[BETA] Destruction Warlock Discussion

[Fearsom1992]

Are you going to set your loot role to demo to try and get those bracers ? lol thats only way to get them outside being demo

[Deleted]

Are you going to set your loot role to demo to try and get those bracers ? lol thats only way to get them outside being demo

what bracers??

[bio347]

sprite

It's definitely "spite". No R.

And honestly, even if it's slightly better than the Destruction legendaries you have no control over what drops. There's a relatively significant chance you just get one of the other Demonology items and have something that's literally useless. I, personally, wouldn't risk running with Demo loot spec until I already had one Destro legendary to use.

[Gaidax]

Well after you get all the decent Destruction legendaries you can flip and get some Demo ones. Will take time.

The shards on fire spells one is non-negotiable, IMO.

[Baconeggcheese]

You are over estimating the contribution of the havoc legendary and underestimating the power of the sindorei sprite.

Just fits into destros kit nice is all, since maximizing havoc usage is what destro does.

Sprite effects all your damage including pet and dg, infernal, and Lord of flames.

For 25s once every three minutes.

Sprite scales on multi target and havoc cleave.

For 25s once every three minutes.

Sprite has a far superior stacking impact with trinkets and lust.

Trinkets are mostly dmg procs outside of a couple dungeon trinkets. Blizzard seems to be wising up to trinket stacking causing shenanigans power creep. There's nothing really to stack besides LoF / lust / racial which will be fun times but that's again for all of 25s once during the fight. It's freaking rare that that matters during progression.

The havoc and fire spell legendaries are good, sprite is amazing.

I imagine you're overestimating sprite quite a bit. I can't express how shit 3 minute cooldowns are and how poorly they tend to line up with fights. As well as you effectively not getting any bonus during the encounter outside of its window that you'll likely only see 2-3 times a fight.

That isn't to say the bracers are bad or anything, cause obviously they're not. They're just not this tier above some of these other legendberries. They're comparable / situational, which is how I imagine the legendberries are supposed to work out. I just see the cloak or belt being more useful for actually killing fights most of the time vs those bracers.

[Gaidax]

They are plenty good, Havoc one is okay, but IMO Spite is just better. Yes 3 min CD, however - it works with AoE, it works with LoF, and you can game around it with Bloodlust, stored shards and Trinkets (and yes there are still plenty trinkets that give power boost for limited time once in a while) and it does not require you to spend 1 GCD every 20 seconds to keep up.

Besides that - Havoc one affects only 1 target, while Spite - everything and everyone.

I agree with the other guy, I think you underestimate Spite quite a bit and overestimate Havoc legendary. Spite is for all intents and purposes a more powerful Dark Soul - it's not to be underestimated really.

[Deleted]

I think the real decider is what Fearsom mentioned, do you REALLY want to risk setting your loot to demonology for the 1/8 chance that you get the right legendary and not the ring or something?

I can see that being viable as affliction, because nearly all the legendaries are situational or none-universal dps gains, if dps gains at all, but destruction's legendaries all look pretty useful to some extent, with two that stand out as being pretty nice looking but I wouldn't be disappointed with the chaosbolt cleave ones etc.
Demonologies, while universally pretty good looking, aren't something I can see myself gambling on before I get 1-2 GOOD legendaries as destruction unless the spec is in a good enough state that you can legitimately see yourself swapping to demonology if a non-spite legendary drops.

[Aldeen]

You are over estimating the contribution of the havoc legendary and underestimating the power of the sindorei sprite.

Sin'dorei Spite's effect doesn't proc when used by a Destruction Warlock on Beta.

Edit: Wait, it just procced when I spec'd back from Demo after making it proc. It didn't initially. That may be a bug?

[Baconeggcheese]

@Gaidax what made dark soul so good for at least the last 2 xpacs was as much if not more to do with the 2 minute cd / 2 charges as opposed to just the power boost it gave.

having it for LoF is fine, but is that dmg going to help you kill the fight? How many fights desperately need a sustained-ish-burst of dmg once per fight like that? I can think of 2 off the top of my head, and at least one of them has such a ludicrous amount of cleave that you'd be taking wreak havoc anyway. And that's really where I find myself favoring the havoc legendary, because in practice there's a lot of opportunities to make use of wreak havoc in the raid regardless of the legendary you're using, so that cape just becomes extra dmg for something you were going to do anyway.

Have you played much boomkin in the last 2 xpacs? Because the bracer reminds me a lot of that experience.

[Gaidax]

@Gaidax what made dark soul so good for at least the last 2 xpacs was as much if not more to do with the 2 minute cd / 2 charges as opposed to just the power boost it gave.

having it for LoF is fine, but is that dmg going to help you kill the fight? How many fights desperately need a sustained-ish-burst of dmg once per fight like that? I can think of 2 off the top of my head

Are you serious? Yes having ability to drastically increase your output in a specific time window indeed helps beat many raid encounters.

