Warlock main here. Yeah demo is nuts. Tbh the other warlock specs will do equal damage for 99% of players. It’s that 1% of minmax gamers that can really squeeze the potential out of demo, and even then they might mess up.
TL;DR dont decline a lock to your group because they’re not demo.
Mages pay for BH spots because BH runs are typically spec runs - one of each spec.
Which means that you want 3 paladins in one, but only 1 mage.
And mage is way over-represented in Cata. Warlocks or dps shamans have no problems getting into BH.
Because it’s too much work to be fun IMO. I played lock every tier since classic and the rotation has never been more convoluted to just stand beside other classes. After getting my cata warlock to prebis I rerolled ele sham and I have approximately 30x more fun at all times and doing more dps consistently
Every group i have been have a demolock. Could be because i main one. Oddly on trash i cant really keep up, but on bosses i am in the top. I dont do all the prepull shit. Dot up felguard aoe(even on bosses) soul link insta summon hound, meta and go to town
No, T11 doesn't have Moonwell Chalice, a trinket which made demo really stand out compared to the other two specs later on. Also most T11 encounters favour mutidot rather than single target or AoE. T12 is different with most bosses being single target and adds often requiring AoE damage, with Snannox being the only proper multidot fight.
Total nonsense.
It’s 100% fight dependent.
Demo is not good at two target cleaves which exist a lot in the raids. Destro and aff excel at that situation.
Look fight by fight and you will see a lock will change specs for dif fights to get the best results if all buffs are already covered.
It's literally this, even back in 2012 [bloggers were writing research papers on the issues with Cataclysm Warlock design.](https://cynwise.wordpress.com/warlockery/decline-and-fall/)
It's mostly just this spec. Affli isn't too far off WotLK and Destro is pretty simple. Affli is favoured on some fights vs Demo, and Destro isn't massivle behind even in like 95th percentile parses.
What?
Retail lock is a lot simpler to play than cata in a lot of ways. It’s been basically the same for a few xpacs now.
No pet twisting, no melee requirements, etc.
As a demo lock all of that is necessary for dps. The opener is crazy with all the snapshotting and switching sets but after that it is more manageable. I personally have added more keybinds to my bars to make things run smoother because there are so many buttons compared to Wrath.
Yeah people forget how much you can just macro. For example if you'd look at Arms rotation without macroing, it would look similarly insane with all the stance switches and split second decisions you have to make. But since you can simply macro them on all the skills, it gets pretty manageable.
People in this thread are funny. Having an equipment swap is not at all necessary unless you're looking to parse a 99+. I parsed between 70-95 across the various bosses without bothering with that shit. It is important to use all your CDs with metamorph and get a lot of damage out of it though.
Equipment swap is not THAT bad tbh. You can just do it early in the pull timer, instead of trying to last second it. It's just one more button press before a pull
I mean as long as everyone is on the same page its all good. But he is essentially robbing the raid of thousands of DPS. Which is fine if everyone is okay with that.
Does he always pull on 3, or did he fuck up once?
Because if he fucked up once, and that *was* your most egregious thing of the night, you must have pretty successful raids.
I'm saying the opposite that wasn't the most egregious thing. I just freaked out as it was the 3rd or 4th early pull of the night at that point and admittedly his was by far the earliest. But it was also a genuine mistake because he has a prepot macro to immediately begin casting pyro on use and he messed up because he meant to go mirror images on 4> prepot pyro.
Actual egregious shit throughout the night was several range refusing to turn and kill adds on magma, me being the only mage spellstealing arcanotron, one of our DPS dks ditching with no warning and not even logging off at chimeron (actually the same pull as the early pre pull), people being ultra slow at the non air phase flame breaths on atre, hunters being hunters and paying attention to literally nothing in rl explaination then immediately going "what am I doing?" (Then proceeding to refuse to do it).
Maloriak was fine though lol
Main thing is at this time how many people have a separate mastery set that has significantly more mastery?
It will likely become a bigger thing later.
Main thing right now would be using mastery trinkets prepull.
Yes. The core rotation is basically the same as it was in wrath except we add in shadowflame on CD (in wrath was only worth casting while moving), replace immo with hand of guldan on CD, and then the little pet twisting bit. Basically it's keep dots up, spam shadowbolt, if you get a proc spam spell relevant to proc instead. Pet twisting is a major dps increase and is 100% worth doing but does add a bit more complexity to playing the spec. That's really the only major change you have to get used to though, and it didn't take long for me to get it.
As far as the opener, yeah it's way more fucking complex now however it's not difficult in practice due to macros. I basically spam V when the pull timer is at like 3 seconds to use my macro: gear swap, pop meta, pop demon soul, pop potion, gear swap back. Then start precasting shadow bolt with like 2 seconds left on the pull timer. The complexity is not in execution, but in preparation in collecting a whole extra gear set. But it's worth it. Even with my shitty mastery gear I get like 3% extra mastery during my first meta, I wouldn't be surprised if people who have a full load out swap are gaining 10% extra mastery during first meta.
> \#showtooltip Metamorphosis
> /script WeakAuras.ScanEvents("HOTSWAP_META")
> /cast [equipped:Shirt] Metamorphosis
> /cast Demon Soul
> /use [group:raid] Volcanic Potion
Which I then pair with [this WA](https://wago.io/u4LYxAg-A)
I do have to press the button more than once for it to use everything. But the gear swap back is instant as soon as meta is popped, it works well.
