PVE Spec Discussion
 

I'm in the process of revamping this first post. Pretty busy with finals and Wrath, so it likely won't be completely transformed until sometime after Winter break starts. I will be cutting out my opinions and simply linking to another post where I discuss my favored specs.

I also plan to go through this thread and provide links to all the posts of WWS reports that people have kindly provided to facilitate discussion (kind of like the few that I've already done).

Talent Tree Discussions:
___Affliction___
Dots and you: The Affliction Warlock Thread, by Namnalia
Affliction Raiding Rotations/Guide, by Fallenman

___Demonology___
Demonology Thread, by Splot

___Destruction___
The Mage Equivalent: The Destruction Warlock, by krilz/Kylskaap

Suggested PVE Specs, in no particular order:
1) Haunt/Ruin ... 51/0/15 +5
WWS: Maalakai 11/19/08

2) Haunt/Demonic Aegis ... 51/13/5 +2
WWS:

3) Metamorphosis/Ruin ... 0/51/15 +5
WWS:

4) Demonic Pact/Devastation ... 0/50/21
WWS: Nicsnock 11/23/08

5) Felguard/Emberstorm ... 0/41/30
WWS: Kabale 11/19/08

6) Master Demonologist/Shadow and Flame ... 0/30/40 +1
WWS:

7) Chaos Bolt/Demonic Aegis ... 0/13/51 +7
WWS:

8) Shadow Mastery/Shadow and Flame ... 30/0/40 +1
WWS:

9) Demonic Sacrifice/Shadow and Flame ... 0/21/40 +10
WWS:

So which one (or a totally different one) are you? Which talents do you take or not take? Do you sacrifice talents with minimal DPS impact for Survivability/Soloability/Fun talents?

WWS Parses are welcome of course, it would be great to see some hard numbers and theorycrafting.



My personal opinion on 0/41/30 (old post, written very soon after I started 80 raiding):
I am 0/41/30 at the moment, and really enjoying it. I haven't had a chance to raid with it yet, but it was pulling 1900 DPS on a dummy with no COE or other buffs. The rotation is CoA/Corruption/Immolate and Incinerate. I'm not sure if Corruption is worth it yet, the mana cost seems steep for it, resulting in a lot of Life Tapping.

I think the Felguard will be a very powerful pet early on, even Blizzard knows it does like 800-1000 DPS in raids. Going 30 into Destro gets you Emberstorm, which is the main powerhouse of Fire. The only really important talent you miss is Shadow and Flame.

In return you gain 10% crit for you and your Felguard, and the FG itself. Because of the huge devalue in ratings, 10% crit really helps out. I have an extremely low crit chance without it, so the "diminishing" return of crit doesn't affect me too much for now. (By that I mean that 1% crit is 1% base damage, not 1% total damage. So the higher crit you have, the less "percent total damage" you gain from 1% more crit.)

It's also a very simple rotation, with no Chaos Bolt or Conflag/Backdraft to worry about.

I think in endgame, 0/30/40 +1 will outscale it though, eventually I will probably spec that. For now though, the Felguard also helps with questing for money, which is another plus.

I haven't seen how Affliction measures up relatively with 0/41/30, 0/30/40+1, 51+ Demo, and 51+ Destro however.

My only qualm with full Affliction is the sheer number of spells to work with. Blizzard has even admitted the toughness of pulling off the rotation of spells. With the latest patch, the set is still as hard as ever (Haunt is nice, but look! another DoT), and the total damage is still only par with the other specs.

I did some basic testing (Just 5-10 minutes of straight up nuking without raidbuffs so numbers are skewed quite a bit from real raid situations) in the last stages of beta. I tried 56/0/15 based specs, 0/31/40 and 0/13/51+ specs. (I did a short test with 0/40/30+1 but found the DPS to be lackluster compared to the variant which included Shadow and Flame.)

56/0/15
Spells used: All DoTs (Skipping Immolate is not an option imo), Haunt + Shadowbolt fillers with Drain Soul below 25%
In terms of raw DPS, nothing could hold a candle next to the deep affliction spec, during the initial test raids with 2000ish spellpower and no mage/moonkin or elemental in the raid I still pushed 3200 DPS over 5 minute fights sustained nuking. (This was mostly in the blue PvP set so quite crappy stats) and on dummies with no other buffs but my own I could sustain 2600 DPS (and consider that this is without pandemic since it ticks for 1 on dummies). I find it rather easy to play affliction well if I actually get to stand and focus on it, harder than Demonology yeah but easier than Destruction.

