[PVE] Raiding info / guide
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1] Introduction
2] No training dummys
3] Rotation
4] Affliction
5] Demonology
6] Destruction
7] About Hit
8] About Crit
9] General tips


Introduction:
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The reason I'm writing this guide is for the most part a lack of a good raiding guide- and a number of really poor rading guides (or guide look-a-like's) popping up in these forums. Additionally, what's good and what isn't really isn't as clear cut as it was throughout TBC and there are a lot more different and viable ways to do DPS now.

I have played most viable DPS specs so far, and done 5k+ DPS in every one of them. Obviously I've not played every single spec within the past week, but I do have experience playing mostly any spec.

I do not think there currently is a thing that can be considered "the best spec", argueably affliction will come out on top when it comes to nuke fests, but a spec is only as good as it's performance in the relavant content. What I mean by this is that, for example Affliction would perform terrible on a M'uru type of fight (We already see this to a lesser extend on Sarth 3D).



No training dummys:
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I often see people compare their DPS in one spec on a training dummy against their DPS of another spec on a training dummy. To put it bluntly; stop doing this. Why? For the most part because training dummys do not provide real world information- you're missing all sorts of buffs that will affect different talents and different specs in very different ways. For example; empowered imp basically does nothing on a training dummy because it's missing 18% worth of raid crit buffs.

That doesn't mean you should stay away from training dummys all together- but you should really understand what to use them for. A training dummy should be seen as just that- a training dummy. A training dummy is a training dummy, it's good to practice your new rotation with- it's good to practice on them- they just don't make a very good benchmark.

In terms of actually testing a talent spec- nothing beats actually bringing it to a raid. With the simplicity of the current raid content and how well mostly any spec can perform- there shouldn't be anything stopping you from trying each talent spec in a raid.



Rotation:
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I'm a fairly frequent poster here, and one of the very few that actually bothers to do any half assed theory crafting on these forums. As such, people ask me a lot of questions. That's fine, I like questions. There's 1 question however that I hate. Really, no question annoys me more than someone asking me "What is your rotation?". I don't have a rotation, and if you want to do decent DPS- neither should you. Warlocks should cast their spells in order of importance. This generally means that you just cast whichever spell has the highest DPSC- and really that's about it. There is no rotation, there is DPSC priority.

Affliction:
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Affliction is still by most people seen as the highest DPS spec currently available to Warlocks. This isn't a wrong observation to make- it's a very solid dps spec with worth while DPS cooldowns like Doomguard/infernal while providing solid mobile DPS and being relatively non-reliant on their pets. So overal, it's definitely a good all-round spec.

With that said, there's one thing that this spec doesn't have- and that's burst. This spec performs exceptionally well on long fights, provides extremely good sustainability- but if Ulduar were to produce a number of fights where burst is important, affliction wouldn't deliver.

The pet to use is the felhunter, though feel free to pop the doomguard or infernal whenever you feel it's suitable.

- Gear:

As with every Warlock spec, hit > spellpower > haste > spirit > crit.

For affliction, the emphasis on hitcapping your affliction spells is quite important. This is not because missing a curse of agony would be devastating (It would be somewhat trivial), but if you miss a haunt it really hurts your DPS. Get your hit capped before anything- but not at the cost of everything. 5 spellpower will beat 1 hit rating, so dont disregard everything just because a certain item has some hit rating.

To be hitcapped you need a total of 17% hit, you can get 3% from raid buffs (Priest Misery or Druid Improved Faerie fire), you can get 3% for affliction and destruction spells with suppression and Catalysm respectively, and if you're alliance you can get 1% from being grouped with a draenei.

The second most important stat is spellpower, and after spellpower there's a pretty big gap in value towards the next best stat. Neither haste, spirit, or crit is really a good stat for affliction. No, Pandemic does not make crit a good stat.

- Spec:

There are a few different variations available, but for the mot part you should try something close to:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=IfxMbzMAoVq0IstZyzhV

- Glyphs:

Glyph of Siphon Life
Glyph of Immolate
Glyph of Curse of Agony

- Spell priority: (In order of importance)

Haunt is pretty the most important spell you've got. Ideally you keep this debuff up as much as possible without refreshing it too early. Refreshing it early is not the same damage loss as refreshing a dot early would be, but essentially it still means you end up casting it more often, which is cast time lost for your other spells.

