Election Day... or Patch Day?

Well, I did my civic duty and voted, then wanted to avoid the frenzy and play a game. But alas! The servers are down (oh, and when they come up, block the general channels for a week or so, trust me on this). Shucks, guess I'll have to write a post or two, so here is what I came up with (with another to follow tomorrow):

A couple Affliction Warlock related changes from Tuesday's patch are worth noting:

• The epic ground mount is now available on the trainer at level 61, requiring 150 riding skill, and the non-epic mount learned.
• Drain Soul: Rank 6 now properly deals additional damage to targets below 25% health.
• Shadow Mastery: Increased the shadow damage bonus.
• Shadow Embrace: Now works on ranks 1-4 and stacks properly with multiple applications.
• Glyph of Souls no longer removes soul shard cost. It instead reduces the mana cost of your Ritual of Souls spell by 70%.

Similar to the Druid community mourning the loss of the swift flight form quest chain, old timer Warlocks should feel saddened by the removal of the Dreadsteed quest requirement. The quest will still be there to do, but will not be required to get your mount. The quest does allow you to get the steed a level earlier, however. I suppose it is for the best, but, having just run a guildy through this quest last night, I, for one, will miss Jeevee's antics.

The middle three points are all part of the buffs that were promised to us. Good stuff, I'll take buffs.

The change to Glyph of Souls will probably NOT make me want to use it. I mean, its not like we use it in combat, so why is mana even an issue? With all the ways Warlocks have of restoring mana, low mana is NOT one of our problems. Especially out of combat. *shrug*.

Cookies anyone?

Want this post in song? Check out a great post here.

He's On Fire!

I found a couple interesting "Blue" posts last night that I wanted to pass on. I found both of these on the forums over at Warlock's Den, but you can also find them on MMO Champion as well.

First, in regards to the buffing of Warlocks everywhere:

The coefficients of these spells were hotfixed last Thursday I believe.

Corruption's coefficient went from 0.156 to 0.20.
Immolate's coefficient went from 0.13 to 0.20.

This ends up being a reasonably significant dps buff to all 3 specs. In our preliminary testing, Demonology may have benefited the most.

Well this just throws my whole "don't use Immolate" rationale out the window. The good news if you've read about my cast rotation is that I have more time in those "windows" to throw this spell in. It doesn't mean a major change. Because of the cast time, I don't think I'd use this on trash, unless in that section I replaced the UA cast with an Immolate cast. My trash rotation would then look something like: Corr, Haunt, Immo, (optional UA/SL), S-bolts, D. Soul. For those of you counting on your screen, this means 6 spell timers to watch on boss fights with the rotation shaping up as (using CoA): CoA, Haunt, UA, Corr, Immo, SL, filler. Yikes!

I can't say I'm completely sold yet, and part of why is in my next blue clip:

When we set out to work on the classes in Lich King, we had some specific goals for each one. Our mission was not to overhaul every class. We had specific things we want to accomplish.

For locks, the list looked something like this:

• Give Destro a rotation that involved more than just Shadowbolt.
• Make sure Affliction had dps comparable with the difficulty in pulling off the rotation.
• Get locks to care more about pets without it just being Imps in PvE and Felhunters in PvP (and sac'ing pets as often as possible).
• Get the Felguard back out and make the Infernal and Doomguard not a joke.
• Make the dps stones something someone might actually use.
• Make Affliction care more about Shadow and Destro fire.
• Get Demo back into the PvE game again.
• Get rid of the hassles with demon training.

Now that Lich King is virtually done, we've moved on to some different topics. This is a partial list, but includes things like:

• Make sure locks do rogue / hunter / mage level dps at 80.
• Make sure locks have enough survivability in PvP (since we nerfed a lot of it).
• Fix some of those deep Demo talents that really aren't worth the investment.
• Make shards more interesting and less of a hassle.
• Get the Voidwalker (and possibly Succubus?) back out.
• Look at the dps spells that cost shards.
• Try and make more of the dots a consistent length, so that Affliction's rotation doesn't require such a big brain.
• Get dots to either scale with crit or just crit.

I know that's vague, and I'm reconstructing the list off the top of my head. Of course I imagine we'll add to that list once we see what the 3 specs actually look like at 80 with thousands of people playing them.