0/31/40
Spells used were: CoA, Corr, Immolate, Incinerate
The highest nuke spec that I could find, probably because of the simplicity in the rotation leading to no GCD clipping, I don't know why I got higher numbers with this than with the deep destruction spec. I blame my own inability to play destruction to the fullest when I did these tests even if I thought I got the rotation right. Maybe the lag caused problems or I just sucked. Anyway, I got to roughly 2300-2400 DPS on the dummies using this. It had alot bigger mana issues than the other specs I tried but that should be better with replenishment and JoW.

0/13/51+
Spells used were: CoA, Corr, Immolate, Incinerate with Chaos Bolt whenever the cooldown was up.
I only managed 2200 DPS or so on the dummies using this spec, the lowest out of the three and it suffers from heavy GCD clipping during external haste effects such as heroism. I find it very enjoyable to play though and definitely the spec which makes me focus the most on how to DPS to push it to the maximum since none of the timers line up. I've played this alot since I did these tests and it might be possible that I can push it a bit higher on DPS now than before, I seem to register around 2500 DPS in stand and nuke fights now on 80 live in heroics with no essential caster buffs and fresh level 80 gear (Mostly Q rewards since this is a reroll character). I still have my doubts of this specs absolute value in high end PvE though compared to master demonologist based destruction specs. The top tiers of destruction are just too lackluster.

On a separate note, I really dislike how the new trees forces you to use both DoTs and nukes, leaving you effectively at 30 yards range if you don't invest in 2 sets of range increasing talents. I don't mind it that much as affliction as I can just spend 2 additional points in destruction to get them but it's extremely limiting to destruction and demonology.

I would appreciate other warlocks takes on these specs or if you have found others which surpass them. Since my raidgroup crashed at M'uru I haven't been able to do any good real tests in raid based environments.

EDIT: I've seen alot of people complain about affliction which I don't really understand. It's just UA, Immolate (Which I tend to cast together since they always line up), SL/Agony (Which you can cast together if you are willing to pass on 1 tick every 30 seconds) and Haunt/Shadowbolts as a filler. Essentially I have to keep track of 3 timers, which isn't causing me any issues so far. I have much greater problems with destruction where I have a 10 second cooldown, a 12 second cooldown, a 15 second cooldown, an 18 second cooldown and a 28 second cooldown to keep them all in check and flowing without losing time. (Even if you only hit a single target mob so that your immolate and conflag cooldowns remain together, that's still 4 different ooldowns to keep track of in relation to afflictions 3 major timers. On top of this affliction got better movement and self sustainability + better debuffs.

Where'd Corruption go?

I was under the impression that Everlasting Affliction will only reset the duration, not put it on the target for you.

It does just refresh it, but since it's a onetime application I don't really count it. I just pop it up at the start of the fight and it stays there so there's no interference with my DPS rotations from it.

My personal belief after 2 naxx clears is that 0/30/40 + 1 is a superior nuking spec to 0/13/5x. The top of our destruction tree is simply rather weak.

Quickly: Xixors, why have you put a point into Demonic Sacrifice as well as 5 into Master Demonologist? It seems like they would cancel each other out.

Edit:
Also Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft 28/43. Thoughts on 3/3 Emp Imp? I haven't tried the talent but heard it its powerful, and a bonus to crit is always helpful- as Fulgurite said.

I've been using 56/0/15 for about a week now since dinging 80, and I can definantly see it being a strong spec, I've only been doing heroics with the other 4 80's in my guild as we're still waiting for others to ding 80 for Naxx.
Therein lies the only problem I'm having with the spec, being trash. The other two dps are a BM hunter and a Ret pala, I can usually comfortably outdps the paladin but trying to stay above a BM hunter just using Steady Shot its pretty damn hard, of course that may well be different in raids and its bosses that matter more anyway.

I was specced for improved fel hunter due to not having a disc priest in our guild, but after actually looking into it the extra spirit is virtually nothing, we have a mage for int and the fel hunter never runs out of mana anyway. Although I'm sure everyone knows that, the only thing I wasn't certain about was choosing between pets, I've settled on using the fel hunter anyway as spell lock and dispell can be very handy, I'm pretty sure that outlook will change for raids as there'll be more people to dispell and you obviously can't spell lock a boss.

