Conflag Change Clarification

1) The changes to Fire and Brimstone are intended as a buff. We implied before that we wanted to buff Destro PvE to make up for the Conflag nerf a couple of weeks ago, which was mostly for PvP reasons. This is that buff.

2) The Conflag glyph does require a little more attention. It does consume Immolate once again. (I mentioned in a previous post that the glyph was working at cross-purposes to the rest of the Destro tree). Essentially, if you Conflag when Immolate is about to expire, you get a self-buff which makes your next 3 Destro spells do more damage. More than likely (in the sense that you probably have this talent) this has also proc'd Backdraft for you as well, so those spells also cast faster.

3) You might want to use one of those procs to get Immolate up again. However since Backdraft now lowers the GCD of the spell as well, we don't see this as a huge sacrifice (compared to how the talent originally worked).

Q u o t e:
Calling something a buff does not make it a buff. In fact, if it's a 30% increase to the 145-169 bonus damage on Incinerate, it's a nerf to an already abysmal talent.

It looks to me like you are just multiplying the "damage" of Incinerate not the "bonus damage". I know this business gets jargony. Consider it like this: Incinerate does X damage. If cast on a target debuffed by Immolate, it does 125% of X. If cast on a target debuffed by Immolate with Fire and Brimstone, it does 155% of X. It's confusing because the Incinerate tooltip is trying to be too smart and tell you the additional damage done, not the multiplier.

Say Incinerate does 1000 damage. With Immolate, it does 1250 damage. Talented with Fire and Brimstone and Immolate it does 1550 damage. So the talent could just say "Incinerate hits 24% harder."

We'll try and come up with text which makes this more clear.

Incinerate's current damage bonus is not flat. It literally takes the damage done, multiplies that by 25% if Immolate is present, and adds it to the base damage. The talent changes that bonus from 25% to 55% (plus 30%).

The damage from the new Conflag glyph should affect dot damage. It is just a proc with charges.

Some of the arguments about the 5 sec window or consuming Immolate in general make some decent points, and that is something we will discuss.

On the other hand the arguments about how much Blizzard hates warlocks or how you want to reroll or whatever are just QQ that do not advance the conversation and are the kind of thing that will get you banned. Please don't make me waste forum space having to remind you of that sort of thing.

I didn't address Nether Protection because this thread was pretty clearly on trying to understand the way Conflag works now. The NP nerf was pretty clearly a nerf and I don't think many people will be confused about how that works or why we made the change. However, if you do want to discuss it or other warlock issues in general, I request that you do not bloat the topic of this thread.

Q u o t e:
The problem isn't really how much it increases Incinerate - it's the fact that it transfers our damage from Immolate to Incinerate, which makes it even harder to play the spec in PvP.

That is the intent though. We nerfed Conflag because it did too much damage in PvP. Adding the damage back through Incinerate should buff PvE damage without buffing PvP damage.

We understand that the 5 sec window or consuming the Immolate might be too much to ask for a PvP Destro lock or even a PvE one trying to handle complex encounters in Ulduar with a lot of movement. This is one of the reasons we wanted to get these changes up on the PTR where the community could test and respond to them versus just hotfixing them all in with relatively little discussion.

On Incinerate:

The tooltip says "Deals 582 to 676 Fire damage to your target and an additional 145 to 169 Fire damage if the target is affected by an Immolate spell." What you can't see from the tooltip is that the spell really says "Deals X Fire damage to your target and an additional X * 0.25 Fire damage if the target is affected by an Immolate spell." What the talent changes does is change that X * 0.25 Fire damage to X * 0.55 Fire damage.

On Conflagrate:

We think at this point we might leave the glyph as it is on live (doesn't consume the Immolate), but we may still iterate some on the design on the PTR. Let us know if you actually get on and try it out.

On Immolate:

Some players are reporting a bug on the PTR with Immolate not scaling correctly with spell power (which will also affect Conflagrate). We're looking into it. We don't think this will affect the live version of the spells.

Q u o t e:
I think the problem isn't confusion over the tool tip, but rather than PTR testing conducted with varying levels of spell power show that the damage bonus provided by F&B doesn't scale.

I think this may be the bug with Immolate I refered to above. Incinerate itself and Fire and Brimstone are working correctly. I apologize if this bug caused any confusion, but it does help explain why some of the feedback was so different from what we have been seeing.

PTRs (betas too) by their very nature are just going to be a little more buggy. We try to get them up quickly so we have enough room for iteration and time to actually make changes based on feedback. The downside of that approach is we don't give them as robust a test pass as we do when a build is ready to go live.

Fire and Brimstone -- After a lot of feedback and testing, we think we are going to change this again. Now increases the damage done by your Incinerate and Chaos Bolt by 15% on targets afflicted by Immolate, and increases the critical strike chance of your Conflagrate by 25%. The first portion of the talent is now a pure percent boost instead of modifying the “bonus” that Incinerate gets. It was too confusing to players and had some weird side-effects, such as Chaos Bolt not scaling well with Incinerate if Incinerate did more damage.

Incinerate and Immolate -- There does seem to be a bug where spellpower is not getting applied correctly. We don't know at this point if this is an old or new bug. Certainly there used to be a lot of spells that didn't scale with spellpower, though we now make an attempt to make sure almost all of them do. It may matter less with the F&B change, but we'll still get it resolved.

Conflagrate -- We still intend to leave this as it currently works on live (not consuming the Immolate).

We understand sometimes players can get whiplash from our rapid iteration. That's just the way we designed, though we perhaps have not always communicated the design churn as openly as we do today.