Blood Pact: Patch 3.3.3 raid build roundup

It's been a few months since we did a roundup of the raiding builds and how the current game mechanics impact their relative DPS. With the patch 3.3.3 changes becoming public there are a couple of interesting warlock changes that are worth having a closer look at. Back in November with the coming of patch 3.3 we saw destruction lose its crown as "the best by far." Before then it was simply hard to justify any other spec unless you were giving the Demonic Pact buff to the raid, and doing so came at a personal DPS cost, so wasn't very popular.
While we've been raiding Icecrown Citadel affliction and destruction have been pretty even in their competitiveness, with demonology still trailing along behind like a wheezy fat-kid -- you still want him with you cos he has all the sweeties, but he's not one of the cool-gang. Well, times are a-changin', that kid is growing up into a real power-house.
So, first off, let's look at the actual changes that have been put in place since 3.3.
Affliction
- Shadow Embrace: This effect can now stack up to 3 times, up from 2. However, the periodic healing reduction effect has been reduced from 3/6/9/12/15% to 2/4/6/8/10% per application.
- Demonic Pact: The damage bonus granted the warlock by this talent has been increased from 1/2/3/4/5% to 2/4/6/8/10%. The buff granted to a raid or party by this talent remains unchanged.
- Conflagrate: The damage-over-time effect of Conflagrate has been increased to 40% of the spell's total damage, up from 20%.
- Empowered Imp: The pet bonus damage provided by this talent has been increased to 10/20/30%, up from 5/10/15%.
- Improved Shadow Bolt: Damage done by Shadow Bolt increased by 2/4/6/8/10%, up from 1/2/3/4/5%.
At first glance that looked like a buff each for affliction and demonology and three for destruction -- but wait -- destro locks don't use shadow bolts, so that's two buffs for each spec. A veritable coup for even-handed buffage. Not all buffs are equal however and if you look at the top damage performances of warlocks in ICC (I used the World of Logs DPS rankings tool) you will see that affliction is still outperforming the others, if by a small margin.
So now we have patch 3.3.3 coming our way, what is this going to bring us?
Demonology
- Demonic Pact: This effect now has a 45-second duration, up from 12 seconds, and a 20-second internal cooldown.
- Immolate: The damage-over-time component of this spell can now produce critical strikes.
The Demonic Pact change probably doesn't do much for DPS. I think the main reason for it being there is to reduce the amount of combat log data being thrown around. It should have a positive effect on the buff uptime however as a refresh (minion crit) doesn't have to occur within the next 12 seconds but somewhere within the 25 seconds after the 20 second cooldown. Essentially, that should double the chance of any one buff being refreshed. It also means any minion should be about as good at keeping the buff refreshed -- not that you want any other minion for DPS but if you wanted to pop an imp onto the Kinetic Bombs, for example, you can and still have the buff.
Another interesting feature of the cooldown is that more powerful buffs are not going to be over-written by weaker ones for at least twenty seconds. The inverse is also true but I wouldn't be surprised to find people stacking spell power abilities to trigger a more powerful DP buff at key moments (such as during Bloodlust or Heroism). This may be a step too far and almost certainly will be for many, but it's a new feature to the ability and someone will be trying it.
Immolate. Well, a buff to Immolate is a comparative nerf to affliction, isn't it? With affliction being the only spec that doesn't include Immolate in their rotation it certainly is (see affliction 101 for the basic rotation). As I said before, it seems that affliction has the edge in ICC, not by a long way but then this is only one spell change, it's not going to break affliction. Is it?
In order to get some baseline figures I went back to SimulationCraft. I didn't want to go mad with balancing gear to what is being used in ICC right now, or finding BiS gear lists etc, I just wanted to representative figures. So I used the sample tier nine profiles. Obviously the figures I get are going to be heavily impacted by the gear used in these profiles and if you want to see where you compare with your gear then you can simply import your character into SimulationCraft and run it with the default settings (I didn't change any, including Heroic Presence for the alliance guys). I wrote a brief guide to using SC a few weeks ago if you are new to the tool.
So the results: The chart below shows the base results of the simulations in the dark colors, I then made some adjustments to account for the Immolate change (multiplied the number of immolate ticks by the immolate crit rate and then by the average tick damage) -- these are represented by the lighter parts of the bars. As you can see, destruction had the lowest base DPS scores in these tests which matches the World of Logs reports I scanned.

Affliction
- A1: 55/00/16
- d1: 00/56/15
Demonology seems to be the biggest winner here though. Not only was it looking to pull the same numbers as affliction prior to this change but it now gets a decent bump in damage. Affliction seems to have lost out somewhat and certainly on that chart it looks to be a big loss. Personally I think affliction will continue to be very competitive in Icecrown Citadel. It's high mobility and raid utility make it still very viable and it's also very popular. This means that people are prepared to invest into making the most of the spec. Destruction never really fell out of favour but certainly now I can see those who like to make things go boom feeling a lot better about their numbers again. Also, I didn't make any rotation or glyph changes, which with the Glyph of Immolate, could be significant for destro numbers.
The clear winner in all this seems to be demonology though. I'm a big fan of demonology and while it's never really had its day in the sun we can see that it is becoming really handy on the damage meters. There is still the issue of fights that buff the player and not the minion (demonology falls behind a bit on Blood-Queen Lana'thel for example) but then with one of the strongest caster buffs available and damage that is right up there I can see a lot of people changing to demo in the near future.

