WotLK Talent Preview / Discussion - Page 45

Phonebooth · 07/11/08, 2:33 PM

Originally Posted by Bibdy

If every Incinerate reset the DoT tick timer then the talent would be borderline useless. I imagine the DoT will continue ticking every 3 seconds, it just bumps the max duration timer back up to 15s every time Incinerate lands. It completely devalues the point of Improved Immolate, since in an ideal world you'd only be casting Immolate once and keeping the timer going with Incinerate so you'd only get that bonus once during the entire fight.

What you do after you have 5 stacks of Eternal Flames going, and barring the one Incinerate every 15 seconds to keep Immo going, is anyone's guess. Do you fire Shadowbolts to get Molten Core and ISB procs? Or do you just spam Incinerate? There's really no other options as all our other spells would decrease DPS. Shadowflame and Shadowfury are AOE and Conflag will lower your DPS.

I wonder what's the point of having Conflag in the tree if Eternal Flames is there. They don't function together whatsoever. Are you really going to Sacrifice your rolling, EF-stacked Immolate for a little bit of damage that lowers your DPS? I can't imagine instant burst damage being so important that you'd do that. I used to have Conflag in my pre-TBC build and even then it wasn't great for burst on things that MUST-DIE like C'thun little eyestalks. It still took 1.5s to get Immolate on them. There's no synergy between the two (EF and Conflag) at all. Conflag is PvP and EF is PvE and never will you want the two in the same build. Unless you're, you know, nuts.

More to the point, I wonder if Joe McCasual is able to figure that out. You see some whacky-ass builds out there because talent descriptions can be pretty vague. The lack of Conflag and EF synergy isn't very obvious.

Edit: Saying that, being able to skip EF in a PvP build let's me go back and grab more PvP oriented talents like Molten Core and Aftermath. Meaning I get all the good stuff for 54 points (well, besides Backdraft - hah! What a piece of junk). Thankfully Chaos Bolt doesn't require EF.

What baffles me, though, is why Shadowfury requires Shadow & Flame.

Conflag will be good assuming fights have an aggro reset or anything of the sort, on a fight with a phase change you can keep incinerating up to the phase change and conflag off the refreshed immolate instead of having it pull aggro.

Bibdy · 07/11/08, 2:53 PM

Well with the tree as it is, with a PVE build you can either have Imp Immo+Conflag or max out ISB and have 2 points in Soul Leech. So you could always switch to Shadowbolt and let the Immolate tick off 15s beforehand.

And, as is my hope, they A) nerf/remove Demonic Sacrifice, B) Give the Imp some way of lasting more than 7 seconds before running OOM and C) Give it some way to survive AOE damage and we use the Imp for damage instead of DS.

So, given all of those far-fetched changes, you wouldn't lose 15% damage by switching to Shadowbolt.

Hearteater · 07/11/08, 2:59 PM

Eternal Flames
Your Shadowbolt and Shadowflame critical strikes grant you Eternal Flames, which increases your Fire damage by 4/8/12/16/20% but decreases your Shadow damage by 2/4/6/8/10% for 6 seconds.

--

There, now you want to switch from Shadow Bolts to Incinerates whenever that procs. Immolate and Conflag are still useful, and getting Immolate/Conflag off under EFs buff will be ideal. Allowing it to proc of Shadowflame makes it at least not a total waste in PVP.

Bibdy · 07/11/08, 3:02 PM

Urgh...what about that next bolt you already have loaded up, though? You'd have to react pretty damn quick so you don't lose DPS time going "Aww crap, I got a crit, better stop and load up an Incinerate".

PSGarak · 07/11/08, 3:53 PM

That, plus against a fire-resistant target that talent would be a strict damage decrease. Putting drawbacks on talents is usually a bad thing, especially passive talents where you can't toggle the effect when it's not worth it.

Hearteater · 07/11/08, 5:47 PM

Originally Posted by PSGarak

That, plus against a fire-resistant target that talent would be a strict damage decrease. Putting drawbacks on talents is usually a bad thing, especially passive talents where you can't toggle the effect when it's not worth it.

I don't think fire-resistant targets are an issue since any problems a warlock would suffer under those conditions, a fire spec'd mage would be in even worse shape (so Blizzard isn't likely to design many significantly fire resistant encounters). At least a warlock could stop, Life Tap once or twice and then resume Shadow Bolts with nearly no loss of damage.

As far as stopping mid-cast, someone would have to do the math on whether the remaining 1-1.5 seconds of a Shadow Bolt is worth waiting out even at -10% damage. Then again, someone would have to check the math to determine if just having it be +20% fire on Shadow Bolt/Shadowflame crits (no downside) would encourage rotation of damage spells.

