[BETA] Destruction Warlock Discussion

[Deleted]

Thank god Haste is the best Destruction stat. I love Haste.

Currently reading the icy veins stuff. Back in the days I used to surf on elitistjerks, but it seems the site is no more? Are there any good sites for in-depth theorycrafting?

From icy veins Furty-guy(raided on LEGION PTR) it sounds like Warlock isn't a top-dps class currently. I hope they can tweak a bit before LEGION comes out, but it is really hard to tell right now because with the artifacts so much can change

One thing I'd love to know is how big difference there is between grimoire of sacrfice and grimoire of service.

After I've done a bit of reading it seems like they have streamlined pretty hard in WoD and LEGION. I used to play from Vanilla to MoP.
Some changes seem pretty good, but they run the danger of homogenizing too much if they continue with it. I loved the choices of profession bonus, reforging, glyphs etc. Seems like all that is gone.

[Gaidax]

Sorry, but Mastery worse than Versatility? That seems to be pretty wrong.

Haste I could see best (with a clause that this is only in case of Roaring Blaze btw), but Mastery worst? No way it is true, it does not make sense mathematically.

[FurtyIRL]

Sorry, but Mastery worse than Versatility? That seems to be pretty wrong.

Haste I could see best (with a clause that this is only in case of Roaring Blaze btw), but Mastery worst? No way it is true, it does not make sense mathematically.

Even without Roaring Blaze Haste and Critical Strike are still very close in value. Mastery and Versatility are also fairly close, if it makes you feel better you can interchange them on the stat priority

[garonne]

I'm honestly really worried about locks.

Affliction has an AoE niche thanks to Soul Flame (And partially Seed of Corruption and Soul Effigy). See Scorpyron fight for example.

Destruction has high uptime cleave, "permanent" with talent.

Demonology is mechanically broken, with the all the downsides of a dot spec (Mostly ramp up time + slow target switching) and pretty much none of the benefits (Multidot galore, demonology only has doom, and no real cleave outside of felguard + implosion).

Can the numbers make up for those things? Sure. But there has been situations in the past where they end up overnerfing things, and I wouldn't be surprised if you have to dance between all 3 specs as warlock on a regular basis, since "OP" stuff gets nerfed (Soul Flame, GrimSac for Aff, Destro Cleave, etc). I know that locks have a pretty good track record, but they have also often had periods of downtime for their specs where they got nerfed too much as a "kneejerk" reaction to something being too strong.

Am I being paranoid?

darkglare is a damage increase currently on two targets for cleave.

[Gaidax]

Even without Roaring Blaze Haste and Critical Strike are still very close in value. Mastery and Versatility are also fairly close, if it makes you feel better you can interchange them on the stat priority

What do you base these weights on? Is this single target or multi target scenario?

I don't need to feel better, I need some sort of concrete data to make educated decision. I know you are a highly credible source and MVP here, but I can't just take things for granted with so little actual explanation.

In short, I don't really care whether Mastery ends up a shit stat or not, but I find it hard to accept stat priorities that are based on little other than your name. It's not that I am some Mastery Pope claiming that it will bring us salvation. I just find your conclusions hard to believe, for the little I did math out I can gather that Mastery is at the very least as good as Crit but this can be wrong, I want to know why.

You explained your case for Haste and it looks reasonable, but the rest of the stats I just don't see how you exactly reached conclusion you reached and in which cases it applies, especially with your Mastery valuation which seems to be off by a margin with little actual explanation behind it.

[Berthold]

Simulationcrafts nightly builds already support Destruction and Affliction Warlock and are stable enough to draw first conclusions. Demonology should be in a good enough state tomorrow / over the week.

http://downloads.simulationcraft.org...3-01-Win64.exe

For 18M geared warlock and a singletarget build
[15: Roaring Blaze 30: Mana Tap 60: Eradication 90: Grimoire of Sacrifice 100: Soul Conduit]
we are looking at
Mastery (7.38) > Haste (7.07) > Crit (6.5) > Vers (6.0)

Scalefactors depending heavily on talents taken .oO(who would have guessed) and fight style. If you take
[15: Backdraft 30: Reverse Entropy 60: Eradication 90: Grimoire of Supremacy 100: Soul Conduit]
you look at:
Haste > Crit > Mastery > Vers

So, the community needs to figure out first what talents will be taken and *then* we can think about the right secondary stats.

