Ewwwwww EF is 10% critical strike dmg,I missread and thought it was 10% more crit... That is quite shitty.... basically EF is a 5 point talent that has 1/10 the effect of ruin a 1 point talent? ( not including the fact it refresh immolate but it still doesn't make up for that).

Actually, since soul shatter is a demonology spell, our +hit talents continue to be worthless.

We're still needing hit-capped on pure gear, since we cannot use the 6% from affliction or the 5% from destruction.



I'm surprised at how positive people are here. Just looking at destruction, these are very poorly designed talents that show no coherence or understanding of how the class plays out once you add talents into the mix.


Molten Core

For as long as demonic sac exists and we can't hybrid affliction/destruction effectively, this talent won't be able to compete. Why would I want +10% to my inefficient element when I have +15% from a demonic sac on my main element? That's a *loss* to use.

Not to mention that since we're not just element split, we're school-split, I don't have threat reduction or range (or +hit, if they fixed soulshatter to not be resistable) on these off-element/off-school spells that I'm casting. So even casting corruption, even if they fix the coefficients to make it worth using in a destruction build, has a huge host of problems associated with it (remember: corruption wasn't even worth using with your succubus sac'd. Now that destruction is clearly a pure fire tree, is corruption suddenly getting a 20+% coefficient boost outside of talents?)

Simply increasing coefficients wouldn't solve the problem with this talent, since the problem lies with the general design of the class (shadow/fire and affliction/destruction both) and the entire existance/placement of demonic sacrifice. (Not to mention: making a build that can actually pick up this talent is tricky, because of where the chokepoints are in the destruction tree.)


Torture

Waste. No point in having an incredibly low chance to proc an instant-cast version of 1.5 second cast spells.


Backdraft

Probably pointless. Conflag directly conflicts with Eternal Flames, and has never had good coefficients anyways. The new AE dragons-breath-style thing is a nuke+dot, so not spammable, so +crit on it isn't significant. The +crit on Immolate conflicts with Eternal Flames.

So three talent points for +10% crit chance on a spell I use once per boss fight (Immolate)? That has to be one of the worst non-zero dps returns per talent point in the game.


Eternal Flames

Are you kidding me? I have 8 talent points that buff immolate, a talent that uses immolate for other damage (Conflag), and a talent that buffs conflag. I can't even avoid *getting* those 5 "Improved Immolate" points really, because the talent trees are so terrible in terms of useful places to put points. Into the nerfed ISB for SB's I'll never use? Cataclysm, with +hit I can't use due to my deaggro's weak design?

Is it a dps boost? Yes. But someone forgot to put their thinking cap on and realize that much of Immolate's damage is up front, and our immolate-buffing talents (which we have to get) buff the up-front portion, which never gets repeated with this talent. Due to that, the boost you'd get off the spell is less than it appears.

+10% damage on criticals is nice, but a fairly weak dps increase (~3%.)


I haven't analyzed the other trees in depth, but I'm deeply suspicious of anyone getting excited about a build that involves your imp attacking, since that's going to be obscenely situational (felguard spec already struggles, and it has a pet with real HP and avoidance.)

As it stands now, I had been very optimistic about WotLK and getting excited. I'm left feeling very concerned that whoever is designing the class has no idea about how it actually plays out when you involve the talent trees not just base abilities (soulshatter, how elements interact, the problem of demonic sac, how many 'dead' areas there are in the talent trees, etc.)



addendum on demonic sac:

Demonic sac needs to be either moved to 40+ demo, or split into two talents, one at 21 which is VW/FH, and the other at 40+ which is imp/succubus. Then a buff needs to be put into the destruction tree somewhere (since the tree is way too weak to stand on its own, it relies on demonic sac to be viable), +10-15% spell coefficient on both SB/Incin would do well, if we can get enough dps boosts out of our suddenly-free talent points to make up for not having the boost on our dots.

I agree Kyth, the destruction tree is incredibly insulting. I think the only way an imp build would work(even in 5 mans) would to make him able to attack when phased. Make it not work in PvP, whatever. All the demo buffs are dependant on pets surviving, which I have no faith in blizzard doing correctly after many tiers of raiding.