This is definitely a very interesting list. It's good to know they had a plan and want to keep us top tier for DPS. If you look at line 6 of the first list, it says "to make affliction care more about Shadow..." This is why I'm not completely sold on Immolate yet. I mean "one of these things is not like the other..." We cast all shadow spells except for one fire spell? It just seems odd to me. However, one cannot ignore the buffed damage output of the spell. I'm just thinking they may tweak something in talents or whatever to make Immolate more of a Destro/Demo rotation must, but not as much for Afflocks.

I plan on throwing it in there sometimes when I feel "on fire". (aside: if you ever played NBA Jam back in the day, insert the crazy announcer saying "He's on Fire!" I want that sound byte in an addon for when my Shadow Trance procs too). It would probably help in an optimal rotation, but 6 DoTs does get hard to manage. Are we really going to be able to keep all these up in a boss fight that requires more than just standing still and being a DPS cannon?

All in all, I think Blizz has done a good job according to that list. The spell stone has definitely become a regular for me, and a nice replaced me to the old hassle of Wizard's Oil. I would love to see something cooler with shards, and anything that brings all three of our trees viability in all aspects of the game is a plus. The second to last point, however, can be good or bad depending on how you look at it.

I know the current rotation is rough to manage, but I think a lot of that is just not being used to it and expecting everything to line up nicely. Who said we were never going to have to make trade offs between spells and deal with some downtime? If this is taken into account in our end-game DPS, I think its good overall. I mean having to make choices will get us away from one "set in stone" rotation that everyone uses and allow individualization. That is never bad, IMO. Plus, it gives me things to write about and play with.

Additionally, I want to see changes made, and then mostly settled on. Its hard to get used to a class if it is constantly in a state of change (see any Paladin for some valid QQ about this). This can be frustrating and drive people away. We don't want that.

On the other hand, it shouldn't take a math degree to figure this stuff out, so a little simplification would probably go a long way in this case. I just don't want to see it eased into idiocity. Warlocks have always been the smart, evil, scheming type. Lets not lose our identity :-).

Pop It Like It's Trinkety (Or Something)

I felt compelled to share another macro. This one is what I have bound to my "1" button as shown in previous posts. It is extremely useful for two reasons. The first, and easiest, is that it binds two spells to one key. The second is that it pops your trinket whenever they become ready to use. Keeping your trinkets in use is a cheap way to get a little DPS boost. Here is the actual macro text:

#showtooltip
/use Dark Iron Smoking Pipe
/use Scryer's Bloodgem
/cast [nomod] Corruption
/cast [mod:alt] Curse of Agony

• Line 1: I've mentioned the showtooltip command in the past, so we will waste no time on it. This isn't really a functional part of the macro, it is just nice to have.
• Line 2: The /use command is how to pop a trinket or any item that has a "Use:" function. I insert the correct name of my trinket, but you could refer to the slot numbers here. I was too lazy to look up the slot numbers, but the command would look something like: /use 14 or /use 13. I just looked those up, so they should be correct and maybe I'll switch them myself later tonight.
• Line 3: Same deal as 2.
• Line 4: This is a modified cast command. The part in the brackets tells you what modifier will be used, in this case it is "nomod" meaning this is my default spell for that button (and the default picture if you choose the ? icon). You can actually specify the rank of the spell, and if you hold left click in your spellbook and click on the spell while making your macro, you will see the name come up "Corruption (Rank #)". If you removed the part in parenthesis like I did, it will automatically cast the highest ranking spell. It may be useful to downrank in other cases, but I normally do not. The only spell I used to downrank was Curse of Recklessness (to help control fear).
• Line 5: Same as 4, except modified to use the "alt" key. Thus, when I hold down alt, the picture should change (if using the "?" icon) and I will cast CoA. Same deal with rankings here.

And that's it. Drag the icon from where you create it to your button bar, and you're good to go. I like having my trinkets on this button for a number of reasons.

First, for trash, you will probably only get one trinket "pop" for the duration of the fight. As explained, I try to spread Corruption around, so I'm hitting this button a lot. Thus, whenever I possibly can have a trinket up, it will be used.

