It looks like they're working hard at making Imps viable Destruction pets in lieu of the standard DS builds. So the question becomes whether Chaos Bolt and an Imp (talented or no) is better than DS.

Right now Imps get 15% of your spell damage, working with a 45% coefficient for Firebolt. Assuming you skip Unholy Frenzy but take the other Imp talents here's a rough calculation of Imp DPS scaling (ignoring crit and resists).

.15 * .45 * 1.15 [Emp Imp] * 1.3 [Imp Imp] * 1.1 [CoE] / 1.5 = .074
1 / .074 = 13.5 Spell Power for 1 Imp DPS

Imps get 1% crit per 80 Intellect and t 30% of a Warlock's Intellect by scaling, but even with that the total scaling will not be equal to 10% of the Warlock's DPS, which it must to be competitive with DS builds in the hypothetical T9+ raids. Without some improvements in scaling (i.e. benefiting from combat ratings) it will have to be the combined scaling of Empowered Imp's Crit Bonus, Chaos Bolt, and the Imp itself that makes DS Destro builds a thing of the past.

Elemental shamans get some love from elements now. Elements now includes nature. Though the new tooltip only says that it changes the resistance, I would imagine that it changes +damage to nature as well, but was just missed. Someone will probably need to check some data mining numbers or check on the beta to be certain.

Effect #1 [Apply Aura]: Mod Resistance (Arcane, Fire, Frost, Nature, Shadow)
Value: -165
Effect #2 [Apply Aura]: Mod Dmg % Taken (Arcane, Fire, Frost, Nature, Shadow)
Value: 10
Boomkin also use nature spells sometimes, although I believe their theorycraft was pointing away from that before this change.

Is it possible Rain of Fire will crit now since Blizzard can?

Currently, the effect on the Imp lasts 30 sec, on the Voidwalker 20 sec and on the Felguard 15 sec. Metamorphosis still has 45 sec duration and looks rather disappointing with its new form.

edit:
The Imp, Succubus and Voidwalker now have Avoidance: a passive ability that reduces damage taken from AoE by 80%.

The Felhunter's Fel Intellect aura doesn't seem to work properly. Apparently it only affects base stats, ignoring gear.

Rain of Fire does indeed crit.

Is the new backdraft - even after getting toned down - still unbelievably good, or is it just me?

"When you cast conflagrate, the cast time and mana cost of your next three Destruction spells is reduced by 30%. Lasts 15 secs."

If you do Conflagrate > Immolate > Shadow Bolt > Shadow Bolt, the last 3 spells go off in 4.55 seconds rather than 6.5 secs. Or, you get 2 "free" seconds every 10 seconds (= cooldown of conflagrate). That's roughly a 20% dps increase -- well, minus a little something for working conflagrate and immolate into a casting rotation. Not bad for 3 talent points.

It's worth noting that having your pet dps also reduces your threat. And they can make pet builds just plain better than DS builds at any attainable gear level, if it is considered a reasonable risk (of pet dying) vs reward (better dps) choice.

On a related note, I am having trouble putting together a Destro/Demo Emp. Imp build.
Even ignoring "situational" talents, the Destro tree is just too crowded. Impr. Immolate and Soul Leech/Impr. SL should be primary targets for thinning imo.

Also with the new Backdraft, Eternal Flames doesn't make sense. Even without Backdraft, its a ~100 dps upgrade with an Immolate ticking for 1200. For 5 points.

The tricky part is the time and DPS "wasted" on using Conflagrate - a spell which apart from the Backdraft buff is quite poor.

The big change for metamorphosis seems that it has it's cooldown now listed as 3 minutes instead of 5 minutes in mmo-champion.com talent calculator (or has it always been like that in beta?). Seem like they also changed some of the demon form abilities, will have to wait for someone to actually test it out.

Demo is extremely bloated with good talents in the last half of the tree, while still forcing you, early on, to spend 3 talent points on talents that the demo lock will never use (speaking of a demo raid spec of course). Right now they just need to streamline the tree a bit, Demonic Pact needs to be a 3 point talent, a bit of reshuffling is in order and I think I'd be happy with the demo tree.

Of course Blizz might've also designed it that way to make Ruin less attractive, and maybe a metamorphosis raid build more viable (which goes in line with their goals). Guess we'll just have to wait and see if more things come along to make up for the lack of ruin for full affliction and demo locks.