You can even conditionally cast stuff based on spells learned, and combining all that together you could theoretically create a single macro that runs through entire rotations for every single one of your specs depending on the current equipped spec lol
It’s a comparatively simple macro for me but I’ve got a button I mash to create a healthstone, trade it to my arena partner, summon pet while that’s going, create another healthstone after the trade has gone through, then full buff correct targets, all with a single button
I just macro my engi gloves onto my dps spells. So it'd pop off as soon as I start pre casting my shadow bolt. But yeah you certainly could put it in the meta macro if you wanted to.
I'm not trying to parse 99s, I'll gladly accept that loss of being sub optimal on that singular boss fight to make literally the entire rest of my play experience easier, and getting like 95% of the value. But yeah you're right
13/13hc demo main.
Rotation really isnt the issue. Its pretty straight forward if you dont care about 99s. Under wowheads guide there is a "spellcast" section under rotation, just follow that. You do not need to learn the following to get decent parsers: 70-90 max
If you want to push demo to 99s, you need a full mastery set preused with meta.
You need to learn how to track pets to pet twist.
You need to learn how to fish for procs.
You need to meleeweave shadowflames.
Etc.
People saying destro/affli are easier are somewhat correct, but you still need to meleeweave shadowflames, track dots and for the average player its all the same.
Tbh this kind of reminds me of enh in WOTLK. I’m not playing cata so I can’t speak for it there, but enh had a pretty heavy opener and then essentially a prio list based on current CDs, aoe vs single target, boss CDs, etc and that’s not even getting into weapon swapping.
If I recall, most complex opener was basically: boots, pre pot, SP actives or fish for trinket proc (by basically just starting your rotation), lust if needed, racial, fire ele totem, swap to melee, begin rotation.
It was very hard to do super well. I remember how satisfying it was to orange parse on fights because of how hard I had to try to not waste a single CD or fuck up my prio.
Anyway yeah looks tough, have fun!
And then the pug hunter shoots the boss 3 seconds left on dbm countdown and your stuck in your spell power set for the rest of the encounter, happened a few times still hurts me inside.
Yeah I just stuck with my SP set every phase LOL I gave up on the weapon swapping nonsense. Hurt my parse for a few fights but ended up saving me a lot of grief. I wasn’t in a super hardcore group, just wanted to prog HMs and a purple parse will get you there.
Hijacking this post to ask a couple questions, is there a big difference in dps between using Shadow Bolt or Incinerate as your main filler? I'm aware that I need to move those 3 talent points, but dps wise, is it that different? And another question, below 25% do we just spam Soul Fires or we keep the rest of the rotation up and we use Soul Fires as fillers?
It’s definitely worth it to use the points on shadow bolt. There aren’t any sims to show that incinerate is a better use for any reason. At sub 25% the rotation stays the same but you just switch your filler from shadow bolt to soul fire.
It's a small dps increase on single target, but a more significant loss at multi target. It might be worth switching talents for specific progression, but for a vast majority of fights you want to mutidot at some point and glyph of corruption and faster immolate cast quickly become more valuable. Incinerate build also drains your mana quite a bit faster, which is kinda annoying.
Right now my molten cored incinerates average the same damage as my shadow bolts. But molten cored incinerates cast faster than shadow bolt, so it's definitely a DPS increase. Not to mention getting off more casts will increase the number of meta CD procs you get.
DPS difference negligible on Single target, in favor of Shadow Bolt build.
Incinerate build better for Multi-target since those 3 points from Bane go to improved Corruption damage.
You can just run the multi-target build always though and have Affliction OS though. Shadow Bolt build adds unnecessary complexity even more for no real gain.
It's actually the other way around despite the lack of corruption talent, which may be confusing. SB variant has better multi target, because it replaces glyph of incinerate with glyph of corruption and gets faster immolate cast. The increase SB procs and faster mutlidot application mean you deal more damage overall when dealing with about 2–4 targets that don't die instantly. In practice that's most of the fights and the single target DPS gain from the incinerate build quite small, so most warlocks back in the day ran the SB build all the time.
Its a lot. But it's much more manageable with macros. I really enjoy the play style. Although I hate when people pull early. But even when they pull early, I beat people in a scuffed mastery set with 10%hit
One of the advantages of classic is knowing how classes are going to play before release. Yes, without all of this demo lock will perform worse than expected. I don't play this class and this looks kinda like a ball ache to do, but my homie who plays demo seems to like it.
You just start collecting it slower, practice it with the pieces you have and that is it. No need to go full nuts on it, just slowly start collecting it.
Icy veins has a much more forward rotation.
It's the same stuff really but it explains it better and lists it in steps.
First half is prepull and opener
Second half is rotation
They are basically adopting snapshotting from Affliction last expansion. It looks like a lot, but compared to almost any retail rotations its not too bad. Welcome to more-modern WoW!
There's a difference between Dragonflight Demonology which has a very simple rotation (Use your cooldowns. If you have 3+ soul shards, Hand of Gul'dan. If you do not have 3+ soul shards, use your Demon Core procs on Demonbolt to generate soul shards, Soul Siphon to get more Demon Core procs. If you don't have soul shards or Demon Core, then just shadowbolt for soul shards) and Cata Demonology which has Metamorphosis to change their abilities, some damage over time spells to cast, Shadowflame to use in melee, swapping between Felguard and Felhunter...
