Destructive reach is of minimal use due to not having points in the affliction talent which makes you stand closer anyway. Threat with 2/2 imp. DS shouldn't already be an issue. MC will definitely be more valuable.
What about the threat reduction? It can help quite lot on Malygos and other fight's where you do lot's of damage.
Corruption will now gain the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.
Create Healthstone: Attempting to create a healthstone when you already have one no longer consumes mana or triggers the cooldown of this ability.
Demonic Circle: Teleport: the button for this ability will now darken when the Warlock is out of range of the Demonic Circle and will light up when the Warlock is in range.
Demon Power Scaling: Spell power gained from spirit via the Fel Armor ability will now properly affect the scaling of spell power and attack power on summoned demons.
Drain Mana: This spell will no longer cancel when the target?s mana poll is low or the caster?s mana poll is full. It also now generates a very small amount of threat instead of no threat.
Everlasting Affliction: Will now calculate correct damage values for Corruption when it is refreshed in all cases.
Haunt: Will now gain correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target. In addition, this ability is now limited to a single target as intended. This also now works properly when refreshed on its current target.
Mana Feed: This talent will no longer sometimes fire for warlocks who do not have the talent.
Master Conjuror: Tooltip revised to indicate it does not increase the damage bonuses of Firestones or Spellstones.
Metamorphosis: The bonus armor effect from this ability will now calculate properly and interact correctly with armor buffs and debuffs.
Ritual of Doom: A Doomguard summoned with this spell will now scale properly from its master's stats.
Shadow Embrace: This ability will now create a separate debuff stack for each Warlock with the talent, and each warlock will benefit properly from his or her own debuff.
Shadow of Death: This ability will no longer cause tracking abilities to become inactive when the death knight becomes a ghoul.
Soul Siphon: Will now gain the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.
Twisted Faith: This talent will no longer sometimes cause Shadow Word: Pain to fail due to a more powerful spell being in effect.
Unstable Afflcition: Will now gain the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.
That's an identical spec to what I posted. Bad copy/paste? Although I've found myself not using Dark Pact at all, so yeah, I can lose the talent.
But anyway, I'm also not that impressed so far with the DPS I'm putting out as Affliction. It's about equal to my old Destro spec, but 10 times more painful to play as I just stare at DoTimer.
Then again that is with no CoA (didn't realize CoE didn't stack with Boomkins) and a Felhunter (no spirit buff from a priest). Still, those two things wouldn't give me much more DPS I'd imagine.
Yes sorry about that. Was a bad c/p indeed.
The specc I meant to post was Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft. Since you still need the hit talents, I think its too soon for you to start experimenting with the imp dmg. but that will be the next step.
On a side note you need to start making use of Drain Soul and Infernal if you want to get up the charts. Both are a huge boost in the last quarter of a fight.
Just stop applying Immolate after you hit 25%, that makes your uptime on DS a lot longer and just use it as soon as you got your DoT's set up. Apply Haunt as the last one to maximize the uptime on DS, that should give you at least 3 ticks in the 10k area.
I have been reading on here and on some other forums and I can't decided which is a better build overall, Destruction or Affliction. I am currently Affliction (56/00/15), and I have my T7 2 set bonus and other Naxx 25 drops / heroism rewards etc, and on average on the dummies in Org (no raid buffs etc) I can pull out 2.5k dps. In raids on fights like Patchwerk I can pull out about 3.5k dps. What I don't understand is other locks in similar gear pulling 4.5k dps according to their WWS reports. I am pretty good about not clipping my DoTs and keeping good DoT up time, so I am not entirely sure why my dps seems to be so much lower. Also, for Affliction +haste seems to be more important because it allows me to cast more SBs before I need to re-up my DoTs, but what if I do switch to destruction? It would seem that you would want more +crit at that point.
tldr; Affliction or Destruction at this point, and which is more important +haste or +crit?
Last edited by immortalg : 01/07/09 at 1:03 PM.
Reason: Spelling mistakes
I have been reading on here and on some other forums and I can't decided which is a better build overall, Destruction or Affliction. I am currently Affliction (56/00/15), and I have my T7 2 set bonus and other Naxx 25 drops / heroism rewards etc, and on average on the dummies in Org (no raid buffs etc) I can pull out 2.5k dps. In raids on fights like Patchwerk I can pull out about 3.5k dps. What I don't understand is other locks in similar gear pulling 4.5k dps according to their WWS reports. I am pretty good about not clipping my DoTs and keeping good DoT up time, so I am not entirely sure why my dps seems to be so much lower. Also, for Affliction +haste seems to be more important because it allows me to cast more SBs before I need to re-up my DoTs, but what if I do switch to destruction? It would seem that you would want more +crit at that point.
tldr; Affliction or Destruction at this point, and which is more important +haste or +crit?
