It does? With ~70-80% of your dps coming from instant and 1.5 second casts?

I have a feeling most of you have seen the MMOchamp talent calc...

Havent any one of you seen the [PH] after Molten core and Molten Skin...
PH means Place holder, which means "This is not where its going to be and there will most likely come something else OR it will change completely."

And i never had this big a bone for patch notes >.< I see "nerfs" that will give us dps boost IF you think of some cool boss' you know instead of just pure math.

I'm not so sure about the crit being more valuable. It doesn't provide the 10% extra damage on shadow spells (CoA, Corruption, UA, Sihpon Life, Haunt and SB) anymore, a crit isn't just gonna be worth as much, even with the higher reliance on SBs in general I think. As I see it, crit might be less important than before.

However, Haste will be more important for sure. Removing Siphon Life and Immolate means more SB spamming = more haste benefits. Also, the change in Eradication means we won't hit the GCD as often in raids as happens when it procs during Heroism etc.

But still, as in TBC early raiding, Affliction proves to be high DPS. But as the gear scales up and we gain SP, Crit and Haste and the Crit and Haste cooefficients just aren't as high as for Demo/Destro specs, we will fall back on the damage meter in Ulduar and on. So why the heck are we getting nerfed? Don't Blizzard understand this, can't they look beyong their nose? We *might* be able to equal Demo/Destro in 3.1 Naxx gear, but Ulduar gear... I just don't see a solution to affliction long term gear scaling yet.

PS. REALLY sad to see the joy of affliction vanish... I loved this spec since TBC, the challenge in perfecting DoT timings... with only 2 DoTs to refresh (plus Haunt), a boring spec.

I m sure you're easily able to keep up a perfect rotation on Sartharion 3D with no dps loss or haunt/shadow embrace dropping off. Not everyone is as good as you so I suppose less spells will enable those low skilled people to perform almost as well as you.

The sarcasm's appreciated, thanks. I'm not saying I'm perfect, I'm just saying that a lot of affliction's damage comes from instants and quick casts. Yes, you lose dps while moving, but do you lose as much as the player who gets 70-80% of her damage from 2-2.5 second casts?

The biggest problem on S3D I have is not addressed: The limited range of the spells. I have to move out of range, if I want to avoid the firewall.

I think we need to run a survey before we can say that definitively, because I'll certainly cast my vote in favor of afflictions current rotations.

Some of these changes are definitely good. Bringing all the hit talents together into one talent will save a number of warlocks a few points, and demonology seems to have picked up a number of interesting buffs, but having never really been much of a demo lock I don't really know how this will really mesh in with what exists.

Destruction seems to have come out mostly untouched. The imp immolate change has been a long time coming, and while the move of molten core seems to be a rather odd move, the 'loss' is made up for by the new aftermath.

The affliction changes make me kinda sad however. The siphon life change is a clear dps loss, the changes to haunt and shadow embrace will likely remove immolate from the rotation bringing us back towards the ever annoying shadow bolt spam that we all (hopefully) grew so tired of in TBC. The pandemic change is probably a mixed blessing, yes it's nice that we get 2 more talent points to spend, but as pointed out standard spell crits are only 150% damage, unless ruin is changed as well we may see another damage loss here as well. The eradication change is interesting, 6% on corruption tick to proc some sort of warlock equivalent to combustion. This has potential, especially given the increase in shadow bolt time for our rotation, to be at least as good as the current talent, if not quite in the same 'classic affliction' feel. It feels like they're almost trying to change the focus of affliction away from DOTS DOTS DOTS and bring it more in line with the other caster classes spamming their nukes.

Okay, so maybe that last bit goes a bit overboard, but I just can't get a really good feel for the changes, and I don't like the idea of being nerfed. Let's wait and see what happens, this is after all just the first iteration of the PTR, which means there are more changes to come. Blizz may still have things to add, remove, redact, or replace before they're done, I think I'll wait for the final version before I pass judgment and emo-rage about it.

A pool on this forum for sure yep, on official forum I don't think so.

