The point of emphasizing DPCT is to point out that the majority of the problem isn't with the amount of damage or cost of DoTs, but that an Afflicition Lock can not spend their entire DPS time casting them. In concept, an Affliction Lock that could spend their entire DPS cycle casting nothing but DoTs would do enough damage to do as well or better than other specs.

Now, having enough DoTs such that you'd never have to touch Shadow Bolt isn't in and of itself a solution, for as you noted it doesn't address the crit and haste scaling issue. Hence the general cry for an affliction filler that makes up the difference.

The problem is that Affliction does not get full benefit from Crit or Haste. At best, only about half of our damage done actually gains any kind of benefit from either of those, where the other specs get far more from those stats. This is offset somewhat by talents that boost damage done from our dots, but if all stats are given equally, and we only gain full use from one stat where other specs gain full use from all, then Affliction WILL fall behind again. Not to mention, those talents that do give us more dot damage are offset in other trees by boosts to and rewards from crits. All in all, it does put Aff behind the power curve as far as PvE goes. Basically, what it boils down to is that currently, Haste/Crit can only help Affliction so much. At some point though, those stats do get marginalized as far as usefulness goes. What we're missing is a way to allow Aff to gain full benefit from those stats, not just partial. There's a number of good ways to do that, that have already been suggested by other people. The question remains as to whether Blizzard wants that to happen or not.

While in 5v5 you'll probably have all kinds of dispellers and healers it doesn't happen in lower brackets, in some random world PVP, and maybe in some other situations. You balance both components and total.

When you raid as Affliction your damage can be broken down into two major components: DOTs and Shadow Bolts. I am not against improving the whole, the whole needs improvement, but I'm against improving the component "DOTs" because it's good enough as it is. And yes, it's because raiding, and boss fights are only a part of a game.

Affliction gets new DPS-oriented talents, it gets better damage in DOTs, yet still, you are stuck at the same idea of making DOTs scale with crit and haste. You are ignoring the problems it may bring and ignoring the alternative possibilities.

And again the same 1000% of 0...
Your gear with x spell power, y haste and z crit contributes to your DPS:
DPS = a*x + b*y + c*z
a, b, and c are constants based on spec. The balance they have to achieve is to make all such DPS equal, it doesn't require that all 3 of a, b and c are non-zero, it only requires that one of them isn't, the other 2 might as well be, but then that one has to be sufficiently high and they are bringing it.

There is absolutely no problem with Affliction using Shadow Bolts, just like no problem with Affliction having Shadow Bolt talents. You'll end up with some filler no matter what, and there is no real difference which one it would be: new one, old one, fire, shadow, whatever. The chain is as good as its weakest link, and its weakest link is Shadow Bolt, and it needs addressing, DOTs are fine.

As for raid DPS, DPCT is what you use to compare relative power of different spells.

10k corruptions would be fine in all aspects of pvp as long as they were removed when the Warlock died. I doubt that will happen and until then it would be completely unbalanced in world pvp where you can't expect a cleanse or heal. With the addition of Lake Wintergrasp providing what I see as a perpetual world pvp area, that's a problem.

--

In trying to figure out how to have affliction scale with crit, I looked at what spells it has that can crit and considered how to improve how they scale with crit. Right now, the only non-Seed spell is Haunt, so it would need to pack a huge punch. Since its current Beta implementation provides a damage increase to DoTs, it would be quite reasonable to have it increase DoT damage when it crits so that it is as though the DoTs themselves had crit over the 12 seconds the crit Haunt is active. Make it a 100% increase, and it becomes basically the same thing as Ruin applied to a different set of spells. If the current damage increase was removed entirely in favor of this on-crit increase it would mean that you'd need a 20% crit rate to get the same overall effect, but that number would be easily reached given raid buffs. It makes sense lore-wise, provides a true justification for its cooldown, and would let your DoTs "crit" at a rate equal to your crit rate.

