On a somewhat related note, has anyone done much comparison of the merits of a 5 Doomcaller's/4 Plagueheart mix vs. full Plagueheart? I had a play on CTProfiles and came up with:

Full Plagueheart Doomcaller's Mix
21.75% Crit 19.62%
10% Hit 9%
10 Spell Penetration 40
+717 Shadow Damage +692
5564 HP 5454
5413 MP 5293

Common gear between both profiles was Amulet of Vek'nilash, Wraith Blade, Sapphiron's Left Eye, Ring of the Godslayer, Neltharion's Tear & Restrained Essence, as well as all the usual enchants.

In terms of bonuses, the mix profile gets the HP leech and 12% to Corruption PH bonuses, as well as 5% to Immolate & the rather nice 15% cheaper Shadow Bolts from DC. Full Plagueheart obviously misses out on those but gets -25% threat to crits and DoTs, and the frankly odd 12% reduced HP cost on Life Tap, which helps a little on healer mana or consumable use but doesn’t aid DPS.

Assuming full PH is going to win out on any fight that’s highly threat-sensitive, I guess on all other fights (ie. anything cutting edge barring any unexpected LOLBROODLORD mechanics on the Horsemen, Sapphiron or Kel’Thuzad), it comes down to whether 15% reduced cost on Shadow Bolt gives you a larger DPS increase compared to 2.13% crit, 1% hit, 25 dmg/heal. At a glance, I’m thinking generally not, but I don’t really have time to do the maths on it while I’m at work.

As Greybone already points out, the loss of Bane is extremely difficult to counter. I ran some numbers a few months ago and found that SM/DS never scaled up to be better than SM/Ruin - not even at +800 damage. If I can find that post again I'll quote it here, but it was on another board in a thread that's likely archived.

Why is this important to mention? SM and Ruin are both calculated after all gear and buffs as well. Losing Ruin and Bane is far, far more harmful to your DPS than saccing a succubus can make up for.

I am becoming more and more disenchanted with Suppression. First, it doesn't affect Shadow Bolt because it's Affliction spells only. The most frequently I'll cast any Affliction spell is every 18 seconds, to renew Corruption. That's seven Shadow Bolts between casts, so it's really only affecting 1/8th of my spells. Couple that with the fairly high concentration of +hit gear in the game now and I'm becoming less and less convinced it's necessary. I have the same odds of landing a spell now as I would with 2 ranks of Suppression, thanks to the 1% rule.

As I've said, I checked the math on this a few months ago expecting to find SM/DS was better. I was incorrect. I'll post my figures if I can find them. And again, you're not just losing 5% crit and 100% crit bonus - you're losing .5 sec on each shadow bolt cast. That's a tremendous hit to DPS.

Chicken misquoted me and hurt my feelings, since I actually am Dark Pact/Shadowburn specced and tank Emps. It's not necessary, it's just helpful. Soul Link is also helpful if you can toss a healer on the warlock's Felhunter, but again it's not actually necessary. As for the first question, that's entirely dependent on what fight we're talking about. Remember, when it comes to gear we can change it before every fight. If I'm going to have aggro problems I equip 8-piece Nemesis, Fetish of the Sand Reaver, or both.

Actually, I'd say Doomcaller is significantly better than more damage focused gear on any fight that requires high sustained DPS without a break. Patchwerk is the perfect example. No currently-available stuff in the five slots Doomcaller requires will make up for a 15% reduction in Shadow Bolt cost. Since there's no downtime, any time you spend tapping or otherwise regenning mana is a detriment to your DPS. This kind of fight is where Doomcaller is simply the best thing available by a long shot.

Again, the nice thing about gear is it can be switched around. My bank is full of stuff that gets used for just a couple of fights, but for those fights it's the best thing available. Restricting yourself to a binary "Doomcaller is best because of the bonus" or "Straight +damage gear is best because I'll hit harder" is too limiting. Pick up everything you can, and strive to make equipment sets that take advantage of everything you have available.

edit for norg's comments:
I view full Plagueheart as pretty much a leveling set. The 2- and 4-piece bonuses are pretty nice for raiding. The 8-piece is clearly not designed with raids in mind. It's a straight efficiency buff for situations where time is not the critical factor - grinding mobs and small group instances. Sure 8-piece has some pretty nice damage and crit on it, but I think taking non-set DPS pieces will likely result in even better performance. Again, it's a matter of what you want out of your gear. Doomcaller will probably have a place in my bank for a long, long time just on the off chance we get a fight that requires higher efficiency.

