I don't think the problem with Ruin is that it forces people to spec 21 points, both UA (until very late game) and Felguard (except in pet unfriendly fights) are taken over ruin in affliction/demo builds. If anything, Bane and to a lesser extent ISB are the "you have to have to raid" talents, it's not like you ever see someone 42/19/0 or 40/21/0 or 16/44/0.

I think the problem is that if you are destruction, and have ruin, it causes your dots to get outscaled by spam. And even this isn't the fault of ruin, it's more a function of Shadow & Flame, combined with ruin, combined with demonic sacrifice, combined with the T6 set bonus. And even that situationally isn't always the case.

I'd be really curious to see numbers that showed how much movement/dps downtime it takes to cause immolate and corruption to still be worth casting. I'd be willing to bet anecdotally that any fight that isn't a stand and spam it is worth using them even as full destro with 4pT6.

Personally I'd like to see Bane as baseline, or just removed and rebalance our damage based on 3 second shadowbolts (maybe put the time off of immolate into improved immolate), or put an equivalent talent in each tree and move bane deeper into destro so you can't have more than one of them (ie in affliction, buff nightfall to give about an equal number of sb in that amount of time, in demo, your pet attacking could give you a stacking haste buff that would equal bane, etc).

1. you're right, that does seem slightly biased. Warlocks should get something similar with their pets.
___Though, a warlock has an easier time with their pets, than a hunter does. A BM spec'd hunter, whose pet is killed, is practically worthless. And they have no way to quickly revive the pet. Where as the Warlock can practically insta-summon a new pet. Not saying that it completly balances things, but it is one advantage we have over hunters.

2. with a class that is constantly fighting agro management, it is funny that they give us something that will kill us once it times out. Which points it more and more towards a purely pvp gimmick.

To an extent you are right. Bane is a "must have" talent, but it exists so low in Destro that it is easy to get, not mutually exclusive with any other talent.

The problem with your analysis of Ruin vs. UA is already self evident. It only remains viable for a minimum frame. A TOP TIER ability only has a limited window of viability. Unfortunately, that problem will not and can not fix itself through the ten levels and and additional spell ranks because of one thing - Item Levels/Stat budgeting. The higher the level of the item, the more inflated it's budget becomes, the more important it is to spread the item points into multiple stats. It's a runaway mechanic that ten levels can't remotely account for. By the time a character is level 80, Blues and Epics will have too many itemization points to simply toss them all into Spell Damage.

You mention UA becoming weak "very late game"... Midway through SSC/TK does not remotely constitute "very late game". Even if it did, the process which made it a poor choice was itemization budgeting! A mechanic that will not change but rather only be exacerbated by ten more levels inflating item levels. With gear homogenization and vastly higher demand for +Crit by ALL cloth casters (Including Shadow Priests in WotLK) EXCEPT Affliction warlocks - the mechanic is goign to be dusted by before Naxx becomes obsolete.

What really chafes my ass about the whole thing is that Blizzard hasn't even recognized it as an issue. In May '07 during the Stratics dev chat I submitted a question to Kalgan regarding DoTs scaling off stats other than +DMG (well before this was a problem but I saw it coming) and summarily got blown off with a statement that wasn't even true.

Several times since then I've made posts here, on the WoW forums, wrote about it on my blog, solicited people who have developer connections and even gone so far as to send in game mail to Kalgan regarding it. Not once have I seen any official recognition that there's an issue with Affliction, no sign of anything to do with fixing it in the alpha, and nothing that makes me believe that they see it as anything more than a glorified leveling tree as Tseric hinted at so long ago.

Blah.

I know this was posted back on page 40, but I haven't seen my thoughts mirrored in any of the replies, so here goes.

