Well unless they have added new ranks, you are still playing with a level 60 spell would seem to be suffering from a rather severe downranking penalty in WotLK. Before we make any judgements really need to see what the new ranks of Chaos Bolt do and figure out how its with spell damage coefficient (1.5/3.5? 3/3.5?). Which right now seems like it would require testing with a Warlock under 70 to be sure that we aren't being corrupted by downranking penalties.
The following post has some rough numbers on how WotLK handles downranking. It appears to be somewhat different from BC, but it's hard to tell.
By this, we can expect that Chaos Bolt, a level 60 spell, to have no penalty at level 70. However, we can expect a penalty of 6.66% per level above, so if level 75s are the ones testing their Chaos Bolts are suffering from A) Lacking the extra damage from the level 70 rank and B) Losing 33.3% of its coefficient. We can guess that Chaos Bolt does 30% more damage than we're currently seeing.
Without some concrete numbers/levels to do a calculation off of, however, there isn't a good way to tell if the damage/scaling is sufficient to make it a worthwhile spell for raiding.
Well ya I didn't think about the downranking. I tested it at 73.
Anyway, I believe blizzard is stuck on this one. They can't make it really powerfull because the spell is obviously thought out for pvp ( fast cast/pierces throught immunities) and you don't want a walking 10k 1.5cast bolt.
Now with DS going back to its old form. Either you go DS and 0/21/50, or you can go improved imp and go 2/14/5x with variations if you want SL or instant corruption etc. Right now thought the imp is really hard to keep up ( actually you can't keep it up with aoes, which is well.. most of the boss I have seen in wotlk so far). On top of that with ISL broke we can't really test destru for grinding because of the massive downtime and pet going oom.
I was looking at the 45 point talent in the afflict tree and something confused me, It says that on the SB and drain life hits it has a 100% chance to renew the tick of corruption. Now, after thinking about this, say u got all your dots on the boss/mob and spamming SB, at the maximum the cast is gonna be 2.5secs but with all the haste we're getting not only from talents in the afflict tree but also gear then the cast is gonna be shorter, so will corruption even have a chance to tick? Corruption ticks every 3 secs, so if your spamming SB with a little bit of haste will corruption get a chance to tick?
Also for pvp, you got all your dots up on the target again and your just draining the guy down again my question is will corruption even be given a chance to tick? I've wanted to go afflict for pve ever since i read these talents but this one thing got me worries abit, just wondering if someone whos played the beta could put my mind at rest...
It's the same treatment priest shadow word pain is getting. The timer is renewed after the next tick, so you won't have a worthless debuff sitting on the mob.
Anyway, I believe blizzard is stuck on this one. They can't make it really powerfull because the spell is obviously thought out for pvp ( fast cast/pierces throught immunities) and you don't want a walking 10k 1.5cast bolt.
You still have to spend 51 points in destruction, which means 51 points in talents that solely boost damage and crit, rather than survivability and utility that the other two trees offer. Seems like it would make you into a bit of a glass cannon, sort of like the old 7/7/47 destro arena spec I remember seeing.
But then again, with soul link being accessible so early in the demo tree and the demonic circle escape mechanism, the metagame for warlocks could change from control to burst dps.
Affliction
* Death's Embrace (Tier 9) does not affect Shadowburn anymore. Haunt has replaced Shadowburn here.
* Haunt (Tier 11) has been changed from a 10 sec cooldown to a 15 sec cooldown.
Demonology
* Soul Link (Tier 3) is not required for Unholy Power anymore.
* Master Demonologist (Tier 6) is no longer required to take Demonic Empowerment (Tier 7)
Destruction
* Aftermath (Tier 2) changed to 2%/4% chance to daze the target for 5 sec. (Previously 5/10% for 5 sec)
* Chaos Bolt (Tier 11) changed to an 8 sec cooldown. (Previously 12 secs)
---------------
Haunt's Cooldown getting longer, showing they're not going in the direction of making that the affliction spammable, or even letting us keep 100% uptime (dot portion of Haunt lasts 12 sec, no?) for gear scaling.
Unlinking talents is always good, but unexciting.
Aftermath... Double-ewe Tee Efff man. apparently 1 in 10% daze is *too strong*.
And Chaos Bolt gets slightly more spammable, and with good timing/haste values/luck you can punch 2 of them through a single 10second immunity.
Well ya I didn't think about the downranking. I tested it at 73.
Anyway, I believe blizzard is stuck on this one. They can't make it really powerfull because the spell is obviously thought out for pvp ( fast cast/pierces throught immunities) and you don't want a walking 10k 1.5cast bolt.