I was asking mostly in regard to Zibro's comment that SM/Ruin would be better than DS/Ruin on "mobile" fights, which I can not see yet.

But regarding your points (keep in mind I am talking about a raid setting):
- Siphon life: I am happy if I can keep Corruption up...:-)
- Better to hit on DoTs: That is true, but not such a big factor if you put the two "extra" points into suppression. Also see Bartolimu's comment above.
- more shard use: I can only see the one shard every 30 minutes to reapply the DS-buff

It would still seem to me that DS/Ruin is superior unless I am on Imp duty.

The main problem with DS/Ruin, aside from things Zibro might bring up if he wants, is that there aren't enough warlocks. When the average raid has two warlocks along, the odds are pretty good you'll be in a MT/OT group and have to keep your imp out. When that happens you're gimped pretty badly compared to SM/Ruin, which really doesn't give a crap what pet it has out (if any).

I will not deny this. I think everyone here will agree that with an Imp out SM/Ruin is by far the best DPS spec around. (Maybe MD/Ruin when sac-rezzing the Imp and using Fire spells boosted by the Scorch debuff and... :-)).

But I think what the OP would like to know and what I am also interested in, if only out of curiosity is: What is the best DPS-build when there is no Imp restriction or aggro restriction?

It seems to me that under this premise the only viable candidates are DS/Ruin and MD/Ruin. And MD/Ruin is only a viable candidate if the warlock is willing to sac/rezz the Succubus. Even then the question is is the 25% damage bonus better than the felhunter sacrifice? That is what I would like to know, at least. :-)

Whoa! Just noticed this myself, my sincerest apologies. I hit the quote button from one of your replies to respond to it, but removed the wrong quote block. Edited it now.

Because it's my belief that you're going to do more damage with SM/Ruin. In a fight like Patchwerk, there's no mobility, you're just standing there casting the whole time, a DS build will be better for the mana regen. Take a fight like Razuvious, though. There's minor breaks for the casters, who have to hop out to dodge the shout. During that time, it's pretty easy to life tap, and you're not sacrificing and dps to do it. You can pretty much always be casting on that fight during times that you actually can, but you still have time to tap, so mana won't really be an issue. Most fights give you time to tap, making SM/Ruin the best in my opinion.

Yes, you can felhunter-sac and also lifetap, but it's not really necessary and I think you'd probably be better off with the other talents from affliction instead.

Zibro, please stop hurting me. :(

But you can sacrifice succy then... Who said you got to have sacrificed felhunter all the time? Best thing about DS is the flexibility.

Did some playing with things last night (ugh 100 gold).

Tried a conflag based spec while we did noth, patchwerk, grobbulus... I started off without Imp SP, but ended up respeccing to get it, because it's pretty much required if you want to do heavy damage with this build. Needless to say, it was significantly better than I thought. However, there are some downsides. First being there is an incredible amount of focus you have to maintain in order to execute your perfect 'shot cycle.' I kept finding myself distracted because I've never really had to focus like that on my warlock. I did however learn a pretty clean way to cycle my spells to make the most effective use out of it:

Immo, Corr, SPx5 (or about 3-4 SB), Conflag repeat. I would do immolate first because it ends up being the shortest dot, and with casting conflag and recasting immolate, it ends up being basically perfect timing with corruption. I didn't quite work in life tap as much as I'd have liked. I did need a bit more practice and maybe a better DoT management system, as the version of necrosis I have bugs out from time to time and it's hard to keep track of the DoTs when it's not working. I may keep the spec for a little while to test it a bit more, and maybe develop more of a cycle for myself.

I did notice that you can get away with a lot of aggro in naxx trash. The aboms prior to patchwerk I could almost spam searing pain 100% instead of shadowbolt. I did get myself killed a few times with a couple crits in a row of SP, and it really only takes a few seconds to get out of hand with aggro spamming that. I don't really understand why they added the threat element to SP, because without that, it would very likely be a very good spell for warlocks to choose in normal scenarios as well.

Anyway - all of the above as opposed to just SB and keeping Corr up. I didn't get any fun huge crits other than a 2200~ conflag... but no 3000+ SB like I'm used to seeing... I'm thinking the micromanagement here often times can only hurt me, because if I am not 100% there, my DPS is going to drop significantly whereas with SB spamming, you only run the risk of not using Corr correctly or pulling aggro (which is a risk anyway).

