Well its the same arguement as why isnt a SM/Ruin based build the king build now. Frankly 0/21/40 spec which would morph into the 0/21/50 spec in the expansion greatly abuses the power stacking % dmg buffs has. Where adding corruption and siphon life would be more of a linear addition, each % debuff that is added is bolstered by all those behind it.

But in the end this can all be considered a future version of 0/21/40 vs 40/0/21.

Also, think about the Sta values that will be in the expansion, how exactly is Demonic Embrace exactly filler, or improved healthstone or improved imp (whichever you put into to get down there, and granted you wouldnt have your imp out optimally but the option is there) for that matter?

Particularly when the lvl 80 variant of Blood Pact is forming out to be 177stamina base. That's a whole load of scaling.

Unless they recently changed it, it was 133. Either way, it's 2x what it is now, considering Rank 6 is 66 stam. Talented with imp imp, it's 173 stam to your group, which is no small amount.

This is one of the things I see pointing to the imp (or maybe pets in general!) scaling better in the xpac.

[quote=Helot;777751]
Even in it's current form, with 2(3 if you have CoA) dots ticking, increasing your fire damage by 10% all the time, giving you life back, be more valuable than a sacrificed pet?
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It won't be up "all the time", it's just a chance to proc. In addition, these things typically have internal cooldowns to prevent back to back procs.

10% chance, on 3 dots, that you can have on multiple targets, for trash. Pretty good odds, considering Nightfall, a 4% chance, occurs frequently if you have more than one corruption up.

And until there is proof there is an internal cooldown, i don't know if it will actually exist. Nightfall, a similar proc, has no internal cooldown. I'm sure that there are talents with similar wording with internal cooldowns, but that'll have to be something that's tested later.

And yes, i consider Demonic Embrace a filler talent. Sure, having 15% more stam is nice, as is having a powerful healthstone. But unless your tanking something, or taking alot of AOE damage, 15% more stam isn't anything special. If your not using the health, it's a filler.

Regarding the imp. imp, there's one reason i avoid this talent at all cost: Tanks.

Tank groups like to have thier stam. Being a 0/21/40 build, and then being told "You have the best imp, go get it out for the tanks" isn't exactly something i want to have to deal with. I'd prefer to have to worry about dropping a max rank (or 1/2) healthstone for the tanks, than be stuck in their group because all the other warlocks didn't take those 2 talent points either. Sure, it's a situation that's not likely to happen, and your raidleader should be understanding enough to get another warlock, one who would have the imp out anyway, but things don't always work out nicely.

With both CoA and Corruption ticking on a target, you could expect ~50% uptime, or an average of +5% to your Incinerate damage. Whether that's worth the casting times on both DOTs, I don't know. And of course that assumes you're in a position to use CoA rather than having to put up CoE or CoS.

Well, Corruption would be worth the cast time, if only to get nightfall procs. SL is situational. If you can train your healers to 'not heal the warlock immediately', then SL will work to it's full potential: Healing and damaging, rather than damaging/overhealing.

If with 2 dots, you can expect a 50% uptime, would not 3 dots increase that to 75%ish?

Regardless, this would be alot more feasible if fire damage increased shadow damage by 10% as well, since you'd be getting a increase to all your sources or damage, rather than just half. It's still something that for now, is just all theorycraft. If the talents change, it'll be better, if they don't, it might still be useful. just not *as* useful.

Yarr! Tools :: Warlock 8391

Would be a build I'd be thinking of. That is, assuming the talent trees are somewhat correct.

There's little use getting imp. Immolate, if Eternal Flames just refreshes the duration, which leaves very little else to take in the tree.

I'd like to think of Destruction as able to switch between fire/shadow, with very little loss. With DS, that's mostly true. There aren't many talents a pure fire warlock skips, that increase Sb damage. And even if they do skip them, there's usually some way to include it in the build regardless. Having that sort of viability is great, given that raid composions aren't always ideal for a fire lock, and they might be better off using SB's due to raid interaction.

