Hey guys,

As you may have seen on PTR/MMO-Champion, some things might change after the patch goes live.

For affliction:
- The Felhunter will be fixed
- CoA Glyph will be an actual dps increase
- Every Warlock will benefit from its own SE debuff

For destruction:
- CB damage increased
- Glyph of conflag no longer consumes Immo

Could it be safe to assume the following after these changes have been implemented?:

Affliction:
For the non hit-capped warlock the following spec should be the best:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Both the Felhunter as the imp can be used with this spec. Imp has slightly higher dps.

The glyphs should be: Immo, SL and CoA

For the hit-capped Warlocks the following spec should be the best:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

With this spec the Imp should be used. Demonic Power decreases his FB casting time.

The glyphs should be: Immo, SL and Imp (CoA after patch might be better.)

These are assumptions I made according to common sense. I haven't linked any calculations to them.

I'm very open to critisism and ideas from other Warlocks.

Does any of you think that deep destro will be viable again with the buff to CB and decent conflag glyph? When will conflag be casted now that it won't consume your immolate anymore?

I think all the bugfixes will help out aff locks a lot, but that conflag change could make quite a big difference...according to MMO-champion a LOT of fixes were done for aff spells. I'm pretty sure it'll bring a noticeable boost, but we'll see soon.

I have to tell you, regarding the first spec in your post, the 53/0/18 spec, it has been proven somewhere on EJ that taking one point off Imp SB and putting it in MC is a damage boost, so you might want to change that.

What's your source on this? Are you saying the Imp's FB has been buffed in 3.0.8? And MC affecting the Imp, is that new in 3.0.8 too?

If so, the Imp is getting a big boost. Are they going through with the corruption/immolate coefficient changes (I read sometime about them going up quite a bit) and the Chaos Bolt damage increase, as well as the new conflag glyph? If so, destro would be close to affliction in raiding again! If not even better!

How about Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft ? Using glyph of conflag, glyph of imp (10% extra on top of his buffed dps is goodie!) and either glyph of immolate or glyph of CoA, not sure which one gives the biggest dps boost after the patch,

The Corruption+Immolate coefficients were raised in a previous patch, so they have already been live for some time.

I neither read anything about the imp benefitting from Molten Core though.

I've never read anything anywhere that suggests it does. If it does, and you can prove it, that would be great. But since MC is a buff that you get, it would be weird to assume the imp would somehow benefit from it.

I definately read about it after 3.0.3. Going from 0.13 and 0.15 or whatever they were to 0.2. Are you sure these are implemented?

I'm sorry about the confusion. I did the research and the Imp does NOT benefit from MC uptime.

That makes it less of a dilemma.

Anyway, personally I wouldn't skip the hit talents just for MC and Demo Power. With the hit talents I was able to gear mostly for spellpower/haste rather than hit. Most of my gems are pure spellpower now, boosting my dps even more.

I think the slight talent changes are subjective. We should balance out the following:

- Are MC and Demo Power an actual DPS increase if you consider that you'll need to itemize for hit?
- If you choose to skip the hit talents, will you take Demo Power or Improved Imp?
- Are you willing to sacrifice a point in ISB for 1 point in MC and is that a smart thing to do?

I'd like see your opinions about this.

Thanks for your replies!

They were implemented before the expansion was released, according to this post by GC.

I'd go for the following spec Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

With Glyph of Immo, Conflag and Imp/coa

I remember some post saying that life tapping lowers a lot destro dps (I think was GC), since the more we life tap, the more GCDs we are not dpsing.
Also, Imp Soul Leech is a 2% mana every 3 spells on average, so I think what I read from someone on these boards, that imp soul leech gives us more mana than replenishment over the course of a boss fight, is true. This implies that imp soul leech helps us life tapping less, thus it let us do much more dps (since life tap is a huge dps loss). Sadly this source didn't provide numbers or proofs, so I'm not sure I'm 100% correct.

From the 2pt7 thread we know that it's not worth to life tap only to get the bonus (altough it's worth to try to maximize its uptime life tapping with a good timing). This means it's not worth to spec in such a way that we need to life tap more in order to have a higher uptime percentage.

After all this being considered. I can't see how the base of a destro spec could be different from [Talent]Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft Calculator - World of Warcraft[/url].
Last 2 points I usually put in Shadowfury, for utility, and Fel Domination (in case I lose my imp, it's good to be able to summon him again in only 4.5 seconds and at a cost of 32% of base mana).
EDIT: I am worried about F&B. With glyph of conflag now there's no more problems of timing. I assume more backdrafts prevail over trying to have every conflag getting the F&B crit bonus. Timing a first conflag to get such bonus and than conflaging at every cd, we can maximize our backdrafts "procs" but only one third of our conflags will get the crit bonus from F&B. In this scenario the actual crit bonus is also one third of what the talent awards. Is F&B still worth it? We could get 5/5 Unholy Power instead of it. I don't know, but since I can now use glyph of immolate I guess it's still better to get F&B (at least if I'm correct about glyph of immolate being a good dps upgrade for destro too).

By the way, from what I've seen CoA accounts for a really small percentage of a destrolock damage (5%-ish I think someone said). So a 10% damage increase would be a 0.5%-ish overall increase, which seems to me to be an highly minor bonus for 2 talent points.

