Improved Soul Fire is Frustrating

[gherkin]

I would like to add one thing to Jess' post.

It's frustrating. Knowing how important it is makes it stressful when it drops. Do you really care when any of your DoTs drop or miss? No, you recast and get on with it. This leaves you scrabbling for Soul Burn or leaves you stood in a stupid place for three seconds while you desperately try to rectify it.

If you recast it too late, and it falls off before you finish casting it, your next spell casts without 15% haste. If your UA refresh lands before Soul Fire does (it can happen during eradication), then UA doesn't have 15% haste.

Lets say you hit on average for 10k shadow bolts, including crits, with a cast time of 2 seconds without ISF, this would be 1.74s with ISF up. If you launch a Soul Fire late and don't want to refresh your dot so cast SB instead, you lose .26s or ~750 damage in this scenario, not to mention UA falling off and prioritizing a low DPCT spell over a high one.

I hate it for the simple fact that I have to completely change my priority based on whether its going to land in time or not.

[Passive Apathy]

It seems Blizzard has made good on their promise and made Imp Soulfire specificly a destro ability AND significantly reduced the internal cooldown.... But as of now, Neither Affliction and, to a lesser extent Demonology, have receved buffs to their specs to compensate... But so far so good. Let's hope they stick with this :S

[Trayke]

# Improved Soul Fire is now a Tier 3 talent, up from Tier 2. No longer increases your spell haste and now increases your Fire and Shadow damage done by 4/8% for 15 sec after you deal damage with Soul Fire. This effect has a 6 sec cooldown.


Lower ICD (6 seconds!!!) and Destro only. This means that there's a good chance Emp Imp can help keep this up without having to burn so many danged soulshards.

[danblee]

Playing a number of different classes, it looks like Blizzard is doing what they can make sure each class has something short they need to focus on which will increase DPS in some way (For example, a warrior's Colossus Smash). In the competitive player's eye, this buff completely gimps you, but without it you can still perform your natural rotation.

I think they are throwing the proverbial monkey wrench into the classic sit-back-and-dps rotation that we are so accustomed to. They don't want it to be easy. They want you to get flustered, unsure when to hard cast it, unsure if you should step out of a long cast for it, sometimes unaware when it drops. There's no way to write it in a rotation other than "keep it up always" even though hardcore dps theorycrafters will take on the challenge of trying to determine when it is and isn't a good time to spend the time to put it up instead of continue on with a different spell.

It's hard. I like that.

[Rayzan]

^ good. More than likely they're seeing how Aff and Demo perform without having ISF and will, hopefully, send some buffs our way when they see that the dps is below par without it.

[Onorvele]

As a demo 'lock, I am gonna miss the execute phase that was possible with Decimation + ISF. Nice and easy and potent - especially when boss fights were just around 3 minutes long...

Still looks like there'll be at least 8 points required in Destro tree for competitive Demo raiding - at least, unless the benefits from buffing Corruption and Bane of Doom outweigh the benefits of buffing Soul Fire, Incin, and SB.