With +510 damage, when you're OOM and lifetapping --

Rank 10: 918 damage, 3.8 second cast time -- 241.6 dps
Rank 6: 650 damage, 3.2 second cast time -- 202 dps
Rank 4: 500 damage, 2.9 second cast time -- 172 dps

Even with the significantly lowered lifetap time, it's still lower dps.

Rank 4 does get a bigger dps boost from +damage in fights where you have to lifetap, so it will eventually catch up, though.

LOL, hell yes.

I can still lead dps on ZG runs sometimes, and on the Spider boss I've takin to Soul Stoneing myself, pulling agro and stoneing up so I can keep nukeing as if nothing happened =D.

Playing a warlock can be a lot of fun...and I our potential dps out put is not a big problem, the problem is that we are about as efficient as and generate as much agro as the IRS =P

Gee whiz, I sure am happy I can lead the DPS on a ZG run if I try real hard!

In all seriousness, I think what the warlock community just wants a sense of identity. If we're a debuff class Blizz, then implement a useful and working debuff system. If we are end-game DPS then give us the tools to do so competitively with other classes. I mean it doesn't seem odd to some of the people here arguing that we just need to shut up and l2play that many of the counter-arguments are based around going to obscure and extreme measures in order to DPS effectively. "But what if you stacked all mana/5 gear, specc'd md/ruin, and had a personal healbot, THEN you would be good at DPS'ing!" You can throw gear on a mage, rogue, or hunter and they can DPS effectively because the tools for DPS are in their classes, not some ridiculously specific spec/gear/skill combo. I can never LEARN to have combat regen, innate threat reduction, or mana efficiency.

Also, for those of you who are pointing out that with 8/8 nemesis you can DPS your little heart out: The caveat to that would be the instant you get your first piece of new gear your ability to dps the same way goes out the window. One piece of new gear, bam, bye bye threat reduction, hello back to Earth where you pull aggro and die.

Infernal Revenue Service?

I am very confused why every warlock except the warlock that provides imp is not specced http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=AV0bZfxNzM0oZvx0tM0z 7/21/23. Yes SM/Ruin is the ideal dps spec if you are providing imp, but if you don't have improved imp you are likely not the one that needs to do it. Also can someone explain why all warlocks do not have points in Cataclysm for reduction in shadow bolt mana cost?

Because theres alot of fights in Naxx where the imp out could make a much greater difference than 5% more damage of which Nightfall could well make up. Also amp curse is nice.

Cataclysm will save you 5% of 20 Shadowbolts per minute. Even in a 10 minute fight, assuming you non stop Shadowbolt you save: 10 shadowbolts (30 seconds) worth of mana, and thats assuming you spend poitns in Imp Shadowbolt. And no, you won't actually do that because you'll be spending 40% of your time lifetapping, so you get maybe another 5 shadowbolts from Cataclysm, vs 14% more or so you'd get from Imp Shadowbolt . Do you chose the 5% or the 14% improvement?

Because Suppresion, Grim Reach, Nightfall and Siphon Life are above and beyond 5% more damage. On top of that, it's only 5% more damage some of the time, when you're short on Warlocks it's 10% less.

Zwink hands down.
Read my posts from page one .
People , with 7/21/23 you dont miss anything from destrc. , the only down is that you have 1/2 destrc. reach.
5/5 cata , 5/5imp. shadowbolt , 5/5 bane , 5/5 devastation , 1/1 ruin , 1/1 ruin , 1/2 reach
sacrifice felhunter at boss
sacrifice sucubus at trash(where you dont run oom or if you do you dont tab alot)

This build have huge sustainded DPS potentian .

But you miss Shadow Mastery, Siphon Life, Curse of Exhaustion, Grim Reach and Nightfall.

I'm 30/0/21 at the moment. Recently I've been 0/30/21 and 7/31/13. You can see my gear in my sig. Another warlock from my guild who is similarly geared to me and specced 9/21/21 rapes on the damage meters every time. A lot of that may be down to me doing officer/raid leader-ish things that distract me from time to time, but even the other warlocks get owned, and I haven't seen any major detraction in his utility.

EDIT: Ok so I can't see my gear in my sig anyway. Not sure why though. http://ctprofiles.net/21102
EDIT 2: Ok so now I can. -huh-

And the only one of those worth mentioning is SM, unfortunately.

Siphon life really doesn't gain you all that much, and with debuff slots already in short demand, the chances of it staying on long enough to make a profit are little. Doing the quick math on it, with SM and CoS and 500 damage gear, it takes 4 ticks to profit (12 seconds) and throughout the entire course of the DoT, you will gain 643 mana assuming you have improved life tap. I'd consider that pretty weak for a talent that far down the tree...
CoX is laughable in raid PvE. Can't think of a mob that isn't immune in any 40 man instance.
Grim Reach is great, but nothing necessary to defeat content. I'd venture to say would barely even provide a tiny lift even if at all to your dps in a raid.
Nightfall is great, but procs far too little, and seems to proc often times when you need it least (IE aggro situations).

I personally am 9/21/21 as I don't see the need to put 2 extra points into destro... 2 suppression often helps the resist rates quite a bit it seems. I find it's likely the most versatile build, and unlike SM, the damage buff seems to be post gear bonus, so not even including the 5% extra damage you get, there is even more benefit to it. It offers far more mana regen, and passive regen even.

