I'm not sure, but in 25man it's 2x more crit than what most warlocks run so It's critting 2times as much for 50% less crit damage.

Also do you think this will proc focus magic? If so thats nice for 10mans when it's just me and an AM running.

Warlock changes from the latest PTR notes:

Skills

* Curse of Elements Rank 5 now increases spell damage taken by the target by 13% (Previously 10%)
* Malediction (Tier 8 ) now increases spell damage by 1/2/3%. (Previously also increased the effect of curse of elements)

These two changes go as a pair. So now you get the 3% damage bonus on CoE from training. Malediction basically got nerfed a bit, but not a big deal. The Affliction locks will still take it. But now, if you are in a raid with no affliction locks, you can still get the 13% CoE from other locks.


* Curse of Recklessness has been removed from the game.

Meh. This is the only curse warlocks have to stop mobs from running away. It'll be harder to solo level in some areas without this curse.

* Curse of Weakness now reduces armor by 5% along with its previous effect.

People use this curse? tongue.gif


Talents

* Pandemic (Tier 9) is now a 1 point talent. It now grants the periodic damage from your Corruption and Unstable Affliction spells the ability to critically hit.

Ohh.... DoT crits? Hmm... much math to be done.

* Eradication (Tier 7) has been changed to: When you deal damage with Corruption, you have a 2/4/6% chance to gain the Eradication effect. The Eradication effect increases the critical strike chance of your Shadow Bolt spell by 30%. Each critical strike reduces the critical strike bonus by 10%. Lasts 30 sec.

So your Corruption has a 6% per tick chance of giving you 30% crit chance on shadowbolt, but if your bolt crits, each crit reduces crit bonus damage by 10%. There'll be lots of min-maxing on this.


* Shadow Embrace (Tier 5) now increases Shadow Periodic damage. (Previously increased all periodic damage)

So I guess Immolate is out of the affliction rotations then.

* Siphon Life (Tier 5) is no longer a spell. It is a passive talent that When you deal damage with your Corruption spell, you are instantly healed for 40% of the damage done.

Meh. Nerf bat on affliction. Siphon Life is about 6% of most affliction locks damage.


* Frailty has been renamed Improved Curse of Weakness (Tier 2).

Who cares.

* Supression (Tier 1) now increases chance to hit with all spells. (Previously only affected affliction spells)

Well at least this is a nice change. Sort of. We can skip Cataclysm now and put points in Improv. Shadow Bolt instead. I wonder what the 0/41/30 do? Probably just ignore Suppression.


Over all I am seeing a significant change to the affliction rotation: (1) no siphon life, (2) no immolate. Since Corruption is renewed by Haunt, the only spells that need to be tracked will be Haunt, Curse of X, and Unstable Affliction. A much simplified rotation. Boooo to that. tongue.gif

Also, the gearing changes seem to be a bit schizophrenic. The Pandemic change will say that you want crit so your DoT crits are good. But the Eradicate change will argue for haste over crit, since your crits are lower damage. Weird.

Also the Glyph of Haunt is decent. 3% more damage. Question is which Glyph can come out.

You're absolutely correct.

It wasn't Ghostcrawler who said it, it was Eyonix.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - "Siphon Life" Changes. Damage Loss?

What I don't get about what seems to be a very significant affliction nerf:

Okay, let's assume they wanted to simplify Affliction's rotation a bit while nerfing it to bring it down in line with other theorycrafted max dps specs.

They went about it by slaughtering immolate's damage for affliction, and outright removing siphon life.

But there's still an elephant in the room, it's called Drain Soul.

Drain Soul is the True most complicated/obnoxious part of an Affliction rotation. It requires clipping parts of it to get max affliction dps, requiring a mod to do so properly and feeling like a remnant of the cast stop macros that they did away with. And last I saw theorycrafted affliction without Drain Soul was down with all the other dps specs.

Instead, Drain Soul is still in. It'll still have to be clipped for max dps (although, probably not as often as before). All for the sake of equal/lesser performance compared to other specs. And we lost some of the dots that make up Affliction's flavor.

I don't get it.

Yeah, it seems that Siphon Life has become a pure PvP talent. I mean, it doesn't seem to provide any benefit in a raid environment. Only negative ones like threat from the healing generated.

Good data. For comparison, what are you pulling on live with the same variables?

There's more than meets the eye with this. The cooldown on Immolation Aura is 30 seconds and with the glyph you have 36 seconds of Meta ie. a second Immolation Aura. Hopefully someone can get this glyph soon to run some tests with it. It may not add up to much more, but could put it over the top of the other glyphe choices in addition to the 6/126 * 0.20 damage increase from the duration itself.

Ah really? That's a shame - it may even out then if you're only getting 1/3 the DPCT of a full immo aura.

Those numbers don't look bad ........... unless you were doing 4k live =/

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> "Siphon Life" Changes. Damage Loss?

GC confirmed the SL nerf.

While GC may have some hidden data, my testing on the lvl 80 dummies (to eliminate partial resist RNG and lack of some hit) shows closer to 400 dps loss self buffed (FA, stone, IotDS at 10 when starting dps, CoA/Immo/SL glyphs, FH out, not attacking). 500 loss when not using Immolate. This is with a 5% crit debuff that will probably be shared with mages.

On top of that, what dps talents? As far as I knew an affliction spec took all dps talents, and with the new changes still can take all dps talents.

While I may be talking nonsense right now I'll do some more testing (with WWS included), though it's a bit difficult as my PTR client seems to be crashing every few minutes.

Affliction PTR
PTR Image of Recount:
Affliction LIVE

A bit of clarification:
Gear is the same on both, Started DPS at 0 IotDS, just couldn't be bothered when PTR crash loomed. FA, Spellstone, FH out not attacking.
Live:
Cut 3 immolates, a couple UA/SL last ticks, even a SL/CoA ~ 4-5 seconds before ending (wrong button, oops).
Peaked at 3720 for about 5 minutes then started making mistakes. Usually I SB if I shouldn't refresh DoT instead of
LTing sometimes (finger memory due to keybindings I guess), which is why SB dmg is high.
PTR:
Some very weird stuff there, all dot tick counts, yet Corr never fell off, never unpaired UA/Immo, certainly did not cast Immo over UA. Damage/dps looks close to what recount said, ticks ... Also emphasized Haunt less so may have had a few more ticks of dots without it.
Recount image of the PTR fight looks better. Neither records crits.

To sum it up:
1. Not sure in which of the tests I failed more so can't rule that RNG out.
2. The difference doesn't seem as big as I initially thought but it's still quite significant considering we don't actually top any meters without doomguard, except maybe on some select few fights. Mages and Hysteria buffed warriors seem to dominate most of the fights, we just happen to be able to go over 7k dps on one fight with a 1h cooldown and favourable RNG.
3. There's also the fact that if mage crit debuff goes to 5% and shared with warlocks then live spec needs 5% crit added (3711 dps I think for round 300 dps difference self buffed).
4. The rotation isn't actually more clear, just fewer buttons to press, not exactly a big change or simplification, and of course nobody will be speccing it if destruction is any good.
5. Someone really needs to try a close to fully raidbuffed test. Pretty interesting to see how scaling has changed, mostly crit vs spellpower.
6. I still see no extra dps points I can take on PTR that I can't on live, someone please enlighten me because I must be blind.

PS: Pandemic damage added as avg Corr/UA tick adds another 158 dps to live dps, self buffed difference of 458 dps between Live and PTR affliction on 18 minute tests