You may very well be correct in your idea of what Blizzard meant to do.

But to be clear. It's not *just* an oversight in the scaling of destro. It's also their entire attitude about pets in raiding and their entire attitude on Useful stats for DoTs.

I'm willing to bet that most of us didn't sign up to be one button spammers. But as long as my pet dies to the first AE every boss does (and semi-randomly to trash), I will run the build that's *stronger* without a pet. As long as a significant portion of the item budget is unused on DoTs, and items wholely effect my power; then Destro is the place to be.

I'm not particularly thrilled at the direction Destro's going at the moment either. Start the game as a pet wielding, kill you slowly while laughing Dark Master, end up just an Alternate version of a Fire Mage. How far we've fallen.

Putting threat reduction on Life Tap is a really bad idea:

1. If you make it reduce a percentage of threat, it would completely obsolete Soul Shatter. Not only that, but it would make threat generation a total non-issue for Locks. Consider how many times a Lock normally Life Taps in any given fight as part of their DPS rotation. Performing your threat reduction move should be a pause in DPS and a conscious decision, not a passive effect that you always do anyway.

2. If you make it reduce a set amount of threat, it would be completely useless. Rogues do not use Feint because they roughly put out more threat than they can Feint off even if they did full time.

Both Vanish and Soul Shatter are on 5 minute cooldowns, and as long as a 50% drop in threat is enough to keep the tank ahead in threat before the boss dies (or the cooldown finishes), they are essentially the same.

The one problem with Soul Shatter is that it is a Demonology spell.

Affliction has Suppression for Affliction spell hit, but Locks are still forced to cap their spell hit completely through gear because Suppression does not affect Shadow Bolts.

Cataclysm is getting changed to provide Destruction spell hit, but guess what? Locks will still be forced to cap their spell hit completely through gear because Soul Shatter is affected by neither talent.

Actually i was thinking more of a threat reduction equal to the amount of life it costs. Yes it wouldnt be all that much but 2k every lifetap wouldnt be the end all be all, but every bit would help.

Destructive Reach plus Blessing of Salvation is a 37% threat reduction, which would reduce a 3k non-crit Shadow Bolt to 1890 threat.

If you can Life Tap for 2000 mana (and -2000 threat), that works out to roughly 4.7 Shadow Bolts per Life Tap. So, you reduce your threat by 2000, but will then cast 9000 threat worth of SBs from that one Tap.

Think about it:

1. If this is enough of an offset for you to never need to Soulshatter, why have Soulshatter at all?

2. If this is NOT enough of an offset, why not just use Soulshatter when a well-placed one can eliminate the need for any other threat reduction in the first place (as is happening now, unless I'm mistaken).

I don't know about you but ive closed huge threat gaps before, frankly i didnt mean this as a fix all solution, more of a helping hand. After said well placed shatter.

While the situation is rare, and I can't really think of any boss during TBC where it happens, except for Void Reaver, it is very often that Soulshatter cooldown together with low amount of wipe is simply not enough. Using a first Soulshatter at 2-3 minutes into fight is usually good, you can even go all out until that point and usually be fine. But by the time you can use it again (at 7-8 minutes), you are already so high relative to tanks that you often have to do nothing for 30-60 seconds before cooldown is ready. This is one use for Soulshatter: reduce threat when tanks' threat is being reduced by boss abilities.

For 90% of everything else you never need Soulshatter at all. If you need it, the spell isn't really perfect. Until you use it its benefit is zero, and you can't use it instantly, because then its benefit is zero too. You have to balance between DPS lost to threat cap before 1st Soulshatter and at the end of fight (or before 2nd Soulshatter, because it pretty much sorts things unless resisted). The fact that you balance it at the end or before 2nd is really showing how much benefit would come from having it higher than 50% wipe, of course you might as well yell on tanks asking for more threat which is what I end up doing all the time.


As for Feint and Vanish, Vanish is clearly superior, and its superiority shows itself the most when it's time to use next one. Soulshatter isn't ready when you want it 2nd time, while Vanish is. Feint isn't a big threat reducer, but it lets convert some DPS into threat, if you are threat limited you can use Feint instead of doing nothing. Lastly Rogues get insane passive threat reduction of 29% which gives them higher threat cap than Mages and Warlocks have with 10% reductions (accounting for different amount to pull aggro in melee range and out of it). It's 1.444 damage per threat for Warlocks and Mages, and 1.549 damage per threat for Rogues (7.26% higher), both values are taken before buffs that everyone can get (like Blessing of Salvation)

T5:
4: Your Shadowbolt spell hits increase the damage of Corruption by 10% and your Incinerate spell hits increase the damage of Immolate by 10%.

