Critique of Soulfire can wait. The shard system is under examination and will be reworked in the future. There would be no reason to fix Soulfire when it's going to be rebalanced later on anyways.

I have yet to see any numbers on the new CoA glyph. Is it anything more than a GC quote and a bliz internal build at this point?

My current spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Once 3.0.8 hits, would it be worth moving that point out of Soul Leech and into Conflag (and get the Conflag glyph) even though I don't have Backdraft? I'm thinking it would be and I just spam Conflag whenever the CD's up.

Most likely, since Emberstorm will also affect Conflagrate with the next patch (a bug fix).

True, most of us do not itemize towards crit, but towards haste. SB has a long base casting time and is our main nuke, DS is our execute and haste affects it, so haste is overal more valuable to us. - open for discussion

But, I reach 28-30% crit rating in raid, this results in an ISB uptime of ~80%. Unbuffed my crit rating is merely 13%. This shows that itemizing towards crit isn't needed to make ISB more valuable than MC.

(Examples of crit rate increasing buffs: Moonkin aura, scorch, ele shaman, etc... etc...)

I dont understand why you would want to use MC as affliction. I use only one fire spell that would benefit from MC, immolate. Soulfire casttime is too long and incinerate is not a good option due to the boost of shadow damage in affliction tree. Could you point me to the discussion about this topic? I havent found it yet.

it doesn't.

Sorry, It was kind of a rhetorical question further pointing out the flaws in that post, it's one of those questions where you just have to think about what you just saw, in amazement.

Any ways, Should we be ducking F&B for like soulleach and tossing an extra 2 points in demo? or is F&B immolate function still a higher dps increase than say, buffing our imp.

The current PTR has significantly buffed base damage ("weapon" damage) for all melee pets. The felhunter has gone from under 100 to over 300 average weapon damage. My initial testing with Simulationcraft seems to show that this has effectively bridged the gap between the felhunter-based and the imp-based affliction specs.

Considering the imp-enhancing talents are wasted if you summon a doomguard (which, incidentally, also receives a major buff in 3.0.8), I'd be inclined to go with the felhunter-based spec.

I actually had a look at the different gearsets that are (according to my research) optimal with the current itemisation. I computed a gain of ~70 dps (or 1.32%) if you need 3% less hit.

As you already said, the only other place you could spend the affliction talent points is (if not threat-capped) fel concentration. Because of lacking an estimate of fel concentration's worth I will simply assume that it cancels with the reduced mana cost you also get from supression and concentrate on destruction talents ;-)

So with 3/3 supression, points in cataclysm lead to the following dps increases via being able to wear different gear (with less hit):
1/3 17.2 dps (0.32%)
2/3 34.5 dps (0.65%)
3/3 49.3 dps (0.92%)

Candidates for the additional points in the destruction tree are isb and molten core (and maybe eradication if you didn't take 3 points there).

Eradication:
There seems to be some dispute on what is the correct way to calculate the time between procs. I'll use iCD+dt*(1/p -1), where dt is the time between corruption ticks and p the procchance. So:
1/3 2.35% increased casting speed
2/3 3.44% increased casting speed
3/3 4.21% increased casting speed
As eradication is multiplicative with haste and reduced casting time results in more time to cast your filler spell, that's an increase of 2.35/3.44/4.21% of your filler dps. According to simulationcraft, filler dps (= sb+ds) is 45% of your total dps, so we're looking at an overall increase of 1.06/1.55/1.89%

ISB:
Well, that's difficult. It's quite likely that you cannot cast four sbs before the debuff expires. That's why I'll again use data from simulationcraft: With 40.8% destro crit, it computes that 72% of the spells benefit from isb. So we have an increase of 1.44% of your direct shodow damage (= sb+haunt) per point. Direct shadow damage is (using simcraft results again) 31% of your total dps, so we get an overall increase of 0.45% per talent point. But since from 25% HP you don't cast sbs anymore (ignoring nightfall), we have to multiply with ~0.79 (according to our latest wws it took 79% of the length of the fight to get patchwerk to 25% HP) and get 0.35%.

Molten Core:
We can't use the same formula as with eradication because as mc's internal CD is shorter than the duration of the buff (it has no CD), it can proc again before the old buff has expired. At any point in time, the chance that the debuff is up is equal to the chance that there was at least one proc in the last 12s. So we need to know the (average) amount of effects in 12s that can proc mc. This time I use results from the "Dots and you"-thread. It states that you can cast 15.26 sbs per minute in addition to recasting DoTs+haunt. So that's approx. 30 CoA ticks, 20 corruption ticks, 20 UA ticks, 20 siphon life ticks, ~6 haunts and 15.26 sbs per minute, or 22.25 shadow damage effects in 12s. I assume immolate is casted only before 25% HP because thats what simcraft does by default and I don't know if drain soul procs mc. MC uptime:
1/3 1-0.95^22.25 = 68.02%
2/3 1-0.9^22.25 = 90.41%
3/3 1-0.85^22.25 = 97.31%
Using simcraft again, immolate (glyphed, but not using it <25% HP) is 6% of your total dps, so we get an overall increase of 0.41/0.54/0.58%.