I mean, seriously, many many tactics revolve around popping all the shit at some phase and trying to finish it ASAP, such thing exists almost every other encounter. We had so many wipes just because we were like 1 second late finishing phase that it is almost silly.

This is what made Dark Soul good - that you could pop it at the right time and do much more damage when you need it.

Compared to that 8% damage increase on ONE target for the length of the encounter may give you better bottom line when you look at total damage done (and it's a big question really seeing the limitations), but in reality you will do worse job when it matters most - things like equivalent of Velhari P2, Xhul last phase or Archimonde first phase or Internals - all these things that are CRITICAL - you will be doing worse job with Havoc legendary.

[Turturin the Warlock]

Are you going to set your loot role to demo to try and get those bracers ? lol thats only way to get them outside being demo

I think you must not have read my original post on the topic. I've asked the devs to open this up to all specs since it works for all of them. Whether it's the legendary you want or not, this shouldn't be a controversial request. I'm hoping others will point this out to them as well. Volume matterso (or seems to) in cases like this.

Also, @Baconeggcheese on a single target, havoc legendary isn't 8% damage gain. I mean this in the nicest and most constructive way (since you seem informed on most matters and not an idiot) when I say I'm not sure why you don't get this.

First of all havoc legendary does not benefit from your pet's damage nor does it benefit from demonic power. It also doesn't benefit from doomguard/infernal. That's 20-22% ish of your single target damage, depending on fight length. Let's say 20% to be generous to you your case. So that's 6.4% (8% havoc* 80% of player single target dmg), but that's before you consider the impact of losing soul conduit or CDF.

You claimed earlier this was "no big deal" but pretending you didn't have the legendary for a second, taking wreak havoc on single target would be akin to not taking a level 100 talent. Are you really suggesting that you'd do a fight without a talent and it would be meaningless?. Current sims put that difference at about 4%. I don't blindly trust sims, but that number seems reasonable to me.

So you're losing ~4% damage not having CDF or Soul Conduit and gaining back 6.4% for a net of 2.4%. Even you acknowledged that single target the sindorei's would be more like 4.2% when you just take uptime into consideration and ignore stacking effects. (i.e. i think it's more than 25/180 seconds * 30% = 4.2% that uptime would suggest, but that's the minimum)

The Havoc legendary is only really good in situations when you would have talented havoc anyway, and even in those situations it's limited to the 6.4% on one target. In those same havoc situations with sindorei's the effect just doubles since it applies to all damage dealt. If perma-cleave is happening, it's 8.4%% (again using your far-too-conservative-assumptions).

It's not close. It really just isn't. But sure, if you think its better its fine, go with it. What I'm really asking for is help making sure sindorei's is available to all. I can't imagine you'd disagree with that.

So for all, please just tweet @Warcraftdevs about this. It's silly that it's not a "warlock" legendary and is currently classified as "demonology"

[Dastey]

In regards to Sin'drei Spite I'm rather certain it working for destruction is a bug that will get fixed.

As it stands right now all 3 speccs have a pair of wrists with Destruction having Magistrike Restraints and Affliction having Streten's Sleepless Shackles.
Obviously the Demonology wrists are much superior to the Destro and Affliction ones, but I'm rather certain that the reason it only drops for demonology is in order to not have double wrists for the other speccs. So don't count on them making the bracers available as a drop for destruction or affliction, in fact count on them disabling it for those 2 speccs.

[Deleted]

Don't know if this is the right thread to ask this, but if the raid team already has 6+ cloth casters; would it be detrimental to go Warlock or does it not matter?

[Deleted]

You should use Personal loot anyway. And that way, stacking one armor type is more beneficial anyway.

[Bjarkan]

I think you must not have read my original post on the topic. I've asked the devs to open this up to all specs since it works for all of them. Whether it's the legendary you want or not, this shouldn't be a controversial request. I'm hoping others will point this out to them as well. Volume matterso (or seems to) in cases like this.

Also, @Baconeggcheese on a single target, havoc legendary isn't 8% damage gain. I mean this in the nicest and most constructive way (since you seem informed on most matters and not an idiot) when I say I'm not sure why you don't get this.

First of all havoc legendary does not benefit from your pet's damage nor does it benefit from demonic power. It also doesn't benefit from doomguard/infernal. That's 20-22% ish of your single target damage, depending on fight length. Let's say 20% to be generous to you your case. So that's 6.4% (8% havoc* 80% of player single target dmg), but that's before you consider the impact of losing soul conduit or CDF.