With Everlasting Affliction or Eternal Flame
T5 have to be changed or it's so bugged that it's only give +10% to one tick or worst bug ever that set would give +10% buff and stacking to infinity. After 100 bolts dot would tick (1.1^100 = 13780) or (1+ 0.1*100 = 12) times nomal value.

I think others have answered most of your other points about Lifetap not being a good canidate for -threat, but I'd like to cover this since it is in response to a suggestion I made towards Soul Shatter. I proposed half health to replace the soul shard cost in combination with reducing the cooldown to 1 or 2 minutes. Clearly, a -threat skill I'm using every 1 or even 2 minutes had better not cost a soul shard. That was the primary reason to put the -health penalty there.

It doesn't, I edited post to clarify that it was accounted for.

You don't need current Soulshatter (-50% threat) every 1 or 2 minutes. 3-4 is a fair deal, and two times should be enough for every fight, and that isn't really high shard cost.

Unless of course it gets resisted. So either it needs to not be resistable, or it needs a shorter cooldown, possibly with reduced effect (-25% or whatever). Because I don't know about you, but having a DPS class that 1% of the time randomly cannot effectively DPS is pretty poor design. You seem to be saying you are happy with 1% of the time getting to AFK and let your raid go about their business 1-man down, independant of anyones skill. Me personally, I can't decide if that or Demonic Sacrifice is a worse class "feature."

And I'm pretty sure you would find the shard cost of a 1-2 minute cooldown pretty annoying, which was the cooldown at which I suggested the soul shard cost be removed. I don't believe a longer cooldown would need the shard cost changed.

Resistibility of Soulshatter is very poor design. They might as well just give every boss ability that they use at 1%: it will have 1% chance of wiping raid and 99% chance of doing nothing, I believe it will be about as good as Soulshatter resistibility. I'm not happy with 1% resist chance, but lower cooldown won't sort it, you can still have it fail several times in a row and that's it. It needs that "feature" removed and get either higher effect, or lower cooldown, or both.

Well as far as shard cost the way they described inscription gives me some hope as to removing the reagent cost off of soulshatter just with inscription alone.

Feliska im not sure what changes you are talking about, there doesnt seem to be anything new since the latest patch about a week ago or so.

One last thing (i keep having to edit as i browse around as to not double post) has anyone found out yet if the Empowered Imp 100% crit effect has an internal cooldown?

This was discussed a few pages back. What happens now if you try to refresh your corruption with 4-pc t5 before it ends you get a "more powerful spell active". Which tends to imply that if you have 4-pc t5 your everlasting affliction/eternal flame refresh will hit the same result when it goes to refresh making the talents worthless.

More like a 1% chance of reducing all damage by 10%. I presume that you would in fact stop dpsing rather than wipe the raid =)

Depending on how finely tuned the encounter is reducing a person's damage on a 1% chance could be the cause of a wipe.

4T5 bonus :"Your Shadowbolt spell hits increase the damage of Corruption by 10% and your Incinerate spell hits increase the damage of Immolate by 10%."
If it did still work,50/0/21,0/21/50 will be the most powerful talent in PVE.



But,the key is......Is it possible?


In early WLK, 50/0/21 will be better....but,i still belive 0/21/50 will be the final PVE talent of WLK

Every DPS class has some sort of limit imposed on their ability to do damage. Be it rage, energy, mana or, in your case, threat. This is to ensure some sort of balance between the classes (in regards to DPS).
Now as far as I know, warlocks already top the meters on most fights, along with hunters. Asking for your class specific "dmg-limit" to be upped does not strike me as something reasonable considering current game / class mechanics.

Just in case anyone feels like complaining about the rogue-tag on the left - I regulary check this thread because of my warlock twink, which I'm considering to promote to main come WOTLK.

When posting about how other classes work, it's best to understand those mechanics. This is a case of not understanding. To translate it to something you may understand better, how about they make Vanish not drop threat 1% of the time. Nothing you can do about it, just sometimes you Vanish and your threat stays the same. In any fight in which that happens, will you be in any way contributing nearly enough DPS for your raid to succeed in difficult fights?