Haste, in both cases.
If you want some hints on your raidperformance you'd need to stick a WWS with your posting
If you want some hints on your raidperformance you'd need to stick a WWS with your posting
First off thanks for clearing up the haste/crit for me, and I will be sure to get a WWS attached, I was just wondering because I am going to respec soon and it seems to me like everyone is on the fence between affliction/destruction. Everywhere I read, it seems like every Affliction lock swears by Affliction and every Destruction lock swears by Destruction. I have been trying to get my gear as close as possible to what is recommended and it seems at this point I have to be doing something wrong as my gear (as far as I can tell) is actually fairly good.
Since you still need the hit talents, I think its too soon for you to start experimenting with the imp dmg. but that will be the next step.
I've been dropping my hit gems. I used to be up at 14%, then dropped to just above 13%, and now I'm down to 10.5% or so. Yes, that means I have to waste talents on +hit, but it also means I can up my spell damage quite a bit.
Originally Posted by Lominen
On a side note you need to start making use of Drain Soul and Infernal if you want to get up the charts. Both are a huge boost in the last quarter of a fight.
Just stop applying Immolate after you hit 25%, that makes your uptime on DS a lot longer and just use it as soon as you got your DoT's set up. Apply Haunt as the last one to maximize the uptime on DS, that should give you at least 3 ticks in the 10k area.
Yeah, that was my first or second night of raiding as Affliction. When do I drop an Infernal?
And I'm still thinking I try 0/30/40 or whatever. If you don't get Affliction just right, your DPS suffers terribly, plus on fights like Malygos (no sub-25%), your DPS seems to suffer a lot.
Last edited by Viper007Bond : 01/07/09 at 7:47 PM.
First off thanks for clearing up the haste/crit for me, and I will be sure to get a WWS attached, I was just wondering because I am going to respec soon and it seems to me like everyone is on the fence between affliction/destruction. Everywhere I read, it seems like every Affliction lock swears by Affliction and every Destruction lock swears by Destruction. I have been trying to get my gear as close as possible to what is recommended and it seems at this point I have to be doing something wrong as my gear (as far as I can tell) is actually fairly good.
You are welcome. The most common thought on this seems to be that haste is for Aff and Crit for destro, which makes sense. If you got a ton of haste and no crit perhaps it will tip a bit, but on a general basis haste will be better. First of all Haste is a lot harder to come by. You get a lot of crit from being in a raid. From mages, from 2pc bonus, from Boomkins, from Elemental Shamans etc. You gain haste from WoA totem and Boomkins if they are specced for it. Secondly its almost 2% haste vs. 1% crit. And finally, you will find that the 1% dmg from direct dmg really isnt that much.
Specc atm. is A LOT about feel and what you started off with. Simply because of the complex rotations. Like everything else it takes practice to become good and if you feel like you are good at rotating your DoTs as Aff, then all of the sudden you get BD, you have to execute Immolate exactly at the right time and not whenever you have time to refresh etc. So usually people stick with, and defend, whatever they feel the most comfortable with. However it is hard to argue against the fact that Affliction is the front horse based on WWS at least.
Originally Posted by Viper007Bond
Yeah, that was my first or second night of raiding as Affliction. When do I drop an Infernal?
And I'm still thinking I try 0/30/40 or whatever. If you don't get Affliction just right, your DPS suffers terribly, plus on fights like Malygos (no sub-25%), your DPS seems to suffer a lot.
Well as the Infernal lasts exactly 1min regardless of when you drop and the factthat you won't have a pet afterwards, it becomes an art predicting how fast the Boss health is dropping to calculate your sweet spot. What I do, cause I know that our PW kills are usually just around the 3min mark is, that I pop Blood Fury as soon as the fight starts (2min CD racial) and that way I know that when that expires, its time to drop my Infernal.
To op it even more you can go with a Doomguard (which also has an amazing attack speed debuff on the boss, wtb this pet in arena). Completely unbuffed mine did around 550 dps in a 10man, but ofc that wont show on WWS as there are some bugs with it atm. But then its still an increase to drop the infernal with 1 min remaining. Then its ofc. a discussion if you should blow both CDs, but thats the most effective at least :P
As I mentioned above, Affliction, as well as every other specc, takes quite a bit of time to settle in completely.
