http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=AV0bZfxhuR0oZEx0xM0z

Is there a more effective build for raid dps, aggro issues aside (I'm the easymode faction), for endgame warlock dps. With a sacced succi,ruin, and the lame 5% less mana cost on shadowbolt you get a decent dps, and better than anything I can come up with on the talent calulator and what I've tested myself. You also keep improved imp and healthstone for when you need to buffer up the MT ( I know using this dps build you are not using the imp for your group but in my situation aleast there are 2 other warlocks who usually do that)

Any input, ideas or number crunching would be appriciated.

The resist talent only affects Affliction spells, unfortunately.

I personally like the 7/21/23 spec for raiding, but I can't imagine a situation where 0/30/21 would be worse-- you maintain nearly the same functionality (albeit without Improved Life Tap) but have the option of sac/resing your pet, drastically increasing your DPS output.

Perhaps Improved Life Tap is worth it, though.

We had a warlock hit about 450 DPS on Patchwerk - He wasn't getting Nightfall and all of our mages were Ice so that lowered his DPS a little as well; Of course, had he used the same stuff on most other bosses he'd have pulled aggro (He did on Anub'Rekhan the week before, to test said spec).

I suppose the question about that is, do you want DPS at the risk of aggro or do you want managable aggro with sustainable solid DPS ? Searing Pain, from what I understand, has an extremely high aggro value ?

Searing Pain generates 2x threat for each point of damage.

In 1.12, threat is multiplied, so you do generate 64% threat with both. Not a big difference, but it is a little more.

I thought I read the pet sac/rez trick would not work anymore in 1.12; if that is true then SM/Ruin should be best.

With the prevailing trend of 2-3 warlocks max per raid (I just had an officers meeting last night where I was told "3 warlocks. max." Time to break it to the rest of my class.), you most likely will not have the luxury of DS/MD succy in a raid setting. Therefor any spec that you have should be pet dependent, or focus on having the imp out pretty much full time.

That being said, your best be is most ~probably~ an SM/Ruin or a NF/Conflag build. If your mages are frost, you should definitely go for SM/Ruin to maximize your SB damage. If they are fire or a mix, you might want to consider NF/Conflag so you can take advantage of the 25% (15% from mages and 10% from CoE) damage to fire. The only problem is - you'll have to watch your aggro like a hawk since you'll be spamming Searing Pain (200% threat modifier) and you may have some serious mana issues.

I'm SM/Ruin with about +625 shadow damage, and I lead the rest of my warlocks by 10-20% and even beat a few of the scrub mages on the DM. I also sport 8/8 Nemesis for the threat reduction, and have BoSEZModez.

And threat for warlocks has always been multiplicative, i.e. 8/8 Nemesis + BoS + Imp + Subtlety isn't 73% aggro reduction, it's only 57% (1 x .8 x .7 x .8 x .97 = .43456. 1 - .43456 = 56.543%). Only mages got the benefit of additive threat reduction with their class felat^h^h^h^h review.

I'm currently 9/21/21 - with the 1320 healthstones for HS stacking...

I chose the 2 points in suppression because during any trash that has decent health, or pretty much anywhere in the game, you'll be using curses, and a resisted curse is going to cost you all of your extra mana that you might gain with only a couple points in cataclysm...

I find using DS Succ instead of SM is a bit better... If you really think about it, nightfall is nice and all, but it only reduces your cast time by 1 second thanks to global cooldowns. And you don't gain a whole lot of raiding viability out of that tree. Having DS will help in a lot more situations which will give you versatility that otherwise isn't available. Basically on any fight where we have the control completely, I use succ. If the fight has large environmental damage, which will cause me to be < 100% on health consistently, and it's not a DPS race, I'll have VW sac'd. And if it's long (> 3 minutes, without heals) type dps fight I'll use felhunter...

The conflag with fire mages sounds very interesting to me... We've got like 4 fire mages attending most of our raids, and I can almost always guarantee I'd see the +25% fire damage up on any given mob... I've always wished conflag was viable, and I may have to try that sometime just to see, but I'd hate to find out it was a shitty spec and end up spending 100g just to test... I would miss the ability to get large SB crits, considering how little micromanagement it is... I guess I'd just wonder if you could actually micromanage to get MORE damage out of this type of build compared to a standard SM/ruin or DS/ruin build...

False.

If you're good about watching buffs and have a quick trigger finger...you can get the full (possible) duration out of it and pop a conflag every single time. Also, you gotta throttle some sense into your hunters/etc to not use stupid debuffs.

Although with the new mage review and frost and fire mages having applicable debuffs the put on, it kinda sucks that the bastards are using more of our precious debuff slots....I mean it's not as though they don't already get a huge benefit from (arguably) the best caster debuff out there.

I speak from extensive experience and thats without silly debuffs going up:<

And what happens to your DPS when you're 1 of 2 warlocks in the raid and you need to have your imp out to Blood Pact your tanks? Then your dps goes to complete and utter shit.

I, and countless other warlocks, have been told that warlocks simply aren't a DPS class anymore. There are healing classes (priests, druids, pallies, shammies), DPS classes (warriors, rogues, mages, and hunters), and there is a utility class; the warlock. Our utility comes in 2 forms - the curses we apply to buff the DPS of the raid by ~10%, and the stamina buff that we provide to the main tanks. Additionally we also hand out healthstones, put up soulstones, and summon party members to speed up the raid. Our ability to DPS is secondary, and speccing for DS when you're basically using your imp 24/7 does nothing to make that DPS better.

I maintain that SM/Ruin or NF/Conflag are going to become the premier damage builds for raiding now that DS/MD stacking is no longer viable in 1.12.

I'm pretty sure SM/Ruin is better than any DS build on just about any fight other than Patchwerk. Any fight where there's no moving or breaking in action is going to benefit from DS, yeah, but there's not many of those fights, and Patchwerk is the only really bad one for us.