Also make sure Corruption is up- this should not be a problem aslong as you're using haunt properly. But if for any reason this debuff drops off, it should be high on your priority list to get it back up there.

Curse of Agony- This comes in fairly high on total damage and lasts a long duration. It should be a high priority to refresh this when it's down.

Siphon life- while this abbility doesn't do that much damage, it does last a long time. This results in high DPSC. This does mean though, though while this spell is important, it loses value quite fast when it doesn't reach it's full duration.

Unstable affliction- Not much to say here.

Immolate- this spell is your lowest priority dot. Note that people often link Unstable affliction and immolate together to simplify their rotation. Since these spells are roughly at the same level of importance this can definitely be worth doing. It might lower your DPS slightly, but shouldn't be a notable difference.
Some people drop this spell from their rotation below 25% because it benefits from neither Soul Siphon or Death's Embrace. Technically it'll still beat your filler spells on DPSC, but if you feel it complicates your rotation too much it's not a big deal to stop casting it below 25%.

Shadow Bolt- This is your normal filler spell. Use it when none of the other spells needs to be casted.

Drain Soul- This spell should replace Shadow Bolt below 25%, the reason for this is that it does 4 times its normal damage below 25%. Although this spell does a lot of damage at this point in the fight, your dots will still return more damage per specond spent casting them- and your (affliction) dots also increase the damage drain soul does through Soul Siphon.
It is fine to interrupt channeling Drain Soul to refresh dots (really you should do this), but when you do this try to interrupt it right after this spell ticks.

Demonology:
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It wasn't long ago that demonology was widely regarded as unviable, subpar, etc. Then Blizzard released patch 3.0.8 and buffed our pets through the roof. This resulted in both, better pet DPS- aswell as more spellpower gained through Demonic knowledge. As of right now, this spec is probably the closest you can get to affliction DPS without actually speccing affliction.

The spec performs well in sustained DPS aswell as burst, and depending on your gear, spec and raid setup- it might provide a very nice raid buff to boot. The main downfall of this spec however is it's heavy reliance on the Felguard. If the felguard for any reason is not a option, or the fight provides a gimmick to boost your DPS heavily without also buffing your pet (IE: Thaddius)- this spec becomes a lot less attractive.

Fortunately, the Felguard comes with a healthy health pool, and typically he'll be able to survive most encounters (Sapphiron for example should be no problem).

It should Perhaps also be noted that it feels quite awkward to

- Gear:

As with every Warlock spec, hit > spellpower > haste > spirit > crit.

Hit rating is still your best DPS stat, and you should really try to cap it with gear because hit rating gained through buff food does not effect our pet. With that said, there's not really any spell that would be disastrous to miss like affliction and destruction. It's still your best DPS stat though.

Spell Power is the next best stat. and is the only stat that your pet really scales well with. Past that, it's also the stat that has the largest effect on your own DPS. There's not quite the same gap that affliction has to the next stat, but a gap is still there.

Haste rating is the next stat, it has an effect on all of your spells and is fairly cheap compared to 'the lesser stats'. This is the last really decent stat. after this the value goes down hill fast.

Spirit is now a beneficial spell. It's not as good as most pure DPS stats, but its definitely a stat you shouldn't ignore. Consider it's value to be roughly half a spellpower for each point- it can't be directly calculated like that, but it's a good rule of thumb.

Crit rating is Unfortunately a quite bad. It does kind of scale with your pet if you're specced for it- but that doesnt make this a less sub-par stat. Depending on wether you're specced for your pet gaining part of your crit rating, you should either value this the equal or slightly below spirit.

- Spec:

There are 2 notable Demonology specs:
0/41/30: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=IZ0xIzsgMq0sxzZVchqr0uV
0/53/18: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=IZ0xIzsgMq0sxuAoE0hV

Depending on your raid/preferences/gear it's perfectly reasonable to swap points from Master Conjurer to Improved healthstones, or in meta/ruin from Catalysm to Improved CoA and Molten Core - try to avoid putting more than 1 or 2 points into molten core with Meta/Ruin..

