I could never get that spreadsheet to work. :/ My socket bonuses are +6 spirit, +6 haste, and +8 haste.

One last question -- to Conflag or not to Conflag if you don't have Backdraft? I'm currently looking at this spec and trying to decide if I should have the point in Conflag or Soul Leech (or something).

Thanks for all the help BTW.


EDIT:

According to RatingsBuster, [Perfect Purified Shadow Crystal] works out to 10.2 spell power (slightly more with Demonic Aegis). Is that really worth it over 9 spell power / 12 stamina? I'd think giving up 1-2 spell dmg for 120 health was worth it (less dying, bigger Fel Armor ticks for Life Tap).

There's no point in getting Conflagrate if you're not going for Backdraft in it's current state since it will lower your overall DPS. Also, when it comes to socket bonuses, you have to look to the points overall. For example a +19 spell power gem will give better DPS than for example a +9 SP, +8 Haste with a socket bonus of +8 crit. If that bonus was haste however, it might be on par. Roughly statwise, 1p of haste and crit (each) is slighty less than half of 1p of SP.

As for the blue gem, [Perfect Purified Shadow Crystal] will give a slightly higher DPS increase than +9 SP, +12 stam but it's up to you to decide if you want a lil' bit higher survivability or DPS. If you feel that you're dying easily, go for stam, otherwise go for spirit. Also the green gem is a lot cheaper than the rare with stam which is one of things why I'm going with it

Actually, the green gem's more expensive on my server (25g) versus a raw 20g Twilight Opal + a guildy to cut it. heh

Thanks much for the tips.

The only reason to use conflagrate is to get backdraft procs. You shouldn't take this talent at all if you're not going to pick backdraft either.

About the gems. Spirit/SP is the best choice dps wise. There are no fights that require high stamina per se and probably never will be. If a warlock can't handle it what about priests/mages?

Use your brain to avoid environmental hazards and you will need no stamina.

EDIT. Beaten hard :P

So, I tried out a 2/13/56 build last night. Compared to playing the 31/40 build I have been playing I would say that 2/13/56 was 10-20% more DPS then 31/40, but only in some fights. Mex, for instance, the web wraps kept hitting and forcing me to miss Backdraft, similar issues on Grob when the injection came at the wrong time. I guess, in general my feeling was for pure DPS deep destro is higher, but the hybrid spec is a little more forgiving in it's simpler rotation. Also, trying to use Soulfire was cool, but shard use was crazy. I think, until Blizz comes out with some shard changes thats only going to be a situational cast for me.

Regarding Conflag, I do have it in my 31/40 build. I find it's helpful in some situations when you dont have time to wait for Immolate. I use it often on Mex for web breaking (I usually Immolate, and then Conflag it right away to do enough damage to break the web). Ive also used it to clear Immolate prior to an agro reset. All that said, its only useful in a small number of situations. If I dont take it, what are people taking? 1 point for maybe SL or NP?

Most cases you would take soul leech to keep your pet alive in the aoe dmg situations (Saph etc) also see a few take Shadowburn.

MMO-Champion - World of Warcraft Guides and Raid Strategies

Casting conflag every Cooldown (10 sec), perhaps this would make Destro much more powerful?

Major, major buff. Thank you blizzard.

Easy to use also. Just conflag at the last 5 seconds, which should line up reasonably well with the 10 second cooldown.

I suppose the next thing to look into is whether to use a castrandom macro for CB, Incin, or a castsequence macro.

Is there a new destro rotation now that can be more effective?

Conflag has the 10s cd and there is 15s on the immolate dot

SO not adjusting GCD for haste am i right in my calculations? (about 2.2s incinerates for most)

<Starting rotation>

conflag (1.5s)
incinerate(with conflag buff)x3 (4.5s) -approx

If everything goes well that leaves you 9 seconds left so to play things - safely we can fit 3 more incinerates in there before conflaging again and then refleshing immolate and then repeating the same process but you will overlap 2 backdraft incinerates.

So it is better to do the following after the first rotation

immolate
incineratex2 (3s)
conflag (1.5s)
incineratex3 (4.5s)

That leaves 6s in a perfect world with 4s left on the conflag CD.
Therefore 2 more incinerates then uses 4.4s and then you can conflag and nail the Fire and Brimstone time slot again.

SO in summary

Can anyone confirm that my thinking below is the best rotation for the new conflag glyph without chaos bolt the following?

conflag (1.5s)
incineratex3 (4.5s) - backdraft
incineratex3 (6.6s)
conflag (1.5s)

--POINT X--

immolate
incineratex2 (3s) - backdraft
conflag (1.5s)
incineratex3 (4.5s) - backdraft
incineratex2 (4.4s)
conflag

--GOTO POINT X--

Now somewhere in there im guessing that people will want to keep up CoA ro proc molten core and others would also like corr - so that can take the place of one of the filler incinerates.

