Given that Loatheb has been killed by numerous guilds many of whom have posted their damage meters in this thread and talked about how they reached those numbers, I think this is beyond a speculative thread... :)

There's a reason why warlocks aren't your top damage classes here, and prioritising the fungal bloom to a class that is, even when *best * played, behind other damage classes would just lower your overall raid dps. The concept that fire mages provide greater damage than warlocks, on single target fights, doesn't change greatly because of fungal bloom, for example. I understand you're a warlock and don't like to feel that your class is underpowered here, and as raiders we all want to see warlock dps upped in the expansion and made more viable, but that doesn't change how things play out for the vast majority of guilds right now.

Suggesting that almost all the guilds that have killed Loatheb have been missing something as simple as "give the warlocks funagl bloom first" in order to up their damage is pretty much a pointless comment.

P.S. I'm not being arsey, a lot of other posters would be a lot harsher here. That's how the forum works.

An interesting question for dagger rogue users, I have never had dmg meter set to dps on loatheb, but I wonder if its really worth me getting the spore.

Last 2 kills i did 230-235k dmg in roughly 5mins15-30. That works out to less than 800dps, granted I am taking 2 bandages.

Since the rogue patch I have been unable to get in on a clean patchwerk kill, but I did one yesterday and recored 830dps without getting lucky on crits, so the question is have any dagger users tried going without the buff and comparing it to their normal dps with the buff? I have about 36% crit with mongoose / motw.

i imagine you would overaggro with 800dps without the buff

Hmm maybe but tanks these days make awesome agro with all the +hit gear.

Just need a well timed vanish probably, but good point none the less. Either that or only get the first buff and dont get the next 1 or 2.

We tried giving warlocks the buff first, it didn't help out much. Getting it on mages(fire specifically) followed by warriors does much more for your overall dps than putting it on a warlock.

And in regards to CD rogues ignoring the buff completely, I've sometimes wondered that too. But like was just said, I think the most important factor of the buff is the aggro-free abilities you get due to it being up. If you can pull the same or very similar dps with the buff as without, I'd say going with the buff is the best option because it makes pulling aggro nearly impossible. There's no reason to have to rely on vanish(and possibly feint) when you don't really have to.

Given that people have only lately understood how good skills like demo shout and CoR really are (purely as an example of how you can discover something year(s) after), I think pulling "case closed" on a raid boss that has been killed by 150 or so guilds in the world is a bit early. We still do Onyxia every reset for gold or whatever and haven't figured out how you do a flawless kill (atleast without clearly overpowered BWL or better equipped raid) even after 80 or so kills. Maybe we're stupid or maybe the encounter is stupid.

Yes, fire mages do 210% dmg with crits while warlocks only get to 200% and yes, FB has way better DPM than SB. Yes, mages have more regen than warlocks (they prolly even are PvE specced with 15% regen from spirit while casting). Yes, warlocks never really regen due to the 5sec rule and no mana/5sec gear. Yes, mages have 30% threat reduction - even the Horde mages. Yes, warlock's dots are quite useless when they get knocked off in a few seconds or purged away every 30sec. But, from these facts, I somehow came to a conclusion that to make your raid DPS shine you need to let warlocks burst-DPS their mana (threat free) to make the most of it while mages are able to do continous DPS. This of course is purely speculative if anything. Who would have more than two or three warlocks in Naxxramas anyway.

P.S. Whenever I go all emo on my class I can always think about Horde hunters and how they're even worse.

P.P.S. I hope there's a moderator who deletes nonsense posts like this on these forums.

not very familiar with loatheb myself. just had one question. can warlock pets live through loatheb or is there AE dmg or something that kills them.

Warlock pets aside from a phased imp will die.

wow double post. delete this~

They would die from the aoe shadow damage.

People have known how CoR worked since Molten Core and BWL - its just only widely common knowledge now by people who fail to do their own theorycrafting.

I'd be willing to bet the guilds that have killed Loatheb know how the mechanics of the game work well enough to make fairly bold statements about it, its mechanics, and which classes are optimal for DPS. I'd be willing to bet those statements could've been made before the encounter had been beaten anyway, or even seen.

You're missing the entire fact that the crit buff improves ignite rolling to the point where it won't drop for 5 full minutes... the ignite alone should out damage all the warlocks combined. The warlocks are there for their curses and imp... sadly, there is no other reason to bring them over say, a melee dps. If you are truly about min/maxing you gotta ignore the emo issues of booting an entire class and do what is best to min/max the encounter - 2 warlocks is max dps.

Anything more you're either doing because you feel bad for someone, the other dps in your guild are absolutely horrible and the warlocks are not, or its a loot issue (seems impossible). While it is true that a warlock can outdamage other dps classes, it is also true that equally geared and competent players of opposite dps class, a warlock shoudl always lose this battle just from the theorycraft there. I'm not sure why warlocks should even care, they shine in other fights.