Kyth, even if Blizzard completely botches the WotLK fire mage tree, there's still a chance fire-destro warlocks will be able to synergize with mages. Really, it all depends on the new Frostfire Bolt, and whether Blizzard allows for 0/30/41 (Winter's Grasp/Water Elemental) and 0/33/38 (Winter's Grasp/Molten Fury) builds to contribute meaningfully to it. If, as many of us are hoping, FFB can benefit fully from combined fire- and frost-tree damage enhancements (Ignite, Ice Shards, Fire Power, Piercing Ice, etc.) and debuffs (Improved Scorch, Winter's Chill), the elementalist build has a chance to become the mage's top DPS option in WotLK.

Such a scenario would certainly help fire-destro warlocks. Level 80 elementalist mages utilizing FFB and scorch as their main nukes will stack that +15% fire vulnerability to enhance FFB damage, in much the same way fire mages use fireball and scorch right now.

It seems like dot scaling is held back by it's utility and low/instant cast time in PVP. In raids, the devs should clearly be able to see the math in how dots do less damage than DD as gear improves. However, being able to dot up 2-3 people on the run in PVP breaks that model and makes equivalent dot scaling too OP.

Would possibly implementing some sort of "memory" on dots, such that the more times you apply a dot, the more damage it does, with this stacking to some point. This allows the dots to increase in damage while not making them particularly OP in PVP, as you don't typically cast corruption on the same target 10 times.

I wonder whether the way to make metamorphosis a worthy choice over Ruin isn't to just give it slightly higher dps in the demon form (maybe 5-10% increased), and then also give it a passive effect when not in the Metamorphosis form. Something like 10% pet haste & 10% pet crit chance when you critically strike. Same intent as ruin, better scaling with crit, but better themed for the demon tree, and giving you a neat new ability to play with.

One big problem with Metamorphsis is it removes your pet, which you've spent 50 points improving. At minimum to be useful in PVE, Metamorphsis needs to put a Warlock's DPS 5-10% ABOVE his Felguard+Personal DPS before he activated Metamorphsis. Even then, you've got issues like: getting into and out of melee in Demon Form, talents in Affliction and Destruction trees are wasted as well in Demon Form, spell pushback in a caster that is in melee, and melee damage on a character geared in spellpower gear.

Some of those problems take care of themselves - Getting into melee is as simple as using Charge (No CD), getting out by using Howl of Terror before the form wears out. Melee damage would be scaled by spell damage, which solves that issue. However, you're 100% correct about Spell Pushback.

I'm not sure how much extra DPS Metamorphosis should bring. AS it is now, Felguard will be tremendous DPS. The new talents in combination with the new mechanics of Shaman Totems are incredibly powerful for a demo lock - Raid-wide Wrath of Air+Totem of Wrath totem for ranges, which scales your base Spell Damage and improves you FGs AP; and Raid Wide Strength of Earth/Grace of Air(they're combined now) + Windfury (which applies to pets now) to improve his AP/Avoidance+Extra attacks... Then there's Demonic Empowerment which will give the FG +20% attack speed with a 30% uptime (20 sec duraton, 1min CD) as well as Demonic Pet for an additional 3% damage and health for your party.

Demo is beastly. 0/50/21 will be hard to top with the new totem mechanics, it'll even give 0/21/50 a run for it's money on pet-friendly fights, perhaps even surpass it.

I'm not talking 41/0/20 vs 0/21/40, I'm talking 41/0/20 vs 40/0/21, as in the only difference in the spec is taking ruin vs taking UA. It takes late game gear to make ruin more powerful in an affliction build than UA. The discussion seemed to revolve around the idea that people were forced to take ruin because it was so powerful, and the point I was making is that you only take ruin if you go full destro, it takes the rest of the tree to overwhelm affliction. In fact, the only 41 point talent not worth taking is the destro talent, and that's due to the power of Demonic Sacrifice.

Don't forget, the scaling of ratings is going to increase as we level, by the time we get to level 80, even with sunwell gear, affliction may be back on top because the crit/haste/hit levels will have dropped dramatically. At max gear WotLK T9/T10, we can expect roughly the same amount of crit/hit/haste as we have now, just more spellpower (and higher base damage on the spells). What's going to be strange as we level is that people may actually find themselves weaker at level 80 initially than they are now.

