Yes that's right. I keep forgetting to use CoD instead of CoA, but do remember to switch to CoA at the end of a fight or you'll lose the last doom. I have about the same spellpower as you, meta/ruin spec and I use those glyphs, just switched to immo last week and noticed a slight increase over the sbolt glyph I had been using before. So Lluelier's spreadsheet was right again.

Avespy - No, you are wrong. The 1% Dot damage and 1% DD damage are on the untalented stones. The talents increase ONLY the haste/crit values, they do not up the 1% damage modifiers, they clarified this in the text of the talents in 3.0.8 patch. How do you figure that the crit and the haste do nothing and shouldn't be counted? Sure the totems and bloodlust etc are better but its not like its an either or situation. They stack. So you get the buff from the stone and THEN get the totems etc. buff. How can this not be something that should be counted?

I was just curious as to what is the aoe of choice for a Meta/Ruin warlock? RoF or Seed? I came across this in the warlock forums and I instantly started replying with 'Seed is better' but now I am starting to second guess myself as I have not done any real testing / see information on the subject. Is there any where to see a graph comparing these two aoe's or possibly any way to look at it in Leuliers?

From my experience FG/ember is by far more stable, giving decent dps in most situations.
Meta/ruin can spike greatly with raid buffs and immolation surpassing the fg/ember, but due to meta cd it isnt worth it on the long run.
Now my raid experience is mostly 10 mans, on heroics the fg/ember is superior 90% of the time. Meta is fun to destroy large amounts of mobs and can save the team at some bosses or serve as panic button to improve ur armor and give more time to healer, but altho being fun it isnt as good dps wise, ive tried different stones, rotations, etc.. The only occasion you can keep your dps on par with fg/ember is on slow 5 mans when ppl stop to heal and ur meta will be up on all bosses and possibly in betweeen them too, its a nice leveling build but once you go raid ember is far superior.

Are there any numbers on the difference between spellstone/firestone, specially in the fg/ember. Haste is suposed to be a better stat but firestone boosts you incinerate 1% wich is the main source of dmg, and adds additional dmg.

Indeed, my apologies. Ofc it's Grand Firestone with 49 crit rating.

You can use Immolation near of boss and it will increase your dps very nice. Also, +20% damage in meta - don't forget.
FG/ES are easier, ofcourse, but Meta/Ruin's dps not worse and brings alot of fun

I agree with Injez above, having played several combos of demo/destro I am certainly having the most fun with Meta/ruin. And Heroism+Meta+immoaura+trinket+haste pot= Sick dps

And with fel synergy It's even easy keeping my felguard alive on Saph, let him dps the boss at ALL times, never heal him, doesn't even come close to dying.

Not only that but some longer fights you can use it twice. Most of the time you want to save it for bloodlust/heroism, but on fights you know are going over 3 minutes, I pop it at the start of the fight and then it is up again at the end. I went deep destruction after the patch as I loved destro. I played around with 41/30 when I dinged 80 because of gear levels, but lately I do a lot of arena and wanted to find a way not to have to blow 200g a week in respecs and still be able to bring it DPS wise in 25 mans.

Meta was the answer.. they did something subtle in this patch that really did boost demo branch, especially at high gear levels. I saw a WWS of a lock doing sick damage as meta and saw him stacking haste like crazy (upwards of 622 haste on armory profile). So I tested it out last night in Naxx 25. WoW Meter Online of last night. We only did a partial clear last night and didn't touch Patch yet. The thing I noticed is that Meta owns for shorter fights and afflication catches up over time (as you would expect just look at the Faerlina fight.. that got a lot of comments in vent). Never had pet problems at all, a little management and Fel Synergy keep the FG going all night long. It helps that he was sitting at almost 30k health raid buffed too.

Haste and spell power make this build bring it. I started grabbing haste stuff last night and stacking haste as high as I can without sacrificing to many other stats. You will have a problem with +hit in this build.. you will need to gem for it eventually and keep your +hit epics because they will come in handy swapping in and out while you gear.

