don't have the talent points to get the new abilities without dropping some very important other abilities (like losing DS for EF). Even though Naxx was never nerfed, I felt it was nerfed by patch 2.0 (there were huge changes, like a 40 debuff limit, stackable HoTs). I don't see anything that big this time around...I can really seeing Sunwell being...very interesting.

Everything about Destruction and Fire comes down to EF and Burnout, and whether they provide 205%/227.5% or 230%/262.5% crits.

The Frost tree gives us the simplest possible comparison point for a 46-50 point talent:

Chilled to the Bone: +5% DPS, plus a positive utility effect.

Sucky EF would give (at 35% crit rate) +1.3% DPS, plus a positive DPS/DPM effect.
Sucky Burnout would give (again, 35%) +4.4% DPS, plus a negative DPM effect.

Good EF would give +7.8% DPS, plus a positive DPS/DPM effect.
Good Burnout would give +13.3% DPS, plus a negative DPM effect.

The "Good" versions are the only ones that make sense when placed next to Chilled to the Bone.

I suppose many of us are just fighting tooth and nail against Atrocity. Like I said before there isn't really a great option for UA to continue on with to really increase raid DPS with Atrocity being AoE/PvP-centric, DS being mutually exclusive with DP, and Ruin making crit a little less terrible, but still not a very good stat until it effects DoTs.


I guess I would have figured Destruction to get the AoE goodies moreso since it already has Shadowfury, Hellfire, Rain of Fire, and Affliction has a very strong basis to be a great sustained DPS tree with all the DoTs, Dark Pact, etc. I would imagine a great many of us who second guess Blizzard will always come to be disappointed when they release what they are *actually* going to do, especially after seeing some really inspired talent trees that players come up with on war-tools.

262.5% crits sounds ridiculously high, even if big portion of them comes through a DOT. An improvement to Fire Mage DPS may come just from fixing of DOT refreshing. On top of that judging from numbers during Alpha isn't precisely best thing we can do. Numbers are what will most likely change as we can judge from what happened during TBC alpha-beta. Though I don't quite understand the idea behind putting a reverse Master of Elements especially based off maximum mana.

Current descriptions suggest theoretic 220% crits with EF (though current bugged live implementation would bring them to 230%), while 227.5% crits with Burnout.

What we however can expect is that ideas behind the talents will stay. So Fire will have higher crits, but it will cost some mana, but not necessarily negative DPM (i.e. Arcane Power-like effect). Destruction will also have higher crits and won't have nuissance of recasting Immolate.



Naxxramas, in particular good old Patchwerk. 3 Warlocks max in a 40-man raid, just for curses. As for Destruction tree name itself suggests it being damage-centric.

That's one of our main problem with Affliction in my opinion.

In theory, Affliction powered dots have great potential, dps/dpm/dpct etc..., while Destro has poor dpm and or dpct.

In reality/raids, the amount of debuffs slots available is very tight. There are times that Affliction locks have to drop some dots ( mostly Siphon Life + Immolate ) because they won't be up for the full duration to be worth casting it. For every dot that one has to drop, one lose dps..., while Destro has nothing to worry about.

I want affliction ( and even demo ) to be viable, but I can gist they won't add anymore dots for us, since the new class Death Knight uses disease based debuffs, most likely needing more than 1 slot, thus hurting affliction even more IF one brings a DK with them.

Yes, the debuff cap is a major headache. Yes, it's more of a general ingame mechanic problem than a lock problem, but it hurts affliction so much

PS : one other problem is itemization, but I think most know about it.

400? According to the spreadsheet my average tick as affliction would be 850. 7k ticks on a 4 minute fight? Obviously that's well beyond broken. Even if it is additive you can shoot lower rank shadowbolts at 1second (and stack +dmg gems/gear instead of haste) and get off atleast 225 shadowbolts in 4 minutes.. That is 20k+ corruption ticks.. On a short fight.

It'd work out to 187.5% up front, followed by an extra 75% as a DOT. It may sound like a lot, but:

Again using 35% crit rate, what we'd have then is:

EF: 5.185% DPS increase from the Crit effect, plus a positive secondary effect
Burnout: 4.4% DPS increase from the Crit effect, plus a negative secondary effect

I'm curious also why you're calling the 230% math "bugged" -- are you suggesting that the CSD isn't working properly, by being applied before other crit modification talents? (I don't mean this to sound argumentative, you could be correct.)

It's true that we're likely in for some tuning.

Actually 2 warlocks in many cases, since for only two of them CoS wasn't worth it...

my guess is this won't work, and it won't require a fix.
do this: put on 4pct5, cast corruption, cast one shadowbolt. Now try to recast corruption. You won't be able to. You'll get a "a more powerful spell is already active message." My guess is a refresh talent would run into the same error through internal coding, meaning you might not be able to use it and the 4pct5 together.

Also, I have to agree with Lhivera again regarding the "x class should be better than y class @ Z" statements. Evidence for these assertions is largely tied to people's readings of the original class descriptions, and anyone who doesn't see that the game has evolved (and should) probably should re-think whether their posts belong here or on the official WoW forums. Best is also a subjective term (does it mean best single spell, best variety of spells, best pve usage of said ability, best longevity while using said spell, etc)

Please try to keep it to what we as warlocks want our class to be with respect to its trees, pve/pvp abilities, internal (meaning cross-tree) balance and playstyle.

Well, as internal role/balance are concerned I still say Affliction should err towards sustainability(sustained DPS sustained health/mana). Destruction as the burst DPS + AoE tree and Demonology as the durability + PvP tree. Naturally every tree should be able to perform all roles reasonably well, but each should have a certain edge to it.

Of course that's just my opinion, but I think it's moronic to give Affliction more AoE.

Unfortunately as it is now 4t5 only increases the base corruption by 10%, so basically gives you 90 more damage (108 at rank 10). I have no clue why they made it so lame in comparison to the other tier sets but unfortunately it is.
Empowered Corruption + Everlasting Affliction would put corruptions coefficient at 150%
Now for the increases after spell damage is added.
13% for CoS (I imagine if you are going down to empowered corruption you picked up malediction)
10% for shadow mastery
5% from contagion
10% from shadow weaving
5% from misery
15% from demonic sacrifice (if you picked it up)
and an off and on 15% from ISB

Starting with just what you get from talents, not including DS as you might not get that. Assuming Rank 10 Corruption, and 2000 spell dmg just to make it easy, corruption would be a total of 4080. Now using that after all the bonuses not including DS or ISB, or set bonuses it would become about 6150 or 1025 a tick. Now if we add in DS it becomes 7073, and further still if we add ISB it becomes 8134. Here is where it gets scary, now i know this is an old tier from before the expansion but from what i remember 4t3 boosted ALL of corruptions damage by 12%. Using that would bring the total damage to 9110 or 1518 a tick. You end up getting a lot more from 4t3, even with the lower stats, towards corruption than you get with 4t5.

Now im not saying this nebulous build we are assuming with DS and everlasting affliction is good, im just calculating out how high one can get their corruption for all those people out there that use it as something of a measurement of their power while affliction, like destros watch shadowbolt or incinerate grow with their gear.