That's where I keep coming to with the calculators... never an issue thru BC for me, I find the current ones crazy, unthemed, undisciplined. A lot of junk, a lot of limited usefulness stuff - stuff to wade through to reach the goods.

[I haven't spent as much time in the destruction side, simply because it's hard for me to go even more mage-like.]

It's obvious they're not really keeping up either e.g. as it stands with % mana/no down-ranking, Improved Drain Soul fails utterly now. It did have specific application and was very useful for solo levelling/grinding/farming/dailies.

So far the trees, the pets, the changes/lack of - I'm concerned the class is going to end in a bad place come WotLK.

Getting back to the topic of a dedicated Affliction filler for a moment:

After mulling it over for a while, I softened my thoughts on the matter (which used to be that affliction needs an affliction-school raid-viable filler spell of its own). What affliction needs from a filler spell is that the Affliction talents help it, that it doesn't need to borrow from other trees to make it viable (although they can help), that it fits the theme of the tree, and that if it's a destro spell it should be distinct from a 51-destro filler spell. However, given that, it's not necessary that it be an affliction spell. It could be a destruction spell, so long as that destruction spell was basically set aside as the affliction filler rather than a mainline destruction spell, both thematically and mechanically.

Currently, Shadowbolt is the de facto affliction filler spell. This left affliction without a distinctive filler in vanilla and most of TBC because shadowbolt is also a mainline destruction spell, and has a grand total of 7 mildly supportive talents in the affliction tree (nightfall and shadow mastery). However, I think it does have some potential to be an affliction-themed filler. For one, ISB makes it fit in the debuffing mindset. Second, it looks like destro is becoming a fire school, which means that shadowbolt would be used only by non-destro builds, essentially marking it as the off-spec nuke.

Here is what it would take for me to feel comfortable viewing Shadowbolt as the affliction filler spell: shadow destro is inviable, and shadowbolt is supported more in the affliction tree.
By shadow-destro, I mean a dedicated build destro build that take at most imp LT and frailty. If someone can make a viable shadowbolt build out of 31/0/40 I'll accept that, so long as they still need to cast DoTs. I would consider that a hybrid build, with shadowbolt acting as the synergy bridge between the two trees, so I find the idea unoffensive. Shadowbolt can stay in S&F. But a deep destro build, or anything that invests more heavily in destro and demo than affliction, should be a fire build. That would put shadowbolt as the affliction- or affliction-support nuke.
By "more supported" I mean that there are more talents either in the affliction tree or using affliction spells that help shadowbolt. I like the idea of moving ISB to the affliction tree, and I could possibly even see Bane moved as well, although that's probably a stretch. Everlasting afflictions would be good if I didn't like the refresh-mechanic itself. A talent version of 4T5 would be another good touch. Just, in general, things that make it not feel like 43 of 50 talent points are being wasted half the time.

Remember, this isn't about balance, this is about thematic consistency. Affliction needs a filler spell to call its own. I think shadowbolt might be made to fit the bill by diminishing the current problem that we feel like a 41-affliction build is 50% destruction by moving shadowbolt from destro to a grey area in between the trees.

If we were to move ISB and Bane to the Affliction tree, it would give us a good opportunity to eliminate Improved Corruption (and make Corruption instant), and possibly change Fel Concentration to cover all affliction spells, with the possible exception of fear, and reduce the talent point cost from 5 to 2 to bring affliction's push back resistance talent more in line with destruction's.

I'd love to see affliction as the shadow tree, and leave all of the fire spells to our destruction brethren. I'd like it even more if Blizzard would find an acceptable way to make DoTs scale at the same rate that destruction scales with crit and haste.