The nagging question I had while developing this idea was whether this talent emphasized crit too much in a tree that's only other mention of critical strikes is in Death's Embrace(where it feels out of place anyway). However, it is currently not particularly useful for soloing and obviously designed for raiding. Since it is likely that crit will be completely unavoidable due to only one caster reward per quest, affliction locks will likely have a crit set for those 5-mans and entry level raids that might not be used for soloing, much as casters might have a hit set for raiding now. While I still feel it might place far too much emphasis on one's crit rate in a non-crit focused tree, I see it is as a relatively straightforward way to make DoTs scale with crit exactly like nukes do with Ruin over the long term.

For those that only read bolded statements, the suggestion is:

To give DoTs scaling via crit, Haunt should increase DoT damage by 100% when it crits instead of its current 20% on every cast.

There's more to it than just pure stat scaling, there's also itemization to consider. Gear with split stats has, in total, more item values than gear which focuses on fewer stats. Beyond gemming, trying to gear specifically for spell power isn't as effective as taking mixed stats. Unless itemization changes drastically beyond spirit becoming a constant feature of cloth, Affliction isn't going to be able to avoid taking stats that it simply doesn't want at the cost of one it desperately needs.

The focus on having DoTs scale with Crit/Haste exists because of a latent fear of Shadow Bolt syndrome, where the filler becomes the main nuke at certain levels of gear. Sufficiently clever talents buffing Shadow Bolt or a new filler can avoid this, but only if they are dependent on or beneficial to the DoTs that Affliction is supposed to be focused on.

Give us a valid affliction filler spell.

I don't want to use a destro spell as filler as affliction. Is just wrong that a untalented destro spell (SB) > talented Life Drain. This more or less forces us to use destro as a sub-tree and that means you HAVE to get ruin, and makes the 51 talent in affliction untakeable. Thats just wrong imo.

My suggestion would be to either give us a new affliction channeling spell that could work side by side with life and mana drain. But functions as a pure damage drain. This should be a affliction talent. Or give us a way to talent drain soul to make it a damage spell.

Making Life drain/the new channeling spell's ticks able to crit could aslo be a choice, but that could maybe have some PvP issues. A pure damage channeling spell would not be unbalanced for PvP. Gives crit some value from crit gear.

This would also remove the need for affliction warlocks to go into the destro tree, and give us some nice stash from demo.

We are going around in circles here. I agree that affliction spec's don't scale well but it has nothing to do with poorly scaling dot's. If dot's were reworked to scale with crit/haste but have lower coeff it wouldn't solve the real problem which is that 70% of the time an affliction warlock is casting shadowbolt's which scales poorly due to a lack of ruin and shadow&flame.

Fixing affliction is simple enough: give it a filler that is buffed almost purely in the affliction tree, make it scale well with crit/haste, and make dots also scale with crit/haste. Below I will outline my ideas on how this can be done.

Baseline changes:
Drain soul becomes a 3 second channeled spell. Coefficient = 85.7% (a 3 second arcane missile that doesn't cause pushback in enemies.)
All damage over time effects gain a chance to critically strike each tick for +50% damage.
Haste causes the tick speed to increase by the haste %. (thus giving true time-compression, cooldowns not withstanding.)
Pets receive your full crit/hit/haste rating.
Reduce coefficients of DoT's as appropriate to get balance.

here's a talent tree i knocked together to illustrate my point.

War Tools :: Talent tree Wotlk Warlock by Vetinari

I haven't done a numbers pass (and ignore demo ><), but i think that the underlying concept is sound.


In my opinion, haste, crit, and damage should have the same benefit for spells baseline, and your talents shift bias towards spells of that talent tree. A warlocks damage breakdown should remain more or less constant from greens to epics: 50% dot, 40% filler 10% pet affliction, 70% filler, 20% dot, 10% pet destro, and 40% dot, 30% filler, 30% pet demo. adjust spells/talents to get something like that at most gear levels, and we are set.

Regarding DPCT: 1% haste, 1% crit, 1% hit, should each increase DPCT by ~1%, for each and every spell, and the % increase should be the same between specs. That way, by definition, the only difference between spells is their spell damage scaling, which is as it should be. (IMO)

I agree, like I said earlier, give us a new channeling spell for affliction. Basically a "drain life" that is pure damage. When this spell has no "added effect" the spell coef will be high enough for it to outdamage SB for a aff lock.