So now I'm left with debating on SM/Ruin or DS/Ruin. I find that I rarely if ever used DS outside raids previously, and my talents in the Demonology tree were fairly wasted other than being able to quick rez a pet in PvP. SM seems to be the more choice build, and that was always my favorite for quite a long time. I guess I'd like to get a healer's opinion on how much mana a warlock truly wastes in a given fight. There are certain fights where I know I'm just a hinderance on the healers, and I feel that I might lose DPS if I'm not able to keep myself up. Anyway, too much typing!

You don't have SM, so you're only doing 5% more damage than SM/Ruin.

Yes, the strength of DS is the flexibility. We understand that. Zibro and I agree (and that is a very rare thing) that the flexibility is not enough to compensate for what we'd have to give up to have DS. There are relatively few fights where the limited supply of warlocks along on most raids have control over what pet they have out/sacrifice. In those few fights yes, DS might gain some advantage. But SM makes up for a fair bit of shortfall on mana regen, and it's always on.

I've been pondering this too. Common sense tells me the 5doomcaller/4plagueheart set would win out in longer fights.

No offense but that's stupid. You might as well use rank 1 nukes if mana per second is what you care about. If we disregard the double aggro issues and the lower base DPS, the amount of talents that affect Shadow Bolt is just too high to make SP catch up.

I'm a firm believer in SM/Ruin being the best raid build there is for a Warlock, and I've pretty much tried them all.

I don't see Plagueheart ever being useful as anything more than either an aggro gimmick set (nemesis mach 2) or a couple pieces for the decent first bonus (nemesis mach 2..).

Quite a few of the items are subpar compared to their non-set equivalents. The bracers are worse than Broodlord drops, the gloves worse than Dark Storm (and not strictly better than Ebony) and the belt is at most equal to Eyestalk Waist Coord. The problem here? To go 5/5 DC + 4/9 PH you'd have to wear all three of these as well as a Kel'Thuzad drop that's also pretty much a downgrade from C'thun, the equivalent Naxx ring and heck the AQ20 class ring.

It's pretty obvious that with how far the itemization pts are stretched with current endgame gear, no items with higher +damage than your current item but less hit and/or crit is gonna be an upgrade.

I think the best sets of gear to look at are:
4/9 PH + random stuff - Circlet, Robes, Boots and Shoulderpads + random gear (Leggings of Polarity etc)
5/5 DC + random stuff - Full Doomcaller + random gear (Soul Harvester's Bindings, Eyestalk etc).
Entirely random stuff - Probably with two pieces of PH as helm and robes especially are very good.

Once you hit the resist cap for the level of mob you're fighting, more +hit is absolutely a waste of itemization points and a piece of equipment with more +damage would definitely be better. At current levels of +damage, you are correct that crit is more efficient than +damage from an item budget perspective.

And as I said before, you're probably right from a raiding perspective. But keep in mind Naxx is that Last Big Thing before the expansion. What happens when the expansion hits? We have to level. While I plan on doing a fair bit of exping in groups, I think it's fairly silly to assume there will be NO soloing involved. The 8-piece PH bonus especially is very good for solo grinding. It serves very little useful purpose in raiding, but it's definitely designed with grinding efficiency in mind.

"Best gear" is an oversimplification. For Patchwerk there is absolutely nothing in the game that can replace the 5-piece Doomcaller bonus. For other fights you're better off stacking up more +damage and +crit. Optimal gear is entirely dependent on the nature of the fight we're participating in.

Obviously you didn't read the rest of my post, your comparison is stupid. I pointed out that searing pain can be STACKED enough to outdps shadowbolt. You can't "stack" shadowbolt against itself because it will affect all ranks, but I'm sure you knew that.

Let me lay out it, maybe you can understand numbers?

Searing Pain is 158-188, average it to 171 per nuke
Throw out +600 dmg, of which 300 goes to searing pain, so we're up to 471 per nuke
Emberstorm, Fire vuln (thanks mages), Curse of Exhaustion (CoS is rarely up) increase by ~35%
15% bare minimum of them will crit (devestation + imp searing pain) for 1270. Odds are more than 25% of them will crit however.