Hunters are thematically a pet and ranged class and should always expect to use their pets and ranged abilities regardless of spec; traps, probably not so much. Shamans are thematically an elemental class, and should expect to be using elemental spells; there's nothing inconsistent about non-enhancement specs not using enhancement spells. Warlocks are, thematically, a damage-over-time, debuffing, and pet class. There's plenty wrong with a 21/40 build forsaking pets and DoTs, but I think there's a very strong arguement that there isn't really anything wrong with an affliction or demonology build being able to get by without mainline nukes because that's not the main identity of the class. Destruction is the damage tree so I wouldn't expect drain life to be better for an affliction build than shadowbolt is for a destruction build, but it's sensible to me that a very deep affliction build might find drain life better for its build than shadowbolt, or at the very least better than completely untalented bane-less shadowbolt. Besides, affliction still has nightfall so it would make some use of it.

Pintofbrew: My earlier suggestion was that only drain life overheals contribute to extra damage. Would that alleviate or ammeliorate your concerns about a high-damage and self-healing spec, since they by construction cannot happen at the same time? Also keep in mind I'm not asking that affliction be comparable to destro in DPS, just that drain life when not healing be better DPS for an affliction build than shadowbolt.

Suggestive: Don't mind us- Affliction has a tendency to attract a cult following of sorts. There's something about the tree in it's playstyle, mechanics and even thematics that doesn't fail to enamor, even when 0/21/40 is the obviously optimal choice. I would say I'm in the camp who would like to see Affliction moved away from Shadowbolt spam, but Garak's example wouldn't do it any justice, as you stated what does it matter if it's a laser or a bolt? It's ultimately the same thing. The beauty and attractiveness of Affliction is the level of micromanagement involved in playing the spec optimally- which is the direction that would be preferable should we ever get a replacement for Shadowbolt- Something that requires a significant amount of micromanagement to play well, rather than the repetitious and monotonous nature of our old friend "Shadowbolt spam" which no doubt contributes to our resentment of the spell and why you see suggestions similar to Garak's. Even though Mages deal with different schools of magic they are, at their core, a nuke class- which is why Mages don't have such rabid attachments to one talent tree or another as Warlocks do. Affliction, however, grants us a glimpse of a potentiality of truly involving gameplay that many of us desire to see become a reality.

At the risk of taking this thread even further OT (), I have to agree. Those of us who have been playing warlocks since the start or very near the start picked warlock instead of mage for those various reasons. I know when I saw curses, summoned pets and evil, life stealing spells I thought "Oh sweet it will be like a necro from D2!". If I had wanted to nuke nuke nuke, i would have been a mage

Same here - Although when I first rolled a lock back when the game came out, it was cause of the cinematic /sob /cry.

I saw that sweet undead warlock with 2 infernals behind it... and I was like @_@!!!!! Evil caster with demons!! I'm rolling one now!

Boy was I ever in for a bitter surprise...

But even then I stuck to my 7/31/13 talent choice - back when 31st point was soul link at 50% damage mitigated.

Then all the QQing on the forums "My succy can't live with SL up! It dies when I'm at 50% HP" started....

So blizzard nerfed it to 30%..... I quit the game.

When I came back to start my druid - I saw SL at 20%... and 5% damage to make up for it..

Now when I first read expansion alpha talents - SL at 15% - but at least it's not a 31st pointer.... It's now a minor buff everyone must spec 11 pts in demo to live...

Anyways - where was I? - Yeah .. what happened to our awsome hair raising power of infernals!!!! The one hour cooldown 50silver reagent outdoor 5 min control version that get's killed by a felguard any day of the week, and twice on sunday, is a joke... Doomguard isn't a joke - it has some very useful spells on it - but it's considered so overpowering, it can't even be summoned reliably without sacrificing a player... and even then it gets it's butt kicked by a felguard...

I sincerely hope those spells will get looked at... and either become more accessible, or if not accessible then more powerful. Infernal and doomguard should be classified as "elites" with respect to damage and HP, at the very least. Don't worry - you can't use either in arenas... and in BG's you can always banish it - or kill the lock and see it turn on their own team - ready to be enslaved by someone else. Fun anyone?