Filed under: Warlock, Analysis / Opinion, Raiding, (Warlock) Blood Pact
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
GAYLONHARDMAN Feb 22nd 2010 4:16PM
I love DEMO!
Dotandrun Feb 22nd 2010 4:18PM
Affliction FTW!!!
Rhabella Feb 22nd 2010 8:09PM
I love affliction as well, but I have a question in hopes that someone might be able to answer it.
Why would you take cataclysm over the one point in dark pact? You don't need it to get to ruin, and dark pact can come in handy for those times when you would rather remain self sufficient and not tax your healers.
Ratskinmahoney Feb 22nd 2010 8:57PM
More mana or less mana consumption = less life-tapping (or dping) which is higher dps (on a sim at least). The 55/0/16 spec is built on the understanding that the gear level is such that LT provides more mana than DP and thus that you would not want to use DP at all.
At ICC gear levels DP actually outscales LT for mana return and the 56/0/15 DP spec comes out on top sim-wise (you completely replace LT with DP). In practice though, as you say, the utility is probably at least as important as any dps difference.
Grizzleton Feb 22nd 2010 4:22PM
Thanks, Dominic, great news and a great article. Can't wait to run my own numbers. The buff to destro was pretty obvious, but I didn't see the buff demo was getting. Time to redo my secondary spec yet again. It'll be good to see my big bodyguard again.
myalternateaccount Feb 22nd 2010 4:36PM
Being a huge destro fan, very happy to see this. Though from my own experience it was not underperforming at all.
Prpleskilage Feb 22nd 2010 4:42PM
I changed to Demonology about a month ago and I do the most damage in that spec when raid buffed. When not raid buffed, the winner is affliction. However, with all the Stamina, Intellect and Spirit from raid buffs (All increasing your spellpower by great amounts if you have talents in the Demonology tree) my Spellpower is so high that Demonology is the winner! Wich is awesome because I love playing the spec.
Modpapa Feb 22nd 2010 4:43PM
love the deep Demo.....just love it.... popping meta and trinkets, charge and immolate aura, (SoulShatter cause you just ripped off the tank) dot em up, and start throwing out the heavy nukes, all while your pet is buffing the raid dps...just so much fun! I love the fact that I'm watching for Molten Core procs to switch out my SBs for Incinerates, and of course the beauty of Decimation at execute.......it just feels right to me.
SaraFF Feb 22nd 2010 4:58PM
Sigh... that ~200dps difference between destro and afflic just hurts so bad... I understand that dps from destro would drop on high mobility fights but still... to have that much of a difference in stand up fights is just ridiculous!
Afflic FTW!!! atleast for now...
feniks9174 Feb 22nd 2010 5:30PM
It could be a lot worse. You could be a Mage who gets wierd looks for being Fire and outright mocked for speccing Frost. For them it's arcane or GTFO.
When all three warlock talent trees can put up numbers within 200-300 DPS of each other, which spec you use is almost enteely dependabt on which one your comfortable with and which brings the raid buff your lacking. Lots of casters? Go demo. Need replenishment? Go Destro w/ soul leech. Even being the "low men on the totem pole" they'll still put up very competitive numbers. I don't know that a pure class has been this balanced in the history of the game with out the balance being "they all suck, reroll". It's a very good time to be a lock.
Biskit333 Feb 22nd 2010 5:04PM
That graph is a bit misleading, the entire range of dps shown is only 600. So while the graph makes it look like affliction is doing half the dps of demo, it is really only a difference of 250 dps or so. I know you have to zoom in in order to see the differences clearly, but I know at first I was shocked by the difference.
Moral of the story, always check the scales!
Hollow Leviathan Feb 22nd 2010 6:40PM
The goal of the article was to highlight the differences in the three specs, which is what is magnified in the chart. As Hobbes mentions in the article that they are all competitive and even predicts a shift to Demo, the only people who would get confused are the ones who only read the articles for the pictures. For those folks I have no pity.
Biskit333 Feb 22nd 2010 7:00PM
I agree, the graph's scale is appropriate for the data, I just wanted to make sure people realized that while it appears to be a very large difference, it is really only a few hundred dps. As you said, it magnifies the difference so that it is easily interpreted, but that can also lead to confusion at first glance. As always I enjoy every article Mr. Hobbes writes.
Euphande Feb 22nd 2010 5:05PM
I raid with a lock who went demo (from destro) a few weeks ago; we're a caster-heavy group and we LOVE it, as a raid. Additionally, once he got the hang of it his personal dps went up too. No downsides here!
Clydtsdk-Rivendare Feb 22nd 2010 5:08PM
I was about to point out that the chart looks a little misleading, because the y-axis starts at 10k and not zero. However, it seems to me that the average wow.com reader will probably be a little smarter than that.
MusedMoose Feb 22nd 2010 7:09PM
I just have to say that I love the picture that accompanies this and I don't know why.
Bharat Feb 25th 2010 9:02PM
I do too! All three specs, destro, demo, aff; decked out in gear. ready to dps the living shit out of anything that crosses them. I wish i could be in a party like that.
Viper007Bond Feb 22nd 2010 8:15PM
I'm my guild's Demo bitch (DP) and this is GOOD NEWS, EVERYONE!
iammurlocftw Feb 22nd 2010 8:28PM
WTB Demo rotation link, I can't find one online and i must be doing something wrong because I'm getting less numbers than in destro, which in theory if i was using the optimal demo rotation i would be getting higher numbers. my current rotation is metamorph/trinket macro CoA, Corruption, immolate, SB till 35% incinerating with molten core procs and refreshing dots
Rowan Feb 22nd 2010 8:49PM
Seconded (is this a word?).
However, I did find this on EJ:
http://elitistjerks.com/f80/t37474-demonology_thread/
About halfway down the first post it has diagram. I could spend some time deciphering it but, getting something in words would help me much more.