AFF - Drain Life

[welko]

I was wondering what locks are still raiding AFF and have they tried out Drain life filler. If so please post and tell me what you think and what numbers you are seeing.

Me personally Raid as AFF-DL spec. I also raid with a lock not as geared as me and he is destro. He does not even come close to my dps or damage output. Not sure if it just I'm a better player and know my class better or AFF is still better.

Well AFF locks come out i know you out there.

Here is my armory if you like to see.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...ar&cn=N%C3%A8x

[Affectionate]

aff-DL hasnt been viable on live... ever, it was in beta for a few weeks but they nerfed the SP contribution to DL and killed the spec, tho its beleived (mathed out too maybe?) that with enough mastery DL will surpass sbolt.

as for you beating a destro lock, he's doing something wrong.

[kosuko]

When stacking enough mastery, drain life affliction is IN THEORY viable.
However, to make it's dps competetive (competetive with Sbolt affliction seeing how you'll never reach the dps that destro does nowadays) you have to have:
1 No lag with the server.. at all
2 No brain lag, you practicly have to be god to cancel your channel at the exact micro second after it ticks.

Seeing how most people here are not god, nor connected to the WoW main server. The spec can be concidered "not viable". Not viable does not mean bad, it just means it's worse than most other things.

If you wish to use drain life filler for the benefit of self healing thats fine, just it is not viable as dps.

in short: Drain life affliction: No

[Uffman]

With enough mastery, drain life beats shadowbolt out of the water at this moment. Ofcourse this is not intended, but anyone saying something else is ignorant.

In single target dps, destro is higher, but any good affliction player is on par with destruction on fights with more than one target.

[Deleted]

affli is good but it needs top end gear and you need to be a master when it comes to using DS as a filler.But then again destro dont work good enough if your low on crit so the fact that you beat them desto locks is because either there low on crit or they are just doing it wrong

[Deleted]

I raided with a 33/3/0 spec last week, reforged everything to mastery (had 21'ish in total, 34% extra dmg to dots/drain) with around 900 haste left. It's pretty tricky cause the window for haunt to refesh SE is pretty small and when u lose SE stacks it takes a while to get em back. Ofc "Nightfall SB's" help a bit. Managed top5 dps and even topped the meters on a fair few fights (ofc that doesnt say a lot cause it depends on your guild, but my 11/12hc icc25 one isnt the worst ;P) Managed to outdps our affliction lock with 'normal SB spec', didnt have a destro to compare to tho

With a bit longer SE debuff duration it could be a pretty nice raiding build for cata, too bad blizz doesnt want us to use DL as a filler

[Uffman]

affli is good but it needs top end gear and you need to be a master when it comes to using DS as a filler.But then again destro dont work good enough if your low on crit so the fact that you beat them desto locks is because either there low on crit or they are just doing it wrong

Crit has nearly nothing to do with anything.
What could matter is that the destro warlocks are in the middle of the haste thresholds.

[Deleted]

yea i know what you mean by haste and i totaly agree that haste is by far the second best stat for any lock.But my point is that if you have loads of spell dmg and hastee and your crit is at lets say 23% destro will not perform as well and having spell dmg good amount of haste and 40% crit.Look it up mate and you will see that crit is pretty cool for destro

[kosuko]

In single target dps, destro is higher, but any good affliction player is on par with destruction on fights with more than one target.

Completely ignoring the fact that destro gets 15% dps for free if there are 2 targets.

[Zurriel]

Hey. Vultures. ^ Stop it.

Yes, drain afflic is higher overall damage than a SB filler spec right now, but it is not by nearly as great a margin as some may think. Drain life becomes competitive with shadow bolt, given enough mastery, but the biggest damage boost is during your execute phase, since DS benefits from mastery.

If you want to try it just reforge for mastery and do it, but all simulations suggest that given a normal Simucraft fight the spec is only SLIGHTLY higher than normal affliction. Most ICC fights with a good group will have a shorter execute phase than Simucraft uses, so I'm fairly confident that normal affliction is preferred unless certain circumstances are in play.