- Glyphs:

Glyph of Felguard
Glyph of Immolate
Glyph of Curse of Agony

Note that if you spec meta/ruin (0/53/18) it's perfectly viable to cast Curse of Doom instead of Curse of agony. It should be noted however that if you do this you should replace Glyph of CoA with Glyph of Corruption.

- Spell Priority: (In order of Importance)

Metamorphosis- You'll want to synchronise this with Bloodlust/Heroism. However if the fight is long enough, try use it earlier aswell and use this as often as possible.

Immolation aura- This is a Metamorphosis only abbility, and it does a lot of damage for the one GCD you'd spend on this. Pop this as soon as you go into metamorphosis (make sure you're in melee range).

Curse of Doom is obviously your highest DPSC spell. However you should only use this if the boss has a healthy chunk of health left and you're "Meta/Ruin" specced.

Immolate does more DPSC than CoA/Corruption in 0/41/30, and Curse of Doom should generally be prefered for 0/53/18. So this is your highest priority if you're 0/41/30.

Curse of Agony should be used either if you're specced 0/41/30 (Important for Molten Core uptime), or if you're Meta Ruin and the fight has less than a minute left to go on it. Try avoiding this all together if the fight has less than 20 seconds left in it.

Corruption Slightly better DPSC than incinerate/Shadow bolt, and for 0/41/30 also an increase to your Molten Core uptime. Still, this spell isn't of immense importance, do use it, but don't worry too much about it.

Incinerate should be your filler if you're 0/41/30 specced.

Shadow Bolt should be your filler if you're 0/53/18 specced.

Destruction:
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Right now I'm more or less convinced that destruction is currently the lowest DPS spec. Which is sad because it's a lot of fun to play. If anyone can proof me wrong here, do feel free. But I for one haven't actually seen deep destruction builds break 6k dps without AoE or ToT abuse.

With that said, this spec is possibly the most versatile spec of all. It has very solid burst, it does great sustained DPS, and while a little reliant on the pet- not very much so (Not compared to demonology anyway).

Make no mistake though, while destruction was known an notorious for it's 'face rolling' in TBC, I personally find it the most complex spec to perfect in WotLK. For the most part this is because, although you have fewer cooldowns too watch, the cooldowns are typically shorter, and generally a lot more connected to eachother. It's easy to do average at destruction, but perfecting it to the point of getting the right spells into backdraft (queing your cooldowns) and only refreshing corruption when Molten core isn't already up is next to impossible.

- Gear:

As with every Warlock spec, hit > spellpower > haste > spirit > crit.

Hit rating for destruction, is much like hit rating for affliction. For destruction it is quite devastating if your conflagrate misses, much like how it is devastating for affliction when haunt misses. Cap this first (But not at the cost of everything).

Spell Power is your second best stat, you simply scale best with this stat.

Haste is the next stat, upto around 600haste rating you're pretty safe, after that you might have some spells that start to rub the GCD cap in the wrong way during heroism. Past this, much like demonology, stats take quite a dive in value.

Spirit is still not a stat to disregard, roughly at the same level as it is for demonology.

Crit rating is bad, more on this later.

- Spec:

There are 2 notable specs at this moment:

0/28/43 http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=IZcxczsgMcZVcGVR0uVkAc
0/20/51 http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=IZcxczcxZVcGVR0uVsAfcz

Esspecially to the 2nd spec, there are a good few variations. Typically taking Fire and Brimstone in favor of Unholy power.

- Glyphs:

Glyph of Conflagrate
Glyph of Immolate
Glyph of Imp

Some people choose to replace imp/immolate with CoA. This returns lower DPS, but the difference isnt huge.

- Spell Priority: (In order of importance)

Essentially the main difference between the 2 specs is that 0/20/51 boasts a slightly more complex rotation with Chaos Bolt. You can disregard Chaos Bolt if you're 0/28/43. Past that, as I wrote before I personally rate this as one of the hardest to perfect specs in terms of spell priority, which makes this part a little bit shaky.