You can cast searing pain at 1.5s, shadowbolt at 2.5s. After 7.5 seconds searing pain will have cast five times, shadowbolt three times. 5*635 gives you 3175 fire damage (no crits) vs. 3*1045 (510+(600*.86)) gives you 3078 damage for shadowbolt (no crits). After 15 seconds searing pain will have cast 10 times for 10*635 for 6350 to shadowbolt's 6 times for 6270. This is again assuming you haven't crit once because that makes it harder to extrapolate given imp shadowbolt's bonus (if you have it).

Searing pain has outdamaged shadowbolt without imp searing pain coming into play, for half the mana in the EXACT same time period. The 'downrank' argument is a damage over time and is entirely fallacious because it takes rank4 10x longer to do the same damage rank10 does even taking lifetap into account. This is showing that pound for pound in the EXACT SAME time frame that searing pain can go against shadowbolt on the rare fights where aggro is not an issue (and your scorch mages can keep fire vuln up).

Next time, try reading a full post and pondering the issue instead of sticking to a single line.

Even tho I play 7-21-23 now Im always drawn back to conflag, was wondering how to extend the use of Searing Pain. Im being told "lol you cant steal aggro from patchwerk", and except that ignite-movie I have never gotten aggro on patch nor has anyone else in our caster camp. Of course we're not that far yet on the encounter so running into the roof isnt an issue, how high is the roof tho? Would using a immo->sp 13-14secs ->conflag cycle work throughout the whole encounter? We've got a lot of scorching mages in the guild so keeping improved scorch debuff up is no problem for us.

Yah, it wouldn't let me edit it :(

I will give the point

Shadow Mastery shadowbolts will outdamage searing pain by a narrow margin (~300 dmg in the given time frames). This is where imp searing pain and the mana cost 'might' come in to play. As I said, I was pondering the idea because there are anomolies that can tip things either way: How does sm+corruption vs. immolate+conflag come into play and improved shadowbolt's actual dps increase (which varies based on # of warlocks in the raid and even the gear you wear as I tend to wear very little crit gear favoring hit gear in pve reducing the instances of imp sb and thus decreasing it's bonus)

Okay, so now you're at +15% shadow damage, compared to +10% from SM. However, the talents leading up to DS are mostly terrible, and the talents leading up to SM are mostly at least useful. Nightfall is great, and so is having 5/5 Suppression. Grim Reach is useful. Siphon Life even has its uses. This is why I'll never spec back into demonology, nothing is really useful until deep in the tree.

How can you assume 5/5 Emberstorm when factoring a build specifically for Searing Pain but not factor in 5/5 Shadow Mastery when comparing it to a build that's all about Shadow Bolt? That's a 10% modifier right there that will bring SB in line with SP, and when you factor in Improved Shadow Bolt, SB becomes a clear winner in terms of DPS:

Searing Pain (5):
635 dmg ((171+300)*1.35), 1.5 second cast = 3,175 damage in 7.5 seconds x 100 cycles = 317,500 dmg over 750 seconds. With a 25% crit rate (10% base, 5% Devastation and 10% Imp Searing Pain) that's an additional 79,375 damage for 396,875 or 529 dps.

Shadow Bolt (10):
1,129 dmg ((510+(600*.86))*1.1), 2.5 second cast = 3,387 damage in 7.5 seconds x 100 cycles = 338,700 dmg over 750 seconds. With a 15% crit rate (10% base, 5% Devastation) that's an additional 50,805 damage. With Improved Shadow Bolt, you get 180 Shadow Bolts (45 crits x 4 additional) at 20% more damage which adds 40,644 for a grand total of 430,149 damage or 574 dps. That's an 8% increase in DPS. Now if you have 3 warlocks in a raid... that quickly becomes 19% more DPS from a Shadow Bolt spec vs. a Searing Pain spec from CoS.

That doesn't factor in the lag delay of 500 casts vs 300 casts. Now wher SP ~does~ shine is this: your DPM from SP way outshines that of SB (5.62 vs 3.77) which can add up. And that's if you don't take your points from Imp SB and Bane and funnel them into Cataclysm which will bring it to 5.92. But then you'd have alllllllllll the aggro problems of a 1,058 DPS caster which no amount of tankage is going to be able to hold back.

What the poster above me said regarding talents, plus highlighting this quote. SB gains 86% as you said, but SP doesn't gain 50%, it gains 43% or 258 damage.

Yes, I agree completely. What I meant with "best gear" was single/few target DPS-fests with no aggro limits, which is the majority of the endgame atm. For levelling, other things apply and I agree the 8 piece PH bonus is tempting for that.