Firelock ... what's the deal

[Mithwen]

So I'm planning to make Pika a spellfire tailor since it makes sense to me to have one of each kind if I'm going to have 3 tailors. That got me to wondering about a fire build for her. I find the idea attractive because affliction has been just too much like being a shadow priest and big flamey crits could be good times. I did a little research, and firelocks seem to be roundly laughed at (by me as well) but I was wondering if you locks know of any theorycrafting about it and maybe some better arguments against it than the trollish 'firelocks r dum lulz' that I keep seeing.

Pika.

[phewl]

the 0/21/40 fire spec is the "raid viable" fire spec as far as i know. where you would not take imp shadowbolt and would take cataclysm. and you would take the all the fire talents besides maybe imp searing pain.

from what i gather its not a joke spec really, it just doesnt scale as well as shadowbolt does because of imp shadowbolt. ive played around with it in ZA when i was running with only fire mages and it was decent. it seems like alot more consistent damage with less major crit spikes. i think the dmg coefficient on shadowbolt works out to be 1.06 and incinerate is 1.03(maybe? either way its less from what i read)

its basically called silly only in the sense of raiding i believe, because of the advantages shadow has in raiding that fire doesn't.

this is the spec i would use for firelock, sacrificing the imp.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/warlock/talents.html?0000000000000000000001250030133200100 000000055000512200510531050

[Raptace]

I did the fire thing once upon a time when I was first running kara, I was afflic by trade but they were having me hellfire tank the adds for Illhoof, and I didn't really ask questions. It is possible to push out some pretty good dmg, and honeslty, I would think imp shadowbolt would be the same thing as having up the scorch debuffs...

The only problem I think your gonna have with using spellfire stuff is that it has 0 stamina on it, which sucks for a lock for life tap, so besides you not having a ton of health, it could be a good setup.

[phewl]

with shadow you get the shadow weaving (10%) and improved shadowbolt (20%) and the curses that both fire and shadow get.

[Mithwen]

Well, scorch should do the same as shadow weaving so it seems that imp SB and the better scaling coefficient on SB over Incinerate is what makes SB spam win. On the other hand, conflagrate doesn't use a shard. :)

Pika.

[phewl]

i believe using conflag in your dps rotation actually lowers your dps, something to do with the mana and since the time your waiting for your global cooldown after isnt worth it vs shadowbolts. basically the time is better spent doing shadowbolts, especially when you start getting T6 type gear. ive read that most destruction locks with 4 piece T6 dont even use immolate as it would lower there dps vs shadowbolt spam.

[Zhek]

firelocks r dum lulz

[Mithwen]

i believe using conflag in your dps rotation actually lowers your dps, something to do with the mana and since the time your waiting for your global cooldown after isnt worth it vs shadowbolts.


Yeah I've read this too. I was wondering if there was actual theorycrafting with some numbers or something. Or a post off a site that doesn't traffic in nudie pics made by someone who can mostly spell. I guess I'll just hit up Elitist Jerks some time that I'm bored.

Pika.

[Raptace]

Wanted to resurrect this a bit, been reading up a bit. With Imp Scorch in effect, and not having Zhek in the raid with Malediction, but still having several mages, and!, the changes being made to emberstorm, I guess this question is to Phewl or someone that crunches numbers, could going fire be better?

[phewl]

for personal dps fire would be an improvement, but generally shadow provides more of a raid dps boost than the sum of the individual gains from fire. But typically that is coming from the point of view of stacked raids that carry 3-4 warlocks and 1-2 shadowpriests. For our paticular raid the question would be, can we afford to nerf pikas dps(and therefore mana/heal generation, i believe) for a gain of ~50 dps to each me and raptace. I was thinking that might be the way to go for our raid before, since we were only carrying 2 warlocks and 3 mages when there was still separate caster dmg curses and recklessness still made sense to use as 1st choice. But now that CoE does all schools of magic it is less of an issue.

Another thing is, i believe to gain that extra dps from fire you have to be pretty damn attentive to watching immolate and getting the most out of it for your incinerates. And at certain haste levels it makes the timing not work out so well i believe, from what i understand firelocks may have a few sweet spots for haste where you can get extra incinerates in on the same immolate.

So i dunno, id say stick with shadow unless getting an extra 100 dps out of us becomes necessary for brutallus, but in the bigger picture 100/29000, that would only add ~0.3% to achieving the dps needed to kill brutallus. Also these are just very rough numbers that i got from reading through the EJ warlock PvE raiding thread.

[Raptace]

I would need probably atleast 2 diff pieces of gear to even try this out. I don't think my badge pvp cloak and pvp boots are really gonna help anything out lol. But yeah I was just wondering what your thoughts on this were, and since Chas is done raiding for awhile atleast, we only have two mages atm, but who knows who/what the replacement will be.