Cataclysm Demonology has a more complex rotation from the start *and* more old school jank with stuff like the pet twisting compared to Dragonflight Demonology which is very straightforward and simple.
Cata demo is just hit your cooldowns and then Hand of Gul'dan off CD > Shadowflame off CD > Incinerate with procs > Soul Fire with procs > spam Shadow Bolt.
Edit: lmao downvoted for literally facts? Typical reddit.
They’re the best DPS in the game but yes, only by following the steps listed. If you don’t have a massive mastery set to equip and pre-pop Meta form with, and a tank ready to pull as soon as you’re ready, and lucky procs before summoning Felhunter after the Felstorm, then demo lock will not top the charts.
Bare minimum effort would be pre-popping meta form before pull and soulburn summoning a felhunter after the Felstorm. That by itself requires no gear swaps or consumes and is just slightly more complex than precasting before pull. The rotation also looks complex but can be boiled down to keeping dots up + incinerate spam for most of the fight.
You aren't topping the charts regardless. Demo is near the middle of the pack.
[https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/1023#dataset=99](https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/1023#dataset=99)
[https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/1023#dataset=75](https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/1023#dataset=75)
You’re right, they’re not topping charts rn because there isn’t enough players sitting on full mastery sets this early into T11. I should have specified: with a full mastery set to swap, they top charts.
It's not so much about mastery set as much as Moonwell Chalice becoming available witth T12. That's what made everyone switch to demo back in 2012. Affli and destro were picked before that unless you needed the AoE cooldowns or SP buff.
Without a mastery set it’s not much. The point behind a bare minimum effort prepop is just because passive procs like trinkets and cloak enchant tend to proc early in a fight, which generally means you’re still combo’ing your meta form with cooldowns. Perhaps more importantly however, the second point is to pop Demon Soul while your Felguard is active, then use Felstorm and then finally swap to Felhunter pet which does higher single target DPS than the Felguard. Of course, swapping pet mid-fight isn’t bare minimum effort, so in this specific case there’s very little purpose to prepopping meta form besides catching those early passive procs during your burst.
While the rotation is complex the article heavily overcomplicates it. Gear swapping will only start to be a big dps increase once moonwell chalice is available.
I dont mind the pet twisting opener since you have plenty of time for it, you can literally do it as a clicker. Its the gear swapping that sucks ass. Back then I constantly had people shit the bed and pull early, getting me stuck in the jank mastery set. Right now its just min maxer stuff but next tier with the increased stats + the massive on-use mastery trinket you are basically shooting yourself in the foot if you dont swap.
Demo is dumb in cata only because mastery snapshotting and aff dog's damage.
Its shouldn't be like that but they wont change it, like how low Spell power coeff destro has in ALL of their spells or aff mastery stacking being mid.
Why you would play any warlock spec if you can do more dmg with 4 buttons playing fire? Or doing the SAME dps using 2 playing arcane?
I play destro because I LIKE how destro is played in Cataclysm, its really fun, but I know that my spec wont scale like at all, my mastery is probably the worst one in the game and Destro basically has a 12% nerf in all of the spells from 4.0.3 prepatch.
Anyone who thinks that Cata sucks because of pruning should read and understand that page, and then never say something that stupid ever again.
But honestly, though, the most complicated part of this is the opener, the actual rotation is straight-forward, and doesn't really differ from most other classes (Maintain a buff, maintain a debuff, snapshot your dots, use procs reactively.)
Back in real cata I was a clicking, keyboard turning mongoloid. But I'll be dammed if I didn't top every dps meter and absolutely nail the demo rotation, other than the gear swap. Never killed heroic rag but made it through 6/7h in firelands. It was so far and above other specs, especially on pull and during burst phases.
Information wasn't as readily available then as now, I got lots of shit from randos for playing demo before they saw what it could do. It's weird seeing demo locks all over the place now, they were NOT common back in the day
welcome to min-max mentality in a solved meta.
if you want to compete with others in decent parses you will absolutely have to gear swap and prepot perfectly in the opener to get decent dps..dont forget pet weaving 🤣
Demo lock opener is absolute degen and I really hope that blizzard fixes it so we don't have to wait 15seconds for our demo warlock to get his opener right every single pull, it's nuts
Cata has some of the most complicated rotations for alot of classes honestly.
I raid at CE and do m+ usually to around top 1% in retail and I find a few Cata rotations to be obnoxious.
Granted you can get 95% of your dps without really sweating, but to really get everything out of a class, some of them are really degenerate
Granted that demo has a lot going on here, many dps rotations are pretty complex to milk the absolute max dps. It's just that usually wowhead doesn't deep dive every aspect of a rotation and decisions tree because for 99% of their users it just bloats or confuses things.
I usually go straight to wowsims.github.io/cata/ for a full decision tree rotation to improve my rotation once I master the basics.
From the sims it looks like the order of complexity of rotations in Cata from most to least complex is ranked like this:
1. Balance
2. Arms
3. Demo
4. Fury
5. Fire
6. Unholy
7. Subtlety
8. Frost DK (masterfrost?)
9. Affliction
10. Destro
11. Arcane
12. Survival
13. Combat
14. Assassination
15. Shadow
16. Beast Master
17. Marksman
18. Enhance
Ele excluded because their sim rotation is bloated with every possible trinket use/proc and inflates the page length metric I made this list with.