I sat down and had a little think on the subject of upper Destruction versus lower Destruction, and kind of came up with a solution to the problem... as outlined here, but it does make use of... nerfage. Suppose the following:

- Ruin is buried in deep Destruction (Tier 7/9?), and is set to 50/75%.
- ISB becomes an effect that increases YOUR crit damage by, say, 25% (applies to all Destruction spells?). In other words, it's kind of the "Tactical Mastery" talent because it boosts every spec (say what you will about Affliction), but not by a gross amount. Only deep Destruction gets the full benefit, but (I hope) the numbers won't be in "crazy land" as Blizzard calls it. Reigns in Destruction somewhat while allowing others to catch up some in the damage department.


OR

- Deep talents in each tree (Demonology, Destruction, Affliction) cater towards making Shadow Bolt, Incinerate or whatever spell you like cater towards that particular tree. To use the following examples:

Demonology: Shadow Bolt/Incinerate causes your pet to do more damage (+AP/SP?), stacking some number of times.
Destruction: Ruin
Affliction: Shadow Bolt (probably just this) deals damage over time and/or boosts your DoT damage, stacking some number of times.


I don't really see any other alternatives aside from moving the juicy bits higher in Destruction, specifically the offloading of Ruin and then burying it so that only heavy Destro builds get full benefit from it, and even then I'm not sure that we should keep the full double-damage-on-crit. 21/40 kind of proved that.


EDIT - Forgot something else that came to mind. Would putting UA ticks on Nightfall help Affliction at all? (I have no idea how to calculate the increase in Nightfall's frequency, and thus DPS, if you add a DoT effect to it, or I wouldn't ask.)

The more I listen to people the more I think Destruction should have

1) Bane, cataclysm and molten core as its first tier

2) Ruin (5pt talent) taking cataclysms place on tier 2

3) Destructive Reach moved to tier 3 and Demonic power moved to tier 4

4) A 21 point talent. Hypothetically something like Tortured souls, For the next 10 seconds all your spells consume a soul shard but do 50% more damage, spells that already consume shards are unaffected. 3 min. CD.

Then give affliction something like. Imp. UA, your UA ticks have a chance equal to 50/100/150% of your crit rating to proc shadow vulnerability which increases all shadow damage done to the target by 20% for 6 seconds. (adjust to tweak damage output needs)

This will let affliction and demon get what they need from destruction without dropping 17 points in the tree and destruction won't have any wasted talent points.

Maybe crit could simply increase the damage DOTs deal by a small percentage. Resilience, or 'negative crit' as I sometimes think of it, does the opposite currently, but it has a greater effect on DD spells and abilities. I'm not sure that DOTs should be made to crit like DD, but a modest increase shouldn't be over the line. Crit itemization would effect all of an Affliction warlock's damage then, although to a lesser degree than a Destruction warlock.

As for haste, maybe reducing the intervals between ticks? We need to remember than anything they do is going to be weighted against pvp, and I think Affliction's potential for concurrent damage on multiple targets has been holding back scaling.

maybe not even then. hit, haste, crit rating being universal and enh shaman and hunters getting AP from int. If you toss in stam thats 5 stats you can make items from that would benefit 15 of the 30 specs. It wouldn't surprise me if the only place to find +hit was on necklaces, cloaks, trinkets, rings, weapons, and tier pieces.

It doesn't really matter what order they put the tier 1-2 talents in, there just isn't enough talents for PvE Destruction. There's only 8 useful talents in the first 2 tiers for deep Destruction PvE Warlocks right now. They really need to bring Demonic Power into tiers 1-2.

Affliction would definitely be a lot stronger a stand-alone tree if talents were changed from affecting Affliction spells to affecting Shadow spells. One of the things that annoys me a lot about Affliction as it stands on live at the moment is that for raiding there's almost no point in taking Grim Reach unless you go 17 points deep into Destro for Destructive Reach.

Grim Reach, Suppression, Fel Concentration, Contagion and Everlasting Affliction would make for a very self-reliant Affliction build if you changed them to affect Shadow instead of Affliction, or a list of dots.