Anything is possible, but i'm only talking about ideal from a pure theorycraft standpoint.
Between bandaging and moving to spores 3-4 fire mages is not going to ensure the ignite is always up - 5-6 fire mages works a lot better, from there you can go to frost... but our luck and damage was always significantly higher if all our mages were fire (only talking about loatheb atm).

It helps signficantly if you have someone who does low dps (hello Holy priest) bandage the Fire mages. As for the spore, if they coordinate you can easily stagger the spore renewal a bit so only half the mages aren't fireballing or scorching at a time. Obviously it requires more work, but it can be done. Most guilds will probably just opt for 5 Fire mages instead though. We tend to run with a 4 Fire / 2 Frost distribution.

If you were to assign anyone to bandage it'd be druids :P

Anyways, how do your guilds setup their buff rotations?(if this question already hasn't been asked?) out of curosity, we buff melee first then mages after(our mages are mostly combustion fire, so burning those cooldowns before they enter the buff rotation).

We had a night of fully buffed attempts on him, and seems something isn't right with our fury warriors. I took a screenshot at 3min mark, best warrior had 617 DPS, while top rogue showed 691 DPS.
Can anybody give some specific advices for fury warriors on Loatheb ?

Fury warriors don't usually start topping DPS until the 20% mark.. At least from my observations ^-^

Btw, takes 15.5-16k unbuffed dps in order to have an optimal raid that can kill him.

I should clarify, that was sustained dps over those 3 minutes. In this thread i see fury warriors with 300k+ damage done, that means about 1k dps sustained, assuming 5min kill. Of course executes will increase our warriors sustained dps, but not by 50%.

Here's ours, from our first kill tonight, no world buffs, not many consumables, and thus only 2 people alive at the end, one of whom used one of the 3 soulstones we put on dps. it was way too tight, and i think we're probably gonna follow the crowd and get hakkar buff next time.

as you can probably deduce from the dps we put out, some rogues like me didn't use dps consumables (none of the juju, elixer of giants, desert dumplings, firewater). That's because it took so long to farm the rest of the stuff and the ones we had were used in unsuccessful attempts. Mages and locks were fully dps-consumable'd up including flasks. if we can get the hakkar buff next time, i think we'll be pretty comfortable.

last note - one set of mages got buffs, then one group of rogues, then the rest of the mages, then the group of rogues i was in.



1) Ignite Boy
2) Fury War, TF/Iblis, best plate dps gear except ribcage (which he got on thaddius when we moved on to him)
3) Combat Sword, AQR/Iblis, 5/9 Bonescythe
4) Combat Dagger HoD/Pugio, 0 BS, 5/5 DD
5) Combat Maces, Servo/Castigator, 0BS, 5/5 DD
6) Combat Dagger, DS/Pugio, 5/9 Bonescythe
7) Combat Dagger, HoD/Pugio, 1 BS, rest Bloodfang
8) Hemo Rogue, Grand Marshal/Iblis, 5/9 BS
9) Hemo Rogue, CTS/Iblis, 4/9 BS
10) Fury war, not sure of weapons, good but not exceptional DPS gear
11) 6/9 Cryptstalker hunter

We went in to our first night of serious Loatheb attempts expecting to just demolish him. We've got a tradition of really solid DPS. Our first Thaddius kill was about 35 seconds to spare before the enrage. Our latest Patchwerk kill left us with a minute and forty five left. Then fully buffed on Loatheb we wiped around 20% and the 5:10 mark. That was humbling. :(

Wish I'd actually read this thread thoroughly prior to tonight.

We had a handful of premature deaths though (lol wuts a healthstone guyz?), and we were missing some of the easy buffs still. Lots of people were without Jujus, Winterfall Firewater, etc. No Supreme Power flasks on the mages. Probably going to cheese it with a Hakkar Heart next week just to get the kill and try to ween ourselves off of that the week after.

We use this strat, and I figure I would just throw the damage for our last kill out (About 5 min 20 seconds, Just Ony and ZG buff)

I wonder who stole the ignites...


Fire Mage
Fury Warrior
Fire Mage
Fire Mage
Fire Mage
Fury Warrior (got screwed out of a couple of buffs by a bad disconnect from a rogue)

Having the healers bandage ups caster DPS a ton, but having them try to bandage melee just gets poison interrupted and the melee killed early most of the time.

As a guess i would for DW fury warriors stacking a shit load of +hit & attacking from behind would make a huge difference to their dps. The fungal 40% crit buff would put a DW'er way over the crit cap (due to glancing blows), so without a lot of +hit they won't be getting full benefit of the buff.

This pic if from our first (and only kill so far), kill time was 5min 23 sec:


It's missing searing totem (around 40k in total).

Nothing special in DPS, ignite mages and fury warriors topping. However, the healer DPS is poor. Most of the healers were wearing full healing gear because we had only 12 healers in rotation + 1 as emeregency healer. Someone was saying they have 60k damage from shamans in average, I'm quite impressed. Our shamans did not melee as far as I know because of the poison, maybe that's the difference. Could you post more pics of damagemeters with all 40 visible.