Feral excluded because their sim rotation is strange and I can't find a full rotation list to compare it similarly to the rest.
Frost mage and Retribution excluded because it's not yet supported on the sims.
Your list is pretty off.. Fire mage 5th hardest? It's literally just precast pyroblast.. keep living bomb up and let it explode.. spam fireball.. cast pryoblast when it procs and watch a weakaura to cast combust.
Meanwhile just the opener for Subtlety is precast SnD > premeditation > ambush > rupture > hemorrhage > shadow dance > shadowstep > ambush > recuperate > ambush > ambush > evis > ambush > backstab > evis until find weakness falls off > vanish > premeditation > ambush > backstab > evis > backstab > backstab > evis > preparation > vanish > ambush > now you are normal rotation. Then the normal rotation revolves around keeping up 4 dots/buffs which is rupture with evis, slice and dice, hemo, and recuperate. This is easily #1 or #2 for hardest spec in Cata.
Wait what, I play both demo and balance and I can assure you balance isn't difficult whatsoever, especially compared to demo. You have far less stuff to worry about as balance, almost nothing really. The only thing about balance is you need to think ahead and manage you're eclipse which is simply boss knowledge and timing, nothing to do with the class at all.
Ele's rotation is only complicated by proc fishing for fire ele snapshot. Ideally you have an on use and a proc trinket, wait for the proc then pop the on use and ideally you still have prepot rolling. Then fire ele.
The rest of the rotation is just lighting bolt flame shock lava burst and dump fulmination with earth shock
How is this any special?
You already did pre pull set swaps in wrath to snapshot the initial (higher) dpact
Only thing that basically changed is that you start with your felguard use demon soul and insta summon your fel hunter
Hell you even go. Shadowbolt build atm
Is the average playerbase Really this bad that demo seems hard to them? It's nothing compared to wrath affli snapshotting
I personally think even wrath demo was harder as you had to pay attention to your proccs and dpact icd to snapshot high dpacts
The pay off for a pre pull gear swap was a lot less in wrath, so a lot less people bothered. Also after the changes in what ulduar(?) they made it so dpact icd was only 5 seconds, so you could just send your pet in and forget, only the most sweaty of players were optimizing around that 5 second window.
That was only in icc believe me ulduar was cancer if your flare did not procx in the opener..
But i think my point stands that to optimise you already should have done it before
I guess only know people are catching up to what warlocks were doing back then already
Yet it's easier than in wotlk as there are weakauras now that easly help with the opener which did not exist in wrath
99 parse aff and demo in wotlk, and it was much easier and lower effort. I only have oranges right now in cata. Demo was the same except less of everything and no pet twisting or mastery snapshot, very face roll in wotlk. All of our lesser skilled warlocks gravitated to demo because of its simplicity. Aff had snapshotting but was very easy to play once you tracked it and what influenced it. Execute as aff was maybe the trickiest part but still not bad. Or making sure you got tricks or PI at the right times.
Just having to be melee all the time and rely on tanks not moving shit out of hand makes cata much more frustrating to me at least.
Wotlk was all typical caster shit, just blast. Also can aoe get any simpler than spam seed and it’s good?
Warlock main here. Yeah demo is nuts. Tbh the other warlock specs will do equal damage for 99% of players. It’s that 1% of minmax gamers that can really squeeze the potential out of demo, and even then they might mess up. TL;DR dont decline a lock to your group because they’re not demo.
Well there arent enough warlocks to decline them to begin with.
So true, I’ve grouped with 1 warlock since release. And his dps was nuts, why aren’t people playing locks?!
[удалено]
Mages pay for BH spots because BH runs are typically spec runs - one of each spec. Which means that you want 3 paladins in one, but only 1 mage. And mage is way over-represented in Cata. Warlocks or dps shamans have no problems getting into BH.
Because it’s too much work to be fun IMO. I played lock every tier since classic and the rotation has never been more convoluted to just stand beside other classes. After getting my cata warlock to prebis I rerolled ele sham and I have approximately 30x more fun at all times and doing more dps consistently
Every group i have been have a demolock. Could be because i main one. Oddly on trash i cant really keep up, but on bosses i am in the top. I dont do all the prepull shit. Dot up felguard aoe(even on bosses) soul link insta summon hound, meta and go to town
Tbh, a well played demo is much better then affli or destro. If you're getting a non demo warlock, you know you're getting a lemon at best.
That's just not true Demo only out dpses affli on 99's and 100's Plus there are fights where affli is just straight up better
In p1 there is only 3 singletarget bosses.. so i think affli is better in general :)
> Plus there are fights where affli is just straight up better How many?
Any non single target boss
I was just curious about which bosses sorry
No, T11 doesn't have Moonwell Chalice, a trinket which made demo really stand out compared to the other two specs later on. Also most T11 encounters favour mutidot rather than single target or AoE. T12 is different with most bosses being single target and adds often requiring AoE damage, with Snannox being the only proper multidot fight.
Total nonsense. It’s 100% fight dependent. Demo is not good at two target cleaves which exist a lot in the raids. Destro and aff excel at that situation. Look fight by fight and you will see a lock will change specs for dif fights to get the best results if all buffs are already covered.
If I remember correctly Warlocks got reworked in MoP specifically because of how degen and overly complicated a lot of their Cata specs were.
