dwsr

I'm going to assume that you mean that ISL is less useful because you spend once every 40 seconds casting LT anyway. I tried 0/13/58 for a few weeks when we had a reliable spriest in our guild, and I found that I was still casting LT more than once every 40 seconds for mana. I don't know how the regen from 219+ gear would scale, but I would think that the ultimate goal is to provide just enough regen that you are LTing exactly once every 40sec., in order to reduce wasted GCDs and still keep the buff. This assumes, of course, that the buff is worth more DPS than a straight Glyph of Incin.

While it is true that ISL decreases dependence on spirit for regen, thanks to 3/3 DA, warlocks shouldn't "shy away". The stat weight changes, but I don't think it changes the priority vs. other stats (namely int). Spirit still does equate to spell power. Warlocks shouldn't be gemming/enchanting any spirit on their gear (except for maybe in a blue socket), and more regen doesn't really hurt anyway, since more regen means you can push the frequency of LT in your rotation down to once/40sec.

Based on the 3.1 thread, I'd still go with Immolate, especially since Incinerate damage is getting a nerf anyway.

Highly situational choice. Depends on your gear/available gem sockets and the availability of a hit debuff/Draenei. If you've got a Draenei spriest that always runs with you, then you only need your 13% to hit anyway. As a Horde without an spriest/oomkin available ever, I find that hard capping my hit/keeping 3/3 Suppression is the way to go.

I wouldn't think so, since Corruption currently isn't used in the destro rotation anyway except where you are moving for extended periods of time. 3% less hit potentially means 3% more crit/haste, or possibly even more spell power.

Interesting that you would pick up Soul Link vs. Shadowfury. I've often thought that SL kills my Imp and that SF would be more useful if something's coming at me.

 

Emoroan

On a fight like mimiron I tend to find that I can make it a complete phase without needing to tap in 25 man. I'll tap myself silly in the between phase but that's another matter. It means that I can last a full 2-3 minutes without requiring a tap at all, I'm not sure why you can't seem to last 40 seconds.

I currently have both talents, Soul Link is great because it takes some pressure off the healers as Shadowfury obviously doesn't work on a fire. Shadowfury on the other hand is still extremely useful, i normally find myself using it to allow tanks a bit more time to get aggro when something spawns as opposed to using on something I accidentally pull.

 

Warlocomotif

I also run my destruction spec with both soul link and shadow fury. Soul Link is really a massive help on fights like Thorim/Freya hard mode, or tanking Mimiron's head on hard mode. Shadowfury is also great (for example on Council Medium p3 or Freya mini adds)- quite frankly I don't believe 2% crit would be better than either of those 2 talents.

The mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's open.

 

Frailty99

First off this is my first time posting here, im gonna try and uphold the no-hand holding aspect of the terms :P I am planning on being the Pact bitch in 3.2 and am just looking for some advice on how to do it right. Im think i have it mostly right, just need to iron out a few details.

1. Spec and glyph's. I have searched for a cookie cutter build with no avail (well the one linked in the demo thread might not be 100% accurate in 3.2). This is what i have come up with, and would like some feedback.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...&version=10147

I hear lifetap glyph and aegis are now correctly applying to pact on PTR, thus my glyph choices.

2. Rotation. Curse of Doom>immolate>corruption>Sbolt spam>soul fires via decimation. Along with popping meta during lusts/times when i think i can get two in a fight etc. Again this is one point im not 100% on. Ive read both that using doom is a DPS boost as full demo over CoA, but ive also read CoA is almost necessary for MC procs. Id like to think CoA would be much more beneficial to use when in decimation range, and generally use doom before that.


I think these questions/discussion are appropriate for this thread, as i havent seen much discussion on Meta builds in this thread or on these boards for 3.2.

 

Warlocomotif

CoA is needed for MC procs in a 0/41/30 spec. It's both, not needed and not very useful for demonic pact spec. Reason being that you're already nuking with Shadow Bolt (=MC procs), and you're not doing that much fire damage anyway since you're not nuking with incinerate (as FG/ES does).

As for your talent spec:
Aftermath is a bad talent. Its not worth taking as Demo.
Let the destruction lock pick up improved healthstones, the demo lock should get Demonic Embrace. Remember that you (slightly) scale with stamina as a demo lock.
Also, pick up 3/3 Improved Demonic Tactics. Makes for much better demonic pact uptime.

The mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's open.

 

Frailty99

So i can count on decent uptime on MC without using CoA in a pact build with one point in MC? This was my original thought, but was told recently CoA is a must. Drawing from my own logic and your comments im gonna roll with CoD :P

Healthstones are a funny issue, while i 100% agree i should be maxing embrace, the other locks sometimes do not show and people start freaking out about 4200 health stones lol

As for aftermath .... thats a tricky one for me. I know its DPCT is greater than shadowbolt unglyphed and without set bonuses, i guess its just me thinking the cumulative effects of all 3 of those warranted the points in it, im gonna have to look at this one again.


Thanks for the reply, ill be messing around on the PTR fine tuning for 3.2 ...... at least the mages wont hate me anymore! LOL

 

Warlocomotif

Molten Core increases your fire damage by 10%, your fire damage will extremely rarely be more than 35% (it'll only really be 35% if you're aoe-ing, and when you're aoeing you wouldnt be casting dots anyway- though I guess you could cast SoC to proc MC) So the increase to your damage when MC is up is roughly 3.5%.

In your normal rotation you have corruption ticking every 3 seconds, and with haste you'll cast a shadowbolt roughly every 2 seconds. Meaning that per 15 seconds you'll get 5 shadow dot ticks and 7.5 shadow bolts. The chance for for molten core to be up at any point is 100% - the chance for it to not have procced in the past 15s, or 1-(0.95^(5+7.5))=47% uptime. If you were to add Curse of agony that would become:

1-(0.95^(5+7.5+7.5))=64%

So you gain 17% uptime to a buff that increases (at best) 35% of your damage by 10%. Which totals at a 0.6% damage increase. Lets say you're doing 7k dps, thats 42k damage in a minute. The gain from CoA over 1 minute time through molten core would be 249.9 damage. Curse of DOom however would do a lot more damage by itself to make up for 2 coa's + the tiny 249 damage.

Curse of Doom > CoA by far.

The mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's open.

 

ZiaSK

I was thinking about the new Empowered Imp change and if it would be possible to make use of it somehow in PvP by, say, /petattack and CCing/LoSing until you get the buff, then lining up a Chaos Bolt crit + Conflag combo. But then I started thinking about the Resilience change and how it relates to 100% crit chance.

As I type this, I'm assuming that the crit chance reduction will be taken off of 100% crit chance. So if someone has -10% to incoming crit chance, then an Empowered Imp spell will be at 90% crit chance and so forth (I'm also assuming that crit chance will not go over 100%).

Or do 100% crit buffs override resilience? This all might be irrelevant, though, as the imp probably will not get any crits at all against highly pvp geared opponents.

 

Darkmantle

Does the empowered imp boost get consumed on cast or on hit?

If it does get consumed on hit, does that mean we can essentially do a shatter by getting 2 spells in the air before the buff is consumed? I'm thinking mainly of CB+ conflag being cast at almost the same time and which one benefits from empowered imp.

 

Taste

Crit chance will get over 100%, try take a look at a feral druid' crit chance when he gets the spore buff from Loatheb. it will go above 100%, our had 117% if i remember correct.

 

Darkmantle

What is displayed on a tooltip isn't necessarily what is happening in the actual game code. It should be fairly simple to test with enough crit rating to have 10% crit, versus a character with resilience sufficient to decrease crit chance by 9%. If they ever don't get crit, we know that crit caps at a 100% then resilience takes away.

 

Profa

My first post here is the question/idea about how to change talents according to the change being made to Life Tap glyph. As it looks like right now, LT glyph increase in damage for all currently available official builds.
Since destro Warlocks have problems with aggro on some encounters, I found Destructive Reach talent pretty important, but till 3.2 I had only one point in this and since I will be using LT anyway, I would change ISL to only 1 point (putting the one to DR) making it 50% effective.
The question is if its worth it?! It would be also nice removing both points from ISL so that raid wont recieve replenishment, but allowing you to put all those 4 more talents into survival talents like molten skin or soul link.
So more survivability or mana regen for raid and you and how much mana regen? Thats the question for discussion.