I'll call the dps you do with this spec 'base_dps'. It has nine points left which can be distributed between isb, mc, cataclysm and eradication. I call the number of points in mc 'm', in isb 'i' and in cataclysm 'c'. The dps will be (ignoring reduction of mana cost from cataclysm):

dps = base_dps*[1+(c>2)?0.0092:(c>1)?0.0065:(c>0)?0.0032:0]*[1+i*0.0035]*[1+(m>2)?0.0058:(m>1)?0.0054:(m>0)?0.0041:0]*[1+(9-c-i-m>2)?0.0189:(9-c-i-m>1)?0.0155:(9-c-i-m>0)?0.0106:0]

using the ternary conditional operator a?b:c, that evaluates to b if a is true and to c if a is false (sorry, can't think of a better way to write this). I get the maximum dps with 1/3 molten core, 5/5 isb, 0/3 cataclysm and 3/3 eradication.

Feel free to point out all the errors/bad assumptions I've made. The differences to the previous posts seems to be caused by different mc&isb uptimes.

Has the DG been improved as well? Sorry I'm locked out of the ptr by the "contact billing thing" or I'd just check.

The latest patch notes included "Ritual of Doom: A Doomguard summoned with this spell will now scale properly from its master's stats." I've tested this on the PTR, and it's true, it scales just like our other pets, including getting our hit rating.

Edit: And yes, he's actually had his base weapon damage increased as well, from 1400 to 1690.

Doomguards are now a 15 minute duration pet that despawns after this period. You'll have to wait until someone with PTR access reply's to get the other questions answered

More importantly, will Doomguard dmg actually get counted as the master's dmg on WWS now?

Seems like felhunter melee dps have almost doubled (/w Fel Armor buff):

They really should fix that, yeah.
But in the meantime you can get a Doomguard to show by manually inserting a SPELL_SUMMON line somewhere into your combatlog:

where the red part must be the owner's UID, and the green part the one of the Doomguard.

Works perfectly fine, see e.g. here.

Assuming 2/2 ISL is granted this means: is 4/5 Unholy Power better than 5/5 F&B? I would still go with F&B even if it's very lackluster for tier 10.

Hi new here =). I've been following this discussion particularly on the parts about deep destro. I'm thinking I want to spec back into this come 3.0.8 but the thing is on how we r gonna handle conflag. If we time conflag perfectly then after u cast immolate it might look like Immolate-conflag-then when its up again conflag again which will probly be under the 5 sec mark for F+B. What I'm wondering is will we just randomly be shooting off conflag whenever the CD is up or would it be worth it to wait for F+B to use conflag. See if we use conflag randomly then a 3rd of the conflags (maybe more) will be affected by F+B and even if it isn't its just a crit loss and u still get the haste buff. I'm thinking it might be worth it to just randomly use conflag whenever its up and if immo is below 5 seconds cool! Granted the extra mana used to cast conflag all the time shud make improved soul siphon more viable. Anyone else have comments on what i'm thinkin?

To make this thread somewhat legible I'll summarize some aspects after a few more resplies.

Taihaku, I'm considering the same thing. Maybe not using conflag whenever it's up, but to use it at start and at the 5 second mark. Assuming F&B won't be changed of course. I'd love to use 1cb and 3sf during backdraft.

I'm still not convinced about ISB and MC. Sure, at 25% you won't use SB anymore, unless you want to keep up 2 stacks of SE (does this affect DS? If it does, we should keep it up, even after 25%) but before 25% ISB is worth more DPS than MC point per point. Dit you also consider that ISB affects Haunt? Will that result in a (slight) dps increase provided by that last point in ISB?

Maybe I'm being stubborn and just don't want to let go of a 'has been' best of talents.

Guys, what about empowered imp, don't you think this talent deserves a significant buff/fix? Does anyone have extensive experience with it in its current state?

SE does affect it, they challange lies in keeping the 2 stacks up with only Haunt under 25%, for which you basicly have to go into melee range due to travel time. NF procs help alot tho.

I think the reasin math proves 1/3 MC 4/5 ISB > 5/5 ISB is that as an afflictionlock, you really don't have much crit. Right now, with my current gear and spec and with a good raidsetup (I'm 0/41/30, felguard) I crit about 48% of my incinerates. How good critratio does an afflilock have on their shadow bolts?

We also drop Immolate at 25% for more DS uptime. Unless its been proven that it's still worth casting Immolate below 25% & I'm unaware.

Our crit may be low, but it gets a considerable buff in raid situations. Prolly on average I'd say my SB crit would be around mid to low 30s, but I've seen ridiculous RNG parses of affliction locks getting 50+% crit on Patchwork.

Shadow Embrace affects DS.