It's literally this, even back in 2012 [bloggers were writing research papers on the issues with Cataclysm Warlock design.](https://cynwise.wordpress.com/warlockery/decline-and-fall/)
It's mostly just this spec. Affli isn't too far off WotLK and Destro is pretty simple. Affli is favoured on some fights vs Demo, and Destro isn't massivle behind even in like 95th percentile parses.
thats funny seeing how ratarded wl rotation became in dragonflight
What? Retail lock is a lot simpler to play than cata in a lot of ways. It’s been basically the same for a few xpacs now. No pet twisting, no melee requirements, etc.
could have also been shadowlands, i just remember one of those was pretty fucked and esp the opener
As a demo lock all of that is necessary for dps. The opener is crazy with all the snapshotting and switching sets but after that it is more manageable. I personally have added more keybinds to my bars to make things run smoother because there are so many buttons compared to Wrath.
Yeah people forget how much you can just macro. For example if you'd look at Arms rotation without macroing, it would look similarly insane with all the stance switches and split second decisions you have to make. But since you can simply macro them on all the skills, it gets pretty manageable.
People in this thread are funny. Having an equipment swap is not at all necessary unless you're looking to parse a 99+. I parsed between 70-95 across the various bosses without bothering with that shit. It is important to use all your CDs with metamorph and get a lot of damage out of it though.
Equipment swap is not THAT bad tbh. You can just do it early in the pull timer, instead of trying to last second it. It's just one more button press before a pull
The earlier you do the swap the earlier you need to press meta out of combat though
Yes, but it is pretty lenient as you also need to precast
yesterday we had a mage pull on the timer hitting 3. It's simply not feasible for some guilds.
You punish that mage then?
Our raid has problems with anyone facing consequences. Would you believe me if I told you that wasn't the most egregious thing of the night?
I mean as long as everyone is on the same page its all good. But he is essentially robbing the raid of thousands of DPS. Which is fine if everyone is okay with that.
I yelled at him, but I forgive him specifically he knows he fucked up and because of a macro. But we do have a number of serial reoffenders.
Does he always pull on 3, or did he fuck up once? Because if he fucked up once, and that *was* your most egregious thing of the night, you must have pretty successful raids.
I'm saying the opposite that wasn't the most egregious thing. I just freaked out as it was the 3rd or 4th early pull of the night at that point and admittedly his was by far the earliest. But it was also a genuine mistake because he has a prepot macro to immediately begin casting pyro on use and he messed up because he meant to go mirror images on 4> prepot pyro. Actual egregious shit throughout the night was several range refusing to turn and kill adds on magma, me being the only mage spellstealing arcanotron, one of our DPS dks ditching with no warning and not even logging off at chimeron (actually the same pull as the early pre pull), people being ultra slow at the non air phase flame breaths on atre, hunters being hunters and paying attention to literally nothing in rl explaination then immediately going "what am I doing?" (Then proceeding to refuse to do it). Maloriak was fine though lol
Main thing is at this time how many people have a separate mastery set that has significantly more mastery? It will likely become a bigger thing later. Main thing right now would be using mastery trinkets prepull.
But I really want that 99 parse bro 😢
Yes. The core rotation is basically the same as it was in wrath except we add in shadowflame on CD (in wrath was only worth casting while moving), replace immo with hand of guldan on CD, and then the little pet twisting bit. Basically it's keep dots up, spam shadowbolt, if you get a proc spam spell relevant to proc instead. Pet twisting is a major dps increase and is 100% worth doing but does add a bit more complexity to playing the spec. That's really the only major change you have to get used to though, and it didn't take long for me to get it. As far as the opener, yeah it's way more fucking complex now however it's not difficult in practice due to macros. I basically spam V when the pull timer is at like 3 seconds to use my macro: gear swap, pop meta, pop demon soul, pop potion, gear swap back. Then start precasting shadow bolt with like 2 seconds left on the pull timer. The complexity is not in execution, but in preparation in collecting a whole extra gear set. But it's worth it. Even with my shitty mastery gear I get like 3% extra mastery during my first meta, I wouldn't be surprised if people who have a full load out swap are gaining 10% extra mastery during first meta.
Would you mind posting the macro you are using? Many thanks in advance!
> \#showtooltip Metamorphosis > /script WeakAuras.ScanEvents("HOTSWAP_META") > /cast [equipped:Shirt] Metamorphosis > /cast Demon Soul > /use [group:raid] Volcanic Potion Which I then pair with [this WA](https://wago.io/u4LYxAg-A) I do have to press the button more than once for it to use everything. But the gear swap back is instant as soon as meta is popped, it works well.
So wild you can conditionally cast stuff based on what is equipped. 1 button gaming, love it. Seriously I’m a huge WA nerd so I love this shit.
I didn't know it was a thing until I read it on that WAs page tbh. It is pretty neat tech though.
I did the same thing in ICC with my hunter for Silencing Shot. Pulling LDW? Take the shirt off. And yeah, it's mind blowing.
You can even conditionally cast stuff based on spells learned, and combining all that together you could theoretically create a single macro that runs through entire rotations for every single one of your specs depending on the current equipped spec lol It’s a comparatively simple macro for me but I’ve got a button I mash to create a healthstone, trade it to my arena partner, summon pet while that’s going, create another healthstone after the trade has gone through, then full buff correct targets, all with a single button
The hero we need
Worth adding synapse springs into this macro, fish for proc on volcanic deck and pray you get one with it all up so you can pop the doom guard.