At one point last night with raid buffs, flask, and food buff I was sitting at 3563 spell power.. from what I understand of Demonic Pact it is 2% of your spell power.. what # is it? Would it be 2% of that 3563 buffed number? At what point does it surpass the Shaman buff? I deliberately did not take Demonic Pact because we always run with the Shammy buff.. free's up 5 points to get creative. Just the napkin math if it is 2% of the buffed number means that Demonic Pact would be a ~700 spell power buff when active. Is this really the case? I always saw this as a useless talent when combined with the Shammy.

*Edit* - The warlock was Farkuw and I saw him post his WWS that I looked at in the highest damage per spec thread.. Here it is

How have the deeper Demo specs been doing? I leveled using 0/55/16 but once we entered Naxx I switched to deep affliction, which is fun, but I have been seeing some good things, number wise, from specs similar to the one I linked. Just curious if anyone here is running something close and what they are seeing.

I would like to say last night my felguard had 28k health raid buffed and for the 1st time ever he didnt die on the heigan or Sapp. As a matter of fact he didnt die once last night on a full clear of naxx. Will see how 3 drake Sarth goes tonight but at this point no one should be complaining about the felguard being hard to keep alive.

yes the fg stays alive nicely on meta build and it does spike greatly, my average on fg/es is 2.5k and meta can spike 4.4k but the rest of the time when its on cooldown it drops below fg/es

Your guild should be able to kill bosses relatively quickly in order to milk Meta for all its worth. A 20% dmg buff + immolation aura for 30 seconds is only a significant amount of DPS if your overall DPS is capable of kill bosses very quickly. Not sure how long your fights were and your overall raid DPS, but 2.5k sounds a bit low for FG/ES.

For those of you who are testing Meta/Ruin without your entire guild being well geared, be aware that you're not maximizing the spec to its full potential. When popping Meta, the damage buff from it and immolation aura is a spurt of DPS that is abnormal beyond your constant output, which means that the duration for which its up it provides a significant skew of your data (outgoing damage).

Yes, perhaps Meta/Ruin puts out a lower amount of DPS when Meta's on cooldown, but it catches up and surpasses other specs when used correctly for a short duration. The point is to make those 30 seconds as large of a fraction of the overall boss fight time as possible.

[Edit] I just re-read your earlier post and you mentioned 10 mans and heroics. Unless your 10 man group is extremely well geared, you probably won't be able to see the same output on Meta/Ruin as some others in here.

The 2.5k dps on fg/ember is self buffed and so its the bottom value, depending on boss and team it can go up to 3k+ .
The 4.4k meta spike was using meta during shaman bloodrage and spam shadowbolts (coe on boss). For comparison fg/ember with bloodrage and spam incinerate only went up to 3.3k.

My gear is mostly heroics/10 mans so its far from optimal yet, I did mention meta is more fun and its potential shines in 5mans where you get it up once in each boss or on large amounts of trash, IF healer pays attention to heal you since ull draw massive aggro.

All my experiences are relevant for a raid begginer of course, its not based on top gear 25mans. My conclusion are that both are good on heroics and while meta is more fun, fg/ember has better average dps, as I go into 10mans fg/ember seems to be widening the advantage. As I advance to 25 mans this can change of course but well see.


Tricks for meta? Stand near boss, cast coe, wait for molten core to trigger, pop meta, Immolation aura and hellfire. Then use a pot and healthstone fast. With luck it will trigger your passive trinkets or you can try to pop them also but mc will run out to soon.

There is no reason to use hellfire on a boss (single target), it's a channeled ability that does mediocre dps.

You forgot the best part. It does damage to you as well.

I leveled as Meta to 80, and I loved every second of it. Its such a fun spec, so I'm really watching this thread closely hoping to see more proof it can compete with Affliction.

That being said, I have a question about aggro. Wouldn't popping Meta at the beginning of the fight put you at risk of ripping aggro from the MT?

It definitely ups the threat level, but so far I haven't had a problem with this, although I might be undergeared compared to my guild's tanks, and I typically give the tank about 10-15 seconds to build threat. But if you do get into threat trouble, you should be okay soulshattering, as the fights are going to be short enough that you're not likely to catch back up and need it again later.