However:

1. Immolate would be unaffected and still need destro talents. Maybe this isn't a bad thing? Sub-spec demo for a stronger / more damaging pet, sub-spec destro for a worthwhile / more useful immolate.
2. It doesn't solve the range talent issue. It's just as bad being specced destro at the moment and having to move closer just so you can apply curses, or seeds. Demo would miss out on range no matter which school it picked, which is a problem with the dev's stated aim of it being multi-schooled (see Molten Core).

I wonder if Eradication triggering from DOT ticks a 100% haste on your next Drain Life would make Drain Life castable in a raid setting. Sadly moving even some of Affliction's filler from Shadow Bolt to Drain Life makes crit gear worth even less. Honestly, I'm not certain why Blizzard doesn't just let crit% increase DOT damage by half as much. So if you have 30% chance to crit, your DOTs deal 15% more damage. Just rebalance base damage and coefficient to get things to the right level.

I though a bit about this whole "affliction filler" thing in the past, and a solution that I came accross was to modify Drain Soul. Let's face it, it's actually not used for anything else that creating Soul Shards at Rank 1.

But what if the spell was changed a little ?

• Give it a proper spell damage coefficient to match its duration (if I remember right, it currently suffer the same 50% "drain" penalty as drain life...)
• Make it work like Arcane Missile: crittable, but interrupted by LoS
• Add an "improved drain soul" talent in the middle of the affliction tree (21 points ?) that boost its debuff: on top of allowing you to drain the soul of the enemy, it would boost your dot damages by your crit%. Seems balanced in PvP by the LoS issue, as well as the fact that it can be interrupted/kicked/etc
• add a second "improved drain soul" talent at the end of the tree (40, 50 points ?) that boost the spell damage coefficient applied to Drain Soul (and possibly Drain Life). Think Shadow And Flame, but for affliction drains.

This way you give a whole new meaning to a mostly unused spell, remove the dependance Affliction has on Destruction spells, and fix most of the scaling issues. Affliction will still scale worst than destru, but only because of the "dot and haste" problem, not because of the crit anymore. Note that Drain Soul does benefit from your spell haste .

Actually, this looks like a very good idea. Flavorful, too, and would fit with the lore of the class. it would bring us closer to the Shadow Priest end of the table, but I do not see this as a bad thing, since they are just as close to the Affliction Ideal as we are.

I think they added Drain Soul to the damage bonus to Everlasting Affliction. But, sacrificing ISB and the smidgeon of crit scaling you get for Drain Soul as a main nuke, would kind of suck.

Then again, Drain Soul as a main 'nuke' would damn near turn an Affliction Warlock into a Shadow Priest in PvE.

Drain Soul rank 1 now costs the same as the highest rank anyways, so there's no more downranking to make essentially free soul shards. Not that this is a big deal in and of itself, but it does kind of point towards a disjoint between devs and players about what this spell should be used for.

A 15 second channeled filler spell is obviously absurd. However it's easy enough to correct this by adding a talent to deep affliction, say 9th tier to replace Death's Embrace, which is fairly underwhelming as-is for a build that scales so poorly with crit. Something to the effect 2pts, Reduces the channel time on your Drain Soul by 6/12 seconds, reducing the number of ticks to 3 and causing it to tick every 3/1 seconds. Rebalance the coefficient based on a 3s channel (no drain component). Voila.

As far as I can see there is nothing lost, and an independent affliction tree to be gained. Affliction will be filling with this spell anyways, so creating shards will not be a problem with the reduced channel time. Clipping DS ticks to reapply dots would be standard practice. Reduction of the coefficient makes zero difference to Demo or Destro, as they would only ever use the spell when a mob is near death (and virtually never with the intention of scoring a killing blow with it). Nightfall could be revamped to apply an ISB like debuff (according to your crit rating perhaps) on DS ticks, which could easily be balanced to allow some proper form of crit scaling. ISB could be removed from destro to facilitate some talent consolidation on that side.

Edit: Clarity.