However on Malygos in particular, we always have Locks topping, at least in p1. Due to the fact of teleporting out of Vortex, combined with the Power Spark on both you and your imp is just amazing. Its easily 5-6k dps even with the moving etc. Also you should have the edge on p3 as you are used to keeping your DoTs up, right?
53/0/18 gives me alot of freedom to switch out gear, into more spellpower. But from all the WWS if looked at it seems like the 56/0/15 does more damage. I don't see a point in speccing into malediction because my guilds raid comp usually has a doom chicken or an unholy DK. But at the same time it has that 3% spell power. How does that get put into affect?
Well the main reason you should pick up Malediction is for the 3% spell damage. Also the tooltip is very vague, it says 3% increased spell damage, not spellpower. When you spec into it, you shouldn't see any increase in your spellpower. So this just means a 3% flat increase to all of your damage, so its definitely worth picking up. It is actually better that it gives you a 3% increase to all damage instead of a 3% spellpower increase.
Question about spell pen, previously, locks didn't need it because CoS/E was assumed to be up at all times, and thus did all the work of any resistances the mob had (IIRC, don't mobs have a little by default?) But now since Ebon Plague and Earth And Moon generally do the work for us, is that Spell pen still needed for a DPS increase?
But at the same time it has that 3% spell power. How does that get put into affect?
Spell damage not spell power. It increases the damage you do by 3%. There are far worse talent points you can spend. (Also, it's nice for P3 Malygos to have that CoE up).
Question about spell pen, previously, locks didn't need it because CoS/E was assumed to be up at all times, and thus did all the work of any resistances the mob had (IIRC, don't mobs have a little by default?) But now since Ebon Plague and Earth And Moon generally do the work for us, is that Spell pen still needed for a DPS increase?
No current bosses have spell resists that you can mitigate using penetration. It's a PvP stat.
Coolio, I was wonder because I need one blue gem to fulfill my meta, and thought that perhaps a spell pen might give more DPS than spirit would, but I wasn't sure what sort of resistances bosses had these days.
53/0/18 gives me alot of freedom to switch out gear, into more spellpower. But from all the WWS if looked at it seems like the 56/0/15 does more damage. I don't see a point in speccing into malediction because my guilds raid comp usually has a doom chicken or an unholy DK. But at the same time it has that 3% spell power. How does that get put into affect?
I'm using the 1st one with quite decent results (5k dps on Patchwerk25 range).
Pros:
-You can live with 10% hit (9% for smelly Alliance) which gives you plenty of room for these lovely sp gems. That's a big boost, don't underestimate it.
-When you get better gear you will just slowly swap two points from cataclysm/suppression per 1% hit gained into for ex. imp. DS or MC and eradication.
Cons:
-When your boomkin and sp have a night off you have to be able to pull this extra 80 hit out of your bank and wear potentially lesser gear.
-From my experience, with anything less then awesome tank you might have some threat problems.
About 2nd option. 3/3 Suppression is a bad idea w/o Cataclysm. You'll always want to cap destruction spells. Missing a dot hurts much less then missing a shadow bolt (unless it's Haunt...).
I'm using the 1st one with quite decent results (5k dps on Patchwerk25 range).
Pros:
-You can live with 10% hit (9% for smelly Alliance) which gives you plenty of room for these lovely sp gems. That's a big boost, don't underestimate it.
-When you get better gear you will just slowly swap two points from cataclysm/suppression per 1% hit gained into for ex. imp. DS or MC and eradication.
Cons:
-When your boomkin and sp have a night off you have to be able to pull this extra 80 hit out of your bank and wear potentially lesser gear.
-From my experience, with anything less then awesome tank you might have some threat problems.
About 2nd option. 3/3 Suppression is a bad idea w/o Cataclysm. You'll always want to cap destruction spells. Missing a dot hurts much less then missing a shadow bolt (unless it's Haunt...).
For the 1st one, wouldn't it be a good dmg boost taking one point of imp sb and putting it in to MC?
Assuming 80%+ MC uptime with 1/3 (a lot of shadow dmg, SHOULD be enough to proc it a lot, but correct me if I'm wrong) and with Immolate being around 12% your dmg I'd estimate 1 point o be 1% of damage increase (12% times a bit less then 10%).
Now for the 4/5 imp. SB instead of 5/5... I cast around 50 shadow bolts on a 3.5 minute Patchwerk kill. Assuming 35% crit rate it will be 17 sb crits. In the best case scenario it will be 100% sb uptime. in the worst (17 crits at just before SD range - thus only 16 casts benefiting from the talent) it's 32.5% uptime.