TPS shouldn't be an issue past the initial use of soulshatter on a single target boss. The TPS from your tanks should be constant enough that even your burst Meta at the end of the fight won't catch you up to the overall threat generated by your tank. If you're having threat issues in raids on bosses such as Patch, then you should be concerned about threat generation (sometimes it's the tanks not optimizing their skills).

However, for fights like 3D Sartharion, I tend to overthreat easily on both the first drake we kill (the one with the whelp adds) because we dump DPS right out in the beginning of that fight. Threat becomes an issue again on the second drake even though our tank sometimes gets a good several seconds up on the drake before DPS is in. I've never run as Meta on these fights either, but I usually rely on Embrace to give me an initial haste boost with my previous 0/33/38 incin spam spec.

Since you don't have soulshatter for each one of those bosses, that's probably the biggest problem with popping Meta on fights like that. Although, chances are you won't be popping Meta very soon afterward, seeing as the cooldowns are long and you won't be bringing maximized DPS on a longer fight like 3D.

Anyway, my point is that threat shouldn't be an issue if your tanks are putting out a good amount of threat, and you soulshatter at about 110% threat or so (note that the ranged threat cap is above 100%, somewhere around 130%).

On that note, does anyone know the range of immolation aura? How dangerous is it threat-wise that your TPS spikes but you're so close that you could get melee'd? Once you hop into melee range, you'll pull aggro as soon as you're above 100% threat. I'm assuming that this won't be that big of a problem if Farkuw is able to execute 6k DPS on Patch.

Also note that the faster your guild can bring down a boss within execution range (when they pop bloodlust/heroism), your Affliction warlock has less time to reap the benefits off Drain Soul and Death's Embrace. I find that other specs are comparable in DPS to affliction (floating around 4.5-5k+) until that last 25% when it pulls far ahead of destruction spam specs. Meta solves this problem in a sense.

Nice post... the range on Immolation Aura is 8 yards. I'll have to remember that 100% threat close in.. I forgot it because I'm so used to the 130% at range. Again it isn't hard to manage this and I only look at the threat meter when I get a high threat notification pop across the screen. 1 soulshatter takes care of the problem for the duration of the fight.

All these people that think that meta/ruin only does good dps because of meta spikes are severely underestimating the actual sustained dps of the spec even outside of Metamorphosis form.

Considering simcraft doesnt support meta/ruin properly. Im going to do a couple of tests and post here.

Tonight, i will have access to Ele shaman, and will try to get a boomkin there too, will make sure to pop haste pot and have everything that i can to output the absolute max from Meta/Ruin....

Then the following week, i am going to test Meta/Ruin without popping Meta form at all, just to see what kind of Sustained dps can be expected while you are waiting for Meta cooldown.

Ill post my results in this thread.

Looking forward to the numbers. I'm going to be respec'ing Meta/Ruin this upcoming raid week (cleared Naxx/OS/EoE 25 this week already). I haven't decided if I'm going to spec Meta/Ruin for 10 mans or not this weekend. Farkew, do you have any numbers from 10 mans? How do you fare?

The only thing Simcraft really needs in order to support meta/ruin is the Immolation aura. I'm ready to implement it, but I need details - mainly I need to know the spell power coefficient and whether it's affected by molten core. I've already gathered from your WWS that it's affected by haste, and I'm guessing that means each tick can miss, but it would be nice to get confirmation on that as well.

We also don't support Shadow Cleave at the moment, but you don't seem to be using it. Is there any particular reason you aren't? Something I read on wowhead seems to suggest it's off the GCD, in which case it should be worth using every cooldown? If so, I'd need details on its scaling as well.

I guess the final question I'd ask is: How do you get into melee range? Do you just start the fight there, or do you use the charge/intercept ability? In the latter case, does that cost a GCD?

Once we have the above information, it should't take long for me or another of the devs to implement it.

Short question about the stat weights to a meta/ruin build.

We all know the FG relies on a different hit cap to that of the Imp, would it be worth it, to only go 15 points into the destro tree, and not taking Cataclysm, but gearing for 13% tooltip hit (Alliance) from gear, one advantage you dont miss on curses or destro spells, but also your dg/fg has another 3% hit.

Anyone with thoughts on this?

Also do i "need" MC or are the gains on immo aura and immolate negligable