You claimed earlier this was "no big deal" but pretending you didn't have the legendary for a second, taking wreak havoc on single target would be akin to not taking a level 100 talent. Are you really suggesting that you'd do a fight without a talent and it would be meaningless?. Current sims put that difference at about 4%. I don't blindly trust sims, but that number seems reasonable to me.

So you're losing ~4% damage not having CDF or Soul Conduit and gaining back 6.4% for a net of 2.4%. Even you acknowledged that single target the sindorei's would be more like 4.2% when you just take uptime into consideration and ignore stacking effects. (i.e. i think it's more than 25/180 seconds * 30% = 4.2% that uptime would suggest, but that's the minimum)

The Havoc legendary is only really good in situations when you would have talented havoc anyway, and even in those situations it's limited to the 6.4% on one target. In those same havoc situations with sindorei's the effect just doubles since it applies to all damage dealt. If perma-cleave is happening, it's 8.4%% (again using your far-too-conservative-assumptions).

It's not close. It really just isn't. But sure, if you think its better its fine, go with it. What I'm really asking for is help making sure sindorei's is available to all. I can't imagine you'd disagree with that.

So for all, please just tweet @Warcraftdevs about this. It's silly that it's not a "warlock" legendary and is currently classified as "demonology"

All of this to me is exactly the same discousion about Soul Havert and Erradication talents... The first is a 2min-CD with boost up all damage (perma pet, LoF & portals too) over 12s (In ST only), and the second is a debuff that make you dealt 12% more damage (and only you is i dont get wrong) over 6s, but without CD.

Both cases are exactly the same to me, what is better? A sustained DPS? Or a Burst? Numbers in paper not really matter that much, as in game there is a lot of thing what can make us lose our action window.

[Deleted]

Ok so my question would be how viable is this spec at lvl 110 wirh full artifacts i mean how viable is this spec compared to the others in raid environment, and that this spec is as good as it was before, in terms of viability ?
Or that this will be the best warlock spec for raiding ? since i know deslock is more or less have bigger rng dependanve than others

[Baconeggcheese]

Are you serious? Yes having ability to drastically increase your output in a specific time window indeed helps beat many raid encounters.

I mean, seriously, many many tactics revolve around popping all the shit at some phase and trying to finish it ASAP, such thing exists almost every other encounter. We had so many wipes just because we were like 1 second late finishing phase that it is almost silly.

This is what made Dark Soul good - that you could pop it at the right time and do much more damage when you need it.

Compared to that 8% damage increase on ONE target for the length of the encounter may give you better bottom line when you look at total damage done (and it's a big question really seeing the limitations), but in reality you will do worse job when it matters most - things like equivalent of Velhari P2, Xhul last phase or Archimonde first phase or Internals - all these things that are CRITICAL - you will be doing worse job with Havoc legendary.

@Gaidax What made dark soul so good was more to do with the 2 minute cooldown + it being on a charge system as opposed to it just being a generic dmg boost cd. I can't express how big a difference that makes vs it being a 3 minute CD without any charges.

Take archimonde for example since you bring it up. Our purpose in life as locks on archie was killing adds, nothing else we did was more important than killing those adds. Dark soul was so good in p1 because you could use it to carry doomfires thanks to the charges. You popped the first one on the pull, lock A pops a DS on the 2nd doomfire, lock B pops one on the 3rd doomfire. You have insane flexibility thanks to the 2 charges in order to use these things to crutch fight mechanics without losing any dmg.

Now take a 3 minute CD with no charges, what are the bracers doing for you to help kill archimonde? You pop it on the pull and then... it doesn't help you kill doomfires at all (which was MASSIVE back in august of last year), it maybe helps you kill a single deathcaller if one lines up with that CD, it maybe helps you with a single set of infernals if again the cooldown lines up well. Whereas the bracers are 8% more dmg to every single add that you want 8% more dmg on. We'd straight up be doing a "worse job" with the bracers at what our purpose is on that fight since they don't do anything outside of that 25s window and the cooldown is ridiculously long.

I'm not sure what you mean by velhari or xhul, velhari was just trying to push through that phase fast but it wasn't a hard check so you didn't NEED the dmg there and add dmg was incredibly important during progress. Xhul was just attrition in his last phase, once my guild got there clean the fight fell over iirc. What was important for locks on xhul was add dmg, specifically the void adds since there was plenty of aoe to go around for the imps. And the better legendary for killing the void adds is obviously the cape.

My point really is that the bracers just aren't this tier above the cape or belt, its about even and situational which ones better and I see the cape / belt being useful more of the time. There's lots of opportunities to use wreak havoc where that 8% dmg will matter, I can only think of 2 fights off the top of my head that I've tested where having the bracers could be massive, and one of them is an add fight where you're running wreak havoc to cleave constantly.

Also, @Baconeggcheese on a single target, havoc legendary isn't 8% damage gain.