Making it able to crit would also be nice. Alltough it would be cool to have critable dots, I think at least giving us crittable channeling spells would be a step in the right direction without designers having to do to much revamping on dot mechanics and scaling.

I would just love to have a channel spell that is pure damage that I can talent and use glyphs on for some utility. That way I could use my dots and channel between. And choose between a damage channel, lifedrain and manadrain depending on what the situation required.

Whats the point of having 3 different spell DPS stats if they all work the exact same for every spell? I agree with the general concept that affliction needs a way to scale better with crit and haste, but if every spell scaled the exact same from each stat that would be an oversimplification IMO. I like the idea of making haunt crits increase DOT damage, that would make crit desirable for affliction without requiring a huge reworking of game mechanics.

The point is to maintain the balance between all forms of damage at all gear levels. Anything else and we run into the same problem that we did in The Burning Crusade.

If crit, haste, and spell damage average out to affect each from of spell damage equally this means that

If destro is 10% more dps than affliction at entry level gear; at high level gear destro still does 10% more damage. The relative balance remains the same; both specs dps increased at the same rate.

If this does not occure we run into the issue that occured in TBC
Destro does 10% more damage than affliction at entry level as affliction but then because they get the same spell damage increase as afflcition but also signfiicant haste/crit increases at high level gear they now do 30% more dps.

Scaling all damage with all stats means that relative balance between specs and with other classes can be maintained at all gear levels. We won't have the situation like in TBC where affliction was superoverpowered with one gear set then horribly underpowered with another.

Heh, I absolutely love how affliction's spells scale by becoming a more marginal part of a rotation.

There is no *single* thing wrong with affliction. As others have said, we need our own filler, one that makes use of our talent investment. We need each of our spells to gain the same benefit from gear stats as destro spells.

The jump going from 0 to 10 spell power looks wierd.

Are these off by a factor of 10, or am I not understanding right?

No need to make up a new spell. A talent that increased shadowbolt crit damage and crit chance to our target by a % for each of our dots on the target would do the job. That would give us crit scaling and have less of an impact on pvp since resilience cuts crits by a lot already. Just to finish it off you could roll imp shadowbolt into it just for the icing on the cake, but that would probably be too much.

I don't think it is a problem. Different abilities scale differently on different stats. Rogue damage scales on agility and crit and poorly with strength, while warrior damage scale much better on strength. Are rogues or warriors broken because they scale differently with different gear?

Right now, dots scale better with spell damage than direct damage spells, but worse with crit or haste. I agree with the argument that it would be beneficial to have some talent or mechanic that allows our dots to benefit from crit, but I think making dot crit scaling the EXACT SAME as every other spell in the game is silly and counter productive. Among other things that would require a reduction of dot spell damage scaling, and it would make socket colors rather meaningless because each dps gem would add the exact same dps.

Further, what you are suggesting is simply an impossibility without a complete reworking of the talent system. For example, if blizzard *did* initially make all spells scale the same with crit, dmg, and haste, the moment you spec into ruin all your direct damage spells are scaling twice as much with crit as anything else. Or if they balanced on the assumption of ruin, then any warlock without it scales worse. What you are suggesting is very unrealistic.

Your Rogue/Warrior example seems to be missing the point on several levels. Firstly, it makes perfect sense that a Rogue scales differently than a Warrior because they're wholly separate classes. It's an irrelevant point to a discussion of the relative strengths/scaling of different specs within a single class. Secondly, while different abilities scale differently with different stats, it's rare for the bread and butter of a spec to fail to scale with normally relevant stats entirely.

I think you also misconstrue what people are asking for. They aren't asking for DoTs to scale *exactly* the same as other spells, but for Affliction's total damage to scale proportionally to other specs. This requires better crit/haste scaling because at this point even were there gear that focused entirely on Spell Power it would still fail to bridge the gap (single stat gear having less overall itemization value).

The *principle* is simple, but just because people are asking for a simple principle doesn't mean a simple solution is expected.