Immolate is your highest DPSC spell, esspecially with the glyph it does a lot of damage, and it should be your #1 priority to cast at more or less all times.

Conflagrate reduces to cast time of your next 3 destruction spells by 30%, this is a pretty big DPS increase for the duration- try cast this spell whenever it's off cooldown.

Curse of Agony is your main dot to provide you with molten core uptime and does good DPSC. Keep it up :)

Chaos Bolt is another high DPSC spell, with it's slightly lower cast time it's essentially a slightly buffed up incinerate.

Corruption should be used if you have the 2xT7 set bonus. Other than proccing that, it also helps with molten core uptime.

Incinerate is your main nuke, use it when other spells dont need to be casted.

It should be noted that you can tinker with this priority system a little bit to get spells with more cast time into your backdraft. For example you could chaos bolt before conflgrate if your immolate is about to expire, so that you do not need to recast immolate during Conflagrate. While this doesn't follow the DPSC priority to the letter- it can (if done well) lead to higher DPS.

About hit:
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As seen in the previous posts, hit rating is one of the most valueable stats. You however can't just keep stacking hit rating until infinity, because at some point all of your spells are simply going to hit. That point is when you have a 17% extra chance to hit.

You can get towards this 17% with talents (suppression, catalysm) 3%, raid debuffs (Misery, Improved Faerie Fire) also 3%, raid buffs (Alliance only; Heroic Presence, group buff) 1%. In a raid you will generally have the hit rating buff, which means that you only need 14% more from talents or gear. Ideally you get hit rating through gear; and there's a few reasons for this.

1] Hit rating from gear effects all of your spells
2] A lot of really good gear has a large amount of hit rating
3] You get to spend your talents on other things

This is particularly true for affliction locks who sometimes spend up to 6 talent points on additional hit rating. Freeing all those points up would allow them to pick up other good talents.



About crit:
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There's a lot to be said about crit, if you've come this far you might have read numerous times already that I called this a bad stat. The reason behind this is a combination of things that really is a bit too much to go into for each individual spec- so I decided to make it a separate section.

Expensive. This is a very simple reason that anyone should be able to understand- to get 1% critical strike rating you need a lot more "item budget" then you'd need to get 1% haste (46 crit vs 33 haste).

Relative scaling. Essentially When you stack 1 stat, each increase will get you a linear increase in DPS. However as you increase- for example- crit by 50%, that means that if you add 1% haste, that 1% of extra casted spells will also benefit from that 50% crit. In sort this means that the more you have from 1 stat, the better your other stats become. Warlocks (Esspecially Demo / Destro specs) get a lot of critical strike rating from talents and raid buffs, while getting next to no haste from either (in comparison). This basically means that until you have an absolutely insane amount of haste, the amount of crit buffs pushes the value of haste further above the value of crit.

Dots. Haste effects all of your spells, from lifetap to curse of agony to shadow bolt. Crit typically only effects your nukes, and even if you're affliction and specced for Pandemic and have your crit effect some of your dots, its still not all spells,- still too little to really make it a worth while stat.

- How much crit do I need for destruction?

I see this question come up a lot, and the simple anwser is that you do not need any at all. This question is a "relic" from TBC times where Warlocks needed a lot of crit to help them keep up a healthy "Improved Shadow Bolt uptime". Destruction no longer procs any important buffs or debuffs with their crits, or otherwise actually gain any benefit at all from critical strikes other than the added damage. WHat this basically means is that crit is nothing but a dps stat, if you have very little of it and have more of another stat- that's absolutely fine.

You might ask then, what about Meta/Ruin? That's a much better question, but still a question to which the anwser is none. It's true that Meta/Ruin gets an 'important' buff from shadow bolt critical strikes- however the truth is that with raid buffs (and talents) you already crit so much that you'll find yourself at nearly 100% uptime before any gear is taken into consideration. So again: you do not need critical strike rating.