I am certainly hoping for the current metamorphosis to survive the nerf bat it will most likely get. I fully expect it to be overpowered in alpha.. maybe even in beta - but I really hope it defines a new way to be a non-mage warlock.

Our most bloated tree stays Destruction. Oddly enough you never want to pick more than 2/3 of it, except for some weird PVP specs that may actually spend all points they have their for some silly low-chance procs. Number of actually useful talents in PVE is even lower...

The trees however are filled with lame issues. We can even think about good old 60s with 30/0/21. Oddly enough 0/0/21 had higher effect on your DPS than 30/0/0.

Affliction not scaling good enough now? How about "Affliction doesn't get enough proper early talents"? Now that makes sense seeing that 0/0/21 > 30/0/0. Problems? Oh, they are countless...
- Suppression: hit cap anyone? How viable is Cataclysm for Affliction? What about Soulshatter? No, of course in Destruction you can go ISB/Cata/Bane/Devas/Ruin and end up with such 21 points, but no extra range or threat reduction for Destruction. Arguable usefulness.
- Improved Corruption: It is of course great... well, until Everlasting Affliction, it's precisely useless once you get EA.
- Improved COW: PVE DPS? No.
- Improved Drain Soul: oh sweet, it's threat reduction, it will be used as a filler anyway...
- Soul Siphon: PVE Drain spec? I don't think so.
- Fel Concentration? Amplify Curse? Yes, maybe latter.
- What an awesome Tier 4 comes after. It's actually all useful.
- Tier 5? Siphon Life is nice, everything else might again have something to do with Affliction, but it's as good for PVE DPS as Defensive Stance.
And this is our good early Affliction. DPS-useful talents in 5 first tiers can almost be counted on one hand. Could that be Affliction problem? That surely could! Tree is indeed getting way better starting from Tier 6, but the early part is ridiculously useless for a very deep Affliction spec.

Drain Life can't be a viable DPS until it's viable healing spell. It's just the way drains work now, they kind of get 50% of bonus damage into damage and 50% into healing, creating a disparity here might yield some good results. Drain Life may become an actually powerful damage spell, but not that good healing spell. The problem is that real heals available to healers have way more HPS than Drain Life, the real nukes have way more DPS than Drain Life. Every time I touch Drain Life button I end up being healed: a massive DPS and mana sacrifice for no real gain. That's what Drain Life needs. It needs to be almost as good damage source as real nukes, but pretty small, yet noticeable and reliable heal (more than Soul Leech currently is).

As for Destruction it needs noticeable and reliable effect on Soul Leech. It needs some more useful talents around as well. The whole tree as it is depends too much on DS (and of curse Ruin) and either Fire Mage or Shadow Priest. Have those nice persons slack and you are kind of screwed.

Haste has absolutely no effect on your spell choice. Shadow Bolt doesn't really get any goodies except Ruin to beat UA, but that shouldn't be enough. If you think about scaling it's pretty much 0.8 per sec of cast time for UA and 0.343 per sec of cast time modified by crit for SB, and then further modified for both by SM.

It's a great idea PSG, but the problem is it doesn't alleviate my concern: that a self-healing autonomous (in both life and mana) class loses nothing to gain more output. By simply introducing this you gain damage from something that previously did nothing, thereby creating value from where there was none. Let me express my worry more concisely:

Assume that the Affli, for whatever reason, would spam DL, rather than SB, to cause DPS. This is also the same thing he'd spam to avoid death. By having the same "tool" for two different jobs, you effectively are able to do both at the same time; by introducing "OH = more dps" rather than "make DL bigger" you put a conditional, that when you're taking damage your output suffers, but only until it's self-corrected, by doing more of what you were doing before. See, you may think that adding OH to damage is a damper in it's self, but you're pretty much constantly at 100%, either because ambient damage is less than a few tics of Drain/SL, or because you got hit by a big shot (as one does in a raid) and got healed by a healer, as you should be. Overheal going into damage would effectively double (or more, if you're on current Fel armor, though I assume nobody would wear Demon armor for dps in WotLK) your Drain's output.

