[BETA] Destruction Warlock Discussion

[Entricks]

I think that unless it is pure single target fight, Shadowburn will be best choice.

Depends how many adds there are and the consistency of them. If it's something like Killrog then Shadowburn would be awesome, but something closer to Xhul'horac with the two big adds minus the imps and voidfiends, I can see the other two being better. Just have to wait and see how the fights are in the raids I guess.

[Baconeggcheese]

I'm not really sure what their intention is with that row, all 3 talents work in pure single target and cleave situations. Obviously shadowburn has its place for movement / adds but for the other two.. backdraft's niche vs roaring blaze is at best burst vs sustained? Backdraft does have an affect on aoe with FnB, but that'd be mostly for wanting to sustain RoF. And I still have no idea what optimal roaring blaze usage is supposed to look like since conflag scales with haste AND the 2p reduces conflag recharge meaning the timing on it doesn't line up well and is ever changing.

Iono

[Uzkin]

I'm not really sure what their intention is with that row, all 3 talents work in pure single target and cleave situations. Obviously shadowburn has its place for movement / adds but for the other two.. backdraft's niche vs roaring blaze is at best burst vs sustained? Backdraft does have an affect on aoe with FnB, but that'd be mostly for wanting to sustain RoF. And I still have no idea what optimal roaring blaze usage is supposed to look like since conflag scales with haste AND the 2p reduces conflag recharge meaning the timing on it doesn't line up well and is ever changing.

Iono

The new talents Roaring Blaze and Channel Demonfire are quite poorly thought-out and feel out-of-place. Both are supposedly sustained single-target dps talents so in order to actually integrate these abilities into the spec I've suggested the following (in an attempt to fix them both at the same go) :
***
Each bolt from Channel Demonfire should *extend* Immolate on its target by a small amount (to be decided), so that in a pure patchwerk situation there would be no need to ever manually *refresh* Immolate. Therefore, the Roaring Blaze effect (if talented) would never drop off after the initial Conflagrate.
***

In any case, Channel Demonfire absolutely needs some interaction with the rest of the toolkit since right now it's essentially pure button bloat. It's just an extra stand-alone nuke slapped on top of the spec serving no particular purpose other than giving destro a visual effect akin to the Felmouth Frenzy food buff.

[bio347]

Depends how many adds there are and the consistency of them. If it's something like Killrog then Shadowburn would be awesome, but something closer to Xhul'horac with the two big adds minus the imps and voidfiends, I can see the other two being better. Just have to wait and see how the fights are in the raids I guess.

That's an interesting thought. Just how many adds does it take for Shadowburn's extra shards to beat out Backdraft's haste or Roaring Blaze's... whatever it does?

[Kirroth]

That's an interesting thought. Just how many adds does it take for Shadowburn's extra shards to beat out Backdraft's haste or Roaring Blaze's... whatever it does?

I don't think there's a hard answer to that. Partly your results are going to vary based on your proficiency at target swapping; the better you are at sniping adds at low health the more shards you'll generate. Thankfully the new Shadowburn doesn't have a health threshold activation, so there won't be the issue of not being able to use it because the adds are dying too quickly.

It's not going to be the best choice for solo or council fights, but those are rare these days. The Devs seem to love throwing packs of adds in. And being able to Havoc the boss, snipe three or four mobs with Shadowburn, and then pile a couple Chaos Bolts to the boss will be very kind to our DPS.

[bio347]

It's not going to be the best choice for solo or council fights, but those are rare these days. The Devs seem to love throwing packs of adds in. And being able to Havoc the boss, snipe three or four mobs with Shadowburn, and then pile a couple Chaos Bolts to the boss will be very kind to our DPS.

For sure. That's why I think it's an interesting point of analysis.

For example, a fight like Star Augur that's only got adds in the last phase. Is there enough of them to warrant taking SB? It's possible, given that it's a soft enrage phase and the adds are a priority, but then again it's only like a third or less of the fight so maybe the overall gains from Backdraft (which, of course, doesn't immediately lose all value in cleave situations) push it ahead.

[Kirroth]

For example, a fight like Star Augur that's only got adds in the last phase. Is there enough of them to warrant taking SB? It's possible, given that it's a soft enrage phase and the adds are a priority, but then again it's only like a third or less of the fight so maybe the overall gains from Backdraft (which, of course, doesn't immediately lose all value in cleave situations) push it ahead.

Ahead on raw numbers, maybe. But are they numbers in the right places? "Padding your meters" isn't as much a thing as it used to be, but if you talent to optimize for the easy boss phases instead of the hard ones? That's still padding of a sort.

Of course, maybe your raid comp is heavy on DPS that excel at add clearing and you're genuinely better off leaving it to them and taking talents for maximum single target damage. That's what I mean about there not being hard answers, because the right choice is based on your own personal conditions.

[bio347]

Comedy option: Newest build nerfs Chas Bolt to 340% spellpower but doesn't touch Shadowburn (also 340%). The timing is uncanny.

[Deleted]

Comedy option: Newest build nerfs Chas Bolt to 340% spellpower but doesn't touch Shadowburn (also 340%). The timing is uncanny.

I thought the exact same thing :P Incinerate is now also only for FnB + AoE situations, immolate will beat it in single target DPS, if you don't use Roaring Blaze (I think). Also, fire mages buffed, and my faith in their ability to tune and balance just dropped even more.

[effs]

Haha those destro nerfs. Not really sure how they're warranted. Looks like chaos bolt is continuing to stay off my bars for pvp. Nice little roaring blaze buff though.

