Can anyone post some numbers with the latest number of the spreadsheet? I know it's not 100% updated, but I'd love to see the value of a crit/hit/haste/spelldmg it produces, and I dont have windows or office, and openoffice cant read it unfortunatly.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft This is the spec I got atm, I'm hit capped, with 334 crit rating and 1967 spelldmg buffed.

All corruption/unstable affliction/shadow bolt and haunt are affected by crit. Which is 50% of my dmg, which leads me to believe crit is far more worth as affliction than I previously though it'd be.

I spent an hour or so yesterday testing some different specs as well, and I can just pretty much confirm Zacaras post above.

These were just 4 minute nuke tests on the "Heroic" lvl 80 dummies in IF with no other buffs then my own, so I guess it's slightly skewed from a proper raid scenario where specs like the Felguard might scale better with full raid buffs, but still. Current gear is T6/SWP left overs and some blues/heroic/badge/Naxx10 like alot of people have atm.

Specs tried was 56/0/15, 0/41/30 Felguard and 7/13/51 Aegis and deep Affliction just leaves the other specs way behind. Affliction averaged at 2300 or so, with the Fire Destro just reaching the 2k mark at one of the attempt. Felguard/Emberstorm was even further behind at around 1800. While I haven't raided that much as Destro and might have been abit rusty on the rotations I dont feel I did _that_ bad.

And remember that this is vs the Affliction-unfriendly mechanical dummies where Pandemic ticks for 1 and you dont gain any life back from Siphon Life.

I have done some Nax10 raids and I seem to do really well with it, dont have any problems maintaining the dots unless there is some major movement involved. To me it seems like you currently get rewarded for being able to keep everything up, which I like. It does seem to be abit of "skill" involved as well, since I have played with a few other Affliction locks in raid that seem to use about the same spells but do less damage, even though it's roughly the same gear. My best guess this is from clipping dots and leaving them off for too long?

One thing that is still up for debate for me is Immo or no Immo. It's the lowest on my priority list and the first thing I drop if I have to, and I dont keep it up during execute range. My theory is that with 5/5 ISB I should gain more from trying to get one more SB in instead of an Immolate in most scenarios. Or maybe cast SB if Shadow Mastery (ISB) is active, else Immo? I guess there is some point in crit% where SB will be higher avg DPCT than Immo with ISB, I'll see what I'll find. Have to dig through the two mega-threads.

I'm in BT and Sunwell gear still, so I guess that should be the usual stats a naxx starter gear has. According to the spreadsheets, Immolate has 4.3k dpsc while sb has only 2.3k if hardcast and 3.8k with a nf proc. Therefore, I guess immolate is a "must cast" for an affliction warlock, although it's your weakest dot, it's still a lot better than your filler.
I dont think you can overcome this easily as the difference is so huge. Maybe with the next tier, but t7 wont suffice: Even if I increase spelldamage to 2.5k, hit max, crit 40% and 20% haste, immolate is still superior. It scales a bit worse, but the break even point is far away.

With the 2pT7 proc you'll probably want to cast Immolate.

Anthraxx, the lack of Demonic Empowerment was from testing with Demonic Sacrifice to see whether or not sacced Felguard and summoned Doomguard would do any decent DPS. It turned out to be worse than simply having the Felguard out, and I've completely neglected to respec. Thanks for the reminder

What about Shadow Mastery? It doesn't affect Immolate.

And if Immolate is better than Shadowbolt shouldn't we then drop ISB and take Molten Core instead?

Even if I can't provide the maths right now, I highly doubt this is the case. Remember that you won't spam immolate, it's damage per cast time is high but the percentage of your damage which originates from the spell is fairly low. Therefore a 10% increase to immolate is alot smaller than a 10% increase to shadowbolt which will be a substantial part of your damage (Around 35-40%).

Shadow Mastery is 15%, besides ISB will boost all my dots except Immolate.