Well a full demo warlock doesn't lose that much when he has to move. Pet doesn't have to move, dot still tick as affliction and no risk of haunt or shadow embrace dropping and screwing up your rotation. I m not saying you're losing all your dps.What I am saying is that moving, due to the relatively complexe rotation of affliction create a bigger loss of dps than say demono where the only thing you lose is a 1.8 shadowbolt cast ( shadowbolt doesn't account for 80% of my dps). Now thats my experience playing affliction, i m certainly no god at it and having to lead a raid while playing affliction tend to be a nightmare for me ( on Sartha 3ad anyway, naxx is another story ^^ ).

Ps: sorry for the double post forgot to edit previous one.

"but one question, any ideas on how new siphon life works for healing? I assume you couldn't just spam corruption on a target and constantly get instant heals, what are the restrictions to it?"

I read it that you get a heal each time your Corruption does damage - since Corruption does not tick instantly (first tick is after 3 seconds then every 3 right?) there's no benefit in spamming it to get those heals.

Lets not despair yet. Ghostcrawler once said about the "old" SL change (worded in a similar way) that it does not mean lack of SL debuff on the mob. I hope it will turn out this way this time too.

Assuming your guild runs more then 1 affliction warlock, number of affli debuffs won't be nerfed by a lot even w/o SL. Immolate, being less DPCT then sb now, is the main issue.

PS. Can anyone please link me new version of talent calculator? http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warlock shows 3.0.9 talents to me.

EDIT: Nvm, clearing cache worked.

I thought they promised a major rework of how soulshards work, something which couldn't just be made with a hotfix. Is the "drain soul provides shards even if the target doesn't die" the major overhaul?

I was also under the impression that they mentioned buffing shadow embrace (at least keeping the same effect, but reducing the number of talents needed to max it out), so what happened there? Same number of talents for a nerfed effect?

Wouldn't we still need to gear for the extra hit anyway since it won't effect our pets?

pastebin - collaborative debugging tool
It seems there are some new glyphs :

How about this spec for starters? we need to get to thinking asap so we got some things to test!

That makes a big difference regarding specs. Life tap glyph seems good, as well does Haunt and Chaos bolt. Would like to see the numbers!

The glyph changes do look better than the announced patch notes, though I wouldn't expect the % to be high. Haunt and Life Tap seem likely candidates to replace Immolate and SL glyphs as affliction.

Metamorphosis seems interesting. With the new demo talent cutting it's original CD by 30% it becomes a 2min 6 sec CD spell and now this glyph extending it's duration it seems like it's uptime is gonna increase significantly for demo locks.

Ok, so basically Metamorphosis now has a 2 min CD as far as demonology locks are concerned.
Haunt increasing dot damage by 3% is nice, but it also makes Haunt even more important to be kept up at all times. Although in all honesty it already is.

The one I'm most interested in is lifetap though. That basically means you'll lifetap once before the fight and then every 20 secs? Will it be a part of the rotation? Does it stack with 4pc T7? Damn the character copy queue :P

After quickly looking it over this looks like my affliction test spec. There's room to move a point from IDS to Eradication depending on the cooldown (if there is one). With fel synergy doing ~25% of damage in pet healing (guessing easily 1k per second upwards in Ulduar gear) it's possible to keep your imp up at all times firebolting away without worrying about health.

Glyphs now pose a problem; have CoA, Imp and Corruption but there's strong competition from the new Haunt and Life Tap ones. Imp is pretty crucial in that build to keep it's damage up so depends on what numbers the new ones bring.

Sad to see the current affliction rotation die though.

I'm very tempted to try some other spec now although it's somewhat harder to maximise talents whilst keeping 3 points in Suppression. Guess it's time to find some more hit gear =/

Considering an average Immolate tick of 1200 currently, it seems the new Conflagrate, with the new talents, will be hitting for around 7.5-8K damage and critting for 15-16K, which is really sick for an instant spell, and higher than Chaos Bolt and Incinerate.

As an idea, will be nice to see if Corr base damage/coefficient was increased to basicly include SL ticks, which will be extremely nice, and most likely making up for most of the damage lost by the SL/Immo changes.