I already conceded that, not sure why you're stuck on that. It is 8% more dmg on the things you use to crutch mechanics though, like CB and SB. Which is what matters when you're talking about what's helping you kill bosses.

The Havoc legendary is only really good in situations when you would have talented havoc anyway, and even in those situations it's limited to the 6.4% on one target. In those same havoc situations with sindorei's the effect just doubles since it applies to all damage dealt. If perma-cleave is happening, it's 8.4%% (again using your far-too-conservative-assumptions).

I think you're not getting that I'm talking about progression. Having just 8% increased dmg on your hardest hitting abilities on the fly whenever you want is frequently useful... Any priority target swaps no matter how many there are or how frequently they're coming I can have 8% more dmg on, which is awesome for actually killing fights. The bracers on the other hand are on a strict and looooong cd, so you at best hold the CD for the moment you need it potentially losing a full cast of both DG / infernal and the buff, or you use it close to on CD and hope the fight lines up.

The bracers aren't bad by any stretch of the imagination, they're just again not on this tier above the other options. If I had all 3 it wouldn't be a night and day choice, it would be situational depending on whats needed on the fight. And I just see the cape being the kind of dmg that's needed more often than the bracer.

[Moruff]

@Gaidax What made dark soul so good was more to do with the 2 minute cooldown + it being on a charge system as opposed to it just being a generic dmg boost cd. I can't express how big a difference that makes vs it being a 3 minute CD without any charges.

Take archimonde for example since you bring it up. Our purpose in life as locks on archie was killing adds, nothing else we did was more important than killing those adds. Dark soul was so good in p1 because you could use it to carry doomfires thanks to the charges. You popped the first one on the pull, lock A pops a DS on the 2nd doomfire, lock B pops one on the 3rd doomfire. You have insane flexibility thanks to the 2 charges in order to use these things to crutch fight mechanics without losing any dmg.

Now take a 3 minute CD with no charges, what are the bracers doing for you to help kill archimonde? You pop it on the pull and then... it doesn't help you kill doomfires at all (which was MASSIVE back in august of last year), it maybe helps you kill a single deathcaller if one lines up with that CD, it maybe helps you with a single set of infernals if again the cooldown lines up well. Whereas the bracers are 8% more dmg to every single add that you want 8% more dmg on. We'd straight up be doing a "worse job" with the bracers at what our purpose is on that fight since they don't do anything outside of that 25s window and the cooldown is ridiculously long.

I'm not sure what you mean by velhari or xhul, velhari was just trying to push through that phase fast but it wasn't a hard check so you didn't NEED the dmg there and add dmg was incredibly important during progress. Xhul was just attrition in his last phase, once my guild got there clean the fight fell over iirc. What was important for locks on xhul was add dmg, specifically the void adds since there was plenty of aoe to go around for the imps. And the better legendary for killing the void adds is obviously the cape.

Kinda just playing devil's advocate here, but in both cases you mentioned Doomfire on Archimonde and Voidfiends on Xhul, you wouldn't even waste a gcd to apply havoc to them for 8% dmg anyway. Is 8% of 2 cbs and two conflag/incin worth more than just an extra cast of something? The add would have to live 12-15 seconds to be worth it? Just a rough estimate. But also, if your adds are living that long, then you have bigger problems anyway. In my eyes, trying to waste a gcd for a short lived add to get 8% dmg is actually a dps loss. It's also compounded with the fact that you aren't taking Soul Conduit, but I guess on most add fights you'd take wreak havoc anyway.

[Baconeggcheese]

@Moruff Voidfiends spawn in pairs, shouldn't need to elaborate. Doomfire would be havoc doomfire -> dump into boss copying onto the doomfire or vice versa. Remember you're cleaving, not single targeting. The havoc was always going to happen with the doomfire, and the deathcallers, and the infernals, and the hounds.

I'm also speaking from a place of doing progression extremely early. My guild killed mythic archie back in august of last year. Our entire progression cycle happened between july / august. Things lived a lot longer than you might be accustomed to if you progressed a few months later in 2015 or even in 2016 (no idea what your situation might be).

[Turturin the Warlock]

You continue to ignore actual math. You wouldn't havoc a Doomfire because you lose a global. At 6.4% increase you would need your casting time on the Doomfire to exceed 16ish seconds to go break even. You well know or should that if a Doomfire was up for 16 seconds it was a wipe.

And void lords is kind of bs too. Many strats involved kiting them and just letting dots kill them, warlocks bursting them with havoc was no where near a make or break in that fight.

There could definitely be situations where the havoc legendary would be better. Maybe cenarius for example.

But they won't be nearly as pervasive as you're suggesting, and the examples you've cited to prove your point are actually wrong.

If you were doing archi today you'd havoc the boss and have one warlock save doomguard for the second Doomfire to get a cooldown 30% increase on each one.