At this point, I'd rather play my feral(or even as Moonkin, that tree looks outstanding now) than my warlock.

[quote=Kyth;757129]
I haven't analyzed the other trees in depth, but I'm deeply suspicious of anyone getting excited about a build that involves your imp attacking, since that's going to be obscenely situational (felguard spec already struggles, and it has a pet with real HP and avoidance.)

QUOTE]

I've said it before, Empowered Imp ought to be renamed to Empowered Patchwerk Attempts. Let's be serious, the imp has no more than 4k hit points raid buffed at level 70. It wouldn't survive any fights in BT/Hyjal unless you were lucky with current mechanics. Once in combat, you can't make it go phase shifted again. I feel like I'm missing something here, like they are boosting the imp's HP or something substantially and giving it avoidance..or something.

Except:

1) We know nothing of the upcoming raid encounters.
2) The pet scales with your stam (30% of your stam)
3) The new rank of Blood Pact grants 133 stam untalented, or 172.9 talented.

However, as far as I can tell, the imp only gets 2.732 hp/stam. So he's pretty squishy in that sense. But if they merely gave him more hp/stam he'd actually scale far better.

As far as the spell strings go, there doesn't appear to be any new pet scaling spell strings, so I couldn't say if there is a change or not.

So, assuming he would scale slightly better (6-7k hp at 80 maybe?) he would actually be pretty viable.

Well my calculation put eternal flames into a 12-14% total dps upgrade, and kindling at about 3% with barely any spirit on my gear so it really isn't as bad as you claim.. Once molten core , backdraft and torture get fixed to not being completely useless I think the destruction changes will end up overall pretty good (unless you like shadow destro). To claim that +5% hit on destruction spells is useless is a gross exaggeration, the real problem is that it is so low in the tree that it really isn't a destruction talent since every spec either goes to bane level or deeper destro.


The machine gun imp spec would still rule for brutallus.. probably patchwerk, etc and could just play as slightly gimped felguard/ruin on fights where it isn't ridiculously overpowered.

Flamingcloud, could you link(if you did it already) or show how eternal flames is that much of a boost? I can see from the warlock spreadsheet, quite easily enough, by turning off immolate, incinerate's dps goes up 13%. But you're probably losing 50% of immolate's dps by not refreshing it, which amounts to about the gain you get from not having to refresh it.

I like Quack's idea for Eternal Flames. Reignite immolate(initial damage and all). MAYBE take conflag off GCD. Destro warlocks can already put out a scary amount of burst damage, that might be too much.

Imho they are heading in the right direction with Warlock talents, but they still seem flawed in it's execution. Still going to have to maintain a 16% hit cap when you can't afford those Shatters to resist, top end Destro talents being counter productive, increased crit on Immolate only to not ever use it in a rotation other than an opener, wtf?

The way Im looking at things at his point in time is 21/50 Shadow Destro with a Immo refresh->Shadow Bolt Spam rotation for Molten Core/Kindling procs. Although it would be heavier on the mana consumption, with enough Spirit/Mana Regen it seems likely that you could keep it up consistantly with possibly a higher DPS potential than pure fire nukes whilst keeping up ISB for teh raids benefit.

Damn, and I had to register just to post these lines of crap.

Seems like Eternal Flames would have been a better talent if it just had the increased critical yield with an additional ability that made your incinerates deal full damage against targets without immolate to reduce Immolate clipping, but sill encouraging Warlocks to use the spell in a rotation and thus giving the strike damage talents some needed value.

Guys are we perhaps assuming the worst and not being inventive enough? Granted, immolate is best cast when it's expired, but assume a full-destro spec, by and large...

What if you spec 10% crit on Conflag/Immo, and you spec Eternal Flame, and you spec that silly Molten Core...

Fight starts, curse-up, Immolate, spam SB. Proc Molten Core, immediately, Conflag-Immo, resume SB.

To Ele, since I didn't see an answer to his comment...

The way I read Atrocity was that it's a talent that is actually a spell, not a passive talent. Therefore, only the Corruptions that were initiated by this spell get the nice little 'boom' at the end. To the best of my knowledge, any spell that you have to talent into never gets you a passive benefit in the nature that you're talking about.