It's hard to justify making DL a nuke, given it's designed almost entirely as a utility spell; currently, unless I'm mistaken, no matter how many talents you dump in DL you'll always have more DPS bolting, even with 0 destro talents. This, intuitively makes sense as given two choices: a moderately expensive channel that heals you for all it's DPS or a very expensive nuke that does not, it's clear that you'd never pick SB if the output was comparable.

Lastly, the problem with making Overheal convert is scaling; your spell would scale at double rate, and it would scale hugely with multiple affli locks. 13% mal-CoS, 10% SW, 5% Misery, 10% Shad. Mastery, and up to 60% from Soul Siphon... That's a huge amount of percentile scaling. Granted, Siphon won't be more than 16% per affli lock, but even so, assume that a given spellpower buffs DL by a coefficient N, converting overhealing (which is larger by N already) into more damage gives you double the coefficient scaling. if DL was comparable to SB, say 5-10% less, then stacking 3 afflis to pump each other's siphon would produce dps far surpassing SB, with much improved survivability and group buffing, while losing only debuff slots.

I guess you could make a new spell, something say in 51 affli, a form perhaps, that'd reduce Drain's heal to 20% of damage done but increase Siphon's effect by *3 (tweak for correctness), while reducing Siphon's effect to a maximum of "max amount of debuffs a lock can have*2=32%" rather than 60%, which makes for 15 debuffs. That's 4 locks if I'm correct. A valid assumption for a 40-man raid but asking for trouble in a 10-25.

edit:

I'm not aware of the specifics of how DL scales, I'll leave that to you guys; you shed some valuable insight into how the spell works and perhaps in this light the overheal->damage will not scale as excessively as I figured. However I can coment slightly on what you posted a little later; reliance on SP/fire-mage is not as prone to trouble as you claim; one can't avoid having his debuff up, the other would rather eat his kitten than let his debuff drop off. Having either of them "slack" as you put it would pretty much mean "die", in which case you can argue the same about having the CoE/CoS lock die.

Having Drain Life as a nuke would be too OP. I don't see anything wrong with DL's current healing either...we are not a healing class. I'll agree vanilla wow DL was way to weak too be really useful outside of solo play, but I think it was buffed rather substantially in TBC. Shadow bolt will be the flavor of choice for affliction and demo locks....incinerate the flavor of choice of destro. Shadow priests complain all the time about the lack of a spammable nuke outside mind flay, which has a terrible coefficient. It doesn't make sense for us to be complaining we have one which has a great coefficient.

I'm not sure why DL is always the default choice for an alternate affliction filler. I don't see a way of salvaging DL that makes it a viable PvE DPS filler that doesn't also completely break it for PvP. Upscaling the damage coef. and downscaling the healing coef. leaves you with, variably, a spell that does too much damage while drain tanking, or doesn't heal enough to make drain tanking possible. Altering the spell to that OH is converted directly into damage shatters it for PvP. And realistically 5 seconds is too lengthy for a true filler spell; consider the plight of the Shadow Priest, and how frequently the last tick of Mindflay has to be clipped off to maintain a maximum dps rotation.

As an alternative, I want to throw Drain Soul out there.

Every rank of drain soul above rank one is useless. 65 mana for a soul shard and zero damage is what the current implementation boils down to. Why other ranks exist we can only speculate! The 15 second duration is utterly pointless, save perhaps while learning the mechanic. When was the last time you cast a drain soul more than 2 seconds before the target died?

Cast times change between different ranks of a spell. Downranking is a viable method for gaining additional efficiency out of otherwise obsolete spells. What if DrS was reworked to specifications similar to Minflay? Leave Rank 1 untouched so that new players can get accustomed to the mechanic of soul shard creation and advanced players still have an efficient (read: cheap) way of generating shards, but reduce the channel time on every other rank to 2 or 3 seconds with a 1s tick. Talented pushback resistance exists. All that would need to be added at that point is some talent synergy, but I don't see that being a problem given the maleable state of the trees right now.

