Oof. Yeah, we raid depending on another afflock for Siphon stacks.

I am not sure why more hasn't been said about that particular part of the notes. Seems like it will really affect raid makeup.

There's a post where GC said they would be looking at Soul Siphon as it forced raids to stack to maximize the buff. With this removed, and the increase in DPS by Demo and Destro, it's less important for all warlocks to be Affliction, without being punishing to the people who remain Affliction.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Affliction changes = nice start IMO
Does this have any bearing on how Eradiction is being done in the simulator atm? I know the ICD was removed when it was changed to crit, not sure if you added it back or not when the change got reverted.

One can assume that the Doomguard won't be used for the early stages of Ulduar due to learning the fights. But once this content is on farm, theoretically one could have the Doomguard up 50% of the time. I do agree that this destroys the spec equality we were seeing. And I for one am extremely frustrated that Blizzard finally got it right by giving Warlocks the ability to play the spec they like rather than being pigeon-holed into one spec just to see it ruined with this change. It's disheartening to see that they messed up such a good thing.

On the other hand, you can pretty much go through "farmed content" with whatever spec you want, it's not as if doomguards will allow for kills otherwise unreachable. It's fluff, really, like doing 7K on patchwerk. It flatters the ego but is pretty useless at that point.

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That would still be a good 300-400dps higher than the succubus.

Immolate and Unstable Affliction cannot both be on the same target (The post says immolation, It's fair to assume he means immolate).
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> 3.1.0 Patch Notes - Updated 3/6/09
That post also has the change to the doomguard in it.
I wonder how the buffs to affliction will outway the loss of immolate


Supplicium is right, they are both still castable on the same target, blizz messed up the patch notes then.

Dropping immolate from rotations is really not a huge deal - It's a 100 dps loss on 6200, using numbers from the simcraft parse. The really really big hit to affliction this cycle was the soul siphon hit, which basically counteracted all the corruption and UA buffs.

Who ever is saying you can't have both up, is flat out wrong

Just tested on the ptr, it does in fact allow both to be up at the same time.

This and this might be the answers.
Looking at how they changed Haunt and Shadow Embrace to increase shadow damage-over-time only its pretty obvious what they're trying to accomplish.

OP updated with the doomguard and UA/immolate changes.

Wow, I am loving how close these trees are to each other right now. I do think destro could use a few tweaks to even up the numbers a little bit more.

Chaos bolt is nice but with the new immo changes I feel a bit underwhelmed at times by it. Or they could change conflag to get the glyph bonuses. A redo of F&B would be really nice too ;P

When you have a chance could you update the scale factors Zak? I appreciate your work!

What has happened recently that pushed 0/40/31 ahead of 0/41/30? I haven't seen anything in the patch notes that explains this. Is it just variance in the simulations?

As noted earlier in the thread, I recently started using some more realistic lag parameters. Since they're lower, they'll tend to favor 40/31, which has a rotation that involves an additional instant cast spell, meaning more spell transitions.

I also tweaked the 40/31 spec to take 3/5 DT and 2/3 MC instead of 2/5 and 3/3.

Both of these things happened long before the most recent update, it's just easier to spot 40/31 being above 41/30 now that the affliction doomguard profile is between them.

CoA is better if you have MC, obviously.

I updated them now. Some of the deep demo numbers are looking a little bit odd - I think the high spirit scaling is being caused by the amount of life taps that happen during meta. That can probably be alleviated by having the sim actors be smarter about when to life tap.

Just spotted a small eradication bug that was adversely affecting its uptime. OP has been updated.

Zakalwe

Did you test aflliction builds with shadowburn?
After patch anyway we will no have any problems with soul shards, so maybe shadowburn will give us more dps?
Can you try something with shadowburn?

On a 1 hour run 53/0/18 can expect to put out 6363 average DPS based on DG uptime and subsequent CD. This is lower than the 0/4x/3x specs by approxmiately ~150DPS. In other words the variance is well within player skill, RNG, etc. The aff and demo trees seem to be very well balanced despite any superfical superiority one might perceive due to increased DG uptime.

I've been watching the scaling factors, and 0-56-15 jumped from 1.02 spell power to 1.47 spell power after yesterdays new build. As far as I can tell, nothing should have changed to effect this.

In addition, the difference between that build and 3-52-16 seems to just be Demonic Pact. Could that talent have caused such a huge gap between them? (1.47 vs. 1.19)

I'm really wondering about the accuracy of the scaling numbers, they seem to swing wildly all over the place, both of the deep demo specs previously had haste factors under 0.5 and now they are both over 1.1. Is there any chance of a bug in there somewhere?