Second, one of these two spells are almost always the first spells I cast. This is when I would like to pop my trinkets anyways in order to give my DoTs the greatest possible benefit. For people who prefer to pop them before the shadowbolt filler, you may want to make a macro with "use" on that spell.

Third, for boss fights, I almost never update Corruption, but I do have to update CoA every 24s. Again, this aligns well with the cool down of my trinkets and keeps them popped almost constantly when they're ready. You may be asking, then, what if they're not ready? Well in that case you get that annoying little message "Item is not ready" at the top of your screen. I just ignore it, but it can be disabled as well if it gets in your way. The key here is that it doesn't cause your macro to get "stuck" and will still cast your spells.

All in all, this is a very simple macro that is a good "lead off" hitter for any cast sequence, depending on your play style. I use a similar structure on many other buttons to place multiple spells on one key. Modifiers are the shizznit.

Dude, There's My Sequence

And here it is! The exciting conclusion to my three part series on how to fight your way out of a brown paper bag! Or, cast sequences if you prefer.

Boss Type Fights

For boss fights I try to stick to the sequence I outlined. Normally you have fair warning that a boss fight is going to occur, so you can be ready with your CoA right off the bat. This will also pop your trinket. I advocate popping your trinket before DoTting, as it will give your DoTs the most benefit. I have seen some that do it before shadow bolt filler, and this is not bad, but I like to try and minimize my reliance on spam.

Thus, I lead into a fight with the flowing spells: CoA, Haunt, UA, Corr, SL, and then filler. Therefore, my button presses look something like this: Alt+1, 4, 3, 1, 3, 2 (filler). Then I just watch my DoT timer and refresh as needed. I try to start casting Haunt and UA shortly after they hit the 2 second mark since if I clip them a bit its no big deal. For CotE, alt+1 is replaced with alt+4.

Having Haunt on its own key here is important because it is the one you will be updating the most. I also clip SL a lot in order to keep my macro “on” UA in the sequence. This seems to work fairly well for me and is pretty simple I think. It just requires watching your timer and a little getting used to which spell is on which button. After running a couple raids with this, I was pretty quick on it. You should almost never have to refresh Corruption as Haunt takes care of that. On a typical boss fight, I’m pushing 1000 DPS.

For 10 or 25 man Trash

This is based on the current state of the game. That is, with the nerfing of most instances, trash is dying REALLY fast, but it may not be that way at 80. My goal here is to get the most “bang for my buck”. You want to maximize your short time damage because you’re not gonna get time for all your DoTs to tick fully. Thus, I’m throwing CoA out the window. It needs time to ramp up before it gets its damage on, and there just isn’t time here. Similarly, I’m not going to be using any curse. Sure, CotE may help everyone get higher DPS, but you don’t need it here. They’re dying fast enough without the bonus, why was time on it?

This is where I look at the spell damage coefficients for DoTs. The question I wanted to answer was: “which DoT is going to perform the best with a limited number of ticks”. If you’ve put points heavy into the affliction tree, you should already have Empowered Corruption. Also, if you notice, a lot of talents seem to mention Corruption. I think this is a hint. Combined with making Corruption instant cast without talent points, this is a strong sign that it is our best DoT. The coefficient backs this up, as with the talent it is 129.6%, the highest of any DoT.

If you’ve picked up the Glyph of Corruption, the spell also gives you a 4% chance to enter a Shadow Trance. To top it off, Corruption is also refreshed automatically by Haunt. What else do you need? A neon sign? USE CORRUPTION ON TRASH. You will get the most for your money here.

So for quick trash, I just try to throw a Corruption on each target (if we’re not AoE’ing). Most tanks now can hold a decent enough aggro on multiple targets that one DoT is not going to pull hate. If you have a lot of Corruptions ticking, you’re gonna start proccing Shadow Trances, so then you get to become a machine gun of Shadow Bolts. That’s the fun part, and will let you keep a respectable DPS on quick dying trash. I like to throw in Haunt too if there is a chance just to refresh the DoT on the main target and others if I can. However, Haunt’s long 8s cooldown really prevents it from being spread around. The healing component is worth it though, to keep yourself full and “life tappable”.

