I might have read it wrong, but if I understand it right Atrocity have two effects: it give you the spell atrocity (the AoE), and add to your "standard" corruption a charge that detonate when the corruption ends.

If we assume that said charge scale nicely with +damage, is there not some kind of anti-synergy between Atrocity and Everlasting Affliction ? I mean, refreshing corruption's duration will delay the on-end charge, and if the scaling of said charge is not too bad, it might be worth loosing a GCD to refresh corruption instead of reseting its duration with a bolt...

I for one frankly love the idea of that teleport. But does anyone else feel like the devs have been playing too much portal?

It's like rolling lifeblooms. If you lose stack you lose hps and 3*GCD. Just like you lose dps if you dont spamming main nuke. It's very nice pvp/aoe tool but only that. 50/0/21 and you dont have to worry about Atrocity scaling.

It might be possible to make a hybrid shadow/fire spec that works with the following general ideas:

Open with decimate shadowbolt for a chance to proc molten core and torture. Follow with immolate and spam incenerate to keep the immolate up. Use decimate on shadowbolt every time the cooldown is up.

Now if you factor in that shadowbolts have a chance to make immolate instant cast and that the crit rate on immolate and conflagrate is going up by 10% and that the crit damage bonus is going up by 10% the following scenario opens up:

Decimate shadowbolt crits procing an instant cast buff for the next immolate. Cast conflagrate and follow with an instant refresh of immolate. Then continue with incenerate spam.

It is true that there would still be cast time lost on conflagrate but it is possible with the extra crit% and the extra crit damage to both the conflagrate and the initial damage of immolate that it could be worth using. Normally resetting a DoT timer is a no-no but the instant cast on immolate would off-set a lot of the DoT timer loss. Assuming it was timed as poorly as possbile and the conflag hit just before immolate would have ticked this would result in a loss of, at most, 3 secs of tic time essentially replacing one tick of immolate with conflagrate and the initial damage of immolate at the cost of 3 secs of cast time.

Or they, you know, change it so it's useful =P

I'm convinced Decimate will make Warlock/Druid full of win. When target is "low", cyclone target and proceed to decimate with a soulfire into shadowfury and other burstful nukes of pain.

Looking forward to 50/0/21 for PvE assuming the debuff cap is raised.

Curious about Demonic Pact 5/5. The scaling would bring it up to 3% damage/health after 3 stacks, sorta like hunter FI but with the health bonus. Depending on the situation, this may allow the warlock to be in either a tank group or dps group without having to radically switch specs.

Immolate already is 1.5 seconds with Bane, so there is no dps gain in PvE from torture unless you are moving. It's pretty much a PvP talent and I don't see raiders picking it up.

As mentioned before, the dps of immolate is already equivalent to instant cast with bane. Highly doubtful the higher crit rate on conflag would make it still worth casting since it only has a 43% coefficient unless they buff the base damage a lot. The better your gear gets, the more actually casting a conflag is a dps loss currently.

I see this getting nerfed. Wouldn't be surprised if they removed decimate altogether, it's blatently a PvP talent with no use in PvE, and I can see a huge outcry when mages/pallies die while in their bubble/block. It's a 3 min CD, so it would work out to about a 40 dps increase in a fight with boss with an immunity phase if you crit with soulfire now. That's a pretty lousy 51 point talent, and that point will have a better return in Demonology.

I was thinking the same thing...demonology and affliction locks can be used in the tank group to give the tank extra stamina. Next time around I fully intend to try demonology. Speaking of which..the felguard still has an empty ability slot..cough cough.

Remains to be seen, but I contend it's additive like the current mage talents, so EF would only bring crits that do 205% of base damage. Blizzard's terminology for crits, and crit bonuses is confusing. They just ought to refer to percents. Baseline crit bonus is 50%. Ruin adds 50% to your crit bonus percentage. CSD ought to add 3% to your crit bonus percentage. EF ought to add 5% to your crit bonus percentage.

Shadow priests are gettting 50% to their crit damage bonus. They are not getting 200% crits like locks, they are actually getting 175% crits. So many people are going to get confused.

Decimate is primarily a PvP talent, that much is true, but there are several bosses now (and potentially many more in Lich King) that have immunity phases. Naj'entus comes to mind, for one. I'm nearly always above the requisite health when he bubbles up, and I'd absolutely love to be able to toss a shot through it while the healers do their work instead of sitting there twiddling my thumbs. Back in the AQ days, dropping an instant Soul Fire into C'thun while running between tentacles and having it hit at full force would have been nice as well. There are probably many, many more on the list, but those will do to demonstrate my point.

I can see Malygos, if nobody else, being able to render himself magic-immune (or at least HIGHLY resistant) for phases of the fight.