SB is around 30% of your damage - so the border dmg gain values from the WHOLE talent are 3% to 0.975% (unlikely like hell). This will be in 2-3% regions in most of the cases, although shit happens.
How to value last talent point in imp. SB then? Probably between 0.6 and 0.2%.
It seems inferior to 1/3 MC (under above assumptions).
Can someone please provide hard number for MC uptime as affliction with 1/3 talents?
PS. How does MC and Haunt work together for immolate ticks?
Assuming 80%+ MC uptime with 1/3 (a lot of shadow dmg, SHOULD be enough to proc it a lot, but correct me if I'm wrong) and with Immolate being around 12% your dmg I'd estimate 1 point o be 1% of damage increase (12% times a bit less then 10%).
Now for the 4/5 imp. SB instead of 5/5... I cast around 50 shadow bolts on a 3.5 minute Patchwerk kill. Assuming 35% crit rate it will be 17 sb crits. In the best case scenario it will be 100% sb uptime. in the worst (17 crits at just before SD range - thus only 16 casts benefiting from the talent) it's 32.5% uptime.
SB is around 30% of your damage - so the border dmg gain values from the WHOLE talent are 3% to 0.975% (unlikely like hell). This will be in 2-3% regions in most of the cases, although shit happens.
How to value last talent point in imp. SB then? Probably between 0.6 and 0.2%.
It seems inferior to 1/3 MC (under above assumptions).
Can someone please provide hard number for MC uptime as affliction with 1/3 talents?
PS. How does MC and Haunt work together for immolate ticks?
Yea that is how I imagined it in my head (no math at all). I believe 4/5 imp sb and 1/3 MC is better then 5/5 Imp SB for just that reason. I believe some more exact math will prove us correct aswell.
About 2nd option. 3/3 Suppression is a bad idea w/o Cataclysm. You'll always want to cap destruction spells. Missing a dot hurts much less then missing a shadow bolt (unless it's Haunt...).
Isn't this just plain false? DOTs have higher DPCT than SB and are the reason why you put them all up + Haunt before starting your SB-fillers.
Well you are going to want to hit cap all of your spells including your destruction ones. Missing immolate completely throws off your rotation and missing shadow bolts hurt you as well. DoTs may have a higher DPCT than SB, but that is when you allow them to run their entire duration. When you miss a DoT, you can just recast it, its not like you are losing out on all of its damage.
Haunt is different though, and the most important reason to become hit-capped for affliction. Missing a haunt does two things, the haunt debuff falls off reducing your DoT damage by 20%, and your corruption falls off forcing you to use a GCD recasting it and you lose some corruption uptime.
Isn't this just plain false? DOTs have higher DPCT than SB and are the reason why you put them all up + Haunt before starting your SB-fillers.
Not quite, you can just recast a dot if it misses, and the only thing you're cutting into is filler time, plus the GCD worth of added downtime on the dot.
More explicitly: If you miss a dot, you've missed 1.5 seconds of the dot's damage plus 1.5 seconds of your SB's damage. If you miss a SB, you've missed the full 2.5 seconds of your SB's damage. I'll just use my own gear level plugged into a simcraft run as data for a rough calculation, using CoA as an example (8846 total damage vs 6294 for SB):
Dotmiss = 1.5 * 8846/24 + 1.5 * 6269/2.5 = 4314 damage lost
SB-miss = 6294 damage lost
So yes, missing an SB is significantly worse than missing a dot.
Not quite, you can just recast a dot if it misses, and the only thing you're cutting into is filler time, plus the GCD worth of added downtime on the dot.
More explicitly: If you miss a dot, you've missed 1.5 seconds of the dot's damage plus 1.5 seconds of your SB's damage. If you miss a SB, you've missed the full 2.5 seconds of your SB's damage. I'll just use my own gear level plugged into simcraft run as data for a rough calculation, using CoA as an example (8846 total damage vs 6294 for SB):
Dotmiss = 1.5 * 8846/24 + 1.5 * 6269/2.5 = 4314 damage lost
SB-miss = 6294 damage lost
So yes, missing an SB is significantly worse than missing a dot.
I totally agree with your data and your opinion, however you always need to weigh in on how much a missed spell matters. If you're 0/41/30, it becomes quite obvius after a while that missing a corruption/CoA every now and then isn't that bad. It's just a GCD anyway, takes away a part of your filler spell sure but nothing we warlocks can't handle. The deeper you go in to destro/affliction, the more crucial it becomes not missing as the rotations gets more complicated.
Imagine the consequence of missing a Chaos Bolt or a Haunt, there we're talking damage lost! Could potentially make a huge dps loss!
01/07/09, 8:46 AM
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