TLDR; All secondaries are okay'ish and it depends on talents. Pick talents for a fight and sim your character to get the important secondaries for these talents.


p.s. If you wanna play around with SimulationCraft and find anything odd or have improvements for APL for cleave/AoE setups, just submit an issue at https://github.com/simulationcraft/simc/issues

[Deleted]

I don't like all those Incinerate nerfs, Destruction to me has always been about Incinerate spamming and the occasional Chaos Bolt. Making Incinerate weak so you can get more dmg out of dots (as destruction hello?) is just bad design imo. Having virtually no interaction between Incinerate and everything else is also just awful. It should generate Soul Shards like Conflagrate, albeit at a slower rate, of course.

[Gaidax]

So basically stats are all over the place, but it seems Mastery is indeed pretty good, I'll play with simulator then.

Pretty surprised to see Mastery that strong in roaring blaze example.

[Imaskar]

Have someone got destro logs from mythic testing? I saw them for many classes, but not for destro apparently.

[Dastey]

Have someone got destro logs from mythic testing? I saw them for many classes, but not for destro apparently.

I posted some earlier in the thread, so if you look at my previous posts you can find some, and from there if you can navigate through Warcraftlogs finding the rest should be rather simple

[striderZA]

So basically stats are all over the place, but it seems Mastery is indeed pretty good, I'll play with simulator then.

Pretty surprised to see Mastery that strong in roaring blaze example.

The way that Mastery adds to your damage is incredibly inconsistent, which, given how much RNG we already have to deal with, demotes it to near-garbage status for me. In any comparison between Mastery and Crit/Haste, Mastery gets left behind by a reasonable margin, imo.

[Gaidax]

The way that Mastery adds to your damage is incredibly inconsistent, which, given how much RNG we already have to deal with, demotes it to near-garbage status for me. In any comparison between Mastery and Crit/Haste, Mastery gets left behind by a reasonable margin, imo.

It is eventually consistent, which is what matters, luckily encounters do not last 15 seconds (and when they do then really it does not even matter at that point *cough Reaver*). Over 6 minutes encounter or more it will be smoothed out perfectly well.

You have the simcraft, you can't say stat is garbage if it's mathematically simulated to be not. I'm not even talking about fat damage reduction it gives on top of that.

That case with Roaring Blaze is pretty interesting though, never expected Mastery to be top stat there of all things, definitely not below Versatility as was suggested.

As for me, I'm looking at this with glee with Soul Conduit being top Single Target choice and Mastery being actually good, the things I was saying all along... remember the flaying I got for Soul Conduit... sheesh.

[Deleted]

Now I aint a math guru or anything.... but isn't the problem with Mastery that you need to half it to get the average damage increase?
ie if you have 100% mastery you average 50%?
It also does not effect 100% of our damage done due to pets etc

Haste & crit I assume are better because they effect all of our damage output and contribute to shard gen to boot.

[Dastey]

Now I aint a math guru or anything.... but isn't the problem with Mastery that you need to half it to get the average damage increase?
ie if you have 100% mastery you average 50%?
It also does not effect 100% of our damage done due to pets etc

Haste & crit I assume are better because they effect all of our damage output and contribute to shard gen to boot.

That would be correct under the assumption that 2 x mastery = 1 x crit/haste

I don't know the ratings atm. but I'm fairly certain the haste and crit ratings required are much higher for a single percentage than is the case with mastery.
So even if mastery is only 75% of our damage but 4 % mastery = 1 % crit/haste, then mastery will simply win out.

[Deleted]

Mana tap :x how big is the difference between it and reverse entropy ?

[Deleted]

So even if mastery is only 75% of our damage but 4 % mastery = 1 % crit/haste, then mastery will simply win out.

That is assuming that 1% crit/haste = 1% damage increase ?

[Dastey]

Mana tap :x how big is the difference between it and reverse entropy ?

Somewhere in the area of 1.2% in the sims I did yesterday.

Talents used were Roaring Blaze - Eradiction - GoSaC - CDF/SC

[Gaidax]

In the simulator, how can I use Legion talents?

[Deleted]

Mana tap :x how big is the difference between it and reverse entropy ?

reverse entropy sounds like an absolute no-brainer to me. It seems to be a really great and necessary talent.

Mana tap probably sounds better than it is. But to be fair I am missing information on how mana tap actually works. 1.5 global cd? does a use refresh a stack? and so on.

[Gaidax]

reverse entropy sounds like an absolute no-brainer to me. It seems to be a really great and necessary talent.

Mana tap probably sounds better than it is. But to be fair I am missing information on how mana tap actually works. 1.5 global cd? does a use refresh a stack? and so on.

Well, Mana Tap can be gamed around with movement and such, it may end up being better, but if it's like 1% better, then honestly - screw it. It is such a massive pain in the ass and is a double whammy of this AND having to use Life Tap (and a lot of it as well).

I have this psychological threshold that if it is 3% or more, then I will be forced to use it, but less than that and I would probably avoid it at all.