You are overlooking the fact that with a non-instant immolate the DoT timer would start at the end of the GCD and with an instant cast immolate the DoT timer would start at the beginning of the GCD.

The question of if conflagrate will scale well enough to be worth it is still very much up in the air because we don't know what the coefficients and base damages on level 80 spells will be for certain. However, with torture and decimate the amount of damage a conflagrate will need to deal in order to be worth casting will be significantly less than it is currently, which was the actual point.

Edit:

Another idea. Take the following scenario:

Cast a decimated immolate followed by best D/CT shadow spells until fire school lockout is over then spam incinerate.

With eternal flames the opening immolate will roll for the entire fight and never drop assuming no long cast time gaps. What would this mean for the damage of the immolate? Will this rolling immolate ignore all resistances, absoptions, and immunities for the duration of the fight and continue dealing Chaos damage instead of fire?

I don't have a working talent calculator anymore, but working from the tooltips elsewhere, I was curious if an imp-cannon/fire destro spec would be viable. Was thinking something along the lines of 0/38/21+12, with plenty of flexibility.

Rank 9 firebolt has a base damage of 199, if the spell tooltip is correct, with a casting time to 2.0 sec, giving it a base dps of 100. The coefficient, I would assume to be ~57% of the imp's +dmg. The imp gains 15% of your +dmg effects, and has an unknown base +dmg. He also has some amount of base crit, and I'm assuming the usual 17% base spell miss chance, neither of which scale (outside of int scaling).

Improved Imp increases his firebolt damage by 30%
Unholy Power increases his firebolt damage by 20%
Master Demonologist increases his fire damage by 5% and fire crit by 5%
Empowered Imp increases his damage by 15% and has a chance to increase your crit chance by 100%
Demonic Knowledge increases his +dmg by 15% of his stam + int.
Demonic Power reduces the imp's firebolt cast time to 1.5 sec (they were supposed to fix this, if anyone remembers... to back to .5/1 sec cast time reduction)

I'm assuming his +dmg affects are additive, but I'm not sure. Something tickles my mind that they are, but they could be multiplicative. Assuming they're additive, his base dps increases to 199/1.5*(1+(.3 + .2 + .05 + .15)) or 225 dps, plus the added spelldamage as 57%*(.15(your +dmg) + .15(his stam+int)).

Just as a ballpark estimate, I'd guess a demo lock of that spec would have ~2k +dmg and the imp would have on the order of 116 stam and 400 int, before scaling (assume ~600 and ~900 at 80, with BP). This would bring his personal +dmg from DK to 225 and his +dmg from your +dmg to 300; so a total of ~525 dmg. This would raise his base firebolt dmg to ~500 per hit. Using the same multipliers, you get ~566 dps from the pet alone. This isn't including crit and misses, but I'm going to assume for now they roughly cancel each other out.

So, the implication is that the imp can turn into a pretty powerful little glass cannon. Throw in his chance to increase your crit to 100%, and he can add quite a bit to your personal dps. On your side, keeping corruption up will keep a flow of +10% fire damage procs going, as well as possibly snagging emberstorm depending on which way you go with the spec, potentially increasing your fire damage multipliers to ~20%, depending on uptime, as well as a steady stream of crits.

I think it has potential to have some very, very big personal dps numbers, but not so much in the way of raid utility.

I don't really see imp cannon spec being fire unless fire is better without imp immo or emberstorm. You need 43 points minimum in demo because you need both empowered imp and demonic tactics, which means you can't reach emberstorm.. but even if you could reach emberstorm I don't see why you would want emberstorm over demonic pact, more mana feed ranks, felguard and other useful talents. If your crit rate is near 100% it really doesn't matter what you are shooting you are gonna be threat capped, and you might as well be applying isb.

Why would you need Demonic Tactics? No need to increase your own critrate at all, and even if the imp has 20% crit, you're still looking at 64% uptime of the crit buff (if I did the math right). A 5% increase to his crit only nets you a small increase in that uptime. Demonic Pact is only a 3% dmg buff, and is more of utilty than anything else.

A 0/40/31 would let you get 3/3 Mana Feed and 5/5 Emberstorm, letting you get the max static % buffs to your own and your imp's fire damage, as well as keeping him constantly supplied with mana.

small increase? close to 7% uptime increase, and 5% crit for when it isn't up. Plus the damage buff to group(lets call it equivalent to 12% self buff).. Emberstorm just brings incinerate to very marginally higher than shadowbolt levels, it is not a 12% increase. Plus with a crit rate that would be roughly 79% without group buffs like moonkin/totem you are providing nearly 100% isb uptime.

Either way, you're still falling into the 0/38/21+12 spec I was referring to. Hence the flexibility of a whole 12 points, to go either shadow or fire, though you do lose out on +5% fire dmg and crit from having the imp out.... but ~90% ISB uptime is pretty crazy in and of itself, netting you about 18% shadow damage overall. Could be worth the tradeoff.

