I imagine an affliction lock will be able to toss at least one Nightfall'd Shadow Bolt every 30 seconds during the execute phase. That should not be much of a DPS loss at all.

Why not? Blizzard has not change anything about Conflag the last 3 builds. And an answer to your logic is, why then they left affliction to be so much overpowered all this time? (Way too far than 00/40/31 is now at ptr...)

Above 25% sure the warlock is the better choice, but in the time under 25% DS will be ticking for 12-14k a tick while shadowbolt will be doing what, 6-7k average? so every 30 seconds we lose any where from a max OF ~10K DMG to a min of 3k. Which is a min of 100 dps lost and a max of 333 dps lost. Not to mention the wrench it can throw into your rotation. But this is assuming a 1:1 switch from a DS tick to a SB cast.

They probably left affliction as it was because this is the first signifigant content push since the expansion. It was also one of the more difficult specs to play flawlessly, and we know Blizzard is more concerned with actual in-game performance than simulated results. The Immolate glyph began effecting conflag aproximately one week ago. I would not be so hasty as to assume any finality in such a short time frame.

So you're using the 0/40/31 playstyle without conflag, all for a gain of 2% crit? Conflagrate is too good on the PTR right now to not shift points that way if you're using this playstyle. Sure, it may do more than 0/41/30 using a Felguard, but so does 0/40/31, and by a larger margin.

No it would be using the 41/30 play style.
I thought about it and the gain may be a wash, depending on how the imp glyph stacks with the talents.

It would gain 7% crit for you, 2% for the imp, over the existing 41/30 build, and have more MC uptime.
So you would do more damage, but your pet does less compared to the felguard.

Think of it as the ezplay alternative. And wouldn't be affected if conflag gets nerfed.

Uh, unless I'm mistaken (which is entirely possible), if you remove conflag from an 0/40/31 setup, you have the 0/41/30 play style.

Either way, if the 7% crit difference is really enough to negate the felguard's damage over the imp, that's interesting, but it still seems silly to play this style and NOT have conflag.

Unless I am mistaken DS ticks 5 times during a 15 second duration before haste, giving it 3 seconds between ticks vs 2.5 base shadow bolt cast time after talents. One could also factor in the time between tick until you cancel the channeled spell. Furthermore, part of the DS damage increase (12%) is from Death's Embrace which you should account for in your average shadow bolt DPET(even if that increase comes 10% before switching).

I do not know mage specs but I suspect the rDPS loss for a lock to toss a shadow bolt once every 30 seconds sub 25% wont be as great as a mage having to spec scortch for 25% of a boss fight. RNG with nightfall procs would also greatly change the DPS loss for the warlock. This would be interesting to find out from somebody that can provide insight from the mage side of things on DPS difference between specs.

Is this something that can be modeled in Simcraft by tracking nightfall procs, and imp ISB buff sub 25%? I'm afraid I am still to blue with the "actions" syntax to know.

Emberstorm (and other percentage modifiers common to both Immolate and Conflagrate) factor in slightly differently. It isn't double-dipping, but the multiplication and addition happens slightly differently so you do see a slight increase in Conflag's damage. Firestone will also have a very noticable effect. Let's look at 3000 SP for 40/31:

(1 + ES + MD:Imp + II + AM) * (157 + 0.2x) =
(1 + 0.15 + 0.05 + 0.30 + 0.06) * (157 + 0.2 * 3000) = 1180.92/tick

(1 + ES + MD:Imp + FS) * 5 * (1 + II + AM) * (157 + 0.2x) =
(1 + 0.15 + 0.05 + 0.04) * 5 * (1 + 0.3 + 0.06) * (157 + 0.2 * 3000) =6383

Which is 8.1% higher than "expected".

There's no double dipping, but emberstorm is being applied directly to conflagrate rather than via immolate, which means multiplicatively rather than additively. So the expected average conflag hit, assuming aftermath, imp immo, immo glyph, and emberstorm (adds up to 71%) can be calculated as (1974/1.71)*(1.71-0.15)*5*1.15 = 10355.

And then there's the fire stone, which adds 4% to conflag but not to immolate: 10355 * 1.04 = 10769.

This is my first post and I apologize if its in the wrong location, but I don't see the older Post 3.1 spec discussion thread any longer.

I don't see any analysis or spec suggestions incorporating Improved Soul Leech for the Replenishment buff. Since most classes are getting some form of this buff I imagine that blizz will try to tax mana supplies in at least a few encounters. As such, I plan to use one of my dual spec slots for a replenishment build while using the other for a pure DPS spec.

Pretty much any spec that takes these talents is going to suffer a DPS loss, but here is a spec that I think would work out well.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...0&version=9658


Its similar in many regards to the 0/28/43 spec which does reasonable on the simcraft analysis. With the talent changes, you lose some additional damage from the 3% crit loss and the +8% damage bonus to the imp for about another 1% overall DPS decrease. However it also adds another point to Pyroclasm which boosts the fire damage boost a little more for those short bursts where the buff is up.

Overall I'm guessing this would put out about 200-300 DPS less than the 0/28/43 spec and would allow for the replenishment.