In terms off deep Affliction raiding, there seems to be 2 options, with one having a few variations...

http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000

53/0/18

Extension of standard UA build I use myself, allows you to fill Death Embrace, Eradication and Everlasting Aff which all look like big winners on the raid field, along with Haunt which has the potential to be good in raids.


http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000

50/0/21

I've left out the last 9 points as it seems like a bit of a puzzle at this stage... 9 points for 11 slots.

I would imagine Everlasting Aff to take 5 points, to improve scaling in the long term, alhough with the amount of SB spamming thats done with Aff atm, 60/80% should be plenty to proc the DoT renew mechanic consistantly. It seems quitw silly that blizz are making us chop and change between 3 talents that seem very good for raiding, althogh I suppose it's only a matter of time until we firgure out which is better and stick to it... sort of making it a waste, possibly why Haunt will trump?

Anyone any ideas on how to work out which would be better for raids? Seems about as confident in what its doing as what we know about Metamorphisis!

Maybe, but Demonic Pact is a very nice raid buff. Pet crits, raid (including yourself) gets an extra 150+ spell damage for 12 seconds? Between Cleave and normal melee attacks I know I'd have 0 problem keeping that up in a raid.

Add Ruin to a Felguard build, which is a great damage modifer on its own. Could be I'm just being too optimistic for a PvE-viable Demo tree, but it's looking fairly competitive.

Holy hell. So many changes I don't know where to start. For one, in Destruction, it looks like Backdraft makes your Conflagrate increase your spell haste of your next 3 spells by some %, but the numbers on the wowhead calculator are all fucked up. It seems like a way to get people to use Conflag in a PvE rotation, but why on earth would you want to do that with Eternal Flames in the picture? Soul Leech returning mana as well is simply fantastic for both PvE and PvP. It seems like Improved Shadowbolt has been reduced to a shadow (no pun intended) of its former self, not only with the 5% reduction (does this version affect DoTs?), but with Bane being put next to it. Bane always has been, is, and forever will be, one of those talents that completely destroys any other talent you put next to it. In PvE its a flat 17% DPS increase to Shadowbolt and in PvP every second counts. A 2s Immolate takes 3 years longer to cast than a 1.5s Immolate. Edit: Actually I just noticed Imp Soul Leech returns mana to the demon as well...that's very nice! If the Imp scales with our crit chance and it gets some AOE avoidance, then I think we'll be set for Imp machine guns.

Destruction's dependence on Demonology...well hot damn. I'm very happy. No more of this sacrificing business. This opens the doorway for a lot of new PvE dps builds. Sure, It might turn out to be a problem later on as we have no other significant damage upgrades in Destruction, but if they somehow make Conflagrate and Chaos Bolt worth casting in a DPS rotation then it could work out. Perhaps they could make Shadow & Flame also give a 20/40/60/80/100% chance that Conflagrate won't consume Immolate? S&F still baffles me. Why does a PvP talent like Shadowfury require 5 points in a talent like S&F? Its got PvE written all over it and is only marginally beneficial in PvP. You cast maybe 1 or 2 Shadowbolts a fight thanks to Backlash. That's not a lot of gain for 5 points that deep in the tree. Talents like Empowered Imp and Demonic Empowerment/MD/Mana Feed/Fel Synergy are still mutually exclusive. If they want Destruction Warlocks running around with Imps then they're going to need all the help they can get in buffing the Imp's crit chance, keep it topped off with Mana and keep it alive (not that Fel Synergy is really going to help something with 2k hp). I doubt they won't be holding back AOE effects on bosses just so those Destruction Warlocks can mess around with their Imps.

As for Demo itself, its looking pretty good, at least 0/50/21 is looking pretty good. Blizzard have obviously been looking very closely at all the talent trees, but Master Conjuror and Improved Enslave Demon still blow my mind. IED was even moved 1 tier down, like they expect people to take it now that its not competing with pre-req talents like Unholy Power...there's never been any difficult choice in talent picking in Demonology, though. Not like Affliction or Destruction where its hard to get everything you want before you move up a tier. Demo just has too much crap filling it up. Metamorphosis better make the warlock damned powerful during those 45s. You lose a LOT to pop that thing in PvP, namely your pet and the primary reasons you're in an arena team - curse of tongues and Fear. Without them you become a shadowbolt spamming retard in an arena match, unless you want to go throwing around a bunch of AOE damage and breaking CC effects like Polymorph and Fear. I can't see anyone take it over Ruin in PvE.