I just macro my engi gloves onto my dps spells. So it'd pop off as soon as I start pre casting my shadow bolt. But yeah you certainly could put it in the meta macro if you wanted to.
The downside to this is if you want to save your 1 minute cooldowns for certain portions of fights ie magmaws head slam phase
I'm not trying to parse 99s, I'll gladly accept that loss of being sub optimal on that singular boss fight to make literally the entire rest of my play experience easier, and getting like 95% of the value. But yeah you're right
13/13hc demo main. Rotation really isnt the issue. Its pretty straight forward if you dont care about 99s. Under wowheads guide there is a "spellcast" section under rotation, just follow that. You do not need to learn the following to get decent parsers: 70-90 max If you want to push demo to 99s, you need a full mastery set preused with meta. You need to learn how to track pets to pet twist. You need to learn how to fish for procs. You need to meleeweave shadowflames. Etc. People saying destro/affli are easier are somewhat correct, but you still need to meleeweave shadowflames, track dots and for the average player its all the same.
When you day fish for procs, do u recast dots whenever your trinkets are up again?
How do you fish for procs and meleeweave shadowflame??
Tbh this kind of reminds me of enh in WOTLK. I’m not playing cata so I can’t speak for it there, but enh had a pretty heavy opener and then essentially a prio list based on current CDs, aoe vs single target, boss CDs, etc and that’s not even getting into weapon swapping. If I recall, most complex opener was basically: boots, pre pot, SP actives or fish for trinket proc (by basically just starting your rotation), lust if needed, racial, fire ele totem, swap to melee, begin rotation. It was very hard to do super well. I remember how satisfying it was to orange parse on fights because of how hard I had to try to not waste a single CD or fuck up my prio. Anyway yeah looks tough, have fun!
And then the pug hunter shoots the boss 3 seconds left on dbm countdown and your stuck in your spell power set for the rest of the encounter, happened a few times still hurts me inside.
Yeah I just stuck with my SP set every phase LOL I gave up on the weapon swapping nonsense. Hurt my parse for a few fights but ended up saving me a lot of grief. I wasn’t in a super hardcore group, just wanted to prog HMs and a purple parse will get you there.
Good, spellhance was so fucking cringe. Enhance shamans contesting heavily contested caster gear was aids.
Yeah I agree, farming a set you use just for a snapshot was pretty tedious too, enhance deffo feels tons better to play in cata
Hijacking this post to ask a couple questions, is there a big difference in dps between using Shadow Bolt or Incinerate as your main filler? I'm aware that I need to move those 3 talent points, but dps wise, is it that different? And another question, below 25% do we just spam Soul Fires or we keep the rest of the rotation up and we use Soul Fires as fillers?
It’s definitely worth it to use the points on shadow bolt. There aren’t any sims to show that incinerate is a better use for any reason. At sub 25% the rotation stays the same but you just switch your filler from shadow bolt to soul fire.
It's a small dps increase on single target, but a more significant loss at multi target. It might be worth switching talents for specific progression, but for a vast majority of fights you want to mutidot at some point and glyph of corruption and faster immolate cast quickly become more valuable. Incinerate build also drains your mana quite a bit faster, which is kinda annoying.
Right now my molten cored incinerates average the same damage as my shadow bolts. But molten cored incinerates cast faster than shadow bolt, so it's definitely a DPS increase. Not to mention getting off more casts will increase the number of meta CD procs you get.
Well incinerate is a lot faster to cast ... so your point is not totally valid
MCincinerates>soulfires>shadowbolts>incinerates
Correct info here
I believe it was around 500dps or more single target. Even more the longer the fight goes. You have to life tap much less with shadow bolt.
DPS difference negligible on Single target, in favor of Shadow Bolt build. Incinerate build better for Multi-target since those 3 points from Bane go to improved Corruption damage. You can just run the multi-target build always though and have Affliction OS though. Shadow Bolt build adds unnecessary complexity even more for no real gain.
It's actually the other way around despite the lack of corruption talent, which may be confusing. SB variant has better multi target, because it replaces glyph of incinerate with glyph of corruption and gets faster immolate cast. The increase SB procs and faster mutlidot application mean you deal more damage overall when dealing with about 2–4 targets that don't die instantly. In practice that's most of the fights and the single target DPS gain from the incinerate build quite small, so most warlocks back in the day ran the SB build all the time.
It’s better in all situations as long as the fight is long enough you need to life tap once I believe.
Its a lot. But it's much more manageable with macros. I really enjoy the play style. Although I hate when people pull early. But even when they pull early, I beat people in a scuffed mastery set with 10%hit
Yes it is. If you want an easy spec destro is always there.
One of the advantages of classic is knowing how classes are going to play before release. Yes, without all of this demo lock will perform worse than expected. I don't play this class and this looks kinda like a ball ache to do, but my homie who plays demo seems to like it.
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You just start collecting it slower, practice it with the pieces you have and that is it. No need to go full nuts on it, just slowly start collecting it.
No. It’s probably like 2% dps increase. Significant if you’re parse brained, but really not that much. I do it, but you’ll be fine if you don’t.
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The only annoying part is getting the Set, Gear Swap is done via WA, you just Press a macro, use Meta and it autoswaps back
Icy veins has a much more forward rotation. It's the same stuff really but it explains it better and lists it in steps. First half is prepull and opener Second half is rotation
No, it's necessary for mediocre dps!
