5.2 Warlock Simulation

[JvChequer 43]

I will stay with affliction, probably, unless the difference in dps be higher than your SM looks like.

Around 1% until 510ish it's very small, unless my core stuck on some fights with need high burn or aoe phase, than i will change to Demonology.

[vladMTL 1]

likewise, thanks for the sims !

[Wolland 1]

It looks like Demonology = Affliction at 509 ilvl, but as you climb to 540 ilvl, Affliction pulls far ahead again. Below 509 ilvl, Demonology > Affliction, so you can enjoy both specs. For you Destro locks, you scale better now, but only with Grim of Supremacy. Using Sacrifice is almost as good as not using a pet at all.

Zagam, thanks for all the great work you are putting into it

It seems build 510-12 "still copying crit rates through MG but it shouldn't be" (http://elitistjerks....33/#post2260891).

I'm not sure how true that is, as that build simply crashes on my pc when I click on Simulate, so I haven't had the chance to look into it, but I thought it was worth mentioning it here just in case.

Edited March 5, 2013 by Wolland

[Jenaye 9]

Interesting read; thanks for all the work you do for the community.

[Mummer 1]

Zag, not sure if you've caught it, but it's been reported that amongst GC last minute changes is that GoSac was nerfed to 25%. I could be wrong, seen it in the MMO 5.2 Warlock Discussion thread.

Versus latest official PTR patch notes:

Immolate: 15 vs 20%

AffGoSac: 25 vs 35%

Haunt: 30 vs 25%

Conflagrate: 15 vs 20%

So I guess this requires Locks to gem Haste even more due to GoSup?

Edited March 5, 2013 by Mummer

[Zagam 1,982]

I can't really take anyone's direct word for any changes. Once the final patch notes are released, I can make those adjustments. I can't see them at work, so if you have the finalized official patch notes, I'd gladly take a look at them.

The Conflag, Immo, and Haunt changes were done in a mini-post by GC. I've not seen Sac modified from 30%. It hasn't been 35% for quite some time. For Affliction, Grim of Sac is still better than Grim of Supremacy and will still be that way if it's reduced to 25%.

[Mummer 1]

No worries, I just wanted to keep you informed.

Warlock

• Fel Armor now reduces damage taken by 10%, instead of increasing the Warlock’s armor.
• Blood Fear has been replaced by Blood Horror. Blood Horror costs 5% health, has 1 charge, and lasts 60 seconds with a 30-second cooldown. While Blood Horror is active, melee attacks that strike the Warlock will cause the attacker to be horrified for 4 seconds.
• Burning Rush now also prevents movement-impairing effects from reducing the Warlock’s movement speed below 100% of normal, in addition to its other effects.
• The Imp ability Blood Pact has been removed.
• Dark Intent now increases Stamina in addition to Spell Power.
• Immolate now deals 15% more damage.
• Shadow Bolt now deals 15% more damage.
• Soul Leech now provides an absorption shield instead of healing.
• Sacrificial Pact now requires the pet to sacrifice 25% of its health to activate (was 50%).
• Kil'jaeden's Cunning is now a passive talent, and its activated ability has been removed.
• The passive damage from Archimonde's Vengeance no longer has a visual effect.
• Grimoire of Sacrifice now increases the damage of abilities by 15% (was 25%) for Destruction Warlocks and 25% (was 50%) for Affliction Warlocks. In addition, it now provides the spell Whiplash instead of Seduction when a Succubus is sacrificed.
• Glyph of Burning Embers has been removed and its effects are now baseline for Destruction Warlocks.
• Glyph of Soul Shards has been removed and its effects are now baseline for Affliction Warlocks.
• New Glyph: Glyph of Ember Tap. This glyph increases the healing gained from Ember Tap by 33%, but the health is restored over 10 seconds.
• New Glyph: Glyph of Drain Life. This glyph increases the healing gained from Drain Life by 30%.
• Glyph of Unstable Affliction has been redesigned. This glyph now reduces the cast time of Unstable Affliction by 25%.
• Affliction
  • Haunt now causes the target to receive an additional 30% damage (was 25%) from Warlock's spells.
  • Unstable Affliction’s backlash effect is now always a critical hit and deals approximately 15% more damage.
• Demonology
  • Chaos Wave now has a new visual.
  • Hand of Gul'dan now deals 15% more damage.
  • Shadowflame now deals 15% more damage.
  • Soul Fire now deals 22% more damage.
  • Touch of Chaos now deals 15% more damage.
  • Wild Imp's Firebolt now deals 15% more damage.
• Destruction
  • Conflagrate now deals 15% more damage.
  • Fire and Brimstone now has a radius of 10 yards (was 15 yards).
  • Incinerate now deals 10% more damage.

