And now for something completely different

“Test Steve Axe” – best flavour text.

Essence of the Underworld – transform into a phoenix? WAT???

Build 13082 – the wtf build

13066 cut numbers back, 13082 gave us more in all specs.  Since I don’t care about affliction and demonology, here is the relevant info for destruction.

important note:  this totally fucks up the previously attained rotation and spell priorities.  so far I refuse to accept it fucks up the talent build, but further testing will indicate so.

 

Immolate base damage increased by 55%.

GOOD CHANGE.   DUH.

I’m not 100% clear on whether this affects the DoT element of Immolate as well.  Testing on the PTR indicates that it might seeing as the total value of Immolate’s damage in my overall damage output increased quite a bit.  Almost 100% in fact.  From 7% to 13%.  I’ve got the screenshots to prove it.  Don’t forget that if Immolate does more damage, then Conflagrate does so as well.  Numbers prove this.

Unfortunately I did not have a very large sample from build 13066 still saved in my Recount or in screenshots, so take it with a slight grain of salt / margin of error.  What IS clear is that Immolate/Conflagrate are greatly increased in value in overall damage:

This was a test done with the same rotation so as not to bring in any different elements into play.  What is important to see is the following:

-average Immolate (DoT) tic went up from 2200 to 3524.
-too small Conflagrate sample in 13066 (only 4, most of them crits) to judge.
-overall value of Immolate (DoT) went up from 8% of total damage done to 14.2%.
-overall value of Conflagrate, despite the crits in 13066, went up from 13.2% to 17.1%

Immolate and Conflagrate are even heavier hitters than they were previously.

 

The Searing Pain Question

Searing Pain now costs 12% of base mana, up from 8%.  Base damage increased 150%.

Check out the tooltip for it, it’s something I hadn’t noticed before or it was changed previously and I ignored it.

“Soulburn: Increases the critical effect chance of your next Searing Pain by 100%, and your subsequent Searing Pain casts by 50% for 6 sec. 

Ok, the developers are clearly trying to push us into using Searing Pain.  This can’t be considered purely a pvp fast cast or anything of the sort because of the big boosts it received.

With that in mind, I went to the PTR and ran a simple test.  I stopped all other sources of damage and simply chain-cast Searing Pain.  I hit 7.5k dps and my mana was not draining overly fast.

I then chain cast Incinerate and hit about 4k dps.

I then cast Immolate and chain chast Incinerate and hit 6-7k dps.

HMMMM.

Interesting stuff.

 

A possible rotation formed in my mind which went like this:

1 – Bane of Havoc on 2nd target
2 – Curse of Doom
3 – Immolate
4 – Chaos Bolt
5 – Conflagrate
6 – 3 x Incinerate
7 – SOUL BURN + 6 seconds of Searing Pain at crazy crit rate
8 – fill as necessary including Soul Fire procs.

 

I hit about 1.5k dps more over the course of 3 soul burn sessions than I did without it with the previous rotation I came up with (essentially the current rotation).  I am reluctant to say this should be the new rotation because it needs more testing.  Here are the problems:

– 3 soul shards / soul burns, then we have to soul harvest for 10 seconds or whatever long it is.  Is the slightly increased dps from Soulburn + Searing Pain spam enough to make up for 10 seconds of no casts?

– Timing Soul Burn + Searing Pain (SB+SP from now on) has to be very carefully managed.  You want to do it when Chaos Bolt is on cooldown , when Immolate has 6+ seconds remaining, and when Conflagrate is on the max possible cooldown and when Backdraft was used on 3 incinerates.  This is essentially not possible, so SOMETHING has to be given up in order to fill it with SB+SP.  I usually let Chaos Bolt go unused while I fired off super quick Searing Pains, but on at least one occasion I let Immolate fall off and lost a Conflagrate hit.

-Threat?  How much of an issue will threat be?  I won’t know this until this goes live.  Maybe tanks will have been so nerfed and the 100% crit, 150% extra damage from Searing Pain will be too much to spam it every 30 seconds for 6 seconds.

 

All in all, I think Searing Pain is going to be worked into our rotation, probably the best combination possible of Soulburn as far as I see it for PVE at this point.  More testing, more builds… and we will have a clearer idea of things. 

As it stands I had to edit my previous post on 4.0.1 rotations and mention that the information MIGHT be invalid as of the latest (13082) build, but I refuse to give a new rotation per build, so I will wait.

If 4.0.1 hit RIGHT NOW, you would not do badly for yourself to simply use the rotation previously mentioned in the other post, or your exact current rotation, and you would still do well.   Stay tuned as to whether searing pain makes sense.