[E] Of course the spirit buff + 30% regeneration from your armor could end up being counterproductive. Less Lifetapping = Less imp mana in the long run. Of course, you could give up the 30% regen for the +% to heal, but then you also lose out on the +dmg from the armor change as well.

[E2] I'm going to go with the stam numbers from the previous estimate of the imp to be very low. Turns out rank7 Blood Pact is 133 stam untalented, or 172.9 with Imp Imp. That's a pretty sizeable upgrade from rank6, which is 66 untalented.

With everlasting affliction in the 50/0/21 spec, the warlock ashtongue talisman trinket might actually be worthy.

The warlock trinket is very good multitarget, and corruption/bolt for multitarget dps is increasing immensely. Corruption x3, uax3, haunt, boltx3, second rotation could add coa in since corruption doesn't need to be recast, would be sick.

You are missing either coe, demonic sac, and emberstorm, and soulfire has a 115% spell coefficent. 11k Shadowbolts are already possible in raid situations, and you might as well count the increased crit damage from the new talent, which I am 99% sure is applied in the same fashion as CSD.

Soulfire gets significantly more than 100%, it's a 6-second base spell so it's actually 12/7 of your spell damage. Nonetheless, while big numbers are sexy, they're also rare. If that were controlled and realistically performable on a PvP opponent I'd be worried, but a freak crit in a raid is more about e-peen than actual performance. Personally, I'm a lot more excited about being able to drop a 5k nuke through a shield on demand than a random 15k crit whenever the stars feel like aligning.

[E] Flaming: he's talking about a demo-heavy spec that relies on Empowered Imp to guarantee the crit. A saced imp, emberstorm, and EF are not available under those circumstances, unless you really wanted to be balls-out insane and sac your imp when you got the procs.

Yeah, I was still talking about the same spec.

And I wasn't aware that SF had a higher than 100% coefficient. That certainly changes things. And I really shouldn't include imp scorch, for a more realistic comparison:

(1490+(2500*1.15))*1.10*1.05*2.09*1.03 = 10.8k

Throw in imp scorch, CoE, and Misery, and you get something more like a 14.4k crit.

Of course, that's on a 4-sec cast (talented) that's on a 1 min cooldown... But that's still a very nice burst.

Comparitively, given say 1900 +dmg as impsac destro, it'd be more along the lines of:

(1490+(1900*1.15))*1.15*2.299*1.10*1.10 = 11.7k or 15.6k with raid buffs.

That's a fairly sizeable difference, too, but that's only an increase of 20 dps (over a minute cooldown) and you're not necessarily guaranteed the crit.

I'm starting to think buffed-imp demo + SB spam with the SF on proc is looking pretty tasty. And the fun thing is, if 3.0 is released before WotLK (think 2.0 coming out before BC), I'll actually be able to test the majority of this spec, only missing out on the top 10 points in demo (the 3% damage buff and some points in mana feed, etc)

This was my initial assumption, but I realized today that there is precedent for talents that increase the total damage of crits -- namely, the hunter Slaying talents. A similar talent is appearing in the Warrior Arms tree, as they're adding +1/2/3/4/5% crit damage to Poleaxe Spec.

So my initial assumption was that they were just sloppy with the tooltip on Eternal Flames, and that EF and the Fire mage counterpart, Burnout, both work as traditional additive crit damage bonus talents.

But what if the tooltip on Eternal Flames is actually correct, and the tooltip on Burnout is meant to read that way as well? (It's currently munged no matter how you read it.)

In that case, Destro would get (without CSD) 230% crits. Fire would get 187.5% crits before Ignite, 262.5% crits after.

At 35% crit, EF's crit bonus would be worth about +7.78% DPS, and it would also gain the Immolate refresh. A Fire Mage would see about a 13.27% DPS increase, but at the cost of every crit costing him an extra 1% of his total mana.

Comparing these two talents to Chilled to the Bone and Everlasting Affliction (for a couple examples), they really only make sense if they're total damage increases, or if Blizzard had a parakeet do the math.

Yes I agree, there is also other precedent, IE the CSD meta gem which reads the exact same way as Eternal Flames.

I wonder if the Demonic Circle is a targetable unit... that would change the dynamics greatly. As-is, I'm looking forward to the strategy of dropping it being something that really lets high-end players distinguish themselves because the LoS/range stunts it can pull are an entirely different sort of performance than gear and button-mashing. Also, in a raid setting, the time lost to movement is considerable. Any situation with a regular fall-back position or a regular DPS position (or even a regular point in between the two) will see an improvement in DPS time from having player-selected tele-pads.