[JvChequer 43]

Really, why so much hate on Gosac?

35% was quite low, 25% is a joke.

All that to force players to go into Demo?

[Zagam 1,982]

Pretty sure it's because Grim of Sac allowed gear to scale way more than others. As you can see with the T15H get up, Aff ends up 20k ahead of Demo. That additional 5% nerf might bring it back in line. Demo will be better up through 515 ilvl now and may hold its own longer.

[leboy 1]

Can't find the changes Mummer told about. Here are the official and unofficial notes that GC or blizzard posted.

Ps: There is a last minute note about RealPPM.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/254470-ptr-class-and-set-bonus-issues-part-iii/#post2169

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1270877-Patch-5-2-Unofficial-Notes?p=20412814#post20412814

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1270784-Patch-5-2-Official-PTR-Notes?p=20410633#post20410633

[Stunlocked 8]

Really, why so much hate on Gosac?

35% was quite low, 25% is a joke.

All that to force players to go into Demo?

It has nothing to do with forcing warlocks to go Demo, but rather to encourage (or 'force' if you prefer) Warlocks to use pets. Blizzard's view is that warlocks are a pet class just as much as a hunter is, and they feel that the majority of 'locks should be using pets.

From ther perspective - which I kind of agree with - GoSac provides passive health regeneration, a higher total health pool (with Soul Link) and you don't have to micromanage your pets or worry about it's AI. If GoSac also provides higher DPS in addiiton to all that, then that tier of grimoires isn't really balanced. Their feeling is that if you want convenience of not having a pet or you want to take advantage of GoSac's passive benefits, then that should be at the expense of a slight DPS loss.

Edited March 5, 2013 by Stunlocked

[Morgaliel 2]

Their feeling is that if you want convenience of not having a pet or you want to take advantage of GoSac's passive benefits, then that should be at the expense of a slight DPS loss.

Although I perfectly understand their point of view, it's a shame that even after 3 consecutives nerfs, GoSac still looks like the best way to go, in the long run at least... At least the affli won't be the best spec for every single 5.2 fight, that's the best change as far as I am concerned. I love playing affli, certainly more than I like paying demo, but change is fun !

Edit : I've seen figures which showed GoSup > GoSac for affli after all... I guess I'll wait for definitive sims...

Edited March 5, 2013 by Morgaliel

[Zagam 1,982]

Well...as of today, something weird happened in Simcraft models...Demonology skyrocketed to the upper tier of DPS, essentially equal to Affliction. Investigation forthcoming.

[Zagam 1,982]

Ah...as I suggested, full Haste, then Mastery and using Grimoire of Sacrifice. Odd that they use Glyph of Imp Swarm...perhaps with that much Haste, it's worth it now. I'll have to do some more digging. HOORAY DEMONOLOGY!

[Zagam 1,982]

What...the...what? Demo simulation crashes because they use Void Ray over Touch of Chaos in priority? WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE THEY DOING?!?!?!!??!

[Omaric 246]

I want Lei Shen's trinket so I can finally go back to Demo. Plz k thx. -_-

[Zagam 1,982]

Dropped for us last night again...Fire Mage was like 'eh, I guess I'll take it for if I go Arcane'...lol

I feel the same way about Wush/Cha-Ye's/Breath. Basically ANY OF THEM. Volatile's 16% Haste uptime isn't fun.

[gahhda 95]

Unerring vision is only 10.3377% dps ahead of the next best trinket for demo. Yes, thats dps, not 10% more dps than the other trinkets provide, but actual dps. Unerring vision increases your dps by 10% if used properly. Rather stupidly broken.

