Deep in the destruction tree for warlocks, the talent “Shadow and Flame,” which reads “Hitting an enemy with Conflagrate increases all Shadow damage you deal by 10% for 20 sec, and hitting an enemy with Shadowburn increases all Fire damage you deal by 10% for 20 sec. In addition, Conflagrate has a 100% chance not to consume Immolate, and Shadowburn has a 100% chance to instantly refund a Soul Shard.”
To me, this reads like it should be a “balance” type playstyle, where you’ll spend 20 seconds casting shadow bolts, and when the 10% shadow damage buff is nearly finished, you’ll cast a shadow burn, which then buffs your Incinerates for the next 20 seconds.
Example rotation: Immolate > Conflagrate > Shadow bolt for ~18 sec > Shadowburn → Incinerate for ~18 sec > Conflagrate > Shadow b
That sounds SUPER fun. The issue, however, is that with the talents available, you’re almost certainly going to spec into Demonic Sacrifice and sacrifice your Succubus for +15% fire damage. This then results in your rotation probably just being almost entirely fire-based. Why bother casting shadow spells when your fire spells are getting 15% extra damage from the DS talent? Overall, your fire spells are 25% increased damage, and your shadow spells are only 10% increased damage.
That said, your realistic rotation is more like this:
Shadowburn > Immolate > Incinerate for ~18 sec > repeat.
Instead of 20 seconds with Shadowbolt and 20 seconds of Incinerate, you’re essentially just casting shadow burn every time your fire buff goes away. No Shadowbolts at all. To me, this is much less flavorful, and I’d like for there to be a way that DS doesn’t pigeonhole you into casting just one filler spell the whole time.
Thoughts?
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I was just doing the math on this and it even looks like you can pull more overall bonuses out of shadow bolt over incinerate EVEN if you have immolate up. At level 60 the damage is very comparable, and when you factor in shadow bolt has a higher spell damage coefficient and you can maintain 100% uptime on the conflagrate buff, there’s no reason to ever incinerate.
I think the shadow and flame buff needs to be increased substantially in order to make it worth alternating between the two schools. Demonic sacrifice really is hard to pass up like you say since it’s such a bonus too so this just further encourages a single school rotation.
It’s been a long time since college but blizzard should really look at the math here and make sure what they intend is being accomplished.
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I probably won’t touch Incinerate or Demonology on a Destro build, instead throwing 21 points into Affliction for shadow crit rate and some DoT stuff. I think a lot of people are sleeping on the fact that demons scale now and are too eager to take Sacrifice. Sure it’s 15% damage but what does your pet contribute and what could you grab instead?
Anyway, Shadow and Flame looks super good. Too good to me, mostly because it morphs Shadow Burn into a soul shard generator and lets you open with Conflag. The only other spec I’d be interested in playing is deep Demonology as a tank meme.
might not be worth to sacrifice the pet with the demonic brand talent will have to test it out.
I agree on the pet; demonic sacrifice might just be good for deep demo now. Demonology is going to be hitting very hard in its own way. Decimation is an outstanding talent. You can even take it as Destro, but I think you give up too much to do it.
Yes I’m planning a 0/21/30 build with decimation and demonic brand but I’m not sure how it will turn out.
So you give up a GCD for an inferior spell to get the 10% damage boot.
You will probably want to try to and cast shadowburn at the end of a pack and have the 20s buff running into the next pack.
DS/incinerate seems obvious, but how about nightfall/incinerate? That could be good too especially if you can corruption several mobs..
You will very likely need to have some points +hit and casting corruption while running is very nice too. i think.. 9/11/31 or 20/0/31
keep in mind also that ony is immune to fire.
I’m going to test 0/31/20 demo with both those talents myself. I’m not sure whether i sac the succy and feldom an imp for 25% fire damage or keep the succy and just use shadowbolts. As for Ony, I’ll just run the affliction build for that. Moar dots.
Yea I was planning something similar but I’m gonna go deeper into destro just to make shadowburn refund the shard.
I was looking at the double sac for raids as well. 25% more shadow dmg overall is kinda nutty and probably overrides the usefulness of imp. Or you just relegate your worst geared lock to imp for blood pact.
I just wanna know wtf I’m suppose to do with Bane of Havoc, its so bad.
There doesn’t seem to be ANY real situation where using it would be better than just using Agony, even in a situation where there are like a dozen non-elite mobs, the extra damage from the AOE is less than Agony would have been for a single tick.
They really need to re-look at Havoc, its incredibly worthless right now.
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My math shows at 12 targets, Havoc is more, but good luck to your tank holding aggro on 12 mobs. The break even at 300 spell power was around 6 mobs, which itself is above the average pack and above the recommended number of mobs a tank should reasonably be able to hold. That was assuming none of the mobs die before 8 seconds are up (this is for both Hellfire and RoF), which is also unreasonable.
I don’t see it getting much use unless it does way more damage with way fewer mobs.
EDIT: Nope, you can’t increase its damage above 15% either without running in cleave problems. A fight like Four Horsemen, where you can nuke one and do 30% to another is too strong.
Shoulda made it have a chance to duplicate your spells to the other target. 10% chance on all destro spells. Would feel good to pop a soulfire and see two pop out one for each target and it’d be actually useful
It just feels like an Affliction talent to me, I don’t understand why its in our Destro tree
Tryna come up with scenarios. Could be good on 4 horsemen. I mean that’s just a straight 15% damage buff where you’re not taking marks for reapplying Agony. But man that’s limited.
Okay so I talked about this in a question I had, but I also wondered if the damage from imps fireball thing and succubus lash of pain as well as demonic brand talent work with the damage bonuses.
The new patch updated Demonic Brand:
Demonology
- Demonic Brand bonus pet damage now only does high threat when it deals Shadow damage.
So that’s only when your succubus casts Lash of Pain rather than all its attacks. It still does bonus damage. It’s a 12 second cooldown, and she attacks every two seconds. So the five white attacks do no extra threat, and the imps attacks do no extra threat. If the succubus is in danger of catching the tank, you can turn LoP off. Also, in Soulfire execute range for Deep Demo, the Imp will now do more damage and NEVER catch the tank.
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