@Cigaras:

ISB doesn't affect DoTs anymore.


Impressive.

Have you tried Meta/Ruin yet with that gear? I used the spec in our first 10-man Naxx while still sporting a full Sunwell kit and did pretty well:

Patchwerk

I'm thinking with your gear you'd be able to put out close to 5k. I might try it again myself in a 25-man setting but my gear is pretty much chosen exclusively for Affliction so I might not be able to put up the numbers.

ISB only affects direct damage spells now, not dots.

I'm gonna make some more tests when I get home since I also started to think about Molten Core vs ISB. I think it's fair to say MC will be up more or less 100% with all the dots on that can trigger it. So it's basically 10% more damage to Immolate or 10% dmg on some Shadow Bolts. The ISB uptime is also really low at the moment since I guess I'm not the only one running around with a crit% in the 11-14% range...

Plus if you go for 2/3 Molten Core you will have Cataclysm, which you wont have if you go 15 points Destro with 5/5 ISB.

Seeing as how I'm incredibly lazy, would you mind linking those builds you tried? I can sort of see how they develop on my own, but I want to see if my talent-build thinking is similar to what you were testing out.

Reaching Cataclysm is a good point, oh and Shadow Mastery is 15% yeah, sorry I must have misunderstood your point since I can't imagine any kind of affliction build not having 5/5 in that talent. And regarding ISB, I consider it being up quite a bit anyway since with all the raidbuffs which increases crit rate, you'll end up at fairly high ratings anyway.

Yes. 4% crit for you and the pet in exchange for some passive pet healing is a mistake. "Smart" AoE heals will heal the pet if he takes dmg, and health funnel ticks for a ridiculous amount (i get 1350ish in complete crap gear). Take 5/5 Demonic Tactics.

Also, I've been running FG/Emberstorm and hve this question: What glyphs? I'm planning on corruption, agony, and felguard....the latter two have limited availability on my server atm. Any thoughts on this?

With 1 free point to throw somewhere as Haunt/Ruin. Would it be more dps to put it into Demonic Power & use a Succubus over a fel hunter? Assuming you have a disc priest.

WoWHead Talent - 53/0/18

You get molten core uptime of about 60% with only DoTs, SB and haunt will increase this. A 6% incrase (60%x10%) to a ~10% spell is roughly 0.6% increase per point. This weighs fairly equally against the two hit talents, where as the next point only gives you 0.25% increase per point and thus falls below the hit talents. A conservative estimate of 65% uptime on ISB puts it at around the 0.4% increase per point.

Balanced Hit talents with only a need of 26 more hit.

Thoughts?

[e] WoWHead Talent - 53/0/18 - 3/3 Supression Added if you don't mind uncapped Destruction hit (~0.4% dps loss)

I've been running 0/13/58 and I did (although I don't have wws, I'll try to find the recount screenshot) like 4600ish dps on Patchwerk. I don't have a really good mainhand yet - but my issue picking a spec right now is that theoretically, affliction should outdps destro - at least via all known simulations. However, empirically, I'm still struggling to find examples of this.

I mean, rng obviously plays a huge roll. Nonetheless - 3m30s fights don't really tell us much about sustained dps. I mean, Maalakai did solid dps obviously and it's making me curious about trying affliction and doing comparisons (damn resets only once a week, I want to fight everything every day to further tune things) - but I just empirically, other then his dps output, haven't seen affliction top any of my totals - and for him it was very little on an extremely short fight. I don't do 2/13/56 due to shadowfury being semi clutch on some things and me deciding to just grab that extra bit of hit from cataclysm (I lose 10% on CoA). I also haven't found a CoA glyph which would obviously up my dps due to less recasting (albeit slightly) - but I'd love to see more empirical data and will also get a hold of my data as well.

My 4600ish was with old world flasks, old world food, and flamecaps.