Now with DS going back to its old form. Either you go DS and 0/21/50, or you can go improved imp and go 2/14/5x with variations if you want SL or instant corruption etc. Right now thought the imp is really hard to keep up ( actually you can't keep it up with aoes, which is well.. most of the boss I have seen in wotlk so far). On top of that with ISL broke we can't really test destru for grinding because of the massive downtime and pet going oom.
Corruption still scales too poorly for Destruction to consider casting it, even with an MC Firelock build. Also, the DPS increase from Imp CoA is too small to be worthwhile even if you're allowed to cast it over CoR. I'm fairly certain all the best Destro builds will have 0 points in Affliction.
Nerfing the heck out of a talent that is already completely ignored by warlocks shows either questionable judgment on Blizzard's part, a typo, or an upcoming mechanics change. I'm inclined to believe they intended to change it to 2%/4% STUN, which (while not great) would at least be taken by SOME people.
To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.
The only issue that brings up with destruction is it looks like blizzard will raise mages over warlock level, or at least plan to. Leaving warlocks between a rock and hard place, at that point you would really only want demo pact/frailty and malediction locks in the raid.
What about a Demonic Pact/Ruin build? 12 second uptime on Demonic Pact and a Felguard with good crit should keep a steady spellpower buff for all casters on single target mobs up a high percentage of the time. I'm assuming, of course, that it stacks with effects like Misery.
What about a Demonic Pact/Ruin build? 12 second uptime on Demonic Pact and a Felguard with good crit should keep a steady spellpower buff for all casters on single target mobs up a high percentage of the time. I'm assuming, of course, that it stacks with effects like Misery.
I think what he means that
If warlock cannot deal competitive damage compared to mage/SP/elemetnal shaman/moonkin or hunter, then a raid will only ever need 2 warlock. One for coe and one for demonic pact and cor.
Also, doing the math on Imp Soul Leech, it too is overpowered as all hell. A sunwell geared Warlock will literally never run OOM and never need to Lifetap. It translates into 9% of your DPS becomes mana regen per second. With 2200 DPS it'll return 198 mana per second. With a 2.0s Shadowbolt (300ish haste) you only consume 199.5 mana per second. Even with a Shadowbolt now costing 715 mana, DPS will go up and we also have Fel Armour regeneration. Destruction would be nothing short of absurd.
It actually should be 4.5% unless I missed something. 30% chance to proc 15% of damage into mana is 0.3*0.15 = 0.045
Originally Posted by Darian_TruBlade
Depends on the fight I suppose. In any fight where there is the potential for significant damage to the Warlock it seems worthwhile as the Warlock can always resummon a dead imp, but once the Warlock's dead that's the end of it.
A good question is if 10 second resummon of pet is even worth it. And dead warlock is just as bad as dead anything else, and some of those "else" don't have Soul Link, healers are always first to be blamed anyway.
Originally Posted by Thordarsen
Well unless they have added new ranks, you are still playing with a level 60 spell would seem to be suffering from a rather severe downranking penalty in WotLK. Before we make any judgements really need to see what the new ranks of Chaos Bolt do and figure out how its with spell damage coefficient (1.5/3.5? 3/3.5?). Which right now seems like it would require testing with a Warlock under 70 to be sure that we aren't being corrupted by downranking penalties.
You are wrong, Chaos Bolt shouldn't receive downranking penalty at 70. As I've read some more the point still stands, however previous estimate of no penalty at level 71 is shattered.
Originally Posted by Darian_TruBlade
The following post has some rough numbers on how WotLK handles downranking. It appears to be somewhat different from BC, but it's hard to tell.
Thank you for this link, but funny thing is that Life Tap DPS of R2 Incinerate stays above R4 Incinerate, because R2, just as expected before, assuming that Life Tap returns with new formula (Base+3*Spi) will be comparable with those with old formula (Base+0.8*SP). But I'm still thinking, in general, why not make penalty determined by mana costs, since mana issues are reason to downrank in the first place.
Originally Posted by Vagabond
*Boggle* New changes:
It's not new changes, it's weird rollbacks on Blizzard talent calculator showing information outdated by various levels (those who saw alpha talents know), Death's Embrace for example lists crit bonus for all Shadow spells in the latest known beta build.
The official WOW site's calculator is currently listing Fel Synergy as healing your pet for 15% of the damage done *to* you, rather than done by you. I wonder if that means they'll be adding a decent trainable way to heal your pet.