If the proposed change to Glyph of Conflagration goes live, that should make the 2/4/55 build the best hands down. Maybe this was the plan all along and they didn't get all the itemization figured out before launch.

For sure, it should out-perform the 5/14/52 that some people have been running. I had to run this while my guild was in 10-man and we didn't have a Moonkin or SP in the raid.

I believe the new rotation is immolate-conflagrate-soulfire-soulfire-soulfire-incinerate-incinerate. /facepalm

You're on the right track. If you have to sacrifice something for ISL or the like, ICOA would be the first to go. The reason why most take it is there aren't that many points left to spend on DPS-improving ones (which is the reason I often removed a point from Destructive Reach for Shadowfury, since it doesn't really increase DPS, it just makes life easier).

With the changes to Destruction in next patch (can't wait to try out Glyph of Conflagration) I think this build will be superior: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Note however that ISL is very situational; if your imp is fully buffed (which it should be!) you should hardly have any mana problems at all really for it. An alternative to above spec is to remove SL and ISL altogether and instead spec into 3/5 Unholy Power for some extra juice on your little machine-gun friend.

You are underestimating the benefit of ISL for the warlock. It returns more mana than replenishment over the course of a fight.

I cheered at when I saw the new conflag glyph. Anyone on the PTR been able to see if it works as it's supposed to? My biggest fear is yes it refreshes, but no backdraft proc.

EDIT: Also, any comparisons at this time between the new conflag glyph and immolate?

I'm playing with a 0/20/51 type spec' atm, no conflagrate. I seem to get more dps this way than with backdraft, is that just cause it's easier to use, and I'm not able to get the most out of the backdraft spec'?

Also I'm wondering about the placement of a few points. This is the spec' I got atm exactly : Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

There's two things I'm wondering about :

1. Should I change 1 point in Intensity into Destructive Reach?
2. Improved Soul Leech / Empowered Imp / Unholy Power . I can't have them all maxed, so right now I'm missing 1 point in Improved Soul Leech, but I'm wondering if that 1% mana might be worth more than 1 point in one of the other two? Mabye go 0/19/52?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers.

I'm not convinced that Soul Fire is the best option. The equation to determine the difference in damage between Incinerate and Soul Fire is as follows:

Soul Fire Damage * 3 - Incinerate Damage * (3 + (Soul Fire Base Cast Time * .7 * 3 / (1 + Haste%) - Incinerate Base Cast Time * .7 * 3 / (1 + Haste%)) / (Incinerate Base Cast Time / (1 + Haste%)))

Obviously this equation can be simplified somewhat via the distributive property, yielding the following.

Soul Fire Damage * 3 - Incinerate Damage * (3 + (Soul Fire Base Cast Time * .7 * 3 / Incinerate Base Cast Time - .7 * 3)
Soul Fire Damage * 3 - Incinerate Damage * (3 + ((Soul Fire Base Cast Time / Incinerate Base Cast Time) - 1) * .7 * 3)

Notice that Haste is completely removed from the equation. Barring GCD pinging no level of haste is going to change which spell is mathematically better. Plugging in the cast times the equation resolves to this point.

Soul Fire Damage * 3 - Incinerate Damage * 4.63

So in order for Soul Fire to be a superior its three casts must be better than 4.63 casts of Incinerate. Soul Fire does ~1490 damage + 115% of Spellpower. Incinerate does ~786 damage + 86.76% of Spellpower (I believe Shadow and Flame was changed to be multiplicative rather than additive, correct me if I'm wrong). If we assume 2500 Spellpower it comes to 4365 and 2955 damage respectively. Plugging these in we get:

13095 - 13681.7

The difference is 586.7 damage in favor of Incinerate. Note that this gap only widens as Spellpower increases and is only affected by Haste once you have enough to reduce Incinerate past a 1.0 second cast time during Backdraft (requiring 57.5%+ Haste). Effectively, there is no conceivable gear level where Soul Fire is a better option during Backdraft than Incinerate, save perhaps during Bloodlust/Heroism.

Historically Soul Fire was a better option because Backdraft did not affect the GCD and Conflagrate consumed Immolate. As these two factors are purportedly changing the remaining benefits of Soul Fire are mana cost and human error.