Sorry about my English, I am not native speaker so I hope you get what I meant.

half ISL build (replenish): http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...&version=10192

survival: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warl...&version=10192

 

Orgath

It is consumed on cast.

for a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest - Simon & Garfunkel

 

ultrajustin

Fixed version:

78.69 points is 3% hit.

You can replace about 78points of itemization with crit/haste if you take suppression.

 

Orgath

Please consider the context of your quotes.
The statement in question was to drop or to not drop the Supression Talent.
The correct answer to that is:
Yes, if you gain more utility through the optional Talents picked.
For Destro ISL provides more DPS than you loose by gearinng for 3% more hit.

for a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest - Simon & Garfunkel

 

renaendel

SampleOutputT8 - simulationcraft - Project Hosting on Google Code

I have noticed that the pawn values listed in the 3.2 T8 warlock specs do not include int for certain specs. Specifically 03-13-55. This seems unreasonable as int has a ranking of 0.85 for the 00-03-58 spec. Was this an oversight or can someone explain why int would not be valued at all in 03-13-55?

note* I do understand that 00-13-58 is technically the higher dps spec, but in the quest for more hit gear and highly mobile fights the 03-13-55 has proven useful. (please comment on the simcraft pawn value question, not on the validity of this note )

 

prorsus

That is probably due to ISL scaling with INT.

 

Dazion

Im curious as to wether Affliction will pull slightly ahead of Destro due to changes to both Immolate and Incinerate. Taking into account that Glyph of Life Tap was buffed, it seems this would now also be the most optimal glyph for any spec. Any thoughts on the subject?

 

ruthlessmind

Due to the mana returns gained from ISL and not using the glyph of life tap for the 00-13-58 spec there is no benefit to using life tap other then to keep from going OOM. Because of this you do not want to cast it unless you need the mana. More int=more mana which allows you to cast longer before you run out of mana.

03-13-55 spec does not have the mana return from ISL causing you to go OOM much sooner. Because of this it includes the glyph of life tap and casting it much more often and regular for both the mana and the bonus spell power. With constant life taps you are gaining mana back already and the value of int becomes null.

 

Bloch

This is the build I am currently using in 3.2. From my PTR experience, I find it to be the highest DPS build provided that (1) you have another viable source of replenishment in your raid and (2) your total mana consumption per second is around ~125 (this is the figure required to lifetap only once per 40 seconds with replenishment active) and while inside the five second rule.

http://http://talent.mmo-champion.co...&version=10192

I find that soul leech is a great tool for PvE survivablity (I always have it active), and the damage my imp does absorb via SL is easily healed by my Fel Synergy (at 5k DPS, you are healing your pet for 750 hps, which, if insufficient, would mean that you personally are taking more than 3750 DPS for an extended period of time which seems unlikely).

The lingering concern I'm having is the 3/3 in supression. While warlock T9 is not hit-heavy (5 pc total provides 124 hit: 72 from Chest and 52 from Gloves at iLvl 232 (141 at iLvl 245)), a significant amount of the loot listed for CC seems to be hit-heavy. I currently run with ~265 hit*, but with the new gear I am able to easily reach the ~340 mark required for a suppression-less build. The question I have been wrestling with is: are there any talents that are accessible to a destro warlock that would be more beneficial in terms of DPS?

I have considered placing an additional point into Destructive Reach, Soul Leech, and Shadowfury. Obviously Soul Leech brings with it greater survivability and eases the strain on healers, so it is viable. Shadowfury seems very situational to me, and I'm not sure if I'd get a decent value for it. Destructive Reach looks like a nice talent, but with the SS CD being reduced to 3 minutes, it seems superfluous (the additional range is negated by the fact that you have to run in and cast CoD every minute anyway). Any thoughts on this build or these modifications?

*265 hit = 10% additional chance to hit. I have assumed the following raid buffs/talents: +1% Heroic Presence, +3% suppression, +3% E&M/Misery.

 

Bloch

Glyph of Lifetap is the highest DPS glyph now provided that your mana consumption enables you to do it once every 40 seconds, thus not wasting GCDs. As for affliction v. destro in terms of DPS, I think a lot is contingent on the changes to Empowered Imp and the T9 2pc bonus. With more destro crits, Pyroclasm should be active more often (6% bonus damage to all fire spells), which should offset the loss of 5% from Fire and Brimstone. Even without Pycroclasm being active, the crit bonus via EI is still significant and scales very well in many Ulduar encounters (XT, Hodir, General, Yogg). The key, I suspect, is in determining how the new empowered imp mechanics work and what effect they have on destro warlocks.