It actually should be 4.5% unless I missed something. 30% chance to proc 15% of damage into mana is 0.3*0.15 = 0.045
It is 15% mana returned for the first rank and 30% for the second rank.(And ofcourse a 30% chance of soul leech proccing)
If this like 200% haste back draft goes into to place my napkin math has it at an over 600 dps gain(basically every 10 seconds a free conflag, and free immolate + few immo ticks, if you rotate conflag, immolate, ten seconds later conflag/immolate) for me at 70 gain if you didn't have to lose demonic sacrifice. Still as is the highest personal dps spec for warlocks would be some heavy like 0x/0x/55+ spec at 70 between backdraft and improved soul leech.
Last edited by Flamingcloud : 07/26/08 at 1:36 AM.
The official talent calculator was updated with the promised changes to Demonic Sacrifice in:
When activated, sacrifices your summoned demon to grant you an effect that lasts 30 min. The effect is canceled if any Demon is summoned.
Imp: Increases your Fire damage by 10%. Voidwalker: Restores 2% of total health every 4 sec. Succubus: Increases your Shadow damage by 10%. Felhunter: Restores 3% of total mana every 4 sec. Felguard: Increases your Shadow and Fire damage by 10% and restores 2% of total mana every 4 sec.
So as 0/21/50 we have an alternative depending on the fight: let the imp DPS or sacrifice it. The 5% loss is probably not too harsh in the long run. What we do not know yet is how and if any changes to survivability of pets will affect things. At least destruction with sacrificed voidwalker is back as a levelling spec.
My suggestions for a maximum fire / imp PVE build would look like this.
Haunt was changed again, too:
2 sec cast
10 sec cooldown
You send a ghostly soul into the target, dealing 645 to 754 Shadow damage and increasing all damage done by your damage-over-time effects on the target by 15% for 12 sec. When the Haunt spell ends or is dispelled, the soul returns to you, healing you for 20% of all damage done to the target.
The cooldown was lowered again so it is able to have a 100% uptime. The cast time was adjusted to 2 seconds, which makes it scale slightly better. Still has a tough time against ruin in my opinion. This will probably be adjusted several more times.
If you are planning on keeping the imp alive you don't need to get DS ( thats only convenience if you don't want to respec for a fight where its impossible to have a pet).
Sooo as of right now I would have something like that for DS build:
That is if backdraft stay in its current beta form ( and not the one on the talent calculator), which mean 3hasted nuke after a conflag ( pretty fun idea and would change the spam inci).
3 points left to either go 2 points in corru + soul link, or 3 points in demonic aegis or a mix etc etc. Could also put points in the Uzi imp talent ( forgot about this one).
I m not sure how good molten core is still have to test it some ( but still finishing leveling right now!)
As far as your second spec there, if you are counting on back draft to stay as it is rather than what it says then eternal flames is a bad idea (as you are popping immolate off fairly frequently), and chaos bolt isnt good for pve in the first place. You are better off going down to unholy power for a better imp machine gun.
My question is if you aren't a mana machine with improved soul leech and back draft stays how it is (one can always hope), would it be better to apply rank 1 immolate rather than max rank? since the main reason for applying it would just to be able to pop it off with conflag for the back draft bonus. Since improved soul leech is still busted its what ive been doing for leveling, its fun blowing through stuff as a shadowbolt machine gun (yes my SB still hits harder than my incinerate) but with the massive mana consumption i needed to skimp somewhere so i figured since it was just being used to enable conflag to avoid the extra cost on immolate.
One more thing, generally fire was more dps in tbc cause fire mages were everywhere. Has anyone been considering that given the mage talents that improved scorch being around on the target might be more of a rare occurrence thus forcing us back into a primarily shadow destro build again? I ask because it seems everyone is embracing fire wholeheartedly while at least if back draft stays the way it is might not be a lot of our overall dps, given a immolate conflag SB SB SB rotation.
Actually yup thinking about it even with an imp, if backdraft stays as it is ( well if they could only lower the haste t 60% instead of 200% that would still be much better than the backdraft talent posted on the calculator), no point in taking eternal flame althought I took chaos bolt based on the fact that with a 8 sec cooldown and further ranks added ( right now you only have the level 60 rank) it might be worth it since at level 80 there won't be downranking problems.
Well the problem arrives in that it has a huge mana cost, at 70 it costs over 700 mana, and the rank you get when you spec into it is it, there are no other ranks as of yet and no telling if they are actually going to dump in more ranks, though it would be stupid not to I would also assume the mana cost would scale accordingly. After going over the math it would be better to put points into demonic power and then just dump the rest into unholy power. The reduced cast time on the imps firebolt outweighs that extra 8%.
Ok, I've searched this thread without finding a comment on this talent so if this has already been discussed then I'm just too stupid to use the search function. Sorry if the latter's the case. I'm trying.