[bio347]

I thought the exact same thing :P Incinerate is now also only for FnB + AoE situations, immolate will beat it in single target DPS, if you don't use Roaring Blaze (I think).

Hilariously enough, with a full artifact, I think it does by a small margin. On average, at least, because of crits. (Without artifact talents, Incinerate wins. Immolate just has ridiculously strong artifact bonuses.)

That doesn't take into account Dimension Ripper, though, which will probably edge the competition in Incinerate's favour at the end of the day. Incinerate will also be slightly more mana efficient, because it costs the same as Immolate but casts a bit slower.

Still, a couple troubling numbers changes.

[Entricks]

Comedy option: Newest build nerfs Chas Bolt to 340% spellpower but doesn't touch Shadowburn (also 340%). The timing is uncanny.

Seems like they're trying to insinuate a build where we stack crit>haste so Chaos Bolt does more damage. The only problem with it is that if they reduce Chaos Bolts base damage, then crit also does less for it therefore making it less valuable, which ends up pushing haste further ahead...

Why can't they just make Shadowburn a baseline execute again... There wasn't even anything wrong with it.

[demonicpanda]

Seems like they're trying to insinuate a build where we stack crit>haste so Chaos Bolt does more damage. The only problem with it is that if they reduce Chaos Bolts base damage, then crit also does less for it therefore making it less valuable, which ends up pushing haste further ahead...

Why can't they just make Shadowburn a baseline execute again... There wasn't even anything wrong with it.

Wouldn't a crit heavy build tilt more towards Shadowburn as well? Merely intuition here, not even napkin math, but I'd think a build with more crit increasing the likelihood of Shadowburn crits would on average slant more towards Shadowburn with a higher damage/shard cost.

[bio347]

On average, it doesn't matter, because it averages out (obvs).

[Deleted]

Crit is equally valuable on all spells we use for the extra damage part. The only thing we gain is immolate crits granting a double shard chance IIRC.
Haste gives us more conflags thus more shards that way. Giving us a faster rotation, but it doesn't really give anything extra beyond that.
Mastery gives us "multistrike" like damage bonus, and some damage reduction.

Given that Shards increase our dps vs shardless rotation. The more shards we generate, the more dps we should do. Crit being the only stat that increases the amount of shards it is the only stat that increases the % total damage that CB does.

If we wanna be as consistent as possible, we should stack crit/haste.

[Entricks]

Immolate only has a 15% chance per tick to give a shard, critical ticks have a 30% chance. The trait that gives our Immolate a 30% extra chance to crit means getting more crit is less valuable because of diminishing returns and more haste is more valuable, because more ticks per Immolate. Immolate in general does not generate a lot of shards which is why the spec is so clunky and rng based right now, and stacking more crit doesn't solve that issue, it just reduces the RNG by a little bit. A legendary item which gives us a 25% chance to generate a shard when we use fire spells is going to solve a big problem with our rotation, and also may cause Backdraft to be the best of the three talents in the first row, because faster fire spells.

[Deleted]

Immolate only has a 15% chance per tick to give a shard, critical ticks have a 30% chance. The trait that gives our Immolate a 30% extra chance to crit means getting more crit is less valuable because of diminishing returns and more haste is more valuable, because more ticks per Immolate. Immolate in general does not generate a lot of shards which is why the spec is so clunky and rng based right now, and stacking more crit doesn't solve that issue, it just reduces the RNG by a little bit. A legendary item which gives us a 25% chance to generate a shard when we use fire spells is going to solve a big problem with our rotation, and also may cause Backdraft to be the best of the three talents in the first row, because faster fire spells.

Haste gives the same diminishing returns as crit, granted we start with a low base haste so we won't notice it at the start. In the end haste just speeds up the rotation. Kinda the same way Mastery increases the output of our rotation (and nothing else). In the end it depends on the stat ratio and we probably want lots of crit and haste. Both smooth out the RNG aswell with bigger chance and more ticks.

We also get some haste talents for CB/Incinerate. All too soon Incinerate will dip below GCD during Bloodlust.

[Uzkin]

Haste gives the same diminishing returns as crit, granted we start with a low base haste so we won't notice it at the start. In the end haste just speeds up the rotation. Kinda the same way Mastery increases the output of our rotation (and nothing else). In the end it depends on the stat ratio and we probably want lots of crit and haste. Both smooth out the RNG aswell with bigger chance and more ticks.

We also get some haste talents for CB/Incinerate. All too soon Incinerate will dip below GCD during Bloodlust.

I would guess this will lower the value of haste and the Backdraft talent quite a bit... looks like yet another short-sight in the legion destro redesign (in this case, due to the removal of the -0.5 sec gcd modifier along with Chaotic Energy).

About crit rating; Conflagration of Chaos makes Conflagrate scale better with crit than the other spells. This might not be enough to "save" crit's scale factor, though, due to the +crit talents lowering the value of crit. That, together with the "gcd effect" lowering the value of haste, might make mastery the best stat for destro. Apparently, not only did Blizzard create a highly disliked mastery design for destro, but they are also making sure the destro players are forced to stack it <333

[Gaidax]

Seen the nerf, it's really tiny tbh. Not sure why they even bothered, it's like what... 3% in total overall.

[Entricks]

Yeah if Backdraft ends up being the best talent there will be a haste threshold for sure. My guess is it'll be around 30% before it becomes worse than crit though, and it depends how good Roaring Blaze is as well. When we start seeing the real power spikes of raid gear I think we will be seeing a lot more haste than we actually need, so crit will become the best stat.