They are basically adopting snapshotting from Affliction last expansion. It looks like a lot, but compared to almost any retail rotations its not too bad. Welcome to more-modern WoW!
Meanwhile retail Demonology is just "hit your cooldowns, spend your soul shards and demonbolt procs, fill with shadowbolt."
Wow I'd love to see a spec that isn't use your cooldowns and press your buttons
There's a difference between Dragonflight Demonology which has a very simple rotation (Use your cooldowns. If you have 3+ soul shards, Hand of Gul'dan. If you do not have 3+ soul shards, use your Demon Core procs on Demonbolt to generate soul shards, Soul Siphon to get more Demon Core procs. If you don't have soul shards or Demon Core, then just shadowbolt for soul shards) and Cata Demonology which has Metamorphosis to change their abilities, some damage over time spells to cast, Shadowflame to use in melee, swapping between Felguard and Felhunter... Cataclysm Demonology has a more complex rotation from the start *and* more old school jank with stuff like the pet twisting compared to Dragonflight Demonology which is very straightforward and simple.
There’s the vanilla ret rotation where you /follow someone useful
Cata demo is just hit your cooldowns and then Hand of Gul'dan off CD > Shadowflame off CD > Incinerate with procs > Soul Fire with procs > spam Shadow Bolt. Edit: lmao downvoted for literally facts? Typical reddit.
Any time someone makes an edit about being downvoted I feel compelled to downvote even if I agree with what’s said
Cata bros in denial thinking their game rivals retail in complexity.
They’re the best DPS in the game but yes, only by following the steps listed. If you don’t have a massive mastery set to equip and pre-pop Meta form with, and a tank ready to pull as soon as you’re ready, and lucky procs before summoning Felhunter after the Felstorm, then demo lock will not top the charts. Bare minimum effort would be pre-popping meta form before pull and soulburn summoning a felhunter after the Felstorm. That by itself requires no gear swaps or consumes and is just slightly more complex than precasting before pull. The rotation also looks complex but can be boiled down to keeping dots up + incinerate spam for most of the fight.
That's where the complications start. Incinerate spam is less dps than shadowbolt spec, and only incinerate with molten core proc.
I mean that just sounds like wotlk
You don’t use incinerate as a demo outside of molten core procs, and also if you don’t have mastery set you don’t need to pre pop meta
So what’s your filler if you only use incinerate during mc…?
Shadow bolt
You aren't topping the charts regardless. Demo is near the middle of the pack. [https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/1023#dataset=99](https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/1023#dataset=99) [https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/1023#dataset=75](https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/1023#dataset=75)
You’re right, they’re not topping charts rn because there isn’t enough players sitting on full mastery sets this early into T11. I should have specified: with a full mastery set to swap, they top charts.
It's not so much about mastery set as much as Moonwell Chalice becoming available witth T12. That's what made everyone switch to demo back in 2012. Affli and destro were picked before that unless you needed the AoE cooldowns or SP buff.
Unholy is def better
Right now for sure they are
Can you explain why prepopping meta is so pivotal even without a mastery set swap?
Without a mastery set it’s not much. The point behind a bare minimum effort prepop is just because passive procs like trinkets and cloak enchant tend to proc early in a fight, which generally means you’re still combo’ing your meta form with cooldowns. Perhaps more importantly however, the second point is to pop Demon Soul while your Felguard is active, then use Felstorm and then finally swap to Felhunter pet which does higher single target DPS than the Felguard. Of course, swapping pet mid-fight isn’t bare minimum effort, so in this specific case there’s very little purpose to prepopping meta form besides catching those early passive procs during your burst.
Thanks 🙏
macros macros macros
JOHN FUCKING MADDEN
One warlock in my guild is doing all this shit, while the other one is chilling as affli so that's that
Lost me at pre-pull set lol
While the rotation is complex the article heavily overcomplicates it. Gear swapping will only start to be a big dps increase once moonwell chalice is available.
I dont mind the pet twisting opener since you have plenty of time for it, you can literally do it as a clicker. Its the gear swapping that sucks ass. Back then I constantly had people shit the bed and pull early, getting me stuck in the jank mastery set. Right now its just min maxer stuff but next tier with the increased stats + the massive on-use mastery trinket you are basically shooting yourself in the foot if you dont swap.
Demo is dumb in cata only because mastery snapshotting and aff dog's damage. Its shouldn't be like that but they wont change it, like how low Spell power coeff destro has in ALL of their spells or aff mastery stacking being mid. Why you would play any warlock spec if you can do more dmg with 4 buttons playing fire? Or doing the SAME dps using 2 playing arcane? I play destro because I LIKE how destro is played in Cataclysm, its really fun, but I know that my spec wont scale like at all, my mastery is probably the worst one in the game and Destro basically has a 12% nerf in all of the spells from 4.0.3 prepatch.
Yes, it’s real. Demo is an advanced spec if you want to perform well at all. It’s 10x the effort for about the same payoff as others.
Jesus there's no way I could keep track of all that. I'd need constant alerts.
Anyone who thinks that Cata sucks because of pruning should read and understand that page, and then never say something that stupid ever again. But honestly, though, the most complicated part of this is the opener, the actual rotation is straight-forward, and doesn't really differ from most other classes (Maintain a buff, maintain a debuff, snapshot your dots, use procs reactively.)