As far as metamorphosis goes, it's basically going to have to be a massive dps increase for a short amount of time in order to be viable in a raid environment, which to me doesn't seem that hard to design. If Demon form doubles your damage for 45 seconds, and Ruin increases your overall damage by 20%, it would be a better damage skill in any fight under 4 minutes, becoming better again if you can use it a second time. Now these examples are somewhat extreme, and that much spike damage would be really hard to manage (maybe have it at a reduced aggro rate). But I don't think it's fair to write if off as a gimmick talent when it seems pretty easy to make it viable. Most people thought the felguard was a gimmick raid talent as well, until people actually tried it and ran the numbers.

Personally I don't like the 45 sec/5 minute balance, I'm hoping for a more trinket-like 30 second/3 minute, or something like that, I don't like having abilities I can't use often. Maybe they could make it start at 15 seconds, give it an ability you could use to maintain it, and have the cooldown increase on a scale. 15 seconds/1 minute cooldown. 30 seconds/2.5 minute cooldown. 45 seconds/5 minute cooldown. Then it could be just like a trinket, or could be a huge blast. To me it could make it potentially viable, creative, something you use often, but sometimes amazing.

And face it, if it is at all competitive or situationally useful, people are going to take it, because it's something we've all been screaming for as long as we've played warlocks. I know I'll be 0/51/10 as soon as I can be, numbers be damned.

I think I prefer Teleport to Summoning Circle to get out of melee as most raid bosses are immune to Howl. Yes there are solutions to those problems, I'm just hoping Blizzard keeps that in mind.

As for Demo, I'm just not seeing it being that strong really. It loses 5% from Soul Link straight off. Assuming 100% Demonic Pact uptime we are still down 2%, provided the buff has enough range to hit the warlock while his pet is in melee in the first place. In effect, we get Totem buffs and an activated 20% haste on our pet which is dealing 98% of the damage he currently does, and we ourselves also only do 98% of our normal damage. I don't know if that can really compete with DS+SnF considering we aren't getting scaling with crit, hit or haste gear and as we level we'll be finding more and more of those stats on our gear.

You are correct in that demo will operate at 98% of current DPS, but you neglected to point out that everyone else in our group gets that 3% dmg/hp buff as well. I think that makes up for the 2% loss in personal DPS. This is assuming nigh-constant demonic pact uptime and, to be honest, I think I can count on one hand the current fights in raid content where the Felguard can't be swinging away during DPS times. We'll have to see how the WotLK encounters play out, but given the HUGE increase in pet survivability (non-necessary SL, 2pT5 talent) I'm feeling optimistic.

I don't see scaling working like that. The reason Ruin took over was not that it was a "more powerful", but merely that it allowed the +Crit stat to scale in an acceptable manner. It was a2 fold problem, one with +crit scaling, and the other to larger amounts of "pure damage" items at around Kara level...

For those 2 reasons, I dont' see Affliction even getting off the ground in WotLK. The +crit scaling still doesn't exist without ruin, and although Crit RATING will mean less, it will still be much more commonly itemized due to gear homogenization. You still won't see those massive "+Damage Only" items because of the way Item Level/Item Budget points work in combination with greater demand for +Crit for all caster speccs except Affliction.

While you are correct in that +Crit Rating will mean less crit per point at 80, the fact that it will be itemized at all, let alone more commonly, will put Affliction at an automatic disadvantage before you even hit 80! The +crit item points may become less effective, but will still cost the same amount of budget points. Which means in order to make the items more efficiently budgeted, the itemization points will be spread into additional stats, which makes them dramatically less desirable for Affliction. In addition, because the budget cost of stats does not change, yet the effect those stats have DOES change, it only means that more and more itemization points which could be spent in pure Spell Damage will be spent in Crit/Haste... Which makes the items less suited for Affliction.