Bibdy · 07/11/08, 6:02 PM

You think that stopped them making Al'ar fire immune, Supremus fire resistant and Rage winterchill frost resistant?

We could very well see some frost immune/resistant stuff in WOTLK, as well as some fire immune/resistant ones in the titan places (with all their forges and lava and junk).

And if you're 2 seconds into a Shadowbolt cast by the time the original crit landed you'll obviously be better off letting it fly. It will make DPS calculations an absolute NIGHTMARE to figure out, though. To the point where we'd all just say 'fuck it! I'd rather be doing rocket science'.

SageoftheTimes · 07/11/08, 7:29 PM

Frostfire Bolt gains from both Frost and Fire talents no matter which type of damage it's dealing. We'll see more immunities, if Blizzard feels like it, which will be rarely.

Also, considering Fire/Shadow Destro synergy, all I can see so far is Molten Core. It seems more like the synergy that Blizzard made with the mage revamp back in 1.8 . Generally, Fire will beat out Shadow only because Shadow has been nerfed. Oh, and because Immolate DoT damage has been buffed.

PSGarak · 07/11/08, 7:32 PM

The point isn't that would be in a tough spot on fire-resistant fights, the point is that it's not hard to come up with situations where not having the talent is flatly worse than having the talent, which is always a bad thing.
It's irrelevant anyways. The point of the talent was to encourage swapping from shadow to fire on a proc. If the buff to fire is big enough, and 20% is big enough, you don't need to penalize shadow to make fire the better option.

The modeling wouldn't be as hard as you think. You modify the cast time of incinerate based on expected reaction time, and then you can find a closed-form solution for the ratio of incinerates to shadowbolts based on SB's crit chance (which is 1:c) and take your filler spell to be a weighted average of the two.

Lhivera · 07/11/08, 8:02 PM

Originally Posted by SageoftheTimes

Frostfire Bolt gains from both Frost and Fire talents no matter which type of damage it's dealing. We'll see more immunities, if Blizzard feels like it, which will be rarely.

Just to clarify that, however, all it means is that Frostfire Bolt will do less terrible damage than Fireball for a Frost Mage, and less terrible damage than Frostbolt for a Fire Mage. But still pretty terrible. We're talking about having your DPS cut by 25% instead of 50% -- still too much to take you along if the immunity fight is also a DPS race. Frostfire Bolt's primary usefulness will be in the hands of an elementalist-spec Mage, not as a backup nuke for Fire and Frost mages on immunity fights.

Still, as you say: it'll happen, but rarely, so it won't be a big deal.

Burberri · 07/12/08, 6:19 AM

Originally Posted by Phonebooth

Conflag will be good assuming fights have an aggro reset or anything of the sort, on a fight with a phase change you can keep incinerating up to the phase change and conflag off the refreshed immolate instead of having it pull aggro.

You are spending 6 talent points on something that marginally increases your dps in only a handful of fights.

Bibdy · 07/12/08, 1:34 PM

Do any 0/21/40 Warlocks that use Immolate in their rotation take Conflag to remove the Immolate on Illidan's phase transitions?

Kyth · 07/13/08, 6:03 AM

Originally Posted by Bibdy

Do any 0/21/40 Warlocks that use Immolate in their rotation take Conflag to remove the Immolate on Illidan's phase transitions?

Since the flames are FR, I just sac my succubus for illidan instead of imp and don't bother to put up immo. (Illidan and KJ are the only two fights I'm shadow on.)

The times I forgot though, no I've never bothered to be concerned about immolate. The lock tank is casting constantly at that point, an immolate tick won't matter.

Drundia · 07/13/08, 9:57 AM

If your Immolate DOT can pull aggro something is going terribly wrong. Tell your tank to get more hit and expertise. The reason to use Conflagrate now before aggro wipe is not so much to get rid of DOT before aggro wipe, but rather the fact that you have a choice of doing it, or doing nothing and let the remaining 1-2 ticks tick out. Conflagrate just ends up doing more damage than those remaining ticks. Aggro wipe just further encourages it.

Conflagrate usefulness is very arguable if it's only for eating Immolate.

Bibdy · 07/14/08, 2:34 PM

I prefer saccing the Felhunter for tanking fights. Lifetap has put me in a dangerous position a couple of times and almost got me killed.

zerdell · 07/15/08, 4:23 AM

I'm assuming that the moving of empowered imp to destro signals that Blizzard expect pets to survive in raids -- most likely due to being immune to boss abilities like in Brutallus. I wonder if this doesn't call for a rethink of Dark Pact. At the moment Dark Pact serves pretty much the same purpose as Life Tap, its only real advantage being that you don't take damage, at the expense of your passive pet's mana pool. If it's fine for the imp to be taken out of phase shift and not die, then that implies that you shouldn't have any mana to take from the imp.