[kosuko]

yea i know what you mean by haste and i totaly agree that haste is by far the second best stat for any lock.But my point is that if you have loads of spell dmg and hastee and your crit is at lets say 23% destro will not perform as well and having spell dmg good amount of haste and 40% crit.Look it up mate and you will see that crit is pretty cool for destro

Crit is one of the worst stats for destro :S
Haste, intel and mastery beat it all. ofcourse you deal more dps if you got 40% crit isntead of 23, but if those 17% crit where haste you'd do even more

---------- Post added 2010-10-21 at 04:32 PM ----------

@ Zurriel, don't forget that those simcrafts expect you to break up your drain life channel half way in teh cast to refresh a dot. Attempting to do this as good as a simcraft does is nearly impossible

[Deleted]

Crit is one of the worst stats for destro :S
Haste, intel and mastery beat it all. ofcourse you deal more dps if you got 40% crit isntead of 23, but if those 17% crit where haste you'd do even more

---------- Post added 2010-10-21 at 04:32 PM ----------

@ Zurriel, don't forget that those simcrafts expect you to break up your drain life channel half way in teh cast to refresh a dot. Attempting to do this as good as a simcraft does is nearly impossible

crit > haste for dest.... you get 15% haste from ISF and 30% for your main nuke really. i rather have more crit with those then more haste especially in PvP crit is so much more superior to haste.

[welko]

I agree crit is more important then haste for destro but that is when you have at least reached the haste soft cap of 1216. It is not hard to reach that number but not everyone has 277 gear.

Also I never said DL will be the main filler once cata comes out. I was just asking what AFF locks have been playing around with DL filler and how do they feel about it.

Again this is my personal opinion but i feel the only hard part of DL filler is keeping up Shadow Embrace stack. There are times you may have to clip DL to recast haunt to keep the stack up. Which in my eyes is better to do then have to reapply the stack to 3 again.

I reapply dots as if i was spamming SB. I mean you not gonna stop SB mid-casting to reapply a DOT right??

[Shadowdoom]

Not sure if my information is up to date but I've seen a lock in aff-DL spec using Imp with 3/3 Dark art and glyph of imp does more dps than using Succy+lash of pain glyph. You dont need to spend 3 points in destro tree since DL spec no longer need to buff your SB cast speed.(Bane)

[kosuko]

@ the guys claiming crit > haste.. this is simply wrong
crit is one of the weakest stats for destro, the ammount of haste you will try to aim for is 1406, having this ammount of haste + the 15% from soulfire will give you an aditional tick on immolate and thus higher conflags.

---------- Post added 2010-10-21 at 06:34 PM ----------

as for the canceling a channel to apply a dot... that IS how the simcrafted numbers are generated.

[Deleted]

you got 1406 haste but what is your crit chance?anyways nvm me i guess its up to the person.

[kosuko]

my unbuffed crit fchance is 27%.
sure its up to the player if they want to stack crit or haste.. but the numbers show haste is simply better, (below 1300 OR when hitting 1406)

[nocturnus]

you got 1406 haste but what is your crit chance?anyways nvm me i guess its up to the person.

No it's not up to the person. It's a fact. Crit and spirit are the worst stats for destro locks. Whenever you reach the last immolate tick you go for mastery - never ever for crit. As always crit can be considered a 'bonus' stat

[sugarfree]

With enough mastery, drain life beats shadowbolt out of the water at this moment. Ofcourse this is not intended, but anyone saying something else is ignorant.

In single target dps, destro is higher, but any good affliction player is on par with destruction on fights with more than one target.

I swear the devs are dumb sometimes. Why make SB our filler when DL scales with mastery. I mean, hello, wasn't that the reason why Warlocks are struggling in Wotlk, because of lack of scaling? And now they're still doing it again. Plus, it forces us to dump all our remaining points in Destruction. So much for CHOICES.

[Inshabel]

I hate to be the bearer of bad new but,

Int=4.6378 SP=3.1804 Hit=6.3289 Crit=2.7720 Haste=1.4481 Mastery=3.0874

These are the destro scaling factors according to EJ.