Now as for my question: looking over the talent tree on wowhead, I sort of stumbled over one of the tier 6 Affliction talents.
Can somebody enlightened please tell me why in the name of all things shadowbolty I would want to have my *Felhunter* out as an Affliction lock?
Dark Pact screams for the Imp. I love the Imp. *Everybody* should love the Imp. Not to mention that there is nothing Affliction-related about this talent (Improved Felhunter) as far as I can see.
But since I've likely (ok, certainly) not figured out everything there is to know about playing a warlock, I'm asking you:
I really hope they get rid of 0/21/50 already. It severely limits talent options in destro, doesn't allow a pet, doesn't allow frailty. One year of that spec dominating in raids is enough and Blizzard seemingly realized it too, they just need to balance destro talents to make that spec undesirable.
The imp should become an integral part of destro raiding, which means at least AE immunity though Phase Shift. Change the ability to let the imp receive buffs but make it still die from DD in PvP. That would give destro unique utility in form of (improved) Blood Pact as demo will go with the Felguard and affliction might opt for the Felhunter depending on how the imp. Felhunter talent and his new bite ability turn out.
Backdraft as it is currently in beta is likely not intended so I won't comment on that. Molten Core probably needs a buff if the intention is to use Corruption/CoA on offtanked mobs to proc it, but it's an interesting concept at least.
Furthermore, destro would be the spec most likely to get Frailty and use CoR, adding a bit to its limited raid utility.
edit, to above poster:
You might want to have the Felhunter out for his abilities, some of which are being changed and aren't fully implemented yet, to Soul Link for pvp etc. The talent basically ensures that he doesn't run oom (as fast) but I'm not sure it's working atm as the talent is reset on every logout/server crash, which happens quite often.
Hmm..ok, we'll have to see then. At this point, I'm just going by the comparably slow mana regeneration rate of ...well, everything when compared to the Imp, as well as the fact that using abilities will mean mana being used for something other than Dark Pact.
So would you say that they included that talent to give Affliction Warlocks an active alternative to having the (passive) Imp out?
An easy way to make 0/21/50 undesireable would be to leave Sacrifice in the haste/spelldamage form, add runspeed to it, and make it autotrigger from the pet dying - no manual trigger.
Would make it both useful to Demonology, and to other specs - a certain use from the pet even if it just got killed, but would ruin the nukespec from it.
Because I agree with Shai, DS-specs turn Warlock balance ad absurdum. As nice as they are, they throw over a lot of potential balancing or capabilities because of how much they change the playstyle.
SQUEAK.
-- (The Death of Rats, Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)
Looking at the newest talentcalc build i see a lot changes in details..
Affliction
1.) Fel Concentration : works for Haunt and UA now
2.) Amplify Curse : the "trigger" wording is back (might be a typo)
3.) Improved Felhunter : 100% mana convertion and now also increases Fel Intelligence by 1% ? (no idea what it is)
4.) Deaths Embrace : critical chance applys to all shadow spells now
5.) Haunt : cooldown back to 10sec but casting time up to 2sec - see point 1.)
Demonology
1.) Demonic Embrace : just a static 10% sta increase now
2.) DS : back to what previous posters wrote
3.) Fel Synergy : heals for damage you get not deal
Destruction
1.) Nothing i can see apart from the already mentioned CD reduce on Chaos Bolt
I do not see the big problem with DS as it is hinted at right now. 10% more damage is good but a specced imp would be better as long as it survives. So depending on the fight you could use the imp or sacrifice it for less damage but being able to sustain it throughout the fight. All depends on pet survivability - if that does not get some love it is back to the old style single spell spam.
As far as I am understanding it, the only mage spec not being able to take up imp scorch is arcane/frost. They are also waiting on a bigger talent revision so we cannot tell right now if deep fire is raid viable but it would not even be necessary. Depending on the raid setup it might be viable to have a mage spec into imp scorch just as some raids now run with an affliction lock or locks put up curses not benefiting themselves. Best option of course would be a real synergy between fire mages and fire destro, like the imp affecting not only the warlock's own crit or maybe make Molten Core worthwhile to cast because it is a debuff on the mob.
We are back to speculation and have to wait it out. It all depends on pet survivability enhancements and the developers to think about fire synergy. And we might even get a Chaos Bolt with a PVE use. Back to the waiting game.
XcsX, if that is not a typo, Fel Synergy being remodelled to Damage Taken heals Pet strongly hints at Demonology (with it's 2 deep PvPish talents) being aimed at a PvP-exclusive-tree?
Or am I missing something?
SQUEAK.
-- (The Death of Rats, Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)
07/24/08, 8:24 PM
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