From my experience, I believe the Empowered Imp proc works something like a killing machine proc for a Frost DK: When you begin to cast a spell, if the EI proc is active you will get a guaranteed crit and the proc will be consumed at the completion of the cast (note that this does not even consider your personal base crit, talents, raid buffs, etc). If you begin to cast a spell and the EI proc is inactive, then whether or not you crit will be determined by your crit rate+talents+buffs. So, in effect, you are not "losing" crits through the new EI mechanic--there are simply fewer instances where your personal crit rating is taken into consideration.

Depending on how exactly these new mechanics play out, I believe warlocks recieved a slight buff (don't forget the SS buff, which should help tremendously duing some of the longer encounters where threat became an issue and locks had to seriously back off their DPS). There is no doubt that we gained crit (and quite a bit of it--the lowest simcraft I've seen is about 4.6% +crit; the highest 8.8% crit).

The DPS increase for that can be (very roughly) calculated to be: 45.91*4.6=211.186 points of crit @ 3.51* DPS/10 crit = 75.4 DPS if the EI+2PC T9 yields 4.6% additional crit; 45.91*8.8=404.8 points of crit @ 3.51* DPS/10 Crit = 141.8 DPS if EI+2PC T9 yields ~8.8% crit. Of course, these numbers don't take into account the additional Pyroclasm uptime, so they should be a little low.

*The figure of 3.51 DPS/10 Crit is a base figure--it will change depending on your gear, buffs, and raid setup. I use this because it is the lowest possible multiplier for an 80 Destro warlock with >1800 sp, >18% crit, >100 hit, and >50 haste.

 

Humpall

My understanding was that because conflagrate is an instant cast and will mostly be cast straight after another spell with a cast time, eg, incinerate > conflag. The incinerate will take the EI buff and unless the imp lands a crit between the incinerate being cast and the conflag (very unlikely), the conflag will not gain any additional crit chance via EI. So there should not be any additional pyroclasm uptime via the EI talent. Please do correct me if i have got this wrong but that was my understanding.


I agree with what you said about glyph of life tap now, I was wondering if you have looked into putting 3 points in unholy power from supression and swapping in glpyh of imp in place of incinerate? With my gear setup i am getting around a 45dps increase on spreadsheet from this. It should work out to be even more when 2xt9 becomes avaliable.

 

Evidicus

Anyone else toying with the idea of robbing a point from Backlash (or from elsewhere in the Destruction tree) to place into Fel Domination? I've found that on some occassions that even Imps can die, and the Fel Dom change to 3 minutes instead of 15 seems to make it a lot more useful. Eight seconds to resummon a pet is an eternity mid-fight, especially on hard modes. My current build eschews points in Backlash for points in not only Fel Dom, but for 2/2 Destructive Reach and Shadowfury as well, and personally I am comfortable losing a little crit to gain that much utility, control and survivability.

To counter Bloch's sentiment concerning the usefulness of the increased range of Destructive Reach I would point out that often encounter-specific buffs (Shadow Crashes, Runes of Power, etc) happen in inconvenient places outside of 30 yards. Perhaps some Warlocks don't plan around situational buffs or scenarios, but I've found it to be more of a DPS gain than planning around CoD's 30 yard range when CoD hits for less than a single Incinerate crit.

 

scandore8472

I have to agree, I go a very long time before I have to tap. I generally only life tap once maybe twice if our DPS is lacking during most boss fights. Then again, I'm not a "good lock" and I generally wait until I'm almost out of mana before I tap, then tap 3 or so times to fill back up, so that is what I consider life tapping once.

 

Bloch

I honestly don't think that 3 yards of range is worth 1 talent point. Even for Vexaz HM and AoI HM, proper raid positioning and paying attention to where you're supposed to be ensures that you will always be in range of the healers, the relevant buffs, and your target. I simply don't see how this is a "situational" talent at all--the situations you bring up require raid coordination and awareness, not extra range.