This is definitely one possible fix. However, it would have to be a somewhat obscene ratio to really even things out. On a typical Patchwerk fight, our mages spend about 14 seconds actively regenning mana: two mana gems (3 seconds of global cooldown), two mana potions (3 seconds of global cooldown), and one Evocation (8 seconds). Comparatively, I spend well in excess of one minute actively regenning mana and not DPSing significantly - 2 Major Rejuvenation pots (3 sec), at least 2 bandage timers (24 sec), 1-2 healthstones, plus Lifetap.

How much time do I spend lifetapping for a 6-minute fight? Enough to go through my initial 6300ish health (15 lifetaps/22.5 sec), two Major Rejuves (average 3200 health/7 lifetaps/10.5 sec), two runecloth bandages (4000 health/9 lifetaps/13.5 sec), and one healthstone (1200 health/3 lifetaps/4.5 sec).

That's 27 seconds of active health regen and 51 seconds of lifetapping. 78 seconds not casting Shadow Bolt, 21% of a 6-minute fight. Contrast that with a mage's 14 seconds, or 3.8% of the fight. Both the mages and I are using consumables like Mageblood Potion, Nightfin Soup, and Major Troll's Blood Potion (which I didn't even take into account, and adds another 1440 health over 6 minutes with accompanying lifetap time). That kind of uptime difference is impossible to completely correct with any one fix, without absolutely destroying balance in some other way. Sure I'd love to lifetap and gain 2000 mana in one cast - until I'm in PvP and that 1700 health lost in 1.5 seconds gets me killed. Sometimes an emergency lifetap keeps me alive in PvP, and I'd lose that functionality if they made the spell scale with +damage.

The problem with having 5.5 times the downtime of a mage is that, as DPS improves, each second hurts our total damage contribution more and widens the mage:warlock damage gap further. No talent spec can compensate for that difference, and I shudder to think what kind of gear differential we'd have to see for warlocks to deal even close to comparable DPS in extended fights.

I'm rather a fan of Siphon, though it is perhaps a bit weak in its original iteration. When I used it on Patchwerk (bad idea due to debuff slots being in higher demand, at least for us), I got a bit over 10k health from it over the course of the fight. I ended up lifetapping it all away, but I used one bandage instead of my normal two.

Agreed. Useless in PvE. I've never really used it in PvP either, since my build has never had the points to spare there.

The primary advantage is it allows me to curse the mob while running into the fight area, still out of range of Shadow Bolt. That gives me a slightly faster start and lets me run OOM more quickly. Agreed, I love it but it's not strictly necessary for raiding. Destructive Reach is far more useful.

Bart, mana gems don't invoke the global cooldown, fyi.

http://www.thottbot.com/?sp=10057

I was going to query that, but I was too embarressed I would be wrong about my own class to mention it... :)

Neither do mana health or rejuv potions unless I'm totally off my rocker.

You mean staying up there for more than 2 ticks.

Can't remeber last time i've had corr/immo last past its third tick on a boss fight

BWL: Razorgore spawns, Drakonids + a lot of the trash.
AQ40: A lot of the trash, Enraged Scarabs on Emps.

It's not a lot, but it's something. I've found that it's still the best way all around to spend my affliction points, as the only real alternatives are imp CoA and Suppresion from 3 to 5/5.

It seems as if we've gotten pigeonholed by our abilities' prowess in PvP. Could you imagine the damage that could be done with scaling debuffs + the regular personal buffs in any PvP scenario? Or could you imagine how gimpy we would be if our damage was greatly reduced to compensate for our utility greatly increased utility?

I see a lot of Warlocks complain about this... but.. sacrificing Felhunter is some of the most incredibly powerful mana regen in the game. Assuming you have a 5k mana pool, you get 2% of that, or 100 every 3 seconds. That's 25 mana per second, in other words, more than DOUBLE what any Mage will get from Mage Armor. If you add Evocation, and Mana Gems, it probably evens it up some, but, the point is that Mage-level mana regen IS possible for a Warlock if they don't have to have imp out.

Your DPM still isn't the same, but, I don't really think it's a realistic expectation to have the same mana efficiency mages do with their nukes.

And yes, I know that Warlocks often have to have imp out. Any Warlocks beyond the 2 you need for tank+ot group, though, could use felhunter sac buff to do a lot more damage. Perhaps it would be reasonable to add a mana regen component to the imp's -20% aggro. Obviously not as strong as the Felhunter sac buff, but, say, 1% of mana every 4 secs?

Even easier fix :

Add a new lifetap that is huge - 1260 health for 1260 mana that is affected by +Damage/Heal. that way you still get the functionality of the old one for trash/pvp and what not, and a new one just for raid bosses, that scales with your gear. Yeah the risk will be higher to use it on some stuff - but I think that would be a fair tradeoff for the added mana regen. A decently geared warlock has about 500 damage? so 230+1260 = 1490 health/mana which isn't too bad.

But i'm not a warlock, so i'm just guessing :)

i think that the best solution is to make life tap a self dot.

Make it last 12 seconds for 4 ticks of life tap at the current rates. This synergizes with rejuvenation quite well, and solves the life tap spam problem which is truly the heart of the beast.

I think its an elegant solution thats in line with the design of the class.