I'll try to get a wws parse from our next kill but if anyone else has parses post them because like I said - I'm not convinced either way since I've seen empirical data showing both being competitive with each other. The bonus of my spec is I bring imp healthstones, for whatever that's worth >.>.

Mal, have you tried 2/3/56 or some derivative? I tend to chaos bolt, immolate, coa, and incinerate, then conflag at around 3-4ish seconds, etc. I don't use corruption as I feel it's a waste of a gcd for minimal molten core uptime.


edit: Most of my gear was still sunwell gear, and I was still using the 4pc bonus (which I've totally replaced now). So hopefully I'll see an increase even with losing the 6% incinerate bonus. Overall in my preliminary tests, it should be a dps increase even without the bonus. Also, our pwerk kill was with 8 healers so it was bit longer (we're not going for dps records or anything but instead gearing people up, hence a slightly slower fight).

While everyone seems to be talking about 0.13.51 variations, I was wondering if anyone has run as 7.3.58+3. Given the relatively low levels of spirit on T6 raiding gear, Aegis is only adding a small amount of additional damage. Wouldn't imp. Lifetap be a better option here? This also opens up the option for max rank healthstone, shadowfury, or additional points in imp. Corruption depending on your raid makeup and playstyle. I'm personally looking at running this: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This build is assuming I'm the only warlock and on curse duty, hence the options for the additional points.

I can't see why you would happily be on curse duty. A DK or Moonkin would really make you life easier: CoA is much better than Corr for Molten Core upkeep - the use of Corr is marginal at best - and both Ebon Plaguebringer and E&M are better than Destro CoE.

If you are looking for 5mans or 10mans without DKs/Moonkins I would really reccommend Affliction or push for one of the aforementioned classes in your raid. Destruction is perfectly viable, but just in your situation Affliction seems to be better when there are no 13% buffers around.

WWS parse from a nax25 with 41 demon/30 destro (arlena) and 31 demon/40 destro (warsaw).

Wow Web Stats

Warsaw is a bit undergeared, my gear is pretty good. I reached 4400 dps on patchwerk with a 50% crit rate on incinerate (which is about normal with my gear and moonkin + scorch). Atm I am very happy with this spec, but I'd really like to see a parse from someone in similar gear running a full Affliction and someone with a Chaos Bolt/imp Fel Armor spec.

WWS with Haunt and Chaos Bolt specs both putting out similar numbers to 0/41/30.

I've been trying out the 0/41/30 Felguard/Emberstorm build as well. My gear is still nearly all T6/Sunwell gear so I'm behind a lot of our guild who levelled very quickly. The DPS seems to be OK but suffers from a couple of issues.

Firstly, the felguard being melee is just impossible for some fights with my felguard getting 1 or 2-shot. On dragons they're a pain because they automatically attack from the rear so are getting tail-swiped constantly. When the FG dies the DPS loss is huge, and resummoning isn't always practical. Managing an imp is much easier as they're ranged, so whenever you need to move you can move the imp with you. However running with an imp with FG spec is a huge DPS loss.

The second issue is, being a build that is crit-heavy, it can be hit hard by RNG.

At the moment it's the CB destro lock who is topping meters in our guild, but he has the best gear of the locks so it's hard to compare.

I am really tempted to ditch the felguard and just go for a destro/imp build.

I did some SimulationCraft on the 0/41/30 spec, and it turns out to be about equal to the 2/13/56 spec. This is pretty consistent with my (one raid worth of) naxx experience with a fairly equivalently geared lock doing 2/13/56, and then me as 0/41/30.

The setup was:
And the result:


Unfortunately (as far as I'm concerned) both still lag behind affliction, at least on the 'perfect' fight.

I think that 2/13/56 is an inferior build to 0/20/51 or 0/30/41 destro builds. Imp CoA is poor given that CoA does about 5% of your total DPS as destro and doesn't benefit from crit or haste, you get more benefit from not using so many poor top-end destro talents and getting some of the mid-demo ones.