Affliction is looking very good. Reducing the GCD on Curses is especially nice for PvP Warlocks spamming COT all over the place and Drain Soul might become a powerful main nuke now that Soul Siphon affects it. However, its still plagued by a mortal enemy in Malediction. Affliction Warlocks are pigeon-holed into using COE instead of their beefed up COD/COA spells. Death's Embrace just looks lame. The LAST thing you're going to be doing at low health is standing still and draining life in PvP. You're more likely going to be running for your life and trying to get out of LOS of whoever is killing you, and increased crit in the final moments of something's life doesn't really mesh with what Affliction is supposed to be. Improved Fear is certainly interesting, and finally gives Affliction Warlocks an edge over Rogues - although Assassination Rogues are likely to tear them to pieces unless UA pops on Hunger for Blood. But with HFB's description reading 'removes' rather than 'dispels', it doesn't seem likely. Haunt will make them scale for a bit longer in PvE as they'll get more bang for their buck per point of spell damage, but there's still a colossal lack of haste/crit scaling going into Affliction.

Lots of very good changes, but still plenty to put under the microscope.

My big question is why Demonology still has so many useless talents. Who has EVER taken Improved Voidwalker, Master Conjuror, or Improved Enslave Demon? IED was so powerful they felt the need to move it up a tier? They purged a lot of useless talents from all the trees for all the classes in TBC and I was expecting something similar with WotLK.

So far, I'm liking the idea of some kind of 50/0/21 build. It's unclear whether Molten Core and the ISB nerf will make it worth using Incinerate over Shadowbolt without Emberstorm though.

Does haunt return life based on the damage Haunt did, the damage your DoTs did, or all damage done?
In any case, I'm not seeing a 50-point affliction build without Haunt. If half your damage is from dots, you need around a 30% crit rate for ruin to outweight the DoT-boost part of the spell.

I wonder if Haunt will affect drain life/soul/mana. All dot build go!

I like the affliction tree a lot. The only two complaints are the dichotomy of 2 talents that improve CoA when Blizzard should know by now that CoA is rarely cast unless soloing. And Death's Embrace feels a bit weak. It averages out to 3% crit for shadowbolt. Why not just a molten fury talent? 15% more damage when under 20%

Demo needs much more work, unless they magically find some base abilities that make pets easily survivable on raids. Still lots of filler as mentioned above.

Destro is looking better. Molten Core still isn't useable. Backdraft and Imp still need more information, and I think Eternal Flames needs some rework. But, it's a step in the right direction.

Eradication Uptime = 1 - (1 - 0.15)^(8) = ~72%

It's a good amount, but not "almost always"

They probably want it that way. So many things hinge on poorly worded talents, or talents that may or may not be completely useless right now. Haunt could make an Affliction Warlock virtually self-sustaining in mana, if it actually heals the amount of damage you deal in the 12 second time frame the debuff is up. Also, does this mean that, with Improved Shadow Bolt and Haunt up, is Drain Life spam suddenly viable? Then there are Malediction and Shadow's Embrace, who still feel like they lack power for the points spent.

So much depends on testing and finding out the simplest things. :/

There's also some possible synergy between the improved Felpuppy talent and Dark pact. at 66% mana return, if it does nothing else than wash the cost of dark bite its still a plus. And if it returns mana...

Though all this hinges on the still up in the air question of will pets live past the first 10 seconds of any meaningfull pve fight....

On that 'almost always' comment...

How many points would you feel comfortable with in Everlasting Affliction to keep up Corr? 4/5 80% seems a bit much, but 3/5 60% seems too little...

Also is the spell damage effect addition too good to not put 5/5 into it anyway?

I think the idea of the "super fragile pet" is way overblown. Yes, you actually have to monitor and control your pet, you often can't just put it on the boss to attack forever as an endless aggro free dot. But there's very few fights in BC that are exceedingly pet unfriendly. Pets catch chain heals just like melee does. The 2pT5 bonus is becoming low tier baseline, as is soul link, and every raid heal will catch your pet. Will there be pet unfriendly fights? Of course there will. Do we already have fights that silence constantly, force movement, and otherwise interrupt perfect dps?

Here are some thoughts about Affliction. I will post some more about the other trees later:

Affliction
Interestingly, what used to be 1 or close to 1 spec for Raiding, 5s, Grinding, and BGs looks to have turned into several specs. Not sure about DPS for raids... seems like a solid buff but the main thing is that the trees, including affliction, have been changed to provide a lot more flexibility. You can really mix and match trees without sacrificing the main abilities of Affliction provided you spec according to what you're going to do.

1) 51/0/20 but really 50/0/19 Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

The usual build... NEW: 3% hit to all spells, -6% mana cost to all spells, Erradication (+15% haste on some dot ticks), Everlasting Affliction (+20% bonus dmg to Cor, Siphon, and UA... plus SB and DL refresh corruption... meaning you will rarely have to ever put up corruption more than a couple times per fight (for 1 boss fights)... that's got to be something like 10 GCDs or something, ya?), plus Haunt. Oh, and +20% to Reck and Weakness.

Not sure what to do about Death's Embrace, Fel Pup buff, or if Shadow Embrace should be 1/1 or not. Plus Haunt seems to use a rather excessive amount of mana for raiding (12%) especially since you're skipping Ruin so basically the right spec is 50/0/21


2) Now what's interesting is that to turn this into a grinding or BG spec you have to re-do a good chunk of both trees:
53/0/18 Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This gets you some juicy talents: Improved Fear (crazy good), CoEx, Imp Felhunter for a great Expel Magic and mana regen buff for Dark Pact, and Death's Embrace for drain tanking. Not bad, especially since you're going to have the Fel Pup out anyway.