Perhaps the spec that needs critical strike rating most is affliction Warlocks. This is because they do not get critical strike rating from talents at all, and yet they still rely on Shadow Bolt for a sizeable part of their damage output (while usually picking up improved Shadow Bolt). This is not to say that you need [x]% critical strike rating for affliction, or to say that it's a stat worth stacking- but it's definitely something to keep in mind.



General tips:
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I am a firm believer that a player's mind-set will make the biggest difference of all relavant factors to his DPS. Yes, your gear matters, your raid group matters, and RNG matters- but a lot of people complaining about their DPS simply have low DPS because they do not have the right mind-set. Yes it's true that making a minor change somewhere down the line will not result in a huge difference in DPS (Not generally anyway)- but if you really want to do better (Or just great) DPS, you will take every DPS increase you can get.

Essentially this means you don't slack on consumables. They might provide only a negliable DPS increase, and not all of them are essential on all raid content- but do not complain about your DPS if you're not throwing all consumables available at it.

Flask: The undisputable king of elixir/flasks for Warlocks. Use the Flask of the frost wyrm.
Food: If you're hit capped, use +46 Spellpower food. If you're not hitcapped, use +40 hir tating food.
Potion: Ideally Crazy Alchmist Potion (although slightly RNG), but potion of wild magic (affliction), potion of speed or runic mana potion are all good too (mana/speed for all specs).
Kreeg's Stout Beatdown: Easy to get in Dire Maul North. Very cheap consumable.
Pet Food: If you're using the felpup, this is probably not worth it. But for the Felguard or Doomguard you should be using +30 STR pet food.
Flame Cap: Deep destruction, or destruction/demonology hybrid specs should really use this if they wish to push out slightly more DPS. Unfortunately theyre becoming hard to get.

Nice post mate. Can't wait until you get this done :-)

Thanks!


//Emo

I've always appreciated your support on the warlock forums Warlocomotif, and this is definitely a guide I'll stick my butt to, thanks a lot :-)

Looking forward to the destruction part!

Looking good so far, I cannot wait till you complete it.

About time somebody made a decent guide on European Forum for warlocks. It even doesnt have to be a raiding guid, I don't like the two current stickies guides at all, they suck and/or are outdated. For a casual player like me, that still wants to contribute to his guild, gathering valuable and true information was always a pain in the ass since Wotlk. I'm not on top of it every day, all day long. So when you finished this piece of work, I hope for all locks it becomes a sticky.

Btw, i changed the title of my post you commented on today, you were absolutly right, and idd I don't know much about it, but I do my best and seen the same topics returning last couple of weeks; how to play destro, and I just wanted to let em know how I play it, even tho I make mistakes aswell. I didn't mean to post a look-a-like-guide. But if that triggered you into making this guide, I am happy about the confusing I gave ;)

So good luck with this guide, looking forward at it. Doing great, clear and straight to the point formulated so far, but not as short and degenerating as some other guides are. Cheers

Hei, a nice guide here.
However, I think I do not completely agree on few points, feel free to counter-disagree if you think I am wrong.

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Q u o t e:
Affliction would perform terrible on a M'uru type of fight (We already see this to a lessed extend on Sarth 3D).

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However this is absolutely true, the good AoE dps affliction can dish out and the mobility granted makes affliction probably more valuable than a deep destro or a demo-destro build, where not only you nearly stop doing damage while having to move but, in case of a demonology build, you might find yourself without a demon if you cannot manage it properly, meaning a loads of damage done less.
However, I am convinced it all comes down to how good is your management, after all.

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Q u o t e:

There is no rotation, there is DPSC priority.

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DPSC = DPCT rite? We're talking about same thing but with different names?

I have to disagree here. However, I can only argue regarding affliction builds and demo destro builds. I never tried deep destro.
Anyway, while it might seem obvious that affliction does NOT have a rotation, this is true to a general extent, but not true if you go into specifics.
When starting a fight where you know your dots will be able to tick for their full lenght (say, patchwerk), an affliction warlock should always, can I emphasize this enough, always start with shadowbolt.
This is due to the same reason an affli warlocks wants to have haunt up at any time.
Due to shadow embrace stacking debuff, simply starting with haunt and then applying all the dots, will make your first ticks deal 5% less damage, which will not happen if you previously applied a stack of SE casting SB before haunt.

