Reuben

Someone earlier mentioned they were hit capped and unfortunately their armory wouldn't load for me. If i could trouble what our new hit goal is, or be pointed in the right direction, would be greatly appreciated : )

As for the current discussion, I have tried a multitude of the new specs and find 2/13/56 for be the most comfortable with similar results to to the fel/ruin builds. Although my gear level may be a bit behind to have a clear picture yet.

 

LadyKahz

I'm speccing into affliction for the first time and would apprecate some feedback before we hit our first Naxx run, I tried a variation with imp felhunter and dark pact and I have been performing terribly on my heroics. Planning to spec still in affliction but without the imp felhunter/dark pact.

My rotation is CoE, SB, Immo, Corr, SL, UA, Haunt and SB spam in between DoT refreshing.
I have been using the Felhunter, and I am very unhappy with it. Is there another pet or rotation that would perform better in the respec I feel is incoming?

 

◊ voy1d

As far as I know Dark Pact isn't that great, Life Tap out performs it.

Your rotation (at the start) should be something along the lines of:
CoE (if on CoE duty), Shadow Bolt, Haunt, UA, Immolate, Corruption, CoA (if you are not on CoE duty), SL

Set your Felhunter on attack for Shadowbite. It does take a bit of getting used to, however there is a lot less AOE damage during boss encounters in comparison to say Sunwell.

Warlock - 56 / 0 / 15 (Note, I raid with 1-2 Boomkin so am not on curse duty at all)

 

kaib

That's what I thought too, but the WWS parse above has a lock with that spec doing equally high dps. I undervalued especially imp Soul Leech in static stand & nuke fight. That lock there gains 19k mana from Lifetap and almost 10k from imp Soul Leech. That's a serious dps gain right there. Plus they are giving JoW another massive nurf for mages/warlocks soon, which makes that even more attractive.
0/20/51 looks like a fairly pointless spec to me anyway. The gain in demon are very minor compared to what you skip out on. And the next 10 points in demon up to 30 on the other hand are a massive gain while all you lose is Chaos Bolt. CB is good, but it does not really compete with 5% fire dmg/5% crit.

@Fimotik: I never had that issue really. Pets just generally suck in some fights. Heigan, Sartharion, Sapphiron and Malygos for example. Ideally you should be Affliction for those fights. Still having a phase shifted imp out there is not a big problem with either demon/destro hybrid specs. You still get all your buffs and lose about 400-800 pet dps. Obviously that's not exactly stellar, but it's still not horrible. In those fights pretty much all classes are somewhat handicapped towards there dps. The reasons that pet sucks usually mean that melee dps are not happy either. And hunters actually have to keep their pets up and alive, which costs them a great deal of effort and loss of dps.

 

Robdopmwop

The updated wiki was mentioned in another thread (can't find it exactly at this moment), however you can find the table here : Spell hit - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft
Basicly it comes down to a "raw" hitcap (with no buffs or talents) of 447 rating (on lvl83 mobs).

 

Talimar

this is true, my lifetap returns about 1.2k extra mana over dark pact. however it's nice to have as a backup when it's unsafe to tap

 

• Bethink

My current impression is that the difference between including and leaving out Immolate in the rotation is small - with a slight bias toward including it.

Leaving out Immolate removes some inherent complexity from a rotation consisting of 5 DOTs already. This reduces the chance of screwing up the rotation, for example by missing a Haunt. Missing a single Haunt results in at least one wasted GCD to re-apply Corruption. The loss is even greater if the Corruption has been optimized to include trinket procs such as the one from [Sundial of the Exiled].

My current perference is to include Immolate in fights that otherwise have a low attention requirement for damage casters, such as Patchwerk. On the other hand, if there are lots of other things to pay attention to, such as void zones and shadow fizures, I prefer to simplify things a bit by leaving out that one extra dot.

 

Kalku

0/30/40+1 performs worse than 2/13/56 or 0/41/30 according to simcraft. I ran 3 sets of calculations trying out the various hybrid specs, and 0/41/30 is clearly the best, and equivalent to 2/13/56. I'll check out 0/20/51 later.

 

Robdopmwop

Kalku:
But If i read your examples correctly , basicly 56/0/15 is alot more DPS then the hybrid specs (which actually makes sense). If this is true, i'm really curious about the diffrence between 56/0/15 and 0/20/51+
Also i'm not really sure how to read the graph, these are players in your raid? A little more explanation would really help me understand it better.

 

kaib

If by that you mean that you cast Corr when Sundial procced/use: trinket is up, then I am 99.99% sure that you cannot 'roll' such a powered up Corruption. Next time you cast Haunt/Drain Life, it will be adjusted to your current spellpower. I tested that late in beta cause that seemed insanely overpowered and it definitely rechecked each time the timer was reset.

 

• Bethink

This is good to know.

The exact wording from the Everlasting Affliction ability is: "... and Haunt spells have a 100% chance to reset the duration of your Corruption spell on the target". I infered from the specific focus on the duration of the spell (instead of the spell as a whole) that indeed only the duration is reset but not the spell power associated with the spell instance.

 

crd

I would like feedback from xx/xx/51+ (chaos bolt) locks who are using conflag and backdraft. I've been playing around with what spells to use during backdraft but do not have good parses to analyze. Some things i've tried:

Conflag -> SB SB SB -> Immo (i'd like to think it uses the haste from backdraft best and helps MC uptime, but SB still feels weak)

Conflag -> Immo Incin Incin (< frustrating to wait on GCD for immo, feels wasted)

Also, during bloodlust just about any spell + backdraft feels like i should just be skipping conflag all together. So, what are you doing during bloodlust?