3) You can also switch this up, ditch the destruction tree, and add Soul Link, plus then either Bane and 2/3 Aegis or no Bane but 3/3 Aegis and 3/5 Unholy power. Not sure why you wouldn't get Bane but, hey, it's an option.
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Seems like they could finally fix the problem of affliction having to rely on a destro spam spell for most of their damage if they did some tweaking to haunt.
1. take off the cooldown (yes i know this leaves the effect on for 12 seconds but that is so when you stop spamming it the effect lingers for the dots).
2. make it 2.5 or 3 second cast for proper coefficient.
3. take off the heal, heals hit spell damage coefficients like a mac truck.
One more needed tweak would be to replace shadowbolt on everlasting affliction with haunt. Oh also not needed but would be good to do is add haunt to the spells made instant by nightfall.
This would make the affliction tree self reliant. Also this would give the added benefit of possibly letting affliction scale even further and the talents down the tree, like grim reach and improved drain soul, affect our spam spell. Given those changes, affliction and destro wouldn't need the help of any other tree to keep them up to speed. Right now with shadowbolt being afflictions spam its hard to ignore putting points into destro.

They are removing Loyalty because they are giving hunter pets their talent trees. And as the system operates differently, loyalty is no longer needed. But that makes me wonder, will the pet get a talent that gives them a +25% increase to dmg, as if the pet were well fed?

Warlocks get no such talent trees, and in fact their pets no longer are trained. Instead they simply learn the new abilities as the warlock levels. Which is good, but should be better. Having the ability to increase a pet's abilities/skills would be a godsend. But that is never going to happen, due to people like Kalgan, who feel warlocks are OP enough already.

And also in what other ways are they buffing hunter/pet relations, while still leaving warlock/pet relations 'working as intended'
If they gain better scaling than warlocks pets, the warlock population of wow will throw a fit. As it should.
If they were to implement inscription effects such as "removes reagent costs of a spell" that would be a nice little fix for warlock shard usage. Or maybe just give warlocks an item/extra bag specifically for shards. Similar to a key ring, or the new hunter bow. Or an even more realistic situation, allow the shards to Stack.

The 4% of your bonus spell dmg would be more than enough incentive to put that extra point in the talent. There is nothing else that you could reach with the extra point that would give you more +dps than that.

There is a talent to make Fear instant-cast off of a resist, which I never thought to see in a million years. I can already hear the cries now.

In other news, the Heal component of Haunt is pretty meh in PvE... but if it doesn't get wiped in PvP it's an incredible utility.It basically says "Either risk detonation of an Unstable Affliction, or give me 4k+ healing for free". I'm liking the looks of deep affliction for PvP, now that Soul Link is at 11.

Apparently there is a 10 sec cooldown on Eradication, so it went from being ridiculous to being mediocre.

The heal triggers off of dispel as well.

The real question is when it says "heals 20% of all damage dealt to target", does this mean dot damage, haunt damage, or literally all damage (yours and allies) done to the target while haunt is up.

Just received a beta key and can't decide what to specc for leveling. Was thinking about using the traditional 0/21/40 raiding specc and sacc. Any thoughts?

Considering the change to Demonic Sacrifice, I would say that spec is pretty much boned. Go test Haunt and find out how the health-return works.

Source on that? The old talent description says that, but I can't find a current one that says anything about the cooldown.

considering the weapons that were leaked you should be sporting 2k+ spell power at 80. That means your pet is increasing all single target caster dps by +200. Figure 5 mage/warlocks + 1-2 elemental shaman/boomkin/spriest, thats an insane buff.

Basically it looks like you gonna want a

51/0/13+xx (although I am not convinced that haunt will out dps ruin, but it at least looks comparable)

0/50/21

I guess the 9/0/51+11 build works nicely for picking up imp CoR

EDIT: personally I rather liked demonic sacrifice. I never considered us a pet dps class, and I would rather have nothing to do with that. I guess having it as an option for some was okay. Warlock pets for the most part have served a utility function only and that seemed nice. I liked affliction a lot (until I hit SSC and switched to destruction), so I am glad to see affliction getting some attention. It is still way to addicted to shadowbolt, and haunt actually makes the build scale worse with crit, which is not the direction we need to be going.

My problem with bane being moved to tier one, is it makes zero sense whatsoever. A destruction build is fire based, and they now have to mull through 5 worthless talent points since the half a second you save off your first and only immolate cast is not worth 5 talent points. Although depending on how much haste conflag brings to the table it might be worth it to blow as a molten core procs.

Oops, forgot about that nerf. Affliction is probably the best tree then. Just feels like the crit/spell haste on my gear will be wasted as Affliction. I will give it a try once character copy is up though.