The problem with that is that people will stack whatever point has the highest DPS potential like they do gems. Their is a penalty for stacking one stat so that other stats become more favorable. Currently, a 30 spell damage, 15 crit bracer might be more DPS than a 36 spell damage, 0 crit bracer. They both have the same itemization budget. If you could have a 45 spell damage bracer, 0 crit, mages, boomkins, locks, and shamans might find it all the best in slot, and there would be no variance. We'd all be running around with 4k spell power, 9% crit in WotLK.

Nobody is arguing that the 'base' damage of affliction should equal destruction and scale in-step if affliction brings more utility. Sadly, I'm not sold on affliction bringing desirable 'must-have' utility. If you read the blue posts, they don't want ANY class to have a unique 'must have' utility. We all know about CoE/Malediction/Ebon Plague, but what if they decide to make something like CoR not stack with Faerie Fire? Already sunder armor does not stack with expose armor. Think about it, if falls in line with what they stated--they are looking to make all the essential raid buffs/debuffs covered by about 10 to 15 classes--so after that, the raid leader has a choice in who to bring based on skill, not a button on their hotbar.

I do think they are aware of affliction's problems. Why do you think they are trying to tack on another 'utility' in Fel intelligence (sadly, not enough to make the class desirable if current scaling issues continue).

In vanilla WoW, locks were lower dps than mages, but because of the 16 debuff limit they really couldn't focus on dots. Not many were complaining about how DoTs don't scale with Crit because chunking shadowbolts was all we were allowed to do. TBC introduced another stat to the game...haste...so that made 3 stats that nukers could use giving them more bang for their itemization budget dollar.

It wouldn't be so bad if they introduced another stat to the game in the later tiers of gear like they did haste in TBC that only affected DoTs, so that DoT classes would have another stat to distribute Item level points on. Imagine a stat like 'Virulence', that increased DoT/channeled damage by x% of damage. Like haste in TBC, you wouldn't see it until the later tiers of gear--when the scaling discrepancy between all the classes start to get all wonky. Nukers would get good returns on haste, crit, and spell damage and very little from virulence, and DoT'ers would get good return on spell damage and virulence, and some on haste and crit.

Several people mention that the stronger scaling of DoTs with spellpower helps to counter the scaling of DD with crit and haste. But that is not the case.

Why? Because spellpower, crit and haste (and also hit but that has a reachable cap) amplify the dps contribution of each other. The more spellpower you have, the more dps crit adds. The more haste you have, the more dps spellpower adds and so on.

So for the whole rotation the dps contributions are NOT something like:
dps = a * sp + b * crit + c * haste + d

Instead you get something like:
dps = a * sp * crit * haste + b * sp * haste + c * sp + ...

Spellpower, crit and haste all depend linearly on itemlevel (il). As a result the dps is approximately (the constants are not supposed to be the same in any of these "formulas"):
dps = a * il^3 + b * il^2 + c * il + d

The strong affliction DoT scaling with spellpower mainly means a big c. That means the dominant part of DoT contribution to dps is linear, while DD contribution is cubed.

ddps/dil = a * il^2 + b * il + c

How are you supposed to keep two scaling curves within a certain percentage of each other that scale with a different power? You will end up with affliction too strong at the start and with early scaling (when the linear scaling is stronger) until the cubed scaling of destro catches up and leaves it in the dust once again. Or you end up with shadowbolt dominating the dps even for affliction in the end and DoTs only there to keep the haste buff running.

Uh, currently the only spec that scales worse with gear than an affliction lock is the shadow priest, but they (for now), at least have sufficient raid utility as to remain needed in raids.

All of your examples, the warrior/rogue, the arms/fury warrior, the feral/moonkin example, have one thing in common: they all have gear specific to their class/spec. A moonkin doesn't use the same gear as a feral, rogues use leather, and warriors use plate (with warriors sometimes using pieces of leather, which is more common among DW fury warriors trying to get hit capped. (Don't quote me on that, though)).

The focus on affliction is pretty simple to understand: destruction is "magey", with it being practically a 1 button spec, especially when the lock has a good shadow priest, raid buffs, mana potions, that results in a 20x shadowbolt, 1x lifetap situation. Especially since a warlock doesn't have much cooldown management to speak of. On the other hand, affliction is considered to be "warlocky", with the whole killing things over time, business. Demonology (going off on a limb here), is mostly ignored, because of the whole pvp thing.