If you’re AoE’ing, it’s simple: Seed of Corruption for the win. I’ll also throw an occasional rain of fire, as it does damage right away and is no longer gimped by gear. Previously most ‘locks had a much higher shadow damage, but with recent gear changes this is just no longer the case. Also, the addition of “crits” to our AoE’s helps each of them as well.

Longer Living Trash

For longer living trash, such as when you run a heroic five man, you may see some benefit from applying more DoTs. As such, I have developed a sort of hybrid approach of the two strategies outlined above. Basically, I’m still not using curses because the duration of the fight is still going to be shorter than the 24s run of CoA. Anything shorter than that I think removes the usefulness of any of our curses.

As such, I still like to lead off with Corruption. Then I move to Haunt, UA (SL if it looks like there will be time), and finish off with a Shadow Bolt and maybe Drain Soul. Thus, my key presses look like this: 1, 4, 3, (3), 2, 5. Again, pretty simple. In shorter fights, you won’t have pay attention to DoT timers as much, and the order doesn’t matter as much, since you shouldn’t have to be refreshing many of your DoTs. The only one I really try to refresh in between shadow bolts is Haunt, which has the added benefit of keeping Corruption up.

This worked pretty well in three separate heroic 5-mans I ran last night, and netted me a respectable 670 DPS. Not as good as I am on bosses, but not as abysmal as I had been seeing post patch. In fact, I would say that is about where I was prior to the patch, though slightly lower across the board because I’ve had a few gear upgrades since then.

Solo/Leveling Mobs

For soloing or when you’re out leveling, there isn’t really a big difference in the above approaches. You’re just going to have to choose which one makes the most sense for what you’re killing. The difference is you may have to throw in things like Fear to keep mobs off you, or kite, or whatever it takes. The sequence I’ve outlined is flexible enough to handle this if you know what you’re getting into.

Obviously, I’ll be testing this part more once the expansion comes out and I actually have to do this, though I have had to fear kite and solo some mobs in raids and in the wild (i.e. Roar for Oz in Kara or random world elites when farming).

And The Results Are In

As I’ve pointed out, I’ve seen numbers pushing 1000 DPS on boss fights, and averaged around 670 DPS on different types of trash. Obviously this can vary depending on how things go. I use recount to track this and glance at it quite often during a raid or instance to see how I’m doing. I think perhaps the most telling stats come from a recent raid of SSC where the breakdown of my damage after 4 hours of raiding looked something like this: 23% Corruption, 18.5% S-bolt, 15% UA, 15% CoA, 11% SL, 8% Haunt. Also there were a couple other spells in there to make up the remaining percentages such as SoC and Drain Soul. However, the majority of the instance was quick dying trash and boss type fights; we didn’t do a lot of AoE’ing. It is nice to see that a DoT, and not Shadow Bolt spam account for a majority of my damage even though Shadow bolts still make up a large portion of my damage.

All in all, it seems that we’re trending to be more DoT reliant, and more diverse in our damage. Though it makes keeping up a cast sequence more of a challenge, it is my opinion that this is a good direction for our class and tree to be headed.

Where Your Sequence, Dude?

So yesterday I gave sort of a “behind the scenes” look at generating a cast sequence. It isn’t necessarily maximized or “the best”, but if you understand why you’re casting spells in a certain order, you can be more flexible as the situation calls for it.

It also looks to me as if we're being led away from a sequence that can be programmed to one key in a macro. Blizz seems to be making affliction Warlocks more dependant on DoT timers by giving us a lot more to juggle that doesn’t necessarily fit well together. It is certainly going to take a lot more brain power to keep up all of our DoTs. It would seem to require hitting multiple keys in quick succession while keeping an eye on a DoT timer in order to keep up a solid complement of DoTs on a mob.

Blizz, however, seems to share our concerns with this post from Ghostcrawler:

We think the complex rotation is very hard to pull off in PvE too and seems to almost mandate a mod, which is a problem. We have some long-term plans to change Affliction around a little bit.

So, depending on how long term "long term" is... this all may be a crock. However, hopefully I can give you some good insight into how to mess around with a sequence of your own. It doesn't have to be completely math intensive, and can help you be better overall by understanding how to choose spells in certain situations.

