I'm looking at ways to raise the dps of my raid, simply by improving our current practises.

We were a late starter in Naxx, and I now worry about things I didn't really have to before (since pushing dps boundaries wasn't as important). One of the agonizing things for me is trying to justify having more than two warlocks in a raid. Our debuff stack just cycles through and knocks their dots off, totally raping their dps. Situationally they do OK on some fights (anub, noth), but once the whole raid starts attacking their dps just plummets.

Here's what I see as being an ideal debuff stack, given common talents:
1: Sunder/expose
2: CoE
3: CoS
4: CoR/CoA (depending on boss)
5: Warlock DoT reserve 1
6: Judgement of Light
7: Judgement of Wisdom
8: Mortal Strike
9: Thunderfury slow debuff
10: Thunderfury NR debuff
11: Demoralizing shout
12: Ignite (Could be a warlock DoT, but for fire mage)
13: Winter's Chill
14: Improved Scorch (Could be a warlock DoT, but for fire mage)
15: Gift of Arthas
16: Faerie Fire

Now, the problem is, this ideal stack gets absolutely raped by proc and dot components of spells and talents. eg: fireball dot component, deep wounds, etc.

As a result of the above, I'm not really convinced fire mages are all that crash hot anymore (no pun intended). We have to sacrifice a lot of debuff slots to keep an ignite stack going, and it has a measurable impact upon performance of other classes. Our best frost mages usually manage to keep fairly close pace with the mage that owns the ignite stack anyway. Basically to make ignite effective, we're giving up 3 debuff slots from warlocks which amount to 300dps owned by another class. The mage also gives up a lot of utility and survivability (imp blizzard, iceblock, nova).

How does everyone else deal with this in your raids? Do you just leave the debuff stack up as a free for all? Have any of you told people "you can't have suchandsuch talent because of the debuff stack" (eg: deep wounds)?

EDIT: Forgot paladins ;p

Oh, I forgot. Two more, JoL and JoW.

Rupture on raids is a big nono. Sure, the dps of the rupture is high. Higher than other rogue finishers? Maybe situationally. Higher than other finishers by enough that you can afford to remove a 90-100dps dot from a warlock? No way.

Only problem with that is your warriors are lowering their dps by a good 3-4% if they drop it. That means if you have more then 1-2 good dpsing warriors, you really have to see how much warlock dots really tick for so that they outweigh every warrior's solid 3-4%. Locks and DPS warriors aren't all that common so I guess it depends on your guild's class selection.

On a positive note, ima probably spec out of it cuz if you don't, you lose a good 3-5% parry which is quite noticeable while offtanking.

A warlock dot does 100 dps? Ignites are commonly 1000+ dps. You're barking up the wrong tree.

But you can't really credit that to one mage. You have to see how many mages collectively add to it don't you? So if you had 5 fire mages going at it, it'd be more like 200 dps.

You will probably never get a rolling ignite going unless you control reapplication of debuffs like a nazist regime i.e. Patchwerk. Ignite is pretty low on debuff priority and gets bumped off very easily. With a full 16 debuffs on the mob, an application of something like Deep Wounds will probably knock it straight off. You're just NOT going to get an Ignite going on for very long if you let people apply debuffs in a free for all.

In this day and age, 2-3 Warlocks should choose their strongest DOT and 1 of the important Curses and use only that one DOT and Shadowbolt spam (or Searing Pain if threat isn't an issue and they want better mana efficiency) to DPS with. The other Warlocks should use COA and bolt spam. When TBC comes out, its hammer time! Throw out those debuffs like your life depended on it.

If every Warlock tries to use both Immolate AND Corruption (and if their mana pool is feeling suicidal, Siphon Life) then they're going to run into serious mana efficiency and DPS problems.

Currently Fire mages can put out more dps than frost mages/warlocks, and don't have many aggro issues, I think that fact justifies the Fire mage DoT usage.

Also, I don't think many guilds use Arthas's Tears, and is JoL used that much?

You have to consider impale as well tho. I'd say 5% is a healthy amount that includes both talents since deep wounds do get overwritten quite frequently. But if you have four fury warriors going at it, each at 600 dps, that means you just lost 120 dps. Not too bad but it's asking for quite a bit considering most wars like pvping with it as well (impale that is).

OK. We only recently started to play with fire mages, so please excuse my ignorance. How do you build your ignite stack? Do all your mages just scorch spam? It's appearing to us as if there's an inefficient cost to it on our debuff stack due to the fireball DoT component. We also find that one fire mage will get much higher dps than the others, but averaging the fire mages vs the frost mages, the frost mages still win by a significant margin (our fire mages are supposedly geared appropriately for fire, having high spell crit).

For getting ignites rolling, you usually need atleast 2 mages with combustion and one with imp scorch. The guy with imp scorch starts it off by applying 5 applications. Then the mages must talk with themselves and negoiate when to start combustion. Most mages tell me, the combustion mages start with scorch spam with the other mages scorch as well, and as soon as you get a good 2-3 applications, the non combustion mages just start fireballing. This process is probably much easier with more combustion mages but it's nice, not necessary.

Edit: I don't really think rolling ignites is possible unless you have ATLEAST 3 very good fire mages. Usually the minimum is 4. 5 is when it gets really amazing.

Thanks for the feedback :)

I guess what I'm trying to get across is the whollistic perspective. Let's say we have 3 fire mages (which we do)

To get ignite going, they will use:
1 debuff slot for scorch
1 debuff slot for ignite
3 debuff slots for fireball

Someone claimed a common scenario of a 1000 ignite tick (so 333 dps).

So, we're looking at 5 debuff slots that could be 400-500dps in DoT's. When our fire mages are only performing on average equally to our frost mages it seems like a waste to me.

In addition, I have to reduce our raid to 3 warlocks, as a fourth or fifth warlock basically has significantly reduced dps due to no space for debuff allocation.