When it comes down to demo destro builds, be it 41/30 or 31/40, I am rather convinced that they do have a rotation. Assuming you'll be using all the 3 dots and you're not on CoE duty (pretty unlikely to happen tbh), you have a total of 3 timers to keep track on.
If you apply them randomly, you will find yourself a bit screwed with them during the fight. A good way to not care much about them is always casting corruption before immolate. This way, due to their duration, if you cast immo straight after having casted corr, you'll have both dots expiring together, thus you will be able to refresh them together.
Applying CoA after immolate also helps (assuming you'll be using glyph of CoA), as you'll be able to fit in more incinerates, wich is your main nuke, while your dots tick.

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Q u o t e:

Haunt is pretty the most important spell you've got. Ideally you keep this debuff up as much as possible without refreshing it too early. Refreshing it early is not the same damage loss as refreshing a dot early would be, but essentially it still means you end up casting it more often, which is cast time lost for your other spells.

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I am not convinced here. As you know, the haunt effect will be applied on your target as soon as the graphic of haunt itself hits the target. Assuming you'll be standing at max range, it takes about 1 second, maybe even a bit more, for it to travel from your hands to your target.
Which means that the haunt effect will be applied when its CD will be at about 7 seconds left.
12 - 7 = 5 seconds. You end up having 5 seconds spare to reapply it before it expires. Now, considering its casting time (1,5s at 0% haste, let's say you have 15% haste, it will be roughly 1,3 seconds) and its travel time (nearly 1 second more or less), you end up having only 2,5-2,7 spare seconds before it expires. Now, this is only valid in a situation where someone is playing at 60+ FPS and is experiencing a 0ms lag, which is quite unlikely to happen. Since the majority of wow players do have lag, this reduces even more the spare time you have to cast haunt to reapply it before it expires.
Now if you want to be precise, and know exactly how much delay you're having, you can try to move an item in your inventory from 1 slot to another one (or simply use quartz, but not everyone likes mods). The time it takes from the item to actually swap position is the delay you're having. Which is also the time the server takes to realize that you're trying to cast haunt.
However, I am ready to bet that none would actually care of this whole crap, as affliction is already brainkilling as it is, so in conclusion I can say that it is worth to recast haunt as soon as possible, for the reason you mentioned above, ergo having max uptime on that and avoiding it to expire.

Oh btw, reported for sticky.

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Q u o t e:
Looking good so far, I cannot wait till you complete it.

About time somebody made a decent guide on European Forum for warlocks. It even doesnt have to be a raiding guid, I don't like the two current stickies guides at all, they suck and/or are outdated. For a casual player like me, that still wants to contribute to his guild, gathering valuable and true information was always a pain in the ass since Wotlk. I'm not on top of it every day, all day long. So when you finished this piece of work, I hope for all locks it becomes a sticky.

Btw, i changed the title of my post you commented on today, you were absolutly right, and idd I don't know much about it, but I do my best and seen the same topics returning last couple of weeks; how to play destro, and I just wanted to let em know how I play it, even tho I make mistakes aswell. I didn't mean to post a look-a-like-guide. But if that triggered you into making this guide, I am happy about the confusing I gave ;)

So good luck with this guide, looking forward at it. Doing great, clear and straight to the point formulated so far, but not as short and degenerating as some other guides are. Cheers

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I feel I might have come accross as slightly harsh on your post, please don't misunderstand it for anything other than just clarification. Anyone who puts in time to try and post a constructive thread is really a step ahead of most in this forum.

You did sort of trigger this, but quite frankly I started writing one of these before aswell- and my pc crashed for first time in months at the time. Needless to say I was pissed off and that guide never ended up making it :p.

Good job warloco, this may save me from some in game question and answering sessions ;p

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Q u o t e:
However this is absolutely true, the good AoE dps affliction can dish out and the mobility granted makes affliction probably more valuable than a deep destro or a demo-destro build,

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I'm not convinced that the aoe of SoC in affliction is superiour to the aoe of FG/ES (Demonic knowledge+Emberstorm). I admit that I do think SoC will scale slightly better towards later content though (FG/ES gets bit of a headstart with Demonic Knowledge).