I think just over 50% of the damage was from the dot portion, so you are basically comparing 2/3 an incinerate every 15 seconds vs immolate initial portion. Don't have time to do the math right now but that was about a 5% gain. The bigger gain was from critting at 2.3 from the crit bonus. Which ofcourse is going to be weaker early expansion and stronger late expansion.

Eternal Flames

I have no clue how you're getting 12-14%. Maybe you forgot to subtract the dps loss from not casting immolate? It's about an 8-9% dps increase, with the math I came up with here. I might be wrong of course, and someone didn't catch it.

Not to mention the basic issue that it negates the value of Improved Immolate and you have no other place to *put* those talent points. At least you can dodge Backdraft (although it'd be nicer if they gave us a talent worth taking.) I'd have more respect for the designer of these trees if he'd changed improved immolate to affect the dot portion at the same time these trees went out (they changed other stuff, clearly they are willing to do that.) As it is, it just shows a lack of a comprehensive examination of what this actually did to the class.


Molten Core

Molten Core is useless not because of the talent per se but because of the design of the trees. I have no clue how you'd "fix" it to account for the fact that corruption is terrible and demonic sac shouldn't exist. Molten Core is bad *because the design of our trees is bad.* As I said, I cannot think of any set of coefficients on that which would make it worth using.


Backdraft

Fix... how? Just add more crit to everything? Again same problems as Molten Core: even increasing all of that stuff to a 75% crit chance for those spells won't fix it. Conflag is even worse now since it reduces the value of Eternal Flames to use, Immolate crit is STILL bad even at +75% because eternal flames negates the talent, and no one in their right mind is going to get +crit on a non-spammable AE spell (put it on SoC and we can talk.)

The talent doesn't need to be fixed, Immolate needs to be redesigned or the talent needs to be *removed*.


+5% hit on destro spells

How am I exaggerating the statement "+hit from talents is useless when it cannot affect our deaggro." This goes right back to the whole discussion we've had since WoW started about Affliction's +hit talents. Since it doesn't affect your deaggro, much less all your spells, there's no point in taking it.

All of this *could* be okay, we could just spend twice as many talent points to get increased range, +hit, and -threat if they solved the demonic sac problem. Except they didn't, that talent still exists, and more important even if they did soul shatter is neither affliction nor destruction.

There's no exaggerating here, +hit is useless if it doesn't include your deaggro (unless that deaggro is on a 30 second cooldown rather than 5 minute.) I will not accept a raiding lock with us who doesn't have their deaggro hitcapped, that's just asking for problems. (6% of the time on bosses I can't drop threat! But that's okay, I'm making use of this amazing talent I got.)

There's no problem with it being shallow in the tree. I think the person who did it (a) forgot about soulshatter and (b) expected something like 21/0/50 -- not realizing that will never happen with demonic sac existing (and destruction not getting enough of a buff to make up for not having demonic sac.)



Err... so. I guess you have a succubus sacrificed then since you're spamming SB? That means that Conflag, which isn't even worth casting with an imp sac'd (+15%), you're casting with only +10% from the talent?

Not to mention SB is a weaker spell anyways, and is designed to be *even* weaker in WotLK (see the nerf to ISB with no corresponding personal boost to the spell.) And without the imp sac'd your immolates are weaker. And of course with that build you'd never pick up the only other decent new talent in the tree (Eternal Flames) since you'd lose the (minor, but existant) benefit from fire nukes.

It's not about not being creative enough here.

I'm willing to bet an awful lot that whoever designed these trees literally is not at all familiar with the raiding builds or with all of our spells. Otherwise they'd have realized the position that demonic sac puts them in when it comes to Molten Core *ever* working out (due to Molten Core's low coefficient, and that you can't get the affliction buffs to affliction spells -- which still don't make corruption worth casting unless you can get 18 deep, but it's at least a slight boost.)