I also think that with empowered imp going to destro, and imp in general being a fire pet, maybe affliction would be better made to synergise with another pet that otherwise wouldn't be seen in raids. I was thinking the Succubus, since she is by nature a shadowy pet, without the useless dps of a voidwalker. Also, maybe they could make it so that turning lash of pain on isn't a bad thing. Maybe:

Dark Pact: Your succubus's lash of pain restores half the damage it inflicts in mana to both you and your succubus.

With the nerf to ISB & dots, the succubus stealing ISB procs shouldn't be as bad. Either that, or make it unable to benefit from / use up ISB.

tetracycloide · 07/15/08, 2:09 PM

Presently dark pact is a significantly larger mana gain than life tap even with 2/2 imp lifetap. If tap were as big or bigger than pact affliction locks would just use tap instead. The lack of HP cost is a very minor additional bonus especially given the myriad of buffed life return options open to an affliciton lock. Pact also allows an affliction lock to double dip on regen buffs like blessing of wisdom. Dark pact really is not the talent in affliction that needs fixing.

Burberri · 07/15/08, 4:43 PM

Actually ISB needs to be buffed so that it is personal to the warlock (or warlock class). +15% on a shadowbolt is better than +15% on any other shadow spell.

Latas · 07/15/08, 5:56 PM

When i went affliction for a boss in SWP for our first attempts, I noticed that with imp LT and dark pact, that the values matched each other all the way. In fact the higher you go the better it is since the only difference is the base and Improved Lifetap brings the base of LT up to 696 which is just under dark pact. So since the spell dmg applied after would also get the 20% bonus the more you get the better LT will become than dark pact. Well except for the whole taking your life thing.

SageoftheTimes · 07/15/08, 6:20 PM

On the one hand, Affliction has high Mana per second. On the other, with an imp (at 70) with a ton of buffs, you can gain an additional 300 mp5 at least, thus easily balancing out the costs. Mana will be a pretty big issue now, due to two things: the massive increase in mana costs and the lack of 20% bonus to healing from Fel Armour making healing from life tap slightly more expensive for healers (probably not too much of a worry with overhealing, none the less, it does stress things in a perfectly coordinated encounter).

As for Improved Shadow Bolt, it'd be interesting if the ability became a personal buff, and was increased back to it's original level. If it doesn't effect DoT damage, this would be a huge blow to Affliction.

Latas · 07/15/08, 8:09 PM

Also another factor that might hit us with life tap, the itemization for caster dps is going back to having spirit on everything. It used to be for our spiritless pieces if it wasnt added to dmg it was added pretty much directly into sta. So in the end we are going to get less overall sta than we are used to compared to other classes.

SageoftheTimes · 07/15/08, 8:18 PM

Thus making life tap a liability in damage heavy fights. :/

zerdell · 07/16/08, 1:07 AM

Hmm.. obviously I wasn't clear enough. With empowered imp in destro, which won't have pet survivability talents, we can assume that in raids it should be safe for pets to dps without dying. Given this, the mana battery passive imp for affliction makes little sense, as you could instead have it dpsing, and life tap instead of dark pacting -- for a very similar mana gain, both using the gcd.

Given this, dark pact will be useless, as your pet's mana will be better spent on it dpsing. Hence the idea that it will need to be reworked to some other form of mana returning talent. So it's not about it being broken now, but it being broken by level 80 raid assumptions.

Drundia · 07/16/08, 3:14 AM

Due to Dark Pact Affliction Warlocks should raid with pet that has mana-independant DPS. This makes Lash of Pain somewhat stupid, but Voidwalker, Succubus, and Felhunter all can do some damage without spending any mana. Depending on how survival of different pets is worked out, all 3 can be viable depending on amount of random damage. Imp hopefully gets something unique that will let him survive and DPS in all fights.

Deathwing · 07/16/08, 11:19 AM

Originally Posted by zerdell

Hmm.. obviously I wasn't clear enough. With empowered imp in destro, which won't have pet survivability talents, we can assume that in raids it should be safe for pets to dps without dying. Given this, the mana battery passive imp for affliction makes little sense, as you could instead have it dpsing, and life tap instead of dark pacting -- for a very similar mana gain, both using the gcd.

Given this, dark pact will be useless, as your pet's mana will be better spent on it dpsing. Hence the idea that it will need to be reworked to some other form of mana returning talent. So it's not about it being broken now, but it being broken by level 80 raid assumptions.

That's quite the assumption. I would wait for some first-hand info about pet survivability first before using this as hard information.