Past that, Murmelock- the other lock in my guild- is probably the best Warlock I've ever played with. Quite frankly, he's probably one of the very best players in the guild. And I'm not just saying that- I'd not even come close to saying that about previous warlocks we've had. Out of all players, he probably got hit by flame tsunami/shadow fissure less while playing affliction than the rest of the raid did in easy specs.

With that said though... I beat his total damage output last Naxx raid by 0.1%, it's an absolutely tiny amount, and he wasn't using Kreeg's stout beatdown or Kibler's bits- but it does go to show that the gap between 0/41/30 is not as wide as most people assume it to be.

Yes with a doomguard out an affliction lock will win on patchwerk- but on real world content FG/ES is very competitive.

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Q u o t e:
However, I am convinced it all comes down to how good is your management, after all.

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Fortunately Blizzard buffed out pet's hp- it really helped a lot. Right now it is (IMO) more about your healers than your pet management, pet management is still important for stuff like making sure your felguard gets the spark buff on malygos- but in terms of keeping your felguard alive it's not particularly special anymore aslong as your healers dont entirely disregard them.

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Q u o t e:
DPSC = DPCT rite? We're talking about same thing but with different names?

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Damage per second casting = Damage per cast time. Yes same thing, different name.

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Q u o t e:
When starting a fight where you know your dots will be able to tick for their full lenght (say, patchwerk), an affliction warlock should always, can I emphasize this enough, always start with shadowbolt.

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I agree, perhaps I should add something about this into the post. Though I'm not sure where I'd fit it in.

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Q u o t e:
When it comes down to demo destro builds, be it 41/30 or 31/40, I am rather convinced that they do have a rotation. Assuming you'll be using all the 3 dots and you're not on CoE duty (pretty unlikely to happen tbh), you have a total of 3 timers to keep track on.
If you apply them randomly, you will find yourself a bit screwed with them during the fight. A good way to not care much about them is always casting corruption before immolate. This way, due to their duration, if you cast immo straight after having casted corr, you'll have both dots expiring together, thus you will be able to refresh them together.

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This is wrong, if you cast Corr -> Immo, and keep that "rotation", that means immolate is down for 3 seconds every single "rotation". You should not link these 2 dots together, you lose DPS doing it.

I'm not going to quote the whole bunch about haunt, but what it comes down to is that it's perfectly possible to not have it drop off if you refresh it a second after the cooldown expires. Does this conplicate it a little bit? Yes. But it will net you a DPS increase.

It's true that below 25% you should consider chaincasting haunt, this is because you're no longer casting shadowbolts and put yourself at the risk of not refreshing Shadow Embrace.

First off, thank you for the guide. It's nice that someone took his time to make a comprehensive post about warlock specs instead of answering the same old boring questions every day.
About warlock specs, i've been testing them myself and i agree with you that destruction has the most limiting and unforgiving rotation - affliction is actually *easy* if you have a small amount of spatial awareness, and refreshing dots after they've run off is nothing compared to destro's cluster@@#*-ish varying cast times and cooldowns.
Oh, and about demonology with demonic pact - it's useless if you don't have upwards of 3100+ spelldamage without totem of wrath. Since DP doesn't consider spirit gained from Fel Armor. And even with that, the bonuses will be mostly minimal. Till ulduar, it's better to take something else instead of DP. My choice would be Fel Synergy, it's extremely powerful for those aoe-heavy bossfights.

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Q u o t e:
I'm not convinced that the aoe of SoC in affliction is superiour to the aoe of FG/ES (Demonic knowledge+Emberstorm). I admit that I do think SoC will scale slightly better towards later content though (FG/ES gets bit of a headstart with Demonic Knowledge).

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SoC's aoe *IS* superior to Rain of Fire in almost all situations i've experienced. Even as demonology without any points in imp corruption etc, SoC is superior in packs of more than 3 mobs. It seems to have a wider range, and the debuff moves with the mobs so it's not limited to a stationary area. Crits tend to be bigger too, and considering SoC is an affliction spell (no benefit from Ruin) that's just insane.