 

Cepha

I do not know how much haste you have but with my badge /naxx gear that I have now, Bloodlust is not able to bring any spell behind gcd except Immolate.

For your rotation question:
If another Lock keeps up Immolate on the mob use
Conflag -> Incin Incin Incin
else
Conflag -> Immo Incin Incin.

But the really interesting question is, what to do if you finished an Incinerate cast and your immolate is at 5,5s.

I always try to conflag as soon as possible in other words as soon as I am below the 5 seconds.

But what to do in this situation?
What to do now? Wait? Cast a new Icinerate?

 

• KingSpeedy

Remember that the felhunter is also buffing your/the group's/the raid's spirit by a decent amount. Keeping a single point in Improved Felhunter allows him to dps all day without running out of mana. You have to babysit him a little bit (fights like Heigan and Sartharion are not too friendly), but he's mostly just a "set it and forget it" pet that comes with a decent buff.


Also, for everyone having issues with the 56/0/15 rotation, I highly recommend syncing up UA and Immo. This more or less takes the place of the UA/Corr "rhythm" we had in the 2.0 era, and makes the casting priority a lot easier to manage.

 

Anthraxx

Conflag -> backdrafted immolate + 2 x incinerate (CB if available) works the best for me. I don't see the point of using SB, MC uptime from CoA is already high and the dmg is low compared to incinerate.

During bloodlust I usualy go: Immolate, spam incinerates(CB if available), backdraft, 3 x soulfire, repeat. If anyone has a better idea how to use that much casting speed in more optimal way please share.

 

Cepha

My Problem with 56/0/15 is that we do not have enough debuff slots. So I am forced to spec destro. Anyone else who has this problem?

 

◊ Melbuframa

This WWS is from last night, I’m running 56/0/15. ~3500 DPS on Patchwerk
Wow Web Stats

Aff IMO is a very viable raid sped and should scale well through T7 Content.

Cepha debuff slot issues really come down to group comp, I’m the only aff lock in our raids and we only run 1 DK and 2 SPs, no Laser Turkey, I have not run into any debuff issues.

 

• KingSpeedy

Yeah, I've kinda mandated only 1 affliction lock in guild as long as a shortage of debuff slots and the Shadow Embrace bug persist. I didn't see anything of mine getting knocked off, but we definitely hit 40 in a hurry.

 

rochan

Wouldn't you want to wait for under 3 seconds to conflag, so you get that last immolate tick? Keep in mind the immolate glyph gives you 20% extra dot damage. Clipping it between 3 and 5 seconds left you'd lose that extra tick. But right now I can't really quantify if it's worth getting the backdraft sooner.

 

Esfernum

What do you mean by "sync Immolate and UA"? Do you mean to make a spell cycle binding both to one key? I've seen many people referring to this specific tip but I don't get how you set it. And more than that how does it actually save some time in your own spell cycle?

Esf

 

Sydane

It saves "brain time" because they both have the same duration. You cast one and then the other always, so if one finishes and gets refreshed you know the other is always the next thing to cast. The complaint about affliction is that balancing DoT uptime is too complex, his suggestions are of ways to minimize the complexity of the rotation with minimal dps loss.

Empathy does not imply approval.

 

Juised

Syncing Immolate and UA refers to the fact that they have the same duration; so if you make it a habit to always cast one right after the other you do not need to pay attention to both timers. For example I always cast UA -> Immo, so I know that as soon as UA expires Immo will be right behind it. If you don't do this, then you're left trying to fit another DoT into a GCD crowded scenario and it is a nightmare. If you keep them together though, its very simple to keep immolate in your rotation for a slight DPS gain.

Edit: Sydane beat me to it.

 

Esfernum

Interesting. Do you have any math proving that Molten Core owns Imp SB? Seeing that SB is still the main damage spell, I was wondering if it's really challenging to buff one DoT (Immolate, and I assume you have the required Glyph) over SB.
I'll go with the same build as of tonight, though I'll change the 2 points in Grim Reach to 1 point in Amplify Curse (seems really benefic for CoA in the long run) and 1 point in Imp FelHunter (so that it never goes OoM). Grim reach seems to be a waste if you don't get the equivalent in the Destro tree, i.e. Destructive Reach.

Esf

 

◊ Melbuframa

I placed the 2 in MC because I was not thinking; putting the "filler points" into ISB would be better however ISB not working with dots makes it pretty bad. I’m running Cor, Agony and SL Major Glyphs.

I went with agony simply because it frees up time in the rotation so that EVERYTHING does not need to be refreshed at the same time, it works for me, kind of personal pref. I guess ill have to test the Immo glyph if I can find it, they seem to be scarce on this server.

You could do this if you wanted both Grim and Des reach, put those last 2 where you want
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I didn’t take imp felhunter because I also don’t use darkpact, Lifetap is far superior at higher gear levels.
Thinking about it I might respec to this Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft tonight

 

Mortala

For our 10 person Naxx group, we will not have a shammy. I am considering a 0/55/16 build for demonic pact. Given that this is only for our 10 person group (our 25 person raid will have shammies), I am wondering if I should be selfish and spec for maximum dps, or go for utility and support our other casters.

Raid composition will be:

1 x prot tank
1 x ret pally/ot
1 x boomkin
2 x mage
1 x lock
1 x sp
1 x disc priest
2 x holy priest

As you can see, we have a predominance of ranged caster classes, so my contribution via dp will be high. Thoughts on this?