Currently I'm using a few talents I could skip for better options, mainly Fel Conc and Imp Drain Soul, I find them quite nice as I haven't quite started raiding, though ideally I'd take some points in both hit talents as while hit rating seems easily availible there also seems to be lots of gear options around with large amounts of other dps stats which look much more appealing than items with just hit and spell power.

Because keeping an imp alive is not always possible. Our pets still do not have the staying power of hunter pets.

You don't lose anything worthwhile to get it anyway.

This might be a "simple question" but it's more relevant to this thread, I think.

Honestly, how good is Demonic Aegis?

In TBC it was a flat 30 spellpower. I was surprised that people try to spec for it. I counted it more as filler than an honest DPS talent, and figured people only took it because there really aren't any good talents at all on the way to Demonic Sacrifice (I ranked it below DE, which is not a DPS talent at all). Apparently people are not only willing to spend the talent points on Demonic Aegis, but actually spec towards it specifically. I realize that fel armor is better and therefore the talent is better, but I still look to it as filler. Is the rest of the world insane, or am I too stuck in my ways?

Per talent point it's 19 spellpower and 3% of your spirit (arguably, it costs 5 or 10 talent points due to lack of DPS talents before it, for 11.4+1.8% to 5.7+0.9% per effective point, assuming you use the imp). It's not the waste of talent points to pick up it used to be, but I still don't see it being actually worth building towards.

Having cleared WotLK content, the spec I've had the most success with is 0/41/30. Was able to push 4.3k DPS on 25 Patchwerk, the only thing missing was a Moonkin. I did some testing of Haunt in 10mans, and that was able to breach 3k DPS. I'm curious as to what numbers others are seeing.

Also has there been any maths on the 2 and 4 piece set bonuses of T7? Sorry if it's been answered elsewhere, I'll review other threads and delete if necessary.

With me still in half 70 gear, and the other half 80 blues, I still have just over 300 spirit. I anticipate with a good set of 80 epics I will have 400-500 spirit unbuffed. With 80 from a Disc Priest and ~50 from Kings, that comes out to 580 spirit, or 17 spell power per point, for a total of 36 per point, 108 total.

You also gain an additional 27 spell power just from your T7 4 piece bonus if you have Demonic Aegis.

100-110 spell power isn't what it used to be, but I don't think it's marginal. That's just over the spell power contribution of any one set piece, and about what the T6 4 piece bonus was estimated at for 70. And it's a hell of a lot more than 30.

For Kabale;

We've been working through Naxx 10 Man over the last few days and on Patchwerk last night I hit 3294 DPS (as per recount)

Raid make up: Prot Paladin, Prot Warrior, 2 x Resto Shaman, Resto Druid, BM Hunter, Destruction Warlock, Affliction Warlock (myself), Balance Druid, Elemental Shaman

Spec: 56 / 0 /15
Pet: Imp (did not have him attacking)
Spells: Corruption, CoA, Haunt, UA, SL, SB (Immolate wasn't used)
Gear: My gear is mostly still T6 (BT/Sunwell) with 3 Wrath Blues and epics (gloves were Sunfire Handwraps)

Only real improvements I could see for that is using the Imp (or possibly spec'ing for imp Felhunter and using that) and including Immolate. Additionally I know I stuffed up the rotation a few times, and thus wouldn't be surprised if I was able to break 3.5k dps with those improvements.

Kabale :
I wonder what kind of playstyle you use when playing the 0/41/30 (spells,pet), I have extensivly used the haunt/ruin build, Going around 3k dps on Patch. Then i see you going 4.3k and i wonder which spells/rotations you use playing 0/41/30 since i have no experience in demonology.
I wanted to try Buzzkill's(0/20/51) spec, with imp out and have yet to see the results in raid.
So if you can provide me with the playstyle you use, i can compare what works best for me using all three specs and post some things here later this week.

My issue with using 0/20/51 in Naxx was the several boss fights that it was not possible to keep the imp up, in addition to fights where you could only keep the imp up my micro managing it's position. It is frustrating as hell (at least for me) to have the imp die when you have 13 talent points invested in it.