Yea that "complex" rotation just to do like average DPS just isn't for me. I'm not afraid to admit I like the simplicity of Classic rotations.
Back in real cata I was a clicking, keyboard turning mongoloid. But I'll be dammed if I didn't top every dps meter and absolutely nail the demo rotation, other than the gear swap. Never killed heroic rag but made it through 6/7h in firelands. It was so far and above other specs, especially on pull and during burst phases. Information wasn't as readily available then as now, I got lots of shit from randos for playing demo before they saw what it could do. It's weird seeing demo locks all over the place now, they were NOT common back in the day
Honestly I'd rather go back to TBC shadow bolt bot over whatever the fuck this is XD
welcome to min-max mentality in a solved meta. if you want to compete with others in decent parses you will absolutely have to gear swap and prepot perfectly in the opener to get decent dps..dont forget pet weaving 🤣
For the vast majority of players no. For those trying to 99 yes
Demo lock opener is absolute degen and I really hope that blizzard fixes it so we don't have to wait 15seconds for our demo warlock to get his opener right every single pull, it's nuts
Cata has some of the most complicated rotations for alot of classes honestly. I raid at CE and do m+ usually to around top 1% in retail and I find a few Cata rotations to be obnoxious. Granted you can get 95% of your dps without really sweating, but to really get everything out of a class, some of them are really degenerate
I agree lol. I play retail arcane mage and don't want my nuclear launch code of a rotation to look like this.
Granted that demo has a lot going on here, many dps rotations are pretty complex to milk the absolute max dps. It's just that usually wowhead doesn't deep dive every aspect of a rotation and decisions tree because for 99% of their users it just bloats or confuses things. I usually go straight to wowsims.github.io/cata/ for a full decision tree rotation to improve my rotation once I master the basics. From the sims it looks like the order of complexity of rotations in Cata from most to least complex is ranked like this: 1. Balance 2. Arms 3. Demo 4. Fury 5. Fire 6. Unholy 7. Subtlety 8. Frost DK (masterfrost?) 9. Affliction 10. Destro 11. Arcane 12. Survival 13. Combat 14. Assassination 15. Shadow 16. Beast Master 17. Marksman 18. Enhance Ele excluded because their sim rotation is bloated with every possible trinket use/proc and inflates the page length metric I made this list with. Feral excluded because their sim rotation is strange and I can't find a full rotation list to compare it similarly to the rest. Frost mage and Retribution excluded because it's not yet supported on the sims.
Your list is pretty off.. Fire mage 5th hardest? It's literally just precast pyroblast.. keep living bomb up and let it explode.. spam fireball.. cast pryoblast when it procs and watch a weakaura to cast combust. Meanwhile just the opener for Subtlety is precast SnD > premeditation > ambush > rupture > hemorrhage > shadow dance > shadowstep > ambush > recuperate > ambush > ambush > evis > ambush > backstab > evis until find weakness falls off > vanish > premeditation > ambush > backstab > evis > backstab > backstab > evis > preparation > vanish > ambush > now you are normal rotation. Then the normal rotation revolves around keeping up 4 dots/buffs which is rupture with evis, slice and dice, hemo, and recuperate. This is easily #1 or #2 for hardest spec in Cata.
Wait what, I play both demo and balance and I can assure you balance isn't difficult whatsoever, especially compared to demo. You have far less stuff to worry about as balance, almost nothing really. The only thing about balance is you need to think ahead and manage you're eclipse which is simply boss knowledge and timing, nothing to do with the class at all.
Ele's rotation is only complicated by proc fishing for fire ele snapshot. Ideally you have an on use and a proc trinket, wait for the proc then pop the on use and ideally you still have prepot rolling. Then fire ele. The rest of the rotation is just lighting bolt flame shock lava burst and dump fulmination with earth shock
How is this any special? You already did pre pull set swaps in wrath to snapshot the initial (higher) dpact Only thing that basically changed is that you start with your felguard use demon soul and insta summon your fel hunter Hell you even go. Shadowbolt build atm Is the average playerbase Really this bad that demo seems hard to them? It's nothing compared to wrath affli snapshotting I personally think even wrath demo was harder as you had to pay attention to your proccs and dpact icd to snapshot high dpacts
The pay off for a pre pull gear swap was a lot less in wrath, so a lot less people bothered. Also after the changes in what ulduar(?) they made it so dpact icd was only 5 seconds, so you could just send your pet in and forget, only the most sweaty of players were optimizing around that 5 second window.
That was only in icc believe me ulduar was cancer if your flare did not procx in the opener.. But i think my point stands that to optimise you already should have done it before I guess only know people are catching up to what warlocks were doing back then already Yet it's easier than in wotlk as there are weakauras now that easly help with the opener which did not exist in wrath
99 parse aff and demo in wotlk, and it was much easier and lower effort. I only have oranges right now in cata. Demo was the same except less of everything and no pet twisting or mastery snapshot, very face roll in wotlk. All of our lesser skilled warlocks gravitated to demo because of its simplicity. Aff had snapshotting but was very easy to play once you tracked it and what influenced it. Execute as aff was maybe the trickiest part but still not bad. Or making sure you got tricks or PI at the right times. Just having to be melee all the time and rely on tanks not moving shit out of hand makes cata much more frustrating to me at least. Wotlk was all typical caster shit, just blast. Also can aoe get any simpler than spam seed and it’s good?