Changing DrS to function as a filler seems like it would be much less work and much easier to balance than DL. Opinions?

I always felt Improved Drain Soul should have been something along those lines: 'Reduces the duration of your Drain Soul spell by 5/10 seconds and reduces the time between damage intervals of your Drain Soul by 1/2 seconds.' In addition to the mana restore proc. Throw the -threat% function into Grim Reach, tweak some talents to include Drain Soul (Soul Siphon and Everlasting Affliction, maybe Nightfall), and have at it.

Hence why I said leave rank 1 at 15 seconds and reduce the channel time on higher ranks incrementally down to, say for argument's sake, 3 seconds at rank 4 and above. You would still use only rank 1 to create shards.

And no it hasn't changed since 1.0, it has always been pointless to have multiple ranks.

But does the duration even matter? I remember reading somewhere that spell pushback on channeled spells was a static % of the channel each hit. Even at a 15 sec channel, if I'm getting hit by something (without Fel Conc, a Basilisk outside Shatt in this example), I usually only get one tick off. The same can't be said about DL, since it ticks every second, but the relative % of pushback looks to be the same.

Pint: You missed two things, and I missed one thing. The first thing you missed is that Drain Life already scales at half-spell-damage because it has a heal component, so if anything converting overheal to damage brings it up to a normal spell, not an OP, before Soul Siphon (plus there's no reason it has to be 100% of overheal). The second is lifetap: even sans ambient damage of any type, and even with Dark Pact, we're still cutting ourselves regularly. My favorite thing about the idea, actually, is the tactical timing of lifetaps relative to other spells to maximize the time healers have to drop heals between a lifetap and a drain life (ie lifetap, reapply dots, DL) and the potential to put deathcoil back into normal rotations.

The one thing that I was missing, that you hinted at in your post but I'm not sure your realize yourself, is that it trivializes one aspect of play. Currently a warlock has to choose between his healing spell and his damage spell. It's usually not a difficult decision in raiding (more common in grinding and a few five-man encounters) but it's there. Making Drain Life intelligently choose between healing and damage removes that decision: it's always the best spell to use, and it knows what choice to make for you. Under this consideration, I would now prefer a new affliction filler instead of a drain-life buff, or perhaps a player-controlled rather than automatic conditional to sacrifice healing for damage.

Looking at PSGarak's points, I think that it's ultimately a good idea. The various stresses of trying to remain at or extremely near full life in order to maintain the boosted damage to Drain Life would, in my opinion, outweigh the trivialization of the heal/damage choice. I'm not entirely convinced the choice is even trivialized, as fights sporting significant raid damage are likely to force the choice regardless.

I'm not sure casting Death Coil once or twice during an encounter qualifies as being part of a regular rotation. And even if it is the healing is less than the 2 lifebloom ticks that just topped you off while you were spending a GCD to cast it instead of a useful spell.

Having an intelligent DL doesn't make it necessarily OP for PvE, but the argument for it being OP for PvP is much stronger, and since that's how balance is arbitrarily determined that's just what we have to live with. If it's a manual toggle...how would that work? We're talking about 2 different spells, one that does damage, and one that does less damage and heals you. There's no way for you to manually select which 'mode' the spell uses currently implemented in the game, and I'm not sure I see a way to do it that doesn't add more bloat than it's worth.

If people are deadset on a channeled spell for dps, then drain life is definitely not the droids you're looking for, unless you're ready to admit you want to have your cake and eat it too. DL is a niche spell that fills a very specific role. Just because blizzard tried to clumsily force it on us as the affliction filler at TBC release doesn't mean it's the only viable option, even if it is the only one they're likely to consider.

The current implementation of shadow priest dps is much closer to what affliction dps should feel like, albeit somewhat lower because of the group health/mana returns they provide. Affliction DPS juggling several dots, a few direct damage cooldowns, and a channeled filler that needs to be intelligently clipped fully satisfies the pleas for more player interaction that we keep hearing.