Todays Topic: Decimation Weaving
Decimation – When your Shadowbolt or Incinerate spells damage a target at or below 35% health, the cast time of your next Soul Fire spell is reduced by 60%. Any Soul Fire spell cast under the Decimation effect will have its Soul Shard cost removed.
Decimation was introducted to the Demonology tree in patch 3.1 and has given deep Demonology builds a more competitive edge outside of Metamorphosis. Previously, deep Meta builds suffered from low DPS unless Meta was available to use but with the introduction of Decimation you will find your DPS to be very competitive with other builds below the 35% mark. Keep in mind that Decimation will be receiving a slight nerf shortly and will only proc at 30% or lower, rather than 35%.
“Decimation Weaving” is a term used once you are in the “Decimation Execute Phase“, or when your target is at or below 35% health. Since Decimation will not proc until your Shadowbolt or Incinerate spells HIT the target, it’s quite hard to manage a 1:1 rotation without casting from melee range (which Meta Warlocks should be used to by now).
There are 2 types of Decimation rotations – 1:1 and 2:1, where the first number is the amount of Incinerates or Shadowbolts cast to the amount of Soul Fires.
1:1 is the common rotation when you are free to cast from melee range, out of harm from Whirlwinds, Cleaves, Swipes, etc. Standing this close to the target allows your Shadowbolt or Incinerate to hit the target almost immediately, allowing you to use a Sbolt/Incin -> Soul Fire rotation.
2:1 is used during phases that aren’t very melee friendly and would otherwise require you to stay at a further distance or constantly run in and out of melee range, which isn’t what you need to be doing. Using a 2:1 would of course follow the Sbolt/Incin x2 -> Soul Fire rotation.
Overall, it’s just a matter of knowing the fights inside and out and knowing if you’ll be OK casting from melee range or not. Warlocks with a Meta build are use to casting from melee range to make use out of Immolation Aura but you hybrid specced Warlocks may be a little new to close quarter casting.. but now is a good time to familiarize yourself.
I did Razorscale the other day in my demo spec just for giggles and felt like a noob. My numbers showed me to be noobish too, but I was starting to get the hang of it and it was pretty fun. I may actually swap it out for fights like that where there are tons of little adds to kill. That sort of thing tanks my Affliction DPS just because of the mechanics involved…
Meta is also a lot of fun for XT-002 during the scrapbot phase. As long as you can keep an eye on your DoTs (which I’m 300% sure your Affliction background can do), use Demonic Empowerment whenever it’s off cooldown and make full use of Immolation Aura, you should be able to stay competitive on the meters but it’s really tough to stay on top.
Demo is still a lot of fun IMO but outside of Metamorphosis and the Decimation Execute Phase it’s still not competitive with the other 3 spec options =\