[gahhda 95]

Oh, and that weird stuff from last night/this morning was because I did an overhaul while half awake, we've since fixed it all :3. Should be reflected on the T15H raid output in an hour or less.

[gahhda 95]

Demo stuffs:

- Sacrifice 0.99% ahead single target (slightly larger in cleave /YAYYAYAYAYA WILD IMPS)

- Unerring specific action list now properly works (1000000% more doom crits.)

- Glyph of imp swarm is a dps gain, if you sync with dark soul. At some level of haste I don't remember right now (not unrealistically high, iirc its actually relatively low), you can set it up in a way where the time between it coming off cd, and the time DS comes off cd, is enough to proc an additional wild imp via the passive. They also benefit from the 30% off DS which is hilarious.

- Soon to come, Cleave/AoE updates for unerring-specific :D.

Destro:

- MUCH BETTER cleave

- Immolate now plays with snapshoting during int procs/darksoul (30% crit chance ftw, so many embers.)

- Chaos bolt/shadowburn now have intelligent intellect trinket use, this is slightly limited currently. I haven't figured out how to make wushoolay's work with it yet so it should be slightly underperforming right now, I'll hopefully update and bring it back up near the other trinkets soon.

- Shadowburn pools embers, similar to chaos bolt

- Unerring-specific updates

Affliction:

- Now with 30% more dot crit chance.

[Zagam 1,982]

I agree...it's a nasty good trinket. I dislike when one piece of gear makes you so much better. I just happened to be on the lucky side of someone who acquired it early.

[Zagam 1,982]

I'm unsure how Glyph of Imp Swarm works out to be a DPS gain. It says in the tooltip (these are known to be wrong often) that the cooldown is affected by Haste and its base CD is 2 minutes. Because I run at high Haste builds, my raid Haste is 29%. This means that I would have to either:

1) Use Imp Swarm on CD and not let it sync up to Dark Soul each time (loses point of using Glyph of Imp Swarm)

2) Delay Imp Swarm until Dark Soul came up (seemingly big DPS loss via missing damage and demonic fury generation)

3) Delay Dark Soul until Imp Swarm came up (appears to be BIG DPS loss)

I believe both of these to be a DPS loss because Imp Swarm caps you at 5 Imps from your passive generation. Are you one of the coders for Simcraft? You seem to be talking as you are, so how would you compare those two situations to not using the glyph at all and just using Dark Soul on CD with Imps all over the place?

[gahhda 95]

Haste doesn't really factor into this other than cd alignment. Haste lowers both the CD of imp swarm, and the internal CD on the wild imp passive, though the tooltip on the passive doesn't mentiont his, it actually does.

While imp swarm is on cd, the ICD on the passive is locked out. If you use both wild imps and dark soul on pull, lets take an extreme case of 30% haste raid buffed:

120 / 1.3 = 92.31 sec cd on imp swarm

CD of dark soul remains static at 120 seconds

120 - 92.31 = 27.69 seconds between imp swarm coming off cd, and dark soul coming off cd

20 second base ICD on the passive + 4 from the glyph

24 / 1.3 = 18.46 second ICD

18.46 seconds after wild imps come off cd, because you don't use it immediately, you proc a wild imp via the passive, dark soul comes off cd shortly there after, and you can pop imp swarm.

During said DS, those 5 wild imps will do 30% more damage than had they been passively summoned over the course of the 92 seconds period. Because they do so much more dps in line with other cds, the loss of a few imps net vs unglyphed is compensated for by the fact that they do a massive amount more dps while active.

Net, its only ~1% ahead or behind no matter how it plays out or how you use it. Just happens that with a decent amount of haste, you can slightly game it around dark soul.

[Omaric 246]

I believe both of these to be a DPS loss because Imp Swarm caps you at 5 Imps from your passive generation.

Is this really true? I wasn't aware. Doesn't Doom crit procs override the disabled passive?

[gahhda 95]

Is this really true? I wasn't aware. Doesn't Doom crit procs override the disabled passive?

Two entirely different mechanisms. Doom crit proc wild imps are entirely separate from the passive/glyph wild imps. They're just extra *bonus* wild imps you get for critting.