Personally I find Drain Soul as a mainline nuke distasteful. However, if you are going to go that way, I would say it needs to be rebalanced around a shorter drain time, and the drain time should be reduced by a Glyph, not a talent. Talents make spells unquestionably better, and while hasting your drain soul is absolutely a worthwhile trade-off, it gives a shorter window per mana point to get a shard in. Glyphs, on the other hand, are allowed to redesign spells, including adding downsides, like the Healing Tough or Moonfire glyphs.


Crit scaling: if ISB were an affliction talent, that would sort of give affliction some type of crit scaling, although not a very good one since you get decreasing marginal utility on ISB uptime as you add crit. I also wouldn't be surprised if ISB doesn't stack with CoE and/or shadow weaving at some point.

So... what does it mean for a DoT to crit? You could easily add in an on-cast or on-tick proc whose proc chance is related to your crit chance for affliction, but what would it be? Does it even have to be damage? One thing I would want to avoid is chance-your-whole-DoT-is-bigger, because it would encourage refreshing smaller DoTs early. I would dislike that even more if it were optimal.
I think a mana-return effect (like paladin Illumination) wouldn't be out of line, and that old talent that made your corruption burn mana would make sense as well (especially if it was reduced by resilience). Eradication is a possibility, as would be a +dmg or some other type of proc, although uptime-based buffs suffer from saturation. A chance on cast to have an extra tick or refresh duration would be interesting, and would make affliction cast shuffling even more confusing, which I think is a good thing, but basically means increasing the use of your filler which isn't very exciting. A pet-related effect, like a felhunter Kill Command, would be warlocky although not afflictiony. Something like Timbal's or Nightfall would make sense both thematically and from a gameplay perspective.
Here's a thought: something not even remotely damage-related, not even mana return. A chance on tick to apply Cripple for three seconds, for example. Make cripple whatever you want: reducing target hit chance would let it matter in raids, while random slow procs would be kinda funny in PvP. It's dangerous to put in such an effect, since "I want my crit to be useful" is a rather thin line in between "tank your damage for raid benefit" and "why does this useless effect use a useless stat?"
I do think it's important that the crit-effect be useful in raids, and that its viability in other venues is not so important, because affliction's lack of crit-scaling is really only an end-game raid issue since that's where the itemization issues occur (this may change with gear homogenization).

As far as Drain Soul is concerned, I agree they've pretty much slapped it back to the Stone Age. (This is part of the reason I was trying to cook up ways to revamp Soul Shards; the acquisition method is time consuming when you use up your stockpile on a raid for whatever reasons.)

My personal thoughts on Drain Soul involve something along the lines of this: Channels for 5 seconds (deals about 75% of the total damage as on Live, which for me would be roughly 450 DPS.) When you fully channel it, you get a (50%?) chance for a Soul Shard in addition to the target dying giving you a guaranteed Shard. Improved Drain Soul could then increase that percentage as well as its current benefit. That should be enough to ease up on the erratic damage component (no one casts it for damage, just the Shards) while at the same time easing up on the time expenditure for farming more shards. It would then gain substantial benefit from Soul Siphon, but I wont' go so far as to call it an "Affliction Nuke", or Mind Flay equivalent. Affliction behaving somewhat like a Shadow Priest isn't really a bad thing, either. You could make a lore based argument that Shadow Priest and Warlock are almost the same thing.

I also like different "drain soul as filler" ideas. Drain life sees acceptable use and has good enough utility.

As it stands now, with having to use shadowbolts, current drain soul could be 1 sec long and deal no damage, it wouldn't effect me; since my latency is good enough to simply cast as the killing bolt is in the air. That's about as completely marginalized as possible while still actually being on a button bar.

I've had the opportunity to play a lock on the beta...and while it hasn't been for very long so far (not even through first zone), Affliction is...underwhelming. As much as it's my first love for playing style, and I really enjoy going back to it, the whole reason I haven't played very much in Beta is because, well, it hasn't excited me very much. Haunt, even if it gets fixed, has no appreciable use until you're up against some long lasting mob, and therefore I've actually specced out of it.