The gap widens since what you compare is 1.15*3 and 0.8676*4.63. Since the second is higher than the first, than spellpowers favors the incinerate solution... in an endless mana pool test, as you pointed out.

Haste have been proven to not affect calculations from darian formula. Unless it puts Incinerate under the 1 sec GCD treshold (refer to darian post).
Crit is a multiplicative parameter which is applied at the end of darian calculations, and since both spells have the same crit multiplier and crit chance, it changes nothing in our comparison (since the actual damage dealt is not relevant, we could easyly work with their ratio).

The mana concern, tough, is really major. 1 Life Tap every 2 backdraft cycle seems huge. To evaluate what's better we need, indeed, to analyze the dps time lost because of the additional life tap in the 3xincincerate case.

This is the highest performing Destruction profile that I could find via simulation:

Results:

Factoring in mana regeneration is more complicated than calculating damage. For example, the 1.3-1.68 additional Incinerate casts have a chance to proc Imp Soul Leech and Judgement of Wisdom. Life Tap may be cast at a point where DPS is impossible (or inadvisable) regardless. It gets complicated very quickly.

Given the non-trivial mana cost difference I think the answer is going to be very fight dependent. In a pure tank and spank the better option will almost always be Soul Fire (unless you have the 4400 Spellpower required the bring the two spells even using hbalsack's 4.3 approximation). In any fight where there are opportune moments to use Life Tap Incinerate will be better.

Edit: Do you have numbers for the DPS lost by swapping Glyph of CoA for Immolate, or the loss from dropping the two points in Imp CoA from Affliction?

Is glyph of CoA Going to be superior than immolate now? I would think with all the destro multipliers etc, Immolate would still be superior to glyph for dmg wise.

Also with dropping corruption, how would that affect my uptime of 2pc t7? after all that a lot of crit, and my average up time in combat (according to procodile, which is probably a little low as I don't reset it as often as I should) is about 23% corruntyl using both agony and corruption.

At the moment I'm glyphed Imp, Immo, and Courruption playing 31/40. Come patch Corruption would be dropped for Conflag, but would Immo be better swapped for agony for a DPS increase (not a rotational thing?)

EDIT: answering to post #249
It's actually not that difficult.

I put a modifier for the life tap in your formula, darian (GCD*haste factor*X, where X = "number of life tap done to compensate the additional mana used for the incinerate cycle" and turns out to be lesser than 1, of course).

During calculations haste turns out to be non relevant if (1+Haste%)>>0.29.. which is easyly achived.

The result is that X = 1484/3000, thus the modified coefficient for the incinerate damage is lowered by X*1.5 (remember that haste is semplified during the calculations). 1484/3000*1.5 = 0.742 which means the coefficient is 4.63 - 0.742 = 3.888


With a second easy modification I added the imp soul leech proc, which slightly modifed the numbers. I assume it works like I analyze in case 2, but since I'm not 100% sure and since case 1 is still useful for the JoW evaluation, here are the 2 cases:

1) In case imp soul leech returns 2% of our base mana (like JoW), than it turns out to be not relevant in this calculation).

2) In case imp soul leech return 2% of our total mana
If (1+Haste%)>>0.33... than, provided M is our mana pool:

X = (1484 - 1.63*0.3*0.02*M)/3000

for a 20k mana pool X =0.429, thus the coefficient for the incinerate case is 4.2.

JOW
I have no idea of the proc rate for the judgment of wisdom debuff, and there's the internal cd to consider, but due to the acutal percentage of mana that it grants, it's of a magnitude comparable with our imp soul leech effect in case #1, and thus not relevant.


What I didn't model was the possible effects of 2p7 since that would really be difficult to evaluate, and it favours the incinerate option of course (since the GCD usage has already been taken into account).



Anyway, the values to use are either 4.2 (12411 total damage) or 3.888 (11489 total damage), and both of them give lower total damage than the 13095 value for the Soul Fire case.



Of course, in some fights there can be moments when you can't dps, so you can freely life tap. In such fights an Incinerate rotation is better. But on fights like petchwerk it's the SF version the one we should use. On the other fights it depend if we will be soon forced to be on the move or not.
So yes, it's like you foresaw, but we have the numbers now.



P.S. (Explaination of my calculations)
I put the GCD*X*haste factor variable in the original formula in order to account for the use of Life Tap.
I evaluated X by using an equation where on one side I put the mana difference from SF and incinerate cases, plus the procs for JoW and Imp Soul Leech and the mana the X life tap award, while on the other side, of course, there's 0. Since I'm balancing the mana for the SF and Incinerate cases.

ISL is total mana: I have 15K6 unbuffed, return 312 mana.