Demonic Pact Rules!
Well, as the summer comes to an end, and WotLK draws closer and closer, a ton of warlocks have been wondering how they are going to function in raids come lvl 80. (It looks like their reign of EZ-Mode Bolt spam to the top of the charts is over.)
It looks like the three trees are keeping their individual roles:
Affliction will be debuffs and DoT damage,
Demonology will be master and pet synergy,
Destruction will be… outright destruction.
The big difference I notice comes to the talents in the demonology tree, where late talents such as Demonic Pact bring a certain buffing aspect to the demonology tree. Well, actually, that is the only group buffing talent late in the tree, but it is so good, it could count for multiple talents!
Lets look at it with Bristinie shall we?
Thooghun has 5% crit from his agility at level 70, I would go so far as to say that will remain constant at 80, he then gets 5% crit from Demonic Tactics, so ten percent overall, self buffed. Well, lets say we toss in Improved Demonic Tactics, I have 21% crit (25% for shadow bolts with Devastation), So lets give Thooghun an additional 4% to crit (it isn’t 7% because putting 3 points there means you can’t get to max out Demonic Pact and get to Ruin) Now we’re looking at 14% chance to crit, before a single raid buff gets tossed in. With just a paladin’s Heart of the Crusader talent, that gets bumped up to 17% chance to crit, not bad at all. With a 2.0 weapon speed (assuming we don’t get haste scaling) we’re looking at a crit every 12 seconds if you’re lucky.
Well, lets go take a look at the Demonic Pact duration again… 12 seconds… interesting… So this could really turn out to be nearly a 10% increase in spell damage for you.
Well, what could it be for the raid you wonder? lets ask Aetherial Circle!
“Hey guys, who has more Spell Damage than 1505 raid buffed?”
…..
“[Über leet mage]?”
Yeah, he has a bit more, but he could dps naked and probably still beat us, he’s that good.
So, since Demonology Warlocks scale the worst with spell damage, but have the most, giving 10% of their damage to the raid is even better!
So, Demonology Warlocks could possibly give to the raid up to 200 spell damage.
Is it just me, or is that the best caster buff in the game?
So… damn… tempting…
Throw in the fact that the new destruction tree as it stands now confuses me a little – well, not so much confuses me as it seems all over the shop, definitely swinging hard towards fire love towards the end which doesn’t excite me. In particular making Conflag seemingly tasty, which leaves me really wondering what to make of things seeing as its currently a definite no-no in a cast rotation… Buffing both Immolate and Conflag in the one talent really makes me suspicious, when by using Conflag you’re costing yourself damage from Imm in the first place – is the buff to Conflag enough to overtake the damage you’re costing yourself? I can see a lot theory-crafting coming as soon as they’re all set in stone, I’m way too lazy to do any of it until I’m relatively confident I won’t have to redo it in a few weeks if (when?) they make changes. I may even end up just ignoring the bottom of the destro tree altogether – much play testing will take place beforehand of course.
Short answer is that I’ll nearly definitely take your lead and head back to my first love and level demo, then see where the wind blows me from there – especially now you’ve outlined just how beautiful Demonic Pact may end up being…
Posted 1 year, 2 months ago