Dang.

But does it still unsummon your pet though?

Man, that 45s of demonform better kick all kind of major ass for it be worth losing ruin. Not losing your pet would help, but it is still 45 s with 3 min cooldown.

Just something to note. One Druid inscription has Swiftmend not eating a HoT on the target. It's quite possible that there will be a Warlock glyph that does the same for Conflagrate.

If demon form is a 50% dps increase for 45 seconds with a three minute cooldown it will be preferable to Ruin at most gear levels. Even if it is only 40% it will be superior at low gear levels and due to timing cooldowns and fight lengths would be a viable choice at basically every point. Plus, the coolness factor is worth sacrificing some dps. Of course all they really need to do is make it scale with crit and they can balance it around Ruin easily.

I've been skipping Unholy Power. Of the Imp talents it's the least powerful, giving only 4% damage per point without any other benefit (Imp Imp is 10% per point for all the Imp's abilities, Emp Imp is 5% per point + the Crit Proc). While it'd be nice to completely max out the little bugger, I doubt that Unholy Power will be able to compare with the extra damage from the Destro Tree.

I did a bit of napkin math, but it's hard without knowing what the mechanics of Eternal Flames are. If the extra 25% damage has to ramp up with each new Immolate, the talent is poor at best. You'll only get 5% of that for the first tick, 10% for the second (assumed that Incinerate travel time + human error delays the third Incinerate cast enough that Immolate doesn't benefit), and 20% for the third. That's an approximate one third reduction in effectiveness for the talent. Even as a self buff (ala Vengeance) it's ultimately a 5 point talent for less damage than what Backdraft affords.

Working off this 0/13/58 build, we see that taking Eternal Flames precludes a number of utility and DPS talents. Chaos Bolt, Shadowfury, Shadowburn, Nether Protection Soul Link, and Fel Domination are all competing for those same 5 talent points. While most of those fall into Utility/Survivability talents, it's questionable whether the ~4% damage increase of Eternal Flames is worth losing out on any of that (particularly if Chaos Bolt becomes raid worthy).

On the flip side, however, Backdraft is questionable as well. Imp Immolate is 5 points for a 10-30 DPS increase, effectively making Backdraft an 8 point talent. 8 points for ~6% more DPS (I assumed a Con/Imm/Inc*6 rotation) isn't phenomenal.

Just unlinking Imp Immolate wouldn't entirely solve the issue as right now it's something of a bridge to the next tier. While 2 of the 4 points necessary to move on could be spent in Demonic Power, and perhaps another in Shadowburn, there's still a loose talent point to deal with. Having Imp Immolate able to stand on its own would be preferable, either by having a greater effect (25% all Immolate damage?) or costing fewer points.

If that were the case, Imp Immolate would become somewhat blah as a prerequisite for Conflagrate. If they do that I really hope they also fix the talent.

It seems likely that all the theorycrafting we're doing now could easily be turned on its head as Warlock Glyphs come out.

This is exactly what happened with the Moonkin theorycrafting after seeing the new inscriptions. The power level they've put into those Glyphs is much higher than anyone expected, enough to change your playstyle entirely.

I don't see a prior mention of it, but did anyone else notice teh changes to deep Demo?

• Love Struck is now Improved Demonic Tactics; it increases your demon's critical strike chance by 10%/20%/30% of your critical strike chance.
• Demonic Empathy has been changed so that when you or pet hits with a critical strike, the other's damage done by their next 3 spells or abilities is increased by 2%/4%/6%.

I'm not that good at the math behind it, but it seems like the uptime on Demonic Empathy should now be fairly high. It seems to be a great combination of talents for something like a Felguard with a cleave attached. This, the higher avoidance for a Felguard, and Fel syngery looks like a huge leap in Demo raiding.

Can anyone project the uptime on Improved Demonic Tactics? I don't want to screw up the math.

You are wrong, they go off in 5 seconds, because Immolate is GCD-limited. Notice that judging from live behavior % cast time reductions don't affect global cooldown, while % cast speed increases do.