I agree on everything else in your post (not needing to lifetap atall during a fight would be awesome), though regarding the last 2 points of your spec, which have not been placed, I can't see any better place to put them then Imp CoA. There's nothing we want in the destro tree. We can't reach what we'd like in the demotree. The 0.5% is better then nothing!

Of course that's true. But the first rule of a good dps is:

"Dead = 0 dps"

And that's true for your imp too.

Some fights (sartharion comes to mind) are risky for our squishy imps. If it dies we lose 10%-15% of our dps (again, numbers I've found on these boards, I've not actually seen documentation about them but no one disagreed with the poster). Being able to resummon in 4.5 leave and spending only 32% of our mana instead means we are comparing a 5% dps increase for coa to 5.5 dps time and 32% of base mana we would need to get back trough life tap. This probably asks for some math, and probably lean towards the coa point dps wise, but the dps increase you get with the coa point over the FelDom point is lower than 0.25% of your total dps... I don't think such negligible dps increase can overcome the utility of being able to stand still only 4.5 seconds instead of 10 in order to get back that imp (think of high mobility fights, an imp dieing in a bad moment so that you need to wait a bit before you are able to stand still for 10 seconds to resummon it).

More or less the same goes for shadowfury. It can stop the sparks on malygos or stop an add from going to your healer, in example. In both these cases the overall dps or hps your raid gains vastly overcome your personal dps loss for not using that talent point on imp coa.

Utility is really important for me, since I always think that is my raid that downs the boss, not my personal dps only.

I agree that utility is important. But I do not think it's smart to sacrifice dps for some minor utility when there are other classes which have these utilities without sacrificing any dps. (Mage rank 1 FB, nova - DK slow, death grip etc... etc...)

For those doubting the viability of Fire and Brimstone after the patch: You're not alone. I've thought about the following spec:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Your Immo will lose a damage bonus equal to 15% of you spellpower. Which is comparable to 300 spellpower if you've got 2000 spellpower: 2000*1.15=2300

In return you will gain 3 points in unholy power and Improved soul leech maxed out.

The next question arises: What proves more dps? imp souleech + 3/5 unholy power? Or 5/5 FB?

Using my spec and putting the 2 remaining points in FelDom and SL we can transfer 5/5 F&B to UP (my spec already has 2/2 imp soul leech).
This means we need to compare 1 point in UP to 1 point in F&B: we put 5/5 in the ones wich gives better result (since every point is worth the same).

1 UP = +3% to a 10%-15% of our dps
1 F&B = +3% of spellpower to immolate and +5/3% crit chance to conflag

If someone could link a WWS for us to know how much percentage of our dps does immo and conflag accounts to, it could be easy to know the answer (and if immo's dps when glyphed isn't quite higher than the imp's dps, than I bet my next epic drop that UP will be the way... because I like to bet only when I have win chances = 1 ).

P.S.
My line of reasoning is the following: both +3% spellpower and +5/3% crit chance are lower dps upgrade than a +3% dps. So if I work with the assumption that they ARE in total a +3% dps increase I just need to compare the spell's dps with the imp's. If they are similar than UP is better since the actual dps increase I get from F&B is way lower than my estimation.
Long way to say one thing I don't know the technical termn for (in english) sorry.

Quite sure we can expect a complete overhaul of F&B after releasing the new Conflag glyph. Now it sucks even more than it used to.

well, 1 UP = +3% to an imp doing 3-400 dps. thats 9-12 dps per point. We can't use old WWS reports since we are discussing what's going to happen after patch, thus immolate wont go wodn when we conflagrate so it's not fair to compare just yet. I'm not sure about the values of immolate and conflag so I can't do the math on 1 point F&B, but my instinct tells me that it's better to go with F&B.

One nice little thing in the patch that often goes unmentioned is that pets will now benefit from our spirit bonus to Fel Armor. This will make spirit even more useful, and should increase everyone's DPS a little bit (Demo should obviously gain more, but it's still nice for other specs).

I sure hope so.

As Blizzard is forcing us to use our demons I'd appreciate if they would increase their overal survivability as well.

To continue on Lominen's reply in an orderly fashion:
- I hope they will make F&B worth taking. A slight adaption so it won't contradict the conflag glyph could be enough.
- Empowered imp should be looked at as well. I just don't think it gives enough bang for it's buck. Maybe awarding the warlock with an instant soulfire everytime the imp crits? This idea is very basic and is more of an introduction to my next point:

- SOULFIRE is still a close to useless spell. With the conflag glyph one could cast a CB and 2 Soulfires. Unfortunately the ridiculous shard cost makes it an unrealistic rotation.

What do you guys think?

ps. I'll summarize what has been said after a few more posts to clarify the main concerns of this thread.

How exactly does F&B suck more than it used to?

Immolate
Incinerate
Incinerate
...
T+5 seconds - Conflagrate
Chaos Bolt
Incinerate
Incinerate
Repeat

You might lose about 0.2-0.5 seconds on your Immolate up-time, but youre squeezing in quite a few spells in those last 5 seconds. Raid geared/buffed, your conflag should have around a 75% crit chance (25% due to F&B).

With 25% crit on Conflag it was already competing with an Incinerate, but the problem was you were also losing out on an Immolate tick, which made it not worthwhile. Now that you won't lose the Immolate ticks, conflag is becoming a good spell.

That's true of course, but:

Do you wait for the last 5 second on immo before casting conflag to benefit from the 25% increased crit? Or will you cast conflag whenever it's off cooldown for the increased haste? Now that it doesn't consume your immo, that's an option too.