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This is wrong, if you cast Corr -> Immo, and keep that "rotation", that means immolate is down for 3 seconds every single "rotation". You should not link these 2 dots together, you lose DPS doing it.

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On a boss fight i usually open with Corr->Immo->CoA->conflag

1st thing is that you cannot conflag right after you apply immo, apperently conflag needs some time to check wether immo is on the target or not, so i use that time to apply CoA.

Now I am purely convinced that i'm using my shadow dots just to keep MC up and immolation is more of a dps dot. After opening corr and imo ideally should have exactly the same dot time, so not to loose immo uptime i'm just skipping corruption when i need to renew dots. Doing that i do not loose immo uptime and i will still have CoA on my target.

When it comes to renewing DoTs 2nd time i just start everythin all over again. Now you can apply corr and immo together, followed by CoA

Good stuff 'Motif, as usual I might add... :)

/kiss

Yu

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t's good to practice your new rotation with- it's good to practice on them- they just don't make a very good benchmark.

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sorry have to desagree with you on this one, training dummies are infact awsome, you cant just benchmark specs against eachother cause some abilities get more from raid buffs or just dont work on dummies(ex: pandemic), nor you cant benchmark diferent classes only on dummies.

Besides that training dummies are good for someone to make a benchmark of himself, or fellow class mates with same spec, I use them all the time to test addons or when I get a new epic.

They are also great for 60+ alts, everytime I get new ranks I go to a 60s one to test myself.

Besides its more pratcal than Dr Boom :) bvut I still go there cause I got the engy teleport cause pandemic works there and one can practise the under 25% rotation

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The pet to use is the felhunter

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affliction concerned, its only if your raid misses the spirit buff, Succubos post 3.0.8 does more Dps.bit quishy tough, ofc this is when infernal/doomguard are out of cooldown

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Q u o t e:
Oh, and about demonology with demonic pact - it's useless if you don't have upwards of 3100+ spelldamage without totem of wrath. Since DP doesn't consider spirit gained from Fel Armor. And even with that, the bonuses will be mostly minimal. Till ulduar, it's better to take something else instead of DP. My choice would be Fel Synergy, it's extremely powerful for those aoe-heavy bossfights.

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I believe this was fixed in 3.0.8, though I admit I've not personally tested it. Will probably get back to this later..

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Q u o t e:
SoC's aoe *IS* superior to Rain of Fire in almost all situations i've experienced. Even as demonology without any points in imp corruption etc, SoC is superior in packs of more than 3 mobs. It seems to have a wider range, and the debuff moves with the mobs so it's not limited to a stationary area. Crits tend to be bigger too, and considering SoC is an affliction spell (no benefit from Ruin) that's just insane.

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I did some tests on this back when both me and the other lock in my guild were destruction (which was the first 2 or 3 weeks of WotLK). We'd usually go up more or less evenly in terms of AoE. If I started to SoC, I'd fall behind slightly. Argueably a terrible way to test it- but that's in my experience anyway.

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Q u o t e:
SoC's aoe *IS* superior to Rain of Fire in almost all situations i've experienced. Even as demonology without any points in imp corruption etc, SoC is superior in packs of more than 3 mobs. It seems to have a wider range, and the debuff moves with the mobs so it's not limited to a stationary area. Crits tend to be bigger too, and considering SoC is an affliction spell (no benefit from Ruin) that's just insane.

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iam experienced in both FG/Ember and affliction and I think that in terms of AOE both does similar if you do this strategy, affliction cast a few curroption 2-3 depending on the packs to proc a few eradication and then spam SOC, FG/Ember cast a few COA to proc Molten Core and then Do Rain of Fire, you also have the FG going ramparts and trowing cleaves left and right.

Iam not FG/ember in a long time but even when Hunters were mad with the Voley I still did pretty good against them with FG/Ember doing that strat on trash packs somepacks came on top.

I'm starting to like you, start a cult and i'll be your first follower.