So with all that being said, let’s get to the meat of this post: implementing a cast sequence.

In the past, I had a simple linear sequence that I put up and then was careful not to clip CoA when I used it. Sure, I had some downtime, but it was pretty efficient and easy. On complicated fights, it wasn't very hard to hit the one button to make sure everything was kept up pretty well and my DPS and Damage Done reflected the benefits of this. I posted the macro in an earlier post if you are curious.

For better or worse, spell mechanics have been added that really muck up a single macro like that, further strengthening the benefits of using multiple buttons for a sequence. The following is how I attempt to make the sequence I chose manageable in a raid environment.

First, let’s take a look at how my button bar is set up:

There are some significant changes from when I last posted a picture of my bar. Mostly, I moved my wande and fire spells off the number keys and up to just a clickable area. Here’s a quick look on what is on each of my number buttons:

1. Contains a macro that pops either of my trinkets when they are ready, while also casting Corruption or (alt modified) Curse of Agony.
2. Casts Shadow Bolt or (alt modified) Soul Fire.
3. Contains my cast sequence macro previously mentioned. I have modified it at this time to cast only Unstable Affliction and Siphon Life. Modifying with alt allows you to just cast UA.
4. Casts Haunt or (alt modified) Curse of the Elements.
5. Contains a macro that puts all three Drain spells on one button. Default is Drain Soul, alt is Drain Life, shift is Drain Mana.
6. Soulshatter. IMO a must for those times when you “accidentally” pull aggro.
7. Contains a macro that binds all types of fear to one button. Default is Death Coil, alt is Howl of Terror, shift is normal Fear.
8. Rain of Fire
9. Seed of Corruption
10. Contains a macro binding a couple utility spells to one button. Default is Life Tap, alt is Demonic Pact (or Demon Tap as I call it), shift is Fel Armor.
11. The last two buttons are just the two kinds of pots. I like to keep these at hand for emergencies. I have seen some good macros that let you pop a pot and healthstone, but since I use Necrosis, my stones are handled elsewhere.

It is important to note that I use alt extensively. Depending on your addons, you cannot use Shift for the first 6 buttons as it will shift bars on you. Thus, for 5 I don’t really use Drain Mana, but it does make the button clickable if I ever need it. This is also why my fears reside on 7, since there is no “bar 7” to flip to, I can use shift in the same manner I use alt. Also, I cannot use Control because that is how you access your pet bar. Again, this behavior changes with addons, but that’s how mine works.

Also, I will try and post a few of those macros at later dates if anyone is interested. In this post I’m trying to just focus on what goes where.

Okay, so now that you have an idea of my set up, tomorrow I’ll tell you how I use it in several common situations. I actually have it all written out, but it appears to me to be far too long to make just one post. I really did mean to post it all today as promised, but after I had said all that I wanted to… ZOMG it’s long. I’ll schedule it to post tomorrow at noon, so tune in then for the exciting conclusion!

Happy Halloween

Pumpkins with Class.

Hit Me

Here is a good post over at Mystic Chicanery concerning spell hit in WotLK. It's good to know what we're going to have to shoot for. Notice the large number from hit scaling at 80. Also, it has a great list of what spell falls under which category. The important thing to note is that we'll need 432 hit points to cap at 80, or 356 hit points with Suppression specced. That is a LOT of hit points.

Some Thoughts

This makes suppression points all the more worthwhile when you hit 80 until you're spell hit is capped. With the added mana reduction bonus, I may just shoot to cap my hit with suppression taken into account (thus "eating" some destro spell misses). That will allow me to focus on other gear stats such as spell power after getting my hit covered. If you're going to keep points in there anyways for the mana reduction, might as well make the most of 'em.

This also shows another reason why I leave Immolate out normal spell rotation. Until I'm hit capped without suppression, it will miss more than my affliction spells, and thus needlessly hurt my DPS. Although, the same could be said about s-bolt spam, but that's why s-bolts get lowest priority. If you follow the same sense of immolate as a "filler" spell, it probably doesn't hurt to use it. I just wouldn't fret about keeping it up at the expense of other, more useful spells.