I did manage to come up with a Molten Core build, it just looks weaker than anything else you can do. It turns out to actually be far far harder than you think because as I said in my post, our trees are designed quite poorly, making it hard to spend points. You can build a 7/21/41+2 build, with the last points going in either imp lifetap or kindling soul, whichever adds more dps. The trick here is dropping shadowburn and soul leech both to pick up molten core and sorta hope it doesn't suck as much as it looks like it does (plan is to keep corruption up, but ignore the +shadow procs -- don't ever cast a shadowbolt, it's not worth it.)

(Keep in mind the affliction points in that build really are a waste. Improved corruption has the same problem it always did: 5 talent points to remove 0.5 seconds effectively from the spell. But at least you can pick up -threat for your corruption, and it opens the window to improved lifetap if it's more dps than Kindling Soul in WotLK-level gear.)




And while technically it's true, we haven't seen the raid encounters, and maybe our imps will have 50,000 HP in the expansion...... be realistic. You're not going to respec for patch in naxx 2.0 just to use your imp just for flavor.

Raid fights have AE damage. This isn't going to change just because some designer forgot how bad pets are in raid encounters. The imp is not going to be viable.


Ignoring the deep felguard builds right now since I don't know enough about demo to offer an opinion (for a pet class I'd rather play my hunter), the two good builds I can see are:

0/21/50 is far weaker than it's TBC counterpart because you're literally spending 7 talent points that you will use once or never on a boss fight (currently you spend one: shadowburn), and because the new talents just don't add that much. But unless magic happens (i.e. dots benefit fully from more than one stat), it's where we'll be just due to how gear works.

29/21/21 gives up UA assuming you have enough crit rate to make ruin mostly viable, and hinges on whether Eternal Afflictions (is that what affl 45-50 is called?) is worth +13% dps or not (you lose 2% off of shadow mastery and gain +15% succubus sac.) Unfortunately you're stuck using shadow nukes to take advantage of shadow mastery, which are weaker than they were with the ISB change, and I haven't felt like doing that much math on trees that will probably change yet.


Granted this *all* depends on whether or not fire mages exist.

Unless dots get completely overhauled to benefit from crit and haste sufficiently (via a fundamental change or a talent), they will not scale as well as nukes do in the end game. Which means you will still end up back at the destruction tree no matter how terrible they manage to make the tree. Since they've killed the viability of shadow destruction, this makes me uncomfortable: If fire mages don't exist for some reason (if they end up arcane), this will kill lock dps; similarly if shadow priests aren't on raids, instead replaced by disc priests.

We're very very dependent on two external class *specs* for dps. They may complain they're dependent on us for curses, but at least our choice of spec doesn't affect them.




Incidentally, CoE/CoS need to be tossed ASAP, CoMagic needs to exist, and CoR needs to have 5 minute effect. Then raids aren't forced to bring three of us.

And affliction should have a deep talent (40+) that lets you cast two curses, so if you want to run with only one warlock you can.



Amusing side-note: they want to make us be spirit casters, but said that our sunwell gear will last us until "well into" the expansion. I wonder if that can actually be the case with no spirit on any of our Sunwell gear.

Not sure how accurate it is but the leak I was looking at shows Shadow Weaving back up to 3% per stack.

It used to be pretty high coefficient, but it was nerfed to 115% (mostly due to PvP with the then half cast meta).


The Warlock trees need some work (and I am sure the Blizzard employees are getting some feedback) and Soul Shatter needs to be a Destro or Affliction spell instead of Demonology.

Basically you gain a 2/3 of an incinerate(around 3500 at my gear) every 15 seconds and lose the non-dot portion which should be around 1800damage. So you are doing 1700 more every 15 seconds, or 113dps. Then you crit at 2.3 instead of 2.0 which at a 30% crit rate would be worth +9% total damage. So yes I think 12-14% seems pretty accurate..(assuming the crit bonus is calculated like csd.. it is worded the same.. both are worded differently from ruin).
From what I see on your post you assume eternal flames is calculated like a 110% ruin.
I disagreed then and I disagree now. I am not threat capped on every fight and if I was going global 11% hit instead of 16%(assuming I added other stats instead of hit) only 5% of the time would I not be able to out dps the person without the talent. It is hardly useless and hit capping JUST for shatter is not wise imo unless your are gaining like 2% hit for every 1% something else..