I haven't gotten to play my pally yet (different account), but I'm chomping at the bit to test out the new improved version of Tankadins. Sad to say, I'm nowhere near that with the lock.

There's a difference between the paladin version of bloat, which really does fit in with the Blue's definition, and warlock's bloat (specifically Affliction side) which is 'bunch of useless stuff'. Yes, there's uses for everything, but the way the tree is set up, optimization for PvE requires you to just spend points in extremely useless talents.

I want to love my lock when WotLK comes out...but at this point, unless something seriously drastic happens, he's going to get left behind.



Oh, and yes, I do agree...either Drain Soul or Drain Life (don't care which) need to be the Affliction filler. If Shadow Bolt is to be it, then it needs to be revamped to fit the Aff style. As of right now, it definitely does not do that.

I couldn't have said it any better. The devs think we have all these great talents to choose from, and the first thing I did when I saw the alpha calc was remake my old faithful demo spec that I love. I knew exactly which talents to get because there just isn't anything better to take, and all I ended up doing is adding to destruction with the new 10 points. Same deal with affliction, there's a reason there are cookie cutter specs, players have long since decided on what is or isn't worth it.

I agree that the problem with not having DoTs scaling with crit is that Blizzard will never be able to balance DoTs vs DD. With every new tier of gear, the amount of crit changes and thus the margin between spells that can crit and spells that cannot shifts in favour of those that can. No matter what tier of gear the coefficients are set to be balanced for, there will be two other tiers for which things are out of kilter - not to mention the impact on levelling.

I also agree that checking for crit only on the initial cast, then having all ticks either crit or not based on that test, is not desirable. Casters would simply spam each DoT until they got a crit.

Having every tick of a DoT able to crit or not crit individually (eg For one cast of a seven-tick DoT ticks 2, 4 & 5 crit) places extra demand on the RNG, which not only impacts server processing time but also is counter to the current move away from reliance on the RNG.

So I contend that the only sustainable solution is to introduce a direct scaling factor for DoTs based on Spell Crit. (This would apply to all DoTs, not just Warlock ones.)

It occurs to me that we already have an indirect link between DoT scaling and Crit in game, but it only reduces damage currently. I'm talking, of course, about Resilience.

Resilience is a stat built to oppose crit rating, and already negatively scales DoTs. This means that algorithms to scale dots based on a percentage score already exist*, so in theory those same algorithms could be used as a code base for a scaling factor between DoTs and Spell Crit Chance. Presumably, this would be a lot easier to implement (and require a lot less server processing time) than checking each and every DoT tick separately to see if it crits.

I've further come to the conclusion that if Blizzard truly want all Warlock specs to use DoTs (as the beta talent trees seem to indicate), and do not want to create a new 'mandatory' talent, then they need to make some small amount of Spell Crit scaling baseline for all DoTs, and then put a talent in Affliction (or Shadow, or whatever) to increase this scaling factor, similar to how Ruin changes the crit scaling for Destruction spells.

For example a caster with a 20% spell crit chance might have their DoT ticks increased in damage by 5% without the talent, or 10% with. (Numbers chosen off the top of my head just to illustrate the concept.)

With something like this in place, DoTs would benefit from crit rating (and Intelligence) without the spikiness or extra RNG processing of trying to make DoT ticks crit individually.

This seems to me to be a straightforward and practical solution, therefore I am presumably missing something blindingly obvious. Am I?
_____________________________________________________________________________________ ______________
*assuming the processes to convert ratings to percentages are separate to the processes applying those percentages

So basically now with these recent changes to the Destro tree, has the predicted "best" raw dps Destro spec changed? And if so please provide a link.

To which changes do you refer? The backdraft and fire & brimstone changes from last week? The "best" spec still depends on how corruption and improved lifetap shake down compared to demonic aegis (which may change depending on spirit itemizatino), and will continue to change anyways since the top two tiers need more fire talents.