Then we have further nerfed Eternal Flames, but still we get 2.5 sec Immolate downtime, which maybe stacked with extra 25%. Realistically I see several possible rotations, each with different Eternal Flames uptimes, and we are still where we started: Conflagrate and Eternal Flames work against each other. Average number of stacks of Eternal Flames with it no longer refreshing goes down from 5 to 2.5-3, but with new Backdraft it's even worse, because Conflagrate seems to be worth casting every cooldown regardless of Eternal Flames, this gradually makes Eternal Flames slightly increase damage of DOT that is likely to be allowed to tick 2 times every 10 seconds (we'll call it 60% uptime).

We are still in as exciting situation as before, 14 points of Improved Immolate, Conflagrate, Backdraft, Eternal Flames, yield an exciting DPS increase along lines of 12%, with some being better (Backdraft), and rest being worse...

If they want to keep some DOT class identity of Destruction with nuke spec identity they pretty much have to deal with Conflagrate consuming Immolate. If they don't want it, they have to put something DD-oriented into Eternal Flames, but more mobility is still needed. I'd say it should get its crit damage bonus back, while making Immolate instant and undispellable, so it can be easily applied and kept for Incinerate and Conflagrate needs.

Tooltip on the mmo champion talent calculator says incinerate.

Warning: this is just some quick napkin math with a lot of unproven assumptions and some simplifications, so take it with a grain of salt; the modeling I am doing is not quite exact, but should provide numbers close to the real results.



Assuming 20% haste from imp. windfury, 2s swing timer, 6s cd on cleave, the felguard hits 4.6 times every 6s. Assuming pure incinerate spam with 30% haste (which seems quite reasonable given wrath of air, gear, heroism, etc.), your cast time is 1.538s. Now we need to make some assumptions on the felguard crit chance, which is something I am not too sure about... DT is 5% crit, assume imp DT to be about 8% (which means 26.6% crit chance for the lock), a retribution pally adds 3%, all pets have 5% base crit, and it should add to 21%, plus whatever more the felguard gets from agility. I am going to go with 22% (again, if you know better feel free to correct me).

Now we can compute the chance that the felguard does not crit in the time it takes you to cast 3 incinerates, which can be estimated as:

(1-22%)^(3*1.538/(6/4.6)) ~= 41.5%.

The uptime should then be 1-41.5% = 58.5%.



On the other side, the same math shows that demonic pact's uptime is:

1-(1-22%)^(12/(6/4.6)) ~= 90%,

which is much better.



I am also surprised nobody commented on the buff to emberstorm. Incinerate's casting time is going down from 2.25 to 2s, a 12.5% damage buff. This is a HUGE buff.



Finally, empowered imp. Assuming imp cast time is down to 1.36s (with wrath of air), 30% total crit for the lock, and 12% crit for the imp (5% base + 3% retribution pally + 3% totem of wrath + 1% from int, again feel free to correct me if I am wrong on this), the talent is equivalent to an increase in crit chance for the lock of:

(1-30%)*(1-(1-12%)^(1.538/1.36)) ~= 9.4%.

This alone almost balances out the effect of DS. Add a moonkin to the party for 5% increased crit chance for both the lock and the pet and you get:

(1-35%)*(1-(1-17%)^(1.538/1.36)) ~= 12.3%,

a clear improvement over DS.

Must be a typo. It still applies to Incinerate in-game.

I heard rumors that pet apparently are not affected by totems. If this is the case, from my calculations, DS will remain superior unless there is a moonkin in the party.

Otherwise DS simply scales better once you get 2000+ spellpower and 25%+ crit. Currently the imp makes up the damage lost via high base damage and the fact it can soak up totems for massive damage improvement, but if they are not affected by it I see all of us going back to DS/SnF.

Betel was using Empowered Imp to show that just the crit bonus from that talent would be close to DS. You're then ignoring imp dps itself, Chaos Bolt, Molten Core/Corruption(if it is a bonus) and Frailty.

No way 0/21/50 should beat 7/13/51 IF the imp stays alive.

Actually my calculations has taken imp dps into account, and if pet are not affected by totems (which might not be true), DS end up winning out unless there is a moonkin, then imp will out dps the damage lost via DS due to moonkin aura.

But you are right, the damage comparison is done assuming non stop incinerate spam. The fact that imp build has more points left over than DS could will push the imp build over the DS build. Even if the imp itself might not make up the damage lost via DS. The extra left over talent point well.