Plus my count on good destro talents(and by good I mean not useless.. like imp immolate) below 50 without getting the imp immolate line is 53... maybe 55 if you like daze.
War Pirate :: Talent tree Warlock

For the record, I was looking into this in the Mage thread to try to determine if Burnout worked this way, and Sancus determined that for Burnout, at least, it's definitely a critical strike damage bonus mod (like ruin, spell power, etc), not a total crit damage mod. I asked him about Eternal Flames, and he replied:

I asked him to check the aura on CSD and Monster Slaying for me so we could compare the wording, but no response yet.

It seems to me, that a massive reworking of decimate, and maybe one or two key other talents would be sufficient to make cross-cutting fire/shadow a workable highest dps mechanic, a more involving in game experience than spamming your shadowbolt button and also be really strong for pvp too.

Imagine say:

Weakness (5/5)
While your Corruption spell is present on a target, your chance to critically strike is increased on that target by (1/2/3/4/5%).

Decimate (1/1) requires 5/5 weakness:
After you perform a critical fire hit, your next shadow spell has no casting time. After you perform a critical shadow hit, your next fire spell has no casting time. A decimated instant cast increases your damage done by that school of magic by 20% for the next 3 casts.

Numbers obviously are completely made up, and would need to be changed, but the idea is there. You keep up corruption because it increases your chance to decimate, a decimate cast means an instant cast straight away, so worth casting form a casting time saved alone, and then switching to that school and hoping to get another crit in that school within the next x casts. It would also serve to increase the pitiful value of crit, when compared to haste/damage, and be good enough to be worth taking over DS while being more interesting.

And for PvP more instant casts is always nice. Get a shadowfury crit, throw out an instant incin while running away, etc.


To me, cross cutting schools has a lot of potential for just being more fun and providing a more dynamic raiding experience, but the talents as they are just don't go nearly far enough to encourage it, and while DS is king, it ain't gonna happen.

Well the spells read: "increased..
Burnout - "Critical damage bonus"
Ruin - ""Critical strike damage bonus"
Iceshards - "Critical strike damage bonus"
Spellpower - "Critical strike damage bonus"

Eternal flames reads - "critical strike damage"
CSD reads - "critical damage"


My theory is the keyword is "bonus". If it says bonus it is the bad kind.

Kyth: You're still thinking in very restrained terms about the potential for Molten Core to break Sac's lock. It's a first-draft alpha talent undergoing revision, not a released talent being patched. The only thing about it that's remotely close to finalized is that it makes shadow spells buff fire spells. At this stage it's still possible to revise it so that shadowbolt crits make the next incinerate instant, and change backdraft to the converse. That pair of talents would shake Sacrifice and give crit some value, especially if they added an incinerate-like bonus to shadowbolt on corrupted targets. But then again, I'm crazy enough to considering adding Conflagrate to Eternal Flames, which would be quite the coup.

Aye, the question is whether the wording is correct, or munged. Note that the tooltip for EF reads "critical strike damage," but the aura that the talent applies reads "mod critical strike damage bonus." The keyword is "bonus," but the wording on the aura and on the talent disagree at present, and there's no way really to know which is correct until test results start leaking out.

It would, after all, not be the first time (or the tenth) that a new talent had a misworded tooltip that implied one mechanic while the spell was supposed to be working with another.

I'm getting even more worried for Affliction.

Spellcrit is a weak Affliction stat.
Spellhaste is a mediocre Affliction stat. (Well, at least relative to Destruction)
If they start throwing spirit on gear and nerf lifetap(likely, or else we wouldnt need the spirit)- Affliction is still using Dark Pact the vast majority of the time anyway and won't need the Spirit. So there's yet another wasted stat on Affliction gear.

I hope they've got an Ace up their sleeves for Affliction. Combine this with the already poor scaling and a lackluster 51-pointer it's not looking good.

It's just alpha so they've got plenty of time to work on things, however =D

Maybe they won't change Lifetap and instead change the spirit regen part of Fel Armor to convert spirit into spell power.