In case it isn't clear enough, with 4 warlocks, if you are in a timed DPS situation and you are pushing the bounds of your raids ability, you will auto-wipe almost 4% of the time because at least one of those warlock's Soul Shatters will fail and they won't be able to put out enough DPS to defeat the boss.

Summary: Broken mechanics are broken. Supporting them in classes you don't like or you feel are "overpowered" doesn't help you, doesn't help your class, and doesn't help the game.

Doesn't Vanish have a chance to fail outright? Feign Death can be resisted (I believe it qualifies as a spell and thus has a 17% chance to be resisted against a boss? Not certain...still, on a 30 second timer, not a huge issue). Invisibility can be interrupted. Fade is simply terrible. Isn't there some degree of unreliability for every active threat reducer?

It's seems feasable, given the post being responded to and what was actually posted, that drundia was pointing out that reducing the cooldown or raising the threat reduction on soulshatter would cause imbalance given the current nature of raid DPS and where warlocks typically lie on the DPS charts.

I could be wrong but it doesn't look like drundia is supporting the idea that soulshatter resist 1% of the time no matter what, merely opposing the idea that soulshatter needs to be more effective than it currently is. 50% threat reduction on a 5 min CD is plenty of reduction on live and it stand to reason that it will remain so when progressing through WotLK.

I think everyone can agree that the 1% resist on soulshatter AND the +hit talent in destruction and affliction not counting towards the hit chance of soulshatter is something that need to be changed but 99% of the time i.e. when the skill actually does what it was intended to do it is plenty powerful.

Hmm, Feign Death, 100% threat wipe, 30 second cooldown. Resist here isn't a problem. Not comparible in the least to Soul Shatter's current design.

Invisibility (assuming untalented, b/c with alpha talents you could drop it from 3 seconds to 1 second), interruption is entirely skill based: do you know the fight well enough to avoid activating it right before splash hits? On top of that, every second you aren't interrupted provides partial threat reduction. So skill based vs RNG based. Again, not comparible in the least to Soul Shatter's current design.

Vanish's failure chance depends on which rogue you ask (no two rogues will agree on how "unreliable" it is). But one area I haven't seen complaint is with regards to dropping threat (vanishing and getting immediately knocked out loses you the ability to use an opener, but still gives you the -threat to my knowledge). Then we've got that this is a 100% threat wipe AND there is both a talent that reduces the CD to 3.5 minutes as well as a talent that allows you to immediately re-vanish. Yet again, not comparible in the least to Soul Shatter's current design.

Fade isn't even attempting to be viable -threat for Priests. It isn't even as strong as Feint.

So in conclusion, no active threat reducer is designed such that a single failed activation effectively removes the class from DPS in threat sensitive fights while at the same time forcing a minimum chance of failure on that threat reducer. And hey, while where at it, FD, Invis, and Vanish are all 100% threat drops vs SS's 50%.

Vanish doesn't get resisted, it gets broken. It still drops threat, but mob swings can start before you vanish, and finish after you vanish, thus hitting you, which breaks stealth.

As far as I know, Vanish isn't resistable. I have never seen it on my rogue, in the 2+ years i've been playing her.

Invisibility would work the same way as vanish, except that due to the cast time, it's *much* more likely to be seen. Again: I don't believe Invis is resisted, it is merely stopped, which means you don't get the full threat reduction. My current understanding of Invis is that it is 20% of your threat reduced per second, so at least you have some sort of threat drop if it's stopped halfway through.

Fade: Not an aggro dump. Temporary effects really shouldn't be included as a threat drop, as it does nothing in terms of your total threat generated over the whole fight.


If i knew that vanish had a 1% chance of being resisted, i would start using Feint again. In the long run, feint would be a significant threat drop. My only issue with it is that it's affected negatively by salvation. IE. The threat reduced by feint (say, 1000) is reduced by 30% from salv, so it would only be 700 per feint. Of course, if i'm wrong about that, feel free to correct me.

It actually multiplies your threat by 0.9 each second.

1 sec: 90% threat
2 sec: 81% threat
3 sec: 72.9% threat
4 sec: 65.51% threat
5 sec: threat wiped

And yes, there is some skill involved in avoiding predictable damage, but random secondary target damage is more of an RNG thing.