TLDR: Affliction has 2 problems, +Crit/Haste scaling, and and Itemization problem which mathematically grows more profound over time. The higher the level the item, the more the budget points need to be distributed into DPS stats other than pure +Damage, the less ideal the gear becomes for Affliction, the worse Affliction becomes over time by comparison.

Making +Crit/+Haste more valuable to Affliction would fix both problems.

Even without the massive +dmg only items affliction still have multiple early expansion bonuses..

1. Base values increase by more than shadowbolt/incin
2. t6 4pc becomes obsoleted (though how fast this happens is anyones guess)
3. +dmg gems and enchants get better and are a larger portion of your +dmg at the beginning on an expansion
4. Affliction got more dps buffs than destruction, including the ability to ua+ruin
5. crit and hit rates are lower
6. malediction benefits mages, and locks adding to his raid dps
7. The health benefit from bloodpact is more significant/valuable early on in an expansion

While I agree that crit and haste need to become better for affliction, I still think affliction will be the best spec as soon as you lose the 4pc t6 bonus, as well as one malediction aff lock even before that.

In terms of benefit per itemization point, not using ruin would be equivalent to requiring twice as much crit rating per crit percent (ignoring ISB for now). While spreading the itemization budget around is something that can help to benefit destruction over affliction, having large rating conversions can help that problem more than you think. If a large amount of crit rating has minimal crit chance effect, the difference in power the two specs get from a single piece of gear will be ameliorated, or possibly reversed if affliction gets better spellpower scaling than destro.

Just like BC...Affliction started out strong and got passed by Destro(and pretty much everything else with a few exceptions) once the stats started adding up.

I don't think anyone believes Affliction will be bad the first few month- The issue is the scalability in endgame content once everyone starts gearing up more. Affliction being OP early on but weak later is NOT sound game design.

It increases the extra damage you gain from your crit rating by double, since the non-crit damage would already have been there.

Yeah, I'm just gonna /facepalm myself here and whap myself on the head with a leg of lamb like the fool that I am.

If I'm not mistaken Feral Druids have nearly every talent affecting something for Bear form and something for Cat form.

Mages also are getting Frostfire Bolt that benefits from both Fire and Frost talents, and will help for units immune or highly resistant to either school.

And we can't even benefit from a decent number of points in Destruction tree.

One-school paths of course deserve to live. Fire would be slightly deeper and work better with Demonology (either Demonic Sacrifice, or Chaos Bolt + Empowered Imp), Shadow would be around 40 points and work better with Affliction (though something like 10/21/40 not excluded). But also I want to get rid of one spell spam. Making a proper Shadow+Fire hybrid would be great, that would use both Shadow Bolt and Incinerate in rotations, and probably throwing in some Conflagrate and Corruption (with Incinerate refreshing Immolate, and Conflagrate interaction with Immolate revised, though I still like the idea of removing own DOTs). Fire immunity solution for Fire Destruction and Hybrid Destruction is also suggested.

Right now Shadow Priests have way lower usefulness of crit than Affliction Warlocks. And quite honestly I believe it becomes roughly the same for both specs with new talents.

I agree with your first points, but not with the last. In BC, sure, SPriests have even less use for Crit than an affliction warlock (at least we have ISB), but come Lich King this is changing. Among other things, the Improved Spirit Tap talent says that, in 5 total points (3 for Spirit Tap and 2 for IST) they get a massive Spirit bonus and 100% I5SR regen for 8 seconds (later talents cause this to massively up their spell power). Shadow Power also gives their crittable spells 50% increased critical strike damage bonus (not as much as Ruin, but again, deep Afflic doesn't take Ruin until Sunwell). Affliction gains no crit-utilizing effects when 3.0 hits.

Yarr! Tools :: Priest 8472

Reread Improved spirit tap talent.

Ouch, thanks for pointing that out, but it changes nothing in the argument. It's still a crit-dependent and powerful buff, so my point stands.