The problem with affliction scaling better with spelldamage is simple: gear across specs and classes is being homogenized. For this reason, every item needs to give the same proportional dps boost to all dps specs that use the item. And there is no doubt in my mind, that t7-t8 is going to be more of the same: large boosts to hit/crit/haste, and minor boosts to spelldamage. Which is just going to result in Affliction being strong at the start (especially if crafted/heroic epics are predominantly spell damage items. Blizz said that they won't be repeating the mistakes of the past, but . . .)

You might not like gear homogenization, but (i think) it is here to stay. Mages, warlocks, priests, will be (other than tier sets), be using almost identical gear (with mp/5 instead of spirit on a few items, an extra few points of haste instead of hit there, etc.) It follows logically that unless each spec/class gets the same proportional benefit, then certain specs/classes will fall behind. And the vagaries of itemization (with a particular stat receiving a higher emphasis at a particular tier), will result in the same problems as we have now.

edit: don't quote, but i think i read somewhere that the wasp poison (which is basically a faerie fire), won't stack with faerie fire itself, and possibly CoR.

In my eyes affliction looks to a lot more powerful even for endgame content than it is in BC right now. With Deaths Embrace and Haunt you will end up dealing quite a lot of damage.

Death's Embrace with Devastation will bring your crit chance on shadows bolts on a target under 20% to 20% just from talents alone. With buffs, totems and gear I am pretty sure you will end up having a bit over 50% crit chance based on experience. For boss fights that is pretty huge and will increase a Warlocks DPS by quite a lot.

Haunt is a static 20% increase in all DoT damage, and it will scale very well with gear upgrades. Together with Death's Embrace you will look at having Improved Shadowbolt up 100% of the time when a boss is under 20%HP, and from the looks of it Destruction specced warlocks will be pretty deep into fire so they won't eat up the charges with their shadow bolts. So I don't think it's unlikely that we will see a constant 15% extra damage to all your DoTs all the time, in addition to the extra damage from the Shadowbolt crit.

Even though Haste doesn't stack so well with DoTs it does now decrease the global cooldown of spells. (Unless something has changed that I missed.) This means that Eradication will not only allow you to send more Shadowbolts but also re-fresh your DoTs faster.

Overall it looks like Blizzard is on the right track when they are making the new Warlock trees, and despite the general attitude towards them I get from these forums I find the new trees to be well designed and fun. They are that in the beta atleast.

One thing though. The wording on Death's Embrace can be understood in 2 ways really. The 15% increase can be a 15% increase of your critical strike rating or a flat out 15% increase. The latter would be better of course, but the Murphy inside of me says it's the former.

No matter how the mechanics of the two talents work eradication and death's embrace don't fix the scaling issue. They actually make it worse.

This is hitting the nail directly on the head. The addition of the haste and crit talents in late affliction don't fix the problem. All the late affliction talents do is increase the coefficent for overall affliction DPS from spellpower. Automatic haste and automatic crit increase the contribution of spellpower in the overall DPS equation. But spellpower still scales lineraly with itemlevel and the coefficent for spellpower don't change because the crit and haste contributions from talents are static values and the crit and haste contribution from gear is very very very small. These talents don't fix the scaling problem.

It really is irrelevent if affliction DPS is compedative at every raiding tier because the math in play here dictates one of three situations will take place. Affliction will start out massively ahead and by the end of the raid season will still be ahead because item levels have not increased enough for other specs to catch up, even with superior scaling. Affliction will start out mostly ahead and by the end of the raid season will be brought along as single slot fillers or not at all if their raid buffs can be replaced. Affliction will start out behind and by the end are so far behind no one would even dream of inviting one to a raid. None of these situations is optimal for anyone.

The only way this can be fixed is by revamping DoT mechanics, either core mechanics or via late affliction talents, so that DoT damage scales with all stats in the same manner that other DD specs do. Obviously not with the exact same DPS proportions from each stat but with the same cubic scaling structure.